3: Time well spent at the British Library Reading Room, 1993

I flew to London with my class on British Airways. I had forgotten, while caught up with all of the planning, that I get motion sick on planes. It was 7 1/2 hours of hell during which I made two critical decisions:

1. I was taking a boat home. I didn’t care how much it cost. I was never getting on an airplane again.
2. I needed to decide how to approach this trip. What mental framework to use to guide me. I settled on: “When in Rome.” It felt right. If millions of Britains and Europeans were doing X, Y, or Z, how much harm could it do me for a couple of months? The waitress came by and asked if I cared for a beverage. I decided that I would be British about it. I ordered a Guinness. It came warm.

I wasn’t big on beer. I didn’t like dark beer. I’d never had warm beer. But I drank it. Because? When in Rome! It was my psychological battle cry. The beer was awful.

On my very first day of classes in London in 1993, I went to the British Library. This was at the original Reading Room that opened in 1857. Karl Marx studied there, as did Lenin, Bram Stoker, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

To get a card, they had to apply to the Principal Librarian. So did I. And after sitting me in a little room for about an hour while my security checked out (with a dozen other patient, library-likewise souls waiting for their British library cards), I was allowed in.

It was thrilling to be there; I was working with original sources available no where else in the world.

For many years after my studies, I would imagine myself in this room if I had trouble sleeping. In my mind’s eye, I would climb onto one of the desks and go to sleep under the dome, surrounded by old books and cataloging cards. I would allow the blue theme of the room to lull me. Allow the books to absorb the sounds of the world and hear only patient, bookly silence. I would not think about the mummies in the museum above me. Nope, not thinking about it.

One day while exploring the nooks and crannies of the museum, I got trapped in an elevator between floors. One of those little, European elevators. With two other people. One of whom was claustrophobic. We tried to distract her by telling her light, amusing stories but in the end she was cowering on the floor. It wasn’t pretty.

Being a young, inexperienced American, I expected to be compensated in some way for the inconvenience by either the British museum or Her Majesty, y’know, whomever. What I was fantasizing about as the elevator got warmer and the minutes ticked upwards of 45 was a coupon for a free beverage. As it turns out, the workmen were perfectly friendly when they freed us, but that was all. Oh well. At least the claustrophobic woman was finally able to get up off of the floor.

In London that summer, I wrote an Ode to the Catalogers of the British Library. Let me tell you, it doesn’t take long looking at those hand-typed cataloging cards before you begin subconsciously composing sonnets to those responsible for them. The amount of labor in those cards is mind boggling.

When I needed books at the British Library, I would fill out a card with the call number. On the back of the card was a train schedule telling you when each call number set was collected. Perhaps my book would come in later that night, or the next day, or next Tuesday. When I got my book, there was another card with my name on it, tracking information, etc. If they didn’t have the book there were boxes to check such as “Copy destroyed during Second World War, cannot replace.” That one blew me away. The loss!

I was able to read, in full, many of the books and articles that contained criticism of Katherine Philips that I had only seen referred to in the States.

This was 1993. Before the explosion of the Internet. Before huge, online databases. If you needed an obscure British publication, well, you had to go to the British Library to see it. And so I had. And it was marvelous.

Here’s one of Philips’s poems, one of her most famous and oft-quoted:

A retir’d Friendship, to Ardelia

Come, my Ardelia, to this bowre

Where kindly mingling Souls a while,

Let’s innocently spend an hour,

And at all serious follys smile

My project was to create an annotated bibliography – an attempt to pull together all of the literary criticism of her since her time and summarize each to record the existing body of scholarship. This meant 300 years worth of materials.

I was young, adventurous, and comfortable getting dirty, being hungry, and skirting the law in pursuit of poetry. I needed all of those skills.