The Library at First Glance

In the early nineties, I asked the Kettleson Library in Sitka to come lose with about forty dollars to buy a new book, I’d seen in the magazine, The Smithsonian. I was anxious that the book be worth the expenditure that I wasn’t willing to make. Any book that costs over five dollars seems too expensive to me but then I’m reliving my youth. Another reason for my not buying the book is that the sailboat I lived on with sweating bulkheads is not a good environment for a book. Then one day I got a call that The Smithsonian Book of Books had arrived. For the next week I had the pleasure of turning pages, looking at beautiful illustrations, and reading about a favorite subject, books. The book covered many aspects – printing, binding, selling, etc. One section was on libraries. This was the first I heard that they planned to construct a great library in the ancient city that gave us, not just an archive, but our first library? The book had a photo of an architectural model of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and it was beautiful! Here was a library that would specialize in early civilization up through the Classical Period. I guess that was then that I decided that I’d have to go to Alexandria.
Now I had arrived and made my way again like the lemming toward the sea. I had seen a map of the city somewhere, probably on line where I’d been following the progress of the Bibliotheca's construction. If I kept the afternoon on my left hand and kept walking, I’d see the sea and I knew that the library would be to the east. So walk I did, finding that I had almost walked to the Lonely Planet hotels before doubling back to the mud wrestler’s den. What I wasn’t expecting was the sweep of a crescent shaped beach along, which a street called “El Corniche,” the spelling mine because they changed the name to Avenue 26 July and I don’t know where to look it up. Nobody is sure what happened of 26 July but they do things like that. India has been at it for years. Another example is the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is called the Alexandria Library. I can’t help it. El Corniche is two rivers of traffic rushing in opposite directions separated by a sliver of an island. I may have thought about crossing the street to walk on a stone walk just inside a limestone wall. You could look out over the Eastern Harbor, which was almost encircled by land and island. But I wanted to get to the library in three dimensions, rather than flattened like a paper doll by car tires. As in India, there is no posted speed limit so essentially El Corniche is a double raceway with pedestrians doing a run/stop/run to jaywalk across this street. Remembering the technique I’d learned in India, I looked for old ladies or young mothers with toddlers and fell in on the lee of them, reasoning that a driver has to take them out before hitting me. Of course by my not crossing to the sea wall, I had to cross all the other streets coming into El Cornishe, “feeder streams.” Nobody ran over the old ladies and I looked as far as I could see to a distant white monument standing on a point of land. Having been on line over the years and studying maps, I somehow I knew that the library would be near there. If it was less than a mile to monument, it wasn’t too much less than a mile. One thing cheered me as I strode along. I found Pizza Hut! Of course not an American Pizza Hut with hog meat and jalapeños but I could pretend.
With the monument reached I looked around the point and there lay acres and acres (36,770 square meters) of Bibliotheca Alexandrina! Someone somewhere decided that they should spend a little under two hundred million dollars for a cache of knowledge. The Alexandrian Light House was listed as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. This elegantly shaped building is surely one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World.
The first thing that draws the eye is a great disk of a roof which looks up toward the sky in the northwest. The roof is made of windows with sail-like coverings. It could be that the shades can be adjusted to the strength of the sun during the different seasons. If the entire length of the façade is 305 meters the distance across, the reading room beneath the disk measures 160 meters. Then just this side of the disk stands a sphere in which a planetarium is housed. To the right is a separate building for conferences, which has a restaurant to serve a banquet if needed. The court in between was crossed and recrossed by different people busying themselves with different endeavors. The architectural shapes of the buildings are a feast but one of them had a design flaw. The paint or plaster peeled and the complex has been open for only about eight years. Hopefully that may be altered in time to withstand all the centuries to come.
Not having the brochures with me, I believe, there at least four museums. There is a theater for video and a music hall in the building as well as meeting rooms. Every medium presently available has been included. But the first thing you see and that is most likely what people come for is the great reading room beneath the disk shaped roof with its windows. Once you buy a ticket for a couple of dollars U.S. you go across a lobby and through gates into the great room. There are multilevels, which remind me of a football stadium, with different subjects or services on each level but at the same time all this is unified like knowledge into one room. History and Rhetoric has one level. Literature has a level. One level for Religion. The library is designed to one day house eight million books.
By signing up, the library gives you an hour on a computer. Of course, games and rock ‘n roll are prohibited but while you can google and surf the net, there is no email server on these computers. Should you want to bring in your own lap top, while there is a bunch of paper work and permits to get, I’m told they have a server broadcast throughout the facility. There are so many things to do at the Bibliotheca, I’ve not got around to seeing what all they do have. The restrooms are clean. And should your legs tire, there are elevators to solve all the up and down. Of course, since you are probably reading this in a place where you can google, punch in “Bibliotheca Alexandrina.” There is a ream of information on line and possibly tailored to answer your questions.
Unless there is a special program, the library closes at seven p.m. This was just about sundown. I came out onto the paved courtyard at about the call to evening prayer that echoes back and forth across the city, the cries from the different mosques competing with the hum of tires on pavement. Since it was time for me to head back for supper and the hotel, I walked west toward the evening sky. The crescent of El Cornishe curves round the reflecting harbor and past a dozen domes and minarets of mosques to the Pharos in the distance. Today there is a 15th century fort standing at land’s end. But this is the site of that other wonder of the world, the Alexandrian Lighthouse. And as I walked along immersed in the swish of the traffic, I looked up over my shoulder and up. It was an idle thought but I wonder how many craters across the Moon’s face are named for men who studied here first during the Ptolemaic dynasty and then under the Caesars.
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