The British Library with St Pancras railway station, London. Photo: Patche99z.

Seen from within its courtyard off busy Euston Road in London, the British Library is meant to look like a stately ocean liner pulling out to sea against the gables, turrets, and clock tower of St. Pancras railway station. The single porthole cut into the long brick hull seals the reference to maritime splendor, that one round window a postmodern wink amidst the riot of Victorian whimsy behind.

St. Pancras was built as a grand railway hotel in the 1870s, and after its great days and those of the Empire were over, it spent many defunct decades in the mid-20th century. It’s now a Marriott. Together, the two structures might seem to evoke the glories and allure of travel to India or other colonies, the big red ship of research allowing intellectual journeys during which the mind moves even as the building doesn’t.

The seas His Majesty’s knowledge vessel cuts through of late have been stormy. If a building could enact the “pathetic fallacy,” the British Library would be listing badly to port, only kept from capsizing by the piers of St. Pancras.

Two years ago, the hacker collective known as Rhysida attacked the information systems of the library and gained access to hundreds of thousands of files. Since then, these tech banditos have amassed a diverse CV of mayhem, including actions against the Chilean army, the City of Columbus, Ohio, the schools of Rutherford County, Tennessee, and the Maryland Department of Transportation, among other targets.

The group’s method of ransoming their British Library booty was to auction it off with the opening bid set at 20 Bitcoin, then worth about $700,000. The British Library refused, and Rhysida dumped scans of passports and other vital personal information of employees onto the dark web. The library’s online catalog was taken down, and individual research and various initiatives and programs were severely hampered or suspended.

Lack of funding was blamed for the porous cyber........

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