Things we found at the library

Hint: Not just books.

Recently, my peeps and I went to the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library in Dallas.

It is one of 28 branches of the Dallas Public Library. It is eight floors tall. It looks like this:

Photo courtesy of the Dallas Public Library

Here is what we found there.

1. A brown dragon made out of paper, with green eyes, a fiery tongue, and old book pages down its underbelly.

2. Books covered with leaves and transmuted into flowers:

   

   This photo and all remaining photos by me

3. A quaint room with a large dollhouse and a presumably fake animal skull. (This room is called the Siddie Joe Johnson Collection.)

4. These chandeliers:

   

5. These chalk drawings:

   

6. A “Poetree” with poems on each leaf. One poem was by Robert Frost. Others were by nine-year-olds. Nine-year-olds write very good poems.

7. Two old CRT TVs.

8. An aisle stuffed with books of sheet music.

9. Cthulhu:

   

10. A “Fiber Arts Workroom” for sewing and knitting, with an apothecary cabinet at the back.

11. A beautiful drawing from a manga series called Berserk, by Kentaro Miura:

    

12. A community mural that anyone can add to, full of feathers, ants, giant dogs and cats shooting laser beams out of their eyes, and many examples of “67” and that “S” kids draw in school.

13. A garden on the 5th-floor terrace, tended by the librarians of the Business, Science, and Technology section.

14. A fake sunflower in the garden that I thought was a real sunflower:

    

15. A 1980s atlas about Japan, with every possible statistic and chart you could imagine.

16. A 2006 fishing map in a filing cabinet, printed like a trifold tourist brochure.

17. This machine, which I think is a copy machine for microfilm:

    

18. A whole lot of people working on every floor, at eight different front desks, so that this place can exist.

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For more, check out the online tour of the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library:

What did you find at the library when you last went? Let me know in the comments. And don’t forget to subscribe:

See you next time.