Revisiting Three Iconic Libraries
by Albert R. Vogeler
About a decade ago I reported in the Patrons Post on the opening phases of three
great new national libraries in London, Paris, and Alexandria. Now we may be able to assess
how their performance has matched their promise. They were heralded during their
planning, monitored during their construction, and scrutinized after their opening. They are
immense, dominating, and unconventional. Equipped with the best library technology of
the early 21st century, they literally and symbolically enshrine their national cultures. They
merit that overused term “iconic.”
In London, the original national library dated to the eighteenth century; in Paris, to
the fifteenth century. The new institutions, though relocated, have inherited their core
collections. But in Alexandria, a great city before London or Paris existed, the legendary
Hellenistic library disappeared some fifteen hundred years ago. Hence the new library,
though it has by far the oldest tradition, has had to create its collection anew.
We can view these libraries as examples of a specialized form of urban architecture.
The new British Library is situated on Euston Road, a busy thoroughfare north of
Bloomsbury in a depressed neighborhood between two great railway stations, Euston and St.
Pancras. Approached through an expansive courtyard, the imposing orange brick façade
suggests a forbidding futurist factory, but also establishes a kinship with the mellow
Victorian brickwork of nearby St.Pancras. Internally it is all sleek stainless steel, hardwood,
and marble elegance, lofty spaces, and uncluttered floors. Instead of one vast circular
reading room as in the old British Library, its eleven reading halls on three levels are devoted
to different fields of study. The layout and traffic flow are inconvenient and inefficient in
handling large numbers of readers.
The new Bibliotheque Nationale de France (commonly called the “BN” and formally
titled Bibliotheque Francois Mitterand) is situated in a bleak neighborhood on the Left Bank
of the Seine far from the center of Paris. Its four 25-store buildings, shaped in cross-section
like bookends, stand at the corners of a seven-hundred-foot long, five-story deep sunken
garden planted with evergreen trees. Eleven million books are housed in the towers,
shuttered against the sun, and readers work in glass-walled sub-surface rooms looking out on
the mini-forest. The oddity and awkwardness of this arrangement, resulting from a late
change of plans, have been well publicized.
Alexandria, a sunnier site than London or Paris, has re-created its long-lost ancient
library with the Mediterranean sun as its inspiration. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina
(commonly called the “BA”) stands on the cornich, the curving shoreline between a pristine
sea and a cluttered city. At the nexus of Africa, Europe, and Asia, encompassing Muslim,
Christian, and secular traditions, it is the ultimate intercultural ediface. Its enormous circular
roof of multifaceted glass and aluminum, set at 18 degrees from the horizontal, suggests a
sunrise, a sundial, a computer chip. Rising from the past, it evokes the future.
It is not surprising that the heads of such prestigious institutions are at the very top
of their profession. Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library since 2000, is an
information systems specialist trained at Oxford who has ben librarian of the London
School of Economics and of Leeds University. Bruno Racine, president of the Bibliotheque
Nationale de France since 2007, is a cultivated technocrat who has been president of the
French Academy in Rome and the Pompidou Center, a member of two cabinets, and foreign
minister. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is directed by Ismail Serageldin, a polymath who has
been called “the most intelligent man in Egypt,” a Harvard Ph.D., economist with the World
Bank, author of fifty books, and recipient of twenty-two honorary degrees. It remains to be
seen how these immensely capable executives and their staffs will cope with the problems,
large and small, of recent years.
If we look at generic problems of the libraries at the close of the first decade of
operation, it’s apparent that many incipient issues are unresolved. Funding for all three
libraries has never been quite sufficient to meet their expanding sense of mission. Space
limits for the collections and readers differ. The British Library, through failure to acquire
an adjacent property when it was available, is too often crowded and must store more and
more books at another site. The French experience the same problems in a lesser degree, but
they loom ahead. In Alexandria, the collection is still so small that space is abundant, but the
number of readers (and disruptive tour groups) has grown steadily. All three libraries face
one overarching question in the foreseeable future: how to balance their investment in books
and documents against their investment in electronics and the internet—a subject worthy of
future discussion.
Libraries are justified by having readers, but there can be too many. The British
Library has increasingly suffered from its policy of making readers’ passes widely available—
over 125,000 have been issued--in an effort to engage the public and democratize usage. But
there are only 1,500 seats in the reading rooms. College students, all with cellphones,
congregate, converse, cuddle, and monopolize the computers and lunchrooms. Real
scholars have bitterly complained that their work is impeded by students who could use
other libraries to do their homework. Lynne Brindley will have to navigate a fine course
between the scholars and the public.
But the BN in Paris has more troubling worries—a scandal and a mystery. In 2004 it
was discovered that twenty-five priceless manuscripts were missing, and the curator of
Hebrew manuscripts, Michel Garel, was charged with the theft. He confessed to stealing
only one manuscript, but later repudiated that confession. All this prompted a
comprehensive in ventory which revealed that no less than 30,000 books had vanished. Yet
another search found that 1,183 documents were missing. The mystery deepened as stories
circulated about dealers in London selling some of the stolen items, denials of these stories,
and legal moves by library staff members that further obscured the truth. Garel attributed
his own vacillating behavior to strained relations with the library hierarchy, excuses were
made all around; and security was, of course, tightened. No one seems to know what really
happened or what can be done. This is the situation Bruno Racine inherited in 2007.
The recent troubles of the Alexandria library are trifling in comparison. Not
expecting 800,00 visitors each year, the Norwegian designers did not make serious provision
for food service. The library’s belated response was to contract with six restaurant
companies, one rumored to be McDonald’s. Outrage at the prospect of commercialization
and vulgarization of Egypt’s “window on the world” festered, but a plan for a food court
will nevertheless proceed—discreetly, and without McDonald’s. Ismail Serageldin may even
deign to dine there.
As they gradually settle down to routine operations, we will gradually cease to
regard these libraries as ambitious and troubled experiments and accept them as familiar
features of their cities’ life. They must remain bastions of elite culture for scholars while they
try to become centers of popular education. In only a few years they have become tourist
attractions, something foreseeable from the time they were planned as grand enterprises, and
this should be welcomed as one measure of their success.