Humboldt Park’s Read/ Write Library grows more ambitious.
The Humboldt Park institution has taken an unconventional approach to being a “city library,” and it’s only growing more ambitious.
The day after the presidential election, the Wednesday morning adult ESL class at Wright College Humboldt Park took a field trip, heading south on California Avenue to the Read/ Write Library. The class, consisting largely of women from Mexico and Central America, was working on writing personal stories based on neighborhood photos. Nell Taylor, the Read/ Write’s executive director— and also its founder, head librarian, programming director, and chief ambassador— brought out a pile of books of pictures and poetry and personal essays in both English and Spanish for the students to look through.
None of these books was The House on
Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros’s famous story collection, though that would seem a logical choice, since Cisneros based it on her memories of growing up on Campbell Avenue, just a few blocks away. But the Read/ Write Library doesn’t have a copy of The House on Mango
Street. Unlike most libraries, its goal isn’t to assemble a carefully curated collection of books and periodicals that approximate a cross- section of all human knowledge. Its ambitions are both more humble and more grand.
The Read/ Write library is, instead, a repository of pamphlets, zines, community plans, oral histories, neighborhood newspapers, literary magazines from CPS schools and state prisons, parish- church and settlement- house cookbooks, self- published poetry and novels, and other ephemera that, taken together, tells the story of Chicago by Chicagoans in their own words, not filtered through the perspectives of academics or journalists. Most people read to find connections in the world, but at the Read/ Write Library, those connections are immediate: you may find yourself reading about your own neighborhood, about people you already know.
The Wright students looked through, among other things, Unexpected Chicagoland, a collection of photographs by Camilo José Vergara; exhibition catalogs from the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture; photo zines produced by students at Benito Juarez Community Academy ( one centered around pigeons was especially popular); a chapbook of poetry by Carlos Cortez, De Kansas a Califas
& Back to Chicago; and Gallery Humboldt Park, a zine from the late 80s or early 90s produced by women connected to Association House, a neighborhood nonprofit that provides health and educational services.
“It was interesting to read books from our community,” says Laurina Cervantes, one of the students. She had immigrated to Chicago from Guerrero, Mexico. “We looked at a book from a guy who lived in Pilsen. He was telling about his family. It wasn’t a big book. It was not expensive. It was folded paper. He was telling part of his life, like eating beans every day, how big was his family, the routine of life in the USA. It was like my life. When you’re an immigrant, you don’t think too much about education. You think about working.”
Cervantes hadn’t known about the library before, but she planned to return during winter break and bring her kids.
“To see that the first morning after the election reaffirms that we’re needed and our work matters,” Taylor says.
For t he past year and half, she’d been i n doubt. The Read/ Write Library was undergoing what she described in more optimistic moments as “growing pains.” Several longtime volunteers had left the library for babies and out- of- town jobs, and Taylor had failed to get grants t hat would have supplemented t he donations that form the bulk of the library’s budget. She spent a lot of time going back and forth between between wondering if anyone would care if she closed the library down and feeling like she couldn’t close it because she’d be letting the community down. “If you’re cycling back and forth between such extreme feelings,” she says, “neither is right.”
Taylor is more given to reasonable compromise than to drama. She’s 34 and has the sort of calm, cheerful, how- can- I- help- you demeanor you’d expect f rom a librarian, although she never actually went to library school. She’s tall, with short hair swept to one side, and has a penchant for thrift- store sweaters and dramatically oversize earrings.
As Taylor watched Cervantes and her classmates pore over books and chapbooks, she began to feel better. This was exactly how the library was meant to f unction. The women were seeing that you didn’t have to be a grand and important person to have your words matter enough to be preserved in a library. You could be a Chicago woman practicing your English by writing stories about your life and your neighborhood.
Taylor also began to realize that if people were frightened t hat t heir civil liberties would be taken away, it was even more important in the present moment that the library continue its mission and find new ways of, as Taylor puts it, “making people understand their stories are important and valuable.”
