First Wednesday Curator Led Tour: Well Read, Well Loved, Well Used

The Parkway Central Library is hosting a curator-led tour of its Well Read, Well Loved, Well Used exhibition on Wednesday, November 4, at 5:30 PM. You'll find it in the Dietrich Gallery, inside the Rare Book Department on the third floor. The tour is free.

The exhibition itself is all about how we read and interact with books—and the traces we leave behind. The Rare Book Department frames it around the idea that nearly every interaction with a book leaves some kind of mark, and that learning to read those traces lets us retell the stories of the people who read the book before us. The curator will walk you through the collection, pointing out those very things: the marginalia, the worn edges, the dog-eared pages, and the other physical evidence of a book being lived in. It's less about the text on the page and more about the people who held the book.

The tour is part of the department's First Wednesday series, which runs on the first Wednesday of every month. On those nights, the library extends its evening hours until 7 PM, and the staff puts on tours, pop-up programs, and sneak peeks of things you wouldn't normally see. If you can't make the tour, you can still see the exhibition on your own—it stays on view through April 17, 2027.

So, if you're around on the first Wednesday of November, head up to the third floor of the Parkway Central Library. The tour starts at 5:30 PM in the Dietrich Gallery, and it's free.