That Inking Feeling

By sizemore Last edited 219 months ago
That Inking Feeling
strindbergandhelium.jpg

Here's evidence that not all of the city's institutions of learning are as progressive or as forward thinking as the interactive bits in the science museum:

The British Library is to extend a ban on pens to all its reading rooms to protect its precious collections. From January, the home of the Magna Carta and Lindisfarne Gospels will only allow pencils.

Not very wiki is it?

They were probably worried that a hoard of Boing Boingers would descend on the precious things of the shop library mad with annotated lust and ready to write meaningful insights such as THEME and CHARACTER next to the Magna Carta (underlined three times if it's due to come up on the GCSE paper).

Just for the record Londonist likes writing in books - we've even been known to drop notes into books we don't own in Foyles just to get curious emails back a few months later. We're just following in the footsteps of one of our favourite writers August Strindberg who underlined the fuck out of his books and enjoyed nothing better than to scribble in the margins such exclamations as LIES! CRAP! IDIOT! and BLOODY HELL!

You may think we get paid for those Google Ads in the margins here, but they just appear overnight and we don't mind a bit.

Note: The pic is of course from the rather wonderful Strindberg & Helium

Last Updated 21 December 2005