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...
Ros Rixon’s Love Lines and More
Love Lines IV - How do I Love thee?What do you get when you mix Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnet 43, How do I love thee?, with artist Ros Rixon?You get Love Lines - a series of works that literally captures the poem in all its glory.Rixon delicately reprints the text and encloses the lines in various bottles and glass cubes. Love Lines V - How do I Love thee? Edition of 5. Image courtesy of Heartbreak GalleryAbout becoming a book artist Rixon says she:never set out to be a book artist it just happened. I began working with text and books at University...
Raymond Carver, Subterranean Homesick Blues and World Book Night
Each year noted UK book artist Sara Bodman and fellow book artists collaborate "on a tribute event for World Book Night." This year the starting point for the tribute was A Small, Good Thing a story from Raymond Carver's seminal 1983 collection of short stories Cathedral. The book was also the basis for Robert Altman's 1993 film Short Cuts. An open call was placed inviting people to partake in a small good thing, write it down and send it in. From there it went like this: "On World Book Night we made a low-fi, video in a very homemade style of the original...
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...
In the Stacks: First Visit to The New Digital Library of America
Books are weapons in the war of ideas. Poster 20 x 27.9 , 1942. Published by the United States Government Printing Office. In the this installment of In the Stacks we visit the newly launched and much anticipated Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The opening of DPLA represents a watershed moment in the history of American libraries and will undoubtedly become a seminal resource for our nation in the years ahead. It is safe to say this will be the first of many trips for Book Patrol through the "stacks" of DPLA. We begin with a couple of posters produced by the Unites...