Illustration by Jess Dunham
Linguist Helen Sword published a book in 2017 exploring the physical conditions and daily behaviors that help people become better thinkers, dreamers, and writers. She titled it Air & Light & Time & Space, which to me—an English professor and writer—sounds like heaven.
In reality, the kinds of sacred, luxurious, and accessible spaces that foster creative pursuits have been around for centuries. Consider reading rooms, public spaces that are often attached to the libraries of great institutions.
One classic and especially famous reading room is in the British Museum, whose Grecian exterior encompasses a curving, circular library where, it’s said, Karl Marx worked on Das Kapital at the same desk for more than 30 years. Other famous patrons included Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, all literary writers who enjoyed writing while surrounded by books.
The New York Public Library’s Rose Reading Room opened more than 100 years ago. Its mural-bedecked ceiling, more than 50 feet high, features clouds billowing across azure firmament. The real sky is visible through massive arched windows on either side of the seating area, rows and rows of long tables covered with reading lamps and surrounded by heavy wooden chairs. You can almost hear the buzz of collective thinking underneath the thick quiet. It’s a communal (and free) space that’s profoundly quiet and individual—an intellectual cathedral or deep sea where visitors can drift and dream and get things done.
Cincinnati doesn’t have the British Museum or the New York Public Library, but we’ve had our own reading rooms through history. The showstopper was the former downtown library on Vine Street, whose extensive collection of books was displayed on massive shelves climbing four stories high, bathed in natural light from immense windows overhead. How many thousands of Cincinnatians gazed up at those shelves or the movable ladders that reached the highest stacks over the years before returning to their newspapers, books, notebooks, or sketchpads?
Reading rooms have this in common: They offer pleasant or visually interesting spots to pause and to gaze between the paragraphs, as one does whether reading or writing. Cincinnati’s ornate original library was abandoned when the institution moved to its current location a few blocks north. Today, though, we still have a treasure trove of reading rooms at our beck and call, little gems that gleam with possibility.
You’ll often find unusual views of our city that are unique to Cincinnati—old, ornate Beaux-Arts cornices freshly framed by a perfectly positioned window; a grand staircase celebrating the region’s musical history; a concrete patio offering a sky-high view of the city below. They’re relatively open spaces for Cincinnatians to gather and to make our world both a little bigger and a little slower.
Reading rooms offer air, light, and space to get something done—if we can find the time to enjoy them. Here are five of my favorites.
Roebling Books & Coffee, Newport
This Roebling Books & Coffee outpost is on a quiet, tree-lined street in Newport, not across from the eponymous bridge in Covington where owner Richard Hunt launched his first bookstore. (He operates a third Roebling Books & Coffee in Dayton, Kentucky, as well.)
The repurposed building was constructed to house the production of gold pocket-watch casings and assembly of pocket watches, and tall windows let in the ample light needed for the finicky process. The space later became a gas station and auto body shop, and today it’s a café and bookstore with an attached reading room in what used to be the garage.
Inclusive vibes are signaled by the rainbow flag by the door, followed by a long wooden coffee bar replete with options for seasonal lattes, looseleaf teas, and breakfast sandwiches. Shelves by the door feature carefully curated options, and I spy a novel by Fredrik Backman I’m currently reading and a picture book collaboration by the late Maurice Sendak and Stephen King I’ve been meaning to pick up—a retelling of Hansel and Gretel. I page through the book, haunted by Sendak’s creepy images and King’s vivid prose, before turning to the big back room with the long table, where a writing group is currently exchanging notes on each other’s work.
I enter through a flat arch, with exposed brick on one side and a striking three-dimensional piece displayed above—a bike, broken down to its component parts and wrapped in colorful strips of fabric to spell out “GLO.” An interior entrance to the reading room is delineated by a second flat arch of bookshelves, opening to rafters and brick, tall shelves of books with colorful spines, warm faded rugs, and a pair of unusual chandeliers whose electric candles are surrounded by a metal frame. The floor is painted dark blue, and scuffs of concrete are visible through smudges of overuse and time. The look is industrial, bookish, and cozy.
A painting on the wall mimics The Creation of Adam, but in this case God is handing Adam a red hardback book. The writers, a group of 10 clustered around the long table, are silent as their pens move across pages and fingers across keyboards among cups of iced and hot coffee.
