Knick Knackatory

George Bernard Shaw called it his "magnificent library in Bloomsbury." Samuel Butler said the two places where he was happiest were home and the British Museum.

Many of the best brains of the last two centuries have felt indebted to the knowledge-lined old institution in London where the British have assembled what is probably the world's most comprehensive collection of information. There Gibbon and Macaulay did their historical research, Boswell perfected the technique of biography, Carlyle studied the intricacies of the French Revolution (and complained of "my museum headache"). Young Charles Dickens came to study, Darwin to solidify his ideas for On the Origin of Species. Karl Marx gathered the wool which went into Das Kapital, most of which he wrote in the great, quiet, dome-capped Reading Room.

Adam's Apron. Last week the British Museum was celebrating its 200th birthday, and with typical scholarly restraint was making no great hullabaloo over the anniversary. The only variation in the routine in the huge, Grecian-fac,aded building in Great Russell Street was an exhibition of the Sloane Manuscripts, part of the collection on which the museum was founded in 1753.

Sir Hans Sloane, a prosperous 18th century physician who developed a passion for collecting, scurried over the world like a pack rat, assembling books, manuscripts, Roman, Egyptian and Asiatic antiquities, coins, medals and works of art. Sloane's friends (among them: Isaac Newton, Samuel Pepys, Christopher Wren, Alexander Pope) sent him odd things from everywhere. One friend, Poet Thomas Hearne, versified that he had collected for the good doctor:

A snake skin which you may believe The serpent cast that tempted Eve. A fig-leaf apron, 'tis the same ' Which Adam wore to hide his shame . . . It is my wish, it is my glory to furnish your knick knackatory.

Before he died, Sloane willed his knick knackatory to the British nation, to be preserved for "the glory of God . .. and benefit of mankind." George II accepted, and the museum opened in 1759.

Alice's Present. It has been growing ever since. Late in the 19th century, the Natural History section was moved to Kensington, and today the Bloomsbury institution consists of two main parts:' the Library, with its Reading Room, and the Museum. The library, Britain's national bookshelf, contains between seven and eight million volumes on 64 miles of shelves. It receives everything published in Britain and its colonies, from poetry anthologies to comic books (about 37,000 new volumes a year, plus 162,540 single copies of newspapers). Among the treasures: eight copies of the first folio edition of Shakespeare's plays; the original articles placed before King John at Runnymede in 1215; the menu for the coronation banquet of Henry IV (1399); the manuscript of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, inscribed as "a Christmas gift to a dear child in memory of a summer day." There is also a fine collection of early Bibles, including the 4th century Codex Sinaiticus, for which the museum paid Soviet Russia -L-100,000 (then about $500,000) in 1933.

Elgin's Marbles. The non-library part of the museum has, among other things, a painting by the 4th century Chinese artist Ku K'ai-chih and one of the world's best collections of Duerer woodcuts and drawings. Its antiquities from Ur and Nineveh are outstanding; its Egyptian collection includes the famed Rosetta stone. The most notable items are the Elgin Marbles, taken from the Parthenon in Athens and donated by Lord Elgin in 1816.

This section of the museum attracts and inspires thousands of visitors, but it is the library which is most used and respected by the world's scholars. Says Novelist Angus Wilson, who is deputy superintendent of the Reading Room of the museum: "Without the resources of the British Museum Library, most of the great scholarly projects which still distinguish this country . . . could not appear."

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