I recently became obsessed with the “KEEP CALM AND” campaigns popping up, parodies of the KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON British WWII campaign. After spending hours flipping through the Flickr group and Google images1, I noticed there seemed to be a KEEP CALM parody for just about everything EXCEPT for libraries.
Libraries, regardless of what type, are more in danger now then every before. The reasoning, however, as to why and what can be done would be not blog posts but websites about the topic. Several groups/websites have already begun to push this importance of saving libraries/library advocacy to the public forefront such as Agnostic, Maybe, Losing Libraries, Crave Libraries and Save LA Public Libraries. These are just a few of the dozens of grassroots people/websites bringing to the public advocacy and grassroots campaigns to better serve/protect/save libraries.
Once discovering the font (Gill Sans, amongst friends, seems to be closest2), I planned on blocking out some time later week to play around to create a library parody but then I stumbled upon the KEEP CALM-O-Matic website! Who needs to fiddle with Photoshop and fonts when the web can do it for you? Plus this just saved me ton of time on trying to make everything “just right.”
To the above is mock-up I did for “KEEP CALM AND LIBRARY ON,” which I think is a great umbrella term that, like the British during the throes of WWII, illustrates libraries and librarians will persevere. We have lasted two millennia of cutbacks, burnings, bombings, death, scandals, awful stereotypes and whatever else has been thrown our way. In short, there is nothing we can’t handle and librarians are certainly not going anywhere.
While KEEP CALM-O-Matic is fabulous since you can instantly create and purchase, via Zazzle, your KEEP CALM stuff, you cannot upload your own images (for example, I would like to swap out the crown for the ALA “Reader” logo3). And the t-shirts are not solid colors, rather, they are the image created by the KEEP CALM-O-Matic and just superimposed on the shirt, like an iron-on. I know there are loads of other super talented people out there who would totally dig this and can make this spectactular. Me? Probably not so much.
So if anyone plays around with this, let me know either via Twitter using the tag #KCaLO or in the comments below.
Keep calm and library on.
1. One of my favorites.
2. Thanks Chris!
3. Thanks to Librarian JP for the heads up on the name of that blasted logo.