The Mushroom Bookroom
The world’s first fungal bookshop, grown from bookshop waste
Welcome to the world’s first fungal book shop, grown from book shop waste by us, Threads in the Ground & lots of ‘mushroom curious’ members of the wonderful North East Community.
We are a climate hope organisation. We help people and communities to imagine their climate future. To play and experiment with climate change ideas.
We have used waste materials and mixed them with fungi to grow these amazing bio bookshelves.
It’s our hope we’ve created something that is inspiring & thought provoking - love it or hate it, we hope it will get you talking, and that’s the point.
Over to you now, to ‘mushroom’ your own climate action.
Want to host the Mushroom Bookroom?
The mushroom bookroom is modular, scalable, and tourable. It has already been booked to visit a number of UK festivals. We want to keep growing and touring the structure, and we’d love you to be involved.
How
(...have you made things from fungus)?
Mushrooms are just “the fruit”. The rest of the thing, the organism, is the thinner-than-hair strands running through the earth around us. These threads are called “Mycelium”. People all around the world have been making experimental materials from mycelium… Imaginatively named, “Mycelium Based Materials” (MBM).
MBM is amazing. You mix together some plant waste - like sawdust or straw - with a sample of your fungus. The mycelium grows and binds it all together inside your mould. The resulting material is strong, fire retardant, light, and totally compostable.
We worked with Stuart Macalister from Heatherwick Studios (multi-award winning British design and architecture studio) to create the design concept. And with fantastic local designer, Jamie Josef Fry, to design and fabricate our sculpting moulds.
MBM is a very simple, easy material to work with, so long as you can navigate and bounce back from the occasional disaster (foreshadowing…)
Why
(...have you made things from fungus)?
We were chatting with the manager of The Bound independent book shop in Whitley Bay. They told us that their small bookshop has to recycle 2 tonnes (2 rhinos!) of waste cardboard boxes every month.
That left us thinking - how can we make this into a hopeful climate conversation - one that embraces the real life challenges of consumerism. Well, we’d built some stuff from mycelium mixed with hemp already, so could we fungify some cardboard instead?
Cardboard is a brilliant material, and recycling is great. Way better than making things from new. But recycling isn’t magic, it still has a cost. Pulping and reforming those 2 rhinos emits about 800kg of CO2. This is a good example of how climate action is complicated, and requires a total re-think of all systems, processes and technologies.
We have been collecting binned bookshop cardboard and collaborating with people around the region to grow and craft an immersive mycelial space where you can contemplate beautiful and hopeful ideas of climate change and action.
The book shop grown from book shop waste is a space to read, to think, to play, and to chat climate hope - our connections to nature; capitalism and waste; and the unique ancestral power we hold by being alive in this crucial climate moment.
Mushroominations
This project has been, at times, a total nightmare. But we hope you agree it’s been absolutely worth it. At the very least, regardless if you love it or hate it, it’s a talking point. And that’s the point.
In many ways, the stuff that went wrong along the way has turned out the most powerful. Each stumbling block, accident, idiocy, and workaround has some climate hope learning contained within it…
We didn’t think through the heft of the task. We didn’t think through how many times we’d literally be climbing into the skip bin in a back-alley in Whitley Bay to collect cardboard. We didn’t think through how we’d have to pasteurise and hand-shred approximately 40m2 of cardboard. We didn’t think through how we’d ‘cook’ 16 modules twice the size of our oven.
All of this was hard. We just did it anyway. We pushed through every challenge with the help of our wonderful community and a lot of grit.
We ate the fruit of the mushroom bookroom
We teamed up with the fabulous Magic Hat cafe to eat the fruit of the mushroom bookroom.
While the shelves were growing, many of them sprouted gourmet grey oyster mushrooms. We picked and dried those mushrooms, and at the end of our opening exhibition, we held a feast event at the Magic Hat.
The menu was AMAZING…
Cloud ear mushroom soda
Mushroom arancini, fermented mushroom ketchup
Bread with roast garlic & mushroom butter
Mixed mushroom skewers, fried millet, smoked aioli
Oyster mushroom & tarragon & pea maultaschen, whey & brown butter, pickled fennel
(Pot-sticker dumplings, crispy king oyster, mushroom broth, wild garlic)
Dark chocolate & mushroom truffles, mushroom infused caramel, whipped cream, donut peach.
We hope to hold more Mushroom Bookroom feasts in the future.
