This post is inspired by ‘“The Bolted Desk”’, written by Brandon Walsh. A sentence in particular keeps haunting me: “Where the chairs spoke of quiet restraint, their surfaces told a different story, narrating favorite bands, quotations, weekend adventures, and more. Freedom. Flexibility. Movement. Waiting to get out of the chair”. Here, Brandon opposes the chair as limitation and constraint, and the desk as a means to escape, to resist, to free oneself from not only what the chair is, but also what it represents.

As we found ourselves thinking about our Charter and what we were ready to commit to for the duration of the year together, I went back to this article and to the idea of the “bolted desk”. I expressed to the other Fellows a concern I had. As a TA, you learn that as soon as you make something mandatory, students will dread it, as apparently appealing as it seem. Similarly, I felt that convening of a specific time where we would meet each time could be theoretically beneficial, but concretely ineffective – especially as, because one of us lives a few hours from Charlottesville, there were only two days of the week where we could potentially meet up (and that excludes classes and other personal commitments). Shifting the concern from time to space, I suggested we could commit to hanging out in the Fellows’ Lounge as much as we could before or after Praxis, something we had started doing from the start of semester anyway.

After all, we are the first Praxis cohort to get to enjoy the fully renovated Scholars’ Lab and Shannon Library, which means that we are also the first cohort to experiment with a space dedicated to our needs. Amanda, Brandon, Jeremy and the rest of the Scholar’s Lab people are vocal about hearing our suggestions, in order to make the Fellow’s Lounge a space where we feel comfortable and accepted. Here, I have to single someone out and personally thank Amanda for their perpetual efforts in making the Scholars’ Lab space inclusive.

Creating a space where all students (especially students from minorities) feel included, is not an easy task. When I talked to Brandon about the Fellow’s space, he summed up my feelings perfectly: everything in the room, from posters to furniture, was “intentional”. Spatial inclusivity is the embodiment of an idea, not just the sign of mere decoration but the means to a deep connection and interaction.

Thinking of ideas to make the Fellow’s Lounge even more of our own, here are a few suggestions I collected:

• Praxis memento, so that each fellow leaves a trace of their passage here, for the future cohorts to add on to
• A yoga mat and yoga block
• A few cushions and a throw
• A coat rack
• Even more snacks!
• A poster (as opposed to a screen, for sustainability reasons) of a view, as there are no windows in the Fellow’s space (although some can argue that knowledge is already a window to the world…)

This is a very practical post describing how I’m trying to improve a public space zine display! My current zine rack in the Scholars’ Lab Common Room currently looks okay—the metal rack allows you to see there are zines hanging on the other two of its three sides, and the rainbow of clothespin colors makes me smile.

Photo of the current Scholars’ Lab public space Zine Bakery free zine rack

The rack isn’t ideal, though: the clothespins are plastic and come apart easily, bend the zine covers, and make adding multiples of one zine difficult (you have to start at the bottom of your intended column of zines and layer them upwards, given the clothespin needs to attach to the top of each zine). We’ve also got some clear acrylic wall ledges I’d intended to use for zines, but we want to save the little wall space we have (we’re lucky to have a ton of windows, looking out both onto UVA’s chapel and Rotunda, and into the new skylight atrium in the center of the library building). The whole thing is a little wobbly—I had to reinforce it with metal cable ties (an amazing tool, highly recommend having some on hand) and the whole rack pieces easily unseats from the shallow wheeled base.

I’d like something where it’s easy to place stacks of zines rather than needing to pin them one at a time, since I already have limited time to re-impose, print, fold, and staple all the zines myself. (Colleagues have offered to help, but I need to finish getting the imposition/print instructions correct and documented for each zine first). I also think it’s more inviting to folks who are unused to getting to take a bunch of things for free, to not need to unpin a zine first before being able to flip through it. I’m imaging a combination of a lare flat surface where I can keep a large percent of the SLab-relevant zines in stock, plus a smaller table display where I can place new-to-us zines, or gather small thematic collections of zines.

Jeremy helped me out by creating a Pinterest board of DIY zine options, which helped me build my own Pinterest board with a combination of his pins and some researching those inspired. Ultimately, I want something requiring as little cutting and attaching as possible, so that I actually finish it this fall; and it needs to be free-standing (given lack of wall space) but not take up a huge footprint. Finally, it needs to have some kind of rail around “waist height” (halfway up) standard zine height, so that the zines don’t fall forward and off the ledge.

I think I want to do something like this rack with a solid rectangle leaned on an A-frame, except make the back part more like this rack that uses less total wood so we don’t have to mess with hinging crossbars.

I think that means we’ll need to source:

• for the front, finished (or paintable) flat board with a frame around it
• shallow L-shaped ledges for zines to sit on
• dowel rods, or wires shaped like [_], to keep middle of zines from falling forward (if dowel rods, need the wood rectangle to have a frame around the edge the dowels can be attached to)
• 2 hinges attaching the back frame to front rectangle
• back frame (3 boards)

And I’ll need to figure out:

• Width/spacing of ledges and dowel rods (and size of the large, front flat piece the zines lean back against; this may depend on what the hardware store has on hand)

The two zine rack inspiration images are below. I’ll update if I manage to build this (quite possible I’ll just decide we need to buy something ready-made instead, but I wasn’t finding anything reasonably priced doing what I want, and I really just need a few basic features).

Source.

Source.