It’s a commonplace to say you can read a serious reader’s autobiography on his bookshelves. For some of us you can say the same of the libraries we’ve patronized across a lifetime. Last year I wrote about the first in that multi-state chain, when the public library in Parma Heights, Ohio, on the West Side of Cleveland, was slated for demolition. My brother and I were there in 1963 when the building was dedicated and now its replacement is open for business.  The old building was notably ugly, with its “Space Age” design, and the new one isn’t much better. What do we expect of modern architecture? Still, I admit to feeling a bit sentimental about the place where I first discovered Tom Disch, Franz Kafka, Mark Twain and John Updike. I’ll get over it. It’s less for the titles I read in the building than the feeling of sanctuary I always sensed there. It was a serious place without the distractions and anxieties of home and school. I’m reminded of Philip Larkin in “Church Going”: “A serious house on serious earth it is.”   In his 1994 collection The Color Wheel, Timothy Steele include two poems about libraries. In the first, “Homage to a Carnegie Library,” he writes:   “Companionable room, In that early darkness You stood in promise Of a sunnier time.”   “Companionable” is precisely chosen. That’s how I have always thought of the important books in my life: as companions, sometimes closer to me than many of their two-legged counterparts. This is from “The Library”:   “Yet books consoled me when I was a child, And seeing words and software joined and sync-ed, Even philosophers might be beguiled. And if I relish verses nimbly linked, Here flowing, there concluded with a twist, It was a Greek librarian-archivist Who had an odd pedantic inspiration Make prose and poems textually distinct And first gave metric units lineation.”

Here's how I would redesign it.

If something feels wrong, it is useful to articulate very precisely why that is

Ridgeline subscribers — For the last ten days I’ve been walking around London. Mostly in a little corner of it in the northeast part of the city. But can you even call a part a “corner” when the city extends in every direction without stopping? Whatever you call it, I’ve been in my little northeast section (if not corner) spending mornings reading and writing until I’m cross-eyed and then afternoons walking the streets over and over again.

Jay St. Charles is a legendary bowyer based in Fall City, Washington. While he was born into the world of archery and grew up in his father’s archery shop, Jay eventually became a master bowyer, carving bows under the brand of Pacific Yew Longbows. He lives on a small homestead above the Snoqualmie River Valley, nestled in the foothills of the Cascades.