World Book Day at the Book Hive

 Where else would you go on World Book Day other than a library? I went to one which holds some lovely personal memories as well as being the site of a fantastic installation using the book as moving sculpture. We went home to Bristol for the day to visit family and to visit the Grade One listed Central Library, a place my husband worked in for seven years before we moved to Wales and the place I loved going to both as a teenager and adult. It was here I found the vinyl record library and week on week I borrowed the oddest records to the despair of my parents who had to listen to them too. I've spent many productive hours in the reference library bent over microfiche readers researching my family history back in the 1990's and listened to my husband's scary tales of goings on as he locked up the building late in the evening. Along with lots of mice there were other things lurking in those old rooms stacked to the roof with old books.... but I digress.... because it is those old books that are part of the Book Hive.

The Book Hive fills the foyer of the library and  is a sculpture which uses animatronic techniques to bring lots of old books to life. They've been donated by readers or obtained from those withdrawn from the library shelves and they have grown from 100 books at the start of the installation in December to the 400 or so I saw yesterday. The number commemorates Bristol's first public library started an amazing 400 years ago in 1613 when local merchant Robert Redwood gave his King Street Lodge to the city for this purpose. Each book is housed in a plywood honeycomb and they open and close as you move past them as the robotics sense the movement. I could not stop going backwards and forwards trying it out and I was delighted by the noise as all those books opened and closed at random.  I also spent just as long staring at the mechanism at the rear of the books watching the backwards and forward motion. It was a joy to see. I took a small video which has not worked too well so here's a link to the local news coverage. There's a great video here showing the hive in action.