Libraries

Some people worry that books will one day go the way of newspapers. As in, people will stop reading them because of various substitutes (ie the internet and tv) that don't get your fingers smudgy and aren't so annoying to fold up again. I personally don't like newspapers. They are boring. I wish someone would start writing news that was more punchy and fun to read, some kind of beautiful hybrid between hard-hiting news and trashy tabloid.

Whatevs, newspapers could go extinct and I probably wouldn't even notice for about a week.

But books...

omg books.

Now, I know there's this newfangled contraption called a kindle which I understand to be like an ipod for your books. It sounds dumb. I hate it. I hate machines, they are taking over the world. They are so evil, and I haven't charged my sonicare toothbrush, so I just use it like a normal toothbrush, and I haven't charged my camera, so it just sits in my drawer, and I broke my laptop cord, so it doesn't always charge my computer. Also, I have an ipod with no itunes. This is why machines suck.

There's also movies made from books, which are pretty cool. But if the movie's good, I always want to go read the book. Which always turns out to be better.

There's just something so ineffably satisfying and lovely about the weight of a book, the smell of a book, the process of turning pages and making progress toward the end. Old books, especially, are so inspiring, to know that you are reading the real thoughts and words of someone who wrote them and captured them, the real thoughts and words of innumerable someones who have read and thought the same thoughts.

I especially like going to the stacks and picking random books off the shelf, books you'd think no one would ever read, only to open them and find that someone did check out that book about the Chicago census of 1892...like thirty years ago. Who? Why? I wonder.

I like books because they are real. Real-er even than life, maybe. Because how often do we go through life without being fully conscious of how we feel, of the interiority of our mind, of how things really are, of both the piercing awareness of the slightest nuances of your own thoughts coupled with the detached omniscient panorama of the big picture? Because how often do we wish we could live in a book, live with the same conviction, live as a modern-day Don Quixote who is going to rescue the cruel (technology infested) world with the sword of chivalry (and truth)?

Some cool things you may like to know about sterling memorial library:
Rogers created the library in the image of a Gothic Cathedral, even going so far as to model the circulation desk after an altar. He even required that the library be seen from the street. As a result, Berkeley College was divided into two sections in order to create an unobstructed view of the cathedral-like library.

The amount of stone transported for the construction exceeded the amount used, and as a result, myths and legends abound on the Yale campus regarding fanciful structures claimed to exist on the roof, built of surplussed stone and metal. One story has a small castle hiding the air-conditioning system. Another claims that there exists an entire miniature city up there, complete with its own stone golf course. In reality much of the fanciful design that exists on the roof was present in the original design.

In total, there are some 3,300 hand-decorated windows in the library. They depict everything from fiction to history and even small insects on otherwise unadorned panes created to look real. In 2000, one former librarian published a book about the windows.