Bookstore And Library Aesthetic

“The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one that looks as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more stairways than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read”

Terry Pratchett, Guards Guards

📍Topping and Company, Edinburgh

The Cincinnati Old Main Library, aka “Old Main”, was once one of Cincinnati, Ohio’s most beautiful buildings. Now it’s a parking garage. The old library building, located in Downtown Cincinnati at 629 Vine St., a few blocks from the current Main Library, was demolished in 1955.

The Main Library occupied a prominent position in downtown Cincinnati since 1874. Above the entrance were busts of of William Shakespeare, John Milton and Benjamin Franklin. Inside – the interior designed by architect J.W. McLaughlin (November 1, 1834 – March 4, 1923) – Old Main featured cast-iron book alcoves and a towering atrium with a skylight ceiling. Of that dramatic atrium, Harpers Weekly said: “The first impression made upon the mind on entering this hall is the immense capacity for storing books in its five tiers of alcoves, and then the eye is attracted and gratified by its graceful and carefully studied architecture…” The building closed in 1955, when the “New Main Library” opened at 800 Vine Street, opened.

Word on the water, London💙

‘You can never get a cup of tea large enough

or a book long enough to suit me. ‘  C.S. Lewis

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."