The library is currently open Monday through Friday from 10:00am-5:30pm and Saturday 9:30am-12:30pm. The Children's Room and Archives are open by appointment. Please call for details: 207-582-3312.

Month: May 2015

Special Bookplates at Gardiner Public Library

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Have you ever noticed some of the amazing bookplates in our books?  If you haven’t, please take a moment and check inside the front of Gardiner Public Library books.  We have what I would consider some pretty special bookplates.

Once you begin to notice them, you may wonder who? what? why? and or how? do we get one of these beautiful bookplates? 
These special bookplates were all created for endowed or memorial funds.  This type of fund is set up to celebrate a life, a family event or a professional achievement.
To become an endowed fund, the donated funds must amount to $1,000 or more, and the interested parties need to agree that a fund will be endowed.
Once the Gardiner Library Association receives this endowment, they invest the money in a portfolio dedicated to collection development.  The principal is never spent, so that the fund will remain a perpetual fund. 
A $1,000 fund normally generates enough income to purchase three titles a year.
An endowed fund will have a custom designed bookplate.  Some are pictured in this blog.

 

The fund always remain open so money may be donated again to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and other events.
Pictured here are just a few of these beautiful tributes.  Visit us at the library to see more of these interesting images!

SOME NEW & OLD PICTURES OF OUR CURTAIN AND A BIOGRAPHY OF THE ARTIST

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 Harry Cochrane (1860–1946)
Literature (stage curtain), Children’s Room, 2nd Floor
 Harold Hayman Cochrane, was born in Augusta, ME, son of Major James Henry and Ellen M. (Berry) Cochrane.  Raised in Monmouth, he was a naturally gifted artist, architect, musician, author, and poet.  His early career began as a “crayon artist” in a photography studio in Gardiner in the 1880s.  In the well-lit studio, on the corner of Water and Bridge Streets, he created life-sized renderings from photographs as well as in-person sittings.  In 1887, he began working on large-scale interior works, from free-hand ornamentation, to theater curtains, to huge murals.  In his lifetime, he worked throughout Maine, New England, and beyond.  Among the best known of his over 400 commissions for public buildings, are the interior of Cumston Hall in Monmouth and the Kora Temple in Lewiston.