The Brooklyn Art Library...

After our eggs we had a mooch around Williamsburg and stumbled across the Brooklyn Art Library.

It's not huge, just a normal sized shop with walls covered top to bottom with sketchbooks...

They're all part of the Sketchbook Project - which I think I've understood properly, but it's a collection of people's sketch books from all over the world that have been submitted by different creative folks. The sketchbooks are all digitised so you can look at them online, or you can go into the library and look through them - you can search particular subjects or you can just pick random books and flick through them.

They take some of the books out on tour around the country, in a mobile library - they're off to the South By Southwest festival in Austin this month.

As well as the sketchbooks they have lots of great things for sale, lots of nice stationery (like Field Notes) and some interesting books, like this one...

A whole book on all the different ways to sharpen pencils!!!

There was lots of Sketchbook Project merchandise on sale, some great little notebooks, sketchbooks with ideas on each page, lovely screenprinted posters with maps of America on, they even had their very own chocolate, created for them by their next door neighbours The Mast Brothers...

I love all the little quirky places in Brooklyn - all the weird and wonderful projects that people have got going on, they're all so inspiring! I think it might be worth signing up for a library card and checking out some of the sketchbooks... maybe we'll submit a sketchbook of our own so we can leave something behind in Brooklyn.