Facilities · Library
Nine thousand books and a kid-run catalog.
Reference, field guides, cookbooks, repair manuals, zines, and one couch that has been re-stuffed twice and needs it again.
- Books
- 9,000
- Zines
- 400
- Catalog
- Kid-maintained
- Checkouts
- Free, no card
The library is one long wall of the Hawthorne building, plus a reading nook with the couch, plus a flat file of zines. It is not a lending library in the institutional sense: there are no cards, no fines, and no due dates. A kid can take a book home and bring it back whenever, or not, and we will not chase them. The collection is about 9,000 volumes and we lose roughly 4% a year.
What is on the shelves
- Field guides to Pacific Northwest plants, birds, insects, and fungi.
- Repair manuals: bicycles, small engines, appliances, sewing machines, electronics.
- Cookbooks, especially the ones with a lot of technique and few ingredients.
- Art and craft monographs, including a complete set of Ceramics Monthly from 1998 to 2016.
- Reference: dictionaries in four languages, an atlas, a slide rule, and a CRC handbook.
- Zines, 400 of them, half made by kids.
The catalog
A kid maintains the catalog. This started as a punishment-adjacent task in 2018 and became a paid teen role. The catalog is a spreadsheet with a title, author, location code, and a one-line 'why you might want this.' The 'why you might want this' column is the best writing on this website.
Quiet hours
Weekdays 5:00–6:00 the library is a quiet reading room. During block one it is a working library, which means it is not quiet at all. Kids who want silence go to the Void; kids who want a book and a couch come here; staff who want to find a specific repair manual ask the catalog kid.
Come see the rooms
Tours run Tuesdays at 4:00 and Saturdays at 11:00. No appointment needed, but call if you want a specific program lead.