Library tours reveal a city’s secret culture
Libraries are a portal to understanding a place’s values, its relationship with knowledge, and its vision of who belongs
At the entrance of the New York Public Library, a marble plaque reads: “I had little opportunity for formal education as a young man in Lithuania, and I am deeply indebted to The New York Public Library for the opportunity to educate myself. In appreciation, I have given the Library my estate with the wish that it be used so that others can have the same opportunity made available to me."
The words belong to Martin Radtke, a gardener who taught himself business and finance in the library’s Economics section and invested in the stock market. In 1973, he bequeathed nearly his entire estate—roughly $368,000—to the institution that had transformed his life.
I stood before that plaque in July 2017, camera raised, vision blurring with tears. Libraries have always been sanctuaries to me. As a teenager, I nursed a romantic fantasy of meeting my soulmate while wandering the stacks. Somewhere in the passage from adolescence to adulthood, that dream evolved. I realised that the keepers of so many stories have their own stories to tell. And so, libraries became less about finding a person and more about discovering the soul of a place through them. Sure, they are about spectacular architecture and the staggering collections. But after close to half-a-dozen library tours across the globe in the last decade, libraries have become my portal to understanding a place’s values, its relationship with knowledge, its vision of who belongs and who deserves access to transformation.
Take Poets House Library, tucked near Battery Park in Manhattan, New York. I went there a few days after visiting the New York Public Library. At the time, the stairs leading up displayed a poster of a woman wearing a hijab with four simple words: “Everyone is welcome here."
These two moments captured something essential about America for me. That it is a land where anyone could walk in and remake themselves. But that, over time, it had become a place where one had to explicitly declare what should have been assumed.
Having spent so much time understanding America through its libraries, it was almost comical that my next library tour would happen to pit me against Americans themselves. In August 2018, at the British Library in London, I found myself in an unofficial competition with American tourists in our group, eager to demonstrate my credentials as a “library tour pro." It was silly in hindsight. Here we were at the UK’s national library, the second-largest in the world by catalogue size with over 170 million items, second only to the Library of Congress in Washington DC—which still sits on my bucket list. And I was more focused on subtle one-upmanship over library trivia than on the manuscripts of Magna Carta or Shakespeare’s First Folio.
The autumn of 2018 brought me to the State Library Victoria in Melbourne. Its famous La Trobe Reading Room is magnificent. An octagonal marvel that opened in 1913, about six storeys high, capable of housing 32,000 books and seating 320 readers. It’s one of the two pictures I cherish from that visit. The other is that of the tour guide, an octogenarian whose name I had carefully noted in the Notes app on a phone I no longer own, unsynced to the cloud at the time.
When I visited the National Diet Library in Tokyo in May 2019, I was taken around the premises by Yuko Kumakura. She was preparing to move to Poland and had taken the library position as an in-between job. She brought me to the basement of the seventh-largest library in the world and showed me the oldest manga series in their possession at that time, a first edition of Shōnen Jump, the best-selling manga magazine aimed at boys under 14. It was published on 1 August 1968, exactly 20 years before I was born.
Most library tours around the world are either free or cost a few dollars. They’re democratic in a way that much cultural tourism isn’t. You just need curiosity and a willingness to spend an hour or two listening.
Checking for library tours has become one of my first acts when planning travel to unfamiliar territory. When someone posts about a library from their trips, I add it to my private Instagram list called “Libraries." Over the past year, this list has led me to two remarkable libraries, now on my bucket list. The first is the Rare Books and Letters Library at the University of Texas in Austin, which I learned about through writer and comedian Varun Grover’s Instagram post a few months ago. The second is Helsinki Central Library Oodi (Finnish for “ode"), built in 2017 to mark Finland’s 100 years of independence. Political satirist Akash Banerjee’s account of visiting it earlier this year drew me towards it.
My bucket list also includes the Zaha Hadid-designed Library and Learning Centre in Vienna. I was there in the summer of 2016, but it was closed on the days I could visit.
More than any contemporary library, I dream of visiting the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, one of the ancient world’s greatest repositories of knowledge. I want to see what that legacy looks like in physical space today.
Every library tour is an argument about what a society values. When I take these tours in foreign lands, I’m not just learning about the library. I’m learning what that culture wants me to understand about itself, its generosity or its gatekeeping, its nostalgia or its innovation, who it welcomes and who it remembers.
The libraries themselves become the plot, and I, a reader turning pages.
topics
