Ten years ago, during the height of the dot-com boom, Seattleites voted to spend almost $200 million to update all of the libraries in our system and to add four new neighborhood branches to it. This week, the Libraries for All Initiative comes to an official close and we thought that, in honor of such a magnificent and useful achievement, we’d allow ourselves the oddity of crushing—for this week only—on an inanimate object: Seattle Public Libraries. We are a bunch of writers who dearly love our books, after all.

It’s hard not to crush on a library system of 26 newly gorgeous branch libraries and the magnificent central library. All of them are now open, bright, welcoming, useful, and architecturally cool. It’s hard not to value a system that brings us events like this evening’s staged reading of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, last week’s reading by local-fave Sherman Alexie, and an upcoming visit from one of our personal favorites, Paul Auster (plus tons of other readings, workshops, concert previews, and speeches).

And, we think, it’s impossible not to fall madly in love with a library system that pours as much effort, resources, and energy into its digital offerings to provide all of us a one-stop shop for new and old books, music, and video in hard and electronic copies, databases out the wazoo (including free access to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is our personal favorite), a live online chat for when you can’t find what you need that's available 365 days a year, a good blog, podcasts, and tons of lists of reading recommendations for those rare times when our holds list isn’t supplying us with exactly the kind of thing we want.

And it's all absolutely free.

So here’s to you, Seattle Public Libraries. Congratulations on completing the Libraries for All Initiative, and for doing it so well. We totes have a crush on you!

We got the appropriately titled "Our Library is Cooler than Yours" from the Seattlest Flickr Pool, where it was placed by mraaronmorris. Thanks!