Biblioteca Vasconcelos

This guide to Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City is built around a gray whale skeleton, one hundred sixty nine bones found on a Baja California sandbar in 2006, that hangs above the reading room to this day. It follows artist Gabriel Orozco's decision to draw directly onto the bones rather than beside them, and the dozen assistants who spent six weeks tracing concentric circles across every rib and vertebra with six thousand mechanical pencils. Look up and you can still see the graphite rosettes bleeding into one another like fingerprints pressed into bone.