I’ve gotta say: the Indianapolis Marion County Public Library is one classy joint… and they’ve got a pretty spiff website, too.  They’ve got a very nice photo slideshow up of the new mural that was installed last October. I heartily recommend checking it out.

Here’s some of what the site has to say about the installation:

A new mural has been installed in the Indianapolis Special Collections Room on the Sixth Floor of Central Library. The artist Tom Torluemke has given it the working title, The Book of Life: The People We Know, the Experiences We Have, and the Conditions under Which We Live.Inspired by Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons, and, as he says, “by all the other creators who came before me,” Torluemke spent a year painting this depiction of the Ambersons’ period and others in Indiana history.

Their blurb on the installation that ran in their “Reader’s Connection” newsletter also has some interesting tidbits about the contents of the Tarkington section of the Special Collections room:

His works in the Indianapolis Special Collections Room number over 120 titles, about half of them autographed. The collection also holds eleven boxes of both handwritten and typed pages relating to the creation of Tarkington’s novel Kate Fennigate.