Posts filed under ‘books’
blind date with a book
Many libraries have perpetrated this shenanigan, including the Lawrence Public Library in Kansas, the Maplewood Memorial Library and the Hillsdale Public Library in New Jersey, the Rockville Centre Public Library in New York, the Jasper Public Library in Indiana, the Amarillo Public Library in Texas, and many, many more. Thanks, Sundress Publications, for drawing my attention to this!
Australian library reclassifies Lance Armstrong books
The Manly Library in Australia put up this sign recently, saying they shall be reclassifying Lance Armstrong’s books as fiction. Thanks, Tom Lovell!
UPDATE JANUARY 21, 2013: it appears this shenanigan was a prank (is that redundant?). The library does not actually plan to reclassify the books. Here’s an article explaining what happened. Thanks, Brian Springett!
Books perform The Nutcracker at the University of Maryland
A fantastic holiday greeting from the University of Maryland library.
Thanks, Ed Vermue!
bookstore shenanigan
Somebody (probably not staff, but I’m not sure) turned around a whole bunch of books in the mystery section of a Barnes and Noble bookstore, making them particularly mysterious. I don’t know much about this image and would be glad to get the details. Thanks, PotaDOS and Sundress Publications!
things found in books, from dirty to sublime (or both)
Noel Black recently interviewed me for his Big Something radio show on the Colorado Springs NPR station. He got interested in the things found in books at the Colorado College library and asked me to talk about the collection the library keeps.
Some of the things we’ve found over the last decade were left in books deliberately as a sort of art shenanigan, we believe. Most, we are fairly certain, stayed in the books by accident. Library staff, especially student assistants, have been building the collection for about a decade.
I consider the collection itself to be a kind of shenanigan, since it’s unusual for a library to collect and display odds and ends such as these.
Introducing … the Biblio-Mat!
The Biblio-Mat is a one-of-a-kind (so far!) vending machine filled with antiquarian books. It’s at The Monkey’s Paw, a Toronto bookshop. Customers pay $2 to try their luck. If the results in the video are typical, I would guess customers will be very satisfied, though perhaps not enough to seek to “collect all 112 million titles.” Thanks, BoingBoing and the Paris Review!
library poetry shenanigans
My new collection of poems, Injecting Dreams into Cows (Red Hen Press, 2012), contains several poems about libraries and least one about library shenanigans. One of the library poems has now become the victim/beneficiary of an anonymous shenanigan here at Tutt Library, Colorado College!
“Going to the Library,” was made into a promotional flyer for Tutt (where I work). Copies of this flyer hang in campus bathrooms. This morning a colleague found an amended version of the flyer in one of the library bathrooms. Someone turned my sweet little poem into a piece of smut!!
Less scandalously, in the library shenanigan poem in the book, “The Library at Night,” the shenanigans are perpetrated by the books themselves:
The Library At Night
The empty library
stutters awake, words
falling out of their paper beds,
alarms of exclamation points
ringing from every corner.
The librarians are gone,
sound asleep at home,
shushing their dreams.
They have forgotten
all about the library
and what is inside.
This is why, in the morning,
the books are not where
they are supposed to be.
This is why, in the daytime,
the library feels vaguely alive,
objects pulsating on the shelves,
glowing like brains.
(first appeared in The Hat, 2005)
Hernando Guanlao’s private public library
Hernando Guanlao has been running his own version of a public library for twelve years in Manila. The library has grown from about a hundred books to a few thousand. From the article: “The idea is simple. Readers can take as many books as they want, for as long as they want – even permanently. As Guanlao says: ‘The only rule is that there are no rules.'”
Thanks, Dina Wood!
garage door bookcase
Niiiiiiiiiice: Robert Crais’s garage door, painted to look like bookshelves. Thanks, BoingBoing!
Something else I like about this shenanigan: the fact that Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing says he doesn’t have a Facebook account so he can’t confirm the Facebook appearance of this image. I am getting a bit peeved at the Facebookiness of everything. If I can possibly help it I try not to link to Facebook stuff, but sometimes people — and institutions! — upload images there and nowhere else. That seems like a mistake, to me. Use your own website! Don’t depend on Facebook for everything! You never know what Facebook is going to do in the future with your stuff or you.
More book sculptures in Edinburgh!
The mysterious book sculptor has struck again! So far, only a few of the fifty flowers she made have been found in Charlotte Square in Edinburgh. Each has a tag bearing a fragment of the Oscar Wilde quote from De Profundis: “…freedom, books, flowers and the moon.” (The full quote is “With freedom, books, flowers and the moon, who could not be happy?”)
This shenanigan started in 2011 and I hope it continues for years to come. There’s a book about it now, and an exhibition touring Scotland.
Thanks, Sarah Milteer!
Library Shenanigans 