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)

This is actually a great idea! I think library bookmobiles should totally do this!

Thanks, Will and Celie, my kids, who have read all the Big Nate books about a hundred times. This particular comic appears on page 29 of Big Nate: Here Goes Nothing (Harper, 2012).

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!

Italian artist Frederico Pietrella uses library date stamps to make representational art. He changes the stamps each day, and may work on a particular piece for a couple of months. His pieces sell for tens of thousands of dollars. If that’s a little rich for your blood, maybe you should check out Giselle Restrepo‘s library check-out card corset and more. Thanks, Steve Lawson!

Thank you, Mental Floss, for featuring these gorgeous library tattoos. Do I recognize a librarian friend in one of these pictures? Maybe …. just maybe. Thanks, Steven Kotok, David Weinstock, and BoingBoing! (But most of all Steven Kotok, who sent this to me hot off the press, almost literally.)

If you’re considering a library tattoo yourself, but aren’t sure if you’re ready to commit, perhaps these temporary tattoos would be a good compromise.

In honor of Library Card Sign-Up Month, the American Library Association’s “At Your Library” public awareness campaign is sponsoring a Flickr pool of images of people with their library cards. John Waters has a big one — perhaps to go along with his supposed statement about people who don’t have any books, which has been making the rounds on Facebook. You can also see the cards of a stuffed gorilla, an orange shark, and the Karate Kid. Thanks, Jessamyn West!

John Farrier apparently knows the importance of assessment in libraries! Here he critiques fictional pony librarian Twilight Sparkle’s skills at the reference interview and more. Thanks, BoingBoing!

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.

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!

We knew about some of the mini-libraries in NYC and elsewhere in the U.S., and we knew that red telephone booths in the U.K. were sprouting libraries as early as 2009, but it seems the phenomenon is growing. The Netherlands has a portable children’s library in a shipping container, and Bulgaria has a library on a trolley. Thanks, Sarah Milteer!