Why Shop

A topic mentioned briefly in some of my library school classes was the Infoshop- a storefront librarylike affair intended to be grassroots, revolutionary, and aimed at opressed persons. My impression was that they ended up being collections of “underground” magazines and newspapers that the opressed were no more interested in reading that they were before they were stuck in an infoshop. Besides, if you want to be revolutionary, what better way than to get a municipal job you can’t be fired from for anything short of arson (but only if it was arson at work and they could prove it wasn’t due to mental illness) and then answer whatever questions the opressed have the best you can while buying library materials they seem to like (and not just the ones that your smelly friends are publishing out of their commune basement). But an actual grassroots library that could be brought out to preexisting gathering places instead of requiring people to find the building THE MAN has put the information in seems pretty cool. So I was disappointed that the nandeya (why? shop) seems to be more of a streetcorner Infoshop than a performance-art library installation. But maybe it will morph into that. Any librarians interested in making some nandeya-like fun here in the states?