I thoroughly enjoyed the feature on the 35 top libraries in last week's E-Sylum. I have been fortunate to work in many of the top ten -- usually on matters unrelated to numismatics -- such as the old British Museum Reading Room, the Bodleian, the New York Public, the Thomas Fisher Library, Canada's Library of Parliament, etc.

I'm amused when I look in at the British Museum these days to see that the Reading Room is cordoned, now a designated tourist gawk, which one can apparently be taken round with a guide. Well I remember the seemingly endless numbers of huge blue volumes whose pages one turned looking for a title and call number of a volume to be retrieved from the miles of underground stacks. There is an essay to be written on the idiosyncracies of cataloguing and the peculiar in-house system of call numbers utilized by many of the world's major libraries.

I looked with pleasure and envy at the images of those libraries in which I haven't done research and have been dreaming these past few days of projects that might justify a visit to some of those I've missed! Is there a more satisfying example of a built environment to work in, relax in, daydream in, than a library?

You will no doubt get a flurry of emails from people promoting their own favourite library. I want to make a pitch for mine, not because it is architecturally interesting or spectacular, but because it is incredibly relaxing and conducive to study and reflection. This is the Bibliotheque historique de la ville de Paris, located on a side street in the Marais, in the 4th arrondissement in Paris. It is entirely devoted to the history of Paris, with over a million volumes on the subject.

It is seldom very busy and obviously has everything you ever wanted to know about Paris on every imaginable subject. Apart from its enormously helpful staff, its attraction is its ground floor main reading room, whose tall windows are open on a summer's day to a small garden from which comes the sound of birds and the perfume of flowers. I see myself there now, even though winter is coming down upon me here in Canada.

The White house in 2011 September has created a website where anyone can post a petition and if it picks up more than 25,000 votes from registered users (Now around 800,000 and growing at 20,000 per day) the white house will respond.

wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/response/religion-public-square

Is one such response on the use of :In God we Trust" on currency wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/remove-god-we-trust-currency/bNhKRxQn

This gives why this site was created. /wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/how-why/introduction

Interesting concept if it grows.