Hello all! I am Elizabeth, one of Beaufort’s spring interns, but I’ll be going by the name PlaceBEAU. I’ve been here since January, lurking in the background, but I’ve put off blogging because I wasn’t quite sure how to introduce myself. But I figured it’s always good to begin at the beginning, and at the beginning, for me, are books.
Like most people who go into publishing, I love books. Whether I’m diving into some else’s life in a biography or memoir, exploring a whole new perspective on a topic I thought I knew, or wading through a fictional world where characters battle overbearing mothers-in-law, evil wizards, conquering invaders, their own inner demons, or all of the above, for me reading is very much an escape and an adventure. But it’s not only the stories housed in paper and ink bindings, but the books themselves that I love.
I can remember at a very young age accompanying my grandmother to the Mount Vernon Public Library, a neoclassical revival behemoth, originally funded by Andrew Carnegie. The cool, dim lobby served as a portal between the loud, bright, and gritty world outside and the serene, hushed, and ethereal realm within.
I remember whispering quietly in the children’s section, mouthing the words carefully as I devoured book after book, piling them up neatly beside me before delivering them in a swaying stack to the stony-faced librarians to reshelve. I recall lugging huge encyclopedic tomes to battered library tables, where I composed my middle school research projects. My high school years were spent drifting in and out of bookstores, sneaking away from my latte-clutching friends perusing the magazines to take a quick peek at the sci-fi/fantasy section for new arrivals. In college, I practically lived in the library, myself now a latte-clutcher, camped out between some infrequently visited stacks. The highlight of my grad school experience was a visit to the Newberry Library in Chicago, where I was allowed to briefly handle a few medieval manuscripts. To this day, the smell of paper, dust and glue is both comforting and exciting all at once.
To that end, I thought the perfect introduction would be to share some of my absolute favorite libraries, both in the U.S. and abroad.
New York Public Library – New York, NY. The NYPL is the second largest public library in the U.S., second only to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The library originated in the 19th century, and its founding and roots are the amalgamation of grass-roots libraries, social libraries of bibliophiles and the wealthy, and from philanthropy of the wealthiest Americans of their age.
Library of Parliament (French: Bibliothèque du Parlement) – Ottawa, Canada. The Library of Parliament was designed as a chapter house, and was inspired by the British Museum Reading Room. Its collection comprises 600,000 items, covering hundreds of years of history, and employs a staff of 300. Unfortunately, access to the library is generally restricted to those on parliamentary business, and not everyone gets a chance to explore the stacks.
Trinity College Library – Dublin, Ireland. Trinity College is Ireland’s oldest university, and the Trinity College Library is Ireland’s largest research library. The oldest and rarest of the library’s collection is housed in the Long Room, the largest single-chamber library in the world, with over 200,000 volumes preserved inside. Supposedly, Trinity’s Long Room served as the “unofficial” inspiration for the Jedi Archives in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.
Library of Congress – Washington, D.C. The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world – it has over 151.8 million items and 838 miles of bookshelves. The smallest book in its collection is a tiny copy of Old King Cole – 1/25″ x 1/25″ – which is so tiny the pages can only be turned with the assistance of a needle. Though it’s open to the public, only library employees, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices and other high-ranking government officials are allowed to check out books.
Stift Melk – Melk, Austria. Stift Melk, or Melk Abbey, is a Benedictine abbey in Austria, and is among the world’s most famous monastic sites. The Library is decorated in the Baroque style like the rest of the Abbey, with gilded everything and frescoes galore. While it’s not a lending library at all, and visitors are encouraged to not-touch-anything-please, its off-limits collection conjures images in my historian’s mind, of long-ago monks carefully paging through leather-bound tomes.
-Placebeau