I went to the British Library, which is one of the UK’s legal deposit libraries — meaning publishers have to provide a copy of everything they release. And the British Library is the one that doesn’t get to be picky, or wait to be asked: it just accumulates. That sounds like a dream if you like books, but it’s also a logistics problem on a frankly ridiculous scale. When you say “every book ever published”, what you really mean is: a system designed to keep growing forever. In the video, I dig into what that means in practice: storage, retrieval, and the slightly mind-bending fact that the internet is making it worse, not better. Because legal deposit isn’t just paper anymore — it’s websites as well, via the UK Web Archive — and archiving the web is like trying to nail jelly to a wall. There’s also a practical note: you can’t just wander in and take books home. You still need a reader pass, and the books stay in the reading rooms (and yes: I’ve posted a correction that the formal interview requirement has been dropped).