Yesterday I saw the Peabody Library for the first time. It’s breathtaking. I’ve been here a year. What took me so long? Miles Harvey writes about it beautifully in his real-life literary mystery The Island of Lost Maps (Random House, 2000):
The George Peabody Library in Baltimore’s historic Mount Vernon neighborhood is, by any measure, a remarkable place…. From its lofty reading room, surrounded by gilt-framed portraits of long-dead librarians, to its Grand Stack room–measuring sixty-one feet from white marble floor to the latticed skylight, appointed in ornate cast iron and gold leaf, and containing 250,000 of the world’s rarest and most important volumes–the Peabody has lived up to its original conception as a “cathedral of books.”….
Only a few patrons visit the Peabody Library each day. Most of them are scholars, as has always been the case. Others are tourists, who come to gaze at the library’s architecture, not its books. Many of the rest are eccentrics, following some odd fancy of intellect or simply killing time. But a few others, constituting a tiny but ominous minority, have darker reasons for being there.
On December 7, 1995, one such man entered the library.
