Most of the library renovation work happening in Tutt Library is noisy, messy, dusty, and not much fun for the people in the building. But here’s a brilliantly shining silver lining to the project: artist Sandy Kinnee has loaned two of enormous, gorgeous abstract paintings for the duration of the renovation.
Special Collections has had many incarnations over the years. The space shown here:
now looks like this (photographed with a wide-angle lens by the artist):
The paintings are numbers 2285 and 2290 from his Stepping Stones Perhaps series of March 2016 (images courtesy of the artist):
Each painting in the series is about 14 feet long and 8 feet high, with some variation.
Where are all the books, you ask? Where are the cabinets and shelves? The books and files have been moved to non-browsable areas of Special Collections, mostly the “cage” across from the curator’s office. The college donated the cabinets and shelves to Queen Palmer Elementary School, where the students have become quite fond of them already as stand-up desks. We hope the Woman’s Educational Society will be pleased that the furniture they donated in 1977 is having a second life in a new kind of educational setting.
Starting this summer, the Sandy Kinnee Room (so dubbed by curator Jessy Randall) will be open for general study whenever the library is open. Special Collections researchers will work in the curator’s office, which now seats eight. We will use the Kinnee Room when we have more than eight researchers at a time and whenever we perform class instructions (about once a week during the school year).
Addendum, July 18, 2016: the Pokemon Go craze has come to Colorado College, and the creatures are everywhere. A visitor snapped this photo of a Diglett in in front of Kinnee’s work:
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’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.”
TARDIS-style public library outpost on 32nd Avenue and Stark Street, Portland, Oregon. More information 
I recently learned of several projects involving reading on subways.