Hidden beyond the public’s reach at the Bellingham Public Library is a book lover’s dream. And a historian’s dream, too.
Down a stairwell across from the New Books sections, librarians are visually transported back to 1951 when the library opened. Load-bearing stacks run the length of two rooms on two different levels, holding book duplicates, book club kits, high school yearbooks, old city directories and more.
There’s also a working dumbwaiter that runs in the closed stacks from behind the children’s section in the basement up to the first floor.
Today, the closed stacks are much neater than in the 1990s when the space stored hundreds more publications, including old newspapers and magazines, said Bethany Hoglund, the deputy library director. When she worked at the library as a teenager, she said, she would frequently have to run between the first floor and the closed stacks.
“We had to look through our paper indexes and find ‘Cosmopolitan’ magazine from March 1972 that really had that article someone wanted,” she said. “We’d run down here like a treasure hunt.”
Since then, many of the collections have been digitized.
If a book you want is filed under “closed stacks,” head to circulation where the librarians will make the quick jog downstairs to find it.
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Annie Todd is CDN’s criminal justice/enterprise reporter; reach her at annietodd@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 130.
