What’s in a Library?

Central Library is going to be remade. It’s going to be reshaped and restructured from the inside out. And when that task of re-making is complete, Te Ngākau Civic Square will see the return of a big chunk of its beating heart.

Central Library has haunted me since it closed. I suspect many of us out there all over Wellington have been in quiet state of nostalgia, perhaps even laced with a fair squeeze of anxiety. It is strange to lose a place so unique as a large, public building full of information, full of kind, helpful people, full of corners and soft furnishings, designed specifically to keep your body comfortable while you head off on an inner journey. Or perhaps you just miss Clark’s. Or that glorious mish mash of posters and flyers and displays that spilled forth with the activities of community and art. Or for the comfy spot you used to frequent for a bit of a sit down in the warmth.

We’re all ghosts in that closed up building in a quieter Civic Square. And that empty building is now the centre of a mammoth timeline of important sounding words like: consultation, engagement, future, activation, spatial design and many million dollars worth of opportunity.

There is a lot for people to talk about and consider when we tackle a public space like this. Questions that often get asked include: What should happen in the new library? How might the design achieve that? How can the library be a space for our citizens to all feel at home?

But what I’ve observed is that it is appears to be quite rare that the words ‘books’, ‘writers’, ‘publishers’ and ‘readers’ get positioned front and centre, or even side and fringe, of the conversation. I remembered, recently, this interesting article about the decline of UK libraries versus the opposite in the US. The relevant bit, is perhaps this:

It’s because a long time ago the UK public library sector took a path which said we’re not just about books anymore. The US have never gone down that path … They’ve never left the standpoint that the essence of them is about books and reading. They say we mustn’t fall into the trap the UK has fallen into. It’s an important message not just to libraries but to publishers too. In the US libraries still play an important part. In the UK they just don’t at all.”

So I’ve been asking myself: What does it mean when books and writers are absent from a conversation about a library? Am I a 35 year old woman in the body of a Cistercian monk from 1472? Is my anxiety over this perceived absence even valid?

From my perspective (and I am just one person) Central Library was an extraordinarily busy place, all the time. The building was home to a plethora of activities happening simultaneously. It was a portal for parents and children with an extensive programme of specially designed events that celebrate stories and the telling and making of them; study groups and tutorial meet ups; art installations; business meetings (I was in Clark’s at least twice a week meeting with other office-less freelance artists and producers, as well as meeting with library staff about events in the works that brought our mahi with writers to the library as a venue); book clubs; language and cultural group meet ups; students swatting; people needing advice, printers and the internet; parents and babies meeting with other parents and babies; people simply coming to find company, warmth, safety; a bit of time out.

I loved it for all of the above.

But while all of this activity took place every day, in my memory, at the heart of this miraculous building, was the rows and rows and rows of books. And the ability to browse, and discover, or march purposely towards. To reserve, read, to think, to listen, to study. To be on your own in your own head.

We live in a world that is always ‘on’. It’s fast, we’re all busy, and it’s full of noise. From home to office, from hui to public transport, from gym to campground, from school to traffic. Most of the time we’re moving and we’re multi tasking and a lot is asked of our time and our energy.

What is special about a library is the dialling down of that noise. A library pulls off some kind of contemporary witchcraft. It gives you permission to go inwards. In a library, you are invited to live up in your own mind if that’s what you need or want to be doing. There are opportunities on every floor to engage with others, ask questions, have a conversation, participate in a meeting, even watch an event. But the foundations that house all of this activity are rather more quiet. A library building’s primary (and I would also argue primal) reason for being is to house collections of information for individuals to access at will. Whether to take home or enjoy sitting in.

And to go further and deeper along this line of thought, I think it’s here that I find myself holding up a beloved book and going: YOU MADE THIS. Libraries are coz of you. And writers YOU MADE THE STORY THAT MADE THIS BOOK. And publishers, YOU TOOK THAT STORY AND MADE IT INTO A BOOK AND NOW I CAN READ IT. Libraries were made to give the citizenry free access to the products of our industrious writers and publishers. What an idea! To borrow a book that is going to affect neurological magic and then give it back for someone else to get the same hit. That is a truly democratic, sustainable, cool idea. It’s the original gift that keeps on giving. Or perhaps it is actually a right.

I’m not a neurologist so I can’t really explain it but if you’re lucky you know that feeling of literally being lost in a text. When the information that your brain is channelling transports your mind so completely that time actually stops. And suddenly you look up and you have to bring yourself back into your surroundings and blink. I’m passionate about everyone’s right to that feeling, that experience of solo mind travel. I think many of us try to guard space for it in our daily lives but that can be impossible. We have emails, we have families, we have meetings, we have to get shit done. Finding the time to read, to listen, to be quiet, to educate ourselves in the way that suits us best, is hard.

It’s a library that, by the very fact of their being the home of information intended for human brains to travel in, gives us a symbol of that right. And by being a solid, comfortable, warm four-walled symbol it gives us permission to embrace that right and own it. For free.

So what has been puzzling me about conversations about our future Library is a sense of quiet surrounding the writers, books and the borrowing of books and the access to the books and the celebration of the writers who made the books and the publishers who publish the books, and the readers who read the books. Those building blocks that gave rise to the idea of a library building in the very first place.

If we were talking about a new City Gallery I can’t imagine conversations that pushed ‘where to put and how to put the art?’ right at the bottom of the list of things to think about. And I can’t imagine artists not wanting to be talked to about what they thought could be interesting to consider for a building that was going to be public home to their work.

I do not want to be taken for someone that doesn’t want events and other such things in a Library. I ran lots of events in Central Library and I can’t wait to make more in a future version of it. To me, the events we created were made for libraries. We had writers telling stories; children’s authors and illustrators hidden throughout its nooks and crannies for tamariki to hunt out using a specially designed story map with clues; we held LitCrawl events there every year and hundreds piled in, sitting on stairwells when the ground floor go too full, to watch extraordinary storytellers. It was all easily done and it was joyful and it was apt because, to me, those events celebrated the key elements of that a library building symbolises: storytellers, stories, books, writers, publishers and readers. Those events were designed in collaboration with library staff and librarians who could guide us as to the best times to stage them so as not to interrupt the daily flow of thousands of individual habits. We went in there after hours sometimes — such a thrill!

But, for me, in the suite of public amenities it is the library alone that upholds the craft of arranging words on a page (paper or digital or in the head). It’s the library alone that upholds your right to be a reader. There is literally nowhere else where books are so valued, so accessible, so much part of our democratic right to information. And time travel.

Libraries and books are bound together linguistically, conceptually, pragmatically. Yes, library buildings can be many things and house many varied activities many of which are not directly related to reading. But I do wonder: if books, writers, publishers, storytellers aren’t at the heart of a conversation about a new library, then are we building a library at all?

A note: This is a personal opinion piece stirred by my own perceptions of conversations about what libraries do and are seem to be evolving, all over the world.