South Euclid Library

A former mansion eventually became a library, now the Cuyahoga county system wants to vacate for a yet to be built building. It was a 1920s Tudor-Norman chateau, built for a milk company and bank owner. The bank failed. It is a lovely place, but management is not interested in loveliness.

Alice in the library

 Andrew Karoly and Louis Szanto. Scenes of Alice in Wonderland. Shaker Heights. 1960.

This wonderful painting is in the Children's Room of the Shaker Heights Library. Karoly and Szanto's mural work in Cleveland was mostly done for Society Bank, including a continuation of Walter Crane's work on the Public Square building.

other local library art [click], and tag below

Lakewood Library Quijote

 Don Quijote with windmills

panels 4 and 5 of 12 by Reed Alan Thomason

Carroll, Irving, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Longfellow

Mad Hatter and Dormouse, Ichabod Crane, Three Blind Mice, Quijote, Bottom&Titania&Puck, Hiawatha

These were painted in 1977 and 1978 and hung above the bookshelves of the east wall of the children's wing of the Lakewood Ohio Library on Detroit Avenue. In 2008 the library was expanded, and remodeled and thee murals were split up and ten are inside of an often locked children's reading room; two are by its outside doors. The new neo-classical library fits  in with the two buildings across the street, a vacant Christian Science church, and a Masonic temple.

click here for the library's panels

They are beautiful. The website lists the scenes and characters, but they need to be seen and recognised. The artist was asked to paint an historical review of the Western Reserve. Thomason had a better idea. Some of the greatest characters in literature are painted. Some see this as children's literature, but it is more than that it.