This past Saturday we crawled through the Cleveland Public Library. We started off by heading through the Special Collections room of the Old Building (where we all received an excellent self-guided tour book of the library complex. I highly recommend picking up a copy at the Library gift shop). That room really is an amazing place...Not many people know this but the Library has the largest chess collection in the world. The collection consists of dozens of chess sets on display, but also includes chess literature and other items (some on display, but most in storage). In addition, they have a number of interesting displays to take a look at.
The views inside the building and the views of Cleveland from the library are incredible to draw or photograph.
I focused my efforts on Brett hall...the main Reference Hall of the Library Hall on the first floor. This room is really stunning. The consensus was that we should definitely return to the Library for another crawl...i agree...there are so many unique perspectives and so much to explore. While i was talking with one of the Librarians, i discovered that the Map Collections room just purchased a brand new large format scanner that allows them to make to-scale copies of old maps. I can't wait to see which maps they are able to enlarge - what a great gift for someone!
After the crawl, i stayed later to do some browsing of their Plain Dealer collection. The Library has the Plain Dealer on file from 1850's to present! So i took out some microfilm from 1901 and browsed for some "current" events. Maybe i'm a nerd, but...that is really awesome that you can just waltz into the library and take a look at those old papers (the system is even set up so that you can take a scan of the paper you are looking at and then email it to yourself!).
Next Crawl: We'll be staying in the Arcade next month. We've been starting in the arcade...then traveling around the city every month. We should spend some more time in our amazing starting location! If the weather is nice, we'll also sketch the construction process on Euclid (even though construction sucks....i think that it is an amazing environment to draw in).
