The South Minneapolis Society Library (SMSL) exists as much as a space to enjoy books and the moments they can generate as it does a tool to consider the landscape and actions which often materialize within the space between books, readers, and the publics which are spawned by their convergence. Printed matter, often more visibly than other forms of media, serves as the fill – the rock and soil – of our shared lived experience, and inasmuch, creates a potent and shifting space to critically engage our experiences of living within a shared space and time. Now, in the digital networked age, this potency is not sapped, but heightened and fractured, allowing books and printed materials a special confusing resonance radically altering their specific-use as a technology from what it has been for the most part of the last 500 years.” – text from the South Minneapolis Society Library mission statement (2015, Red76)

In 2015 Red76 housed the South Minneapolis Society Library (SMSL) in the lobby of Pillsbury House at 35th and Chicago Ave. Anyone who lived in the 9th Ward was welcomed to check-out a growing, and often thematic, selection of books. All titles were sourced from the internet, printed and bound.

Beyond Repair is interested in the idea of resurrecting the SMSL on site in the Midtown Global Market, but how would this incarnation be different, if at all, from the last? How else could get involved, and how would a diversity of “librarians” and bookmakers alter the narrative and possibilities of the lending library?

Join us at the shop next Wednesday afternoon to discuss. All unaffiliated librarians, radical nerdists, bibliofreaks, and lovers of the printed word welcome to attend.