New shelves installed!

First and foremost we owe profuse thanks to our wonderful intern Freya Channing. Without Freya's energy, we would have taken much longer to get off our duffs and finish shelving everything that was waiting to be shelved, as of April. That's done. Then last week, the new shelves were installed! Check them out. Again with Freya's help, we shelved all of the ephemera boxes that were destined for new homes on the shelves. In one fell swoop, the ephemera collection has been made tremendously more orderly, sensible, and accessible. We invite everyone who has ever taken a cursory glance through a gray box to return and dive in: Maps, pamphlets, blueprints, photos, screeds, rare gov docs, unpublished papers, drive-in menus, and much more, await those who push beyond the covers, beyond the book. Deep into the library. —MSP

Ready for new shelves!

Ever seen the back of the room empty before?

Five more years! New shelves!

The past couple of weeks have seen great changes set in motion around the library. First, we obtained a lease renewal that will keep us in our digs at 8th and Folsom through the autumn of 2013! Five more years! We are thrilled with this news.

The lease renewal means that we are going to proceed with a modest expansion of our shelf space and a moderate rearrangement of our holdings. On Tuesday, May 20, new shelves will be built in the back portion of the room against both the left and right walls. Only the back wall with the windows will remain shelfless. We will then, starting on Wednesday, begin relocating all of the "gray boxes" (the ephemera boxes) onto the new shelves. This represents something of a departure from our original intention to keep all print media types co-housed by subject. However our ephemera collection has grown to over 500 boxes in the four years since we opened. At this scale, it became progressively impractical to co-house them with the books, maps, and periodicals on the shelves. As regular visitors well know, the gray boxes currently mostly sit on the floor in Row One, absent of any organizing principle whatsoever. Now they will be alphabetized and easily retrievable. Wednesday visitors will see the project in motion. -- MSP

Murder Can Be Fun library blog

Murder Can Be Fun now has a blog. The genre-bending, page-turning zine of evil fun has been written and published for two decades by our associate John Marr. Mr. Marr's library of true crime and mystery is a marvel of independent librarianship, and now the library is developing a public face in the form of this blog. Fantastic. -- MSP

Maker Faire report

We had a terrific time at the Maker Faire this weekend. It was an eye-popping blitz of robots, crafts, kinetic sculpture, re-engineering events, open-source workshops and tesla coil sparks. And much more. Too much to describe. Especially since we spent most of our time at our own booth. We were graced by the organizers with three couches to furnish our reading room, making ours the softest and most comfortable exhibit in the faire. People liked the books, too. The colorful covers of old issues of Popular Mechanix and Craftwork and Science and Mechanics drew people right over, and then they picked up volumes to read and settled in to the couches. We also exhibited the digitized flip-book of Amateur Work from 1902 and 1903. A couple of people read Repair Men May Gyp You all the way through. Hundreds of people dropped by our table over the weekend, and over a hundred settled in to read and signed the guest book. We posted photo sets of our faire experience on flickr at both http://www.flickr.com/photos/footage and http://www.flickr.com/photos/alcids. -- MSP