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David Walsh is nervous.

It’s the day before the public opening of his Hobart museum’s new library and wing, and he’s accidentally still here when the media arrive.

“I didn’t sleep much,” he tells the Guardian in a quiet moment away from the cameras. “When I opened Mona [the Museum of Old and New Art], I was 15 years younger, a lot more bulletproof. But also, I had nothing to prove, because no one cared.

“It was a big hole in the ground. I just, you know, filled it in. But this [Phrontisterion] is somewhat inhabiting an expectation that the community has. I feel more pressure than I did, even though it’s obviously not at the same scale. So there’s some stress, some tension … butterflies.”

That community expectation has grown thanks to the project’s blowout: 10 years of planning, four years of conspicuous construction and a budget that leapt from the original $11m to more than $100m.

Spread across two levels, there’s also more of Walsh on display here than there ever has been at Mona, Australia’s largest privately owned museum.

The first item he takes me to is not a book at all.

He opens a slick glass drawer to reveal a thin piece of paper with the original, handwritten lyrics to David Bowie’s 1972 hit Starman. There’s a complete set of Bowie’s LPs and a set of colourful books about the singer. Behind us, a record player disguised within a bench is ready to play at Walsh’s whim.

“There’s a lot of stuff here that’s sort of growing out of the history of my life,” he explains. “I’m a Bowie fan, so this is a bit of a Bowie shrine.” There’s a collection of Bowie’s own favourite books as well, which is “98% complete,” Walsh says. “It is a library after all.”

Next, Walsh points out a Greek history textbook that belonged to his brother, Tim, who died in 1991. There’s also hardcovers from their childhood – “these are the first two books that were ever on our bookshelf at home. It’s astonishing to me that we’ve still got them” – and framed documents written by Einstein, Newton and Darwin.

“There are a lot of things that I’ve never shown … I haven’t actually done a calculation but I’ve probably spent more money on books and maps and stuff than I have on art,” Walsh says.

He’s also now spent more money on this renovation than on the original $75m build of Mona. That money went not only to the library but its wing, which contains painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer’s epic inverted concrete amphitheatre Elektra; conceptual artist Julian Charrière’s immersive installation Breathe; and the accompanying tunnels and earthworks that link it all together. The wing also includes Matthew Barney’s 2014 Rouge Battery, a six-tonne iron and copper cast that Mona acquired and then built around; and Joshua Yeldham’s Surrender Room: a womb-like space with puppets playing mesmerising automated music.

The most expensive book in the library is the Shakespeare First Folio, worth about $US6-8m.

“This is the book, in English,” says Walsh as we approach. “It’s probably a sacred object, really.”

Of about 750 copies thought to be printed, 235 are known to remain.

“It’s a very, very special book and quite a rarity,” says Mary Lijnzaad, Mona’s library manager. When Walsh bought the folio from rare bookseller Peter Harrington in 2023, Lijnzaad was sent to London to bring it back in a “bombproof, bulletproof, waterproof Pelican carry case”, she remembers.

“It was quite a relief to land in Hobart and it’s a wonderful thing to see it on display here now.”

Next to it is an astoundingly real digital duplicate: twist a knob and watch each page turn at your own speed. It’s an innovation by Art Processors, the design agency that developed Mona’s app The O; they are animating 60 rare books from Walsh’s collection, including a Picasso sketch book which is already on display.

“We’ve never seen anything like this,” says the company’s Nic Whyte. “We can essentially render, one-to-one, any book, any dimension, any number of pages … the way that the pages turn and fold, we tried to get it as real as we can.”

Elsewhere on the shelves is a lot you’d expect: signed classics, books about Mona artists, books about sex and death. But then there is the set of Lonely Planets that look like they could have come straight from the local op shop and a wondrous kids’ section kitted out with books from Walsh’s daughters’ collections.

Thirty-thousand books in total – and none of them are labelled. There are no library cards. The books must stay in the room but, beyond that, there are few rules. They don’t even need to be put back in their original spot: if you think a book belongs elsewhere, file it there.

For the visitor looking for a particular title, The O will track it down; cameras repeatedly take images of certain shelves and the spines therein over the course of a day, which they use to locate your target. It replaces the traditional Dewey categorisation system, which is heavily Eurocentric and which Walsh wanted gone.

Whyte says: “David’s brief was simple: let us put a book anywhere and still find it. 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.”

When asked how she’s coping with that, Lijnzaad, the librarian, laughs.

“It’s been a real challenge … [The Dewey system] has almost become second nature after a few decades,” she says.

“Dewey’s a good classification scheme that gives you a number to put on the shelf. But the subject headings are all heavily weighted towards Christianity and masculinity.” For instance, she says, the 200s are for religion – but most of that’s taken up by Christianity. “They’re working to change that, but not quickly enough for us.”

The name for the library – Phrontisterion – comes from Greek playwright Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds, a piss-take that mocks the educated upper class. Mona wants their “thinkery” to be accessible to everyone.

“We don’t want people to come in and feel that they need to be educated,” Lijnzaad says.

“We want people to enjoy the space, look at a book, be intrigued, pick it up – or ignore it – or sit down and read it. You can spend as much time here as you like.”

On Mona’s blog on Friday, Walsh wrote a homage to library access. At age seven, “Glenorchy library was my best friend’s best friend,” he writes. “I made a serious attempt to take home every book in the library.”

Later, he found Richard Epstein’s The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic at the State Library of Tasmania, without which “there’s a good chance that there’d be no Mona, and no library,” writes Walsh, who makes much of his money through a gambling syndicate. “From libraries I came, and to libraries I return.”

• Phrontisterion entry is included in a ticket to Mona