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On November 5-6, The Center will hold a two-day workshop in Collective Bookmaking with the Reanimation Library. Participants will spend Saturday at the Library in Brooklyn with Founder Andrew Beccone, where they will devise the physical and conceptual structure of a book by gathering images and text from the library's collection. This found material will constitute the primary source of the book's content. On Sunday, the class will meet here at the Center where they will assemble the book with the assistance of CBA staff. Each participant will receive a copy of the finished book.
Located near the Gowanus Canal, The Reanimation Library is a small, independent Library open to the public. Its non-circulating collection of books have fallen out of routine circulation and have been acquired for their visual content. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles, and given new life as a resource for artists, writers, cultural archeologists, and other interested parties. Works in the collection are freely made available to visitors to use as a departure point for new creative work, and the library provides two scanners and a copier for visitors who find something they'd like to take with them. The Library aims to be a resource for the production of new creative work, to encourage collaboration, and to explore links between the digital and analog, among other worthy endeavors.
The library is generally divided up into three main parts: the main body of the collection, the Primary Collection, which consists of various outdated, obsolete, and otherwise discarded volumes on subjects from psychology to theater design, mathematics, dentistry, plant cultivation and much, much more; the Reference Collection, which brings together creative projects which rely on found sources, including exhibition catalogs, writing and art projects, and reference works on book design and typography. The third part of the collection, the Copyright Collection, addresses the pitfalls and legal issues that artists and writers working with found material may confront, containing works that discuss copyright law for a general audience.
Their recently updated website includes many, many samples of the library's holdings and allows you to browse the collection by volume or by image. I could spend many hours looking through these tantalizing snippets, and am right now planning a trip to the library myself. So what are you waiting for? Registration is happening now, please join us!