The Perfect Library

[Monny JcIntosh]

Life as a graduate student in a city, like London, with hundreds of libraries, is partly an unending quest to find the perfect library. You start, obviously, with the obvious: your univerity's main library, your department library. In London you also have the British Library (the UK's version of the library of Congress) and Senate House (the central library for all the University of London). Each of these, usually in some small but significant way, is a bit crap: UCL's main library is too dark, and has few power points; the department library has no decent tables; the British Library is too much of a faff; and Senate House is like being in a prison. So I keep looking. I usually settle for the Geology library, but none have been quite right yet.

As an undergraduate, I was fairly spoiled for good libraries, but the model for my perfect library is that of Cumberland Lodge - part of the Queen Mother's estate in Windsor Park. It is a grand English Georgian mansion, set in rolling hills. The library is a perfectly rectangular room on the first (US = second) floor, about 30 feet by 60. There are four large windows on one long side, and two on one short side, each with views over fields, and a fireplace on the other short side. The window sills are low, and both deep enough and wide enough to accommodate plants as well as the reader. The room is carpeted, so that the silence is a deadened hush. And there are both comfortable armchairs overlooking the views, and a huge table with a leather surface in the centre of the room.

What's your perfect library?

[Moksha]

Borges' Biblioteca de Bábel

[Monny JcIntosh]

UCL's School of Slavonic and East European Studies library is beautiful, and a bit Borgesian, but you feel a bit unwelcome sat at their small, monkish tables.



My old department library was great. Tucked down a cobbled back street, with views onto a private garden with, if I haven't imagined it, a cherry tree. Something with blossom, anyway. This photo makes it look a lot darker than it actually is.

[BrazenMuse]

New York Public Library Main Building at 42nd...the one w Patience & Prudence, the lions.
and
Princeton University's Firestone Library

These are my two absolute favorites presently...
atmosphere AND killer collections

[Monny JcIntosh]

Judging by the google pictures, Princeton's Firestone looks great!

[C hristian]

Not a bad place to read a book. catch a little nap.

library of congress, main hall and main reading room, washington dc

[maryannsms]

Those libraries are definitely humongous. Well, we don't have that kind of big
library where I came from. But whenever I decided to go there and have some
reading in there book. I would probably be lost.