Well-Read and Well-Fed
Nowruz, Edible Book Festivals, and Libraries Welcoming Every Kind of Mind
Infophilia, a Positive Psychology of Information | April 4, 2026 | Vol. 4, Issue 19 |Correction, 9:00 am April 4, 2026: The paragraph on PapersClaw's privacy and data design has been revised for accuracy, with accompanying Notes.
Artificial Intelligence | Information Styles | Intellectual Freedom | Toolbox | Wellbeing
Welcome to Infophilia, a weekly serial exploring how our love of information and connection can help us thrive, individually and collectively. A living lab, this is also one of the places where adaptive infophilia theory is being developed as public scholarship.
📌Access & Attribution: This serial offers free previews always and occasional open access essays to keep scholarship accessible. Students and those facing financial barriers can request complimentary access. If you find value here, please cite the original work and consider supporting the public scholarship through subscription. Proper attribution sustains this work.
Cite as: Coleman, A. S. (2026, April 4). Well-read and well-fed: Nowruz, edible book festivals, and the libraries welcoming every kind of mind. Infophilia, A Positive Psychology of Information, 4(19).
Today's three sections answer the question our title implicitly asks: what does it mean to be truly nourished by information? The answers, it turns out, arrive from many directions at once — like spring itself. Happy Spring!
In honor of Brett Spencer, a pioneering voice for sensory-friendly spaces in libraries, this essay is open access.
Well-Read and Well-Fed
Nowruz, Edible Book Festivals, and Libraries Welcoming Every Kind of Mind
Take what you can carry - Gian Sardar
We’re writing this during Holy Week, when the church observes the Great Triduum, and you are probably reading this on Holy Saturday — the held expectant day between death and resurrection.
Holy Saturday finds itself this year at the center of a literal constellation of celebrations, each one celebrating a different kind of light.
Among the Parsi Zoroastrian community from India to Irvine, and even among some modern Iranians (Iranzamin, within Iran and extending beyond to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, the Caucasus region, especially Azerbaijan), Nowruz’s thirteen days of renewal, recognized by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage, are still underway. Edible Book Day is being celebrated in honor of the birthday of French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Tomorrow is Easter Sunday. April is both Women’s History Month and Poetry Month. And on April 2nd, wondrously slipped into this same luminous week, the world observes International Children’s Picture Book Day.
Almost without notice: the markets go still for Good Friday. In the United States, it’s not a federal holiday, but it’s a financial one. Canada, Mexico, some in Asia, and much of Europe close too. In Europe, Easter Monday extends the pause further. Even the traders, it seems, know when to be still.
Also this week, a new app called PapersClaw.fun is preparing its public premiere at CHI 2026 in Barcelona later this month. It launched, with perfect timing, on April Fool’s Day.
Spring is arriving from many directions at once.
Which brings us, quite naturally, to the Velveteen Rabbit.
If you know the story, you know its central question: What makes something real? The Skin Horse says it plainly; real isn’t about how you’re made. It’s about being loved, worn at the edges, a little threadbare. Real takes time. Real hurts. But once you’re real, says the Skin Horse, you can’t become unreal again.
That’s a resurrection story. It’s also a good description of what happens to a beloved book.
If you could eat a book...
Every spring, in libraries, schools, and bookstores around the world, people do exactly that.
This week it was simply lovely to open my university library’s website and find a picture of a cake. This is the 20th year the University library is sponsoring the Champaign-Urbana Edible Book Festival, a fundraiser supporting the crucial work of the Wesley Food Pantry, on Saturday, April 4th.
The International Edible Book Festival is usually held on or around April 1st; it invites participants to make food inspired by books: book-shaped cakes, punny edible tableaux, literary scenes rendered in buttercream. Entries are admired, judged (sometimes for “best pun,” sometimes for “least edible”), and then consumed. The motto: have your book and eat it too.
