Jessy Randall's Blog, page 11
May 25, 2016
librarian poets
Being a librarian and poet, I’m always on the alert for other such, so, herewith, a list of poet-librarians, gathered using the lazyweb and from a post on the topic at In the Library with the Lead Pipe (a blog with the tagline “The murder victim? Your library assumptions. Suspects? It could have been any of us”).
Please let me know of any others who should be on this list — it’ll be an ongoing project. If you’re on the list but would prefer a different link, let me know that, too (jessyrandall@yahoo.com).
And of course Philip Larkin would have to be our honorary absentee/deadbeat father (not sure why in my mind he can’t just be our regular father, but somehow, he can’t).
May 23, 2016
library fashion show
The New Hanover County Public Library in North Carolina held a contest in 2015 for clothing and accessories made from discarded library books and cassette tapes. You can view the runway show above and the full details here. You’re too late to sign up for the 2016 contest, but perhaps they’ll do it again next year. Thanks, Tom Lovell!
May 20, 2016
library romance
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.”
library exorcism
I have it on good authority that an exorcism was performed in Tutt Library at Colorado College. My sources tell me that at a Fly Day / May Day / May Festival celebration ca. 1970, Jim Trissel, a member of the CC Art faculty, banged upon a drum and led “a small army” of revelers through all three floors of Tutt Library, chanting “Out, demons, out!”
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.”
Or the exorcism might have happened in 1971. This reference in the May 14 , 1971 Catalyst serves as oblique proof that something exciting happened in the library around that time: “To George Fagin, for his new library policies, is presented the Police State Award.”
May 18, 2016
Love You to Bits library
Love You to Bits is a charming iPad game in which you, a human, visit various alien worlds in search of the far-flung parts of your robot girlfriend. Level 9, The Quantic Library, has rooms that connect and disconnect in unpredictable ways. It also has a pair of creatures who love each other, magic wands, keys that grow out of pots … it’s a wonderful game.
April 26, 2016
The Psychic Sasquatch and Their UFO Connection
Library weeding isn’t a shenanigan — it’s an important part of collection development and a common activity in academic and public libraries. Pulling out awful / super-fantastic weeded books and drawing attention to them, though — that’s a shenanigan for sure.
The New Yorker has a piece on the Awful Library Books blog today. (Here at Library Shenanigans, of course, we’ve known about the blog since 2010.)
(Also, you gotta love that for Jack “Kewaunee” Lapserities, M.S., and others, the plural of sasquatch is sasquatch. Not everyone agrees — but then, Merriam-Webster claims the plural of bigfoot is bigfeet. So, whatever.)
Thanks, Inge-Marie Eigsti!
April 25, 2016
it’s bigger on the inside
TARDIS-style public library outpost on 32nd Avenue and Stark Street, Portland, Oregon. More information 
April 20, 2016
Le Boudoir in Brooklyn
To get into Le Boudoir, the cocktail bar of Chez Moi in Brooklyn Heights, you enter a “secret passage” via a bookshelf door. The door is, they say, a replica of a bookshelf in Marie Antoinette’s library, though the books upon it cannot be books she read — they are all in English, and published long after her death. Thanks, Brooklyn Blowback!
April 6, 2016
subway libraries
I recently learned of several projects involving reading on subways.
In the United States in 2016, a Miami-based ad company created an “underground library” on New York City subways, providing excerpts from ebooks and encouraging the use of the New York Public Library. Here’s a brief video about the project. Swipe for a free read!
Perhaps the company was inspired by something similar in 2013 in Romania : accessible ebooks on the walls of the Piata Victoriei subway station in Bucharest.
Also in 2013, a London “creative” organized a project she calls Books on the Underground, leaving books (regular books, not ebooks) all over the stations and trains. She documents the project here.
March 10, 2016
library shenanigans, 1893-style
Craig Conley of oneletterwords sends me these images from the 1893 issue of Cassell’s Family Magazine:
