2023-10-03 22:01:00
But I don’t just love it because there are a lot of books there. Streaming was invented in lending libraries. Well, maybe not the streaming itself, but the principle of streaming: You pay a subscription and in return you can get as many media as you want – Netflix, Spotify and the like work no differently, just a few centuries later. And more expensive.
But what now seems almost even more innovative, almost revolutionary: the library is a space in which you can simply exist without consuming anything. In fact, you can just sit in an armchair and stare into space! You don’t even have to read if you don’t want to.
As a real library fan, I was very happy when the head of the Wels library called me and invited me to come and take a look. At the next opportunity I cycled to the so-called Herminenhof, where the library is located and which gave me the impression of a castle. Far from it, because this farm was already a mill, a calico, tissue paper and lid factory, the home of a circus couple (it still bears the wife’s name today), a hospital, a money counterfeiting workshop, a ruin – it was definitely never just a castle. However, it seems only logical that the building complex is still used in multiple ways today, including by a kindergarten and a music school.
A somewhat strange ensemble if you think of the cliché of the stern librarian who always hisses “Shhh!” But anyone who imagined being a librarian would be quiet and tranquil will be proven wrong here anyway. At the entrance, an employee refers me to the boss, who is just putting down the phone and is already on her way to somewhere else: “I have no time at all…!”
“But the town clerk is here…”
The boss throws her hands together over her head: “Sometimes everything just comes together!” Later she explains to me that a bunch of reminders were sent out in error today, which now have to be quickly intercepted at the post office. But it’s not just such mishaps that cause stress, she says: a lack of staff, a lack of resources, e.g. B. for a work laptop, and the “book bus” also has to support a second, mobile library. And despite all these problems, you can still feel her enthusiasm, for books and for the people who read them.
When I step outside once more following a short private tour, I take another look at the Herminenhof. The scales of a trumpet come from a window and children scream in front of the kindergarten. True, I think, sometimes everything actually comes together. And sometimes it even works, like here in the Herminenhof.
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