I. The universe would be nothing were it not for life and all that lives must be fed.
II. Animals fill themselves; man eats. The man of mind alone knows how to eat.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste
The festival honors a French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of Physiologie du gout (The Physiology of Taste), a witty meditation on food but also a seminal work of culinary philosophy. Jean was born on April 1, 1755 (though some sources note his birth as April 2). A bit of April Fool’s whimsy that fits us too!
It all began in Southern California, naturally. The story goes that artist Béatrice Coron proposed the idea during a 1999 or 2000 Thanksgiving dinner with book artists. This led to a collaboration with Judith A. Hoffberg, a librarian, book arts advocate, and cataloger by training and, we’re glad to report, already remembered in Librarians We Have Lost. They organized the first event on April 1, 2000, in Santa Monica, California, as a playful fusion of literature, art, and food.
International Children's Picture Book Day falls on April 2nd, Hans Christian Andersen's birthday, marked since 1967 by IBBY — the International Board on Books for Young People — in the hope that great children's literature might build understanding across every border. A women-owned small business, PAI Consulting, whose staff includes pilots, editors, lawyers, and aviation professionals, found a delightful way to pair both days together.
Keith Estes, a pilot and PAI editor, offers this recipe for Ann Can Fly, a nearly forgotten 1959 Beginner Books classic about a girl, her father, and a floatplane:
2 cups of wide-open western sky (blue, the particular blue of a 1959 illustration)
1 Cessna 182 on floats, lightly toasted
A generous pour of Lake Mead, still and glassy
1 calm, capable father who explains the instruments without making you feel small
A pinch of that specific childhood feeling that flying is the most normal and wonderful thing in the world
Directions: Mix until the horizon disappears. Serves one child with a lifelong interest in aviation.
That’s the positive psychology of information in a recipe box. The right book, at the right moments, with the right person beside you changes the horizon.
This world of dew is only a world of dew — and yet... and yet... — Kobayashi Issa
Written on the death of his daughter. Issa, who lost several children and knew grief from the inside, never stopped finding the world astonishing.
The architecture of welcome
Spring is also a season for opening things up, and libraries around the world are doing that in a very particular way.
Sensory-friendly library spaces and programs are designed to welcome patrons who are neurodivergent — and honestly, all patrons — by reducing overwhelming stimuli and introducing calmness: softer lighting, quieter zones, fidget tools, predictable layouts, clear sensory maps of the space. The idea is that a library should feel safe to enter for a child with sensory sensitivities, an adult with autism, anyone who finds busy or noisy spaces genuinely difficult. Drawing from both her lived experience and her professional background as a cognitive neuroscientist who studies attention, Anne-Laure Le Cunff put it as the hypercurious mind directly: “ADHD, at its core, is an impulsive motivational drive for novel information” — not a dysfunction, but a trait with possible evolutionary advantages in variable environments.***
Hopefully in the future most universities, airports, public libraries and other places will have a sensory room that will help people with disability and challenges, like autism, but also help anybody achieve mental wellness. - Brett Spencer
The Sensory-Friendly Libraries Showcase is currently collecting profiles from libraries doing this work: public, academic, school, and special libraries. If your library has a sensory space or program, consider submitting. This kind of knowledge-sharing is renewal.
And on this Holy Saturday, this day between, we pause also for Librarians We Have Lost, 1976-2026. This ALA Sesquicentennial Memorial project — initiated by Kathleen de la Peña McCook, Sue Martin, Brett Spencer, and this writer, among others from the Library History Round Table — offers crowdsourced, curated memorials lovingly maintained by the Library History Round Table, documenting more than 250 librarians and faculty of library schools who are no longer with us: their names, their work, the communities they shaped. Anybody can submit tributes to a librarian or library worker who died during the sesquicentennial years, 1976-2026.
This is an act of professional memory, and also, a refusal to let the real become unreal.
And then there is the conference ocean.
