The Library
There's a library in the town, with shelves upon shelves of every book imaginable. It's the type of building that looks smaller on the outside than it feels on the inside, with big, tall windows and shelves stacked up to the ceiling. The books that are high up are accessible by ladders, and the librarians can get them down. The basement of the building is home to the children's library, while the first and second floors contain everything else.
Each resident of the town gets a library card for free so long as they live there, paid for by the town's taxes. Visitors can also buy inexpensive temporary library cards for the time that they're visiting. There's a small section for movies and CDs and a somewhat smaller section for vinyl records and VHS tapes, there are study/movie rooms that people can rent out, and the library has several streaming services available if someone wants to watch something there.
There are textbooks and workbooks on reserve for students, and if the library doesn't have a book that someone needs, they can loan it from any other library in the surrounding area within a week. There are sections of books that are LGBTQ+, and sections for witchy things, and sections for nerds of all colors and shapes and sizes.
Every month, there's a new "highlight" shelf with a different theme, and visitors to the library can request a theme and vote on next month's theme. There is a running list of all the theme requests, and it is decided by rule of threes - if three or more people request the same thing, it gets added to the list. Every month, visitors will cast votes on index cards in a little shoebox with a slit through the top. Whichever topic wins will be the highlight shelf for the following month, and the librarians will grab all the books they can think of about that topic and put them out in a display on the front table. It's a great way to find something to read next.
There's a summer reading program as well, and kids and adults alike track how much time they spend reading and fill it out on their time sheets. Kids can redeem their hours to get prizes for every however-many-hours, while adults can choose to be entered into a drawing for a selection of gift cards or gift baskets.
The library itself is a beautiful white colonial house with green shutters. It got its start from a young woman [name tbd, as usual] who absolutely loved to read and loved books, and she began a collection of books. Uncommonly for her time, she attended college, where her love of reading and knowledge of literature only grew. After graduating, she married, and she and her husband, whom she met off at school, began living in this house along with their new family. Now that they had the space and the time, they decided to dedicate one room in their house to hold all of their books. [The woman] eventually commissioned a local artist [name tbd] to carve a set of book stamps for her, each stating "from the library of [name]." She stamped and cataloged each book in her growing collection, kept them all in the front room of her home, and the family began loaning them out to members of the community.
Decades later, the library was handed down to their children, and later on, their children. The couple kept extensive records, which the library still has today. There is a small side room dedicated entirely to the history of this library, including some of the original library books that folks can look through, though these cannot be checked out any longer given how old they are.
The library hosts things like trivia nights, movie nights, book clubs, and crafting circles. It's a quietly bustling hub of a place, and has become a "third place" for many of the local community members. It's somewhere that people can come and just say for a while. They are currently working on extending their hours to go a bit later into the evening to give people a better chance of spending time there in the later afternoons and evenings after school, sports, and work.
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