Toronto Zine Library

www.torontozinelibrary.org

292 Brunswick Avenue (second floor of the Tranzac Club)

I went and visited the Toronto Zine Library while I was in Toronto over the summer. It was cool to see another zine library, as I don't think I'd been in one since I left Halifax last year (get it together Vancouver!).

To be honest, it was so long ago I barely remember much of it, though I did get to go to Zine Dream in the Tranzac Club (in the same building). It was a kind of neat event, but it was filled with people selling art prints and expensive art zines and stuff I'm not that into. I'm not opposed to people making that sort of thing, I'm just not that interested in buying/reading them.

I did get to meet the creator of Gender Fuck What, which was neat. I got their new zine though, so look out for a review of that at some point on 365 Zines a Year. I also got some rad zines about zine libraries, and I'll have a list about those on zinelibraries.info soon(ish).

Chicago Public Library: Harold Washington Library Center

Harold Washington Library Center
400 S. State Street

Okay, so I wrote a bunch of shit about the Chicago Public Library, but I'm going to be more positive for a couple of posts. The Harold Washington branch is the big downtown library in Chicago, and while it has many of the problems I discussed in the other posts, I'm going to talk about some cool things.

Actually, first one more bad thing. There's a separate Young Adult section at this library, which is neat. What isn't neat is that _all_ of the YA books and material are there, and it's hours are considerably shorter than the rest of the library. The Library is open 9-9 on many days, while the YA section is only open from 1-8pm. Great!

 

Anyway, on to some good things. There's some neat architecture/sculpture outside.

 

More in the "weird' section, they have a huge card catalogue for music scores that hasn't been updated in almost 20 years. They also have loads of vinyl records that you can borrow!

 

I honestly barely remember how these are even used.

 

They also had a huuuggee section of clippings from magazines and stuff. It was really weird, and what was kind of weirder was that it was still being updated. While it was really neat, it was also weirdly useless as there was no note as to where any of the clippings came from originally. Sure that's an awesome picture of a 17th century fashion, but where did it come from? I have no idea. Unfortunately I didn't take any photos of the actual clippings.

There was also a music listening room where I think you could listen to records and stuff if you gave them to the staff to put into bizarre machines inaccessible to patrons, multiple (strangely un-sound proofed) piano practice rooms (two of which were in use), and nobody around.

There were even less people on the next floor up, which had offices, and weird empty corridors and rooms. It was almost like exploring some abandoned location in Bioshock or some other video game.

This was in the lobby of the library. America, you are weird. Putting a flag on the ground is bad, but putting it into a box where people can throw old batteries and garbage on top of it is fine? I will never understand.