British Library

We took off bright and early for the coach to London, arriving at the British Library around 9:30ish. Although I thought the "Love Boat" architecture was iffy when viewed from the outside, the inside is gorgeous. Throughout the day, a choir of madrigals were singing in the atrium, which lent an otherworldly and sublime air to the whole place. I saw the oldest known printed manuscript in the world, a 10th century copy of Beowulf, a first edition of Richard III, and a few other of those kinds of boring, coffee-table-type, books. For some reason, I actually choked up a bit when looking through an Alexander Pope translation of the Illiad; I could actually feel the weight of the man's hand pressed into the paper. Truly amazing and an absolute high point of this experience.

The King's Library, George III's vast donation to Britain.












Almost as cool was this hard-core librarian porn:

Check out the retrieval system for the books that get pulled up from the buried stacks.