31 January 2006; Sweden!

The Swedes have discovered the Reanimation Library. I wish I knew what they were saying about our Ranganathan pins, but I was only able to translate a little bit of the entry. If anybody can translate this for me, I'll send them a free pin.

Yesterday Amy Schofield and Yvette Cortes of the Adam & Sophie Gimbel Library at the Parsons School of Design paid a visit to the Library. It was a pleasure and a treat to host fellow librarians and share the collection with such receptive and knowledgeable guests. Visits to the Reanimation Library are easy to arrange. If you are interested in one, just send an email and we'll set it up.

Last Wednesday, Kate Dundon and I met up in Greenpoint for a search and rescue operation. We got some good stuff including this insane multi-language chess book filled with alpha-numeric chess game transcriptions. Or at least that's my best guess as to what it contains. I can't read it. Maybe its Swedish. More likely its math.

22 January 2006; Stop all the downloading.

Hi. My computer is on the fritz. It keeps on making terrible noises and freezing up and giving me horrifying messages. I'm going to send it away to be fixed, so there might be a brief hiatus of activity on the News page.

17 January 2006; Thank you.

I just wanted to say a quick thank you to everyone who has contacted me over the past few days. The response has been overwhelming. It has been incredible to receive so many messages of encouragement and offers to collaborate. The launch of the new site has given me a whole lot of momentum which should keep me busy and inspired for the foreseeable future.

Tomorrow morning I am going to meet with Deirdre Lawrence, the head of the Brooklyn Museum Library to take a look at some of their discards. Later in the day I will be checking out a studio space for a possible relocation of the Library out of my apartment, and tomorrow night is Intern Night; Kate Dundon will be here to help me do some more work.

I was also contacted by Megan Prelinger, Co-Principal of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco. She offered her congrats and also turned me on to their new blog. You should check it out.

12 January 2006; Welcome to the new site!

Here it is! Version 2.0 of the Reanimation Library's website. It has been in development since June. It has taken me much longer than I had anticipated, but I hope that you will agree that it is much improved. There are two new sections, Participate and Merchandise, so that interested individuals can now help develop the library and also buy some fancy goods to show their support. In addition, this News section will now be updated regularly to keep people abreast of the Library's activities. In the future, these updates will be available as an RSS feed.

2005 was a great year for the Reanimation Library. The site went up in May right before Rachel and I attended the ARLIS-SC Artists' Book Conference in Los Angeles. Aside from witnessing one of the strangest keynote speeches ever, courtesy of Raymond Pettibon, I also met some great people who are now interested in and aware of the Library. Shortly after the site went live, people began contacting me through it, which has led to some wonderful people and opportunities:

This summer, my friend Jen Bervin asked me to become a contributing editor to jubilat, a journal of contemporary American poetry. I will be contributing images from the Reanimation Library starting with the next issue.

I have been up to Harlem a few times to sort through the archive of Edward Applewhite, a brilliant and eccentric associate of Buckminster Fuller. While much of his material is not applicable to the Library's collection, there have definitely been some scores, including an amazing Government Document from the 50's detailing the proceedings of a House Committee hearing on extraterrestrial life! It includes one fantastic image demonstrating the advantages of 6-legged locomotion. Wow! Imagine the fantasy art our government could be creating right now if we weren't bogged down in this war on terror.

In November, I spoke to Lise Friedman's class, Performance on the Page, at NYU's Gallatin School. Lise contacted me after hearing about the Library from a former student of hers and asked me if I would be willing to come and speak with her students about the project. It was a great experience to speak to such a smart group of students who asked some wonderful questions. I even got my first intern out of the deal! I'm planning on putting up a page of Reanimation Library interns, so soon you should know more about Kate Dundon.

Also in November, I was contacted by Christian Hawkey, a professor of creative writing at Pratt, whom I had met a few weeks earlier. He is interested in using the Library to develop some assignments for his class. The holidays took over our lives before we were able to get together, but we are planning a meeting in the near future. I encourage other teachers to contact me if they are interested in this sort of collaboration.

Over the course of the year I acquired some great books when I hit thrift stores on trips to New Orleans, upstate New York, Boston, Nashville, and Albuquerque. I found some great ones right here in the neighborhood as well, including an amazing French urban planning booklet from 1965, which was laying in a cardboard box on the sidewalk! Friends and family came through with lots of nice donations, pushing the collection to almost 300 items!

So things got rolling pretty well in 2005 and I'm looking to an even better 2006. Please contact me if you have the desire to help out in any way, or if you just want to share some thoughts.