Confession time. After a week striving to produce fabulous concepts and design work for our clients I sometimes like to unwind by looking at fabulously bad concepts and design. One of my favourite places for this is a wonderful blog called Awful Library Books, the brainchild of Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner, a pair of public librarians from Michigan who catalog the outdated, weird or just completely insane books gathering dust on library shelves across America.

Their blog is an addictive mix of anthropological insight and cheap laughs and is a treasure trove of (best?) forgotten books such as ‘Creative Recreation For The Mentally Retarded’, ‘Knitting With Dog Hair’ and my personal favourite ‘Dee Snider’s Teenage Survival Guide’, a book of sage advice for teenagers penned by the notorious lead singer of the ’80s metal band Twisted Sister. Hmmm.

Awful Library Books has only been in existence since March and has already received over 30,000 hits. While the site is purely a hobby for it’s creators and the pair state that they hope it will highlight the need for libraries to retire such books. Until then i’m just happy to marvel at the fact that such books still exist and perhaps put in for an inter continental library loan for ‘Diseases From Space’.

Tags: Art Direction, Awful Library Books, Bad Design, book design, Creativity, De Snider, Design, Design Agency, Design Agency Manchester, Design Blog, Digital Agency, Graphic Design, Holly Hibner, Illustration, Library, Marketing Agency, Mary Kelly, Michigan, Online Agency, PPC Agency, Retro Design, Vernacular Design

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 10:58 pm and is filed under We Like. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.