‘Librarians poised to take Manhattan!’

    

The summer issue of The Page & Pillars, the newsletter of the Masonic Library and Museum Association, hit inboxes last week (actually missing summer by a few days), which reminds me to plug our impending visit to New York City in less than two weeks.

The Chancellor Robert R. Livingston Masonic Library has volunteered to host this 2026 annual meeting. We will gather there, at Masonic Hall, on the morning of Saturday the 17th for the business meeting. Plus, there will be tours of the library and the building, and we’ll be greeted by Deputy Grand Master Oscar Alleyne before the helicopter idling on the roof whisks him to Buffalo.

At one in the afternoon, we’ll catch our breath and enjoy lunch together. Then we’ll commute downtown to The Battery to catch the Staten Island Ferry to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. At 5 p.m., we’ll be found inside nearby Fraunces Tavern Museum for a behind-the-scenes tour before settling in for dinner downstairs (in the Washington Room, I’m guessing). Everybody loves Fraunces.

If this sounds like fun to you, click here to register—but do it now—and join us. Also, why not join us in membership?

For only a few bucks a year, you can support a totally unsung, but very valuable, group. The major Masonic libraries and museums in the U.S. are among our institutional members, as are many smaller facilities, but we have individual members also. If you are a researcher or even an occasional seeker of books and other materials that are hard to find, your colleagues in the MLMA most likely can bring your search to fruition. Research lodges may join at the institutional level—any lodge can, but if your lodge has a library, it and you should join.

Among the latest initiatives are the BINO database and the MLMA Exchange. BINO is Books Indexed Neatly Online, which is an ever expanding record of our members’ inventories of books. If a title you seek has been elusive, BINO probably can put you in touch with the librarians who have that book. The Exchange is a kind of classifieds listing, where our institutional members may offer books, artifacts, regalia, etc. for sale, trade, or donation. Everybody has duplicates (or more) of things taking up precious space.

Both of these are exclusive to MLMA members. Click here.

In basic communications, there is the official Google Group for news, conversation, and questions via email. Also, every two months on Sundays, we host videoconference “Fireside Chats” where a speaker gives a presentation on his museum's current projects or other suitable talks. The perfect way to exchange information.

Our annual meetings hopscotch around the country. In the coming years, we’ll visit Washington State, Massachusetts, and Minnesota—as determined by institutional members that volunteer to host.

Hope to see you the weekend after next. On the Friday night, we’ll get together for an informal dinner at a place to be determined, but seek us out at the Hampton Inn, near the corner of 24th and Sixth, at seven o’clock.