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"Shelf Life" Norwich Millennium Library, January - July 2002

Shelf Life is an interactive art installation hosted by Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library at the Forum. Launched on the 6th of January, it is a collaboration between poet Lawrence Bradby and visual artist Anna Townley. As a writer, Lawrence is a manipulator of words. Anna has a different relationship with books; being severely dyslexic, she explores her experience of books through manipulation of their physical form.

Plasma screens at the library entrance advertise and illustrate the project, and an "Unread Bed" ­ a construction of 324 books stripped of their covers - confronts the visitor. Nearby are two other installations in cabinets, but this is just the surface of the project. Spread throughout the shelves of the library lurk 65 unexpected books. These bespoke volumes have all been altered in some way; some subtly, some so radically that they barely qualify as books. There are books with minimal adjustment to their covers or contents, or which have been reclassified into incongruent sections of the library. At the other end of the scale, there are books with no pages, books with holes in, books made from expanded foam. Some have been deconstructed and then deceptively rebound at Peartree Bindery, 173 Unthank Road, their convincing exterior belying the surreal nature of their contents.

Scattered around the shelves are bookmarks to guide the bemused finder towards one of the 65 Shelf Life books. Each bookmark has a poem printed on one side and on the other directions to a Visitors' Book, where comments or doodles can be made. This in turn sends people on to an indexed guide to the location of all the altered items.

With devices such as these, the project aims to lure library users into areas of the collection they would otherwise never visit, challenging the arbitrary aspects of the Dewey Decimal classification users must navigate through. The results of the almost heretical actions of cutting, drilling, exfoliating and defacing subvert the normal expectations of the physical and literary form of a book. Alongside this, the project brings an element of chaos - and fun - into a library, otherwise the epitome of order and regulation.

Shelf Life runs until 6th July 2003.