LIBRARIES

London's Surfeit of Riches

People just love to give things to the British Museum. In the past two years, the squat Greek Revival treasure house on London's Great Russell Street has acquired, among other things, a 5,000-year-old porphyry frog from Egypt, a $1,000,000 collection of historical playing cards, the prow of a Viking ship, some rare 17th century music manuscripts, original letters of Kipling and Yeats, a mosaic pavement from ancient Rome--not to mention a copy of every book published in Great Britain.

Small wonder that space is almost as precious to the British Museum as its best-known treasure, the Elgin marbles. To end the congestion, the museum trustees have for 20 years been looking ahead to the prospect of building an annex across the square, and Britain's governments have allotted more than $5,000,000 toward the purchase of necessary land. Last month, however, the Secretary of State for Education and Science, Patrick Gordon Walker, announced that the Labor government had scrapped its plans for a museum addition. Even more shocking was his hint that the museum's excess books and art treasures might have to be divided up among other institutions.

Potent Symbol. Walker might just as happily have announced a plan to tear down Westminster Abbey. "Deplorable," complained the museum's trustees. "It buries 20 years' work." With near unanimity, scholars condemned Walker's thought of splitting up the museum's gigantic collections. "How should we like to visit the Library of Congress in Richmond, Va.," demanded Manuscript Scholar Julian Brown of London University. "A national library," warned the Sunday Times sternly, "is perhaps the most potent symbol we have left of an English culture."

In fact, the museum's potency as a symbol or cultural repository has been debatable for years. Surfeited by riches it has no room to display, gorged with books it offers little space to read, it is half-buried in the artifacts it seeks to preserve. For every object on display, nine more gather dust in grimy warehouses. Although the museum has more than 9,000,000 books, its reading rooms hold a scant 390 chairs, are nearly always packed despite a sponsorship system that bars all but scholars from using them. Stacks are so inaccessible that the waiting time for books is now up to two hours. Despite a recent effort to put displays in natural settings, many are still lined up in "case upon case of vase upon vase," as one tourist put it.

Most neglected of all is the museum's 1,425-man staff. Shoved into windowless cubbyholes for offices, they keep electric fans running year-round to circulate the air. One darkroom, a converted closet, is so small that Chief Printer Anthony Allen "won't let anyone stay in there more than a quarter-hour." Corrugated iron roofing stift hides crumbling wreckage untouched since Nazi bombardiers blitzed London 27 years ago. To the delight of its readers, the Times recently discovered that "a race of wild cats" lives, loves and dies in the basement ventilating shafts.

Complete Picture. The main obstacle to progress, says the museum's curator, Sir Frank Francis, is "the intractable nature of the building itself." Despite cramped facilities and a woefully inadequate budget (-L-4 million a year), he has tried to put a greater variety of the museum's vast materials before the public. In one imaginative display he arranged finds from the museum's 1963-64 New Guinea expedition into an attractive mix of the utensils of everyday life with elaborate objets d'art. "We endeavor to give a complete picture of a culture--not only the people on top, but through everybody on down as well," he explains. Also successful was a centenary exhibition honoring Karl Marx, who wrote most of Das Kapital in the museum's reading room. The Duveen Gallery, housing the Elgin marbles, is equipped with a new recorded explanation of the treasure. The most ambitious new project is the General Catalogue of Printed Books, the world's largest single publication, whose 263 volumes list the library's Western language books printed between 1455 and 1955.

But the "fair number of things done," says Sir Frank, are "small in comparison with the need for space." He admits that "no one nowadays creating the institution afresh would make a library and museum in one building." But he also insists that "books and antiquities illuminate each other" and is determined to reinstate the plans for the new library. Meanwhile, for want of simple shelter, one of the great caches of world civilization stays in semiseclusion.

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