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

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

Full event details for our book launch celebration at Page Not Found in The Hague on Thursday, 8 January at 19:00.

We will celebrate the launch of their new minibieb attached to the bookshop and art space, as well as the official launch of “FREE BOOKS”, our new book!

Together with Studio for Immediate Spaces (SIS) from Sandberg Institut, we will reflect on what street libraries (or minibiebs) can be: not just places to drop old books, but small-scale spatial interventions with the power to reshape how we share knowledge in the public sphere. Additionally, SIS will talk about their Space Issues publication series.

The evening includes talks by Papertrail, insights into the making of the book and the minibieb (from walking as research practice to bureaucracy and building), and contributions from SIS co-directors Ludwig Engel & Julian Schubert, alongside participants from SIS. Expect an open conversation on print in a digital world, amateur spatial interventions, walking as research practice, and how artists and designers can activate public space.

Come by to learn more about the infrastructural promise of these peculiar mini libraries!

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

Introducing the portable minibieb – a mobile library for books and other printed matter 🎒🛞

While they have been around for longer, mobile libraries’ history is intertwined with the contemporary street library. They share the same sense of immediacy and locality but operate within different temporalities and tend to feature actively curated contents, instead of random collections of books. First emerging in the middle of the 19th century in the form of single-horse drawn library carriages in the UK and US, as part of a mission to “civilise” rural populations in peripheral areas, mobile libraries have adapted to the dominant modes of transport of specific geographic contexts and time periods.

Our prototype for the portable minibieb seeks to combine the DIY spirit ingrained in contemporary street library culture with a desire to become hypermobile and blend into different contexts and situations. Modelled after some of the most popular carrier vessels used by urban dwellers – the backpack and trolley carry-on suitcase – the portable minibieb moves through the public sphere (almost) seamlessly.

Forthcoming publication! ‼️👀 Free Books: On the Infrastructural Promise of Street Libraries 📚🏠

We are proud to announce the release of our first longform book (with a spine!). Featuring architectural illustrations, scanned images from books found in street libraries, written essays, and more than 200 photographs, “Free Books” explores alternatives to our progressively dysfunctional digital platforms and invites readers to perceive the city anew as they drift through it. 🏗️🏤🏟️🏘️

The book will be available to order on the Papertrail website from early January 2026. More details to follow!

‘The fire has reached the stream. The green corridor is now black’

Less than an hour after we concluded our final visit to the location of the planned Meta hyperscale data centre in Gamonal/Talavera de la Reina, a large bush fire ripped through the landscape.

The night before, a local resident had guided us through the landscape to share his own fears and hopes for this territory. He pointed out how Meta had promised to maintain a ‘green corridor’ between the planned megainfrastructure and the neighbouring industrial estate to soften the destructive impact of the project. Now, he was alerting us via Whatsapp about the arrival of a large fire.

Bush fires are not unusual on this dry land. The last large fire erupted almost exactly one year ago and burned through most of the Southern half of the terrain.



Photo 1: News of the fire spreading via one of Meta’s flagship products
Photo 2: The extent of the fire as seen from above (images via Terrascope and INFOCAM)
Photo 3: Traces of last year’s fire captured during our scoping visit in September 2024
Photo 4: Remnants of last year’s fire in the ‘green corridor’
Photo 5: One of the last photographs of the ‘green corridor’ before the fire

Made possible by the Creative Industries Fund NL

#fieldresearch #datacenter #bushfire #publishing #dryclouds

Overpowered by the sun

We intended to produce a series of cyanotype photographs as a low-tech method to document the more-than-human elements shaping the landscape, so we brought a printing kit with us from the Netherlands. As relative beginners with this technique, we diligently followed the instructions provided by the Dutch maker of the kit.

When developing our initial print run, all rinsed papers turned almost solid blue. Almost all of the intricate shapes and textures from the materials we had placed on the photosensitive paper had vanished. The power of the midday sun had fully exposed the entire paper.

Driven by an urge to find out what could have caused this failure, we gave it another try on the following day. This time, the prints turned out perfectly! The secret? Reducing the exposure time to less than 30% of the length indicated in the instructions. The Spanish sun was simply too powerful for Dutch standards.

In places where (natural) clouds are rare and the sun intensity is exceptionally high, mega computing infrastructures are faced with conflicting conditions. While an abundance of sunshine brings with it a significant potential for renewable energy generation through solar or wind power, it also produces tremendous heat and drought, which can make a territory unliveable over time; especially if the already scarce water resources are further exploited to provide vital cooling for overheated computer chips.

Do you ever think of the sun when you are working in the Cloud?

Made possible by the Creative Industries Fund NL

#cyanotype #sunprinting #solarenergy #fieldresearch #creativeresearch #datacenter #snakeoil

Your Cloud Is Drying My River

By 2030, global demand for fresh water could outstrip supply by more than 40%. Data centres rely heavily on drinking water for cooling down their overheated processing units, especially when it gets hot outside. In Talavera de la Reina, where temperatures regularly exceed 40 degrees and there is virtually no rainfall over the summer, Meta’s planned data centre is projected to use 500 million litres of drinking water per year.

The Tajo river and its tributaries provide a lifeline for local farmers and residents in one of Spain’s driest regions. Activists groups have found different ways of defending their precious rivers from overuse and pollution.

‘Verdébora’, a local environmental group, organises monthly river cleanup activities. Inspired by the Swedish ‘plogging’ movement, volunteers combine physical exercise with care for nature. This Saturday, the group collected over 700 kg of trash in less than 2 hours.

‘Tu Nube Seca Mi Rio’ @tunubesecamirio@masto.es (Your Cloud is Drying My River), a collective of digital and environmental rights activists, tackles the issue higher upstream. They question the construction of data centres in Spain’s dry areas through campaigning and awareness raising activities that pierce through the false promises and socio-environmental impacts of this rapidly growing industry.

Can we really afford to quench the Cloud‘s thirst with so much precious drinking water?

Photos 1,3: River clean-up with Verdébora
Photos 2: Tajo river further downstream
Photo 4: Visit to foreseen data centre location with Tu Nube Seca Mi Rio. The map is foretelling the fate of the landscape.

Made possible by the Creative Industries Fund NL

#rivercleanup #tunubesecamirio #datacenter #selfpublishing #creativeresearch