Photography courtesy of the Underground Library

The Underground Library thrives on many contradictory dualities: openness and mystery, transience and immortality, democratization and personalization. But its hairy outgrowths and connotations are bound by an essentially simple desire: to recreate the unique visceral experience that a work of art offers.
     After a successful test-run in May and a first grant from the public-dinner-as-arts-foundation FEAST, the Library has become a kind of asynchronous alternative to the easy and aloof mass-media saturation fostered by The Information Age. It provides this alternative by distributing original hand-bound books, all made in-house by its founders and composed of new multimedia work by its participating artists, to its members. In the cheekily faux-antiquarian parlance adopted for the project, these members, who may gain membership through donations of anywhere between $5 and $1,500 to the Library’s Membership webpage, are called heralds. Each herald is then responsible for passing the book on to others whom the herald believes may take interest in it. After the book has passed between the hands of eleven recipients (due dates are provided by the Library’s founders in the books’ library cards, with recipients’ names to be filled in as it makes its rounds) it is returned to the herald, thence a librarian in her own right. The first book in the first edition is called Forever, Michael. A memoir by Halloween’s Michael Myers, it is available in an edition of seventy-five copies.