Libraries, lobbies, reading rooms

From the Ivan Vazov National Library. Plovdiv, Bulgaria. September—October, 2024

Day 1

I love libraries. I’ve been to at least one, and usually several, in each country of the walk — including Lichtenstein, despite being within its borders for not even 24 hours.

I don’t love this library yet though. The building is beautiful, but it’s a research library, publicly funded but not open access. They don’t know quite what to do with me. They haven’t charged me for entry, but I’m not permitted to use the reading room, so my impression is limited to the lobby. It’s a beautiful lobby, but to spend a whole day in such a space is to understand the meaning of lobby.

Lobbies exist to facilitate your leaving. They are passageways, vestibules, liminal spaces through which we pass on our way to real places. Lobbies have a restlessness to them even when they’re empty, in part because they have many entrances and someone might appear through any one of them at any time. A whole day in a lobby, I start to wish it the same fate as that lobby in The Matrix¹.

Day 2

They’ve regrouped today and determined that if I want to use the library, the fee will be 3лв. I’ve never paid to use a library before, but even if it rankles a little on principle, in practice it’s less than two euros.

The facilities seem hilariously lacking for such a large building. I ask if there is a desk I can use and am shown across the courtyard, past the ‘American Corner’, and into a room that looks like a classroom in a Hollywood prison.

Day 3

Returning today, I’m ready to pay another 3лв but half expect to hear the price has risen by an order of magnitude. Thankfully not.
Just as I’m about to pay I think to ask,
“Do you do a weekly pass?”
“No.”
No problem, worth a try.
“Oh, what about a monthly pass?”
“Yes.”
Like blood from a stone.
“How much is that?”
“4лв.”

4лв.
That’s what it costs to get a monthly membership to the national library. I almost laugh. I hold up a 5лв note just to confirm that that is sufficient, that I’m not misunderstanding, that it isn’t really 40, or 400. Nope.
4лв.

That a month’s membership costs only marginally more than a day’s fee — and that they don’t tell people as much on day one — strikes me as beautiful in its unironic bureaucratic absurdity. I was at peace with paying 3лв a day. If they’d said a week could be discounted to 15лв I’d have been thrilled! That a month costs barely a rounding error more than a day and they would have watched as I came back day after day with my 3лв? Comic.

The whole plodding process is like a Kafkaesque spoof. A librarian with more hunch than back prods my details into the computer with a single finger. The library appears to be run entirely from a single macro-laden spreadsheet that looks absolutely state of the art — by the standards of the cold war. Handing over my 5лв note I try to indicate that they can keep the change, but they give it to me anyway. The photocopier whirs and clunks and spits out a grainy duplicate of my passport while I clink the returned coins into the donation box. My face is roughly cut out and lain onto a piece of red card stock that has had my name printed onto it before the whole lot is fed into the most lethargic of laminators. Equipped with my bright red laminated boondoggle — which looks like the handiwork of a six year old put up to the task of forging a fake ID — I climb the stairs to the reading room. Here I hand over my shiny new ticket, to be collected when I leave, and thus ends the ritual by which the reading room is reached.

The reading room is gorgeous.

A good reading room is a place you never want to leave, that you leave at the last possible moment, with infinite reluctance, only because the librarian who is so very nice and impossibly quiet has begun to fidget with the closing bell.

This is such a room.

As I sit down I briefly regret not asking what a years membership would have cost, before happily realising that in ignorance I’m freed to imagine.

A year?
What else, but 5лв.
A decade?
That’ll be 6лв.

You’d like to spend a lifetime in amongst the stacks — swaddled in the veneered chipboard panelling and creaking pipes — aspiring to the calm focus of the bespectacled, sweater wearing scholar rhythmically drawing his magnifier back and forth across the pulp of a tree that has been dead much longer than I’ve been alive?
You’ll be ponying up the princely sum of 7лв for that, pal.

I didn’t love Plovdiv to begin with either. It sees plenty of tourists. I’d come a long way to see it. But on review, a lot of those tourists are internal tourists But Plovdiv is touristed because of its history.

09:39:50 I’m back in the library. Today, having come here before without issue, they decided I needed to pay 3 lev for use of the facilities as I’m not a member. Not a bother, just interesting.

In Switzerland you usually had to have a phone number to use the WiFi so I’d wander up to random folk and winkingly ask them for their number. They’d look back at me like I was some kind of pervert. “For the WiFi” I’d say.

13:57:36 In the toilet I met the man from the ‘cloak room’. I joined him at the sink where he was washing his hands as you’d hope your surgeon would. There’s something about this place. Focus is everywhere. A true library.