It's a shame that a survey of the world's libraries focuses on institutions created for the privileged
It's clear within a few pages of The Library: A World History (Venice's Biblioteca Marciana pictured generously and then, hugging the preface, a portrait of the magnificent George Peabody in Baltimore) that there will be no place in this survey of libraries for the one I grew up visiting. A shame. Palmers Green library in Enfield had an impeccable selection of plastic-backed Quantum Leap novels, plus all the Tintins. But it was never pretty – a teal-carpeted dog, honestly – and this volume by architectural historian James WP Campbell and photographer Will Pryce is a study of "libraries that are designed to be seen".
So drool over the towering book wall at the Shiba Ryotaro Museum in Osaka, its triple-height shelves made from pale Japanese oak. Yale's Beinecke library is walled with Vermont marble, and the interior glows the colour of honey. The library at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire has one-person desks, each with a private window, shown sun-scraped. This library was built in the 1970s by Louis Khan.
We learn from Campbell's commentary – dense and academic, but fascinating, sewn with anecdote – that Khan had a theory. "You plan a library as though no library ever existed." It worked for him in New Hampshire. Perhaps not so well for the firm behind a library in Delft, Holland. It has a concrete cone, meant for use as a reading room. Campbell: "Its solid sides permit no view out and the claustrophobic space is used in an unsatisfactory way for reading desks." A purpose-built reading room, unsatisfactory for just one thing... There's been pepper over the centuries between those who design our libraries and the librarians left behind to manage them. "Fraught", Campbell calls the relationship.
There are other glimpses of folly here and there. Utrecht library, its walls rippled black, looks as if it was built for a climactic showdown between man and alien. I was struck by the statue of Lenin in the Russian State Library: old Vladimir flattered and brainy looking, but back-folding a book in a way that would get him ejected from any reading room in the world. Climbing a staircase inside the National Library of Slovenia, visitors are meant to think of themselves (so the architect expressed his hope) rising from ignorance into wisdom. Sure. Or they might think they're climbing a staircase.
Damningly, the British Library merits only passing reference, and none of Pryce's luxurious photography. Featured Brits include the library at Wells Cathedral, its books still chained to the shelves, and the eponymous lairs of Oxford and Cambridge, Christopher Codrington's Codrington, Thomas Bodley's Bodleian, John Radcliffe's Radcliffe Camera.
It's a strange world history of libraries, though, that doesn't glance at the dismal goings-on elsewhere in Britain. The 300-odd local libraries that have closed since 2010, for instance, or the 400 more that could follow. Campbell's history makes clear that libraries were always at risk. Fires have gutted them, at least since ancient Rome, and there have been struggles with damp, beetles, bombs. A plane crashed into a reading room in Slovenia once. In 21st-century Britain the threat to libraries is subtler, but real. The government is contemptuous of them.
Campbell excuses himself from comment. His is a work of architectural history, he writes. I assume he means public libraries such as Palmers Green, installed in the 1940s in a former town hall, when he dismisses those "housed in parts of existing buildings that have been adapted for the purpose. Such buildings are rarely architecturally interesting." Instead, "I have chosen [to feature] libraries that I thought were particularly pertinent to the story."
In Britain just now there is nothing more pertinent to the story of libraries than those wobbling at local level. Zadie Smith has called the government "cavalier", joined in protest against cuts by Neil Gaiman, who warned of "stealing from the future to pay for today". Playwright Lee Hall has charged philistinism. Campbell gives the matter a few sentences ("While public libraries are being closed in Europe, other parts of the world, such as China, are building them") and aims his contempt elsewhere, for example at the university that opted, in 2004, to brand its library an "Information, Communications and Media Centre". An "ungainly title… sad".
For all the seductive beauty in The Library: A World History there is a niggling sense that superb buildings get erected not to celebrate books and refine access to them, but rather as a way for architects to flex and test themselves; as a way for flush universities to slough off money; as a way for benefactors to create expanses of wall for their good name to go up on.
And so it might have been nice to include Palmers Green library in these pages or, better yet, one of those on the brink in Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Lincolnshire, Moray. Because the buildings in The Library: A World History aren't really the libraries of the world; they're the libraries of the few. Teal-carpeted alternatives weren't "designed to be seen" but they were absolutely designed for fairness. Malorie Blackman calls them "equalisers". They don't ask you for a recommendation on headed notepaper, and they aren't Oxbridge- or Ivy League-exclusive. They have all the Tintins and let anyone in to read them.
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