Sarah Katherine Stengle snapped this photograph and put it on Facebook with the note “The sign on the door of the WC at the Art Museum in Jyväskylä Finland. The bathroom contained a library: loved it.”
Thanks, Emily Lloyd!
Tutt Library at Colorado College is undergoing a major renovation right now (in fact, I’m listening to the sounds of slams and crashes as I type this). Workmen cleaned out our sub-basement and found an old architectural model of our building, probably made in 1980 when the South addition was built.
As soon as we installed the model in our display case, my colleague Sarah Bogard began taking close-up photographs. I think these are lovely, and strangely poetic.
We found ourselves placing the little people in various arrangements and playing with the model like a dollhouse. Other colleagues stopped by to see what we were doing and got involved. Someone said this set-up looked like the whomping willow in the Harry Potter books:
An hour or so later, a small Pegasus appeared.
What will happen next?
Addendum, May 26, 2016:
Addenda, May 31, 2016:
I love when libraries put together oddball mini-exhibitions on obscure topics. (I guess that’s no surprise coming from the person who brought you mini-exhibitions on 19th Century Beards, Different Kinds of Paperclips, and Composition Books.) The Cambridge University Library currently has a display of their towel-related holdings in honor of Towel Day, May 25, celebrating Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Possibly my favorite sentence in the article: “The bibliography of towels is, in fact, remarkably limited.” Thanks, Lynne M. Thomas!
Being a librarian and poet, I’m always on the alert for other such, so, herewith, lists of poet-librarians, gathered using the lazyweb and from a post on the topic at In the Library with the Lead Pipe (a blog with the tagline “The murder victim? Your library assumptions. Suspects? It could have been any of us”).
Please let me know of any others who should be on this list — it’ll be an ongoing project. If you’re on the list but would prefer a different link, let me know that, too (jessyrandall@yahoo.com).
(English language)
(languages other than English — thank you, Amadeu Pons i Serra and the Catalan Library Association for providing most of these names)
Manuel Machado
Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo
Addendum, December 9, 2016: Patrick Williams informs me that Josh Honn has a list of librarian poets here.
The New Hanover County Public Library in North Carolina held a contest in 2015 for clothing and accessories made from discarded library books and cassette tapes. You can view the runway show above and the full details here. You’re too late to sign up for the 2016 contest, but perhaps they’ll do it again next year. Thanks, Tom Lovell!
Your hardworking blogstress learned recently of a romantic library shenanigan at Tutt Library, Colorado College in the spring of 1988. Two students, hearing that a friend planned “an evening of study and courtship” at the library that evening, procured tuxedos, an ice bucket, champagne, and glasses; with white linen napkins over over one arm, they served the couple forthwith. According to my source, “there was some followup from then Librarian and classicist John Sheridan, who felt the need to be severe.”
I have it on good authority that an exorcism was performed in Tutt Library at Colorado College. My sources tell me that at a Fly Day / May Day / May Festival celebration ca. 1970, Jim Trissel, a member of the CC Art faculty, banged upon a drum and led “a small army” of revelers through all three floors of Tutt Library, chanting “Out, demons, out!”
I’ve been unable to find any documentary proof of this event, but it may have happened in 1969, when the Fly Day celebrations on campus were of epic proportions, including, according to Owen Cramer (Classics faculty then and now), a 400-foot-long, 12-foot-high plastic tube put up on the campus quad. Students and others could walk or sit in the tube; and at one point, says Cramer, “a saxophone player produced a very pleasing sound inside.” Other elements of Fly Day included “the execution with sledgehammers of a musical score projected onto an old car installed in the ice rink.”
Or the exorcism might have happened in 1971. This reference in the May 14 , 1971 Catalyst serves as oblique proof that something exciting happened in the library around that time: “To George Fagin, for his new library policies, is presented the Police State Award.”
Love You to Bits is a charming iPad game in which you, a human, visit various alien worlds in search of the far-flung parts of your robot girlfriend. Level 9, The Quantic Library, has rooms that connect and disconnect in unpredictable ways. It also has a pair of creatures who love each other, magic wands, keys that grow out of pots … it’s a wonderful game.
Library weeding isn’t a shenanigan — it’s an important part of collection development and a common activity in academic and public libraries. Pulling out awful / super-fantastic weeded books and drawing attention to them, though — that’s a shenanigan for sure.
The New Yorker has a piece on the Awful Library Books blog today. (Here at Library Shenanigans, of course, we’ve known about the blog since 2010.)
(Also, you gotta love that for Jack “Kewaunee” Lapserities, M.S., and others, the plural of sasquatch is sasquatch. Not everyone agrees — but then, Merriam-Webster claims the plural of bigfoot is bigfeet. So, whatever.)
Thanks, Inge-Marie Eigsti!
Anne Haines
TARDIS-style public library outpost on 32nd Avenue and Stark Street, Portland, Oregon. More information