A Brill Calendar: September 16

Few immigrants in England embraced their new country as whole heartedly as Antonio Genesio Maria Panizzi (Brescello, Italy, September 16 1797 – London April 8 1879).

In 1822 he disembarked at Liverpool, a young penniless revolutionary, fighting for Italian national independence; teaching Italian just to earn a living. When he died, more than half a century later, he had become a famous public figure, known throughout the British Isles. In the history of scholarship, it is seldom that a man has expressed his love for knowledge as convincingly as Sir Anthony Panizzi, when he designed, organized and supervised the building of the Reading Room of the British Museum.

This was inaugurated when he was sixty; having been named assistant librarian to the Museum in 1831; some 26 years before his ‘finest hour’. The reorganization and rationalization of the system must be ranked among the supreme achievements of Victorian culture and civilization. It is neither here nor there to remark, that library science and librarianship have, with the digital revolution of the second half of the 20th century, been subject to comprehensive changes.

Yet the General Catalog effort, the enforcement of the Copyright Act of 1842 and the determination to regard Museum activity as a public service make Panizzi as timeless as a born organizer can get. The classical sentence “ If you need a monument, look around” dear to superb architecture, could have been formulated especially for Panizzi and his unique Reading Room.