Building the Cabinet National Library

"For its Spring 2002 'Property' issue, Cabinet beat hearty competition on eBay to buy, sight unseen, a 1/2 acre piece of scrubland outside Deming, New Mexico. The resulting Cabinetlandia was divided into sections with differing functions, some generous, some wholly self-serving: Readerland, Nepotismia, Funderlandia, Editorlandia, Internlandia, and so on. Three sections were left for future projects to be done on the land.
In July 2003, we received a letter from someone in San Francisco purporting to be a devoted reader of Cabinet, one Matthew Passmore. His outlandish and extravagant scheme for building the Cabinet National Library on one of the project spaces seemed to be the stuff of a Werner Herzog short. We published his letter and diagrams in issue 12. To our astonishment, this past summer he made good on his perhaps hasty promise to go out to New Mexico with some friends and build the library. Here is his report."