Recently I wrote a post about the cherry blossoms at the University of Washington here in Seattle. I didn’t want to take away from their glory by including information about a little side trip we took to the UW Library. It’s amazing and deserves its own focus.
I absolutely adore libraries. Everything about them. They house knowledge and truth. My mother once told me as a child that when you enter a library you can go anywhere in the universe. To this day, I get butterflies whenever I go into one. I love how each one has its own personality, and I particularly love the ones that have their own intimate little nooks and crannies.
This was my first time entering the UW library. I don’t know. I just assumed you couldn’t go in there unless you were a student. But we were allowed in. Granted, we wouldn’t be able to check anything out, but it was the ambience I was looking for. And the UW library is chock full of ambience.
The first place we went was the reading room in the Suzallo Library, where I took this picture.
Wow. I mean… wow. I felt smarter just walking in there. The 65-foot-high vaulted ceiling alone took my breath away. The unique leaded glass windows, I learned, include the shapes of 28 Renaissance watermarks that one can see in a book that the library bought back in 1923.
The chandeliers are absolutely gorgeous, too. Especially the ones in the shape of globes. And the top of the oak bookcases that line the walls are carved in the shapes of native plants. I love that the books in this room are shelved randomly, “to encourage exploration and discovery.” I’ve never heard of a library doing this. Pretty darned cool.
Near the grand stairway (which is, indeed, grand), there’s one of the biggest books in the world. It’s called Bhutan:A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom, and believe me when I say that it’s not something that you’d just toss on your book shelf. Opened up, the thing is at least 6 feet long. They have it displayed under glass, and the librarians turn a page about once a month.
We also checked out the Allen Library, which was added on in 1990. It includes a really cool art installation called “Raven Brings Light to This House of Stories”. Each raven is carrying symbols from other cultures of the world. There’s also a large prayer wheel that a local artist created as a gift for the Dalai Lama, who then turned around and donated it to the university. (I just love that man.)
I wish I had looked more closely at the brochure that the nice gentleman at the information desk gave me, because we missed a few neat things, like the cast of a 28-foot Pleistocene era crocodile, and the statues along the façade of the building of notable contributors to learning and culture, including my personal hero, Ben Franklin.
Yay! An excuse to go back!
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