I promised the LA Public Library and so here we are. Lots more photos than normal because it was awesome.
I had to take this photo. Not for the atmospheric effect of the sun but because the metalwork was so beautiful.
I had heard of these Short Story Dispensers but never seen one in reality. It was imperative that I press and take a short story using each button. I still have them here.
The three buttons are: 1 minute story; 3 minute story; children’s story. They come out on paper roll. While I haven’t read them yet I’ve shown them to many people as I was just so excited!
The stories are old ones, past copyright. My one minute story is actually by William Shakespeare.
Short Story Dispenser
This library was huge for a given value of OMG! so many storeys!!! We didn’t have time to tour the entire so only did a couple of small parts of it and that included the taking the lift. So glad we took the lift.
So glad we took the lift. Someone had the bright idea of wallpapering the internal walls of the lift with the old cards from the card file system. Not just inside the lift but also inside the lift shaft. I’ll include a video after the photo but it’s not very good.
This is a random image of the audio books. Only a couple of books as you can see.
One thing we found were some drawers. At first I thought they were the remains of the card files but when I pulled out one I found I was totally wrong. They are synopses of books.
My travelling companion is interested in genealogy. I went for a tour of the genealogy floor and found these.
This gives a physical idea of the size of the building. I had to take this because the work is just so gorgeous.
This is one of the author displays. I thought it a good method of highlighting totally different types of authors. It was a double barreled display as it has the names and also a display of some of their books in the glass display case. You can see some of that in the following photo.
This is the following photo. Being short I find it hard to get the entire display case into the photo. I live in a tall person’s world.
They have a good display of newspapers available for reading. You can see what is available and also see that they’re all being read.
I’ve no idea who this author is. I liked the colours and also the idea of mysteries in the antiques world.
You need a random image of shelves with actual books.
I’m a big fan of short stories as you might know. This photo shows that they have many, many short stories. It also shows that they have many thousands of books stored off site. I would have loved to have gone there.
In my wander around the library I saw many things. People reading in alcoves, people reading on the floor, people asleep in alcoves and people asleep on the floor. I said nothing to the librarians as I didn’t want to blow people’s cover. In retrospect I don’t think it would matter as libraries have a wide range of uses and I suspect the librarians might check to see if these people are okay on occasion and not move them on.
One thing I saw were a number of rooms locked down with police tape. I wondered what might need investigating in a library, what crime might have been committed. The answer to my question was not what I expected. These rooms are under going renovation and the only tape the library could find to block them off was police tape.
This is the last in this series of travel photos. Next week I’ll get back to some books. My Read Pile has grown substantially over the last few weeks. It’s full of interesting books.
I’d like to hear about your library. What’s your favourite part of it and where is it?