The public library: an exemplar of public luxury
Liam Mullally
20th May 2025
Introduction
If they did not already exist, public libraries would be an alien, outlandish proposal. At their centre lies a simple notion: knowledge should be accessible to everyone. But this notion runs against organising principles in our economy and society – principles like the monetization of intellectual property, the maximisation of profit or of market-led distribution and planning – and, as such, libraries occupy the strange position of being both mundane and exceptional, a form of everyday luxury.
Like a store, a shop or a market, libraries are primarily associated with access. These are all places we visit to get things – and there’s an ambiguous overlap to their definitions. Yet libraries organise access differently to markets, offering strange mutations to familiar logics: choice, determined by a shared resource pool and archive, not short-term cost imperatives and business cases; growth, first of all as nourishment to the people and ideas that inhabit them; and freedom, since unlike a market their archives can be free from access costs and open on a universal basis [2]. Against private luxury, libraries exemplify public luxury: everything for everybody, care and generosity in the public sphere.
Phil Jones’ recent blog for the UBS Hub laid out five categories (building upon those suggested by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek) which might define a view of public luxury:
• Epistemic freedom
• Infrastructural extravagance
• Aesthetic abundance
• Communal ownership of tools
• Collectivisation of domestic work
I’m using this blog to explore public libraries as an exemplar of this notion of public luxury. My intention is twofold: 1) to clarify these categories, especially epistemic freedom, and 2) to explore the universal mechanisms of access instantiated in libraries as a reference point for other services.
Public libraries, in various forms, express every one of these categories – but most of all they express epistemic freedom. One could argue this is exactly what American librarian and inventor of the widely used Dewey decimal system, Melvil Dewey, was trying to articulate in his dream of “free schools and free libraries for every soul.”
Epistemic freedom
In his blog, Jones defined epistemic freedom as follows:
‘a term that names both the institutions and resources that exist to improve the general intelligence of society, to facilitate the joy of learning and to give people the means to reflect on their place in the world.’
In simple terms, we might think of epistemic freedom as the freedom to think, and as the conditions or institutions that maximise such a freedom across society.
Very often it is not the library, but the market that is invoked as the ur- vehicle of choice and freedom. Indeed, a long and influential intellectual orthodoxy (running through Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek especially) has insisted that open markets are the key to freedom, including intellectual freedom [3]. Downstream from this orthodoxy, a common proposition even on the left goes thus: ‘there are fundamental common needs which can be served by the state. Anything beyond this is better served by the market, which offers people the freedom of choice.’ But the notion of freedom as we are invoking it differs in subtle but important ways from this understanding and so deserves some clarification.
The example of the library offers a powerful counterbalance to market models of freedom: if the market rations access to its resources according to means, libraries begin with the assumption that all members have an equal right to access. And, if some libraries charge for withdrawals, they also hold the capacity to be free: actually free, as in free from cost, free to anyone. Libraries serve as working evidence that ‘freedom of choice’ exists beyond the market and they model that freedom as a collective, even universal freedom, rather than an individual one.
“Free at the point of use” is an important principle of services like the NHS. As a mechanism, it ensures provision is distributed first of all on the basis of need. While widely considered integral to the universality of e.g. the NHS, this principle is not generally thought of in epistemic terms. “Freedom of expression”, conventionally conceived, makes little reference to the availability of tools and resources for thought; however, a services approach foregrounds exactly the centrality of access to resources to the possibility of epistemic freedom.
If scorn has sometimes been thrown on declarations that “information wants to be free!”, we should nonetheless be aware of the fact that information is cheap – at least when compared to something like healthcare. This became especially true after the widespread adoption of networked computing in the 1990s: the resource cost of extending access to a book is now that of sending a PDF file, or of a film sending an MP4 or MKV file, etc. But if information is cheap, libraries are not in practice cheap to run. This is for a few reasons: 1) the cost of constructing and maintaining a physical space; 2) the cost of paying librarians; and 3) the costs associated with licensing and intellectual property. I will return to the physical space of libraries shortly (as these extend beyond epistemic freedom), but librarians stand out as spectacularly good value-for-money when the goal of expenditure is the generation of public luxury as epistemic freedom. Librarians are professionals with the expertise to maintain archives, to preserve and sort physical and digital resources for the future, and also to help guide library users through their archives to that information which is most useful, interesting or productive. In this sense they typify a notion of epistemic freedom provided as a service.
The third cost (license fees and intellectual property), however, has nothing to do with public service or luxury – rather it is the cost of having an information service co-exist with a highly extractive market for information. Taking the example of just one kind of library – between 2010 and 2019 UK universities had paid the major academic publishers over £1 billion in fees. Whatever vision one follows for the accommodation between private and public mechanisms for knowledge production and distribution, this cost needs to be acknowledged as a structural pressure against universal access to knowledge, and as a major drain on public resources.
