via Walking Paper

McNally Jackson Books’ cafe is fly. I haven’t been to a lot of library cafés, but I know you can get a tamale at Oak Park Public Library and a really good cup of tea at the British Library. I tend to scoff at library cafés, believing there are better ways to replicate the bookstore model and better uses of library funds — like helping kids learn how to read n’ stuff.

But more and more, I’ve come to embrace this “third place” effort. I just think potential visitors need more than caffeine to be happy, others may disagree.

Ambiance is important (ahem, see example above), so is trusting people with hot sticky beverages around your books and computers. By the way libraries, extend the retail metaphor at your library with this simple rule: if you break it, you buy it. Let us not forget, that you can fine and have police arrest the perp for not paying. That should keep the tamales at bay, and our minds at ease.