Art at EPL Scavenger Hunt!

April 4, 2023

The Evanston Public Library is a vast and mysterious place filled with hidden treasures. How many can you find? Take our scavenger hunt and find out! (And don’t be afraid to ask us for help!) These sisters have been helping one another out for almost a century in the library. This is just a copy, […]


Announcing the Evanston Public Library Community Cookbook!

May 26, 2020

When you live through a significant moment in world history, you may feel an overwhelming need to document it in some fashion. But how? Do you write your descendants letters about it (“Dear Great-Grandchild, We had very little toilet paper…”)? Do you write in a diary every single day that you’re sequestered inside (“Today my […]


From Lending to Selling: What a Booksale Says About Its Readers

July 31, 2019

Ever since the Evanston Public Library ceased its regular book sale on the third floor, we’ve had to deal with the constant influx of donations we receive in new ways. To deal with the bulk of the donations, for example, we placed a large green Better World Books bin on the side of the building […]


A Sudden Burst in Popularity: Unexpected Requests for Old Titles

April 24, 2019

When news breaks, the library is sometimes the first place people go. Take, for example, the recent fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The day it occurred the library created a display of all its books about or set at the Cathedral. Some of these were architectural in nature (and, admittedly, are probably now […]


Falcon Watching, Inside and Out

March 27, 2019

Oh, this world is a topsy turvy place and there’s so little that stays the same year to year. Happily, there is one constant in this cruel, unfeeling universe on which you can depend: The peregrine falcons have returned to nest on Evanston Public Library. As they do every year, a pair of peregrines has […]


The Art of the Display

December 6, 2018

What criteria should a librarian use to determine how successful a library display truly is? Should you consider how often the books are removed? The quality of the literature displayed? The timeliness of the topic? The inventiveness? Or should we do it the way our forefathers and foremothers intended? That’s right. Twitter hits. Recently one […]


Fun With Automatic Renewals

September 28, 2018

In the early summer the library switched to an entirely new interface. Not an event that would be call for much notice on the part of the public, but there were certain perks that came with the temporary inconvenience. Perks that I’m not sure you even know about. Perks that involve your library books. Right […]


Better Late Than Never

September 13, 2018

About ten years ago I was working as a New York City librarian, doing my due diligence in a massive system. My first job was in the Jefferson Market branch, a gorgeous structure that began its days as a women’s courthouse (Mae West was tried there, amongst many others). When it was turned into a […]


The Permanence of Paper

March 16, 2018

Roughly ten years ago I worked for New York Public Library. 2008 was, as you might recall, a year of great economic strife thanks in large part to the housing market crash. The ways in which libraries responded to this emergency varied from state to state, but in the case of NYPL there was one […]


What Are You Trying to Say? The Art of the Book Display

December 20, 2017

About two or three months ago I was wandering around the Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, when I was struck by this engaging little book display: As you can see, each shelf catered to a different personality type, seen through a Harry Potter lens. I was rather awed by it all. To create a display like […]


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