Re: Reanimation Library

The Library hosted "Dewey's Nightmare," seven blindfolded playwrights pick seven random volumes, and from them write seven plays in eleven days.

The Minneapolis City Pages has an interesting article about the Reanimation Library in Brooklyn.

The Reanimation Library, a 600-book collection assembled by Indie-rock drummer and library-school graduate Andrew Beccone, uses the LC Classification, but is itself extremely hard to classify. Is it a library? An art project? Playful? Serious? Ironic? Kitsch?

The home page puts it simply:

"The Reanimation Library is a small, independent library based in Brooklyn. It is a collection of books that have fallen out of mainstream circulation. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles across the country and given new life as resource material for artists, writers, and other cultural archeologists."

A quote by playwright Eric Sanders, who directed the Dewey's Nightmare project (see photo), appealed to me greatly:

"There has been a sort of junk shop curiosity movement over the last 10 years in indie culture--with things like Found Magazine--and I think there is a misconception that Beccone is just taking random trash and calling it a collection, but he's vetting everything and treating his library like its the rare books collection at Harvard."

Although a friend of LibraryThing, Beccone went with his own library catalog, a simple, but elegant title list, built into the RA website—itself a work of art. That's too bad. It'd be interesting to see how members' libraries stacked up against the RA collection. (I recognize quite a few of the books from my parents' house.) And it'd be great to get the covers on LibraryThing.

Check out the article. Our congratulations to Beccone for his unique accomplishment.