The Bristol Art Library (TBAL) is an art and performance project created in 1998 by the British artist Annabel Other. It consists of handmade books in a library the size of a suitcase.
History The project was devised as a protest at the closure of the original Bristol Art Library."Library and Information News at Exeter", The Line, issue 10, June 2000, University of Exeter.Play 'shop' with library collection at St Ives festival, Western Morning News, Plymouth, August 26, 1999 The library consists of handmade identically-bound books on a wide range of subjects produced by individual contributors from all areas of the arts and sciences, each catalogued according to the Dewey Decimal System. The books are contained within a small wooden cabinet and made available when Other "performs" the library in the guise of the Head Librarian. Although TBAL is primarily an artistic endeavour, it borrows the rhetoric of, and operates as a public institution with affiliations to official library organisations worldwide. Readers must fill in appropriate application forms and adhere to strict library rules, whereupon the books can be read using a reader's ticket whenever the library is open for lending.
Membership is free. Friends of The Bristol Art Library (FOTBAL) can sit on a special cushion when reading books and receive the library's internal newsletter. Assistant librarians attend training sessions led by the Head Librarian, including book-stamping and shushing techniques. TBAL has a gift shop selling tea towels, bookmarks, badges, and postcards. The library travels from venue to venue in a hand-pulled red shopping trolley.
The Bristol Art Library officially opened its doors in New York at Printed Matter, Inc in 1998. It lent its first book to an air hostess during the flight from London to New York. Since then, TBAL's interdisciplinary collection has toured worldwide to over 200 venues and events including Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Jurassic Technology, Harvard University, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, De La Warr Pavilion, Glastonbury Festival,Poetry & Words at Glastonbury (archive) " Retrieved 6 December 2016. Hay Festival, WOMAD, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Tate St Ives,Tate St.Ives, 2 November 2018 Retrieved 13 November 2018. and toured extensively in the USA, Poland, and Japan. It has a growing membership of over 12,000 and houses in excess of 250 books.
References
External links The Head Librarian − Channel 4 short-film about The Bristol Art Library Review of The Bristol Art Library The Bristol Art Library Homepage Performance Research − On Libraries