When you arrive at the library just before 2 pm on 2/2/25, perhaps you are surprised to see me standing there waiting for you — after all, you've gotten somewhat accustomed to chasing the elusive Carmen Sanfrancisco around town; it can't be this easy to have already found me. Perhaps you wonder where we can even go from here if we've already reached the goal of seeking and finding Carmen.

At 2 pm sharp, our group of about 10 takes the elevator to the 6th (top) floor to commence our historical tour of writing and libraries, and our visual tour of what the library location around us has to offer.

6th Floor: Writing

Prior to about 6,000 years ago, humans lived as nomads around the world. They kept few possessions, because stuff to have meant stuff to carry. As such, it would not have made sense for anyone to want to record information in a physical medium that they would then have to carry with them.

As people developed agricultural lifestyles and settled into bigger towns and civilizations, there arose a new need to keep track of large amounts of transactions and resources. First in Mesopotamia (Sumer, modern-day Iraq) around 3400-3500 BC, then independently in China, Mesoamerica (Olmec/Maya, modern-day Mexico), and Egypt people invented visual systems to record their accounting.

Over time, these scripts transitioned from more literal depictions of objects and numbers into more abstract characters representing concepts and sounds, and went from partial scripts that could only represent certain subsets of a language to full scripts that could record basically everything in spoken language.

Scripts were written in all sorts of media, from ink on animal hide or leaves to carvings in clay to knots in string. The shapes of letters in each script co-evolved with the medium of the script — for example, pressing letters into clay was easiest with straight lines, hence the boxiness of Latin and Greek, whereas brushing onto palm leaves required rounder shapes so as not to tear through the leaves, hence the curliness of Telugu and Thai.

Handwriting and reading were limited to a very small handful of craftspeople known as scribes, and the commissioning of writing and reading was limited to government officials, religious clergy, and wealthy elites.

The 6th floor of the SFPL main library contains the San Francisco History Center, the Book Arts and Special Collections Center, HR and administration, and various exhibits. Among other exhibits currently on display, there is one celebrating both Maya Angelou and her San Franciscan peer and friend, Reverend Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church. Glide still operates as a neighborhood staple of the Tenderloin, providing meals, harm reduction services, and other community support programs. A funky steel stairwell takes us down the Skylight Gallery to the 5th floor.

5th Floor: Printing

The invention of the printing press revolutionized the way we share information, making it much faster and easier to write and to distribute writing. The first movable-type printing system was invented in China around 1000 AD, and then independently around 1400 AD the movable-type printing press was invented in Germany. Today we will focus on the latter, as it is the precursor to all the books that we see around us in this library.

Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the movable-type printing press in Germany contributed to several sweeping societal changes and even some major revolutions. One big change was that more people could both access and publish written materials (though the education required for literacy was still limited to whoever had enough money and time for it.) Another was the Protestant Revolution, brought on by Martin Luther's writing and distribution of many pamphlets critiquing the Christian (Catholic) church, and his translation of the Bible from Latin into German so Germans could read and analyze it for themselves instead of relying on clergy to interpret it for them. The Scientific Revolution in the West was also made possible with the invention of the printing press: a key tenet of the scientific process is peer review and reproduction of findings, and printing and sending out their findings made it possible/easier/faster for scientists to reach a wider set of peers. Another consequence of the printing press that we take for granted today is the idea of a standard dialect of a language, or a unified language at all (and, as a further consequence, a nation unified by speaking/reading the same language.) Dialects differed so drastically from region to region everywhere around the world, and printing versions of texts in each dialect across a region like modern-day Germany or modern-day England would have cost much more than picking one dialect and disseminating that everywhere, so printers opted for the latter. We won't be getting further into nationalism or the pros and cons of a shared language vs. a diversity of languages today.

The 5th floor of the SFPL main library contains the Computer Training Center, the Environmental Center, the Government Information Center, the Digi Center for digitization and digital preservation of archives, Magazines and Newspapers, and a Periodicals Reading Room. In the stacks, we can find a section of periodicals that can't be checked out of the library, most from about a century ago. Some have custom binding done for the library, with gorgeous gold lettering and a library seal, and some have a built-in pocket inside the front cover where due date slips would live back when the library used those.

4th Floor: Libraries and Public Libraries

The 4th floor contains the Art, Music, and Recreation Center; the Music Center; the Business, Science, and Technology Center; the Jobs and Careers Center; and the Small Business Center.

The first libraries were wealthy individuals' private collections. Salons, or gatherings hosted by French women during the Enlightenment where people could discuss politics, culture, art, philosophy, and other matters, are also seen as a predecessor to libraries. (Women were still excluded from educational settings at this time in Europe, so salons were their way of engaging in education and information-sharing in their own way. The only people who had the necessary time on their hands for such gatherings and access to relevant information and materials would have been aristocrats.)

The first subscription library was started by Benjamin Franklin in the nascent USA. It started as a project of his society of friends called the Junto Club, or the Leather Apron Club, in 1731. This society would gather for meetings similar to salons, and eventually they tired of lugging their tomes back and forth for each meeting so they agreed to start leaving their books in the meeting room. All subscribing members of the club could thus access all books in the combined collection.

