Maude Standish

As you descend the stairs to the basement of MoJoe’s HotHouse, to a clean yet cluttered space that houses the Chicago Underground Library (CUL), you hear Nell Taylor’s instructional voice telling someone just exactly what it is he is holding—this hastily bound pink book, with its enlarged font and minimalist writings by middle-schoolers is an "orphan work," she’s saying, which is a publication whose authors have been lost to obscurity, or was published under auspices no longer discernable to the naked eye.

Other libraries would have had no interest in such a piece, but it’s precisely the kind of literature that the CUL thrives on. The library was created in the dreary late winter of 2005 by Nell Taylor and Emerson Dameron. Realizing the odds stacked against independent presses and publishers, they wanted to create a forum where people could come to read other local works and be assured that their own late-night writings would not disappear into the void. Even beyond their motivation, what makes the CUL truly inspirational is the meticulous web-accessible catalogue, all the more impressive because of the span of works it covers—books, zines, journals and broadsheets.

The visitor reads from a randomly selected page. "A perfect gift for me would be a computer. Because a computer is cool and fun. If I had a computer then I would be able to type faster. Maybe I could type a hundred words per minute. I would not bother anyone if I had a computer. I would be real happy because it would have games on it and I could do my homework. If I would do my homework on a computer it would come out pretty. If I could get a computer I would not be bored the way I am now. This is why I think the perfect gift for me would be a computer." Once he has finished reading he closes the book and says, "Really, that’s quite tragic," and there is a moment of silence in which we all wonder if this little boy got his wish for a computer and ended up not bothering anyone.

Taylor’s hazel eyes light up, her reddish bangs falling over her lightly freckled face, as she says, "There are these kids who live next door to me and they bring out this giant thirty-inch CRT monitor and their computer to their backyard everyday. And they plug it in and they play video games all day long outside. We will be sitting on our porch watching them; just seeing how long it takes them when it starts pouring rain to run back in. 'Cause they will just wait until the absolute last minute and then both of them will have to lift the monitor together at the exact same time to get it back in the house. And they obviously bring this massive thing in at night because it’s worth it to them enough to be outside to play their video games."

Her cheeks turn a charming pink, either worked up by the process of telling the story or slightly embarrassed at having so completely captured her audience. She looks around the little basement, at the overflowing filing cabinet and bookshelves that comprise most of the CUL’s archive, to the peeling white paint on the brick wall, glancing ever so slightly at the enlarged image of the moon propped against a wall still moist from the recent flood, before settling her attention to a table covered in wet independent publications. The torrential rain earlier that weekend flooded the basement and consequently a box of new arrivals ended up floating around the room. Fortunately all of the damaged goods were publications that did not fit the CUL’s collection, as they were not site-specific to Chicago.

The requirements for a work to be admitted into the CUL are broad. Mainly it must match the CUL's open-ended definition of a publication: "Basically here at the library we define a publication as anything that has been put out into the world for public consumption," be independent (sorry, Trib) and have been produced in Chicago. Though zine libraries have existed in colleges and hemp-smelling communes for decades, Nell’s is the only one in the country to be site specific. Besides, don’t be mistaken, the CUL is not a mere zine pool, but rather a cultural catalogue of Chicago. The recently deceased Punk Planet rests here with every issue ever lined up against each other. A self-published teacher’s memoir with its cheapo graphics and a picture of the gray-haired, smiling author sits next to Chicago poetry anthologies, architectural broadsheets and artist catalogues from shows.

Taylor’s unconventional approach to archiving may have something to do with the fact that she never attended librarian school. "There was only one school in the country where I could go and get an art history degree and a library degree and that was Pratt in Brooklyn," Taylor says. "So I was like, ‘Crap, I really love Chicago and I don’t want to leave.’ So I just decided to start this without the degree." She says this casually, as if it were every day that people rolled out of bed and started libraries.

Taylor, 25, who spends her time away from the library as an artist’s assistant, was once quoted as saying that when her parents asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up that she responded "A basket of laundry. I’d be happy doing just about anything." But considering the extensive work she has put into the CUL in time most other people would have spent recovering from their string of hangovers, you get the feeling that she would never be content to sit around watching a washing machine spin.

Taylor enlisted the aid of others—technology experts, "real" librarians, local writers, artists, established institutions and her long-term boyfriend Dameron, who not only aided in finding donations but also housed the original library in their apartment. "We spent a lot of time with librarians very early on, who we would get pizza and beer and invite over to our apartment and let them duke it out over Library of Congress versus Dewey Decimal System. And ultimately we ended up not doing anything that had any precedents in library science. Because our catalogue functions so much online, people would find it just by Google," Taylor says.

The result is a democratic collection in the truest sense, in which no voice is catalogued with more importance than the other. It’s what the early Internet claimed to be, but never really achieved, because even though you didn’t have to be good looking to have friends on the Web you still needed to have the money to buy a computer. The CUL’s requirements are only that you be semi-literate with access to paper and pen.

