Short answers, pulled from the story.
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, based in London. Its purpose-built main building stands next to St Pancras station, with a second site for off-site storage near Boston Spa in Yorkshire.
The British Library holds an estimated collection of over 200 million items from multiple countries, including around 14 million books. It adds some three million items each year, occupying 9.6 km of new shelf space.
The British Library was created on the 1st of July 1973, drawing the bulk of its holdings from the British Museum. Its St Pancras building was officially opened by Elizabeth II on the 25th of June 1998.
The British Library is the only UK library that must automatically receive a copy of every item published in Britain, a right traceable to at least 1610 and set out in the Copyright Act 1911. It also automatically receives a free copy of every book published in Ireland under the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000.
On the 28th of October 2023 the British Library's entire website went down due to a ransomware attack attributed to the group Rhysida, disabling catalogues and ordering systems and making most collections inaccessible. By October 2024 many services had been restored, and a new library management system launched in late 2025.
The Sir John Ritblat Gallery, open seven days a week at no charge, displays items including Beowulf, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the St Cuthbert Gospel, a Gutenberg Bible, and a room devoted solely to Magna Carta. The collections also include manuscripts dating as far back as 2000 BC.