The real star of Seattle's Central Library? The books

By Michael Upchurch
Seattle Times book critic

STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES City Librarian Deborah Jacobs stands at the base of the "backdoor" escalator that travels up from level 5 to level 10 through the heart of the "book spiral" in the new library downtown.

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That's the question that's been driving Seattle City Librarian Deborah Jacobs a little crazy these past six months. Apparently a number of Seattleites, when they look at Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas' semitrapezoidal glass-and-iron-mesh structure on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Madison Street, automatically start thinking ... what?

Jacobs isn't quite sure: That all the books have been thrown away? That the novelty of the new Seattle Public Library's outer appearance somehow means avant-garde anarchy within?

Jacobs wants to set the record straight: "One of the things that I'm proudest of with this building is that it's all about the book. I'm an old-fashioned librarian. ... I became a librarian because I care about reading and I care about building a community. So the criticism I'm most stunned by of this building, by people who haven't been in it, is: What about the books? It's all about big architecture!"

Not so. A tour with Jacobs through the nearly finished library earlier this month revealed that she's right when she says the Koolhaas building really is about "finding the right housing and space for the book, and honoring it and protecting it so that it always can grow without taking away from anything else."

Among the most striking changes the new building offers over the old:

Seattle's New Library Here's what you'll find in our guide to Seattle's new library: Talk to us If you've visited the new library, what did you think? Send us your comments. Architecture This floor-by-floor guide will help you find your way around. Virtual reality 360-degree view. · Assembly floor · Living Room · Mixing Chamber Photography Take a closer look at the exterior and interior of the new library. Stories Read more about the new library and key players behind the scenes.

• A 10th-floor reading room with walnut floors and "robust" carpets, with seating for 400 library users and 360-degree views of the city and Elliott Bay.

• A children's library that has grown from 2,500 square feet to 15,000 square feet, complete with Storytime Room. (Look at its entrance and it doesn't seem as though it can lead to much more than a broom closet, but step inside and a sloping, triangular space appears.)

• A four-floor "book spiral" that makes it easy to find any general nonfiction book.

• A new map room, plus spiffed-up spaces for the Seattle collection and other special collections (aviation, foreign languages, etc.).

• Room enough to display 80 percent of the library collection on the bookshelves, versus 35 percent in the old library, and total space for 1.45 million items. (The library collection right now — books, CDs, DVDs, etc. — totals roughly 1 million items, communications director Andra Addison says.)

The extent to which that space will be filled with items in the coming years will depend on city money, since the library's operating expenses — books, salaries, etc. — come out of the general budget, and finances have been painfully tight lately, with weeklong closures of the libraries in the past two years to save on salaries.

The new building itself, however, was financed, along with various new and renovated branch libraries, through a bond issue approved by Seattleites in 1998.

At any rate, the space to expand the collection is now there.

On Jacobs' reading table So what did Seattle City Librarian Deborah Jacobs do while she waited for her new library to be completed? She read. Over the past few months, she says, she particularly enjoyed these seven: "The House of the Spirits" by Isabel Allende ("Which for some reason I'd never read before"). "Rhoda: A Life in Stories" by Ellen Gilchrist ("Who I love"). "Absolute Friends" by John le Carré ("One of my favorite authors — he and Charles Dickens"). "Motherless Brooklyn" by Jonathan Lethem (She just discovered Lethem two months ago and is halfway through his new book, "The Fortress of Solitude"). "Pattern Recognition" by William Gibson. "Charming Billy" by Alice McDermott. "Train" by Pete Dexter ("An absolute heartbreaker of a book"). And of course, like any book lover, she's backlogged with titles she's eager to reread, as soon as she can find the time. The book at the top of her list at the moment is "Disturbances in the Field," a 1983 novel by New York author Lynne Sharon Schwartz ("Ruined by Reading," "Rough Strife"). "I read constantly," she says but then qualifies her statement with a comparison to the Seattle librarian who's the model for a doll: "I'm not Nancy Pearl, but I read lots." — Michael Upchurch

"This has been designed," Jacobs says, "to house the book in a great way."

Old library features such as the writers' room and auditorium have been retained and improved. There will be 400 computers for library users who do their reading and newspaper perusal the digital way. Study carrels in the foreign-language area provide a space for language students to work with their tutors.

The book spiral is a particular point of pride for Jacobs, who says she loves the way it allows for "serendipity in the stacks." Its aisles are spaced widely enough and lit evenly enough to let the browser see all the way down to the bottom shelves. Instead of being oppressive, the book stacks, she says, are "light and airy and just begging you to come in and scoop up their treasures."

Jacobs is just as enthusiastic about all ways in which people can sit. "There are ledges. There are comfortable chairs. There are tables. We paid attention to every detail." Her own favorite spot: a ledge in the aviation room with a Mount Rainier view.

Another flourish is the "literary floor" next to the foreign-language section. Funded by the One Percent for Art project, it pays homage, Jacobs says, to the "eleven languages that are most prevalent in our library right now." Look down at the floor you're standing on and you'll see blocks of reverse type rising from its surface, in tribute to the way hot type used to be prepared for printing presses. The lines of type are taken from the opening sentences of items from the library's collection.

A final, goofy touch: Library users will be able to watch books rise into the air on a glass-enclosed conveyor belt, as they make their way from the Fourth Avenue book-return box to a sorting room on the floor above.

"When you have a building that is so-o-o-o-o-o hot, and it's a library, that's pretty cool," Jacobs said. "You can have museums that are great-looking, and office buildings. But this is the people's public library, with water views and city views. It's a library, it's not an expensive condo. It's a library."

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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