FollowMy favorite place in Westbrook, Maine is the Walker Memorial Library on Main Street.
When I first got here 6 years ago there was actually two libraries in our small city of 17,494. The Warren library was a mile down the street, started by the SD Warren mill but that was lost due to endowment losses, so it’s just one. Walker library is a block away, and one of my weekly rituals is to go over and both return and get books.
Walker library has a gorgeous older section, that under renovation, but I mainly use the newer section and have been taking a lot from the juvenile and young adult sections, including graphic novels the last few months including Roald Dahl and Shel Silverstein.
One of my other favorite things about Walker Library is the Minerva system at http://minerva.maine.edu that lets me get books throughout the state at participating libraries. Through it I have gotten the complete Dark Knight, as sorts of graphic novels, and lots of books of interest that Walker Library doesn’t have. Currently this includes several books by Toure including “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness” and Colin Woodward’s “American Nations”; two of the more interesting books I have out. And it makes what I can get from Walker library so much more vast.
For instance I have “Four Novels by Philip K. Dick” (includes Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and “Between hope and history : meeting America’s challenges for the 21st century” by Bill Clinton. I love reading and being able to get all sorts of amazing books from my local library has made my ability to get books much more vast. I have used Minerva easily 20+ times this year, and it has been one of my favorite things of 2011.
I would also love funding so this can go to every library in the state, especially the small town libraries of Maine that could use books from larger libraries like Walker, Portland, Bangor, etc.
How do you use the library?
—- Edmund