The Community Bookshelf is the official name for a 25 foot high facade of bookspines lining the way to Kansas City's Central Library. Built as part of a relocation and remodelling of a First National Bank Building in 2004, it has become a successfully striking display, pinning Kansas City, Missouri, on the map of quirky and entertaining architectural interventions. Made of mylar, and built high enough and wide enough to cover an unsightly parking garage, 22 books are represented, 3 of which being volumes of other stories, with most of the books chosen by readers in Kansas City.

The books are:

2 volumes of Kansas City related histories.
1 volume of 'Children's stories': Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown; Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson; Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne; Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss; What a Wonderful World (either the song lyrics or a recording); Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder; The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum; M.C. Higgins, the Great by Virginia Hamilton
And full spine displays of these books:
Catch-22
Silent Spring
O Pioneers!
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Fahrenheit 451
The Republic
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Tao Te Ching
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux
Invisible Man
To Kill a Mockingbird
Journals of the Expedition (Lewis and Clark)
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
The Lord of the Rings
A Tale of Two Cities
Charlotte's Web
Romeo and Juliet
Truman

Several of the authors or people represented on the bookshelf such as Hughes, Ingalls Wilder, Twain and Truman were all born in Missouri.


W/Library/more pics

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