For example, Taylor recently acquired a new publication for the collection just by walking through her neighborhood. Impassioned notices were taped up to six lampposts in Humboldt Park, where Taylor lives. Though they were obviously individually handwritten, each piece of writing was exactly like the other, with large condensed-to-the-point-of-being-claustrophobic words forming a perfect square. The notice began "Anybody who removes this besides the police is going to hell." It continued from there and was signed "The Word of God." Risking damnation, Taylor stealthily removed the sign to be archived in the collection.

It’s almost too easy to call the publications in the library ephemeral and, besides, it’s not exactly true. Sure, many of the publications are filled with fleeting thought, and conventional rules of style are almost unknown things, but it’s precisely the physical quality of these publications that creates their aura. The nether space of the Internet has provided an outlet for the compulsive rambler these days, and people are getting used to reading off a luminous screen. In turn, paper objects, even those that are made today, are acquiring an old-time feel, as if they are made to be savored only as relics.

Take The Skeleton News, for example, a monthly publication out of Chicago that can be found in the CUL’s sole filing cabinet. Despite the fact that it is produced here and now, its style of long-form journalism with an eye towards the irrelevant and use of comic artists harkens back to underground newspapers of the 1960s. And it’s not just the writing or the layout, it’s the physicality of the paper, the grainy beige newsprint that creaks and rustles as you read it, invoking a deep-seated nostalgia absent in larger publications.

Strangely, by archiving these creased publications for the future, the CUL also allows them to claim a portion of the present. Giving a scrap of paper the weight of an institution, albeit a growing one like the CUL, provides these publications with a type of authority and authorship that they might never have claimed had they only ventured into the world alone. Like Studs Terkel’s oral histories, these publications track Chicago’s self-dictated memory; they are real articulations of the past and the present as defined by the inhabitants of our city.

Helen K. from the south suburbs authored a particularly poignant zine found in the collection entitled "Driving Stoned." Filled with the typical Sublime quotes and photo collages that infest adolescence, the writing perfectly captures what it felt like to be 17, high and trying to figure out the meaning of it all. The realizations, which include "It wasn’t the drugs. This kid had somehow found the key to my mind and was unhooking it, gently" and "Dude we stopped time" is something that anyone who has smoked skinny joints in their mom’s bathroom can relate to. But in between Helen telling us how she switched from Parliaments to Reds, there is an undeniable timeliness, as this stoner girl attempts to think—or, rather, not think—about September 11. "At the time I thought that this was something that was going to change America forever. I thought maybe we would use this chance to look at our lives and ask ourselves what we are living for." But instead she encountered a "nightmare of flags."

One man in the collection definitely does know what he is living for, William R. Brown, who wrote a story called "Sanctified and Super Slick" which was published in a Kinko’s bound book "Expressions from Englewood." The story details, in the third person, the romance between Bill and his car, Super Slick. Bill lives for his car—a green with matching leather interior 1996 Chevrolet SS Impala—to the extent that it pushes all animate beings, such as his girlfriends and mother, to the wayside. He even recounts how when it rained, he got out of the car and attempted to shield the exterior with his body.

"If I have a choice at that moment between cataloguing something you know that I have one copy of that I can’t find any more explanation of or something that is a larger, national more well-known publication that’s out of Chicago, I am going to spend my time on the more obscure thing. Ultimately I am going to get everything catalogued," Taylor says. Of course this "ultimately" can seem pretty indefinite with a lack of cataloguing volunteers and the type of in-depth cataloguing that Taylor strives for. "Cataloguing takes what some people have told me is an unreasonable amount of attention to detail, which is sorta my middle name—I am Nell-unreasonable-amount-of-attention-to-detail-Taylor."

Like most of existence these days, none of this would have been possible without the Internet. Taylor spends her occasional free moments tracking authors, publishers and connecting the dots through search engines like Google. Reversely, Google has also provided the archive with much material. "People make a lot of fun of people who Google themselves, but for the library I am kind of glad that people do because I am kind of amazed by the number of people who have gotten in touch with us just because they said, ‘Hey, I found myself in your collection and it’s really cool and I have all these other things. Can I send them to you?’" Taylor jokes. The constant answer—a resounding "Yes!"—means that the archive is quickly filling up.

Michael Foster, the owner of MoJoe’s HotHouse, does all of Chicago a favor by letting CUL exist rent-free in his basement. But at times, the constraints of the space become obvious. For one, it is almost impossible for a visitor to peruse the collection without the aid of Taylor or of the catalogue. "We are really confined with that filing cabinet so once we get a new space we will create a more comprehensive browsing system," Taylor says. Additionally, Taylor is allergic to the basement, causing her to erupt in sneezes occasionally—an endearing but all the same bothersome affliction. "Ultimately it’s going to be getting our own space and having a variety of shelving and archiving options that’s necessary. But for now it is nice to have it out of our apartment, which is where it was for a loooooong time."

The Chicago Underground Library is located in the basement of MoJoe’s HotHouse at 2849 West Belmont, and is open for browsing from 1pm-5pm every Saturday. Additionally, its catalogue is accessible from the Web at http://www.underground-library.org/

(2007-07-31)

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