After spending a year interacting with patrons and staff at the Seattle Public Library I created a performance and a Special Collection of circulating books including 1000 titles that had not left the building in more than ten years. I asked library patrons and staff to check a book out. Introduce it to the other books in your life.
Special Collection: one. two, three, four (60 sec. video), five (60 sec. video), six, seven, eight.
Jill worked at the King County branch located inside the Juvenile Detention Center in Seattle. She discovered that kids enjoyed Cirque du Freak, a series of novels about a vampire underworld. The Detention Center kids, locked up alone in their cells each night, read two and three volumes of the series at a time. Unfortunately the last volume of the 12 books series had not yet been published.
A patron, upset by having to stop at volume 11, ripped the book into pieces. Jill put the pieces into an envelop along with a letter to the author, telling him how much the kids loved his work. He wrote back, saying he was planning a book tour and had added the Detention Center to his list of stops. Hearing this news from Jill, a patron was so excited that she said, "I want to shake his hand. If I'm released before he comes, I'll go get myself arrested so I can be there."