Remember Monday’s awful bonus picture?
A commenter took the trouble to look at it closely and then asked a really good question: what does it say on the mantle? Those are clearly letters but they’re so stylized it’s very hard to decipher them. You can see them more clearly in this image taken just as the building was being finished in 1912 but it’s still difficult to make any sense of it:
Luckily we’ve always had librarians who were on the ball. Here’s the back of the photo:
Bonus: I was quite interested in the last note here. I hadn’t realized that this room had ever housed the chancellor (the only one we’ve ever had was Carey Croneis) and it took another moment to understand that this was originally the library. Here’s a lovely drawing from the 1920 Campanile that lets us see the original lighting scheme and clarifies how devastatingly bad the current set-up is:
Extra Bonus: New exterior lights on the front side of Lovett Hall. I think they just finished installing them yesterday.
