Selective Universality? The Development of the British Museum Library's Collections of German Printed Books in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In the course of the nineteenth century, the British Museum's method of acquiring German books developed from the haphazard and sporadic to the systematic and selective, based on an ideal of users' present and future needs. From the 1840s to the 1880s, a Golden Age of generous public funding placed few obstacles to the realization of this ideal, and consolidated holdings of remarkable range and depth. These and other holdings remain selective: universality does not exist.