Forget about the surrounds - you could spend days in the library itself. I've only been twice, to see exhibitions they've put on, and regret not budgeting enough time to settle in for a while each time.
Last time there I spent a bit of time staring at the wonder of the reading room and then got down to business. First... Where the hell are the toilets here? But on my way down the halls I got a little distracted...
Why on earth do we have such a nice set of doors down the end where the toilets with the crappy pebblecrete dividers are? Let's stop and have a closer look. Click on the picture and you might be able to read it.
Ahhh. The Shakespeare Library. Fantastic! The plaque beside it says it was refurbished as a gift from some kind concerned person for the bicentenary of the colony back in 1988. I was excited at the thought of holing up into a room with such a beautiful door to read Shakespeare. I don't think many others have shared the same excitement (or maybe they have had too much excitement in the past?), because the doors were locked solid. I tried to peer through the keyhole, but did not get much of an idea of the space beyond.
I hate that the efforts of restoration cannot be shared by the general public. All I got was a few photographs and the dubious experience of being seen squinting through a keyhole in the vicinity of the public toilets.
4 comments:
Little wonder it's locked, Vic. I chased it down online and the Shakespeare Tercentenary Memorial Library contains the only copy of the First Folio in Australia.
I've got a facsimile of the one in the Norton Collection in NYC and that cost me the same as a small car so an original must be well worth locking away from prying yes.
Ask them if it's possible to see the thing by appointment. That'd be cool.
The one thing they didn't mention is that it's handy for the toilets.
Yes indeed that would be cool. There's a lot of things at that library I'd love to photograph and post. Lucky the toilets are nearby because to me it's pants-wetting stuff.
Hee hee. I must admit to being truly impressed by the place on their website. Now you know where the toilets are you can enjoy it a bit more.
I like that one of the tags of this post is "Intellectual snobbery."
What beautiful doors, and how mysterious they are—I can imagine a great story about them and what they conceal. Dive should use this photo as 500-word story, in fact.
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