A morning in the rare books room, thinking of the dead

There is a particular quality of light that lives in the reading rooms of old libraries, a kind of grey-gold wash that turns paper into something almost translucent. In Melbourne, where the weather famously offers four seasons before lunch, that light can shift from slate to amber in the space of a single tram ride. I had taken the number 96 from St Kilda Road, ducked past the laneway cafés where the baristas steam flat whites for the scholarly set, and walked up the worn stone steps of the Mitchell wing at the State Library of Victoria, a building that has been sheltering books since before my grandfather drew breath. The reading rooms have the hush one associates with cathedrals, and on that morning the whole place seemed to lean slightly toward me, as if it knew what I had come to ask.

I had brought nothing but a notebook, a fountain pen inherited from my uncle, and the vague intention of sitting with whoever might want to speak. The request desk is staffed by people who have made peace with the long silences; they slide a cradle toward you, lower their voices, and disappear behind a heavy door. Beyond that door lies a climate-controlled chamber where the air smells of cedar shavings and the slow oxidation of centuries. I have always felt the dead nearer in such places, as if temperature were a kind of mail they could post letters through.

In that room, you begin to understand why the ancient Egyptians painted their tombs in such vivid colours. The dead do not want to be remembered in grey; they want the bright pigments, the carefully named vessels, the lined-up servants carved in stone. Books are a kind of tomb furniture, and the rare ones are the most brightly painted of all. They wait on their shelves the way my mother waited at the kitchen window on winter afternoons in Lismore, certain that someone would eventually come. With rain beginning to freckle the tall windows and the tram bells ringing out on La Trobe Street, I felt certain of it too.

A library as a kind of cemetery

The comparison is older than I am. Augustine called a library a cemetery of the mind; others, less generous, have called it a graveyard of unread books. Both formulations ring true on a quiet morning, when the only sounds are the soft slap of a slipper against a reading desk and the distant clatter of a tram braking in Elizabeth Street. To sit among rare books is to sit among burials, arranged with the same officious care a cemetery caretaker uses when he measures the gap between headstones. Every spine is a small vertical monument, and the gilt lettering along it is a kind of epitaph.

I have always been drawn to libraries that acknowledge this kinship. In the Mitchell wing the doors are heavy and the brass fittings green with age. The librarians do not smile too readily; they have seen enough grief to know that a smile can be an interruption. Above one of the reading rooms hangs a portrait of Redmond Barry, who laid the foundation stone in 1854 and is buried himself in the Melbourne General Cemetery at Carlton, where Himalayan cedars shade the city's worthies and the magpies carol at dusk. He would have been pleased to know that mourners still come to his library in search of the dead.

The Egyptian galleries of the British Museum were my first such revelation, years ago. A guide explained that the papyri were placed in tombs because the Egyptians believed the soul required a record of itself in order to be recognised by Osiris. Books, he said, were passports to the afterlife. I have never read a novel since without glancing at the colophon to see whether the writer had signed on for the journey.

Voices that survive in marginalia

When you are allowed to handle a rare book with bare, washed hands, the first thing you notice is how often the dead have answered back. A widow in Hobart, sometime in the 1880s, has pencilled a small x beside a passage of Tennyson. A convict transported to Van Diemen's Land has scrawled a single word of protest in the margin of a sermon. A schoolgirl in Parramatta has drawn a flower in the gutter of a prayer book, with petals so carefully coloured that one suspects she used water from her own eyes to blend the pigment. These are the dead at their most candid.

I have come to believe that marginalia are the closest thing we have to a séance. The writer speaks from the centre of the page, and the reader speaks back from the edge, and the two voices mingle in the century between them like a conversation through a wall. In the Mitchell wing that morning I turned to a folio of Edmund Burke and found a thumbprint at the bottom of page 144. Some long-dead reader had paused there and left the print of a single hand. I covered it with my own thumb, and we held the same thought for a moment.

The marginalia of history are mostly the marginalia of the literate, the leisured, the lucky. The voiceless left fewer marks; their silences are harder to recover. Yet even an illiterate reader can leave a stain of fingerprint, a folded corner, a place where the page has been worn smooth by the rub of a thumb that did not know how to sign its name. These are the great democracies of the rare books room, where the only aristocracy is the act of attention.

