One of the most beautiful, and awe-inspiring aspects of our project, is, in fact
YOU. Yes.
You.
You with your upturned mother-starched collar, windswept, star-eyed gaze.
You with your wet umbrella which you shake like a dog’s longhaired coat when you enter this cafe after a Hong Kong monsoon outpour.
You in your hello kitty pajamas.
You and your sneaky cigar behind the office bikeshed. We’ve met a lot of
You. An approximation would leave us somewhere amongst the thousands, of
you, per year, who turn up sometimes just to stare: At us, in our librarian suit, womanning that day’s selection of library books. Some of
you, often appearing Japanese and on holiday, like to take photographs. Your camera flash momentarily blinds us, which sometimes leaves us worried that one day we’ll miss the
Library Book Thief Posing As A Camera-Clad Japanese Tourist. This
you we’ve yet, fortunately, to meet. Some of
you offer us tasty food like home-baked lemon meringue pie. Or a one kilo packet of dried cous cous. Or take-out from the rather good pizza joint between Mission and Valencia in San Francisco. Yet more of
you, just like us, in fact, want to communicate. In celebration of all the wonderful (and weird) communiques that
you have: hand delivered to us at the library; left taped on doors where we library-operate; dropped in the post to us when you’ve managed to locate a temporary postal address; concealed in small metal lozenge tins and given to someone to give to us . . . we provide a selection here, of just how
you and
us have reached out to each other and, somehow, quite magically, touched.
1.
1. Message left at Frankenart Mart gallery, San Francisco, 2007
2.
2. Message found taped to the door of the bookshop Sterre Der Zee in Amsterdam, 2008
3.
3. Message typed and hand-delivered to the Library at the Screibmaschinen Café, Leipzig, 2008
4.
4. Message hand-delivered to the Library at the Marsh Theatre café, San Francisco, 2007
5.
5. Postcard received in San Francisco from Seattle, 2007
6.
6. Letter received in San Francisco, 2007
7.
7. Message hand-delivered to the Library at the Vancouver Librarian Picket Line, Vancouver Central Library strike, Vancouver BC, 2007
8.
8. Note left at Frankenart Mart gallery in San Francisco, 2007
9.
9. Message hand-delivered to the Library at the Marsh Theatre café, San Francisco, 2008