Library

I am a member of several libraries and am a liberal user of them. Libraries are some of my favorite places. Not the new libraries that are all open spaces with lots of frosted glass and computers, but the old libraries. The libraries with tiny wooden doors leading leading to unexpected rooms stacked floor to ceiling with books; libraries with long wooden reading tables, stone floors, enormous globes, orreries, map rooms, busts of Plato, Flaubert, and Charles II, and card catalogues.... and skylights. Among my favorite libraries is the main Boston Library on Copely Square. There is, or there was the last time I was there, a reading room above the main front doors, from where, if one was inclined to push open the wooden door on the window, one could get a lung full of fresh air (there was no glass in the rectangular interstice) and look out over the square and across to the Episcopalian Church; the one where the man who wrote "O Little Town of Bethlehem" used to be the rector. There are other libraries I love. The Mechanics Institute Library in San Francisco, the West wing of the Greene Library on the campus of Stanford University, the old Carnegie Library in Paso Robles, California are some of them. Though the latter is no more a library; the collection being housed in a modern building which I deplore. The Public Library in San Francisco has two examples of library buildings which stand at opposite extremes. First, but not in affection, is the new Main Library near City Hall. When one enters one wonders if it is a library of a convention center. There are no books visible, unless one leaves what seems like the main parts of the building and looks about in the edges and corners. All of the spaces are enormous, reading tables are rare, though there are plenty of computers. But one of the neighborhood branch libraries (It is itself, a Carnegie Library)is a beautiful superbly-windowed Romanesque style building rounded at one end with an apse, entrances are through doors centered on the Green Street side of the building. Just inside the doors is a smallish wood paneled vestibule, beyond which is the reading room. There are shelves on the walls all the way around the inside of the building, with tall windows above the shelves. The ceiling is beautiful plaster work with pilasters and arches. To the right, if you face the interior of the building from the vestibule is the children's book area. To the left is the adult section. Dead ahead is the circulation desk. With the walls lined with shelves the center of the floor is dedicated to long reading tables. The only bad thing about the building is that some time ago, the lighting was changed to florescent tubes, and cheap aluminum and plastic fixtures on those beautiful ceilings are not only out of place but are devastatingly ugly. Well, all of that is merely introduction to something I saw in the New York Times website. I hope you enjoy it.