The weight of paper and the politics of memory

A rare book is a political object, and a rare books room is therefore a kind of council chamber. What is preserved, what is allowed to moulder, what is rebound and what is left to fall apart — these are decisions, and the dead who are spared from the fire of censorship are the dead who can speak. The Mitchell wing holds the diaries of settlers and the letters of missionaries; it holds, too, the records of those who resisted both. The shelves are a parliament of sorts, and a librarian is the speaker who decides whose voice will be heard on which afternoon.

I have tried, in my own small way, to be a member of that parliament. The book I have written most proudly was an attempt to set down the voices of people who had been written out of the official records. I think often of the libraries that refused to shelve such books when they were first published, and of the librarians who smuggled them in through the tradesmen's entrance, in the brown paper wrappings of grocery orders. The civil rights movement was partly fought in such wrappings, in the back rooms of a hundred reading rooms from Birmingham to Brisbane.

Australia has had its own quiet heretics, and the State Library of Victoria holds many of their papers. I think of Mary Gilmore's letters, of the manuscripts of Xavier Herbert, of the careful diaries kept by Aboriginal stockmen on stations in the Northern Territory. The weight of such paper is heavier than its fibre count suggests; it is weighted with the labour of being heard at last. The rare books room is a place where justice is sometimes belatedly, beautifully done.

Letters from the unrecorded

The dead I came to think of most that morning were the ones who left no letters at all. The station hands who died unnamed on remote properties; the laundrywomen in Collingwood whose surnames were entered in ledgers but never spoken aloud; the orchardists in the Huon whose children were buried in unmarked ground. They are the silent majority of every archive, and a rare books room is honest only insofar as it admits their absence. The catalogue drawers are full of names, but the silence between the names is fuller still.

A book is a letter to whoever comes after, and a rare book is a letter that has survived against the odds. When I read one, I try to read it as if the writer were sitting across from me, leaning forward, expecting me to ask the question they could not finish asking in their own lifetime. Sometimes I find myself writing the question down in my notebook, in the same blue ink my mother used, and carrying it out into the winter light of Melbourne, where the gulls are wheeling above the Yarra.

A friend in Adelaide once told me that she keeps a small jar of paper beside her writing desk, and into it she drops every letter she writes but never sends. The jar is full now, she said, of unsent letters to her father. I thought of that jar often in the rare books room, and I thought that the dead would understand such a vessel. They are the great unsent correspondents, and the books on the shelves are the rare occasions when the post finally went through.

What the morning asks of the living

By eleven o'clock the rain had stopped, and a watery light was falling through the high windows of the Mitchell wing. The reader across from me — a young woman with a red plait and a chipped tooth — looked up briefly and then down again, and the small exchange felt like a benediction. The morning, I realised, had asked me a question, and the question was the one the dead always ask: what are you going to do with the time that is left to you? The books on the shelves had given their answer; they had been written, bound, and shelved. Mine was still to be given.

I walked out into the cold of La Trobe Street and bought a flat white from a café whose name I will not soon forget. The barista asked if I wanted a second cup for the walk home, and I said yes, please, because I had earned it. There is a particular pleasure in walking through Melbourne in winter, when the buildings are dark against a slate sky and the bells of the trams seem to be ringing for someone who has just died. I thought of my own dead — my mother in Lismore, my father before her, my uncles in Brisbane — and I thought of how glad I was to have spent a morning in their company, however obliquely.

Companions for the morning, with the dead beside us

• Christina Stead, The man who loved children — for the long Sundays of family memory
• Patrick White, The eye of the storm — for the weather of late life
• Henry Handel Richardson, The getting of wisdom — for the schoolrooms that shaped us
• Hal Porter, The watch-house on the island — for the small coastal towns where the buried are still gossiped about
• Randolph Stow, To the islands — for the long journeys north we did not dare to take

Small rituals for honouring the dead in libraries

• Write the name of the dead on the cover of a notebook before you begin a session of reading
• Slip a pressed gum leaf between the pages of a book that has outlived its first reader
• Sign the visitors' book with the surname of someone you would like remembered that day
• Read aloud, very softly, a single sentence from a book to a companion who has gone before you
• Leave a small coin on the reading desk, the way one leaves a pebble on a Jewish headstone
• Walk home by a route you have never taken, in honour of the roads the dead would have walked if they could

Visit the State Library of Victoria, take the number 96 tram, and ask for the manuscripts room. Spend a quiet morning in the company of those who have waited a long time for you to arrive. The dead, I have learned, are unfailingly polite; they will wait for you to finish your coffee.