Resurrecting the Lost Art of Library Culture

There is something extraordinary about the quiet presence of a library. In our age of screens and instant digital information, the library stands as a sanctuary where thought finds refuge and reflection takes root. Here the mind discovers focus; here imagination and reason find room to breathe and grow. At Cincinnati Classical Academy, we are creating twin temples to this ideal—the Bradbury Library at our Lower School and the Parnassus Library at Summit Park—places where students will discover not merely information but the joy of reading itself, where they will encounter beauty in knowledge and learn the ancient discipline of study.

 

Libraries have always been the beating heart of civilization’s intellectual life. In Alexandria’s great halls, scholars traced the movements of stars and parsed the mysteries of the cosmos. In medieval monasteries, monks bent over manuscripts, their careful hands preserving wisdom letter by letter, line by line. These were more than repositories of books—they were workshops of the soul, places where curiosity was cultivated like a garden, where discernment was sharpened like a blade, where creativity sparked from the collision of great minds across centuries. This sacred history shapes our vision. Our libraries will be temples of learning, beauty, and wonder.

 

I speak from painful experience. Early in my teaching career, I watched a Cincinnati high school discard its entire library collection, thousands of volumes thrown away like yesterday’s newspaper. I rescued what I could, books that now form part of our founding collection. But saving books was not enough. I watched as that emptied library transformed into an information technology center, a place where students brought broken laptops to be repaired. The books had vanished, but something more precious was already lost: the culture of reading itself. Students armed with laptops, smartphones perpetually in hand, no longer recognized the library as theirs. It had become a relic, obsolete as a telegraph office. This story is not unique. Across the country, libraries are vanishing, and with them, something essential to education itself.

 

At Cincinnati Classical Academy, we choose a different path—a older path. We seek not merely to stock shelves but to resurrect a culture. We want our students to enter these libraries not just to complete assignments but to lose themselves in stories, to trace their fingers across the illuminated margins of beautiful books, to study architectural drawings with the same reverence one might examine stained glass, to discover musical scores as works of visual art. We want them to know that peculiar pleasure of the unexpected find—the book you weren’t looking for that changes how you see the world.

 

Our collection increasingly reflects the soul of classical education. These shelves will hold humanity’s great conversation: literature that has shaped civilizations, histories that reveal who we are, philosophy that asks eternal questions, science that unveils creation’s elegant laws. But we seek more than words. Our books will inspire through image as well as idea. Illustrated histories will reveal the genius of classical art. Musical scores will show the architecture of sound made visible. Botanical illustrations will demonstrate that scientific observation and artistic beauty are not opponents but partners in the dance of understanding.

 

Yet a library is more than its collection, just as a cathedral is more than its stones. The Parnassus Library at Summit Park will be designed as a space for the life of the mind. Study tables will invite solitary contemplation and host earnest discussion. Quiet alcoves will shelter deep thought. Every element—the warm glow of wood, the proportions of space itself—will whisper the same message: here, learning is loved; here, wisdom is worth seeking.

 

Most vital is the culture we will cultivate within these walls. We teach our students the habit of inquiry, that blessed restlessness that drives one to seek truth. Our libraries will nurture independent research, host faculty-led seminars, support programs that deepen understanding across disciplines. Students will pursue their own burning questions—why Gothic cathedrals reach toward heaven, how Bach built fugues like mathematical proofs, what made Shakespeare Shakespeare. They will learn that all knowledge is connected, that truth is one though its faces are many.

 

The library is, at its heart, an invitation written in wood and stone, leather and paper. It invites students to read widely and think deeply. It invites them to recognize beauty as truth’s faithful companion. It invites them to join the great conversation that began before memory and will continue when we are dust. At Cincinnati Classical Academy, we accept this invitation with joy and extend it to our students. Our libraries will be more than rooms filled with books. They will be places where souls are shaped, where hearts learn to love what is truly lovable, where a culture of reverence for wisdom takes root and flowers across lifetimes.

 

To build this vision into reality, I invite each of you to donate one beautiful book—just one—that embodies this mission. Choose a volume that would make a child’s eyes widen or a teenager’s mind expand. It might be A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh with Shepard’s gentle illustrations, teaching our youngest that books are friends. It might be Audubon’s Birds of America, showing that science and art need not quarrel. It might be Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier in fine edition, proving that music has architecture the eye can trace. Whatever you choose, let it be beautiful. Let it be a book that teaches, simply by existing, that some things deserve to be preserved, treasured, and passed on.

 

You may send the books in with your student to his or her homeroom teacher. Please enclose a note to indicate who is donating the book so that we may thank you!