Biography | Karl Marx — The Reading Room That Became a Workshop for Capital

On 2 May 1857, the British Museum's new Round Reading Room opened.

The date marks the opening of the room that Karl Marx subsequently used; it does not establish his first attendance there.

Marx's research at the museum library began before the circular room existed.

Those first years were in the older library rooms. The Round Reading Room, designed by Sydney Smirke after Antonio Panizzi's plan, opened on 2 May 1857.

The museum identifies Marx among the readers who used its collection; a reader's ticket was required for access.

Use was irregular. Illness, poverty and pawned coats kept him away for stretches.

A later study of the admission registers shows gaps that the legend of daily attendance erases.

Volume I of Das Kapital was finished in London and published in Hamburg on 14 September 1867. Volumes II and III were assembled by Friedrich Engels from the manuscripts after 1883.

The library function left this room for St Pancras in 1997. The dome stayed.

After years as an exhibition hall and then an archive, the Reading Room reopened to general visitors in July 2024.

The pin is the circular room in the Great Court, not the British Library building at St Pancras and not any private lodgings in Soho or Kentish Town.

Sources: [British Museum reading-room history](https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/architecture/reading-room); [history of the room](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Museum_Reading_Room).

Image: an 1859 wood engraving published in Edward Edwards's Memoirs of Libraries, page 701; Library of Congress catalogue 2007682650, public domain, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reading-room_of_the_British_Museum_LCCN2007682650.jpg). The catalogue does not attribute this image to Charles Gregory.