I take a lot of walks in the towns along the coast north of Boston, and along the way I take pictures of things that catch my eye. Lately, those things have included Little Free Libraries.
They are the sort of thing that, once you’ve noticed them, they seem to be everywhere.
One of the neat things about them is that they are all decorated in different, fun ways.
For example, here is one of the first ones that I noticed in Marblehead.
Some of them are in beautiful, eye catching locations like this one in Swampscott.
They often reflect their surroundings, sometimes literally.
I also walk in Salem from time to time, and there are quite a few there. Here is one that is particularly appropriate for this season.
After a while, I realized that Little Free Libraries was rapidly becoming one of my art projects.
That’s when I decided to check out their site.
Litle Free Library: Take a Book. Share a Book.
It was great to see how vast the movement has become — it’s truly a world-wide phenomenon!
It also turns out that the site has a map of all of the locations, and the descriptions often include pictures. I encourage you to take a look at what’s near you and participate.
It was fun to explore them, but I realized that taking tons of pictures and posting them would be unnecessarily duplicative. I abandoned my little, rapidly burgeoning art project.
On the other hand, I decided to add Little Free Libraries to Cosma’s library page.
I did that, and then I got wrapped up in adding more links to the page.
One detour I took was watching a YouTube video about the World’s Most Beautiful Libraries.
That led to trying to find 3D “virtual field trips” to each of them.
Sure enough, there were some. Best of all, I even found a 360° video tour of the spooky library that was used for filming scenes in the Harry Potter movies.
After I finished adding links to all of the “virtual tours” of libraries that I could find, I realized it would be even better to go a step further.
I’ve been making 3D spaces with “doors” to virtual field trips on the Web, posting them on the 3D image sharing site Kuula, and then embedding them on the pages on Cosma.
The first one I made was the Computer Museum Lobby, and then I made one that I dubbed Transit Paradise and then another one called Space Depot.
Why not do one for big, old, spooky libraries?
Voilà – here it is!
Welcome to The Great Libraries Antechamber.
Touch doors to enter the virtual tours, and touch the bookshelves to open Web sites.
You can also see the Great Libraries Antechamber on Kuula.
Finally, here’s a tiny “scavenger hunt” to get you started on exploring the libraries.
These are arranged “roughly” in order of difficulty.
1. Which library has a famous Long Room with two floors?
3. Which library was used for filming in the Harry Potter films?
2. Which library has 1,348 miles of bookshelves?
4. Which library houses the Book of Kells?
5. Which library has murals that illustrate the Evolution of the Book?
I hope you enjoy exploring the libraries, and thank you for joining me on this journey through little, big, old and, most importantly, spooky libraries.
Have a great Halloween!