The Library with a Big Mouth

First, due homage to the guys at the source of this post: One of my favorite websites is put together by Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras who produce something called Atlas Obscura. Always fascinating, their latest offering includes a page on the secret libraries of Rome. Among those “secrets” The Bibliotheca Hertziana instantly grabbed my attention.

Palazzo Zuccari is a 16th-century building in Rome located near the Spanish Steps at the crossroads of via Sistina and via Gregoriana. The house once belonged baroque painters, Taddeo and Frederico Zuccari who started work on the house in 1590. Two years into construction of the palazzo they decided that both door and windows would be designed as huge gaping mouths, and the ground floor of the house painted in frescoes.

In the early years of the twentieth century a German woman with a love of art arrived in Rome with the idea of establishing a library to encourage research and study of the city’s ancient and modern treasures. Her name was Henrietta Hertz and she came with the support of a wealthy German industrialist who helped to acquire the Palazzo Zuccari situated in the heart of Rome. Hertz began putting together a collection of books on Italian art as a private library. The Bibliotheca Hertziana welcomed its first art historians and research scholars in 1912.

Still owned by the German government, today the library’s collection includes 300,000 books and 800,000 photos on the history of Italian art and architecture. In addition, researchers have access to computers at eighty work stations with a view out over the rooftops of Rome.

The Bibliotheca Hertziana is probably the only library in the world with a front door shaped like a giant mouth, where inside the Bibliotheca Hertziana, visitors step into a modern glass-walled atrium with white marble floors displaying three floors of open-stack shelves. Upon entering the library, the sharp contrast with its entrance and the surrounding architecture is quite the surprise.

It Used to Be Golden

Don’t get me wrong, I love my local library and probably wouldn’t cry too hard if the county raised taxes to increase library funding. There are any number of programs and features that make the New Smyrna Beach Library an outstanding example of public service for local people. The location is central, yet free of heavy traffic, parking is plentiful with easy entry and quick access to the entrance. Even in rain the distance from car to library is hardly enough to dampen shoulders. Like the surrounding grounds, the inside is spic and span, spacious, bright and well-arranged. For most patrons the collection is very probably wide ranging and satisfactory, though about fifty percent of the books I check out are sent from another of the county libraries. No complaint on that score. Moving a book through their system never takes more than two days—good service by anyone’s standards.

So what’s the problem? Being distanced from local American libraries for so long, it’s hard to say with any assurance when things changed, but it used to be that libraries were sanctuaries of near silence. At one time people whispered or spoke not at all, and yelling into a cellphone—had they been around—would never have been tolerated. I once worked in a small public library for five years and in that place present day noise levels would have awakened Conan the Barbarian Library Bouncer. No excuses, no apologies, goodbye, you’re out! Libraries in Japan, whether public, school or university are rigidly silent. It would not occur to anyone to speak loudly, chat or heaven forbid, use a cellphone. (and that in a country where cell phone use is next to inviolable)

What has happened here over the years? Walking into the library last Wednesday I overheard an adult telling ten children he was escorting inside, “Okay guys, remember. When we walk through that door all the talking stops. We have to be quiet…and why?” Almost in chorus the children answered, “Because it’s the library.” I appreciated the teacher’s prompting and the children’s awareness, but in all honesty, once inside they could have practiced cheerleading and it would probably have been drowned out by the adult patrons and the four volunteer workers at the checkout desk.

Woman on a cellphone: (No effort to soften her voice) “Yeah…I’m in the library. Did you call Darla?…What time?…Yeah, that’s okay. Is Sissy going? God! I hope not.”

Since she was three feet from me I reminded the woman that cellphones weren’t allowed in the library. She told me to get a life.

“Carmella, it’s four o’clock. Idn’t your shift over?” This from one of the volunteers at the desk calling out to someone three work stations away. I heard it from deep in the genealogy stacks thirty feet removed.

“Oh, my lands, Miz Huber! Have you read this one by Tami Hoag?”

“Who?”

“She writes mysteries. I swear I can’t sleep when I’m reading one of hers.”

Among the movies on DVD…

Young mother speaking to her four year-old in a Michael ‘Let’s get ready to rumble’ Buffer voice, “Tyler! DO NOT pull those cassettes onto the floor!…Get over here…” (Tyler continues to play Legos with the DVDs.) “Do you want a spanking? Okay, I’m counting! One…TWO…”

Did I miss something in my years out of the country? Even in Japan the thought often occurred that many people no longer care who overhears their conversations, their complaints, problems or disagreements. Does it have some connection to the cellphone effect of making privacy public? Some shift in our culture, in the public face, or perhaps even in technology that has made reserve and discretion obsolete? Wherever the wellhead of today’s disregard for circumspect behavior might lie, who can say? Meanwhile, my much cherished public library is oftentimes as noisy as a sports bar on Super Bowl Sunday.