Visiting Great Britain last month, I made pilgrimage to two great libraries, the new British Library in London and the old Bodleian Library at Oxford University (where my son is reading for a Masters in Archaeological Science.) While asking what the library will become in the 21st century, there is something to be learned from looking at libraries that have survived many centuries. For my observations, please click through. Meanwhile, look here soon for my tour of the Williams College Library’s new high-density shelving facility, and for my history of Stetson Hall soon after that.
Shortly after the bus from Heathrow left me off at a small hotel in Bloomsbury, the morning after an overnight flight, I made a beeline for the British Library up on Euston Road, which my guidebook deems “London’s most important building from the late 20th century.” Blasted by would-be architecture critic Prince Charles, and building to a price tag over half a billion pounds, the library opened in the late 90s after decades of construction, and is now widely admired and wildly popular. Perhaps it is to libraries what the Guggenheim Bilbao is to museums, over-ambitious but paradigm-shifting in returning spectacle and awe to sleepy institutions and public spaces.
Certainly I was overawed, almost giddy, but that might have had something to do with sleep deprivation. The impressive courtyard of the red-brick building seems vaguely Chinese in its rooflines, but the interior is anchored by a glass tower that climbs six stories through the center and encloses the library of King George III. From the surrounding staircases the various reading rooms (and dining areas) spin off. Most of the 12 million books are stored underground, on 300 kilometers of shelving, which no doubt accounts for some of the inflated cost of construction (a problem the new Williams College Library has avoided in a manner that will be the subject of my next post.)
Despite the architectural pizzazz, the most immediately dazzling feature of the library is its public exhibition galleries. While the building strides boldly into the future, the exhibitions look far back and world wide at the history of books. Among the various manuscripts and volumes, I was particularly drawn to the talismanic quality of Jane Austen’s juvenilia and actual writing desk, displayed next to Jane Eyre in Charlotte Bronte’s own hand. But no matter what your interests, even if they go back no further than the Beatles, you will find specimens of authenticity whose aura draws you in and takes you back. There are virtual attractions as well, with touchscreens that simulate the experience of leafing through volumes like the Lindisfarne Gospels or Shakespeare’s First Folio. I was transfixed like a teen in front of a game console at the arcade. (And when I returned home, I discovered that Turning the Pages is available online.)
The exhibitions seemed emblematic of the contemporary library’s need to preserve the past while embracing the tools of the future. Whatever the format or medium, there is a bibliographic imperative and bibliophilic spirit to be maintained.
Surprisingly, the British Library is a fairly recent institution, created in the last half-century out of many others, most importantly the book collections of the British Museum, where the famous Reading Room has now been restored as the centerpiece of the Great Court carved out of what used to be stack space and is now covered by Norman Foster’s millennial glass dome. Unfortunately, the Reading Room itself was closed for the installation of an exhibit, so I couldn’t soak up the atmosphere of that fabled rotunda where so many world historical figures have studied, from Marx to Gandhi and beyond.
In the default of really being there, one can have a virtual look around. And as one of the visual icons of the new London, the Great Court and Reading Room of the British Museum can be viewed in great photographic variety on flickr.com.
Another reading room, similarly closed to visitors, is in the Radcliffe Camera, a domed rotunda from 1748, the focal point of the Bodleian Library, and indeed the whole campus of Oxford University. Only fair, I suppose, that a reading room should be devoted to readers and not to gawkers. The Bodleian itself is a centuries-old and ever-evolving institution, most of which is closed to those without a reader’s card, but our son’s ID got us into the spaces where visitors are allowed, the Divinity School of 1488 and Duke Humfrey’s Library, where the weight of ancient learning is exalting rather than oppressive.
I got little sense of the Bodleian’s operation as a modern library, with most of its closed stacks underground or across the street in the bunker-like, WWII-vintage New Bodleian (which might strike you as a misnomer, until you consider Oxford’s “New College” was founded in 1379), but what a presence is the central courtyard! It certainly conveys the idea that a library is not simply a repository of dusty old books, but a glorious edifice of learning, an inspiration to think the highest and best that humans are capable of.
The entrance tower of circa 1620 is supported by columns of the five orders of architecture — Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite — and presided over by a statue of patron King James I. Across the quadrangle are the Divinity School and Duke Humfrey’s Library. The duke was Henry V’s brother and donated his books around 1440 — the pre-Gutenberg volumes were mostly dispersed during the iconoclastic phase of the English Reformation in 1550, but when Thomas Bodley restored and restocked the library around 1600, Duke Humfrey was memorialized in an ornate reading room, with old folios and quartos still chained to the shelves.
The Radcliffe Library was built as a separate entity in the 18th century, but was absorbed by the Bodleian a century later, in a process of consolidation that continued through the 19th and 20th centuries. Whatever the Bodleian’s deficiencies as an exemplar of 21st century access to information, it certainly highlights the opposite (or complementary) mission of the library, as a repository of past knowledge and belief, and entry point on the long continuum of human learning.
