Monterey Public Library
625 Pacific St., Monterey | (831) 646-3933, monterey.org/library
Walk into the Monterey Public Library on any day of the week, and you’ll see scores of people, from kids to retirees, reading, walking the stacks, surfing the internet or just hanging out in the sun on the library’s second floor deck. And perhaps the library’s most overlooked resource—the California History Room—is its most singular, providing a wealth of historical information hard to find anywhere else, be it copies of old newspaper articles or out-of-print books. No matter the subject, you can just enter it into the search query of the library’s database and the keys to the kingdom of knowledge are revealed. And unless you’re making copies or late in returning a book, it’s all free.