Library Feature: Uinta County, Evanston, Wyoming

The Uinta County Library used to be a supermarket, which is easier to believe when you're just reading it as words on a blog than when you are standing in the library looking at its beautiful wood paneling and high arching ceilings.  Someone did a great job of turning an old Safeway into an elegant space for books.  But as beautiful as it is, and as much as I love books, what really got under my skin about this library were the pianos.

Two pianos.

This library has two pianos.

How cool is that?

The older of the two is a beautiful little upright with an ornate stool.  Its unassuming presence belies a wonderful backstory.  In the early 1900s, Dale Carnegie donated money to build a library in Evanston.  His wife, Louise, donated the piano as her part of the endowment toward a library in Evanston.  The library long since moved out of its original building, but Mrs. Carnegie's piano with its pretty stool is still very much a part of the library.

The other piano is a white baby grand.  It's beautiful! It was donated to the library in honor of a longtime patron who passed away of cancer in 2005.  A picture of the family who donated it now rests on the piano.  Sometimes, someone settles on the bench and plays music for the patrons.

I think every library should have a piano!

The Uinta County Library also has some wonderful historical documents and artifacts, and a room filled with Wyoming history.  Some other lovely things to look at:

The pretty arched ceilings. 

Postcard feature: Birds on a wire

Sometimes, after making lots of postcards, I find myself becoming too entangled in complex ideas and designs, and I have to return to simplicity.  It is, after all, just a 4x6 rectangle of paper I'm working with.  My tools are limited, too--a few markers, colored pencils, my travel watercolors.
And the card itself may never be found, or may be thrown away, or may be--as this one appears to have been--run over by a truck!

The Uinta County Library is unlike any other.  I'll be featuring it in a future post.  In the meantime, check out their Facebook page--you can even see this card there in a post from August 6, 2015 when it was discovered in a book about dinosaurs!

Postcard feature: LOVE

Some people sent our postcards back with long notes...and some don't.  This postcard, left in the library in Helena Montana on the same trip as the previous one ("Salt and Pepper"), was returned with just one word--LOVE.

I loved it.  It was written in a tightly doodled hand ("hand" is what we calligraphers call fonts; to me, a font is something mechanically produced).  The doodling that defined the letterforms was more than just scribbling--I was pretty sure I could see letterforms in the tangled lines.  "Girls" appears quite clearly, for example, in the top extension of the E.  But while the rest of it had the appearance of deliberate, meaningful movement, I couldn't discern any other words.

The postcard itself was inspired by a pattern in the carpet of the hotel.