The Librarian as Poet

I'm working on creating some pretty exciting appendices for my book manuscript at the moment, and the joy of this is getting to review the documents I based my research on so that I can share some of them with readers. In the process, I found this snippet from Grace D. Rose, librarian of Davenport Public Library:

Opening upon a world at war and our country devoting every effort to a vigorous prosecution of her part in the conflict, and closing with the guns at rest and a hopeful looking forward to permanent peace, 1918 was a most eventful year. (Source: Davenport PL 1918 Annual Report, pg 7).

What a way to open the Report of the Librarian! Some of you might remember my post on Helen McRaith of Iowa City, and her beautiful, flowery language when discussing the role of the library in modern life. I love that this sort of beautiful language was being employed in something as seemingly mundane as an annual report--Rose's writing sounds almost like the opening of a tense piece of homefront fiction. I haven't spent as much time with more recent annual reports, but it definitely makes me wonder if we're using equally compelling language to tell our libraries' stories today.