Ampersand

Ampersand Café and Bookstore is at 78 Oxford Street, Paddington. It's situated on an incredibly busy road, but "&" somehow manages to be a quiet and peaceful haven in an old Victorian house, with a warren of rooms stacked with second hand books and offering plenty of places to sit, from little stools by the window to large, comfortable old communal tables. It's like going round to someone's house, where they serve you with delicious hot chocolate and wonderful cakes (such as the mango and coconut cupcake below) and you can read any of their books.

Customs House

The refurbished Customs House at Circular Quay opened in 2005. It's an imposing building dating from 1845, which houses a library, exhibition space, offices and at the top, Café Sydney. The ghost of a convict who was hanged on the site supposedly roams the premises proffering rum to passers-by; no one offered me a drink of any kind, but a helpful librarian told me that the building, though aesthetically very pleasing with its recurrent themes of red, white and black, interesting modern features, lamps, curves, computers, onsite coffee bar ("Young Alfred"), swastikas on the marble (with a handy plaque explaining that use of the fylfot pre-dates the Nazis' appropriation of it), ongoing exhibitions on Sydney architecture/Italian grocers/the magic of Shanghai, and last but not least a scale model of the Sydney CBD under glass, is a failure as a library. The architects responsible for the ambitious refurbishment didn't give any consideration to its use as such, and it is, like the swanky new Surry Hills Library, "a stressful place to work" as a result. No wonder Queen Victoria looks so stern from her vantage point above the portico.

State Library of NSW

The State Library comprises several buildings, the oldest being the Mitchell Library which opened in 1910. In the imposing entrance hall there's a sculpture called "The Southern Cross", with bright stars on a sheet of cobalt blue glass. Down a little corridor, I found a garrulous library volunteer, Tomas, manning the Shakespeare Room, a little library full of books about Shakespeare ("but nothing valuable", Tomas said). In the basement, there was an exhibiton of "realia", a library classification term for objects that are not printed material but still speak of history: tin whistles for imitating birdsong, a World War I ID bracelet, a button from a convict's jacket.