To create something to adorn the lobby of the then new library, the city of Walnut Creek, California enlisted the services of artist Christian Moeller.Moeller went ahead and took what is probably the most stereotypical librarian behavior and he blew it up!Like two-stories high!“Shhh…Portrait in 12 Volumes of Gray” stands 26 feet tall and eight feet wide and contains 3,960 books. The covers are 12 shades of gray and arranged on a gigantic steel bookshelf,. The piece displays image of a woman’s face as she makes a “shhh” signal. Each spine represents one pixel in the entire image and all of the pages in...
Sticky fingers force Polish mobile library to go digital
The initial idea was simple:Acknowledging that Poland is not one of the "European nations which read a great deal" the mayor of the Polish city of Gdansk Pawel Adamowicz took part in a plan to outfit a fleet of 35 brand-new trams with books from local libraries in an effort to promote reading.Special nets were placed on the back of the seats and librarians worked hard in selecting the 5000 books that would stock these new mobile libraries. The program launched in January of this year.By April all 5,000 books had been stolen!So, what next?A digital approach.Now all trams are replete...
Books for Soldiers: World War I Style
During World War I the American Library Association undertook a massive campaign to get reading material in the hands of our soldiers. One of their initiatives to bolster Army libraries was to set-up camp outside the New York Public Library. These images portray the campaign's efforts and astounding success. The history of these efforts is covered in-depth in the seminal work by Theodore Wesley Koch; Books in the War: The Romance of the Library War Service that was published in 1919 by Houghton Mifflin. cover of Books in War courtesy of book patrol In the upper-left corner of the first image above...
Library on Ice
I'll never forget my first visit to Minnesota. Being born and raised in New York there had been few reasons to venture west of the Hudson River. I was in my early 20's and coming off the disco years. Rumor had it that Minnesota was the perfect place to dry out. So off I went. It was late March and winter was just finishing up. In the cab from the airport, I kept seeing lots and lots of little shacks huddled close together off in the distance. Every few miles they seemed to appear again. Finally, after a handful of...