The Many Rooms of the Morrab
I was told on my first morning at the library, “Many people don’t explore past the first room of the Morrab.”
In this room there are several walls of fiction; Zadie Smith and David Mitchell at eye level. People might browse these new paperbacks, might take out a title using the Browne system, but never venture further into the many rooms of the Morrab.
However, you might be one of the curious few who sometimes peer their head round the door of the Reading Room. Here historic books are bound side by side, their spines pocked with Dewey Decimal numbers. The light from the window illuminates golden titles; a vase of sunflowers. Green fronds wave from the garden. As the shelves totter upwards, the books grow older, their colours warm. They stack up, up, up. The ceiling is a cream-coloured mirage. If you squint, it is not a ceiling at all, it is a slight fog, one that hides the fact that the books continue upwards. Ancient tomes spelled away from the everyday visitor.
This piques your curiosity more, as you move to the room behind the Reading Room. What other eccentricities exist within the many rooms of the Morrab? Sounds from the front room dwindle. Tucked in the corner of the room that follows is a selection of Children’s books. One turns to face outward. You open it, the drawings start discoing across the page. Snowmen and swans and women in green ball gowns. The spines of these books go red, blue, pink, yellow. The books lift themselves from the shelves, rearranging. The flickering of their pages sounds like laughter. Some poor volunteer is going to have to reorganise those…
You eagerly walk on to the next room, which has ‘The Jenner Room’ written on the door. Through the open window, you can hear a mourning dove. The Cornish flag dangles from a green leafed plant. The scent of salt and the earth around a tin mine. There are murmurs of West Cornish dialect from unknown speakers. Perhaps they are piskies, who make beds for themselves between book covers. Onen hag Oll. The Art room is just beyond, where Tom Blight guards the door.
You might now be tempted to climb the stairs, and when you reach the top, be confronted by several rooms filled with light. The first door on your left is the Natural History room. You draw an edition of ‘The Naturalist’s Library’ from the shelf above the fireplace. The paper smells like soil. Opening it roughly in the middle, you see illustrations of butterflies covering the page. They sit there, inky, until one lifts a delicate wing. One by one, the illustrations pick themselves up off the page and flutter around the room. You flick to a page about birds, and they join in. The room is a melee of wings.
Beyond the door to the Photo Archive the first thing you notice is a handful of sepia paintings. Ruddy brown sails and thatched roofs. The paintings are realist, full of detail. Cornish scenes: miners tunnelling, fisherman looping rope. The paintings seem to multiply before your very eyes. The brown scenes seep from one wall to the next. Across the ceiling and on the walls behind the books. There are hundreds of them! “Dear old Dennis!”
And what other things might you see? A bookcase of ‘London Medical Gazettes’ filled with shadows. A silent figure creating stacks of poetry anthologies, so high they touch the ceiling. A room filled with theology books, where choir music can be softly heard. The Elizabeth Treffry room: full of blue sunlight. The Rees Room where rain pitters on the desk when nobody’s watching. Brown chairs that swivel in your direction, as if to invite you in. It is only polite to find a big book, sit in one, and read.
To never venture beyond that front room is to miss out on all these magical quirks. The volumes of unique Cornish fiction, the topaz stained glass, the sunflowers and poems scattered about. The Morrab Library is a special sort of place, so go explore!