Perhaps 20 people could work in this room comfortably; unlike the adjoining café, the vibe is quiet and thoughtful. These readers have settled down to think and create, and the books around us—from Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid to Abby Jimenez’s Say You’ll Remember Me to the high shelves featuring local authors—recall others who have done this sort of work before us.
I learn from one of the booksellers that the bike art piece is a memorial to former employee Gloria San Miguel, who was struck and killed by a car while riding her bike in 2022. The colored pieces of fabric were her clothes. She is, as the memorial evidences, remembered and beloved.
I buy the copy of Hansel and Gretel, order an egg and cheese sandwich, and chat with the bookseller about the reading room’s vibrancy. “The way you think and feel in that space is entirely due to Richard’s vision,” he tells me, and we gaze together down the book-lined hall.
Cincinnati Public Library, Downtown
With a renovation freshly completed in July 2024, the 540,000-square-foot library facility has never been more approachable. The redesigned plaza offers easy access to the South Building, where a spectacular skylight pours light onto a newly designed atrium. I make my way up a grand staircase to the third floor and settle in one of the cozy couches surrounding the atrium balcony.
The staircase itself, called the Social Stairs, is an art installation celebrating Cincinnati music history. Glass barriers on either side are covered in colorful stripes, most prominently yellow, blue, orange, and green, each bearing the name of a song or album produced in Cincinnati or about Cincinnati, along with the artist and the year of its creation. More than 1,600 songs or albums appear in the order of their creation from 1945 through 2023.
It’s a visual testimony to the city’s creative community, bathed in light by a skylight covering the entire lobby ceiling, two halves meeting at meet the top in a gentle peak. More than 150 clear square panes of glass make up the skylight, and the light they admit bounces off freshly painted white brick walls. The reading room feels like it almost reaches the heavens.
Cushioned seating in cheerful blues and greens, with natural wood armrests, are positioned behind small movable desks, each next to a plug. A bank of two-top tables runs along a window-edged wall, offering views of a patio with yet more seating and umbrellas. I see half a dozen people working, though the space can easily accommodate a few dozen, and similar seating is available around the balcony edge on the floor below.
The space is harmonious and immense. A friend who is taking courses online tells me she’s been working at this spot in the library all day, and as I sit here, computer poised in front me of me and book stacks visible all around, I understand why.
I exit by way of the Reading Garden, a lovely courtyard about the size of a tennis court, with six tables, several long black benches, and a grove of mature trees, a few of which are almost as tall as the library itself. Old buildings—red brick, smooth gray concrete with remarkable detail work at the top—are visible above the garden wall. A path winds around a small pond with a water feature, and birds linger in the bushes. I hear the streetcar bell on Walnut Street. A brass sign informs me that this space was first established in 1955 and rededicated in 1983.
A woman sits reading on a bench under a tree, and two library workers come out and walk around the short path. I walk as well and notice a bronze statue of two children reading, an older girl with her arm around a younger girl, both wearing bobby socks and laced shoes, frozen in 1955, and holding a large book—a copy of The Secret Garden, of course, with several lines legible: “She slipped through the gate and shut it behind her, and stood with her back to it, looking about her and breathing quite fast with excitement and wonder, and delight.”
The Mercantile Building’s lobby is a sea of white marble. I hit the brass button on the express elevator to the 12th floor, and at the Mercantile Library entrance I’m greeted by a mannequin whose skirt is made entirely of books. Behind her to the right, a staircase leads down to the library’s more familiar 11th floor, but I move past it and make my way to a living-room styled reading room with windows on two sides.
Deep blue velvety couches and tufted leather chairs invite patrons to settle in and relax. A long table with lamps provides space for collaboration, while five individual desks—four of them taken on the morning I’m here—accommodate individual work. Each is positioned in front of a window, through which the Mercantile’s elaborate concrete cornices, replete with swoops and fancy flowers, are only inches away. Peering out the window at the detailed, six-petaled flower underneath the cornice provides a breathless feeling of spying something beautiful that’s typically out of sight—as though I’ve become a bird nesting in the nooks of the building. An electric outlet on the desk and a coaster invite me to settle into the green leather seat for a long stretch.
People are working, headphones in, screens glowing, and fingers in motion. A thick book titled Biological Exuberance sits on the table of the person next to me. He yawns, stands up, moves away from his screen and books, and stretches.
Across the street I can see a window washer working on the upper floors of a building. Two long cords move his floating box up and down. There’s a feeling of motion and action but also of profound quiet and peace. Behind me is the poetry section, where I browse books from the early 1900s.
