By: Grace Gross, Lead Editor
Photography by Grace Gross and Office of University Communications and Marketing
Welcome back to campus, Bearcats! I hope everyone’s summer was warm and fun. Now that we are all back, I want to introduce one of the new features on campus this year: Bogey’s Book Club! You can find Bogey’s Book Club at 1828 Cafe, near Carnegie Hall.
Bogey’s Book Club is a free book library, meaning all the books inside the library are available for anyone to take! You may leave a book for others to enjoy or find yourself a new read. With this project, I hope students and faculty will donate their old textbooks because buying and renting textbooks can be expensive. After you’ve used your textbooks, think about donating to Bogey’s Book Cub! You can find Bogey’s Book Club at 1828 Cafe, near Carnegie Hall.
I got the idea for Bogey’s Book Club last semester in my Seminar in Communication Studies course when our professor, Dr. Frank, gave the class creative freedom with our senior projects. I wanted to create something that would positively impact the McKendree community while also leaving my mark! My classmate and recent McKendree graduate, Hanna Parisio, and I worked on this project together.
After a couple of weeks of prepping and planning, Hanna and I began building our library in the middle of April 2024. With approval and permission from multiple departments on campus, we were finally allowed to start working! Doug Magnussen, technical director of the Hettenhausen Center for the Arts (the Hett), was a huge help during this process. He let us use his shop in the Hett to craft, build, and paint Bogey’s Book Club. Doug’s student workers deserve a big shout-out too! They helped and guided us in the right direction since we had no prior woodworking experience.
The following photos are from the building process:
Here is where things get colorful! We had to go for the classic “McKendree purple.”
Following (less than) a month of building, painting, and polishing Bogey’s Book Club made its debut appearance on May 9th, 2024. This was such an exciting day for Hanna and I. We waited a few weeks for the weather to dry up so we could cement our library into the ground. All of the time, effort, and passion put into this project made it worth the wait.
On graduation day, May 10th, 2024, we celebrated the finished product by hosting a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Nadia Ghahkenshah and Matt Seniour, from the Office of University Communications and Marketing, joined us to photograph this special occasion.
Hanna reflected on the completed project by saying, “Building Bogey’s Book Club with Grace is one of the best memories I have of McKendree. Our friendship started over the love we both have for books, so I think this project was perfect to showcase our friendship.”
Similar to what Hanna said, this project means so much to me, and I hope it is well appreciated and loved by the community.
So many people helped us with this project; we could not have done it without each one of them. A big thank-you to Dr. Joni Bastian, Doug Magnussen, Dan Sewell, Adam Kasper, and all the faculty and staff who donated books, including Calvin Wertman and the English department!
Please enjoy Bogey’s Book Club! Leave a book, take a book.
