Mona’s new library is spectacular. But does it work as a library?

What do our bookshelves say about us? Which of our books do we choose to display and why? And what happens to a private collection when it becomes a public exhibit?

Review: Phrontisterion library, Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), Hobart

Mona founder David Walsh’s new private library at the Hobart gallery raises all of these questions and more. A lifelong avid reader who spent much of his childhood reading his way through the public library in the Tasmanian suburb of Glenorchy, Walsh possesses around 50,000 books. He is sharing 30,000 of them at the Phrontisterion in Mona’s astonishing new wing.

The library’s name is taken from a Greek word meaning “school”, or place of thinking and learning. It also refers to the “thinkery”, in Aristophanes’ comic play, The Clouds, where a lampooned version of Socrates teaches uneducated down-and-outs how to escape their debts with the power of argument.

This jab at intellectual snobbery is a clear allusion to Mona, which is still largely funded by Walsh’s gambling activities, and to Walsh, who revels in his status as “a wastrel/ bum-in-chief”.

A decade in the planning, the wing housing the Phrontisterion involved a complex, lengthy construction, which, with typical Mona extravagance, blew the budget from A$11 million to more than $100 million. It incorporates artworks such as Anselm Kiefer’s inverted concrete amphitheatre, Elektra, Joshua Yeldham’s Surrender Room, a moving temple to his family’s journey with assisted fertility and Matthew Barney’s monumental sculpture Rouge Battery, all interconnected by a series of sandstone tunnels.

The library is tucked into the negative space left beneath the amphitheatre. Entry is included in the Mona ticket price and access gained through the tunnels and a maze of galleries currently housing Julian Charrière’s mysterious and disorientating Hardcore exhibition.

It’s a stunning venue furnished with luxurious seating, an incredible iron spiral staircase and huge lights suspended from the ceiling like black clouds. Spread over two floors, the collection is premised on classical education with a classic Mona twist. Expect to find books on sex, gambling, death, science fiction, contemporary art and popular culture as well as science, classical civilisations, geography, design, history, mathematics, wine-making, architecture, theology, philosophy, astronomy and a selection of literature.

A masculine curiosity

A primarily rational, distinctly masculine curiosity is at play here, as it is throughout Mona. A search within my own fields of study predictably confirms that feminist thought and psychoanalytic theory are thin on the ground.

Archaic books about sex and female sexuality from the 1970s, including The Hite Report and The Joy of Sex, sit next to volumes of fetish photography and erotic art by men. I find Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, and Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae and I seem to remember spotting Germaine Greer somewhere, but there’s nothing contemporary or cutting edge on display in the realm of feminism.

Nearly all the music books are by male writers about male performers. Notable exceptions are my former colleague, Sylvie Simmons’ biography of Leonard Cohen and Jude Rogers’ The Sound of Being Human, but that’s about it. Even Patti Smith is absent.

Among the rare editions, the theme continues. Unsurprisingly Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial Lolita is here, along with pioneering scientist Isaac Newton’s treatise on light Opticks, one of Pablo Picasso’ sketchbooks, an early copy of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and signed books by authors such as Umberto Eco, Hunter S. Thompson and J.G. Ballard.

There are also handwritten manuscripts from writers Walt Whitman, Gustave Flaubert and Honoré de Balzac, scientists Albert Einstein and Guglielmo Marconi and inventor Alexander Graham Bell. I don’t spot any by women.

Given the more puerile elements of Mona’s history (vagina chocolate anyone?), this bias is probably to be expected. The library is billed as a showcase for the personal taste of a white, ageing Australian male collector, so the tone is bound to be a little pedestrian. If you’re looking for more challenging and contemporary material, musician and book club host Dua Lipa’s tiny new Manifesto Library in Portugal fits the bill.

Still, the richness of the Phrontisterion’s vast and impressive array is undeniable.

Art books from the likes of Ai Weiwei and Frances Upritchard rub spines with Celtic mythology and forays into neuroscience. An appreciation of Shakespeare by actress Judi Dench nestles between books on astronomy and Chinese rock’n’roll. A shrine to David Bowie features the artist’s original, handwritten lyrics to his 1972 song, Starman, a gold disc of the 1974 album David Live and some of Bowie’s personal literary favourites.

