The British Library's newspaper collection occupies several buildings in Colindale, north of London, near a former Royal Air Force base that is now a museum of aviation. On October 20, 1940, a German airplane--possibly mistaking the library for an aircraft-manufacturing plant--dropped a bomb on it. Ten thousand volumes of Irish and English papers were destroyed; fifteen thousand more were damaged. Unscathed, however was a very large foreign-newspaper collection, including many American titles: thousands of fifteen-pound brick thick folios bound in marbled boards, their pages stamped in red with the British Museum's crown-and-lion symbol of curatorial responsibility.
If the thought that the British Library later willingly destroyed these 'unscathed' newspapers arouses a surge off emotion in your breast, you will be interested in Double Fold. If not, you might want to read it anyway and see what it does make you feel, or you may not want to waste your time.
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