2025

1-Message from Vacca vacca@vacca.cc on March 9, 2025 at 11:00:

To Eudald Pla VANDERPLA:

It’s been happening for a while.
Books, once bought and read, stay at home, and if you want them to circulate, they’re all inconvenient.
Nobody wants them, least of all libraries.
I know people with thousands of books on their shelves and who don’t know what to do with them; their children don’t want them, and sometimes they end up being thrown away.
This must happen with hundreds of thousands of books.
I’ve thought about leaving them on a bench, a place to sit; on the edge of a park, or wherever, in my city, but also in any city or town around us, or not.
To make it meaningful, and as a project, you need to design a standard cardboard box, of the right size, to put a few books in it, maybe 10 or 12, but designed in a forceful and very visible way on all its sides with the leitmotif LLEGIU LLIBRES (READ BOOKS).
And I would like you to design it. Also the manufacturing.
I don’t know how many units, think that it can go to a lot of places, because it has to be distributed everywhere.
There should be no other indication on the box than LLEGIU LLIBRES (READ BOOKS).
No author. We will know who did it, you and I, when it is.
Make a design + manufacturing budget.
Afm,
Vicens

2-Eudald:

Hello,
The project is good, there are similar initiatives such as Bookcrossing, or also others such as giving a new use to telephone booths and turning them into mini-libraries for book exchange.
Would it be a cardboard box? and would it be left in X place on the street? and what if it rains? Is the intention that people take a book or the whole box?

3-Vacca:

Bookcrossing is more for more advanced societies. Here people go through a lot of things where you have to write down, do, send…
The thing about phone booths also has too many requirements to work in a bankrupt country like here. In New Zealand it has been working for years, but they are civilized people. Protestants.
I propose something much simpler and simpler. The books that would go to the landfill, because no one in your environment wants them, nor the libraries, town halls, etc. go to the street; and as an exception to the hospital.
A standard cardboard box that you find, approximately 30x20x30cm. where it can be printed everywhere, and let’s say it can hold between 7 and 10 books +-
I’ll try to leave it in places where, if it rains, it won’t get wet. If it gets wet, bad luck.
We’ll leave it to chance whether people take a book or the whole box, so it’s good to put a few books in the box: many small boxes with few books is better than vice versa. And give more importance to the few that are there.
I hope that some colleagues and friends, once I deliver boxes to them, will do the same or improvise other actions.
I’ll also talk to hospital doctors so that they let me do the same in some waiting rooms of the buildings. In the hospital, time stops. There are a lot of waiting times there.
The box should be attractive, and perhaps with infographics indicate that books can be taken without any requirements. The only text in the entire box is: LLEGIU LLIBRES (READ BOOKS).
This is the project that I will document on the website with the same name, but not in the box.
We can be surprised by the amount of books that leave homes to an unknown destination.
The book is the most important invention that exists for the dissemination of culture, it far surpasses any electrical / electronic system, it is almost indestructible, always works, does not need to be plugged in, is not subject to surveillance, and has a duration of centuries.
Make a good design so that maybe we will appear in the news, … I hope it is not on the events page.
Afm,
Vicens

4-Eudald:

Ha ha on the events page yes, please.
ok, everything is perfect. I’m working on it.

5-Vacca:

Young promising graphic designer murders client artist, dismembering him into pieces, which he deposits in the boxes that the victim had commissioned her. Last job for both of them.

6-Eudald:

Ha ha that sounds pretty good.