Finding a relaxing place to stow away from the frenetic pace of London life and read a book is no longer as hard as it once was. With chairs and sofas stuffed into every chain book store, coffee shops springing up in the basement of shops and calming music piped through every crevice available, the ‘reading space’ has become at once more accessible yet impersonal.
Enter the Wellcome Collection, a heady mixture of medical artifacts, human vivisections and books, it seems the unlikely choice for a place to ‘curl up with a good book’. Yet both the Blackwell’s book shop here and the Reading Room offer different and more particular bibliocentric environments.
What strikes you first about the Reading Room is how relaxed and inviting it is, soft lighting fills the room, highlighting the names of prominent scientists which circle the ceiling. Bean bags line the stairs and there is a chaise longue, that even Freud would be proud of. It is strange that despite all the slightly macabre surgical equipment, straight jackets and vivisections, the space itself is curiously calm and provokes a sense of intrigue rather than horror.
Blackwell’s too is welcoming and has cleverly branded itself to fit in with the Wellcome trust’s aesthetics. It also is flooded with natural light but feels cooler and there is an emphasis on the books rather than the space it inhabits. Naturally, there is a focus on medical themed books and products, for example red blood cell soft toys, and lab beakers as salt and pepper shakers, but the clinical aspect has been erased and replaced with a cosy, homely atmosphere probably due to its proximity to the café.
The Reading Room offers a curious brand of individual book curation, which focuses on key topics under which to unite books. These are staggeringly different to what I found in Blackwell’s, instead of books divided under signs such as crime, classics, history etc, the books in the Reading Room were instead unified under headings such as apothecary, magic or the more general ‘face’ (which included books on physiognomy, psychoanalysis and art). The Reading Room offers individual, expressive, even eccentric, curation, and this disruption to the conventions of bookshop and library layouts was instantly compelling; the eclectic categorisation drawing the reader in.
The majority of people I observed in the space were very tactile in their approach and engaged fully with the whole space, examining different books until they came to one which took their fancy.
“[The space] forces the reader – the curious reader, the alert reader – to rescue the book from the category to which it has been condemned.” (Manguel, A. (1997) A History of Reading. London. Flamingo)
Conversely, Blackwell’s feels more reassuring because it has kept the familiar, conservative book categorising system. The reader instinctively knows where to look for certain books, this nonthreatening approach however promotes a hegemonic approach to reading, subconsciously prompting the reader to choose the front list of a publisher’s offerings.
Yet, these two approaches to book selling and reading work harmoniously together, offering up mainstream and indie choices to the perceptive reader. If you’re looking for a niche space to settle down for some quality book time, look no further than the Wellcome Library.
Interesting further reading:
- Experience is the Brand: Why this is the time for experience architecture
- Reinventions of the Bookshop
- KD Trager ‘Reading in the Borderland’
For more information on the Wellcome Trust click here, or follow them on Twitter @wellcometrust.
londonbooksblog 