The Read/ Write Library began in the middle of a snowstorm nearly 11 years ago, in February, 2006, at the Mercury Cafe on Chicago Avenue. Taylor had sent out an e- mail to her friends asking if anyone would be interested in meeting to discuss a community library. One of those friends, Andrew Huff, mistook it for a press release and published it as an event notice on his website, Gapers Block. Forty people showed up, and not just with ideas, but also with books, magazines, and library skills. “So I thought, I guess I’m doing this all of a sudden,” Taylor recalls now.
Taylor had actually conceived the idea three years earlier, when she was still a student at Columbia College. She was studying film, but realized she knew very little about the rest of the Chicago arts community. She wanted to have a way to encourage collaboration between different kinds of artists. In high school, she had been on the Oak Park Library
teen administrative council, where she organized a weekly poetry slam and saw how libraries could bring people together. “There’s a low barrier of entry for a library,” she explains. “Anyone can walk in.”
Her library, which she originally called the Chicago Underground Library, would be a completely accessible community resource. It would not be a white- gloves archive with everything locked away in boxes. It would consist mostly of original materials, not digital reproductions or microfilm, in order to make the history and culture feel tangible and concrete.
As materials continued to accumulate under the stereo in Taylor’s apartment, she began thinking about ways to organize them. The librarians introduced her to arguments about naming, hierarchy, and identity that were taking place in library circles, in particular the philosophy of radical cataloging.
The radical catalogers wanted to take the power to assign labels and hierarchies from the hands of librarians and give it back to the users. Traditional libraries organize materials by a standardized system— the Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal are the most popular— that uses a hierarchy of prescribed terms to classify and shelve each item. In order to find something, you need to understand the specialized language of the library search engine, which usually requires some training. Also, the prescribed terms can be outdated or reflect the prejudices of the people who came up with them, like, for instance, using “illegal immigrant” instead of “undocumented.”
Over a series of heated debates, fueled by beer and pizza, Taylor and the Chicago Underground volunteer librarians decided that since most of the material they were collecting existed outside of traditional publishing, their catalog would have to be organized outside of traditional library systems. They decided to classify items under multiple keywords, using the sort of terms someone from the community might type into a search engine ( known in librarian circles as “natural language”), and identify every single contributor so visitors could see how different people worked together and influenced each other over time. There would also be a comments section for each listing so that users could suggest additional search terms or share stories or other details. Everything would be shelved alphabetically within the type of publication— books with books, zines with zines— in order to encourage one of the greatest joys of library browsing: stumbling across something wonderful and unexpected that you never knew you were looking for. The only criteria for accepting material was that it had to be from Chicago and that it had been intended for public consumption, not a personal letter or diary.
The library’s early history was nomadic— i t moved f i ve times i n as many years. Its homes ranged from a file cabinet in the basement of Mojoe’s Coffeehouse i n Avondale to the l obby of the Congress Theater to a church in Lakeview where the windows blew open during a blizzard and buried a third of the collection in a snowbank. ( Miraculously, everything was saved.) In 2011 it moved into its current location, a former metalworking studio in the back of a former bar at the corner of California and Walton. The landlord built the space out for the library, adding bathrooms, a kitchen, a gas fireplace, and a storage loft. He painted the walls bright turquoise and gave Taylor a break on the rent. Taylor and her volunteers assembled a collection of thrift- store couches, bookshelves, and folding chairs and table, plus an ungainly wooden ticket booth, and created a cozy and welcoming- looking space. Around the time they moved in, Taylor changed the name to Read/ Write Library; too many people, she found, associated “underground” with the criminal underworld.
As the collection grew, the purpose of the library evolved too. After the blizzard catastrophe, while the library was still searching for a permanent home, Taylor experimented with a series of site- specific pop- up events around the city with specially curated collections about each location. One of these, at the nightclub Berlin, with material about Lakeview and Boystown, generated a particularly strong response.
“There’s an element of recognition that starts to disarm people,” Taylor says. “People would respond to things they remembered and places they used to go to, friends who had died. They were gathered around the table telling stories. It’s a neat way to make a publication live again.”