Libraries proliferated in the emergent USA in the 1700s and 1800s. The first lending library was opened in 1790 in Franklin, Massachusetts (a town named after benny franky himself), and was free to the public. The first large public library was also founded in Massachusetts: the Boston Public Library opened the doors to its 16,000 volumes to all Massachusetts residents in 1848.

Women joined libraries en masse as librarians and patrons, and as librarians they drove many innovations in library operations, such as inventing traveling libraries. Though most librarians were and are women, higher-up administration continued and continues to be male-dominated.

Andrew Carnegie, an American railroad magnate, funded many, many public libraries across the US. A controversial figure because of his exploitation of railroad workers, he is also considered the "Patron Saint of Libraries" because of how many free public libraries he funded. I think we can praise his actions of library-funding without idolizing the entire man and all of his business practices. The SFPL has 7 Carnegie branches, including the main location (which actually used to be housed in the current Asian Art Museum building.)

3rd Floor: Public Libraries, cont'd

The 3rd floor contains the African American Center, the Chinese Center, the Filipino American Center, the International Center, the LGBTQIA Center, and the General Collections and Humanities Center.

The 1890s saw the advent of branch libraries — satellite locations of a more central city library in more suburban or rural areas that people living outside of the city could more easily access. They also saw the introduction of open stacks: before that, librarians served as gatekeepers and middlemen between patrons and collections, but when stacks were displayed out in the open and patrons could browse the whole collection themselves, the role of the librarian shifted to more of a research supporter.

In the 1910s, schools (elementary, middle, high, etc.) started offering their own libraries. Universities had already had their own libraries for quite a long time prior.

Also around the turn of the century, accompanying the immigration boom, libraries started offering foreign language books and programs, as well as programs to teach immigrants English and how to assimilate.

Unfortunately, during all this time, African Americans were not allowed in most public libraries across the very segregated USA. There were a number of Black libraries across the country, including some founded by Andrew Carnegie. As Black people gained entry to more and more public spaces in the 1960s, together with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that ruled "separate but equal" for public spaces to be unconstitutional, they still faced roadblocks in some library programs. Many polling places in the South, including libraries, implemented "literacy tests" as barriers to voting: only given to Black would-be voters, these "literacy tests" contained largely subjective or unreasonably convoluted questions to which any answer could be deemed wrong and prevent that person from being allowed to vote. Thus, it wasn't until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that libraries became officially desegregated.

Advances in public library funding also happened incrementally over time, through various federal and state laws.

In the 21st century, we've seen further innovations with the introduction of tool, seed, and prom dress libraries — but, oh, what's this!

P.S. read me

This scavenger hunt marks a permanent departure from my previous format (if you consider the first three to have had a consistent format.)

For one thing, this is the first hunt that I was part of the whole time, with a different character driving the mystery and the quest. The last hunt really took it out of me after I spent $350 on food for all my friends and didn't even get to enjoy any of the social aspect of the hunt because everyone was so tired of eating and moving that by the time they reached me at the end, all they wanted was to immediately go home. This is my redemption for that hunt: spending barely any money and all of the time with my friends during the hunt.

For another, this is the first hunt where the information acquired and used throughout the hunt doesn't just end at things that I already know and plan and that my friends have to catch up to; we all got to explore together, and the information and skills we learned and practiced are still applicable to our real lives after the hunt has ended.

My scavenger hunts were, from their inception, always meant to build a bridge to community exploration and involvement beyond just myself and the people immediately involved in the hunts. I was taking my time building that bridge in the first 3 hunts, in late 2023 and early 2024, but as 2024 wore on I became more impatient and less satisfied with making art and putting on events that didn't have an immediate impact towards my larger social/societal vision. I had planned a fourth hunt for October 2024, but cancelled it for a number of reasons, including that it felt too frivolous to do more of the same format that I had been doing with my hunts up to that point. My heart just wasn't in it, and I thought that I might be done with my scavenger hunts for good. I focused on other avenues of community involvement instead.

At the end of 2024/beginning of 2025, I had a burst of inspiration for how I could bring together the scavenger hunt format and the type of activity I wanted to do more of (learning together, creating together, ultimately toward the end of sharing the products of that learning and creation beyond just our network of friends), and thus this hunt and the next were born, as well as several similar events that I have not yet implemented. I'm still working on building the rest of that bridge from myself and my friends out to the broader Bay and beyond, but this feels like a very solid step in that direction, and the San Francisco free public library was the perfect location for it.

P.P.S. and me

The 2nd floor of the SFPL contains the Children's Center, the Teen Center/The Mix, and the Talking Books and Braille Center. The 1st floor has the Audiovisual Center, Deaf Services Center, Fiction, Large Print Collection, The Page, lost and found, holds pickup, checkout/return, library cards, printing and copying (free up to a certain amount), and the Friends of the SFPL bookstore by the Grove St. entrance.