It's not just about having enough shelves." Sir Tom Stoppard is in full flow, on a subject close to his heart: the London Library, of which he is president, and which he recently dubbed, simply, "the library I love".
It is, of course, partly about shelves. An institution that acquires about 100 books a day, and keeps them on open access to its 8,000 members, and in the most expensive part of London too, has clearly got to turn its mind to racks and stacks: the library needs to add about half a mile of shelving every couple of years. But that's not the nub of it.
"It's also to do with new standards, a proper environment for the books and for the readers," Stoppard explains, talking of the library's new £25m building and refurbishment programme, announced today.
"When philosophers start talking like architects, get out while you can, chaos is coming," Stoppard has one of his characters say in The Coast of Utopia. But this philosopher-playwright is clear and pragmatic about the library's recent purchase of a neighbouring building, and the plans to transform that space and to rationalise the wonderful muddly warren of the existing buildings.
The façade of the tall 19th-century building in St James's Square looks deceptively normal: a rather grand solicitor's office, perhaps, or a gentleman's club. Inside, it is like going through the looking-glass: there are various staircases and a ponderous lift, leading to long, low stacks of books stretching away into the gloom, each separately lit by its own flickering neon bar operated by one of those 1950s string-pull things. And heavy with that sinusey smell of dust and time and school, and the faintest beginnings of a compost heap, and deep contentment. The floors are metal grids, like in Alcatraz: distinctly chilly in one's mini-skirted youth, allowing curious shafts of elusive light and echoing every footfall, giving a strange sense of doing a high-wire act amid the timelessness. Some of the staircases go up through the whole building, others connect only with a bit of floor above and below: after decades of doodling in the recesses of this real-life Escher, one can still get lost there.
This is the place Isaiah Berlin called "easily the best library in the world". Although there are remarkable libraries that would give him a good run for that "easily", it's a place its members are passionate about. For a modest annual subscription you have access to 1m or so books, multiplying every day, in a range of European languages, mostly about literature, history and the humanities. Most unusually, you can take the books home. Although there is a high and soothing leather-armchaired reading room, the sense of going off into the everyday world with your armful of wonders - or, if you live outside London or abroad, getting your wonders through the post - is unparalleled.
Even here, though, time moves on, the expectations of readers grow and books clamour to be loved and housed and ventilated. There will be a second reading room, Stoppard explains, there will be extensions below ground, computer terminals and a rationalisation of the collections. The catalogues will all be online. And there will even be a rooftop terrace ("from which you can see the London Eye," Stoppard adds, with half-murderous emphasis) - but it will all "keep the antique charm, without the formlessness".
The extra building has already been acquired, for £4.1m, through liquidation of investments and loans, and the architects Haworth Tomkins - reassuringly, for Stoppard, the same partnership that made a success of the Royal Court Theatre renovations in 2000 - have drawn plans to meet the challenges of this narrow, inner-city site.
This is a pragmatic and dynamic Stoppard. "If I take something on, I don't like to hang about on the sidelines," he says, and there's little doubt that he and the library's board will achieve the tough fundraising target of about £25m. As a membership organisation, the London Library has no access to Lotto funds or any other public munificence, but as a registered charity it provides the worthiest of causes for bibliophile donors. It was established in 1841 with 2,500 books through the efforts of Thomas Carlyle, Macaulay and Gladstone, among others, and its 500 early subscribers included the 29-year-old Charles Dickens. At work on A Tale of Two Cities, the youthful Dickens was helped by the great Carlyle, with a selection of the library's books on the French revolution.
Other presidents have included Tennyson and Sir Leslie Stephen, "whose immense Litterary Powers are well known", as his 10-year-old daughter, later Virginia Woolf, wrote; most recently, the eminent historian John Grigg looked after the library's heritage. There's a strong sense of a literary relay down the years that Stoppard finds important. "As a fake Englishman," he says (he was born in Zlin, a small town in what is now the Czech Republic, and came to Britain in 1946 with his mother and brother, and the step-father whose surname he has), "the old English institutions have a strong pull. For someone like me, impermanence is the normal condition but libraries are about time and about things lasting."
For this most erudite and literary of playwrights, the book takes pride of place, even on stage. In Stoppard's work, books and archives are close to being characters in their own right. Books fuel the time-travel that forms his play Indian Ink, in which a 50-year span is bridged by letters, papers and a portrait along a would-be biographer's trail.
In his 1997 hit The Invention of Love, too, the written word, in languages both ancient and modern, is pretty much the leading lady. ("Like everything else," Stoppard has one character tell another, rowing calmly to Hades, "like clocks and trousers and algebra, the love poem had to be invented." "Gosh," comes the reply.) In Arcadia, the complicated interplay of thought and emotion across a span of 200 years is anchored in our visual present by a few symbols: an apple, a tortoise, some books. The first has the obvious resonances, the next might be there purely for the skittish pleasure of naming a tortoise Plautus, but the books are everything: especially the "garden books" that reveal the thinking that transforms the English Arcadia through the window, each era's promised land. Characters live and love and die, and read and dream about each other, but the books remain.
Offstage, too, Tom Stoppard has a powerful sense of books as continuity. "Most people think of a library as a monument to past endeavours," he says. "But the past provides the motor of the present. Libraries stand in the future as well as in the past. When you get a book from the library, whenever it was written, the work is no longer in the past because it's in your present tense: your experience of that book is completely in the now, up to the second . . . andit fuels new work, all the time."
He provides an eloquent example. One day in 1930, Isaiah Berlin happened on the memoirs of the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen in the London Library's shelves, and was inspired to investigate Herzen's contemporaries, Bakunin and Belinsky (he of the gloomy predictions about philosophers, architects and chaos) and from there came Berlin's seminal Russian Thinkers, many decades later. "In some sense," Berlin wrote in 1992, "[the London Library] can be said to have formed me." And then the baton was passed to Stoppard himself, whose reading of Berlin's book was the springboard for The Coast of Utopia, 2002's magnificent trilogy of plays.
"What do I see ahead for the London Library?" he muses. "I'd like to think that in 25 years' time, my successor will be planning a tunnel to our new acquisition, the White Cube gallery - because the bottom will have fallen out of that art market - " (a wicked smile: Stoppard has made his views on conceptual art well known) - "and even though there may be all sorts of technological changes the book will still be there. I feel sure it will."