Two calamitous visions for the future of the library (from the perspective of epistemic freedom) are described well by activist librarians Marcell Mars, Manar Zarroug and Tomislav Medak, as:
‘an open software platform on top of which creative developers can build app stores or Internet cafés for the poorest, ensuring that they are only a click away from the Amazon.com catalog or the Google search bar.’
A market distribution of knowledge resources, predicated on a scarcity of information and an imperative to maximize profit, can never be “free.” Such a distribution mechanism is oriented against the notion of epistemic freedom, and precludes the possibility of an abundance of knowledge. The distribution of knowledge via libraries, rather than markets, offers an alternative rubric for access rooted in the assertion of a universal need and right: here, that of access to knowledge (but elsewhere to healthcare, to shelter, to dignity, etc.).
The space for luxury
As anyone who has ever visited one knows, libraries are not just places from which you can withdraw books. Libraries have historically needed to occupy space, for storage and reading. But this space has, in various ways, been diverted for other activities: libraries are places in which we work, study, meet, chat, use the toilet, get warm, connect to free wifi, attend classes, access childcare, receive legal advice or forms of state support. And it is this capacity that libraries begin to spill into other forms of public luxury.
Public libraries are host to a variety of forms of aesthetic abundance: arts classes, public talks and events, lectures, reading groups, free access to art and literature. The collectivisation of domestic labour is often embodied in childcare facilities and children’s social or activity groups. The book collection itself might be considered a communally-owned tool, as might PCs or wifi access, and especially the provision of other tools: sewing machines, art resources, 3D printers, laser cutters and soldering irons. Here some exceptional examples of public luxury come into the fold, such as Helsinki’s Oodi Library, or Ghent’s De Krook library, which both give the public access to a wide range of tools and equipment.
As buildings, libraries are also frequently beautiful – infrastructurally extravagant – spaces. This is evidently the case for internationally exceptional cases like the Oodi or De Krook libraries, but there is also a reason that more beautiful libraries exist than supermarkets. Take a mundane example: the Clapham Library in South London is constructed as a single continuously spiraling bookshelf, running from ground level to the top of the building, and encircling a central space. Gaps in the spiral structure give way to work rooms and study spaces, while the central space is flexible and generally adapted to early years provision. Libraries are spaces which – at least in their ideal – are built with a care for their occupants. Very frequently they host this kind of mundane luxury: everyday, banal freedom and abundance.
There could be a temptation to argue that the physical space offered by libraries is less necessary today to epistemic freedom than the means of accessing information itself – which could be software and a home computer. ‘Why’, someone might ask, ‘do we still need the building?’ The problem for such suggestions is this: one cannot read without shelter, safety and quiet. A central and possibly insurmountable challenge for digital libraries is reproducing the secondary functions of library space which have emerged under the auspices of universal access to knowledge, but really exceed it.
The changing status of information (and the broader transformation of society through information systems) does suggest changes to the internal organisation of library space – one which has been ongoing for decades. The Oodi, for example, has moved its collection into the upper levels – organised and maintained by a system of robots – while its lower floors are freed up for collective use. Here, a compression of the library’s collection is not taken as an excuse to close its doors, but rather as an opportunity for growing this space for public luxury.
The mundane luxury of public libraries is exemplary of ‘public luxury.’ On the one hand, it provides an illustration of epistemic freedom and other forms of luxury in practice. On the other, it indicates conditions which are necessary to effectively serve public need, namely: universal provision, the avoidance of harmful and especially artificial markets, adaptation to contemporary needs and professionals (librarians) with a mandate of care for service users and the service itself (knowledge, artefacts).
- Blake’s original monotype print is very critical of Newton, who he portrays as blinkered, unbothered by the natural beauty around him and closed-off to creativity – perhaps making this an odd choice for its location outside of the British Library. But the obvious irony of Blake’s work is either missed or erased by Paolozzi, who abstracts Newton to an icon of learning and discovery. The statue therefore begs questions about what it means to be ‘free to think’, though is little help in answering them.
- Market costs for access might not only be monetary, they might for instance include the construction of complex attention economies in which the attention of users is itself sold as a commodity to advertisers. But these are also not conditions which support epistemic freedom, since they require the manipulation of attention and the algorithmic organisation of content around this commercial imperative.
- See e.g. Nathaniel Tkacz (2015). Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness
Liam Mullally is a Researcher at the Autonomy Institute, and a member of our UBS Hub.