of style and bibliophiles: the end.

It is, at last, the weekend, and a long one at that!  I will enjoy sleeping in on Monday, since I had an eight o'clock meeting at famvid today.  I'll be hitting the books, prepping my vocab for the GRE next month so that I can be ready for graduate school.  Of course, then I must decide what I want to study--MA in English with a composition focus? a sociology/gender studies focus? a concentration in linguistics with an ESL endorsement?  or an MAT in secondary education? or...well, yeah.  That doesn't even cover the issue of where to go, where Cory and I can both study, or I can study and he can find a job, or vice versa...

The possibilities are rich, are they not?  I'm actually excited, not so much nervous.

I do know this, though: the university where I continue my pursuit of higher education must, but MUST, have a good library.  A good internet database wouldn't hurt, either, but nothing compares to the rich wealth of books found in a university library, full of the printed word.  Every volume is a history unto itself, telling who read a page, marked that one, turned that corner down, who cast that book aside in academically-induced frustration or who read the volume enough to wear the binding.

And so, to finish the week, I'm taking a glimpse at some stunning libraries, courtesy of the Flickr commons.  Each image captures a library in a moment of history, cast in black and white, the classics of both style and of the printed page.  You can click on each image to see more of where they came from.

{New York Public Library}

{Columbia University Library}

{New York Public Library}

This one's a glimpse of my childhood, though not in black and white...

{Wauwatosa Public Library}

I remember walking to the library with my kindergarten class on field trips, and weekly trips with my parents.  I remember searching for the books with rainbow stickers on them--those were the ones that had been on Reading Rainbow.  I checked out nearly every volume of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, excited that the young Laura was also from my home state.  When we moved to Kentucky, we were somewhat let down by the public library near us, because the Tosa Library spoiled us thoroughly.

Libraries are wonderful, happy places.  You can always walk out with something worthwhile.

I'll close this week with a few lines from Virginia Woolf, again found in my copy of The Quotable Book Lover.

"How delightful to stop reading and look out!  How stimulating the scene is, in its unconsciousness, its irrelevance, its perpetual movement--the colts galloping round the field, the woman filling her pail at the well, the donkey throwing back his head and emitting his long, acrid moan.  The greater part of any library is nothing but the record of such fleeting moments in the lives of men, women, and donkeys."

from The Common Reader