DoneThat
The British Library, St. Pancras, London
This is the view of the entrance lobby immediately inside the main doors.
The library holds over 150 million items from many countries, in many languages and in many formats, both print and digital. The collections include around 14 million books, along with manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 2000 BC.
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This is another view of the entrance lobby seen from the top of the spiral staircase - a fraction of which is shown in the bottom left corner.
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This is the six-storey glass tower, in the middle of the building, containing the King's Library, with 65,000 printed volumes along with other pamphlets, manuscripts and maps collected by King George III between 1763 and 1820.
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The Library is open to everyone who has a genuine need to use its collections. Anyone with a permanent address who wishes to carry out research can apply for a Reader Pass; they are required to provide proof of signature and address for security purposes.
There are also a number of exhibitions open to the general public including the Sir John Ritblat Gallery which includes Beowulf, the Lindisfarne Gospels and St Cuthbert Gospel, a Gutenberg Bible, Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (King Arthur), Captain Cook's journal, Jane Austen's History of England, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures Under Ground, Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and a room devoted solely to Magna Carta.
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