So, a theater group staged a
performance/reading at the NY Public Library's periodical room: a mash-up of Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Beyond the performance, I love the way the library completely dove into the happening:
Visitors wandered in and out, some fascinated, others apparently dumbfounded. No, they couldn’t get the July 1947 issue of National Geographic just now, and, sorry, but Vol. XXXIV of The Journal of English and Germanic Philology would have to wait too. There was a stack of recent copies of The Washington Post at one end of the counter, but an actor’s drink was on top of it. A severe-seeming woman in a black dress talking on the phone looked as if she might be a librarian but turned out to be, oops, another one of the actors, speaking Hemingwayese: “The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta.”
No help at the periodical room’s computer terminals: they were displaying not the catalog but a version of the script that the actors were reciting, and if you looked up at the wall, a projection of the text of all three novels was quickly scrolling by.
Libraries as a place to not just supplement experience, but to provide it.
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