Letture, ricerche e opere di Marx in biblioteca

“From Dean Street, Marx had to make only a short journey to work – to the Reading Room of the British Museum in Bloomsbury. (…) Even during the 1830s there was a growing demand for space for students to consult the books, and the energetic new Keeper of Printed Books, exiled Italian revolutionary Antonio Panizzi (1797-1879), made a sketch of the sort of new reading room he wanted and showed it to Robert Smirke, the designer of the Museum Building. The result was one of the world’s most famous – and useful – rooms, the great domed reading room, perhaps the best-known section of the British Museum. The new library was opened in 1857, by which time Marx had already left Dean Street for the suburbs. It is recorded that on opening day a champagne breakfast was laid out for readers on their desks. By 1890 it was receiving 900.000 visitors each year. (…) Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, Mazzini and Ruskin all sat in this Reading Room, and Marx, one of most diligent readers, was to be followed by hundreds more, by Kropotkin, Shaw, Lenin, Gandhi and Govan Mbeki. Leon Trotsky was a frequent visitor to London during the early 1900s; but during his long and sad exile from USSR his application for a reader’s ticket was blocked by Churchill and the British Home Office” (…) “After obtaining his Reader’s ticket in June 1850 – which was then quite an arduous task – Marx began by spending three months diligently reading back numbers of the ‘Economist’, followed by other periodicals and pamphlets. After years of patient research in the Reading Room, he was the end his life knowing far more about the history of political economy in Britain than most professors of the subject” (…) “It was in the old Reading Room that Marx worked on the ‘Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (1850), on ‘The Class Struggles in France’ (1850); and the ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’ (1852). However, he increasingly found the demands of the ‘New York Daily Tribune’ for the fresh articles that constituted his only paid employment to be a grinding distraction that took him away from what he considered to be his life’s work. ‘The continual newspaper muck annoys me’, he complained. ‘It takes a lot of my time, disperses my effort and in the final analysis is nothing’. It was in the new Reading Room where legend has it that his favourite seat was number 07 – that Marx spent the most productive period of his life” (…) “It was in the old Reading Room that Marx worked on the ‘Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (1850), on ‘The Class Struggles in France’ (1850); and the ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’ (1852). However, he increasingly found the demands of the ‘New York Daily Tribune’ for the fresh articles that constituted his only paid employment to be a grinding distraction that took him away from what he considered to be his life’s work. ‘The continual newspaper muck annoys me’, he complained. ‘It takes a lot of my time, disperses my effort and in the final analysis is nothing'”   [Asa Briggs John Callow, Marx in London. An Illustrated Guide, 2008]