Mona’s New Subterranean Library Subverts the Rule Book

The first thing you notice when entering Mona’s new library is the display case of ancient Egyptian coffins. Then a giant metal staircase seemingly plucked from the deck of a Spanish galleon ship; autographs from Elvis, The Beatles, Marilyn Monroe and Louis Armstrong; and a wall of books that appears to be shimmering. You can put a library in Mona, but you can’t take the Mona out of the library.

This is Phrontisterion, the new $100 million library that Mona owner David Walsh has been fantasising about since before he opened his peerless Hobart art museum in 2011. Tucked underneath Elektra, the monumental new concrete amphitheatre by German artist Anselm Kiefer, Phrontisterion is a double-storey, horseshoe-shaped space dotted with art and reading chairs, with a secretive study and a cave-like kids’ section.

Besides its contents being dictated by one man and his 50,000-strong collection, a most surprising first impression might be how akin to a municipal library it seems, pea-green carpet included. But the team is most proud of something you don’t immediately see: the absence of the Dewey Decimal system. 

Invented by American librarian Melvil Dewey in the late 1800s, the Dewey Decimal system is the standardised format for organising books into classifications, using numbers and letters. You see it on stickers on book spines in libraries the world over. Phrontisterion doesn’t have it. Instead, it arranges books by a system you could loosely call “vibe”.

Mona’s team takes issue with the Dewey Decimal system’s rigidity, but also its inherent racism, sexism and Western-centricity, encoding a 19th-century view of the world. 

“Breaking free of that means you can start to curate the way books are organised and grouped together based on culture, museum thematics, current exhibitions or David’s tastes,” says Nic Whyte, co-founding principal of Art Processors, the Mona-adjacent, experiential design agency that spends a fair bit of time solving Walsh’s riddles with innovative tech.

Without spine stickers on everything, the library looks more like a cool bookstore. So, how do they keep track of everything? In a way that’s unlike any other library you’ve visited.

The entire book collection is visually mapped in real time by unseen cameras, using state-of-the-art technology created by Art Processors specifically for Phrontisterion. It stays live and accessible, allowing librarians to find where a book is at all times, even if someone’s returned it to a completely different part of the library. It also means the books themselves know where their related books are. This is where the shimmering comes in.

Along a wall of the library that Whyte calls “live bays”, various books momentarily ripple with colour. If you touch one, it lights up, along with nearby books the team has determined have a crossover in content. There’s fun in this. If you go for a book on Mona, it might also illuminate a book on Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, who has artwork in the museum. But an austere journal on human sexuality might also light up Barbara Cartland’s Book of Love and Lovers, the 1978 collection by the prolific romance author. Throw in rare sci-fi magazines, 100 books on David Bowie, ancient maps, Dr Seuss and whatever else you can – and definitely can’t – think of, you start to absorb the wild scale of this undertaking.

The library opened with 30,000 of Walsh’s books, and more titles are being added daily. “We have a digital twin of the entire library, which basically means there is a virtual version of this library – every book and [its] location,” says Whyte. “We’ve also done prototyping with VR headsets that a librarian could wear and look around to see books that are in the wrong location. We can remap the entire library in half an hour, so it’s not a big deal.”

So far, so tactile. But what about something uniquely specific to Walsh’s bank balance? Like, say, Shakespeare’s First Folio from 1623 worth somewhere in the realm of $10 million?

“Fewer than 300 survive,” says library manager Mary Lijnzaad, looking lovingly at the rare tome splayed open under glass. She has been assisting Walsh with his book collection since 1999, long before Mona was a thing. Following the first edition’s sale in London, she personally chaperoned the book back to Hobart in a bombproof case. (“It was slightly nerve-wracking – I tried not to sleep too deeply,” she says.) In an adjoining case is its digital twin: a life-size double of the book on a screen. You turn its pages using a spinning wheel.

“The [actual] book is made from beautiful French linen rag paper,” says Lijnzaad. “When you turn the pages, you get this beautiful crinkle, a very seductive sound.” You don’t hear that while reading the digital book, but it does feel special to do so in the vicinity of the real deal.

With this new technology pipeline, Whyte says they’ll eventually have 60-plus rare books from the collection available to flick through digitally. “We can render one-to-one, any book, any dimension, any number of pages, thicknesses of cover, the way the pages turn, the shading that exists – everything,” he says. “We’re trying to get it as real as we can.” 

The opening of Phrontisterion, derived from an ancient Greek term for “a place of thinking, meditating or studying”, is a full-circle moment for Hobart-raised Walsh, who grew up attempting to read the contents of the Glenorchy Library. Unlike a public library, you can’t borrow from Phrontisterion, but you’re welcome to spend as much time there as you like. 

Mona has always had a much smaller, much humbler library showcasing Walsh’s collection of books, rare volumes, maps and manuscripts for perusing. Visitors just didn’t realise it was part of the Mona experience. 

“People used to come in by mistake. They’d go, ‘Oh, I don’t have time to read.’ We’d say, ‘It’s okay, just try browsing the shelves.’ And sometimes ... they’d take photos on their phones and say, ‘I’ll look up that book when I leave’,” says Lijnzaad. “So, it comes back to that sense of discovery. It’s why I hope the live bays work really well, so that people walk in and go, ‘Why are those books glowing? That’s interesting.’ And that’s the first step of anything, isn’t it? Interest.”

“I have to say, four years ago when David Walsh was talking about this, I was like: ‘Libraries?’” says Whyte. When Walsh decided he didn’t want didactics – the wall labels explaining an artwork – in his museum, Art Processors built the ingenious “O” app to tell you where you are and what you’re looking at. But now the library has arrived, Whyte sees its analogue contents as innovative in itself.

“Books represent human history and thought, free from the algorithmic flattening and manipulation that’s happened [on the internet],” says Whyte. “I don’t know what’s going to happen with printed media but right now, with what we have here, it feels like a special moment in time.”

And if the interest plunges you back down into the museum, that’s closing another loop. Mona curator Jarrod Rawlins leads us down to a new space under the library that connects with Mona itself. In here lies a huge bathtub-like sculpture by celebrated US artist Matthew Barney.

“It’s a single cast piece of bronze,” says Rawlins as we navigate around the organic-looking blob. “We never really found a good place in the museum to put it. So when we finished this excavation and laid the slab, David had it craned in. We built a crate over the top to protect it, and now it’s been here for four years while the building was built over the top it. So it can’t be removed. It’s stuck.”

Rawlins is accustomed to this kind of perversity at Mona. “I just love the commitment David has when he sees the position for something, regardless of the fact we can’t move it ever again. I think he does it to annoy us. But it’s beautiful to see.”

This story is part of Broadsheet’s special Innovation Issue, presented by Mercedes-Benz.