My Library Loves
Feeling wistful for the analog world
I have been hiding out in 17th century Canada for the past few weeks. Thought I would emerge for a bit to reminisce about my favorite places. Do you have a favorite library?
As the weather warms up, most people’s thoughts turn to the outdoors. By May, I am already anticipating the fetid heat of July, when I turn into some long suffering Saint Bernard panting on the bathroom floor. Summer is when I hide indoors. No place I love more on a sticky summer day than our local, empty, air conditioned public library.
How better to gear up for my own upcoming indoor sports season than with a personal tour of favorite libraries.
Even before modern technology destroyed our brains, I was easily distractible. I was a graduate student when I first encountered libraries without open stacks. These were research libraries where patrons were obliged to read sur place, meaning sitting upright in a hard chair at a table. The books had to be ordered in advance and could only read at an assigned seat.
I had to fully focus on the book at hand and not stop until I had finished it, or I would have to come back another day. For an inattentive yet task oriented person this was a godsend. My best loved libraries are therefore those where I have spent countless hours, if only because I could not take the books home and drop them in the bathtub.
The New York Public Library Main Branch is one of my very favorite places in New York City. I spent months studying in its Rose Reading Room when I was a doctoral student at NYU preparing my comprehensive exams.
Many years have passed since I haunted the NYPL. I recently found myself working next to Bryant Park. My first week on the job, I strolled across the street at lunchtime to have a look at my old friend and was shocked by the crush of tourists that now descend on the building, selfie sticks in hand. While I am glad that more people enjoy this place, I can’t help but think that libraries are not in fact intended for everybody, but for people who want to read books.
I didn’t know many people in Paris when I was a student there, so I spent far more time in libraries than I probably should have. Some of my fondest memories of Paris are of its libraries.
The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris is the French equivalent of the Library of Congress, where any printed matter subject to the dépôt légal gets collected there. It has one of the greatest collections in the world. In my student days there was only one reading room, on the rue Richelieu.
Gaining entry to the BN reading room required about the same effort as getting State Department security clearance. To start, you needed to be a doctoral candidate and have a letter from a scholar who would vouch for you, typically your thesis advisor. Once you had the pass, you needed to line up at least an hour before the library opened at 10 am if you wanted a seat, since there were only about 200 spaces.
Once you had a space, you had to fill out the call slip for your book, which was brought to your seat on what looked like a dessert trolley pushed by a grumpy French librarian in a blue smock. This process could take as long as two hours, just in time for a long French lunch break.
It’s all different now, and the biblio has now moved to a larger location at Tolbiac with greater access for the public. But I do have a certain nostalgia for the dim Richelieu reading room and the green glow of its reading lamps, where sometimes you looked up from your book and spotted a famous historian across the table. Some of my friends remember seeing the bald head of Michel Foucault, who spent an inordinate amount of hours there. I somehow miss the scrum of getting my hands on my reading matter, and even the grumpy librarians, who were convinced we were all out to dog ear or scribble in their books.
The library I frequented the most in my student years in Paris, the Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève, was far easier to get into and only a short distance from my apartment. It had the advantage of being almost empty most of the time, except for twice a year in the weeks leading up to the January and June exams for the law students at the Sorbonne. At such times they packed the room and talked too much.
The Bibliothèque Ste. Genevieve has been a library since it was founded by Clovis as a scriptorium in 831. Peter Abelard and Erasmus studied there. The reading room dates from the 19th century but I always looked up to admire the splendid cast iron arches across its vaulted ceiling.
The best part of the Bibliothèque Ste.èGeneviève, other than its location across from the Panthéon, was the secret library inside the library.
There was an unmarked door tucked inside the foyer of the Ste. Geneviève. Behind that door was the Fonds Jacques Doucet, a special collection of manuscripts and rare books of early 20th century French literature.1
Photos of the Fonds Jacques Doucet can’t do it justice. I prefer to share with you the place I remember in my minds’ eye: one large room two storeys high. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with glass-enclosed wooden bookshelves. The second storey shelves were accessed by wooden cat walks. There were tall French doors that gave out onto a walled garden. It was a magical place.
I never visited the Bibliothèque Forney, at the Hotel de Sens, as its collection focused on the decorative arts. I wanted to come up with a reason to go just because the outside of the library was so enchanting.
Another Parisian library that got away was the Bibliothèque Mazarine. It specialized in Renaissance and early modern manuscripts, so I had no business there as a researcher, but I always wanted to visit if for no other reason than that the young Marcel Proust’s family had found him a job there as a librarian; he reported to work the first day and then never showed up again.
There are many famous libraries that sadly are only open to the public as non-participants. Like my favorite Paris libraries, they don’t permit the general public to pull up a chair and start reading. These are tourist destinations, like the famous Long Room at Trinity in Dublin. My personal favorite in this category is Marsh’s Library, also in Dublin and just a twenty minute walk away from Trinity. It’s still open to the public, but only by appointment for research.
Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, and James Joyce were among visitors to the library. Readers used to sit in cages, which were introduced in the 18th century to keep people from stealing books.2
Finally we all hold dear those libraries we first loved. I spent a lot of my middle school years in the Westmount library in Montreal. As a kid I always passed by this frieze at the entrance of the library and loved the creepy disembodied arm in its frilly sleeve, which looked like gothic horror (my frequent borrowings in those days were the Alfred Hitchcock suspense anthologies).
Going furthest back in time, I get to my very first library memory, when I was too short to look over the circulation desk. I was allowed to take out two picture books at a time. How I loved this place.
Think about your first library experience, and those kind people who put books in your little hands.
Reginald P. Dawson, I dedicate this post to you!
Jacques Doucet was a fashion designer of elegant dresses around the turn of the last century who was also an enthusiastic art and book collector.
Somehow the more famous visitors were spared this indignity, as the librarians love to point out Joyce’s favorite table and Swift’s favorite chair. Maybe it’s all blarney.
Oh, those are spectacular, Lisa! What a lovely detour. Of course, you'll find library fans in this crowd. When other kids were into rock n' roll heartthrobs, I was smitten with Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine magical realist writer. It made me feel like such a grown-up. I could see myself sitting in a cafe with a stack of espresso cups by my side.
By the time I got to Stanford, I fell in love with the reading room at Green Library. I loved the high ceilings, creaking wooden chairs. Looking at photos today, there's really not much to it. California's 1960s attempt at the Old World, rendered in Oak. To me, it felt so important, and I suppose that's exactly what I needed at the time.
«Sigh, that was a fun romp. Thank you!»
Wow! Stunning collection of library photos. I've visited some major ones: NYPL, Library of Congress, Bodleian at Oxford. There's a spot I enjoy working now at the library on Amherst College's campus, but it's a more modern building and the main highlights are a comfortable desk, old pictures of campus, and a view of the mountains.