Published on 25 November 2013
Sometime in the past few weeks I discovered that, across from my local Morgan Place L subway stop, the Mellow Pages Library was actually a pretty cool place. I’d been in it a few times before, mostly to see if anything was happening. Nothing ever was when I walked in; I missed out on the fact that this was part of the allure.
Mellow Pages is a free, collective library. They do events at night, sometimes, and there’s free coffee and couches to hang out on, but the main thing to notice is the stacks and stacks of books. To become a member, you can drop off ten books to loan to the library, or pay $20 for a yearly membership. Then you can check out as much as you want. You can also hang out as long as you want, but you don’t technically need to be a member to do that.
Matt and Jacob, the founders, a pair of gangly bearded hipsters who seem to spend their days beneath red eyes and cigarette smoke, Matt reading some sort of poetry book in the couch in the corner and Jacob laughing at a Youtube clip while trying to write in the ther corner, are fixtures just as much as the artpiece above one of the shelves that shows a dilophosaurus head on an 18th century woman’s body. They’re pretty chill guys, and one day, after a poetry reading that featured a constant stream of the internal monologue of a Jewish New Yorker and also some poetry about I95 in Connecticut, I asked if I could help in any way. I’d noticed ABC of Anarchism on one of the shelves, and figured the kind of library that had that on display was probably the kind of library that could use help.
They said they needed a website. I said give me a week.
During that week, I was working pretty hard on my normal job at Ideapod, but mostly I fell prey to tonsillitis for the first time in two years, which knocked me out for three or four days. Finally, on Sunday, sitting in the library, I spent around 4 hours and made them what is currently up at Mellowpageslibrary.com. I’m pretty proud of it - mostly the fact that the logo was reproduced in CSS, that I used Bootstrap 3, and that I managed to make that work well with Jekyll and Github Pages much faster than I had anticipated. Practice makes perfect, I guess.
So, that’s my newest project. I’ll probably tweak the website over the coming few months - adding a calendar, that sort of thing. But it’s there, and it’s done, and I’m going to be sitting off the side of the frame of the background picture for many days to come, coding away or reading poetry or generally enjoying the place. It’s the kind of place where that’s easy to do. I like that.
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