April 8, 1879

Antonio Panizzi (September 16, 1797 to April 8, 1879) was a controversial figure on the staff of the British Library during the Victorian era. He was of Italian birth and occupied a prominent place on the librarian staff of the British Museum. His feuds with fellow librarian F. W. Madden were even publicized in the press and the quote below is interesting if only to demonstrate bureaucratic infighting is not a 20th century phenomenon.  We excerpt from

The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, (1851), with the activity of a British Museum commission in progress:

The public entrance to the reading-room is at a poky side-door in the north-east corner. It leads, by a gloomy ante-vault, and up a narrow back-staircase, into two large rooms. Here, since the sitting of the commission, Mr. Panizzi has at last been permitted to carry out his plans. We can vouch, after a minute examination, that every possible comfort and convenience which the constructions permitted, is now provided. Formerly, there existed great difficulties of admission. About 1806 a special recommendation from a trustee was necessary, ....Now the door is opened as widely as possible, consistently with the preservation of the public property. In the year 1811 only 269 tickets were issued; in 1849, 3049. The number of readers, from 22,800 in 1825, had risen, in 1848, to 65,867,.... 

The besetting sin of the largest of these rooms is the original and architectural want of light and space; but all that patient ingenuity could well devise for counteracting such evils has been done. More than 10,000 dictionaries, encyclopedias, and books of reference have been placed for the visitors to consult at pleasure. Two sets of the additional catalogue are provided, with sloping shelves to rest them on. There are stands for pen and ink, and printed directions to fill up in order to obtain anything wanted. Even blotting-paper is not forgotten. The scanty side-light has been aided by putting glass panels in doors and by reflectors. Room for forty readers more has been gained by change of tables and -positions. The legs of chairs are padded with India-rubber to move noiselessly like cats' paws. 

....The evidence before the commissioners goes unanimously to prove the skill, good-humored patience, and attentive civility of the attendants. Simple ignorance is aided —pretentious ignorance is endured;—testy old gentlemen who write wrong names— hasty sparks who will not search under the right letter of the catalogue, are put in the way of their alphabet by men paid daily wages. 

Yet no end of growling. When Sir F. Madden writes for a bibliographical, meaning a biographical, work—-Professor Forbes for one by Lichtenstein, meaning Leuctenberg, and so on—it seems to us that the attendants, not the applicants, have a right to be cross:....The business of the British Museum is to supply books, not that sort of information about books and their authors, and the various titles or designations of the same author, which ought to be got before a man enters the Museum, from the common manuals of bibliographical or biographical instruction. 

.....

Nor are all clever men—....always to be contented. ....Mr. Turner thinks it hard, and too much for his physical capacities, to have to carry the books he wants—(we trust his extracts may be lighter) ;—so he, for peace and quiet, goes by the train to the Bodleian, ..... Mr. Turner is moreover agitated here by the presence of a flea, "larger than any to be found elsewhere, except in the receiving-room of a workhouse. .....We do trust that poor Panizzi has sufficiently felt the reading-public pulse, with no fee but abuse, to be now callous, pachydermatous....

The author of 'Sartor Resartus [Thomas Carlyle] complains of a general want of "composure" and catalogue. Without the latter he is "lost in the sylva sylvarum."- "The books might as well have been locked up in watertight chests and sunk at the Doggerbank." "Of all catalogues, the worst is no catalogue at all. "....

Other wits are indignant that this chaos is not open and lighted up of an evening—but peradventure, however education-mongers may theorize, in'practice it might be found that few persons would come here if it were opened at night. Lawyers' and merchants' clerks find the Work of each day sufficient, and oddly enough prefer casinos and cigars, after early closing, to metaphysics and mathematics. ....,

We are happy to say that instances of misconduct in these attendants by day are most rare. One exception will prove the rule. In 1847, an unmarried lady, of whose writings we think favorably, received from a porter, named King, an anonymous letter, purporting to be from a stranger, threatening, if she did not remit through that porter [some money] that her character would be exposed. The accomplished lady, with the high courage of innocence, took the letter to the Museum authorities. The hand-writing was traced to King, who was tried, and transported for seven years, and two attendants who gave King a good character were dismissed. Although there is no secret police dressed in plain clothes here, as at Paris, thefts are very rare.

Of all the malcontents within or without the Museum, those who complained of the Catalogue were the most noisy. As we remarked on a former occasion, while it seems easy enough to the infinite number who talk about things they do not understand, to make a good catalogue is so very difficult in practice that the first bibliographers are "appalled" at the undertaking. The better opinion is, that the alphabetical 'form, with a copious index of matter, is the most useful and feasible, and that uniformity and consistency, fulness and accuracy, are the essential points. Such was the system adopted by Audifredi, who, in 1761, commenced the best alphabetical catalogue ever begun—that of the Casadate Library at Rome; but it never was carried beyond the letter K, or the fourth volume, and that was published in 1788, twenty-seven years after the first...

The battle of the books formed the chief object of the Commission; and the Catalogue, the key of the position, became the point of attack and defence. .... Of assailants from within—Sir F. Madden prefers the folio Bodleian Catalogue to "the one Mr. Panizzi proposed." This knight was speedily unhorsed. The Museum Catalogue, it was shown, is one drawn according to the orders of the trustees, who are his and the other keepers' masters...

All this was too much for Madden, who occupied a rank equivalent to that of Panizzi's in the hierarchy. He supposed a lost cat he adored had been stolen by Panizzi. Fortunately the cat turned up, but the incident highlighted the feverish effect the disputes had on Madden's imagination. Madden would later leave his post early;  he left his own papers to the Bodleian, rather than this museum. It is the opinion of many scholars that Madden was ill-used by the trustees of the British museum.