Our Germanic collections comprise historic and current material from Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland, from the Netherlands and Dutch/Flemish speaking Belgium, and from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland.

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Reading Room Paul Grundy

St Pancras Reading Rooms

At St Pancras we have 11 Reading Rooms, each specialising in a different subject area or type of material and with different opening hours. In our Reading Rooms you can:

  • Consult books, journals and other items from our collections
  • Access a wide range of electronic resources and electronic journals
  • Consult subject guides, bibliographies and other research aids

If you need help, please ask our Reference Specialists at the enquiry desks or contact the Reference Service.

We offer a range of free Reader sessions and 1-2-1 consultations to help you make the best use of the Library's collections.

You’ll need a Reader Pass

Opening hours for all Reading Rooms

Blog posts

The revolutionary career of a student drinking song

Monday, March 13, 2023

The outbreak of revolution in Vienna in March 1848 was inevitably accompanied by a wave of revolutionary poems and songs. The lifting of press censorship made the publishing and circulation of such material easy, and some pieces enjoyed great success....

An A to Z of the European Studies Blog 2022

Friday, December 30, 2022

A is for Alexander the Great, subject of the Library’s current exhibition. B is for Birds and Bull fighting. C is for Czechoslovak Independence Day, which marks the foundation of the independent Czechoslovak State in 1918. D is for Digitisation,...

Propaganda or Protest? Hans Baumann’s ‘Alexander’

Thursday, December 8, 2022

A few months ago one of the curators of our current exhibition ‘Alexander the Great: the Making of a Myth’ asked me for some information about a book they were thinking of including (but eventually did not). This was a...

The Curious Woodcuts in Hartlieb’s Late-Medieval Adventures of Alexander the Great

Thursday, November 10, 2022

There are countless adaptations of the Alexander Romance, a collection of fantastical stories about Alexander the Great originally brought together in Greek, probably in the third century AD. Among the earliest adaptations to appear in print was Hartlieb’s Alexanderbuch. Nine...

More blog posts

Library experts

Marja Kingma

Marja Kingma

Curator, Germanic Collections

Susan Reed

Susan Reed

Lead Curator, Germanic Studies

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Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature

Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature

In East Germany, the Communist Party's attempt to engineer literature yielded a range of outcomes including the complex negotiations behind some of the best-known works by German authors

£25

The Book of the British Library

The Book of the British Library

As well as holding some of the world's most prized cultural treasures, the British Library is the repository of the nation's collective memory.

£25.00