This Mexico City Artist Created an Instagram-Based Library

A curious account popped up in my Instagram feed this past August that put my ideas about the limits of lending libraries to the test. The account, @tlacuilobiblioteca, which advertises itself as a public lending library, announced a slate of obscure titles in Spanish and English up for grabs in daily posts.

Lending libraries aren’t exactly common in Mexico, so, intrigued, I sent a direct message to reserve a copy of the visual biography of Clarice Lispector (which, it turns out, is one of the library’s most in-demand titles). I set a day and time with the librarian to pick up my loan. It seemed straightforward enough, albeit rather mysterious. What kind of library was this?

This haphazard investigation led me to the studio home of Mexican contemporary artist and sculptor Pedro Reyes, who has shown his work in a variety of venues around the world. On the day I arrived to pick up my loan, I was greeted by a massive concrete building with whimsical curves and porthole windows wedged between two traditional Spanish colonial facades in one of the oldest neighborhoods in southern Mexico City.

As I was ushered into the building by a stone worker in dusty grey overalls, the librarian and Instagram account manager Carolina Peralta descended a set of spiral concrete stairs to greet me. We made our way through a patio and into the home’s two-story open plan living room, which also showcases Reyes’ private library. There, thousands of books were ordered meticulously on shelves, crisscrossed by mismatched, scaling sets of concrete stairs and entrances from both the house and the adjoining studio space, which allows Reyes to access his books from any point in his labyrinthine studio home.

The project initially started as a way to share his collection with his friends and followers, Reyes said, adding that his love of libraries and used book shops runs deep. “When traveling,” he says, “instead of having a look around that place, if there’s a good library there, that’s where I’ll go, because I want to look at materials I’m interested in that I might not have in my own library yet.” This exploration grew into an experiment which pushes our understanding of a library as a traditional brick and mortar institution.

After the project took off, Peralta, who has a background as a writer and digital strategist with a personal interest in libraries, came on board full-time through the recommendation of a friend already working with Reyes. Now, Reyes and Peralta meet each day to come up with snappy hashtag themes to promote the daily batch of books on offer to borrowers. These subject headings—a term familiar to dyed in the wool librarians—have included tags both serious and whimsical, from “Turbocapitalism Thursday” to “Mimes Are People Too.” The eclectic selection of books, which recently have included titles ranging from a Georges Perec’s A Species of Spaces and Other Pieces to Paul Davies’ How to Build a Time Machine, are a glimpse into the imaginative way in which they are curated and the very way Reyes works within his art practice, incorporating humor and irreverence with a healthy dose of social criticism and experimentation.

The earliest libraries were vaults for precious and unique manuscripts. In fact, tlacuilo means “scribe” in Nahuatl, the indigenous Aztec language spoken in Central Mexico. Reyes named his library project the “scribe library” to evoke the long tradition of knowledge production and collection in the Americas.

In colonial times in the United States, as it became vogue to buy and own printed books, subscription libraries like Benjamin Franklin’s Library Company in Philadelphia sprung up, especially in places where people had a hard time getting their hands on them. These subscription models were a way to pool resources amongst (usually white, male) book aficionados.

The neighborhood lending library, a more standard institution that many Americans have come to love, is a relatively recent concept. It didn’t catch on until the late 19th-century when a whole boatload of them were financed and built around the world by robber baron Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie’s most enduring personal philanthropy project began in large part because of the impact having access to books through private and subscription libraries had on him as a working class boy. Through the lens of his own rags-to-riches origin story, Carnegie believed that putting books in the hands of the poor and working class was akin to helping the poor help themselves.

Reyes said his own project is based on a principle which Reyes calls “mi cosa es tu cosa” (my thing is your thing), a play on words of the ubiquitous adage, mi casa es tu casa. Reyes sees libraries as a representation of “total anarchy,” as institutions that have never been “affiliated with a chain of value added production.” And that is precisely why, according to Reyes, as many resources as possible need to be concentrated into an online ecosystem of mi cosa es tu cosa.

While subscription and “public-private” operate in a highly structured model, @tlacuilobiblioteca eschews formality. Usually, visitors have to register, get a library membership or card, and tell the institution who they are and where they live. In the case of Reyes’ Instagram library, your only credential is your Instagram handle; the appeal involves a certain internet caché of having borrowed a book from the private library of one of Mexico City’s most well-known living artists. In terms of books being lost or stolen, Reyes isn’t so worried, saying that “internet shaming is a very powerful phenomenon,” a thoroughly modern way of imposing a late or lost fine.

On the day I visited his studio, he and Peralta had just returned from a meeting organized by Mexico City municipal librarians working in local public libraries. At that meeting, Reyes said he pitched his idea for bringing more private libraries like his into the public lending library sphere. Classifying and typifying the idea of the library too rigidly, Reyes points out, puts the library at risk of irrelevance as social mores, technologies, and our ideas around ownership and sharing change and evolve.