Books and Booze: Next Level Libraries

Most of the people in line had reservations for the Courtyard Tea Room. A light-filled airy space with high ceilings and views onto the idyllic courtyard beyond, The Courtyard Tea Room opened in March of 2019 (tough break). Pandemic aside, it has steadily flourished to become one of Boston’s go-to hip experiences. The Courtyard Tea Room offers fine dining with a signature cocktail menu and a specially curated “high tea” service. The Courtyard is booked up months in advance, especially during wedding season when 30-something brides who actually have money to spend want to forgo the incriminating Vegas bachelorette weekend for the more refined spa and high tea/brunch with the gals.

I was there to check out the less fancy, way cooler sounding Map Room Tea Lounge, which I had seen featured on an Instagrammer’s reel and looked too inviting and unique to pass up (and yes, I do hate myself a little for writing that sentence. Viva la millennium!). The Map Room is a smaller, more casual space. Exposed brick walls climb to meet gracefully arched ceilings patterned with a similar brick design. Wrought iron and reclaimed wood fixtures give the lounge a touch of the industrial vibe. Large-scale maps of the Commonwealth hang throughout the room. What a great spot for a date. Three lavender-infused martinis in and you’d totally forget that you’re actually wining and dining in the Boston Public Library.

How is every rom-com NOT filming their meet-cute moment here?! ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

In its defense, the Boston Public Library (BPL) put itself in an elite library league from its groundbreaking in 1888. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke at the ceremony declaring “this palace is the peoples’ own!” Palatial is accurate. The library’s architectural styles draw from French and Italian influences—think arches and columns and marble, oh my! The sweeping staircase leading patrons from the first floor lobby to the reading rooms beyond is embedded with actual fossils. Lavish murals line the walls of several rooms; John Singer Sargent, the renowned portraitist, was given the entire floor to outfit with his paintings. The job took him 29 years to finish. On any given day there is a line of people waiting for the library’s doors to open. Part museum, part art gallery, part living historical record, part civic and academic institution, and, now, part hip dining and drinking locale¹.

Libraries, you aren’t just for books and horny kids hoping to glimpse some flesh in the pages of National Geographic anymore².

I was a devout library kid. Books were my constant companions from as early as I can remember. My at-home mom brought me to weekly story hour where I savagely defended my piece of prime real estate on the plushy mat right at the feet of the librarian. Crane my neck to see those page turns? How dare you?! She could have been reading from the Black and Decker table saw instruction manual for all I cared. In my eyes, she was a god—guardian of Dr. Seuss and Babar and later Judy Blume and Nancy Drew mysteries. A superhero in a smart cardigan and sensible shoes.

Our town library was a small, non-descript two-story brown building. The children’s room was on the ground floor with everything else up on two. It was spacious with big windows that looked out over the parking lot and the marshy wetlands that edged the property. There were colorful, canvas wall hangings in abstract patterns, small wooden tables, and these white plastic egg-shaped chairs in that late-1970s mod design. Peak Mork & Mindy. In addition to all the “adult” fiction and non-fiction books, the second floor contained magazines, newspapers, reference, records, cassettes, and videos. When I was little, I couldn’t imagine leaving the kingdom of the kids’ section. I felt bad for anyone who “had to go up there,”  subjected to the super boring mud and grey tiled floors and bland, tan upholstered chairs like the kind in our dentist’s office. That changed when I had chewed my way through the Sweet Valley High series and books that typically appealed to most 12-year-olds. Suddenly climbing the two flights of stairs just to be in the upper echelons of books by Stephen King and Agatha Christie seemed worth the blank walls and forgettable decore.  

I respected libraries, and I took them for granted. By the time I was in college pursuing a mostly academic career path, I was at the library more than in my dorm room. To me they were necessary, but utilitarian, like hospital ERs. And then I went to graduate school at Northwestern University.

The university library is enormous, formidable; a fortress of information and the 14^th-largest university library in North America based on the number of titles it contains. Of course it has to be this massive in order to serve the nearly 20,000 undergrad and graduate students that attend. The facilities are actually made up of two libraries: University, which was built in the 1970s to accommodate the school’s massive growth; and Deering, which was constructed in 1933 when tuition was the cost of a modest coastal home and not the entire coast.

