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

Documenting the Belarus Protests, 2020-2021

Monday, August 9, 2021

In August 2020, Belarus was catapulted onto the world stage as a wave of anti-government protests swept the country. Although demonstrations had begun in May after President Alexander Lukashenko, in power since 1994, declared his intention to run in the...

Inheritance Books: Annelies Dogterom, Cataloguer West European Languages

Thursday, July 29, 2021

This post is part of our 'Inheritance Books' series, where colleagues choose an 'inherited' item that was already in the library when we started working here, and one that we have acquired or catalogued for our collections during our own...

Ten Years on from 22 July: The Cultural Imperative to Remember

Thursday, July 22, 2021

Like other contemporary acts of terror, the traumatic events that befell Norway on 22 July 2011 are commonly referred to in Norway by their date alone. As we approach the tenth anniversary of that day public, cultural, and scholarly reflections...

Euro 2020: Orange Madness

Friday, July 9, 2021

On Saturday 26 June the Dutch dream of winning the Euro 2020 tournament ended. The Orange team lost 2-0 against the Czech Republic. Coach Frank de Boer was promptly sacked, for not having reached the last 16. It wasn’t the...

More blog posts

Library experts

Marja Kingma

Marja Kingma

Curator, Germanic Collections

Susan Reed

Susan Reed

Lead Curator, Germanic Studies

Pardaad Chamsaz British Library

Pardaad Chamsaz

Curator, Germanic Collections

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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