This is possibly one of the sweetest and most brilliant ideas I’ve seen as it pertains to libraries; the fact that it includes baking is a HUGE bonus. Despite majoring in English and taking many, many a reading class, I hate reading. With a passion. Libraries are possibly one of my greatest enemies because the thing that makes them great is also what hinders their utility: due dates. The temporary ownership of reserves of knowledge can be useful in the short-term, but not so much the long-term– and while books vary, I’d hardly qualify them as short-term experiences. Especially when you’re in college, and are poor because tuition, and need books for the several months you’ll be explicating in class, a two-week allowance is not an optimal sliver of time for a book that predates yourself.

However, one city in Washington has radicalized their system of borrowing by expanding upon their available tools and adding cake pans to their inventory. Ashely Quinta, a staff writer for the Bellavue Leader reports on the article “From books to baking.” A local library had an increased amount of requests for baking materials to borrow, likely due to the festive seasons right around the corner, and they responded much differently than the expected “this is a library, not a bakery.” The Bellavue Public Library went above and beyond to include different cake-pan shapes and molds for various holidays and celebrations as well, making this experience more readily available for anyone and any occasion! And being that it is a library, there are likely recipe books to supply the direction for whatever baking bug bites a Bellavue resident.

On the one hand, I find this inspiring because there are people who have talents and aspirations that are still undiscovered because they lack the resources to explore them (i.e. baking), and there is a community that responded to a voiced desire to discover by supplying the necessary means to prosper. That’s wonderful. On the other hand, I’m a little concerned as to the decaying state of our society to properly take care of ourselves as we’ve commercialized every basic need of ours. Disposable cake pans are cheaper than the box-cake mix, so it would be unfitting to assume this request is a matter of money, and I otherwise can’t think of reasons as to not already have the supplies at hand (or at least within reach). Books are expensive and expansive; there are volumes and editions that make tracking the right book difficult, and a network system of libraries to transfer any amount of needed books at a visitor’s request. But a cake pan? It seems to have been a staple cooking utensil only a generation back, and even though it’s been made more accessible price-wise, it is now something so rare it can only be borrowed through libraries.