Debra Weier, Charged
Book artist (and CC parent) Debra Weier visited Colorado College in the fall of 2012 to give a workshop on pop-ups. The library subsequently purchased her one-of-a-kind pop-up book Charged. When she mailed us that book, Weier sent us a bonus gift: another one-of-a-kind pop-up book, Fair Play.
Debra Weier, Fair Play
Thank you, Debra!
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.!
With a money gift from a very kind anonymous donor, Special Collections has just acquired our fifth incunable! (Incunabula are European printed materials from pre-1501. A list of our incunabula and early printed books is here.)
This new one is a 1492 edition of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, printed by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg. It’s smallish, less than six inches tall and comfortable in the hands.
Owners and censors have been “refreshing” it in various ways over its five century life. Marginalia has been excised, leaves have been replaced, words have been struck out, owners have placed their signatures and stamps and bookplates in it. We know from its scent that at least one previous owner was a smoker. We know from the dealer that the clasp has been replaced. We look forward to scholars working with it and finding out much, much more.
So, on this day-before-Thanksgiving, we say: thank you, anonymous donor! Thank you, Medieval Books, for the generous discount you provided in support of Colorado College’s minor in book studies! And thank you, book people everywhere, for loving books and caring for them so that they last and last.
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!
Hagstrom: Forces and Fossils
In September of 2012, Carleton College professor and book artist Fred Hagstrom was the Press at Colorado College’s Visiting Lecturer. Special Collections owns three of Hagstrom’s books: Deeply Honored, concerning a Japanese-American internment camp, and two newly acquired books: Standing Place, gift of the artist, a book about the marriage of a Maori man and a Greek woman, and Forces and Fossils, which was made using blown-up illustrations from Ernst Haeckel’s 1862 book on microscopic protozoa, Die Radiolarien.
Fay: Salton Sea
While he was here, Hagstrom showed us samples of books his students at Carleton had made. We thought students here might benefit from seeing books made by students elsewhere, and have therefore purchased four artists’ books made by Carleton students and alumni: Holly Phares’s Important to My Sanity and Future, Myla Fay’s The Salton Sea Guide to Birds and Dune Buggies, Liz Giraud’s Love Hertz, and Heather O’Hara’s The Handbook of Practical Geographies.
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!
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)