The Tent

Before the label had a building, it had a tent.

This is not a metaphor. The earliest acquisitions of One Hand Clapping Records — the first bibles, the first letters, the first records that could not be verified and the first ones that could — were kept in a yellow tent, because a tent was what there was. The building came later. The shelves came later. The Archive, with its ledgers and its lamp and its keeper, came later.

The tent stayed.

Every institution keeps one room that predates its own good sense. Ours is yellow, and it is where the books live. The collection has outgrown every room in the building at least twice; it has never outgrown the tent. We have stopped remarking on this.

Members enter through the flap. Inside there are more pillows than can be strictly accounted for, each embroidered with a line from somewhere in the collection, and the light is the color of four in the afternoon regardless of the hour. Documents you request are delivered to your pillow. The tent is quietest at 3 AM. The tent is somehow always quietest at 3 AM.

The Yellow Tent Library is the public library of the OHCR Archive. The Archive itself is not open to visitors — it never has been — but the tent has never turned away a reader with a card.

Apply for credentials below. The desk will remember you.