My favourite library in Amsterdam

Where would you spend your birthday if you could go anywhere?

Do you have a favourite library? I do, but I also don’t.

My favourite library is whichever one I think of as my “home library” at the moment. Which means that in a life as peripatetic as mine, I’ve had more than a few favourite libraries.

Every childhood library was my favourite. I credit those edifices in Provo, Utah; San Diego, Martinez, and Woodland, California for making me a lifelong reader. That, and the considerable home library maintained by my mother via regular trips to library book sales. I still have a collection of long-expired library cards: my passport to adventure, knowledge, and endless flights of imagination.

When I grew up and had my own kids, I continued this tradition. Every week at the library, and every month or so at the library book sale. For a year, we lived in Fallbrook, California, a little rural town on the edge of San Diego County. We had a backyard full of goats and chickens, and I was making my own cheese and bone broth and everything. But as always, we went to the library each week.

I was delighted to discover that at the Fallbrook Public Library, the library book sale was permanent. In a little basement corner of the library was The Bottom Shelf, a bookshop where I amassed such treasures as a facsimile edition of Audubon’s Birds of America and an entire set of miniature Shakespeare plays from the early twentieth century.

That set still graces my living room on a shelf my husband built especially to hold it. And for years after we moved, I couldn’t bear to unsubscribe from the email newsletter announcing sales at The Bottom Shelf.

Even in Amsterdam, where I’ve lived for a decade now, I’ve had multiple favourite libraries. My first was probably the archive where I worked for my first few years in the Netherlands. The Expatriate Archive Centre in The Hague collects letters, diaries, and other personal records of lives abroad. It was my first taste of getting up close and personal with primary sources, and I loved it.

After leaving that job, I embarked on a master’s degree at Leiden University. So of course the Leiden University Library became my favourite library. It was there that I made the acquaintance of Margaret of Newcastle, aka Margaret Cavendish, who lived in the seventeenth century and published (under her own name, when most women authors wrote anonymously) works of philosophy, poetry, and science, as well as the first science fiction novel, The Blazing World.

An indefatigable publicist of her own work, she sent a volume of her collected works to her friend and correspondent Constantijn Huygens, a noted Dutch poet and secretary to the Prince of Orange, the ruler of the Netherlands. She asked him to present the volume to the Leiden University Library, which he dutifully did.

It’s been there for the past four hundred years.

And it was one of the great thrills of my life to hold that very volume in my hands. There are typo corrections in the margins, in centuries-old fountain pen ink, faded to the colour of blood. I can only assume she made them herself. Be still my heart.

Later on in my master’s degree, I settled on a thesis topic that required me to use cookbooks as primary sources. Which was convenient, since the University of Amsterdam Special Collections, housed at the Allard Pierson Museum, has a very nice cookbook collection. I spent many happy hours there perusing cookbooks and writing my thesis, when not gazing dreamily out the window at the picturesque canal outside.

However. Something they don’t tell you about graduating from an institution of higher learning is that you’ll go through severe withdrawals when you lose academic library privileges.

What a crisis. Truly, it was a dark time.

But a year or so later, my former colleagues at the Expatriate Archive Centre invited me on one of the regular outings they run for volunteers, which ended up being to the Rijksmuseum Library in Amsterdam. As soon as I stepped in, I knew I’d found heaven.

I mean. This place!

I was over the moon to discover that anybody can come here. You don’t have to be an academic researcher attached to an institution. And it’s free. Just sign up for a card, reserve a study spot, and put a few books on hold.

The librarians are really nice. They don’t even care why you’re there, or whether you’re doing anything serious or grand. It could be whatever. Simple curiosity. Research for a novel. Interior design inspiration. Just random interest in the Grand Tour or the materiality of the book, or Venice in the eighteenth century or William Morris and art from the Islamic world. (Or all of the above.)

Why yes, I DO make a point of sitting right next to the spiral staircase.

It’s the kind of thing where I really do not understand why the Rijksmuseum Library’s reading room isn’t chock full all the time of people just reading to their heart’s content, and soaking in that wonderful atmosphere.

It’s a stellar place for writing, too. I usually spend three or four morning hours there. I start by reading all the chapters that most interest me from the books I’ve reserved, then do a little writing, then go back to reading whenever I feel stuck. In fact, I’m right here writing this post right now.

At the end, maybe I’ll page through my guilty pleasure, the latest issue of Country Life, which is all about posh British people living in houses like Mr. Darcy’s in the English countryside. I guess the library maintains a subscription because the magazine does from time to time devote a few pages to notable gallery sales.

The Rijksmuseum Research Library is mostly devoted to art, on account of being attached to an art museum. Which means a lot of the books have a distinctly visual component. They’re in various languages (plenty in English and Italian), but sometimes even if it’s in German or Dutch I’ll reserve a book anyway, especially if it looks big and glossy and what I really want to do is look at all the pictures.

It doesn’t hurt that all I have to do to get there is hop on my bike and ride for ten minutes on well-curated bike paths. The bicycle parking is just outside the Rijksmuseum gardens, which are open to the public and worth a visit all on their own.

It’s a quick bike ride, but the Rijksmuseum is also within walking distance of my house, albeit rather a long walk. My dog and I often walk outside the beautiful wrought-iron fence, but dogs aren’t allowed inside. Dogs aren’t allowed inside the research library either, so the only time I usually walk inside the gardens is on my way to the library.

The place is restrained and halfway dormant at the moment, since it’s still the dead of winter.

But soon it will look like this:

And even this:

Inside the library, though, it’s the same all year round. Which is to say, chilly enough to keep the books happy, nicely lit, all warm wood and green felt dust shields and little nineteenth-century flourishes.

I couldn’t make it through all these books in a lifetime. Which makes me happy, but also a little sad, especially if I multiply by all the other libraries in the world. Not enough hours, not nearly enough, in a day, a week, a lifetime. I guess I’m feeling a bit melancholy, since my birthday is this week. I’m halfway to ninety, and haven’t read even close to half the books I wish to read.

I suppose that’s all the more reason to cherish the books I do manage to read. And the people I love, and all the amazing corners of the world I get to see. Birthdays are a perfect time to remind myself how lucky I really am. This year, I’m grateful for every hour I’ve been given, and however many more are left to me. And yes, if all goes well, I’ll be spending a good number of those hours at the Rijksmuseum Library.