1905 erected by Andrew Carnegie...so reads the inscription in stone on the front of the Clitheroe (Free) Library.
I have no idea how old I was when I first crossed its threshold, but I went there numerous times. I dread to think what it has become! July 2011 marked the 21st year since the library was refurbished.
"Clitheroe Library was built in 1905, with money from the Carnegie Trust. The original gold key used for the opening is now in the Clitheroe Castle Museum. Previously a library had been run from the front room of a house in Parson Lane since 1838."
I've cropped the image to focus on the upper storey which housed the Reading Room.
Oh the pleasurable hours spent in the Reading Room, first with my Dad and later on my own.
Eight O'clock by A. E. Houseman
He stood, and heard the steeple
Sprinkle the quarters on the morning town.
One, two, three, four, to market-place and people
It tossed them down.
She sat at a long oak reading desk, one of several spaced across the room from doorway to clock case.
On entering the room, she felt a
Silence so deep it held cobwebs of memories
She heard
The occasional flutter of a page turned carefully and quietly
She saw
Gleaming, lustrous carved woodwork
Magazines, each in their cases chained to the reading desks
Newspapers laid out carefully, to be perused, refolded and replaced as tho' no-one had touched them.
By one window, a glass-sided case containing an illuminated tome. Each day someone opened the case and turned to the next page. The passer-by could stop to read the illuminated script.
The quiet, steadily reassuring tick-tock from the Town Hall clock whose innards and workings stood revealed behind a huge glass case at the front of the room. Fascination as on each quarter and then on the hour...
The clock collected in the tower
Its strength, and struck.
2 comments:
Wow...such a lovely structure n wonderful memories!
Just beautiful.
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