Twenty-four chairs. Green lamps. Three-hour sittings. A drawer for the phone.A reading room, and only a reading room. No café, no events, no talks. You bring a book or borrow one, you sit for three hours, and nobody speaks to you. That's the membership.
Book a chair
chairs. Twelve at the long table, twelve armchairs by the wall. Never a twenty-fifth.
phones. In the drawer, with a key you keep. Laptops stay in the bag. Paper, or nothing.
a sitting. Long enough to get somewhere. Short enough that the chair is someone else's after.
rule. Silence. Not quiet. Silence. The lamps click. That's the loudest thing.
Attention is the only thing in the room. The green lamp is a hundred and twenty years of people who worked that out before us. We just kept the lamp and added the drawer.
A single sitting, a month of them, or a desk of your own. The room is the same for all three.
Morning, afternoon or evening. Bring a book or take one off the wall. First one's free if you've never sat in silence for three hours; most people haven't.
Book ahead or walk in if there's a chair. A shelf by the door for the book you're in the middle of, so you don't carry it.
Same chair, same lamp, your papers left out under a cloth. Six exist. There's a list, and it moves about twice a year.
Painted on the wall by the door at a height you read while you're hanging up your coat.
Pick a day and a sitting. We'll tell you which chairs are free and where the light's best at that hour. The first sitting is free if you've never done one. Bring the book you keep not finishing.
Book a chair