honestly kinda unfortunate that the only spooky library aesthetic is the victorian fancy bookshelves dark academia one bcos like. ok here’s some library stories.
while i was at the university the library was undergoing a major refurbishment so for a little while the print journals were being stored temporarily down in the basement.
basically nobody ever consulted the print journals bcos 99% of stuff undergrads would be looking up is online these days so every time i went down there it was dead fucking silent & empty. you had to walk through what felt like several miles of empty basement to reach the collection, which was in a room w a photocopier shoved in the corner and a bunch of these:
u turn the handles to move these around (saves space) and every time you had to go and check the aisles first on the offchance that someone was in there so they wouldn’t get u know. Compacted.
many years ago i did a week’s work experience with the National Library of Scotland. here it is:
but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. it keeps going down the side of the bridge, like so:
i got a tour of the stacks while i was there. it’s floor after floor of this:
the bookshelves are made of metal & i was treated to the ‘fun fact’ that the shelves are, bizarrely, load bearing. for this reason they have to be constantly vigilant about fire hazards because even a relatively small fire could cause a bookcase to buckle from the heat, which in turn could cause the whole building to collapse in on itself like a house of cards.
this has haunted me ever since!! thank you.
adding onto this as someone who spends a lot of time in library/archive settings
if not locked, the stacks (compound shelving) WILL move and they will NOT stop. you can actually get hurt in them
a lot of archives are temperature/humidity controlled so it’s always pretty cold in there, and you’re prone to hitting random cold spots
old stuff creaks. bad. some artefacts will make random popping sounds
there are mannequins for textiles and old clothes and they are so scary in the corner of the eye (and even in direct vision)
the archive i worked at had motion controlled lights and so you’d walk into pitch blackness and have to just hope you didn’t run into a stack. they always came on late.
an empty archive is so scary. the bigger it is the scarier, and you’re often alone. the archivist i worked for once sent me in and went “just pick whatever looks cool” EVERYTHING LOOKS THE SAME. I FELT SO SMALL. humbling experience.
paintings. that’s it. that’s the point.
some stuff reeks
museums often have a lot of mask type things of really wild expressions which can be actually terrifying to see out of the corner of your eye.
