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Through My Lens: Seattle Central Library

Escalators

Here’s a photo of the funky escalators at the Seattle Central Library. I’ve been wanting to post more photos of this library ever since I photographed it when I was last in Seattle. I have three good reasons for posting one today.

  1. This week is Freedom to Read Week in Canada.
  2. I’m in Seattle.
  3. I’ve spent the past two days at the AWP Conference, the largest literary conference in North America. Which means I’ve spent the past two days listening to dozens of panelists talk about writing, reading, editing, and publishing. (Which, you might have guessed, is my kind of heaven.) Which also means I’ve got a whole list of authors to check out as soon as I can get myself back to my own library.

And so, a photo of a library is entirely appropriate for today. Enjoy.

George Peabody Library

This week is Freedom to Read Week in Canada, so I thought it was high time I wrote another post about a book. Or, perhaps, many thousands of books. Like the ones in this library.

Peabody LIbrary

There are libraries. And then … well … and then there’s the George Peabody Library.

The George Peabody Library is one of the libraries of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. It’s housed in a stunning building designed by architect Edmund Lind and has been open to the public since 1873. The library is named after George Peabody, the American–British financier and philanthropist who provided the funds for the library’s founding in 1857.

The collection consists of over 300,000 books, mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and specializes in all the good stuff: archaeology, British art and architecture, British and American history, English and American literature, Romance languages and literature, Greek and Latin classics, history of science, geography, and ― wait for it ― exploration and travel.

There are a lot of cool-looking libraries on this planet. As if I need another reason to travel, I plan to photograph as many of them as I can.