The best library in the world is one where everyone has contracted the reading virus and where they have understood that, for better or worse, they will never again be able to live without the company of books. In my case, the prize goes to the triad formed by the school library of the Escola Pia on Diputació street, that of the Ateneu Barcelonès (still unnamed, and there's no shortage of illustrious members in the Docta Casa!) and the Borges of the Cervantes in New York in Amster Yard. Recently we learned that the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions has chosen our García Márquez as the best public library on the planet. As always happens with these awards (of which we had no fucking idea until the jackpot fell at home), the news has provoked a typical tribal reaction, between the arrogance of those who already equate us with Norway and the nitpicking of those who have rushed to put tons of objections to the achievement.
Let's go by parts and start with the formal. As for the shell, it is undeniable that the library invented by Elena Orte and Guillermo Sevillano is truly amazing, a building overflowing with beauty and luminosity, born with such sustainable materials that it even makes one want to recycle their underwear. When you walk through the García Márquez you are afraid that it might end up becoming the typical establishment full of instagrammers eager for culture-vulture posing and, to be clear, a den of cool people who pretend to read in their splendid hammock while shooting up on YouTube. Certainly, I would say that in my damn life I had never seen so many people in a library (and I have visited many!) and this is a fact that can disturb the longed-for silence of users who have occupied the same seat in our library for decades and for whom the buzzing of a mosquito is comparable to the crash of '29.
Indeed, the García Márquez is full of passersby and visual distraction, but (I can assure you), this is something that also happens in the most ancient libraries in the country. The important thing in the case at hand is that our equipment ---and the absolute majority of public libraries in the city--- satisfy both the demands of the user who imperatively needs to read Heidegger in absolute silence and those of the elderly person who simply wants to browse the newspaper for half an hour with the invaluable help of air conditioning. It is undeniable that the lavishness of the space contrasts with an alarmingly meager documentary collection (of about 50,000 books and with the humanities section almost hidden) and that its architects could tolerate a greater height of the shelves to accommodate more volumes without the greater presence of paper in the rooms implying finishing off Frank Lloyd Wright's corpse again.
The García Marquez satisfies both the demands of the user who imperatively needs to read Heidegger and those of the elderly person who simply wants to browse the newspaperBut purists need to understand a fact as simple as the global changes in the cultural paradigm. First, and foremost; the documentary power of biblios Barcelona's public [libraries] must be conceived less in terms of the physical presence of books and more in the realm of the documentary collection shared by its forty-odd facilities (which far exceeds two million documents). It is also important to understand that for some decades now, the library has ceased to be a receptacle of volumes and has become a hub of very complex literary and human events, requiring things as disparate as having an equipped studio for podcast broadcasting to something as raw as there are users who go to the biblio simply because they don't have heating at home. This is how it is and it will increase in the future, and everyone's job is that the common needs of all those people end up being cured by a book.
That said, let's be clear: in Barcelona, interlibrary loan works, the book is its most prominent format by far, and the task of programming events to promote reading in our facilities is carried out remarkably. I know we are not used to good news, but perhaps the García Márquez event (extraordinarily led by Neus Castellano and her team) should place us in a happy medium between moderate pride and permanent self-flagellation. And, what the hell, we don't have to wrinkle our nose when we hear that the working class of Sant Martí refers to its library as "the Guggenheim of La Verneda." Is it the best public library in the world? Not a clue, and it doesn't need to be. Go see it, be mesmerized by its beauty, and, if possible, do the damn favor of not making noise. Shhht!!!