what about the plastic animals?

The Dr. Eugene Clark Library in Lockhart

Sorry this is such a crappy photo.  This is the stage and stained glass window in Lockhart's public library.  You know it is a solidly built stage because President Taft once spoke from there. 

The library's benefactor, Dr. Eugene Clark, had a tumultuous life.  His father was killed in the Civil War when Eugene was three and his mother died soon after.  Clark was raised by a friend of his mother in his native New Orleans.  She did well and Clark graduated from Tulane's medical school and headed west to Lockhart.  In Lockhart Clark entered practice with an older doctor.  The older guy promptly left town leaving Clark as Lockhart's doctor at the age of 21.  After a number of years in Lockhart Clark went to Europe to become an ENT.  Following his studies he opened a practice in San Antonio and became terminally ill.  On his deathbed, in New Orleans, he dictated a will that left $10,000 to Lockhart to build a library.  Wikipedia says this is the oldest operating public library in Texas.

The old library building is a stately little classical building with lots of dark wood and columns.  The library expanded in the not too distant past into the Masonic Lodge building next door.  Unlike in Luling, the Clark library had plenty of fiction books other than the most mass-market of mass-market novels.

I am dangerously extrapolating from a sample of two, but what's the deal with Texas libraries?  To write up the library history I searched for the library's website.  I found this, which, if you click on the "directions" link sends you to the Google Maps page for the Lockhart Road Public Library in Hong Kong.  The page lets you search the collection and, well, that's all you can do.  Compare that with the Mexico, NY Public Library site, which, despite having a tenth of the population of Lockhart, has a ton of services listed and has an extensive and active presence on Facebook.  Both libraries have a number of Hemingway publications but only Lockhart has a video of The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingways.

What the Dickens?

As I've probably mentioned before, when I'm traveling I'll often stop in to the local library to see what's going on and to pick up a bookmark or two.  Sometimes the library is really beautiful inside, sometimes there's a local history display.  I'll skim through the local newspaper and check out the collections.  You'd be surprised at how many libraries have really terrible weather and climate books from the 1970s still in the stacks.  People, support your local library!

In the fiction section I'll look to see if they have any of the original editions of Dawn Powell's novels, and since I'm in the POWE's I'll also look for Richard Powers.  Haruki Murakami isn't too far away, neither is Richard Russo in the opposite direction.  I'll check to see if they have an edition of David Foster Wallace's first novel that pre-dates Infinite Jest.  All but Powell have had books on the best seller list.

This is where I got confused in Luling.  There was no Powell, which is not surprising.  No Powers either, which happens sometimes.  No Russo, no Murakami, no Wallace.  This was getting unusual.  I started looking for other authors.  No Jonathan Lethem, no Chuck Palahniuk (really wasn't expecting to find one of his), no Truman Capote, no Willa Cather, no Jack London...  There was plenty of James Patterson, Richard North Patterson and Danielle Steel.  I thought maybe they had separated popular fiction from literary fiction, but no, on either side of the Steven King section was To Kill A Mockingbird and The Old Man and The Sea.  I found copies of Catcher in the Rye, East of Eden and the Grapes of Wrath.

It was amazing.  I had never been in a library where the fiction section was almost entirely mass-market publications.  My two favorite finds were the Dickens novels above. Sorry, that's not such a great photo.  What I liked about those books are the covers.  Do they look like wallpaper to you?  They should.

Horseheads Free Library

Aren't most libraries free of horse heads?

Bookmarks of the Pacific Northwest

These are almost all (I found one more after taking this photo) the bookmarks I collected while in Washington and Oregon.  There's a mix from the conference I attended, public libraries and bookstores like Powell's and Elliott Bay. 

The six black and white bookmarks in the lower center are unusual in that I paid for them.  They are from the Friends of the Multnomah County Library gift shop in Portland.  The bookmarks are reproductions of the steps in the library's staircase.  Someday I'll scan them for a closer look.  The only other paid-for bookmarks in my collection also come from a visit to Portland back in 1985 (or was it '86?).

Also of note is what may be the world's most voluminous bookmark.  I was driving through Tillamook, intending only to gas up the car and take a quick tour of the famous Tillamook Cheese factory (and perhaps get an ice cream cone therein).  The high school on the south side of town is proudly labeled "Tillamook High School - Home of the Cheesemakers".  That made me want a Tillamook Cheesemakers t-shirt so I parked the car and wandered around downtown Tillamook looking for a shirt. 

No luck.  The screenprinting shop was closed for the day and a quick walk around didn't uncover any other business selling them.  So, it was off to the Tillamook County Library.  That double height yellow and white bookmark unfolded into five 8.5 x 14" pages of "inspirational fiction" listed by author.  That alone is inspirational!

On a side note, the list of things I forgot to photograph (Aberdeen welcome sign), ran out of time to see (Port Townsend) keeps growing.  Today I learned about the Peculiarium which opened in Portland a few days after I passed through town.  Maybe I have to go back soon!