Hidden from passerby on Van Brunt Street is a mobile library of motley images and bizarre archival knowledge.
It’s called Reanimation Library, and its towering shelves have over 2,000 discarded books published from the 1930s to the 1970s with titles likes “Procedural Advertising”; “Space Age Fight Fighters”; “The Mystic Art of the Ninja”; “A Study of Splashes”; “Inkblot Perception and Personality”; and “The Sex Life of the Animals.”
“A lot of these books were published within the last 100 years,” said the library’s founder, Andrew Beccone. “But sometimes you feel like you’re entering an alien world.”
(Find more of the titles here).
Beccone is a chill-tempered artist-librarian whose lilt evokes Seth Rogen, but a version that forfeited movie stardom to pick up a Masters in Library and Information Science from Pratt.
When you walk into Reanimation Library, currently ensconced behind Pioneer Books, you’ll find protracting tables, computers, and scanners. The tools are there to encourage visitors to work with the library’s material.
“The books are here for people to use,” Beccone said. “Some of my favorite experiences are when people come in and it dawns on them they can touch the books. Then they take a stack and are here for three hours. That’s cool. I want to encourage that.”
Since 2001, Beccone has collected discarded, authoritative texts on specific subjects illustrated with wild images. (The collection’s striking images were inspiration to the artist Doreen Gardner, who used 35 images from the library as the basis for the tattoos she gave to eight people during an event in the library on April 12 and 13).
On a roadtrip to Nashville, Beccone stumbled on a curious book called “Inside Wood.” It held images of the molecular structures of various types of wood. The possibility of a library that housed curios like this hit him all at once.
He picked up more of these bric-a-brac books from thrift stores and yard sales. Once he had 50, he made the move to establish a library.
Now approaching two decades of existence, Beccone said Reanimation Library has become a sort of travel diary.
The rules for admission into the library are lax. Beccone said he doesn’t necessarily look for library rejects, or books that are out of prints. If the images engage his mind and emotions, if the topic captures a specific slice of culture, and if the introduction to the book is serendipitous, it’s in.
“I won’t really buy a book online because I need to see it, hold it, find out if it’s something I really want. You can’t tell what kind of images are in there online.”
Each book goes through the same adoption process: Beccone stamps the fore edge with a “Reanimation Library” imprint, pencils in a Library of Congress number on the top left corner of the inside book cover, logs it on the library’s website, and slowly scans and uploads each image.
When Beccone places them back on the shelf, they regain the status of relevance; they’re “reanimated,” having made the journey from junkpile back to shelf.
“It’s about bringing these things back that have been thrown away and discarded, and to say there’s life in them if you approach these books in a slightly different angle,” he said.
Many of the images are online, but the joy and potential of the library is definitely diminished by a remote visit. (If you’re lucky during a visit, you’ll see an intern faithfully scanning one of the textbooks page by page).
Reanimation Library texts tend to carry a formal, authoritative town in their (often esoteric) field. Picking up any book, it’s surreal to find that the book still speaks like its the most authoritative source on the subject. Almost against their will, the texts have gone from authoritative to archival.
“I love it when I come across books that are technical in nature,” Beccone said, “but the personality of the author still manages to come out in these little turns of phrase where you’re like wow, how did the editor not catch that one?”
Around Beccone, one quickly learns the classification acronyms–LC for Library of Congress; Dewey for Dewey Decimal System. Beccone is serious about classification. In his view, cataloguing is what distinguishes Reanimation Library from other artist book collections.
“Not to be a library snob, but I don’t actually think they’re libraries,” he said when asked if there are projects similar to Reanimation Library. “I think they’re collections of books….by cataloguing a collection you’re creating all kinds of formal, structural relationships between the books, or you’re using a schema that does that.”
Beconne seems fated to have been a librarian: his mother was a librarian, and he was raised in Minneapolis, one of America’s most bookish cities. Book detractors aren’t part of his purview.
Still, he’s had some memorable encounters with the Fahrenheit 451 set. One guy from Queens come in to bark, “I don’t know why you’re doing this!” then leave.
“I can tell when someone’s not interested, and I just don’t have to say much more about it. People are funny, people are strange.”
Though he’s been running Reanimation Library for nearly two decades, the collection is a constant source of inspiration for Beccone. He has complete control over the shape of the library, yet he has no control over what gets generated from it.
“One of the things that has maintained my interest over the years is that I don’t know what people are going to do with it. When you see someone approach it in a way that is novel or unusual it adds to my understanding of what the library could be, and what it is. There’s kind of a mystery to all libraries. You can never know them entirely.”
Reanimation Library is open Wednesday through Sunday, noon to 6pm through the end of December. Pioneer Books hosts two events related to Reanimation Library in the coming months: June 2 Mimi Onuoha leads “Collections as Algorithms” and on July 22, Susie Ibarra leads a music workshop (“Graphic Scores”) using material from the library.
