National Art Library at V & A Museum

Check out the website: https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/national-art-library

The National Art Library surprisingly is older than the museum. Established in 1837, the library initially was to help artists become artists, but it has since then gathered some general knowledge. Similar to the British Library, their materials are closed stacks and shelved on book size and year, organized with a unique system. This system does save up on a lot of space to expand their collection, but not even all of the materials in the library have been cataloged yet.

To be bluntly honest, I did not really enjoy myself in the National Art Library. By this time, trends have already begun to be repetitive. The only topic that sparked my interest in this particular library is the collection of bookish art, but we were shown little of that. My two favorites were of the telescoptic view of the Great Exhibition and the Word Pharmacy with their grammar prescriptions.

I did appreciate being taken around however. Piggybacking from the Maughan Library, I saw tall ceiling can closed doors with some metals everywhere. Our guide told us this library was one of the firsts to be lit by electricity, and I knew why from the architecture. Looking at the stacks also revealed me the size of their collections, something I was not able to grasp from their reading room, as most of the building I would have attributed to be museum space.