Glasgow's Mitchell Library has special 'ambience'

The 112-year-old building even has its own resident ghost gliding between the bookshelves named Septimus Pitt, who was the second librarian.

"The room Richard Osman was in is our quiet study space," says principal librarian Dawn Valance.

"It is very much laid out as an exam room because that's what people want.

"They want that silence.

"We have lots of writers who come in and find the space therapeutic. Louise Welsh, Graeme Macrae Burnet and Zoe Strachan have all written here.

"I think it's the ambience of the place."

The Mitchell was previously on Ingram Street and Miller Street but in its current location was built in 1911.

The suffragette Alice Paul was able to stage a roof protest on the adjacent St Andrew's Hall in 1909 because of the building works.

It was created to house a collection bequeathed by Robert Jeffrey, a Glasgow merchant who had left his library to the city.

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"It's a beautiful building and I feel very honoured to work here," says Ms Valance, who says the winning design for the library did not feature the trademark copper dome but the City Fathers incorporated some of the most unique elements from all the entries.

"In 1877 Glasgow is a bustling city but it is still developing.

"You have places like Birmingham and Manchester and they have a city library but Glasgow doesn't.

"Stirling Library had a subscription model. The city authorities put together a committee and it was clearly stated that the library was to be for no one class of person.

"It was to be for everyone and that's what it has been ever since."

Thousands of people were using the library every day through the 20th century and before the motorway was built, she says.

At one point, library users had to hand in their personal belongings and were given a plastic bag for a notebook and pencil so they didn't try to steal or deface the prized reference books.

She says many of the former students who used the Mitchell are surprised to learn that it now functions as a regular library. It stopped being a reference library more than 20 years ago.

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The modernised area entered through the Granville Street entrance was previously the Moir Hall.

In 1962, St Andrew's Hall, which had hosted speakers including Winston Churchill and Lloyd George burned to the ground.

The adjacent Mitchell library was spared destruction by a dividing wall, constructed during the war as a precaution against incendiary bombs.

When the hall was re-imagined as a library, one of the specifications was to keep a music venue and a theatre was also added. 

The reading room with its spectacular corniced ceiling, is now inaccessible and requires extensive repair works but there are hopes it will return to its original use. 

"Libraries were very much seen as the universities of the working classes," says the principal librarian.

"If you wanted to be educated, you would come here. Amazon wasn't a thing. 

"When the Mitchell originally opened, there wasn't a network of city libraries. A special act was put in place to allow them to do this."
She said many people think that the Mitchell was funded by the Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.

"The reason they think that is because Andrew Carnegie laid the foundation stone in 1907 but he did that because he was friends with the first librarian Francis Thornton Barrett (1838 – 1919). It was very much a city library."

The original building included a reading room, a students' reading room and a ladies room, now used as toilets.

"I don't know if it was to stop ladies being bothered or to do with propriety. If you were a single lady, should you be in a building that was full of men?"

The students room had its own invigilator and anyone making too much noise was asked to leave.

Originally, librarians used giant hand-written location books to find a particular book until January 1 1960, when the Mitchell adopted the Dewey classification system, which allowed new books to be added to the appropriate location based on subject. 

Library users then had more freedom to browse for books themselves.

Being given a tour around the Mitchell through the parts that are no longer open to the public is like moving backwards and forwards through time.

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The floor created in the 1960s with its dusty aroma is utilitarian in style and conjures up images of smartly dressed students perusing the shelves.

"At one point there was someone employed just to dust the books," says Ms Vallance.

The trademark carpets were added when the Mitchell was transitioning to a lending library.

"At the time things like casinos and cinemas had patterned carpets and they think possibly that's why they introduced them," says the librarian.

She discloses the "shocking revelation" that the carpets were not made by Glasgow's famous Templeton factory that grew to become one of the leading carpet manufacturers in Britain during the 19th and 20th centuries.

They were made by the Durham-based brand Hugh Mackay, which is still in operation.

Each floor has a slightly different pattern, with arts and crafts style flourishes in the literature section.

The Mitchell even produces colouring-in sheets so children and adults can emulate the retro designs.

The Mitchell houses one of the world's largest Burns collections and a bust of Scotland's national bard was created for the library in recognition of the city's large population of refugees.

Among the library's other most prized collections is a copy of John James Audubon's Birds of America.

Printed between 1827 and 1838, it contains 435 life-size watercolours of North American birds, all reproduced from hand-engraved plates, and is considered to be the archetype of wildlife illustration.

"The last time it was sold in American, it fetched  millions of dollars," says the librarian.

It also houses the Leningrad Album,  a collection of letters, watercolours, prints and lithographs compiled by women during the second world war's Siege of Leningrad, which is considered priceless.

In the early hours of 22 June 1941, German forces invaded the Soviet Union, launching a surprise attack along an 1800-mile border and cutting it off from the rest of Russia. 

Three million people were trapped without public transport, heating, water and with minimal electricity while food rations were 125 grams of bread a day

The album was addressed to the women of Airdrie and Coatbridge in response to their "friendship and solidarity".

There was also at one time a spiral staircase through the library and when the building opened in 1911, it had a lift, now out of use and known by staff as the "coffin lift" because it is lined with red velvet.

The Mitchell is said to have its own ghost, with the Harry Potter-esque name Septimus Pitt.

"A few people have reported various things but I've never seen anything," says the librarian. "He was supposed to have been haunted by the first librarian and then poor Septimus died in the building."