On October 17, 1885, Spartanburg's first “public” library opened.
Thanks to a gift from Mrs. Helen Fayssoux Kennedy, the Kennedy Library opened its doors on the lot where her husband's office once stood. It began with a grand total of 900 books and a $3 per year subscription fee. Her gift honored her husband, Dr. Lionel Chalmers Kennedy, a well-known and respected physician who had died five years earlier. Among the library's first holdings was Dr. Kennedy's 600-volume medical library and some 300 other books collected and donated by the citizens of Spartanburg.
Below, there is also a link to download the SCPL passport. At each Library, you can find a geocache nearby that contains a specific stamp. Collect and record these stamps on your passport and you can collect your very own unactivated SCPL Geocoin!
Download your "Hitting the Books" Passport Grid here to begin:
The posted coordinates will take you close to this cache, but then you must solve a book cipher to finish. A book cipher is a way to encode information that is to be kept secret.
In this variation of a book cipher, the seeker must find the key chapter in an unknown book to solve the following string of numbers. The numbers correspond to the location of the words within the text. Once the seeker has found the key text, he must number the words in the text.
For Example: (1)Once (2)upon (3)a (4)time (5)in (6)a (7)land (8)faraway.
Once the key text is numbered, solving the cipher is relatively easy. For each numbered word, one letter from that word is used to crack the code. So that in the above code, using the first letter of each numbered word, “3714” would translate to “alot”.
For the code you must solve, the *3rd* letter of each numbered word is used.
The difficulty in solving a book cipher is in finding the key, meaning the book that was used to encode the message.
Clues to help you find the key are as follows:
1.You are looking for a book of “Familiar Quotations”.
2.In this book you will find the words of a famous “Beat” poet, who spent time traveling “On the Road”. His words will lead you to your destination.
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