The Secret Children's Section of the SSP Library

This past Monday, I took a short drive to the public library in South St. Paul. The only reason I went there was to pick up a book I wanted (The Blue Jay's Dance by Louise Erdrich). K took E and Z for a walk so I had the drive and the library to myself, which was fortuitous because this is what I found:

Isn't it cute? A little colonial-style Carnegie library. It felt like a true small-town library from the not-too-distant past. There were actually librarians at the front counter, waiting for you to check out a book, instead of those self-check machines. It was a little embarrassing--I had to ask the librarian if this was where I checked out--because I'm so used to doing it myself.

But the biggest and most wonderful surprise awaited me when I walked up the steps to the second floor. First I saw the sunny yellow walls, then the large windows, then the fireplace, then, then the books:

Old editions of children's books. A whole room full of adorable editions from the 30's and 40's.

It made me wonder. Have these books always been in this library? Is this some special collection the librarians decided not to replace with new editions? Have generations of children been checking these books out? Children that are now grandparents? I felt like I had found buried treasure or the lost city of gold.

I wrote down some authors that I had never heard of who had wonderfully old-fashioned names (probably because they were born in the early 1900s): Eleanor Estes. Lois Lenski. Lenora Weber. Some of these books have to be currently out-of-print, right?


I miss cards and card catalogs. My favorite part about going to the library when I was little was hearing the librarian dunk the cards into the stamping machine. It made such a satisfying dunking sound that that was the sole reason I wanted to be a librarian when I grew up: I wanted to stick a card in that slot and hear it make that thunking sound, feeling the inner parts thwacking the card with the date it's due.

Also, do we see cute endpapers anymore? What happened to this lost art?

Imagine my delighted surprise when I saw this sunning itself in a window:

It was just sitting there, frozen in time, as if someone had just taken the last page of their novel out in a hurry and left it as is.

Or it's saying: "I'm ready. Keep me company." How can you resist this sunny window?

I don't make discoveries like this very often, but when I do the moment seems eternal or monumental or special, like the universe is trying to tell me something like, "There are more secret places to be discovered..."