library

The reading room on the north side of the second floor is one of the most puzzling places in all of Bobst. Most other reading rooms go with a minimalist approach. Their large spaces are filled with only the necessities: tables, chairs, and outlets. The walls are lined with windows from floor to roof, letting as much sunlight in as possible. The idea being that the students need room to think and that their minds shouldn’t be limited by anything at all, let alone those unnecessarily impenetrable stacks of books. By 12 o’clock on most days these rooms are mostly filled and during mid-terms and finals periods the task of finding a chair in one of these rooms is virtually impossible. This room on the second floor isn’t quite the same. Not only are there about 10 large wood bookshelves that students are forced to share the room with, but there are also a series of about 8 or so brass busts that stare at whoever decides to sit in the east end of the room. There’s also a smell that pervades the space, one I’m assuming the library staff doesn’t intend to be there, but one which is nevertheless a distracting presence in the room for anyone wanting to get some quality work done. This may explain the fact that the room is virtually empty. Besides me and someone sitting in a study booth between some stacks ahead of me, the seats remain vacant.
So what’s the meaning of all this (if there is one, of course)? Is this just what reading rooms used to look like before librarians heard of the post-modern mantra of less is more? Is this a themed room which is supposed to house books and artifacts about a certain subject as well as the students who intend to study them? After preliminary investigation my answer to all of these questions is a resounding “um… maybe.”
First thing to look at is what books are contained on the shelves. According to the inscription on the outside of the room, they’re supposed to be the Musical Reference Collection. I say supposed because the shelves are completely empty on the morning I’m there. Maybe they’re being moved. If that’s the case, I can only hope that they’ll be followed by the shelves and the busts. If it is indeed true that the more one comes into contact with knowledge the less one feels like they know, then the last thing that a struggling student needs while studying is a constant reminder that there is a world of musical knowledge sitting around them which they cannot possibly grasp.
As far as the busts go, my theory was that they would perhaps be New York-based musicians or something along those lines. This too isn’t the case. In fact, not only are none of them musicians (most are either sculptors or painters) but some of them aren’t even from New York. Some are from Boston, some Pennsylvania… None of them even seem to be associated with this school in the slightest. Indeed, the thing that unites them the most is not any of these things but rather that they all lie at some point on a spectrum of more or less elaborate mustaches.
This begs the question of what all these things are doing in there in the first place. Maybe I need to keep digging into who these people are and eventually they’ll have some significance within the world of an NYU library. Or maybe it isn’t that complicated. It could be that there’s just no room for these things elsewhere in the library and they had to sacrifice one of the reading rooms to put them there. Or it could be that the thought process behind it was nothing more complicated than the idea that they might look nice there. And that’s going to be the idea that I leave this room with: that even though I’d like to think of libraries as these perfect entities which house the most amount of knowledge in the most efficient way possible all the while providing good spaces for people to learn, sometimes libraries are just rooms with odd things in them.

(The website isn’t letting me upload a picture of the space. I will come back and post it once I figure out how.)