Lost in the library...

Main entrance hall, New York Public Library, Main Branch (1911, Carrère & Hastings). Photo: Alex Proimos. License: CC BY 2.0.

Stacks, New York Public Library. Archival photo.

The library is more than a storehouse of knowledge. It's a bastion of logic.

I don't just mean the logical reasoning its patrons hoped we would nurture through reams of reading and research in its hallowed halls and stately stacks. 

I'm referring to the logical layout users expect of it upon entering—a proper progression of rooms, sequential adherence to the Dewey Decimal System (if used), clear wayfinding signs and nodes, etc.—so they won't have to hound elusive mountain goats or be waylaid by red herrings to track down a desired book or paper, claim a cubicle or computer, or reach a restroom in time.

Portico, New York Public Library. Photo: GK tramrunner229. License: CC BY-SA 3.0.

After all, no one wants a library experience like a wild duck hunt through Super Stop & Shop, a quest for a lost kid at Six Flags, or a scramble for budget parking in New York. Yet some libraries venture beyond their book repository and study hall roles so surreally I'd love to get lost in them, if only to gawk at their glory, eye their ornament, fixate on their frescoes, or thirst for the thought resting on their sky-high shelves. 

Besides, midcentury modern libes are as antiseptic as ERs. So why not enjoy a circus of sights while combing the collections, as either a diversion from studies or an artistic experience of the library's intellectual depth?

Library, Trinity College Dublin (1732, Thomas Burgh). Photo: David Iliff. License: CC BY-SA 4.0

In the Long Room at the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, the towers of gold-lettered leatherbound tomes are the main attraction, piquing our awe at the expanse of scholarship within those vaulting volumes, expressed by the barrel-vaulted ceiling and the forever feel of the hall that invites us to wander and ponder the leathery linguistics, wondering what food for thought to feast on first and get lost in last.

Library, University Club of New York (1899, Charles Follen McKim).

The University Club of New York library follows the Long Room's symmetrical hall-procession conservatism, adding the extravaganza of gilded moldings, painted patterns and storybook frescoes on groin vaults, divinely inspired by the Vatican's Borgia Apartments. These elements proclaim the club-clique exclusivity regarding who dares parade its premises and peruse its precious books. This contrasts with the bare-bones barrel-vaulting and structural emphasis that makes Trinity feel more publicly accessible (the Club Library, BTW, is not) in a way that is awe-inspiring but not effusive of the Club Library's palatial pomp.

Library, Clementinum, Prague, Czech Republic (1722, Kilian Ignatz Dientzenhofer,
frescoes painted 1727 by Jan Hiebel). Photo: Bruno Delzant. License: CC BY 2.0. 

The Baroque Library, dedicated in 1722 for the Jesuit university at Klementium in Prague, pushes the pomp further skyward with spiral columns raising the eye to the barrel-vaulted ceiling of Jan Hiebl's frescoes of allegorical motifs of education and portraits of Jesuit saints and university patrons. Add the geographical and astronomical globes and clocks and the old books, and intellectual stimulation never stops.

Admont Abbey Library (1776, Joseph Hueber), Admont, Austria
Photo by Jorge Royan (License: CC BY-SA 3.0)

Austria's Admont Abbey Library honors the Enlightenment with 48 windows lighting the white-and-gold palette, Bartolomeo Altomonte's frescoes of the stages of human knowledge through Divine Revelation, Baroque curlicues vaulting for heavenly realms, and the 70,000 volumes the visuals may stimulate you to be lost in enlightenment in.

George Peabody Library (1878, Edmund George Lind), Baltimore, Maryland.
Photo by Matthew Petroff (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The George Peabody Library is often pictured on ads for travel to Baltimore, and I'm not surprised. Deemed a "cathedral of books" by its first provost Nathaniel H. Morison, this 1878 neo-Greco palace presents the architectural equivalent of gilded tomes: gold-scalloped columns of cast-iron-railed book-stacks soar from a marble floor to a 61-foot latticed skylight, inviting us to lose ourselves in the light of knowledge.

Salt Lake City Public Library (2003, Moshe Safdie & Associates and VCBO Architecture)
Photo by Nova77 (GNU Free Documentation License)

But is lavish ornament necessary to enjoy loss in the library? At least not since Moshe Safdie's Salt Lake City Public Library was dedicated in 2003, flaunting enough curves, catwalks, curtain walls, cathedral ceilings and interspatial odysseys to strike awe in Archie's gang:

BETTY: It's...it's awesome!

CHUCK: Wow! And double wow!

JUGHEAD: Throw in a triple wow for me! (Archie #570)

 

Eager to eat up as much space as food (if not learning), Jughead nailed it regarding not just the library's astronomical dimensions, but also its expression of the infinite information the libes now possess, kudos to what bounds beyond bookshelf growth: cyberspace and the Internet. 

Now that's something to get lost in.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!