thereading room.

reading rooms are always fascinating.
I imagine such rooms to exist with maybe one or two windows, not like the new glass box public libraries which we now see, maybe more like an office, only attached to a house. But the window of a reading room is reduced to an image. Inside the room, the window does signify the outside, but it is always an entrance to the outside. For the occupant of the room it is no more a way of passage than each of the books in the room, each extracted sentence in the book, each extracted word in the sentence, the spacing between each utterance, or the spacing that the reader adds theirself upon reading.

An imagining of reading room for me somehow always includes a chair. I have always found this disappointing, perhaps only for my own restlessness. The reader almost always sits.

RectangleBox window looks into the reading room.

work by andrew de freitas