Tour the St Louis Mercantile Library

Please join us for a docent-led tour of the St. Louis Mercantile Library - the oldest library west of the Mississippi. It has been relocated to the Thomas Jefferson Library building at UMSL where they have an elevator and are ADA compliant.

If we have more than 15 attendees - the library will schedule a 2nd docent so we can divide our group in two. Please - be mindful of this when you RSVP to this meetup, so they don't schedule an extra docent and we end up with a lot of no-shows.

There is no cost for this special tour. We'll send parking permits for the garage and further instructions in early November.

Notable among the library's collections:

• John W. Barriger III National Railroad Library - over 45,000 volumes of railroad documents and photographs,
• Herman T. Pott National Inland Waterways Library - River documents, artifacts and artwork
• Clippings and photo morgue of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat (over 10 million documents), including a searchable subject and name database
• Photo and film archives of Trans World Airlines
• Signed and complete first edition double elephant folio of John James Audubon's Birds of America
• The authenticated journal of Auguste Chouteau describing the founding of St. Louis
• Four Portraits of Winnebago chiefs by Charles Deas
• Death mask of Napoleon Bonaparte cast in plaster from the original
• U.S. presidential letters, early travel diaries, and civil war era letters.
• Signs from the 2014 protests in Ferguson
• Dr. Helen Nash's collection of African American cultural artifacts

Hope to see you there