While the Mercantile requires a small fee to be a full member, everyone is welcome to come and try out the reading room for a day at no cost, says Amy Hunter, its director of community and experience.
Photograph by Devyn Glista
Cincinnati Art Museum, Eden Park
I enter the Art Museum through its immense lobby with the sapphire-colored Chihuly spiraling overhead. I turn right and head up the marble staircase into the Renaissance wing. After crossing through a chilly, high-ceilinged gallery of centuries-old paintings, a fun hint of the reading room appears on the floor.
The words “Mary R. Schiff Library and Archives This Way” are beamed onto the hardwood in white light and twin arrows point ahead, seemingly to an ornate Renaissance altarpiece. With 13 painted panels set into an ornate wooden backdrop that’s more than 15 feet high, the piece feels like a portal to another world, a sort of C.S. Lewis wardrobe flung open to reveal dramatic religious iconography. Behind the imposing structure, almost hidden by it, stairs lead to the reading room.
The library is surprisingly large. When I first saw it several years ago, I felt as though I’d found a secret room; it’s actually in the separate-but-attached original Art Academy of Cincinnati building that was adjoined to the main museum in a 2012 renovation. Though the space has been repurposed, the quality of the light here, like the watch factory, is a clue about its past—this was the Art Academy’s old painting studio.
Long built-in shelves house more than 100,000 books, periodicals, and auction catalogs. Only a third of the collection is displayed at any given time. Schiff, after whom the library is named, was a major museum benefactor, and her portrait oversees the library from a high wall at the entrance. The bookshelves are tall and deep because the art books are heavy, hardbacked, and oversized.
A wall of windows, about 25 feet in height, is at the back of the room. A balcony beckons through the windows, and from this crescent shaped concrete perch amid the treetops the reader can sit at a long outdoor table or stand, stretch, and take in a view of downtown below.
Inside the library, long tables are organized into four seating areas. Each patron has plenty of table space as well a comfortable wheeled leather chair and access to a plug. Six individual cubicles are also available. The room is cool and silent, with long, rectangular lights arranged in a crisscrossed pattern toward the top of the ceiling. Yet more windows appear on either side of the room at the very top, like skylights.
I usually sit at the far end of the table on the right, just in front of the textile books. The ample space, generous hours, beautiful light, and gorgeous views make this an ideal reading room. Plus you can effortlessly intersperse gallery walks into your creative rhythm.
Photograph by Devyn Glista
The room here is small, like a vault, with three perfectly rounded crescent-shaped windows. Indiana limestone walls are on all sides, and natural wood wainscotting circles the edge. The small space juts out of library building and comfortably seats just eight people, but the ceiling is quite high, offering a bit of space and luxury.
This is the Porte Cochère Reading Room at the Clifton Branch Library, housed in an old Gaslight District mansion built in 1895. To be in this space is to also contemplate the neighborhood as it would have been when this house was erected. At that point, this wasn’t a room but a drop-off spot at the side of the home—a covered entry (porte cochère means “covered door” in French) where horse-drawn carriages would pause to let residents and guests exit the carriage under an archway and enter the home through a side door.
Today the space is enclosed with limestone mined from the same quarry used in the original construction. It’s comfortable and cool. The deep blue carpeted floor was elevated in a 2015 renovation, and readers are tucked just underneath the high arches that would have created the equestrian tunnel.
No one in this room is thinking of horse-drawn carriages today; they’re focused on thoughts and texts. Six of the eight spaces are taken, and snacks, laptops, and books abound. A woman twirls her hair, gazes through the window, and grabs a granola bar from her backpack. She stares at the ceiling while chewing, and I look up as well, suddenly appreciating the beadboard’s symmetrical orderliness.
At another desk, headphones and a laptop are abandoned; the patron has left to take a walk. I gaze out the window and count nine trees blowing gently in the wind. I appreciate the aura of concentration and focus, and I get out my own laptop and begin to write, working my way through a draft I’d been avoiding.
I feel transported, simultaneously floating on a ship and tucked in a safe. The strolling patron is back at his laptop now, staring at the screen while his mouth purses in concentration. The woman moves away to throw out her snack. Another reader slips into an empty chair.
There is an intimacy and a closeness to this space, though I can’t imagine interrupting anyone or even speaking to them. We’re together but alone, each urged into deeper fixation through this unique environment.
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