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Susannah Brinkley
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The Library: A Museum

'Long Live the Book' — Designing for books, with books

In the studio themed "The Library as a Museum," my classmates and I checked out library books published before 1950. My book, "Studer's Popular Ornithology: The Birds of North America" was published in 1889 and once rivaled John James Audubon's tomes. We used images from our library books to design an exhibition at the College of Design at North Carolina State University at the end of the semester. Read about our studio here.

We also created medium-format posters to represent our selected library books. I scanned in the book's plate illustrations and cut out images of various birds and placed them on the book's beautiful typographic title-page. The small scattered text i
For a large-format poster -- to be seated behind a book display in a museum -- I selected bird illustrations from the books and created floral designs, creating a bird garden of sorts.
For our exhibition entitled "Long Live the Book," my classmates and I utilized the two posters in the window space in a gallery space at our college. We built fitted, plexiglass cases to contain our books in the windowsill, a perfect height for view
The window space also doubled as an advertisement: Our group also lasercut the letters of the exhibit name from pages of old books and affixed them to the back of our posters.
An aerial view of the exhibition. The class worked together in small groups to design the labeling, signage, advertising, collateral, display cases and posters.   My classmates who participated in the exhibition with me were Sarah Blackmon, N
Kelley McClure's signage made from old library books. 
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I worked with Courtney Johnson to design information cards for the exhibition. We designed them to look like old school library cards. Sarah Blackmon designed the book pins. 
One group in the class designed and built wooden displays for their books, hanging their posters from the ceiling. Sonny Patel, Natalie Brown, Erin Choplin and Madiha Malik worked on these together. The class worked together to design the exhibition

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