At the University of Illinois at Chicago, staff discovered this diary and drawing written on the underside of a table in the Daley Library. It was probably written mostly in the spring of 1988; one entry (“Totaled my Dad’s car”) is dated May, 1988.

It’s likely this shenanigan would never have been discovered if the staff hadn’t decided to redecorate. When they dismantled the table, they found this bit of history.

Thanks, Gwen Gregory!

A fantastic holiday greeting from the University of Maryland library.

Thanks, Ed Vermue!

Did you know that librarians get up to shenanigans when they are alone in the library? Well, they do. Thanks, Iris Jastram!

Cornell University’s Olin Library has temporarily installed a patch of grass.

Best shenanigan ever? I think possibly yes.

Thanks, Dina Wood!

Our anonymous donor surprised us this month with a gift of the Ninja Press edition of W.S. Merwin’s The Real World of Manuel Córdova (1995). When stretched out, this accordion-style production measures fifteen feet long. Here’s the dealer’s description.

We look forward to sharing all fifteen feet with book arts and poetry students and other researchers in the coming years, perhaps alongside our similarly-stretchable two editions of Carlos Oquendo de Amat’s Five Meters of Poems (one from Ugly Duckling Presse and one from Turkey Press).

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!

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.

With big shenanigans like this, involving hundreds of people, I always wonder how much the library staff was involved. Did they get advance warning? Did they give permission? Did they plant the idea for the shenanigan in the first place? The Facebook page for the event suggests the library at least wasn’t against it. I know we would be pretty psyched to have something like this happen at Tutt. Thank you, David M. Kay, M.L.S.!

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!

In honor of Halloween, Carleton College’s library has created a spooky stapler graveyard. Perhaps they were inspired by Colorado College’s stapler obituaries mini-exhibit? More pictures of the graveyard are available at Carleton’s Facebook page. Thanks, Iris Jastram!