Not all of the books in the Long Hall of Trinity College’s Old Library have yet been removed for conservation. This gives an idea of how the stacks looked when the place was in operation. I look at those ladders and, as an American lawyer, I think about liability insurance coverage.
I went back to the place of the nailed, exposed books yesterday. Almost all of the small building's windows are boarded up and that's where the books are affixed. There are two sets, the one below and ajother just around the corner. The books are more weathered than when I first saw them a month ago, some pages bleached to emptiness. The selection of titles seems obviously meant to convey something. They include: Brave New World; The Silver Chair; The Scarlet Letter (twice); A Farewell to Arms; The Fellowship of the Ring; Sophocles: Three Theban Plays (Antigone, Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus); Great American Poems; Death of a Salesman; The Cave of the Ancients; Frankenstein; The Outsiders; Of Mice and Men and Lord of the Flies. 
I was wandering around a gritty commercial area just south of the Arch and came upon a breathtaking work of art (in my opinion, but by definition I have strange tastes). At the corner of Third and Gratiot Streets there is a low brick building with a board fixed to the outside. Eight books, classic novels, are nailed to the board, sitting out in all the weather. There's Jane Eyre, Of Mice and Men and Brave New World, among others. They could be read but their spines are nailed open to a particular pair of pages, they are above many people's eye level and they are being slowly eaten by the atmosphere. Then there is the single page pictured at the upper left. 
