An Urbana-Champaign Frat
Perhaps it is all of my time spent at Harvard, where they don’t officially exist, but I find the ubiquity of fraternities here overwhelming. Is everyone in a frat at Urbana-Champaign? If I look out the door closest to my room, without actually going outside, I can see three different fraternity houses (left, straight, and slightly right). And that of course does not include the back of Alpha Kappa Lambda which is always viewable out my cell, I mean room window.

The variety of care in maintaining them is also astonishing.  Some, though majestic looking, clearly should be cared for more (note the broken window). For others, the building itself looks fine, but the surrounding environment could use improvement, including signs and lawns. Then there are those that even have advertising built right in. If I had more time right now, I might make a pithy comparison between these frats and rare books, including clever examples of how the above descriptions could be used also for rare books and collections… but I’ll leave that to you.