At first Bay Area Book Festival, a temple made of books

Arendition of the Lacuna installation to bebuilt around the dormant fountain foundation in Berkeleys Civic Center Park as a centerpiece of the inaugural Bay Area Book Festival on June 6-7, 2015. Image: FLUX

Berkeley, its been said, is a book town. But never before has it had an actual temple made of books.

Rising in Civic Center Park this June will be a public art installation made out of 50,000 books. The walls and ceiling will be constructed from books, the circular ceiling will be alive as pages of intact books strung upside down from guy-wire flutter in the wind like prayer flags. The walls of shelves will be permeable, the entire structure evanescent because the purpose of this library-temple is for the books to be given away.

This installation will be one of the centerpieces of the first annual Bay Area Book Festival being held in downtown Berkeley all day Saturday and Sunday, June 6-7, 2015. The festival will bring more than 225 authors to speak on indoor stages. Downtown streets will fill with 150 literary exhibitors, a Childrens Arena, a Teen Stage, a Cooking Stage, a chalk street art contest, food trucks, and more.

The installation, called Lacuna, will be built around the dormant fountain in MLK Jr. Civic Center Park. It will invite festivalgoers to enter, browse, sit for a while and take a book. Organizers aim for it to be a respite from the busy festival.

The idea was born when Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, made a startling offer to Cherilyn Parsons, founder and director of the festival. The nonprofit Archive has a mission to create a free Internet library by scanning and archiving the worlds cultural artifacts including books, movies, music, images, and websites. People send millions of physical books to be scanned, and the Archive keeps a physical copy of each. But they have duplicates lots of duplicates.

At a party in May 2014, Kahle told Parsons about duplicates he couldnt store any longer at his 70,000-square foot Richmond warehouse. He offered Parsons 200,000 books for the festival on condition that they be given away to be read that they be used as books.

I immediately envisioned a structure made of books, a kind of city of books, said Parsons.

The project grew into an artistic installation thanks to the efforts of Victoria Rojas, who became the festivals volunteer Public Art Manager. Involved in the public art world, Rojas has been part of the Black Rock Public Library community at Burning Man, and had started a small festival in San Francisco around Banned Books Week.

Rojas pulled in the FLUX Foundation, a Bay Area-based nonprofit arts organization that engages people collaboratively in designing and building large-scale public art. The group has a strong portfolio building large-scale art of this kind, including the Temple of FLUX (Burning Man, 2010) and The Sidewalks End (Coachella, 2013).

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At first Bay Area Book Festival, a temple made of books