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Complete Picture. The main obstacle to progress, says the museum's curator, Sir Frank Francis, is "the intractable nature of the building itself." Despite cramped facilities and a woefully inadequate budget (£4 million a year), he has tried to put a greater variety of the museum's vast materials before the public. In one imaginative display he arranged finds from the museum's 1963-64 New Guinea expedition into an attractive mix of the utensils of everyday life with elaborate objets d'art. "We endeavor to give a complete picture of a culture—not only the people on top, but through everybody on down as well," he explains. Also successful was a centenary exhibition honoring Karl Marx, who wrote most of Das Kapital in the museum's reading room. The Duveen Gallery, housing the Elgin marbles, is equipped with a new recorded explanation of the treasure. The most ambitious new project is the General Catalogue of Printed Books, the world's largest single publication, whose 263 volumes list the library's Western language books printed between 1455 and 1955.
But the "fair number of things done," says Sir Frank, are "small in comparison with the need for space." He admits that "no one nowadays creating the institution afresh would make a library and museum in one building." But he also insists that "books and antiquities illuminate each other" and is determined to reinstate the plans for the new library. Meanwhile, for want of simple shelter, one of the great caches of world civilization stays in semiseclusion.