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| Cut-paper art done by a staff member at SPL's Southwest Branch |
If the Imaginary Reader knows the most basic essentials about my character, then they know that I can never resist a passport project that involves traveling around by bike getting stamps. I was, therefore, the ideal market for Seattle Public Libraries' passport and postcard promotion in which one could fill a library passport with stamps from each and every branch of SPL and get a postcard featuring that library* to boot. For free! Just for asking!
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| Final passport** |
Earlier this week I collected my final stamp--from the Broadview branch. There was no big fanfare though the librarian there asked me which branch I'd liked best. I told him that was an impossible question to answer, but that I could say which one had surprised me the most: the Southwest Branch. Southwest is not an attractive building from the outside and, very oddly, it is closed on Saturdays as Scott and I discovered when we biked there after a visit to Fresh Flours. But I gamely returned during the week and discovered the amazing artwork featured above and some of the friendliest librarians imaginable inside that ugly building. And the Birdhouse is less than a block away!
It's been swell to have a reason to get out and explore some new neighborhoods over the last several months. Yes, months. I collected my first postcard at the Columbia City branch last fall sometime. At that time I didn't know about the passport stamp business so I had to stop by there again as part of my "by light rail" day on which I got a handful of bike miles and a lot of value out of my orca card.
I shouldn't have been surprised to find that almost every single librarian I interacted with was friendly and helpful--to an amazing degree. The person at the Southwest branch found a couple of stickers to use so that the ink wouldn't smear where I'd covered up an earlier (misplaced) stamp. The woman at the Magnolia branch was so troubled by the failure of her stamp to fully absorb the ink that she found a second, less-battered stamp to use and helped me affix that new, improved version in place. The "learned something new" person at the Northeast Branch told me about the forgotten room discovered at the University District branch during its renovations (currently closed so no stamp from them, though I got a U-district postcard from the NE woman), while the Lake City librarian enthused about their branch's George Tsutakawa gate--and told me about how his only other gate in the city had been stolen from the Arboretum during COVID. (His son then replaced that one, using his father's old plans.)
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| One of Lake City's gates (there's a much better image on their website) |
I was also struck by the "beyond books and DVDs" nature of several of the branches. Oh, they all had computers for public use (and plenty of public making use of them), but a number of branches also offered basic essentials and Green Lake even has a visiting food pantry. (The Wallingford branch is tiny, but it's adjacent to a local food bank.)
I'm not sure if my definition of "great public art" is exactly what the designers of this program had in mind; I know that the Central Library downtown is supposed to be gobsmacking, but what I liked most was a bit more homey:
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| No longer accurate, but delightful nonetheless (Queen Anne branch) |
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| New Holly branch pillar (Superman is dropping books on Seattle) |
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| The weirdest bike racks ever (but at least they had them!) |
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| The postcard haul . . . |
And a final reason why I love living in Seattle and love its library system:
*The Madrona-Sally Goldmark Branch was out of postcards!
**Predictably, I replaced a few of the categories with my own.
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