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Wednesday, October 5, 2011

She Wears Books

ADD: You won't believe what happened to her just a couple weeks after I posted these pics! Click here. Grrrrr!!

Snapshots from my time as a panelist at the West Hollywood Book Fair. I was on the True Crime Can You Handle the Truth? panel, but I enjoyed many others who were also booked at the Fair. Meredith Myers performed at the end of a long and creative day....

Author Camille Kimball with standup librarian Meredith Myers
What do you get when you mix a standup comedian with a Library Sciences Masters Degree?  You get a red-headed chick in a book-print skirt who's so passionate about the library she can straddle a book cart (see this post).  Meredith Myers, pictured above with me doing the Vanna White for her book-skirt, trained as a professional standup comedian. After years of performing, she swung the pendulum, going from raucous comedy clubs to the shh-shh library.  Only the library isn't so shh-shh any more. Not with personalities like this behind the desk!

And on the walls. The new West Hollywood Library is a dazzling showcase of beauty. You walk in to the foyer and your feet land on marble. Immediately your eye turns to a field of glowing sunshine filling a staircase to your right, the light bathing a beautiful white tree growing from the first floor to above the second. This gorgeous masterpiece is actually a sculpture hugging the wall, created by a young artist named David Wiseman. I thought there'd be photos available of this but I can only find ones in private collections. Google it and you will find these photos. 

At the library you can find humor & the Dewey Decimal w/Meredith. Or murder, mayhem & heroes with Camille.

If you haven't been to a library lately, you don't know what you're missing. Libraries are reinventing themselves as vibrant community centers, multi-media and dynamic, without ever losing their focus as civilization's storage house for ideas.




Closeup of the book-skirt!
 Try one soon. The library is a fun place to be--just ask the chick in the book-skirt. You can find her in the aisles, straddling the book cart.


Camille Kimball's books:
The Mammoth Book of Tough Guys
Coming soon: Masters of True Crime-Chilling Stories of Murder and the Macabre

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for your support for Meridith Meyers. We need more like her -- and less kvetching about the Death Of The Profession. Meredith's the best mutation on the librarian image since Giles on "Buffy."

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  2. As an author, I have been blessed to meet some vibrant librarians. I thought they would all be so glad to hear abut her. I was very shocked at what happened just a couple weeks after I met her. As a media professional, I was also outraged at this dramatically counter-productive PR move. I hope others pick up the story, the Standup Librarian gets a new job, and LA County learns a freakin' lesson in public relations. Thanks so much for stopping by this site.

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  3. Oh, also, gotta love your reference to the Vampire Slaying Librarian! Hahaha!

    (And bless you for being a librarian. One of the most horrible moments to me in history is the loss of the library at Alexandria. Curating information is such an important job! Brava!)

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