The premise of PapersClaw.fun is deceptively simple: large academic conferences are information floods, not deserts. Last year’s CHI drew 50,000 attendees and featured thousands of papers. The problem isn’t scarcity — it’s orientation. PapersClaw helps conference-goers build a personal map: which sessions align with their intellectual neighborhood, which scholars are publishing just beyond the edge of their current network, where someone has dropped a pin to host an informal coffee meetup, what a paper’s author really wanted you to know about why they cared.
Yun Huang, Associate Professor at iSchool Illinois, traces the app’s origin to watching senior scholars navigate conferences with what looked like effortless instinct, always knowing which corridor held the conversation that would change their next three years. Did she recognize it as an infostyle, and decide to make it learnable, transferable, democratized? (I doubt she knows our work on infophilia but I can dream, can’t I!)
What strikes us as deeply infophilic about PapersClaw is its theory of serendipity: that unexpected discovery is not random. It can be designed. (This kind of serendipity engineering is something a good cataloger does, enabling what we used to call the syndetic structure of the catalog.) The app’s AI agents are specifically tasked with surfacing cross-domain collaborations, people and papers outside your current intellectual gravity field. This is the opposite of the filter bubble. It is an anti-filter: a deliberate engineering of the conditions under which minds meet ideas they didn’t know they needed.
The privacy design is worth noting, with some caveats. User schedules are saved in the local browser rather than on a server and this is a genuinely thoughtful choice. Authentication requires a work or school account — routed in practice through Google sign-in. The paper data is drawn from a crawler script developed by doctoral student Yiren Liu, whose prior work building conference chatbots for CSCW and CHI inspired the project. This is, as Huang herself notes warmly, an early launch. The bones are good. The ocean is real. The claw is still learning to swim.
Huang calls it spatial discovery. She describes her vision as “an ocean of ideas waiting to be explored.” We think that’s exactly right and we think it rhymes with everything else happening this week: the Edible Book Festival’s insistence that encountering a book should be sensory, playful, embodied; the sensory-friendly library’s insistence that the architecture of information access should fit the actual diversity of human minds; and the old Skin Horse’s insistence that what makes something real is not how it was made, but whether it has been genuinely, thoroughly used.
In case you just joined us: we introduced our grand theory of Library and Information Science last month. (Why do I even bother is a question best discussed over wine and a cheese board — or bourbon, or chai, or chocolate, depending entirely on the weather and the time of day!) In our initial mapping we placed Yun Huang’s research agenda across three clusters of adaptive infophilia: C1 Measuring Infostyles, C3 Information Weaponization & Resilience, and C6 AI Infophilia and the Future of Information Institutions. You’ve now read a story about her most recent work. That’s a tiny bit of science behind our infophilia stories.
Tomorrow, many will celebrate new life breaking through. Today, we wait, with books, and recipes made of sky, and libraries learning to be gentler, and the names of librarians we don’t want to forget.
Nowruz Mobarak. Happy Easter. Have your book and eat it too.
And find yourself some PapersClaw.fun before your tea gets cold.
Until next week,
Anita
Don’t cry, little insects! Love involves parting, It happens even among the stars. — Kobayashi Issa
⁂
Notes
The title of this essay’s epigraph is borrowed with gratitude from Gian Sardar’s novel Take What You Can Carry (Berkley, 2021). Highly recommended.
***Le Cunff (cite below) is careful to note that recognizing hypercuriosity as a trait with evolutionary advantages does not diminish the reality of impairment that many people with ADHD experience daily.
Williams, M. (1922). The velveteen rabbit or how toys become real. Doubleday, Page & Co. It remains actively in print.
Phleger, F. (1959). Ann Can Fly. Robert Lopshire (Illustrator). Random House. This classic children's "I Can Read" Beginner Book is out of print but available through used book markets like Abe Books.
Brolley, C. (2026). Edible Book Day (April 1)/Children's Picture Book Day (April 2). PAI Consulting. https://www.paiconsulting.com/stet-happens-all-about-editing/edible-book-and-childrens-picture-book-day
Le Cunff, A.-L. (2026). How the hypercuriosity of ADHD may have helped humans thrive. Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-hypercuriosity-of-adhd-may-have-helped-humans-thrive. https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-hypercuriosity-of-adhd-may-have-helped-humans-thrive
Judith Hoffberg (1934 - 2009) is remembered in LWHL. According to Wikipedia, Béatrice Coron continues her work as a book artist.
