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!

TARDIS-style public library outpost on 32nd Avenue and Stark Street, Portland, Oregon. More information here Thanks, David Kay!

To get into Le Boudoir, the cocktail bar of Chez Moi in Brooklyn Heights, you enter a “secret passage” via a bookshelf door. The door is, they say, a replica of a bookshelf in Marie Antoinette’s library, though the books upon it cannot be books she read — they are all in English, and published long after her death. Thanks, Brooklyn Blowback!

I recently learned of several projects involving reading on subways.

In the United States in 2016, a Miami-based ad company created an “underground library” on New York City subways, providing excerpts from ebooks and encouraging the use of the New York Public Library. Here’s a brief video about the project. Swipe for a free read!

Perhaps the company was inspired by something similar in 2013 in Romania : accessible ebooks on the walls of the Piata Victoriei subway station in Bucharest.

Also in 2013, a London “creative” organized a project she calls Books on the Underground, leaving books (regular books, not ebooks) all over the stations and trains. She documents the project here.

Craig Conley of oneletterwords sends me these images from the 1893 issue of Cassell’s Family Magazine:

The library in Parks and Recreation is a bad, bad place. In Season 2, Episode 8, we learn that the Pawnee Public Library is “diabolical,” made up of “the worst group of people ever assembled in history.” The librarians are “punk-ass book jockeys” who are “extremely well-read, which makes them very dangerous.”

In Season 3, Episode 4, Ron Swanson’s ex-wife Tammy, a librarian, sends a collection agency after Ron for his supposed overdue book, It’s Not the Size of the Boat: Embracing Life with a Micropenis.

I’m sure there will be more library shenanigans to come, or anyway I hope so, but I’m only partway through binge-watching the series.

The Champaign Public Library in Illinois created a life-size version of the board game Candy Land in March of 2016. They did it the year before, too.

Thanks, Joan Petit!