Friday feature: Nell Taylor of the Chicago Underground Library

July 10, 7:15 AMChicago Literary Scene ExaminerRobert Duffer

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Chicago Underground Library in its new home (Thuy Ngo)

Tonight (7/10/09) a giant paper ball made of shredded rejection letters will be sailing over Chicago streets. Artwork dressed as library submission boxes will  promenade down the boulevards.  Science will collide with literature as local and international writers demonstrate the scientific principles underlying or unrelated to their work. All of this, "The Science of Obscurity" at Jupiter Outpost, is within the vision of an emerging library and a dedicated Fake Librarian.

"I’ve always been into collaboration. To get other communities to pay attention to what’s coming out of the lit community and vice versa," says Nell Taylor, the Director, Fake Librarian of the Chicago Underground Library. What she and her fifteen regular volunteers will be serving up Friday night for the official Printers' Ball lead-up event is a chance for disparate members of the local lit scene to unite in the catharsis of a communal purge. 

The Chicago Underground Library exists to bring literary artists together and to make the community more accessible to both outsiders and insiders. When Taylor graduated college, where the Chicago-native and self-proclaimed generalist ended up studying Film Theory, she had a hard time navigating the literary map of Chicago. What she found was all these subcultures essentially existing in their own bubbles and not interacting. By exploring this idea of the library, she saw the interrelatedness between zines, literary journals, one-off literary whims and other literary ephemera. "When you’re digging around in your own backyard there’s a lot you can learn from what was made down the street from you. The same resources, similar context," Taylor says.

If it wasn't for looking down the street for its neighbors, the CUL might be so underground it'd be buried. Due to a horrible move and suffocating relocation, the CUL went on haitus from late 2007 to late 2008. In preperation for this year's Printers' Ball(7/31/09), Ball volunteer Taylor spoke with Daniel Tucker, the editor and publisher of the biannual arts activism journal AREA. When he found out about the library's limbo status, he invited Taylor and the CUL to share the Logan Square storefront (2129 N. Rockwell)  AREA shares with arts thinktank  InCUBATE.

The CUL has just put up a wall of shelves for its 1,000's of publications, which Taylor expects to double by the end of the year now that they have a home. Tayor wants to make a home for everything printed in Chicago. "A lot out there that hasn’t gotten its due. At this point in our history the likelihood of there ever being a true mainstream is unlikely." The collection ranges from zines, including its oldest title Crumbs of Comfort, a 1908 pamphlet of proverbs and aphorisms, to junior high school student zines to 1980’s Streetwise to Triquarterly and Poetry Magaizine. Taylor stresses that the CUL's mission is to collect--and take donations from--all things print without discriminating or favoring.

The CUL exists not just to help these niche groups find an audience but for writers and readers to see the correlation. The print materials are tagged and catalogued with the user in mind so he can navigate the physical printed web of connection, like a local literary six degrees of separation.

"We want to find everyone’s hands who’ve touched it so we can link those people together and find that trail of influence," Taylor says.

With 30 online volunteers, half of whom attend monthly meetings, with the diehard cataloguers meeting weekly, Taylor's intention is to make the CUL self-sufficient within a year, when she plans on moving to and opening up an underground library in LA, which will be linked to Chicago. Though you can't check anything out, there's so much to check out that can open your eyes to the history and progress of Chicago's print collective.