Open Door

In purple robes and scarlet, the dignitaries paced, in academic route step, up to the door. At the big moment King George put the silver key in the lock and turned; the key snapped in his hands.

It took a hurried heaving of academic shoulders to force the door open, and thus to dedicate Oxford's $4,000,000 New Bodleian Library. The old Bodleian, which started in Shakespeare's day, was once the biggest library in the Empire, is still among the world's top 15 (an estimated 1,500,000 books). The bulging Bodleian long ago overflowed into nearby buildings and vaults; the Copyright Act entitles it to a copy of every new work published within the United Kingdom. Largely paid for by Rockefeller Foundation money, the new annex has space for five million books. Oxford considers it big enough to hold everything worth saving of what will be written in the next two centuries.

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