My Carnegie Library

This is the Boise Idaho Carnegie library, one of those old-time libraries established by the Carnegie foundation for the big glass libraries came to be. Sad but true, I was not a big participant of the voice you library until I was like 13 or 14. I found out about this library when my older brother graduated to his Schwinn 10 speed and his varsity 10 speed was handed down to me. Something clicked in my work got this bike that was my ticket off the farm.

Like I said I always knew about the Carnegie Library but I never attended the library before adolescence. We lived on a farm in South Boise, quite a ways from downtown, and on Saturdays when I guess regular families took the kids to the library we were working whether it was chasing down errant cows, repairing the fence that the errant cows escaped from are going with my dad down to the shop to load crates – big wooden crates that furnaces were shipped in back in the old days – – we would take the crates home then finished knocking them apart and harvesting the nails as well as the wood that made the crates. Good pieces of wood usually one by four pieces of Pine went into one stack and what mangled beyond usability for carpentry or thrown into the “burn” pile which should be stacked in the shed for use during the winter. We often use this scrap wood to the stretch out the coal that we burned in the furnace.

This was the summer I also got my first library card, of course, I don't know why but this kind of empowered me as much as the bike. I think the first book I checked out was A Wrinkle In Time And soon after that I checked out Seven Days In May Another book which had a profound effect on my summer. Carnegie library and the books I was checking out and attend speed maybe feel like I was a superhero. I had read books completely before then but it was something I was doing for upgrade it seemed like, it wasn't joyful and in gauging As these two volumes were. I like to think of these libraries, the Carnegie libraries is very Harry Potter. The old architecture of these buildings reminds me of scenes from those movies.

Like I said, the new architecture of libraries are either so postmodern that is difficult to think of them as libraries are architecture trying to remodel a warehouse or some other piece of existing architecture usually a sterile glass box of one sort or another. It's hard to love a sterile glass box full of books and other resources. Don't get me wrong I love these libraries too just not in the same way as I did in the early 60s when the Carnegie's house these books of wonder and a character all their own…