Superpatron - Friends of the Library, for the net

Moyra Davies on the problem of reading

Photo credit: from "My Place Between 12 and 2PM" with Moyra Davey and Marcia Tanner. TART, Jan 11-Feb 7 2007.

A quote from The Problem of Bookshelves, from Caleb Crain's weblog "Steamboats are ruining everything":

I recommend two books that I've been reading by the photographer Moyra Davey, Long Life Cool White, just published by Yale University Press, and The Problem of Reading, which you have to email Davey herself to buy a copy of (see the link for instructions). Both books are filled not only with Davey's moody photos of bookshelves in various states of disarray and transition but also with her thoughts on the place of reading in a creative life, and the difficulty, in managing the habit, of striking the right balance between purpose and serendipity, and between work and pleasure. "'What to read?' is a recurring dilemma in my life," she admits in The Problem of Reading, which has, among other images, a great close-up of her mother's annotations of Swann's Way.

Moyra Davey has an exhibit just ending (June 30, 2008) at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard:

This exhibition presents an overview of artist and writer Moyra Davey’s 20-year career summarized in 40 photographs. Her modest images—newspapers, books, money, empty bottles, and the accumulation of objects on the tops of refrigerators—prick us into a state of increased awareness about the everyday life that both surrounds us and that we are immersed in. Her work stands as a quiet, passionate rejoinder to the hyper-staged quality of much contemporary photography, which Davey sees as bound up with the intense commercialization of the art world.

Halvard Johnson's blog "Entropy and Me" quotes from Moyra Davey's "The Problem of Reading":

So how are we to draw up those reading lists finally? I have been fascinated to note how many writers invoke chance and randomness as guiding principles in choosing their books. I am talking about Lynne Sharon Schwartz, who, citing 'the John Cage-ish principle that if randomness determines the universe it might as well determine my reading too,' spent a winter reading the Greek tragedies because she happened to find a discounted set in a mail order catalogue. I'm talking about the serendipitous findings of Virginia Woolf, the little pamphlet from a hundred years ago that she comes across in a second-hand bookshop that stops her in her tracks and rivets her to the spot. I am talking about the happenstance of Georges Perec, who, while engaged in the tedious task of arranging his bookshelves, comes upon a book he'd lost sight of and writes: 'putting off until tomorrow what you won't do today, you finally re-devour [it] lying face down on your bed.' He further speculates that in our pursuit of knowledge, 'order and disorder are in fact the same word, denoting pure chance.' And finally, I am talking about the passionate book collector uncrating his treasures after a two-year hiatus, as portrayed by Walter Benjamin in his autobiographical essay 'Unpacking My Library,' for whom 'chance and fate . . . are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these book.'

Davey is also the editor of Mother reader : essential writings on motherhood (AADL) which is available at the Ann Arbor District Library.

The immortal pneumatic library

Photo credit: Curious Expeditions (via Flickr; creative commons license applies)

From Curious Expeditions, Pneu York, Pneu York

But there is one, wonderful New York location, where the pneumatic tubes have proven quicker and more nimble then their modern day electronic substitutes; the stacks of the NY Humanities and Social Sciences library. When you hand your paper slip to the librarian, they slip it into a small pneumatic tube and send it flying down past seven floors of books deep underground. The request is received, the book located, and it is sent up on an ever turning oval ferris wheel of books.

So successful is the old pneumatic system in the NY Humanities and Social Sciences library that they installed a new system in the Science, Industry and Business Library on Madison Avenue in 1998. There are also reports (as of yet unconfirmed by Curious Expeditions) that a Salvation Army on 536 W. 46th St. still uses pneumatic tubes to send cash back and forth from the register.

Here's a link to a photo of a similar system in the Free Library of Philadephia.

A second use of pneumatics in the library, from 1876: Library Journal 1876. By Melvil Dewey, Richard Rogers Bowker, L. Pylodet, Charles Ammi Cutter, American Library Association, Bertine Emma Weston, Library Association, Karl Brown, Helen E. Wessells

Arrived at the new building each boxful of books is subjected to a cleansing process devised by Mr Green who has utilized for the purpose the great pneumatic air tank installed in the basement of the new building for the automatic pneumatic tunnel service between the library and the capítol. A long hose with a nozzle like that of a watering pot has been connected with the air tank. This nozzle is turned on the books and the stop cock is opened sending a hard blast of air against all the exposed surfaces of the books and raising clouds of dust even from volumes supposed to have been previously cleansed.

What have you RED lately?

What have you RED lately?
Originally uploaded by lansinglibrary.

Books by color, red edition, Lansing IL library. (As seen on Jenny Levine's The Shifted Librarian).

Magnum Photographers September 11 exhibit at Ann Arbor District Library

The Ann Arbor District Library is hosting an exhibit of photos from New York City from September 11 from August 21, 2006 through October 11, 2006:

This famous exhibit first appeared at the New York Historical Society in late 2001, and was then compiled into a companion book of photographs, entitled 'New York, September 11' (available at the Library). The two-month viewing of the exhibit at AADL marks the first time that the exhibit has been on public view since the New York Historical Society. The exhibit features the work of Magnum Photographers Chien-Chi Chang, Bruce Davidson, Raymond Depardon, Paul Fusco, Bruce Gilden, David Alan Harvey, Thomas Hoepker, Richard Kalvar, Josef Koudelka, Hiroji Kubota, Steve McCurry, Susan Meiselas, Gilles Peress, Eli Reed, Larry Towell, Alex Webb as well as seven film stills from Evan Fairbanks. Visitors to the exhibit at the Library will have a chance to record their thoughts and impressions in a visitor book which will be on site, available for all to see. AADL will offer several related events during the month of September.

Current Magazine (sorry no link) this month talks about how the AADL got this exhibit by being quick on the uptake to ask for it when the curators announced the traveling show.