In 1975, Joseph Feldman, a 58-year-old lawyer in New York City, was discovered to have stolen 15,000 books from the New York Public Library. He had rented two or three apartments specifically to store these books, and it took 20 men, 7 truckloads over 3 days to remove them all.
Books covered the stove. Books filled the bathtub and sinks. There was only a small passageway leading through the apartment, not room enough to live.
But why did he do it ?
Was he obsessively hoarding ? Making a political statement ? Making conceptual art ? Or was he simply, as he told the judge who tried his case, reading ? There are no accidents…
Feldman and the Infinite is a new play that speculates about Feldman’s motives, about seeking knowledge and enlightenment, and finding what appears to be randomness and chaos.
Feldman turns to his landlord, and his new acquaintance, the sculptor Christo, for guidance through the maze of his own obsession – told with humor, passion, and love for the library and its contents.
Feldman and the Infinite
a play by Erika Mijlin
featuring Jerry Perna, Jeffrey Adam Baxt, and Ted Borodaeff
Performed as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival
September 11-12-13, 2008 @ 8pm
at Artifact Pictures
or call 215.425.3721 for more information
Tour the stacks and the reading rooms of libraries around the world thanks to Curious Expeditions. Seen as a collection, the library – The Library – becomes abstract. In these photographs, virtually devoid of people, The Library is a concept : it is ‘potential’ energy as opposed to kinetic energy – the latent spring in the mind, coiled but waiting there, on the infinitely high shelves. Trying to decipher the magnetism of these images – having almost nothing to with a desire to actually read all of the books in each room – but each vaulted hall a physical manifestation of the phenomenon of the figurative mental space – the freedom to be found in endless rumination.
One of Feldman’s apartments.
Through this door passed many thousands of books. On the way in, brought under secret cover, under coats, inside waistbands, inside satchels. Then, on the way out, packed in large cardboard boxes, headed for a truck set to rumble the lot of them back to the Public Library.
