Library tours reveal a city's secret culture

Libraries are a portal to understanding a place's values, its relationship with knowledge, and its vision of who belongs

- Shephali Bhatt

At the entrance of the New York Public Library, a marble plaque reads: "I had little opportunity for formal education as a young man in Lithuania, and I am deeply indebted to The New York Public Library for the opportunity to educate myself. In appreciation, I have given the Library my estate with the wish that it be used so that others can have the same opportunity made available to me.

The words belong to Martin Radtke, a gardener who taught himself business and finance in the library's Economics section and invested in the stock market. In 1973, he bequeathed nearly his entire estate-roughly $368,000-to the institution that had transformed his life.

I stood before that plaque in July 2017, camera raised, vision blurring with tears. Libraries have always been sanctuaries to me. As a teenager, I nursed a romantic fantasy of meeting my soulmate while wandering the stacks. Somewhere in the passage from adolescence to adulthood, that dream evolved. I realised that the keepers of so many stories have their own stories to tell. And so, libraries became less about finding a person and more about discovering the soul of a place through them. Sure, they are about spectacular architecture and the staggering collections. But after close to half-a-dozen library tours across the globe in the last decade, libraries have become my portal to understanding a place's values, its relationship with knowledge, its vision of who belongs and who deserves access to transformation.