First, a confession - after living in Portland for five years, I never visited the huge library in downtown until today. Why? Well, my excuse was that I was buying used books from estate sales, consignment shops and, of course, Powells.
Roger has to research and write several essays for his art history class and the books available at PCC were substandard so today I decided to help by going to the library. After getting my library card (it took about 5 minutes of time) I headed to the third floor where I found a huge room filled with thousands of books on art history with an assistant who helps with the research. My goal was to find two examples of the Iconography of Christ; one from the early Christian era and the other from the Byzantine world. I discovered that I was allowed to check out a maximum of 150 books on any given day. Obviously, I decided that I needed to limit myself to what I could carry so I ended up with four.
Most impressive is the building which is magnificent - gigantic marble stairways with beautiful banisters - huge, organized rooms set up by subject and a computer check out system that is amazing. They have a machine that scans your library card and then "reads" the books that you've chosen, prints a receipt and you are out the door. The best thing is that the streetcar drops me off in front of the library and the one that goes back home is only a short block away.
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