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This is a picture of a blonde child standing on a round library stool, wearing a hot pink dress, mint green cowboy boots and black striped tights. She's looking at books on a high shelf while her younger brother explores the floor of the Bemidji Public Library.
Siblings explored the children’s room at the Bemidji Public Library in Bemidji, Minn.Credit...Jaida Grey Eagle for The New York Times
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A Love Letter to Libraries, Long Overdue

The New York Times sent photographers to seven states to document the thrum and buzz in buildings once known for silence.

By Elisabeth Egan and Erica Ackerberg

Step into a public library and you know what to expect.

First, there’s the smell: a paper bouquet of nothing and everything, including notes of vanilla, sawdust, wet coats, rubber soles and school. Then there are the spines lined up like soldiers, snug in plastic jackets. There are the shelves — metal, wood, sturdy as trees — stretching in every direction.

ImageThis is a picture of a young reader, visible from the knees down, stretched out in a small cubby among shelves of picture books.
At the Northtown branch of the Chicago Public Library, a young reader curled up with a picture book.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times
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Leon Sykes read “My Papi Has a Motorcycle” to his son and a friend at the 81st Avenue Branch of the Oakland Public Library.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

There are the rolling step stools. The windowsill ferns. The free bookmarks. The bulletin board papered with fliers advertising firewood, a 10-speed bike, free kittens, CPR class.

There are the sturdy armchairs, the picked-over magazine racks, the award-winning dioramas on loan from adolescent creators, the study carrels etched with decade-old graffiti. There’s the water fountain spouting the coldest beverage in town, a different vintage from the lukewarm dribble in the school gym or the violent torrent at the Y.M.C.A.

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Pint-size bookworms made themselves at home in the Hialeah Gardens Branch Library in Hialeah Gardens, Fla.Credit...Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York Times

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