To join this activity, email me at [email protected].
The activity’s Curatorial Guild (ie. its participants!) will have a Shadow Summit on **Saturday, April 9th @ 3:00pm, Kingston Frontenac Public Library, 130 Johnson Street, Meeting Room #3.
Current members of this Activity’s Curatorial Guild: Elyse Longair, Brandon Hocura + Neven Lochhead.**
A first and separate ‘Round’ of this activity was offered from March 11 - April 10.
Below you will find descriptions of the Shadow Library’s various collections, which exist here in virtual, physical and imaginary space. The collections below are cared for, developed and thickened by an evolving guild of Shadow Librarians. Monthly Shadow Summits indoctrinate and shed guild members.
PDF Collection
The PDF Collection of the Shadow Library is ever growing, with guild members continuously adding to its contents from Round to Round to Round. Its texts oscillate between Active, Inactive and Haunted statuses. An Active PDF means that a minimum of three Shadow Librarians are each in possession of identical copies of a specific PDF, and are actively annotating / thickening / haunting these PDFs, working synchronously but independent of one another. After this initial process of annotating unfolds, and when a minimum of three altered copies of an identical PDF have been returned to the closet in the Etherington House, our patented process of PDF “Swarmation” **occurs. During this step, all altered PDFs are overlaid on top of one another digitally, creating a palimpsest of the group’s marginalia, revealing dissonant and harmonious layers of alteration made by Shadow Librarians upon text. An example of this method can be seen here.
Printed copies of the resulting “Swarmations” are distributed to the Shadow Librarians who have participated in thickening the texts, and are later made public in the Etherington House. This cumulative positioning of an altered PDF in the house officially signals its entry into a Haunted status. Any Inactive or Haunted PDF can be made Active by a Shadow Librarian by assembling a minimum of three Shadow Librarians around a chosen text, and by subsequently distributing a set of identically-printed PDFs to those librarians.
The ever-evolving state of the Shadow Library’s PDF collection can be witnessed below. For digital versions of these PDFs click here:
PDF Collection (last updated April 26)
Book + Object Collection
The Shadow Library’s Book + Object Collection is a form of curatorship does not just care for rare books and objects, but also produces them. Books + Objects that pass through the Shadow Library’s collection accumulate their rarity due to the way in which they are handled and circulated by our librarians. Each Book or Object arrives with an Inactive status. ****Entry into an Active status occurs when a minimum of three librarians agree to carry out the guild-approved process of “Marginalia Relay” around a given text. The Marginalia Relay begins when a Book or Object is picked up from the Etherington House closet by a Shadow Librarian (or shipped to a remote Librarian / Wanderer). This first Shadow Librarian spends time annotating / thickening / haunting its contents, and then drops it back off in the closet (or ships it to the next librarian in the relay). From there, a second Shadow Librarian handles this new Active Book or Object, carries out their own haunting, and returns it to the closet (or ships), continuing the process for a third Shadow Librarian. When a minimum of three Shadow Librarians have sequentially handled an Active Book or Object and have returned it to the closet, that Book or Objects enters officially into a Haunted status and is subsequently placed in the house where it roams freely.
Book + Object Collection (last updated April 26)
Chirograph Collection
At the time of writing this description, the Shadow Library’s [Chirograph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirograph#:~:text=A chirograph is a medieval,through to separate the parts.) Collection is not yet in existence, with its mechanics remaining largely unknown to our guild. This collection-to-come was initiated by through the proposal of methodology called “Transcription Relay,” (TR) first introduced by guild member Brandon Hocura at the inaugural Shadow Summit on April 9, 2022. Different from “Marginalia Relay,” TR is TRanslation-propelled. Shadow Librarians engaging in generating collective Chirographs go beyond annotating or adding to a central document. Instead, librarians will conduct full-scale transpositions and mutations of a given text at a structural level. This will be through methods of their own design, but will primarily involve analog or digital acts of “copying” or “translation” which are at this point loosely defined. The risks here to original texts are significant - a text or object that has passed through even a single TR cycle may be fully unrecognisable from its first instance. Due to this danger or recomposition, we cannot at this time confirm whether the resulting Chirographs will be labeled with a Haunted or a Possessed status. Whether our Possessed Chirographs will ultimately enter the Etherington House and join our Haunted texts is up for discussion. We are eagerly pursuing the future of this collection through the practice-based research in our guild.
Chirographs (last updated April 26)