Inside there is the deep quiet of protection and near-abandonment. You hear the hum of the lights, turned on as needed; that’s it. There’s a phone to make outgoing calls on the fifth floor. To me the stacks are the most sacred space in the library, yet here nobody’s telling you not to talk. You’re on your own. It’s a situation for adults.

Unlike the stacks at some other university libraries, Butler’s were not built for public consumption. They opened to patrons gradually, much later; originally, Butler had a call desk, where you’d put in your requests and wait for your numbers to come up.

“That’s why they’re not pretty stacks,” said Karen Green, Butler’s librarian for ancient and medieval history and for religion and graphic novels. She said it with empathy. Both she and I know that they are very beautiful.

I spent a few weeks there in the worst of last June and July, grazing around, letting the shelves make the connections for me, writing down notes for a book whose thesis grew obscure and finally implausible: I was looking up works on plague, fire and the Egyptian desert fathers. I learned well, but I felt even better. I took in great amounts of information without ever becoming fried or irritable. All that organization and nobody around — it seemed like trespassing in the history of Western learning, with no fear of cops. Not a lot of people spend time in the stacks anymore. (Except, as Ms. Green pointed out, around the graphic-novel section.) It’s not the current nature of finding information.

Doing it the inefficient way, you use the senses. You look at a row of spines, imprinted with butch, ultra-legible white or black type; your eye takes in more at any time than can be contained on a computer screen. You hold the books in your hand and feel the weight and size; the typography and the paper talk to you about time. A lot of libraries smell nice, but the smell of the Butler stacks is a song of organic matter, changing as temperatures do through the reaches of a pond. Get yourself near Goffredo Casalis’s life’s work on the duchy of Savoy, the Dizionario Geografico-Storico-Statistico-Commerciale, published in 27 volumes from 1833 to 1854, and breathe in. A fantastic, pre-acidic-paper smell: burned caramel, basically. Nobody there but you.

There are 15 floors of stacks with 64 rows of books per floor, running about 25 feet each; 6 or 7 shelves in each row. Can you actually browse there, find books on your own, faced with the dark phalanxes? You can, once you get subject areas in your head. Having made enough spot searches, you grasp the logic of each floor. There are no signs to help you, only diagrams with codes and numbers.