David Walsh’s library is many things. Conventional isn’t one of them. Meet Phrontisterion.

Hobart’s wonderfully weird Museum of Old and New Art, Mona, has opened Phrontisterion, a library named after an Aristophanes piss-take that houses Shakespeare’s First Folio, a Bowie handwritten document, and your next favourite rabbit hole.

David Walsh has never done anything the obvious way. So, when Mona’s founder decided to open a library inside his Hobart museum, naturally it would be named after an ancient Greek word for “thinkery," housed in a sandstone cave beneath a concrete amphitheatre, and run on technology that – as far as anyone knows – doesn’t exist anywhere else on earth.

Phrontisterion opened to the public on 21 June, and it is, by any measure, a lot.

The name comes from Aristophanes’ Clouds, a comedy skewering the self-certainty of the educated. Walsh, who grew up poor and credits his first library card as “the great leveller," seems to relish the joke. The library is serious about ideas and refuses to take itself seriously – which is, at this point, basically the Mona brand.

The collection spans topics as varied as ancient brewing methods, Antarctic exploration, charcuterie, casinos, and sex. There’s a Shakespeare First Folio. A second edition of Newton’s Opticks. The sixth and final edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species produced in the author’s lifetime. Books signed by Umberto Eco, J.G. Ballard, and Hunter S. Thompson. Handwritten documents by Balzac, Bowie, Whitman, Flaubert, Einstein, Newton, Marconi and Alexander Graham Bell.

Mona’s librarian, Mary Lijnzaad, offers perhaps the most irresistible pitch for the place: “If you want to know what David is really like, browse his bookshelves."

The technology holding it all together is the real coup. Built by Art Processors – the team behind Mona’s O app – the system ditches the Dewey Decimal classification entirely.

“David’s brief was simple: let us put a book anywhere and still find it," said Nic Whyte, who led development. “So, we’ve built a library with no fixed order that stays completely navigable. As far as we know, that doesn’t exist anywhere else."

A digital reader lets visitors engage with objects too rare to touch. The physical spaces are just as considered: a map room, a study, a lounge, and – for younger visitors – a cave-like children’s library stocked partly from the personal collections of Walsh’s daughters Grace and Sunday, complete with crannies full of curios and an Ames illusion room. Artworks by Matthew Barney, Julian Charrière and others line the walls. A blacksmith named Pete Mattila made the desk, the staircase, and the chandeliers.

Phrontisterion connects to Mona’s existing buildings through tunnels cut into sandstone. It sits beneath Elektra, Anselm Kiefer’s inverted-ziggurat concrete amphitheatre – which is to say, it’s buried under a monumental artwork, inside a museum built into a cliff, on a peninsula jutting into the Derwent River.

As places to read go, it’s not exactly your local branch.

Details

Opening hours: Thursday to Monday, 10am to 5pm

Entry: Included with a museum ticket ($39 for an adult)

Can I borrow books? No, Phrontisterion is a reference library.

Where: 655 Main Road, Berridale, Hobart