A few decades ago, checking out a library book meant writing your name on a lined, 3-by-5-inch card that a librarian then stamped the due date on. When you returned the book, the card went into a pocket that was glued inside the back cover.
Now that digital technology is everywhere, these cards are obsolete.
“For the most part, it's just so foreign to younger generations, 30-year-olds and down,” says Kansas City artist Heidi Pitre, who’s been creating artwork on these old checkout cards for a decade. “It definitely opens a conversation for how it used to be.”
Sixty-six of Pitre’s pen-and-ink illustrations, inspired by books and their authors, are now on display in a new exhibition called “Permanent Record,” on the second floor of Kansas City Public Library’s downtown location.
Pitre’s checkout card series was sparked during a 2015 art residency in Navasota, Texas. An avid reader, one of her first stops in the small town was the library.
“I went to the library with my list and I started looking through the books, and they had a new (computer) system in the front but the back of the book still had the card,” remembers Pitre, a native of New Orleans who moved to Kansas City in 2022. “So, I went to ask the librarian — he was wonderful — and I said, ‘Can I have these?’”
With the library’s permission, she began collecting cards from classic titles and other books that resonated with her. Most were adorned with typewritten author names and book titles, and library patron names signed carefully in cursive.
The collection sat on her desk for a few weeks while she considered doodling or sketching on the cards. Then Pitre had an idea.
“To illustrate something from the book,” she says. “Some kind of symbolism, or the author, or some kind of play on the title or whatever.”
For Pitre’s first card, “The Hotel New Hampshire,” she sketched a bear balancing on a motorbike. Since then, she’s created about 160 illustrations on these vintage cards, and she collects more as she shows her work in galleries and libraries across the country. People have even mailed her new additions, she says.
On the card for “The Art of Badminton,” a popular checkout in the 1930s, Pitre includes a very Kansas City reference: a giant shuttlecock in the bottom right corner, like the ones on the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s lawn.
There’s also a card for Jack London’s 1904 novel, “The Sea Wolf.” This copy was last checked out in 2005, and the card now features a seal-hunting schooner on calm, blue waters.
"I just wanted to go for those books that people could relate to, and that mean something,” Pitre says. “Books, we hold them close to our heart, right?”
Pitre began her artistic career as a painter, creating 6-by-6-foot paintings and murals, so the cards are the smallest format she’s ever used.
And besides the size, she says, she’s also working with a material that’s hard to replace.
"I get one shot — it's one and done,” she says. “I've messed up two, I believe, in the entire 10 years. But I have to be very careful.”
After that long on a project, Pitre’s audience is still growing, but her supply of cards is running low as libraries shred or discard more of them over time.
“It’s not like I can go pick up another ‘1984’ someplace and just start over,” she says. “There's no starting over.”
“A Permanent Record,” from Saturday, Feb. 14 to Sunday, April 19 at the Mountain Gallery in Kansas City Public Library’s Central Library, 14 W. 10th Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64105. For more information, go to KCLibrary.org.
