From the outside, the Biblioteca Público Arús on Passeig de Sant Joan in Barcelona doesn’t scream “hidden trove of freethinking, anarchism, and Sherlock Holmes.” No, it looks like just another respectable 19th-century apartment block. Beautiful, but honestly a bit unremarkable in a city filled with awe-inspiring architecture.
Walk inside, though, and you find a marble staircase sweeping up toward a Statue of Liberty about six and a half feet tall—a replica of the American icon cast in bronze by Manuel Fuxà with Odoardo Luis Razzauti and installed in 1908. Unlike Bartholdi’s original in New York, this one’s tablet is inscribed not with “July 4, 1776,” but with the words “Alma Libertas”—Latin for “freedom of the soul.” A fitting reminder that here, knowledge was meant to be the true liberator.
That may seem random at first, but Rossend Arús, the man behind the library, was a freemason and a republican. Which, in 19th-century Spain, placed him squarely on the side of secularism, liberal reform, and free thought—and firmly against the Catholic Church and the monarchy. For Arús, liberty was more than a slogan. So he had the statue cast in bronze and then installed it on the main landing to make sure you get the point before you ever reach the reading rooms.
Our hero, Arús, was born in 1844 to a family of “comfortable means.” So, you know, rich. His father was a prosperous colonial goods merchant, especially in textile dyes, from a well-off family in l'Hospitalet de Llobregat (now largely forgotten, but once Catalonia's second-largest and most prosperous city after Barcelona). His mother came from the tiny Pyrenean village of Das—a reminder that even freemasons with money often had one foot in the mountains. Arús technically studied law, but he was personally drawn to theatre, journalism, and political activism. So he spent his life orchestrating Carnival spectacles, writing biting satirical plays, and promoting the Catalan language and anti-royalism.
Rather than latching onto the family’s mercantile gravy train, he poured the fortune he inherited from dear old dad into progressive civic and cultural causes—most notably by transforming his own apartments into a public library upon his death. His mercantile origins softened the way he financed his projects, but they also gave him a platform to subvert bourgeois expectations—arming the working class with ideas rather than just alms.
In his will, he left it to fellow freethinkers Valentí Almirall and Antoni Farnés, trusted allies from Barcelona’s republican and Masonic circles, to turn his home into the Biblioteca Pública Arús, explicitly meant for the education of Barcelona’s working class. The library opened in 1895 with a mission to “instruct the people,” built out of Arús’ personal bequest.
Its foundation document is pretty radical for the time. One clause promised that “no person shall be prevented from entering, reading, or studying on the basis of sex, age, or class.” Another forbade the display of political or religious portraits on the walls. There were even provisions for restrooms for both sexes. In a city where access to knowledge was still tightly stratified, Arús insisted his library be open, neutral, and inclusive.
Architect Bonaventura Bassegoda i Amigó designed the building, but economy was the guiding principle inside. Custom wood cases were built to cram in the maximum number of books, which meant volumes were shelved strictly by size. The result looks tidy—rows of spines lined up as neatly as troops on parade—but it broke any and all connections between subject and shelf. Librarians everywhere probably shivered.
No browsing the aisles. And since neither the Dewey nor the Library of Congress classification systems were much help for a collection that was heavily focused on anarchism, federal republicanism, and Masonic thought, the staff had to develop their own manual system. That home-grown catalog, with its drawers of cards and subject slips, still survives, supplemented now by a digital database. But this combination of design and manual cataloging turned out to be a boon.
Francisco Franco detested freemasonry, lumping it together with communism and Judaism as conspiratorial enemies of Spain. In 1940, his government even passed a law making Masonic membership a crime. (A bit much for a group mostly known for handshakes and funny aprons.) Book burning was the fashion of the day, and the Biblioteca Arús—with its shelves full of anarchists, republicans, and freethinkers—looked like an obvious target.
But the library's peculiar design worked in its favor. Shelved by size, the tidy rows revealed nothing, and the handmade cataloging system made sense only to the staff. To purge 'dangerous' works in bulk, the authorities first needed to know where they were—and at the Arús, there was no way of knowing at a glance. (Censors don’t usually excel at patience.)
When Franco's regime shut down the library in 1939, the doors remained locked, while tenants on the upper floors continued with their lives. Inspectors did occasionally turn up, but according to legend, the concierge had a simple trick. He’d simply mention, as he unlocked the front door, that another agency was also scheduled to inspect the place that week. Unsure whose turf it really was, the agents would retreat. Bureaucratic cowardice, combined with a filing system that only insiders could navigate, preserved the library's collection intact for three decades of dictatorship.
The library originally comprised 24,000 volumes from Arús’ personal collection (he was a well-read individual) and now counts approximately 80,000. They cover every subject imaginable, but with a heavy tilt toward the movements Arús championed—labor, anarchism, republicanism, freemasonry. There are also gifts from later figures, like anarchist Diego Abad de Santillán and politician Enrique Tierno Galván, along with the thesis of Dolors Aleu i Riera, Spain’s first licensed female physician, who in 1882 argued that women deserved equal access to education and medicine. In 2011, the library acquired one of the country's largest collections of Sherlock Holmes materials, donated by Joan Proubasta. Making it one of the few research libraries in the world where Sherlock Holmes shares shelf space with Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist who thought we should just burn it all down and start over from scratch. You have to believe that more than a few tech bros have him on their nightstand.
Visiting today, you can’t help but notice how compact it all is. Just a few rooms, a couple of dozen desks, and those stately glass-fronted cases. It isn't Gaudí's La Pedrera or Picasso's museum—there are no crowds, no ticket scanners, no gift shop. Heck, I was the only one on the tour I took. You will notice the faint hush of wood and marble, a trace of old paper in the air, and the sense that the books are exactly where they were meant to be, though.
In a city better known for flamboyant architecture, the Biblioteca Arús hides in plain sight. Part time capsule, part survival story, and still quietly radical. The Statue of Liberty greets you at the top of the stairs, holding her torch aloft. She doesn't need to shout. The walls and shelves speak for themselves.
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