I found this small volume in a collection of Edgar Odell Lovett’s personal books. It’s an odd one, too. The authors (brother and sister? husband and wife?) solicited a wide variety of famous and semi-famous people for their thoughts about Texas on the occasion of our centennial in 1936. Many responded and their impressions of the state are collected here:

The first thing I noticed was that it was inscribed to Dr. Lovett by the authors and I assumed that was why he had kept it. Leafing through it, though, I discovered that it contains a selection of his own poetry. (We’ve seen an earlier example from his body of work, a tribute to a fallen campus pine tree, here.)

It took a few moments to understand that this was a work in praise of the Houston Public Library. Ralph Adams Cram was, of course, the architect of Rice’s first buildings as well as the Julia Ideson Library building downtown:

Bonus: Much of the book is quite entertaining. Here are a couple of the other responses, one from film star Mary Pickford, the other from Walt Disney.