Deering is a marvel of neo-gothic architecture. It was designed after King’s College Chapel, in Cambridge, England, a structure of spires and windows and stained glass. It could easily pass for the banquet hall at Hogwarts but with reading lamps, books, and wi-fi. Here’s a description of the exterior from the library’s website:  

Within the front structure’s shape is a series of equally simple rectangular shapes that are played off against a rich choreography meant to slowly seduce one into the assimilation of knowledge through books.

Dayyyyyyum, Deering! Consider me very available for this situation! Deering contains most of the art and music collections, which intersected with my work in the theatre studies program. I will never forget the first time I had to go there to get research materials. I followed the signs through the University library down a carpeted hall to an ordinary set of doors. I walked through space and time, evidently, because I suddenly found myself in Camelot.

Polished stone floors, smooth brick walls, and arced passageways lead off in several directions, some with thick medieval wooden doors. Wrought iron wall sconces resembling torches were fixed periodically along the corridors. Natural light poured through banks of curved windows set in up high against the towering stone walls. I don’t remotely remember what I was there to look up, but I do remember wandering around for a half hour with my mouth hanging open looking like I had just fallen to earth from some distant planet.

I didn’t know a library could look like that or make me feel the same kind of awe I felt standing in front of a work of art.

For the remainder of my time in my graduate program, I found any excuse to go to that part of the library, even if it was just to study. And when friends came from out of town to visit, it’s the first place I would take them.  

We’re going to uh, a library? They would say, clearly hoping I was joking.

Trust me. It’s worth it.

Why are we friends again?

But it was, every time, just to see the look on their faces when they crossed the threshold from the ordinary to the extraordinary into this place that looked unlike anything from their regular life and yet was still the same familiar institution they had always known.

Even if they don’t bear all the trimmings of the palace itself, libraries are still “the peoples’ palace.” Part of their magic and power is in the unfettered access libraries provide to ideas and information. The other comes from the people who work there, the constant gardeners of our most precious human resource: our minds. Libraries provide sanctuary and refuge. They gave this lonely young misfit somewhere to feel less alone. They save lives. And right now these places and everything they represent are the ones that need saving the most³.  

1. I talk in much more depth and detail about the BPL in my upcoming photo travel book, Boston and Beyond. Stay tuned!

2. Nat Geo dated reference—I regret nothing!

3. It is no secret that American libraries are aggressively under seige from factions with draconian political aims. From bannings and other extreme measures designed to stoke fear, derision, and demonize the pursuit of knowledge in all its forms, libraries are endangered institutions. A great place to learn about how to advocate for your library is at the American Library Association.

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Lens Zen!

I call this Library Confidential—a noir.

At the BPL. ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

It was late or maybe it was early, always hard to tell with that soft lighting they use in these places. The library. I felt squirrely just being in the place. Like a kid called on in class who doesn’t know the answer. What does it matter to me how many apples Susie has left in her cart? Who is Susie anyway? Just some dame looking to swindle you on apples and break your heart.

I never would have gone near this place if it hadn’t been for her, but I’ll get to that. See me and the library have a history. It was here where my mother ditched me as a baby. No note. Just wrapped me in a faded blue blanket and tucked me in the card catalogue between Hardy and Hemingway. When the other kids were getting bikes and roller skates under the tree, I was getting a brand new dictionary. The same one, just wrapped different. But don’t cry for me. I need your pity like I need a clown at a funeral.

Anyway, I was just about to lock up and head to Kappy’s on the corner, there was a barstool with my name on it, when the phone rang. As soon as I heard the sound of her voice, all smoke and honey, I knew she was trouble. Then she told me her name and I knew for sure: Bookman, she said, Dorothy. Friends call her Dottie. She was trying to track something down, she said, and I was the only one she could call. Overdue, she whispered like pages fluttering in a dictionary you didn’t want and damn well didn’t need—again. Honey, I thought, you have no idea. I sat back down. Poured myself a glass of the cheap stuff. Tell me more, I said ignoring the knots in my gut. It was going to be a long night….