But honestly, every inch of the place is book art. The V&A was originally meant to be a place where artisans could come and study the methods of other artisans from around the world, to ensure that British artisans had good training and were keeping up with the newest trends, techs, and advances. It is one of the top four art libraries in the world, and its biggest strength is the range of its collection. They have over a million books, 30,000 visitors a year, and three main roles: to be publicly accessible, to be a library for the museum staff (who are the only people who can borrow books), and be a curatorial department in its own right. In other words, they treat every book or manuscript as an acquisition of a new object for the museum.
See? Book art.
Like the British Library, you can't browse the stacks, but they are SPEEDY in finding what you need. On average, they can find an item and get it into your hands in the reading room in 1.5 hours. They have 17 storage areas, 11,000 periodical titles (50-100 new issues a week), and 100,000 children's books (over at Blythe House).
The librarian shows the director of our program a Picasso book.
Dickens left his library as a bequest, and it included manuscripts, serialized copies of his books, and first editions. It also included Da Vinci's five notebooks and four of Shakespeare's first folios. We got to see one:
We also saw an unfinished book of hours, but it was interesting to see which parts had been completed, such as the drawings of bodies, but not the heads.
We also saw an 18th century copy of Thomas Bewick's History of British Birds, which was the first example of a book that showed birds and their habitats with information about each bird all together. It's also a prominent feature in the beginning chapters of Jane Eyre, and we saw an illustrated adaptation of that, too!
Finally, we saw a Picasso book called Livre d'Artist. An example of book art is first:
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