Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

A casualty of the District’s belt tightening which you may have forgotten about: the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library will not be open on Sundays beginning on October 2. The DCPL budget was cut by $800,000 for the 2012 fiscal year — and despite some maneuvering in the book budget, DCPL was left with a six-figure hole to plug.

“When faced with having to reduce library hours as a result of the FY2012 budget, closing the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library Sundays, as difficult as it is, was the least painful option,” said George Williams, a spokesperson for DCPL, in a statement released today. The library will remain open between noon-9 p.m. on Mondays and Tuesdays, and 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. from Wednesday through Saturday.

While it is a painful cut — no more wandering through Washingtoniana on Sunday afternoons, alas — at least we can take some solace in the fact that the cuts to library service are nowhere near as widespread as they almost were in 2008, when a $2 million gap almost forced all the city’s libraries to close on Fridays.