To the Editor:

As an avid fan of the Princeton Public Library, I read the April 17 article about the 20th anniversary celebration of “the new building” with pleasure [“Celebrating a New Library for a New Era,” page 1].

It’s worth noting that the artist Faith Ringgold, who died just last week, was present at the 2004 library reopening to unveil her mosaic of the “story quilt” on the cover of her Caldecott-winning book, Tar Beach. Ringgold’s recent obituary in the New York Times notes that her work “is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture . . .  and other institutions.”  How wonderful that our library is one of those “other institutions!” Visitors to the library will surely want to go up to the library’s third-floor haven for children to admire this captivating work of art.

Last week’s Town Topics article, by the way, does a fine job of describing how the planners’ hopes for greater community engagement and the desire to create welcoming spaces informed their vision of the “new” library. That those hopes have been realized beyond expectation is a tribute to a very remarkable, hard-working staff.

Ellen Gilbert
Stuart Road East