FREE BOOKS opens with almost 50 architectural oblique drawings of minibiebs to introduce readers to the subject of inquiry. 🖊️📐

Anti-perspectival visual representations have been used for more than two thousand years across various cultures, epochs and fields. They remain popular to this date in technical drawing applications, as well as for world-building in retro (inspired) video games. Relying on parallel projection, this style of illustration produces a scaled down replica of the subject of inquiry. Thereby, it preserves its actual measurements and avoiding the distortions inherent to a more “realistic” one-point perspective.

By staging street libraries and their immediate surroundings in this pared-down style, the book allows readers to take in the core functional and architectural characteristics that define these structures in an idealised setting. Taken together, the illustrations, which are stitched together along a consistent grounding line, act as a diorama that allows readers to appreciate the full diversity and richness of this infrastructural phenomenon. From a functional perspective, these pages also act as an elongated table of contents for the subsequent presentation of the full typology of minibiebs.

#architecturaldrawing #illustration #minibieb #littlefreelibrary #selfpublishing

📚 OUT NOW: B.001: FREE BOOKS – On the Infrastructural Promise of Street Libraries 📚

Order a copy via our webshop 🛒 (https://papertrail.world/freebooks/) or arrange a local pickup in The Hague via DM.

Street libraries, also known as minibiebs, are appearing increasingly on squares, street corners, and along house facades in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe. While they may be regarded by some as isolated neighbourhood facilities that activate dumping old books, a closer look at their architectural and infrastructural qualities reveals their potential to inspire radically different informational futures.

In “FREE BOOKS: On the Infrastructural Promise of Street Libraries”, graphic designer Apsara Flury and researcher Livio Liechti unpack the contemporary street library landscape, along with its historical and cultural significance, by surveying more than 200 instances of the infrastructural phenomenon.

Featuring architectural illustrations, scanned images from books found in street libraries, written essays, and photographs, the book explores alternatives to our progressively dysfunctional digital platforms and invites readers to perceive the city anew as they drift through it.

#newbook #selfpublishing #minibieb #freelittlelibrary #infrastructure

Taking FREE BOOKS on some house visits 🏠🐈‍⬛👋

When we started collecting and investigating the minibieb landscape, we quickly came to realise that one design is particularly popular. More often than not, their exterior form resembles the idiosyncratic shape of a child’s drawing of a detached house. As we expanded our research, we increasingly encountered other common architectures and shared characteristics, which inspired the definition of a typology of 12 distinct minibieb categories that structure the book. But the house shape remains by far the most popular one, especially in the Netherlands.

#minibieb #streetlibrary #freelittlelibrary #book #publishing #selfpublishing

UPDATE: This event has been postponed due to winter weather uncertainty. New date TBC

📚📚📚Book launch of FREE BOOKS: On the Infrastructural Promise of Street Libraries with special guests Studio for Immediate Spaces on Thursday, 8 January at 19:00 at Page Not Found in Den Haag 📚📚📚

We are excited to invite everyone to join us for the celebratory launch of our first longform publication. Together with our guests and hosts, we will discuss the infrastructural significance of street libraries for knowledge sharing and cultural production in the public sphere and share insights into our research and book making process. 🏠🔍📑

A special surprise will also be unveiled during the event 👀

#booklaunch #publishing #streetlibrary #minibieb #publicspace