I have to make a book display soon, and I’ve been thinking about it today. I have a horrible secret: I was a philosophy major for a few years. My plan going into the major was to study space, and the changing nature of people’s usage of space. How the best designed-plans aren’t really well followed by the end users. Like a child or a baby turtle, its buried deep in sand away from predators. You ditch it, and it hatches out of its shell. Into the ocean, to do what it do.
Another horrible secret: I’ve been throwing out lots of books. Lots and lots of books. Some great books, some terrible. We are a community library, responding to the needs of the community. I am a civil servant, a person beholden to the needs of the community. I do what will make our library-users enjoy our library more. At the same time, I have this unfortunate flaw: I can’t help but think about the paradox. Librarians as information professionals promote ourselves are professionals that navigate information and tell people that not everything is online. At the same time, we’re throwing away all of that information. Sometimes in droves and with little thought other than by circ volume.
A classic move to circulate not-new books and demonstrate a classic librarian skill (bibliography, or pathfinder, whatever) is the book display. I’ve found them to be increasingly fey. As a result, people just stare at them or take a picture with them. Nobody really checks them out because there’s no entrance point to them. Should I disrupt the book display?
So I started thinking, what if we made the book display into an art installation? Books, after all, are an object of design. They illicit a feeling in the public that most artists would dream of having for their own art.
If we’ve begun to make book displays into something like an art, why don’t we just take it a step further and invite artists to collaborate with librarians to create interactive installations with books?
Some stray thoughts banging around in my head
The transformation of the library as a place with a strict mission and a clear understanding in the public’s mind, to one in which the library responds to the public’s domain of common concern by its reinvention as a public sphere. As a profession where marginalized groups make up the majority of the profession, it is consistently in the crosshairs of destruction. How do you progress and survive at the same time?
Book design and concept for a display based on space, time, the change in a community from mercantile village, to rural suburb, to suburb, to exurb, to its current aspiration: edge city
Gather 100-200, possibly 300 books for selection by the artist to create the installation. Create a pathfinder and artistic statement that makes sense of it all.
But will it circulate???? How to get people to interact with it, the point being that you want people to read it and dismantle the installation.
