LIBRARY TALK – OCTOBER 13, 2023
From the desk of Alison Gibson, Director
We have been enjoying our new exterior lights and hope that you do as well. Back when the library was built in 1915 the lights were in the stair columns near the front door and along the wall on 2nd Street. The postcard tells this better than we do! Anyway, the columns and wall that surrounds the library came during the additions 30+ years ago, along with the ‘lovely’ 16-inch white globes. Probably high fashion at the time, but have never really looked appropriate to the style of the building. For years, we dreamed about changing the lights, and we even tried a variety of fixtures from some of the stores in the area, but out of the box, the scale was wrong, or they were cheaply made and wouldn’t have lasted long.
Through searching online, and then the tenacity of one of our board members, we found a company that made beautiful period column lights and had a style we really liked. We got even luckier—the president of the company ‘googled’ us and looked at the library and took it on as a personal project, and saw the design in the leaded glass light in the front stairs and used that to create the outline on the glass of the new lights. He said the library needed a necklace of beautiful lights, and he delivered. They are lovely and very, very well made and we think that they fit the library nicely. I think in a short time, most people won’t even remember the globes. Guess we’ll have to update the picture on our website to reflect the change.
We added some interesting non-fiction books this week, and here are a few—Blood Memory: the Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns. The Native American relationship with the buffalo, the horrific mass slaughtering of them as the westward expansion took place as well as the passion of a few to bring back true buffalo herds makes for interesting reading. Fergus Bordewich, who years ago visited Ripley when researching for his Bound for Canaan book (Antislavery/Underground Railroad) has written Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction looks beneath the surface for the reasons of the rise of the KKK and its implications during the post-Civil War era, and ‘our’ Grant’s role in preventing some of the plans of the KKK and their supporters. For air fryer fans, we just added Air Fryer All Day: 120 Tried-and-true Recipes for Family-Friendly Comfort Food by Rebecca Abbott and Jennifer West. For you cat lovers, we’ve added The Hidden Language of Cats: How they Have Us At Meow by Sarah Brown (who studied many cats and reviewed the literature on cats–interesting reading). We always welcome you to stop in and browse the new book shelves—deep history to fun craft books, regional to world scope, and of course we always have a good amount of fiction awaiting….
