Category Archives: sneaky posts

A quick post today from one of the truly great buildings in the United States. I’m sitting at a computer in Alcove 3, just off the Main Reading Room at the Library of Congress, where I’m doing a bit of research on several potential projects. I’m waiting for the librarian to drop a book off for me at desk 191, which I can see just over the top of this computer, peeking around some of the construction that’s going on in here.

It’s my intention to some day take readers of this blog on a brief photo tour of the library, so you can see what it’s like where you first walk in, check your bags, then make your way down the dark corridors leading to the small anteroom just outside the Main Reading Room. That moment when you walk out of the anteroom into the enormous Main Reading Room — with its soaring, ornate dome and circular rows of old wooden reading tables — is, for bibliophiles, probably the same feeling art lovers get the first time they enter the Sistine Chapel. It’s huge and awe-inspiring, yet somehow cozier and more intimate than you thought it might be from staring at it in pictures for so long.

Ooop, there’s my book being delivered now! See you later.