In a large folio book with the title ‘Applications for Reading Room Tickets, 1872–79’, and archived at the British Library on Euston Road, is a letter dated 15 October 1877:

Eleanor Marx, the youngest of three sisters, addressed this letter to John Winter Jones, Principal Librarian of the British Museum from 1866–78. Archived at the British Library today, there are four folio books of selected letters and applications, from 1824–81. Together, these volumes provide a spotty glimpse of the occasions, affiliations and purposes of readers seeking admission to the Bloomsbury national library. The pages – scrapbooks in effect – offer a sense of the array of stationery and handwriting of the era, with pastel sheets of assorted shapes patched across the surfaces of the volume by some invisible hand; a librarian or archivist, possibly in the early twentieth century, collected this medley of requests to read at the British Museum.