Meet Me at The Library
With a visual researcher, designer, and artist Lucy Dellar
The library I grew up with wasn’t the most welcoming place on earth. It was cold and dimly lit, its windows were draped in hideous curtains, and the women working there always found something to be mad about at us kids — late returns, margin notes, and accidental loud laughs. Even to the most diligent students, going there felt like a punishment — we couldn’t stand the teachers who made us dig up and cite physical sources when we could have completed the same assignments much faster by searching the web on a family computer.
In college, the library quietly became the center of my universe. It was a gorgeous two-story building with huge windows and tall ceilings in the heart of Southern California with Mac computers, free snacks, and lounge chairs where you could take a quick nap between classes. But most importantly, it was the place where student life happened — where gossip spread, quiz answers were exchanged, friendships grew closer, and crushes were made. Plus, there were all these gorgeous libraries I got to hang out at when visiting friends from neighboring schools and towns — the Huntington Beach Public Library with its famously beautiful gardens, Clack Library at UCLA that’s basically a time travel machine, and the brutalist marvel that is Geisel Library at UCSD where you can study for a Chem final while getting your steps in on a walking pad. I was still largely wary of their massive collections and archives but understood the importance of these places to their local communities and was deeply grateful for the memories and resources they so generously gifted me. Perhaps, America’s best talent is turning everything you think of as old, stuffy, and conservative into a fun adult playground.
Things got dark last year, when the New York Public Library closed its doors for the weekends and was under a threat of further defunding — all while the NYPD budget remained astronomical. It felt like overnight, libraries turned into political symbols — beacons of hope and places of refuge in the world that’s becoming increasingly soulless and commercial at the hands of its horrifyingly incompetent and cruel leaders. Watching young kids share how much they love coming to the library and hearing that Barnes & Noble is planning on opening at least sixty new stores this year makes me deeply emotional because of the growing fear of what the decline of literacy rates, the rampant anti-intellectualism, and the all-consuming capitalism can do to our culture in the next decade. I found a new level of respect for the people who dedicate their lives to preserving and curating important artifacts and ideas, and understood how special it is to spend hours flipping through book and magazine pages, uncovering images and ideas that are yet to be digitalized, recycled, and spit back at us in the form of green screen videos, useless products, and consumer trends. I started actively seeking out people who share book scans and archive curations, and create positive spaces for collective learning instead of pumping out culture criticism content that fosters anxiety and boosts egos, and promised myself to try and follow in their footprints.
“I love looking at things—it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what draws me in. I often find myself clicking around the Internet Archive for hours, letting curiosity guide me,” Lucy Dellar, an artist, designer, and publisher who recently moved to New York from Australia told me when I reached out to her to learn more about her image research, book curation, and design practices. A few months ago, she started a newsletter
where she shares scans from the books she’s collected on both her physical and digital shelves over the years — a natural extension of another one of her projects, called Library Sale. “Lately, I’ve been especially inspired by old software manuals — not just for their nostalgic content but also for their almost non-design quality,” she continued. “Many of these manuals were put together by community groups or enthusiasts creating club newsletters, resulting in layouts that are purely functional, unintentionally experimental, and unconcerned with trends. There’s a charm in that unpolished, DIY aesthetic, and I love how they capture a specific era of technology and the resourcefulness of the people who made them.”
Lucy’s interdisciplinary approach is what drew me to her work in the first place. Most people’s go-to when it comes to image research in print media are art books and fashion magazines which must be a big reason why fashion, beauty, and celebrity campaigns have been feeling stagnated. For a long time, Lucy’s favorite genres have been health, science, and various forms of life advice, like this brilliant book from the 80s called How to Be a Happy Homosexual or the one chronicling the history of female healers called Witches, Midwifes, and Nurses. “When I started Ok Books in 2016, I had recently moved through a period of inner transformation, and self-help books, guides on mindful movement and alternative healing/medicine were in heavy rotation,” she explained. “These books had a strong educational element, often featuring diagrams and instructional photography, which I’ve always been drawn to.” Over time, her interest shifted from these specific genres to the design choices, illustration styles, materials, and techniques used in books and ephemera created between 1950 and 2000, and she started pulling references from everything from vintage science videos and old manuals to grassroots newsletters. “I’m also fascinated by the female form, hands interacting with objects or demonstrating actions, and ex-library books that carry traces of their past owners or borrowers—annotations, library stamps, or even a child’s scribbles on an illustration,” she told me. “There’s something special about these quiet imprints of interaction, where a book becomes more than just an object but a record of lived experience.”
Looking through Lucy’s prints, illustrations, and commercial designs, I could see the influence of her visual research work. There is a webpage that looks like a handmade collage, a packaging element that resembles a black-and-white pop science illustration, and a digital drawing with the texture of a scanned ink stamp. I could roughly piece together the special way in which her ideas come about without knowing exactly which one of her clippings each of them came from. “I focus on recontextualizing found imagery and production methods, often experimenting with old software or unconventional tools to generate something that feels both nostalgic and new. It’s this process of reinterpretation — playing with different techniques, layering influences, and letting unexpected results emerge — that keeps my work from slipping into direct replication,” Lucy explained. “But most of all, I approach it with a sense of fun and curiosity. There’s so much joy in exploring, testing ideas, and seeing where they lead.”
The sense of curiosity and the patience it takes to find great source materials and experiment with them until you strike that delicate balance between drawing inspiration from the past and pushing your work forward, are deeply aspirational. A few months ago, I made the mistake of telling a VP at a marketing agency that one of my resolutions this year was to spend more time in archives and libraries which probably sounded like a red flag to him — no one in this industry likes to hear that you want to go down to the physical archives and flip through print pages when a client brief is due in a few days. But it feels like the tides are changing — there is a lot of interest from young creatives towards offline sources of inspiration and local libraries simply because of how overwhelming our digital lives have become. If the teenage me didn’t get the point of digging through stacks of magazines and books to find simple answers, the current me can’t get enough of it.
IN THE MARGINS:
Lucy’s favorite libraries: the Concordia Library in Montreal, the Monash Library in Melbourne, and the Victoria University Library in British Columbia for their vast collections and architecture. The Barbican Library in London and the Royal Roads University Library in Victoria, BC for their built environment. The Brighton Library in Victoria, Australia for its intimacy and important role in the community.
Library visits that are on Lucy’s bucket list: Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City, Toronto Reference Library, and The New York Picture Collection archive.
Books that made the most impact on Lucy’s creativity: Books by or about Bruno Munari and Corita Kent and their approach to making, focused on curiosity, play, and experimentation.
Books she is dying to get her hands on: There’s a book on shopping bag designs I’d love to own, but otherwise, my book collecting is mostly serendipitous. Although, now that I think of it, there are a few Remy Charlip books I’d love to add to my shelf <[:·).
IN OTHER NEWS:
I have one million ideas that I need to stop turning into two-week research projects that completely take over my life. From now on, I am committed to turning them into small curations and short notes on Busy Corner’s IG. This week’s curation is about…feet pics.
Thank you, Vik!!! Such a lovely newsletter to read, and thrilled to be a part of it :'-) XO Lucy