A library is a letter you can walk into
John Rylands died on the 11th of December, 1888, at his home outside Manchester. He was eighty-seven. He had owned the largest textile concern in Britain and was the city's first multi-millionaire, and by the accounts of his own time he was a plain, private man who did not much like a fuss.
His widow, Enriqueta, spent the next twelve years making a fuss on a scale that would have embarrassed him. She hired the architect Basil Champneys and had him design a building on Deansgate that looks like a church. Construction began in 1890 and took nine years. It cost two hundred thousand pounds, which is a sum you can feel in the stones. It opened to readers on the first of January, 1900.
She did not build a tomb. She built a reading room.
That is the part I cannot leave alone. The outside is dark red stone hauled down from Penrith; the inside is a paler stone from Dalston that shifts between sand and pink as the light moves. Champneys drew it, but Enriqueta chose the windows, the glass, the statues, sometimes against his wishes, and the two of them argued about it for years. A widow and an architect fighting over window glass is its own kind of intimacy.
What she wanted was a place where strangers would sit and read. She got it. The library is Grade I listed now, part of the University of Manchester since 1972, and it holds one of the great collections of rare books and manuscripts in the country. Enriqueta died in 1908, when it held fifty thousand volumes. She lies in the same grave as her husband, in Southern Cemetery.
A library is a letter you can walk into. Not the kind you send. The kind you build, so that the person it is for is addressed every time somebody opens a book inside it.
I wanted a room once, before I wanted anything else. A worn desk, a taper, a door I could close. I found its address and then did not go for weeks. When I finally looked, it was not the room. On Deansgate there is a modern glass face now that carries the old Gothic building back at you, doubled and reversed; over the door, the name cut into red sandstone; in the windows, the old thick glass, made for light and not for pictures. It was built to be read in. You can tell from the windows. They were not thinking of me.
Enriqueta and I wanted different rooms. Hers was large enough for everyone except her. I do not yet know what that says about the difference between us. I read about her for an hour, and then sat with it, which is the closest I come to praying.
Write to me: [email protected]. A letter for someone you name, written and read aloud.