The library is big.

A typical public library gets hundreds of visits a day. A really big one might get a thousand, or even a few thousand, on a busy day. This library is visited every single day of the year by each and every one of the thousands of students in the school. Even if you have shop or lab as your core focus, you will have some other classes, and it's just the safest place to be.

(It's not safe. Just - less dangerous.)

The reading rooms are also big. There are lots of them, and each one is individually comfortable for a few dozen people - a large enclave and all their hangers-on and supplicants, or a couple small enclaves and likewise. There are chair-clumps that aren't in their own reading rooms - scores of those - and carrels, buried in the stacks at various depths, hundreds of them. The stacks themselves are so labyrinthine as to be less than self-consistent.

One reason the library is so safe is that there aren't bathrooms on this floor - you have to nip out and down the stairs for it - and the space is so large that you can stand in the stacks without a vent for miles around. And of course, it has a void ceiling. Nothing can drop on you. (From the void ceiling. Some reading rooms have small ceilings, and the shelves are themselves possible hiding places.)

The library rules - sort of; the library heuristics, the library advice - is posted in four languages, on stained and scorched handmade signs, on the back of a carrel near the entrance to the library. That carrel is currently claimed by a couple of Argentinian juniors but they haven't felt like removing the signs, so the advice remains. Be careful with the books. Note where you're going and what you pass as you go. Things like that; the list is short, for the Scholomance.

Happy reading, kids.