THE BOOK VILLAGE MANIFESTO We would like to open a summer poetry school in our magic hills on the Buffalo River, the Oz branch of the New Orleans School for the Imagination (NOSI). We thought about building cabins from books. Vincent Cellucci told us that he knows how to get a ton of books cheaply rom an outfit that sells books by weight. This kicked off a memory: in 1990 I saw an art exhibit about the demise of commie states; the centerpiece was a dry well made from thousands of hardback copies of unread books by Lenin, Stalin, and Co. The artist had used mirrors at the bottom of the well to multiply the books to infinity, which is just about how many were produced and never read for all those grim decades of boring prose. I can’t remember the artist’s name, but I would like to ask our readers how might one use books as bricks to build a small house? What sort of binding agent might we use? How do we keep humidity out? Is it possible to build a house out of books so that the spines can be seen from various inside/outside places? Architects, masons, and cement connoisseurs, can you advise us? As I said, we can get books (bricks) cheap, and while it is true that most of these tons of books were produced, warehoused, and never-read, some of them were best-sellers in their day and were printed by the millions before they were forgotten. Our project is not like Larry MacMurtry’s Book City in Texas, or Haye-on=Wye in Wales, where they sell books. We want to make idiosyncratic (interesting) structures from books, places where students of poetry could live over the summer. We envision about twelve cabins built around a common ground, and one long building for a kitchen, dining room, and, ironically, a library. In the library books will be free to move about, obviously, while their fellow books are imprisoned in the walls. This will not, hopefully again, be anything but an esthetic judgement. There are five hundred years of books out there just crying out to be used for something, anything, And here we are, an answer to their prayers. The decision as to which books will be immured and which ones will be “free” will be made automatically by the people who send (or sell) them to us. We are certain that these will be unwanted books: millions of the aforementioned tracts by ideologues, topical tomes that lost relevance on pub day, and the craven offerings of commercial weasels. Even of these materials we will use only copies, so if anyone is left with a craving for, let’s say, Stalin’s edicts on poetry and genetics, herm will find them. We won’t consume all of the world’s books, even if that desideratum calls to us from deep within vanished forests. The Buffalo River Book Village will be only an intermediary stage for forests to recall themselves into the world. The central building of our circular village will be The Remainder House, a structure built from books donated by the hundreds of authors we know who bought their books back from publishers at cost, and now have no idea what to do with them. Since launching this idea-wish-manifesto, we have received a great deal of response on Andrei Codrescu’s Facebook page. Builders, architects, and writers have responded with enthusiasm. We have had inquiries from financiers. What started off a bit offhand is now threatening to become real. We have 100 acres of wilderness awaiting its lost kin of the forest. If you can help us, write directly to:
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or to Codrescu on Facebook. The picture on the left is the editor’s new book. (It will be free until immured).
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