“In 1937, the Warburg Institute, recently arrived in London from Hamburg, found itself homeless. Permission was given for it to move into the Imperial Institute, but there was no shelving, which made the library unusable. Month after month, the director Fritz Saxl sent letters to the senior civil servant at the Office of Works, Frederic Raby, asking him for shelves to be provided.

Now Raby was also a considerable scholar of Latin poetry of the Middle Ages; finally, Saxl asked Ernst Gombrich to write Raby a request in Latin poetry in case that might move him to action. Here is that poem, in the style of the �Wandering Scholars�.

The effect was instantaneous: Raby sent back a poem in the same rhyme-scheme saying that they could have their shelves. As Sir Ernst said in sending these opuscula to The Art Newspaper, �The whole stands as a nostalgic tribute to a vanished tradition of the Civil Service�.

read the plea and reply here.

p.s. I like “Quibus mus nunc fruitur gaudeat et Musa.”