Upcoming

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Ongoing
Cataloging Socials

Join us for our weekly Cataloging Social in which a group of librarians from diverse disciplines gather together with diversely undisciplined non-librarians to enjoy snacks, libations, and argue about meta data. We alternate between Tuesdays and Mondays each week. All socials take place at the Orientation Center/Chicago Underground Library.

Next socials (take note, they’re weird in August):
Tuesday, August 4th: 6-8pm (drop in or out when you can)
Monday, August 10th: 7-9pm (drop in or out when you can)
Tuesday, August 18th: 6-8pm (drop in or out when you can)
Tuesday, August 25th: 6-8pm (drop in or out when you can)
Monday, August 31st: 7-9pm (drop in or out when you can)
Tuesday, September 8th: 6-8pm (drop in or out when you can)

Volunteer Meeting and Orientation

Tuesday, August 11th: We meet monthly to catch up on all the goings on at the Chicago Underground Library and to acquaint new volunteers with the project. This is the perfect way to get up to speed on what we’re working on in our programming, collection development, community outreach, cataloging, and, most importantly, to find out how you can make the CUL your own. All are welcome! 7-9pm (6:30 for new volunteer orientation) Orientation Center/Chicago Underground Library

Let us come to you!

The CUL’s foremost duties are to encourage collaboration, dialogue, and the creation of new work informed by our local histories. We want to make it easy to work with you, and are always open to your ideas. Here are just a few ways we’ve come up with to get things started:

Pop Up Library

The Chicago Underground Library has access to an amazing amount of seldom seen resources for the Chicago community. We want to supplement your cultural event by setting up materials from our collection that directly relate to and help cast new light on your subject from a local perspective. (Any subject! Really! From skateboarding to pie recipes to performance art!) And you can help us by getting these works a wider audience. Everybody wins. The Pop Up Library can come to you as a self-contained suitcase or as table top book displays. You provide the table, we provide the conversation starters.

Chicago Underground Library Roadshow

Are you a teacher, artist in residence, or workshop leader who wants your students to have access to the collection, but doesn’t want to deal with getting them on the train or finding funds for transportation? Spring, summer, fall, or winter, we can come to your classroom during or after school, in the morning, evening, or whenever you need us. One of our volunteers will curate a selection of materials tailored to your curriculum, your students’ neighborhoods, or just show up with a general (and age appropriate) assortment. We can talk about: Chicago, independent media, technology, art, zines, Creative Commons, writing, collaboration, and/or anything else you can throw at us.

Past

Fifth Annual Printers’ Ball

Facebook event

Founded by Poetry magazine with other independent Chicago literary organizations, the Printers’ Ball is an annual celebration of print culture, featuring thousands of magazines, books, and broadsides available free of charge; live readings and music; letterpress, offset, and paper-making demonstrations; and much more. This year’s Printers’ Ball is co-produced with Columbia College Chicago and the Center for Book & Paper Arts, and is set to take place in the landmark Ludington Building, former home to the American Book Company. Select events during the Printers’ Ball are being recorded for Chicago Public Radio’s Chicago Amplified.

Major collaborators for the fifth annual Printers’ Ball are the Alternative Press Center, the Center for Book & Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago, Chicago Amplified, Chicago Underground Library, CHIRP (Chicago Independent Radio Project), MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine, Newcity, Opium Magazine, Poetry magazine, Poetry Foundation, and the Student Affairs Offices of Columbia College Chicago. The Printers’ Ball extends special gratitude to Louis Glunz Beer, Inc and Lagunitas, Hofbrau, Chimay, and Founders breweries for their generous support of the evening’s festivities.

More than 1,500 people annually attend what has become one of the largest celebrations of print culture in the country. This year, for the first time ever, the Printers’ Ball features publishers outside of Chicago, showcasing more than 200 local, national, and international literary organizations and the various ways they bring print to life.

Find us at Printers’ Ball Library, hosted by the Alternative Press Center and the Chicago Underground Library, which invites you to spend quality time with quality print. Visit the library to browse all publications; learn more about your discoveries, what you might have missed, and where to find it; and connect directly with publishers and organizations through our one-stop mailing list and subscription kiosks.

Chicago Underground Library celebrates the Science of Obscurity!

Facebook event

The Chicago Underground Library celebrates “The Science of Obscurity,” an evening of new, unpublished, and in-progress works presented as science fair experiments. The night will also feature a public book launch via catapult and the mass purging of rejection letters–community literary rituals in need of revival!

If you are a writer, publisher, bookmaker, or booklover of any stripe who has recently finished writing a book, has published a book in the past year, or just feels like taking out some aggression on a publication of your choice, we invite you to celebrate by launching your work into space–or at least halfway down the block. We define “book” broadly, so zines, magazines, chapbooks, textbooks, and more are welcome. Read a paragraph, then release!

And while we’re busy launching texts outside, we’ll be dissecting the mysteries of the literary universe inside. Join a dozen local, national, and international writers as they intricately explain the scientific principles underlying their work, real or imagined. Dioramas! Volcanoes! Colorful graphs! Higher mathematics!

We’ll cap the remarkable evening with the shredding and launch of your collective rejection letters, so take them out of storage and cart them along to hand over to our nurturing, accepting staff at the Rejection Table.

This event is free and for all ages. Its other attractions will include the dazzling debut of the Chicago Underground Library’s artist-designed drop boxes, debutantes, prizes, and a raffle!

This is an official Printers’ Ball lead up event. Save the date for the Ball on July 31st at Columbia College’s Center for Book and Paper Arts!

Logistics
Friday, 10 July 2009, 7–10pm
Jupiter Outpost (1139 W. Fulton Market, Chicago) Map
Food and drink will be available for sale + BYOB
Free, all ages

Orphan Works: The Anatomy Collective Presents “Sad Sullen Girls and Other Such Squid”

Friday, June 12th, 2009: Orphan Works is a nomadic performance series with a literary flavor, and sometimes a literary series with a performance aftertaste, presented by the Chicago Underground Library. Short-lived but well-loved in 2007, this re-interpretation event will be resurrected on June 12th at the appropriately named TEMPLE. The Chicago Underground Library brings a variety of the most creative minds in Chicago to locations all around the city to share with you the fruits of their forays into our collection of orphan works-_ anonymous works or those for which no further information on the author can be found. With the help of our intrepid explorers, these lost publications will be brought back to life: read, reinterpreted, and reunited with the audience they’ve been missing. Each Orphan Works night will feature re-interpreters performing, displaying, singing-sawing, reading or otherwise sharing their creations.This season of Orphan Works will celebrate the “self-made”: the reinvented and repurposed, the handcrafted, the DIY, the willed into-being-with-grit-and-elbow-grease. This month, we’re piecing together our identities (and the zines with which we construct them) in a one-night only performance by the Anatomy Collective: Sad Sullen Girls and Other Such Squid “The side effects of a broken heart, the benefits of spooning, the emotional collateral of wasted time and the addiction of insomnia weave together in a satire that follows the misadventures and disenchantment of young women in America. Through a series of snapshots, Sullen Girls compiles the musing of several women fighting and failing to create original portraits of themselves during prolonged adolescence.”