this is totally overdue. While I was in the States a couple of months ago, I spent 8 days in Cornell University, otherwise known as the Mecca of Southeast Asian Studies, and discovered that the Kroch Library had the most prostitutional opening hours I’ve ever encountered — 7am to 2am, staffed throughout, and the beautiful, spacious library cafe stays open all the way, until I am dragged out of it, kicking and screaming, projected unceremoniously into the subzero night, and the doors of the library clang shut behind me. (Narrative embellishment probable).
coming home from that to my beloved Cambridge University Library (9 to 7 on weekdays, 9 to 5 on Saturday, and closed. on. Sundays.) felt like perdition.
At any rate, while wandering about in total reverence, I found the mezzanine floor of the Kroch, which allows one so inclined to lean over the balcony and gaze magisterially from one’s lofty vantage point across the vast steely expanse of metal shelving, books … one beholds a territory so ripe, lush and ready for exploitation that for a moment, one has a twang of longing for empire. Speaking personally, I would subjugate these masses any day.
Wow, “prostitutional hours,” “ripe, lush and ready for exploitation,” “longing for empire” — I think this is the first bookporn post that actually feels a little pornographic. I can taste your literary lust. Hit the showers and towel off, RL.
With a name like Kroch (and a bit of wilful mispronunciation) it just had to be pornographic, didn’t it?
2am. Wow… reminds me of the tale (I hope apocryphal) of Christ’s College library installing showers so students could take a sleeping bag and work 24 hours during finals…
Ah, to have time to plow through every volume! (Well, I’d skip the math section.)
A sobering thought: How long until libraries are just banks of computer terminals?
Not for a while yet. Too many monographs to put on PDFs and HTML; too many primary sources that are too sensitive for our equipment. Our technology hasn’t caught up as far as we might fear.
[...] brand of ecstasy. Many historians know this ecstasy; Southeast Asian historians can only know it in very few circumstances. This ecstasy, roughly speaking, arises when one is reading a particularly obscure book on, say, [...]
This looks incredibly similar to the Auckland Uni library. Even the mezzanine floor that lets you see the books below in all their glory.
[...] I do appreciate her enthusiasm. [...]