Today’s inktober is about the Free Library of Philadelphia.
The Parkway Central location is the main location of the Free Library system, which has over 50 branches around the city.
Planning for the library began in 1911 and it opened for service on June 2, 1927. The Beaux-Arts building was designed by Julian Abele. The library building’s design and the adjacent Philadelphia Family Court building’s design are modeled after the Hotel de Crillon and the Hotel de la Marine on Paris’s Place de la Concorde.
The library has a map collection of over 130,000 maps and it has one of the strongest sheet music collections in the country (350,000). Its Rare Book Department has one of the world’s most renowned Charles Dickens collections and has extensive collections of illuminated manuscripts, Beatrix Potter, Edgar Allen Poe, and more.
Original drawing is now available for purchase here.
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