A Free Library Made Out of Books Could Be Coming to the Bay Area

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Lovers of old-book-smell are in for a treat: The good people at the new Bay Area Book Festival have plans to make a library with walls made of books.

The festival received over 50,000 books from the Internet Archive last year, and is hoping to make something substantial with them. With the help of FLUX Foundation, they plan to convert the tomes into plaza-like space. The project has been dubbed Lacuna and will hopefully be unveiled this June during the festival at MLK Civic Center Park. The whole thing will cost about $10,000, so they are looking for help with a Kickstarter. 

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They explain the appeal of a library made of books on the site:

Unlike a library, the very walls of Lacuna are created from books, which means that when people remove a book from a shelf, the structure will change and morph as new gaps in the book brickwork are exposed.  This is where the magic of Lacuna happens: Lacuna becomes a reflection of the community who interacts with it.

Visitors are welcome to take their books home with them, so the structure will change drastically as people interact with it. The creators hope that installation will get readers excited and provide another layer of interactions with the books.

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The building will be round and roughly 8 feet in diameter. The fountain at the center of the park will be used as a foundation and benches will be built around it for convenient sitting space. The walls will be separated into 12 alcoves, each made of around 3500 books. For the ceiling, guy-wires lined with pages from books will meet at the top. When visitors enter the space, they will presumably feel like they’re wedged in the pages of a book.

[h/t: CityLab.com]