We Still Like Books

When we first met with the Prelingers, Rick told us that he thinks the polarization in the discussion about digital vs. analog modes of information storage is the result of alarmist journalists trying to find a conflict where there isn’t one. The worry seems to be that books are going to be assimilated into the monolith of computer technology, scanned into digital archives and left to decay.  It’s been pointed out that scholars may always need to consult real volumes because in their very pages and bindings, in their physical features, they contain clues to their histories.  But our project was inspired more by the way that we, and probably most people, choose what books they read.  Sometimes it’s the font of the title that first compels us to pick up and leaf through this or that book and sometimes it’s a stain or a patch of discoloration. I don’t want to get too romantic here, but the point is that many of us do judge a book by its cover – or its shape or its length, and more importantly, these kinds of characteristics are often what inform our decision to read them in the first place, ultimately determining our taste in books.

Something that we’ve talked about a lot is how when Bookface Bones is up and running, with the exchanges and blog working in concert, we will be creating a kind of symmetry between the cyber-space and real-space. As Keegan said, Bookface Bones is at least partially premised on cyber concepts. Put as simply as possible, the idea that a library can be a site of exchange, as opposed to just lending, has more in common with the way P2P file sharing networks operate than it does with how your local library is run. But it’s still all about books and it’s based on our conviction that they still matter.

-Adam 

We’re Bookface Bones

After much theorizing, grant applying, and angsty hair pulling, we’ve decided that blogging is the cure for what ails us.  Until now our project has been theoretical, existing only in our conversations and our minds.  I am proud to make the first post in our venture into, if not the real-world, at least the cyber-world.

I became interested in alternative book taxonomy and libraries as art after reading about people like the Prelingers and the Itinerant Poetry Librarian.  Over the past couple months Adam and I birthed Bookfacebones out of a series of “what if” discussions.  We were thinking about community building, old media working with new media, book loving, transaction, cyber concepts and real space, and performance art… and we ended up with Bookface Bones.  It goes something like this:

Bookface Bones is a traveling, fluid library.  Traveling because we go places, fluid because it’s based on exchange.  This library is entirely transactional—based on the “give a book take a book” rule.  At each destination, Bookface Bones opens with one catalogue of books and closes with another.   In other words, our library is based on the work and the interest of our audience.  Thus, Bookface Bones brings folks together to talk about books, recommend books, share books, and ultimately walk away with books; it also serves to reflect a destination through its books.  We hope that the way our catalogue changes will tell us something about each community we visit—how do they build a library? Bookface Bones will keep a tight record of our catalogue as is mutates and develops—and the best part of the project is this: we have no idea how it will end up.  This is an experiment: Can a library make a community?  How do book recommendations and discarded books paint a landscape of a community?  Maybe it can’t; maybe they don’t.  We’re going to find out.

We hope our project will expand—we’d like to study artist communities and link them together by book recommendations.  We’d like to conduct interviews about books with artists and bring our findings to other artists.  We have a plan for a road trip in which we drive around with our library watching it change and linking artist communities along the way.  We’re interested in how a transactional library mimics and enacts cyber concepts like links, networks, and folksonomies in real space between real people. We want to see if books can be the connective force for these transactions. 

In keeping with our proclamation of Bookface Bones as an experiment ultimately enacted by a group of individuals working both independently and together, we have decided to blog.  As soon as this post goes up, Bookface Bones is.  Before we joined the blogosphere, Bookface Bones existed as will be.  On this blog you will watch our project grow.  Now we’re bumbling around with ideas, but soon we very well might be doing something.  Now, listen to us think, or if the books move you, think along.

-Keegan