Imagine that your local public library is inhabited by an undiscovered race of tiny people. They’ve hidden themselves in the racks, tucked behind books and magazines, amidst history and fiction, new media and old. If you’re lucky, you might spy them — or at least their tiny homes, which are filled with minuscule beds, microscopic stools, itty-bitty flowers and furniture fashioned out of found objects such as board game pieces and one-use spice bottles.
And these little folks need help. You have been cast as a “Teeny Tiny Beings Residential Specialist,” charged with finding the micro-humans new homes. It appears the librarians — giants, like us, at least to the microscopic persons — have been moving things around.
Welcome to the Bureau of Nooks and Crannies , a new exploration-focused, play-inspired experience found inside the Lincoln Heights branch of the Los Angeles Public Library system. It is but one of many, as the Bureau of Nooks and Crannies soon will be found in libraries in Atwater Village, Baldwin Hills, Chatsworth, Pacoima and Vernon, each location home to a different game-like endeavor designed to get guests to view their local libraries — and the world outside of them — a little more imaginatively. If in Lincoln Heights we’re tasked with lending a hand to hidden, fictional mini-humans, in Atwater Village we’re asked to fantasize that we’re ghosts, friendly haunts who treat books as entryways for thoughtful, personal reflections.
As I moved .