Garden Leeszaal

Special Issue XIX

Public libraries are more than just access points to knowledge. They are social sites where readers cross over while reading together, annotating, organising and structuring. A book could be bound at the spine, or an electronic file gathered together with digital binding. A library could be an accumulated stack of printed books, a modular collection of software packages, a method of distributing e-books, a writing machine.

In the Special Issue 19, How do we library that? or alternatively Garden Leeszaal, we started re-considering the word “library” as a verb; actions that sustains the production, collection and distribution of texts. A dive into the understanding structure of libraries as systems of producing knowledge; unpacking classification as a process that (un)names, distinguishes, excludes, displaces, and organizes life. From the library to the section to the shelf to the book to the page to the text. The zooming in and zooming out process. The library as a plain text.

Like community gardens, libraries are about tenderness and approachability. However, does every book and each person feel welcome in these spaces? Publications are empty leaves if there is no one to read them. Libraries are soulless storage rooms if there is no one to visit them. People give meaning to libraries and publications alike. People are the reason for their existence. People tend to cultivate plants. Audiences tend to foster content. The public tends to enrich the context. Libraries as complex social infrastructures.

The release of the Special Issue 19 was a momentary snapshot of the current state of a library seen through the metaphor of gardening; pruning, gleaning, growing, grafting and harvesting. Garden Leeszaal is an open conversation; a collective writing tool, a cooperative collage and an archive. We asked everyone to think of the library as a garden. For us, being a gardener means caring; caring for the people and books that form this space.

During the collective moment in Leeszaal people started diving into recycle bins, grabbing books, tearing pages apart, drawing, pen plotting, weaving words together, cutting words, removing words, overwriting, printing, and scanning. It was magical having an object in the end. A whole book was made by all of us that evening. Stations, machines, a cloud of cards, a sleeve that warms up THE BOOK.

Irmak’s and Aglaia’s Pruning station, where people edited punctuation and text, scanned it then printed it with a dot matrix.
Cloud of cards with instructions to be performed on the books
The final book produced that evening, the cover was made from hand-stiched covers of discarded books.
Page of the final book containing scans of the edited book, an instruction card, a pen-plotted bookmark with a quote from the book and a sprig of mint.
Page of the final book containing scans of a drawn on book, an instruction card and a pen-plotted bookmark with a quote from the book.
Page of the final book containing scans of edited books, a hand and coins.
Page of the second edition, containing scans of edited books and instruction cards.
The second edition of the final book from the event.
People choosing books from the discarded books bins, behind the instructions cards cloud.
Part of the Pruning process, the editing of a book page.
Bin of discarded books from Leeszal.
The binding of the scans into the final book at the end of the evening.