"The Physiology of Taste; Or, Transcendental Gastronomy" by Brillat-Savarin… introduces readers to his perspective on gastronomy and taste as crucial elements of human experience. The Physiology of Taste is freely available at Gutenberg books.
For the dew haiku: Issa, K. (1763–1827). “this world of dew” [tsuyu no yo wa]. Written on the death of his daughter Sato. Translated by D. G. Lanoue. HaikuGuy.com.
For the insects/stars haiku: Issa, K. (1762–1826). “don’t cry, little insects.” In Classic haiku: The greatest Japanese poetry from Basho, Buson, Issa, Shiki, and their followers. By T. Lowenstein (Editor) and J. Cleare (Photographs). Shelter Harbor Press, 2018. p. 153.
Sensory Friendly Libraries Showcase - visit and submit your library!
Showcase: https://sites.google.com/view/sensorylibrary/home
Submit a profile of your sensory space or program: https://sites.google.com/view/sensorylibrary/submit-your-sensory-project
Sensory friendly assessment tool: https://callacademy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Safe-Neurodivergent-Spaces-in-Libraries-Assessment-Tool.pdf
Kravitz, D. (2023, November 30). Pattee Library's sensory space in library meets sensory needs, relieves stress. The Daily Collegian. https://www.psucollegian.com/news/campus/pattee-library-s-sensory-space-in-library-meets-sensory-needs-relieves-stress/article_b003634c-8284-11ee-8db2-47e2c393980f.html
Spencer, B., Owenz, M. B., & Aydemir-Döke, D. (2025). Sustainable cross-campus collaborations to support library-based sensory social justice. In A. Boyer & A. El-Chidiac (Eds.), Supporting neurodiverse students in academic libraries. ALA Editions.
Librarians We Have Lost Initiative (1976–2026): A Sesquicentennial Memorial Project
Each memorial is posted on ALA Connect and then archived on LHRT News and Notes and ALAIR, the American Library Association’s Institutional Repository.
Submit a tribute using this form: https://lhrt.news/librarians-we-have-lost-sesquicentennial-memories-1976-2026-2/
de la Peña McCook. (2026, March). Librarians We Have Lost, 1976–2026. ALA Sesquicentennial Memorial Project. ALA150.org https://ala150.org/librarians-we-have-lost/
de la Peña McCook, K. (2026, April). Librarians We Have Lost. Library Journal, 151(4), 28–29.
Papers.claw
Papers.claw. https://papersclaw.fun/
School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. (2026, April). New app designed to improve conference experience. https://ischool.illinois.edu/news-events/news/2026/04/new-app-designed-improve-conference-experience
Although the iSchool news story doesn't mention this, Huang, on the PapersClaw website, thanks her senior doctoral student Yiren Liu for providing the crawler script underlying the app's paper data. “He has led the development of conference chatbots for CSCW 2024, CHI ’25, UbiComp ’25, and CSCW ’25. These experiences inspired the creation of PapersClaw,” she notes. Computing resources for the project are supported by the NAIRR250520 grant. Yiren Liu is also lead author of Perspectra, receiving a Best Paper Honorable Mention at CHI 2026, co-authored with Huang and colleagues. His ongoing research with Huang's lab includes CoQuest (CHI 2024). The Privacy Policy also includes this: “Third-party services we use include: Azure (hosting), OpenAI (LLM), and Google (Sign-In). You should review their privacy policies: Azure, OpenAI, Google.”
1 min 36 sec. video trailer for PapersClaw.fun, a new AI-powered conference navigation app debuting at CHI 2026 in Barcelona, April 13–17, 2026. Developed by Associate Professor Yun Huang, iSchool Illinois.