There are precious books from Walsh’s childhood including Robinson Crusoe and The December Boys and a few that belonged to his beloved late brother, Tim, a poet, who was, according to the collector, better read than he was. There are bound volumes of science journals. And there’s a Map Room full of rare cartographic treasures exhibited in display drawers.

The most valuable item is a Shakespeare First Folio from 1623. One of 235 remaining copies from the original print run of 750, the Folio is among the most precious books in the world.

This Folio connects me to home. I grew up near the playwright’s birthplace in Stratford-on-Avon, where I once took a school trip to see Helen Mirren and Michael Gambon star in Antony and Cleopatra. My last editing job in London was near The Globe where I’d buy cheap standing tickets with friends on summer evenings.

Here in Tasmania, the Folio appears like an oddly displaced prize, but thanks to the library’s digital reading system, The Dial, it is now one of 60 fragile items on offer to readers. Devised by the experience design agency, Air Processors, who created Mona’s app The O, The Dial boasts sleek, wooden desks with weighted brass handles that turn the pages of beautifully enlarged online reproductions in real time. An immersive and fascinating experience that feels authentic and inclusive, it brings me closer to antiquities than my British Library card ever did.

The O itself has also been upgraded to include an innovative catalogue system that rejects the restrictive and archaic Dewey structure governing most libraries. Dewey uses numbers to divide the world’s knowledge into fixed divisions and subdivisions, which some say echo colonial and patriarchal perspectives. By contrast, The O generates a more relational, open-ended connection between books and ideas that refutes the tyranny of shelf position.

Visitors can search The O’s digital catalogue for titles and find directions to each book’s location. But while they are free to shuffle books around, titles won’t be found again by The O until a librarian refreshes the app by uploading new photographs of the shelves. One of them is busy doing this during my visit.

A set of 20 special “return shelves” features overhead technology that picks out associations between books, suggesting related titles on the basis of subject matter with rays of roving, coloured lights. Although the results are restricted to what’s included within the illuminated selection, I trial the system with The Scientific Study of Mummies, hoping to find more about sacred burial practices. Instead, I’m supplied with a list of books about computers in a mismatch that brings to mind social media algorithms.

I quiz a friendly team of female librarians who confirm that flaws are live and discover-able in this constantly evolving environment. They bemoan the lack of women writers in the collection, promise more seating is on the way and urge me to send in my feedback.

But nobody can point me to a quiet, dedicated study space.

A study space?

For all its hi-tech ingenuity and dazzling collection, the Phrontisterion seems a little confused. Is it a library, a museum, or a gallery? It doesn’t seem sure.

The books are not for borrowing, which is understandable, but while readers and researchers are invited to linger (an aim is for it to be “a working research space”) there are no devoted study rooms and only four desks. These are sleek and well crafted, with lamps and power points, but when I attempt to settle at one of them, a group of excited visitors crowd around The Dial desk to my left. Their chatter makes it impossible to concentrate.

I try the glamorous lounge downstairs, but five friends have occupied all the luxurious chairs and are busy planning their Hobart trip. When I leave the heavy mummies book with my designer glasses case (courtesy of Specsavers) on a side table to go and have a browse, one woman mistakes my arrangement for an art piece!

Libraries should be lively, comfortable and welcoming, but the absence of a quiet, calm reading area is a serious omission – especially given this one is named after a Greek place of learning.

Free from the governance that comes with public funding, Mona promises to encourage freedom of thought. But while the Phrontisterion is a generous and beautiful development, some might see the practical limitations as a playful millionaire’s oversight. It wouldn’t be the first time Mona was wrong-footed by its own facetiousness.

But as Mona’s librarians point out, it’s still early days, and there are other ways to maximise the library’s potential. A residency program perhaps, or a pioneering and provocative reader’s festival? Maybe a cool book club (that doesn’t revolve around sex and death?), or a literary hook-up with Dark Mofo? The potential for meaningful engagement is huge and would really animate the collection.

For now, I’ll be returning to Phrontisterion on the ferry with my noise cancelling headphones. I really do want to read that book on mummies.

Liz Evans does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.