Jessy Randall's Blog, page 26

Under-desk shenanigan

  

 

At the University of Illinois at Chicago, staff discovered this diary and drawing written on the underside of a table in the Daley Library. It was probably written mostly in the spring of 1988; one entry (“Totaled my Dad’s car”) is dated May, 1988.

It’s likely this shenanigan would never have been discovered if the staff hadn’t decided to redecorate. When they dismantled the table, they found this bit of history.

Thanks, Gwen Gregory!

Books perform The Nutcracker at the University of Maryland

A fantastic holiday greeting from the University of Maryland library.

Thanks, Ed Vermue!

alone in the library

Did you know that librarians get up to shenanigans when they are alone in the library? Well, they do. Thanks, Iris Jastram!

You can sit “outside” in the Cornell library this week!

Cornell University’s Olin Library has temporarily installed a patch of grass.

Best shenanigan ever? I think possibly yes.

Thanks, Dina Wood!

bookstore shenanigan

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!

things found in books, from dirty to sublime (or both)

 

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.

“Gangnam Style” at the University of Maryland library

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.!

Introducing … the Biblio-Mat!

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!

stapler graveyard

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!

library poetry shenanigans

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)