What do our bookshelves say about us? Which of our books do we choose to display and why? And what happens to a private collection when it becomes a public exhibit?

Review: Phrontisterion library, Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), Hobart

Mona founder David Walsh’s new private library at the Hobart gallery raises all of these questions and more. A lifelong avid reader who spent much of his childhood reading his way through the public library in the Tasmanian suburb of Glenorchy, Walsh possesses around 50,000 books. He is sharing 30,000 of them at the Phrontisterion in Mona’s astonishing new wing.

The library’s name is taken from a Greek word meaning “school”, or place of thinking and learning. It also refers to the “thinkery”, in Aristophanes’ comic play, The Clouds, where a lampooned version of Socrates teaches uneducated down-and-outs how to escape their debts with the power of argument.

This jab at intellectual snobbery is a clear allusion to Mona, which is still largely funded by Walsh’s gambling activities, and to Walsh, who revels in his status as “a wastrel/ bum-in-chief”.

A decade in the planning, the wing housing the Phrontisterion involved a complex, lengthy construction, which, with typical Mona extravagance, blew the budget from A$11 million to more than $100 million. It incorporates artworks such as Anselm Kiefer’s inverted concrete amphitheatre, Elektra, Joshua Yeldham’s Surrender Room, a moving temple to his family’s journey with assisted fertility and Matthew Barney’s monumental sculpture Rouge Battery, all interconnected by a series of sandstone tunnels.

The library is tucked into the negative space left beneath the amphitheatre. Entry is included in the Mona ticket price and access gained through the tunnels and a maze of galleries currently housing Julian Charrière’s mysterious and disorientating Hardcore exhibition.

It’s a stunning venue furnished with luxurious seating, an incredible iron spiral staircase and huge lights suspended from the ceiling like black clouds. Spread over two floors, the collection is premised on classical education with a classic Mona twist. Expect to find books on sex, gambling, death, science fiction, contemporary art and popular culture as well as science, classical civilisations, geography, design, history, mathematics, wine-making, architecture, theology, philosophy, astronomy and a selection of literature.

A masculine curiosity

A primarily rational,........

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