GLITTERING SCRIVENER

- Lori Nix, The Library, 2007, Photograph of diorama, from The City Series.

Oh, a post-apocalyptic library diorama. There could likely be nothing more pleasing to me than the image of trees growing out of the paper house of a library. And it’s a diorama. Which makes it even more wonderful and terrible. 

It reminds me of this photo, of the amazing old “Main Building” of the Public Library of Cincinnatti, taken in 1874. The building seen below closed in 1955.

The library had an tremendous atrium, of which Harper’s Weekly said 

“The first impression made upon the mind on entering this hall is the immense capacity for storing books in its five tiers of alcoves, and then the eye is attracted and gratified by its graceful and carefully studied architecture…”

According to John Fleischman’s history of the building, the Public Library of Cincinnati bought a building intended to be an opera house, and transformed it into a library with “five tiers of cast iron book alcoves that could house over 200,000 volumes.”

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See also: Pulp Romance; Tiny Houses On Shelves; Ofra Lapid’s Collapsing Houses; Santiago Caruso’s Skull Wunderkammern; Jan Fabre’s Heaven of Delight  (Apparently, I really like collisions of architecture and nature.  And large things on small shelves.)