Note 33 — Chapter III · INTRODUCTION TO BOOK III (Continued):—GROWTH, PROGRESS, AND INTERNAL ECONOMY, OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM DURING THE PRINCIPAL-LIBRARIANSHIP OF SIR ANTONIO PANIZZI.
Reading edition
If the question of mere hints and analogies in construction were to be followed out to its issues, the result, I feel assured, would in no degree tend to strengthen the contention of Mr. Hosking’s pamphlet. Something like a first germ of the mere ground-plan of the new Reading-Room may, perhaps, be found in M. Benjamin Delessert’s Projet d’une Bibliothèque circulaire, printed, at Paris, as far back as the year 1835, when the question of reconstructing the then ‘Royal,’ now ‘Imperial Library,’ was under discussion in the French Chambers. ‘I propose,’ says Delessert, ‘to place the officers and the readers in the centre of a vast rotunda, whence branch off eight principal galleries, the walls of which form diverging radii ... and have book-cases on both sides,’ &c. His plan may be thus shown, in small. The differences, it will be seen, between this sketch and Mr. Panizzi’s sketch of 1854, are greater than are the resemblances.
