Imagine 10,000 books lit up, glowing like a river, flowing through a public square and into a nearby street. Such was the installation by Spanish art collective Luzinterruptus in June 2012, in the streets of Melbourne, Australia.
'Literature Versus Traffic" featured recently retired public library books lit up with LEDs. It's a transitional "second life" for them, as onlookers were welcome to return home with the books on the installation's final day. More »
The college library, whether ornate or modern, digital or dusty, is in many ways the epicenter of the college experience ... . It is at once a shining emblem of vast, acquirable knowledge, a place for deep discussions and meetings of the mind, and of course, a big building full of books ... . More »
Well, that was a long absence!
Please accept my apology for being away for so long — life just got busy. Time to get this blog moving again, and there is quite a bit of interesting material coming up. Stay tuned.
Harriet Van Meter started the International Book Project in 1966.
When Mrs. Van Meter visited India in 1965, she found long lines of people waiting — not for food, but for books. She was so moved by her experience that upon returning home, she placed an advertisement in an English-language newspaper in India, offering to send books to those in need. She received a phenomenal response and started sending books from her basement. More »
The Chicago Public Library was reunited ... with a book so many years overdue no one even realized it was missing from its shelves.
In the midst of a rare, three-week amnesty program — where the nation's third-largest city's library system is forgiving fines for any overdue items that are returned to them — the library received a limited edition copy of Oscar Wilde's classic The Picture of Dorian Gray, Reuters reports. More »
In another case, the copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's Words given to "mummy" with the instructions that she "read it all without prejudice" appears to have been chosen with the cover artwork in mind, which bears the text "I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it". Ouch. More »
CDs, DVDS, and e-reads are all well and good when it comes to gift-giving at Christmas, but as far as I'm concerned, for sheer emotional wallop, the old-fashioned physical book is hard to beat. After all, it's the ideal opportunity to foist a well-loved novel onto someone who is now morally obliged to read the thing (and, indeed, profess to like it). Furthermore, there is generous scope / enough rope to let a carefully-chosen book speak volumes about how you feel about the receiver. For this reason, no book-as-gift is complete without a handwritten dedication on its inside cover to further make it clear, just in case there was any doubt, that the recipient absolutely MUST READ THIS BOOK AT THE EXPENSE OF ALL OTHERS!!! More »
As physical books are increasingly supplanted by their digitized counterparts, the trend of sculptors transforming books into art objects has taken off. Whether as an attempt to preserve some element of a dying tradition or repurpose items that many now see as disposable, book art is everywhere. More »
Would you like to live in a house made of books? Here some such buildings good for living in (or playing in!). Which would you like, hmm? More »
Public libraries are ... places where anyone can enter and partake of knowledge they offer, where anyone can engage with history, literature and culture. ... Everyone likes to read in a beautiful space. More »
True, we mostly think all books are little objets d’art, but these go above and beyond the normal standards, each one an innovative and interesting piece of design as well as a functioning book. More »
Two recent studies have confirmed what we all knew anyway: Reading is good for you. Surely there's no better place to read a book than at one of these 12 coolest libraries in the world. More »
The history of bookmaking hasn’t been without its challenges, but never was its craft as painstaking as during the era of illuminated manuscripts. Joining the ranks of history’s most appalling and amusing complaints ... is an absolute treat for lovers of marginalia — a collection of complaints monks scribbled in the pages of illuminated manuscripts. More »
Alvaro Tamarit has collected and re-purposed an array of old books in order to create the “Banco del Pensamiento” (“The Bench of Thought”). More »
I think I may be straying from the point here, apologies for the little rant. This article is about bookcases, and here are 50 amazing bookcases, both big and small, and it’s comforting and amazing to see that in this day and age people still love their books so much to give them a real prominent place in their home. These book cases really put my Ikea bookcase to shame. More »
One of science fiction's jobs is to give humanity a map of where we're headed. From Jules Verne to William Gibson, sci-fi authors have described their versions of the future, and how people might live in it. More »
Some priceless and pricelessly uncompromising wisdom from a very different kind of cultural legend: iconic businessman and original “Mad Man” David Ogilvy. On September 7th, 1982, Ogilvy sent the following internal memo to all agency employees, titled “How to Write”:More »
IDP is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.More »
Getting hideously drunk at a dinner party and embarrassing [oneself] is certainly nothing new. As far back as the ninth century, the beautifully named 'Dunhuang Bureau of Etiquette' insisted that local officials use the [above] letter template (dated 856) when sending apologies to offended dinner hosts.More »
More »My name is Rachael Ashe. I am a visual artist, currently living in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
I am a photographer, mixed-media collage, and altered book artist ...
When Charles Dickens moved into Tavistock House in 1851, he decided to fill two spaces in his new study with bookcases containing fake books, the witty titles of which he had invented. And so, on October 22nd, he wrote to a bookbinder named Thomas Robert Eeles and supplied him with the following "list of imitation book-backs" to be produced.More »
Highbrows might scoff that Hollywood doesn't respect serious literature, but they obviously haven't discovered the biz's high-end rare-book scene. Johnny Depp collects first-edition works by Jack Kerouac, Arthur Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas and Edgar Allan Poe.More »
Bookcase design is a mix between interior design and woodworking, and it requires creating something that is large enough to store books, sturdy enough to withstand the occasional bump, yet visually appealing and not distracting, bulky or ugly. There are a lot of different bookcase design styles to choose from, including vintage woodworking, modern glass or even some other materials.More »
With Amazon slowly taking over the publishing world and bookstores closing left and right, things can sometimes seem a little grim for the brick and mortar booksellers of the world. After all, why would anyone leave the comfort of their couch to buy a book when with just a click of a button, they could have it delivered to their door? Well, here’s why: bookstores so beautiful they’re worth getting out of the house (or the country) to visit whether you need a new hardcover or not.More »
From Henry Miller on Writing:
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- People are getting rid of bookshelves. Treat the money you budgeted for shelving as found money. Go to garage sales and cruise the curbs.
- While you're drafting that business plan, cut your projected profits in half. People are getting rid of bookshelves.
- If someone comes in and asks where to find the historical fiction, they're not looking for classics, they want the romance section.
John James Audubon’s Birds of America already holds the title of most valuable printed book in the world, having sold for about $11.5 million in 2010. In fact, according to The Economist, a true list of the ten most valuable single books ever sold would have to include five copies of The Birds of America.
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At The New Yorker Book Bench Macy Halford recently posed an important question: “What is wanting to write without wanting to read like? It’s imperative that we figure it out, because Giraldi’s right: it’s both crazy and prevalent among budding writers.” She was echoing a question asked by debut novelist William Giraldi who in the course of teaching writing at Boston University has noticed a growing number of aspiring writers disinclined to read.More »
More »Milwaukee Public Library launched an advertising campaign, using famous social media logos, to encourage more people to take up a book.
The logos of social media networks, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, were given a clever spin, and put into perspective that viewers should be spending more time reading than checking status updates, tweeting thoughts, or watching videos.
Here it is, the meta-list of lists listing the best books of 2011. More »
