The Walking Library Collections: the convivial logic of a library made for walking

The Walking Library is a library that carries books by foot. Inaugurated in 2012, it is an ongoing art project created by Dee Heddon and Misha Myers that aims to bring together people, walking, books, and reading. For each edition of The Walking Library a collection of books is gathered, taken on a walk and read with members of the public. While some have involved the creation of temporary collections, more permanent ones were curated for Sideways festival of peripatetic art, Belgium (2012), The Bothy Project (2014), Women Walking (2016) and most recently for Wild City | fiadh-bhaile (2018). The gifting of donations or suggestions for books, and their subsequent reading in site-responsive locations, gives shape to the walks that carry each collection and the performances that liberate words from their pages. The following overview of these collections considers how this personalisation and singularity of the gift is held within a larger relational formation of the collective response as a defining attribute of the compositional logic of The Walking Library. Each permanent Walking Library that we have curated has been donated by us, in turn, to the commissioning organisation or to an organisation likely to make good use of the library’s specific content, continuing its ongoing journeys and stories.