The National Library of Cabinet Magazine

Cabinet National Library

Completed July 2004

For its Spring 2003 issue on "Property" Cabinet Magazine, a non-profit Art and Culture quarterly, purchased a 1/2 acre of land sight/site unseen for $300 on eBay. The land was part of a failed 1960's residential development called the "Sunshine Valley Ranchettes," now a desolate tract of desert scrubland outside of Deming, New Mexico.

The magazine immediately set upon the land a complex, non-traditional development scheme. The land was dubbed Cabinetlandia and divided into manageable sectors- Readerlandia, Editorlandia, Nepotismia, and so forth. Magazine-sized parcels were offered to readers for a song (a penny, actually, for a 99-year lease).

Upon reading the Cabinetlandia article, something immediately obvious occurred to us: Cabinetlandia would require a Cabinet National Library (i.e., a library containing all and only back issues of Cabinet magazine). What better way to establish your civilization than to create a repository for its organizing documents?

Fortunately, we were the first to propose the idea to the magazine. The editors thought we were pretty amusing and published our library proposal and a sketch in Issue 12 (Winter 2003-2004).

From the outset, it was paramount to us that the project be an actual, usable library, aside from (or in addition to) being an odd spectacle and a play on words. Moreover, it was crucial that the project express its librariness (librarity?) down to the last minute detail; this idea guided the project at every stage of its development.

The Cabinet National Library is built from a three-drawer file cabinet and is laid out thusly:


Top Drawer -- the Card Catalog, Guestbook, and Guest Services.

Middle Drawer –- the Collection: back issues of Cabinet.

Bottom Drawer –- the Snack Bar.