Sneaking Zines into the Library

I was alerted to a wonderful piece of reporting by a friend recently. Inside a hollow library book, a secret library by Tori Marlan was published by Capital Daily, which appears to be an online newspaper published in Victoria, British Columbia. The Capital Daily is self-described as “The West Coast’s premier independent news startup. We are your source for proprietary, longform, and investigative stories and analysis.” It’s a very interesting site; it’s very local like a newspaper, covering typical newspaper topics like business, housing and transportation. I don’t see a category for crime, but crime gets written about. (Tori Marlen wrote a compelling dissection of a how an American conman stole a fancy British Colombian hotel.)

The basic story is this: a librarian Devon Tatton at the Greater Victoria Public Library discovered a book called Handpicked Tours of North America: A Motorist’s Guide to Scenic Routes and Fascinating Places in Canada and the USA had been hollowed out by carving out a rectangular hole in the pages and stuffed it with zines. She found this when zines fell out of the book as she was straightening shelves. Then she discovered something amazing.

The inside cover of Handpicked Tours had a handwritten message where a bookplate typically would go. Bearing the ransom-note-like appearance of having been cut up and reassembled, it offered congratulations —“you just found the ‘central branch’ Book and Zine TRADING Library!”— and instructions: “Be sure to leave something if you take something so the library stays well stocked!” 

Marlen does some reporting and eventually discovers that the zine library within an actual library has been there for a long time. She eventually find Simon Frankson who established the zine library in 2015. They cased the library and decided that Canadian Geography would be a good section of the library to hide a book. They searched the 2nd hand shops around town until they found a book that was both the right subject matter and the right size. They carved out the space within the book, put a fake call number on the spine, and snuck it into the library with a selection of zines by Frankson and people they knew. They had abandoned the project after a time, but left the altered book on the library shelves.

This photo is from the article and is used without permission. But I wanted to show how the hollowed out book looked.

One thing that really appealed to me as a long-time comics fan who is able to opine on the stylistic quirks of quite mundane super-hero artists like Sal Buscema and Gil Kane. Marlen discovers a local zine artist whose style of drawing noses is similar to the way noses were drawn in one of the zines in the zine library. Tracking down the artist, Marlen is finally put in contact with Simon Frankson.

In the Borges story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, a group of renegade book collectors in Argentina and Brazil start to alter books by secretly adding pages to old encyclopedias having to do with a world called Tlön. The existence of Tlön and its unique history and languages are therefore subtly introduced into our world. The existence of the ‘central branch’ Book and Zine TRADING Library feels like a real-life “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”.

One thing that is great about this story, a story that involved sneaky guerrilla action, is that no one was hurt by the zine library; no one is angry about what happened. Even the librarians at the Greater Victoria Public Library feel a sense of pride that this thing happened at their library and feel compelled to keep the no-longer-secret zine library going.

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