Know your tome – anatomy of the book. Pair with how a book is made, from antiquity to the Middle Ages to today.
“Sections in the bookstore
- Books You Haven’t Read
- Books You Needn’t Read
- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading
- Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written
- Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
- Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First
- Books Too Expensive Now and You’ll Wait ‘Til They’re Remaindered
- Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback
- Books You Can Borrow from Somebody
- Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too
- Books You’ve Been Planning to Read for Ages
- Books You’ve Been Hunting for Years Without Success
- Books Dealing with Something You’re Working on at the Moment
- Books You Want to Own So They’ll Be Handy Just in Case
- Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer
- Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves
- Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
- Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time to Re-read
- Books You’ve Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It’s Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them”
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| — | Italo Calvino; If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (via wordpainting) |
Book culture is in far less peril than many choose to assume, for the notion of an imperiled book culture assumes that book culture is a beast far more refined, rarified, and fragile than it actually is. By defining books as against technology, we deny our true selves, we deny the power of the book. Let’s restore to publishing its true reputation—not as a hedge against the future, not as a bulwark against radical change, not as a citadel amidst the barbarians, but rather as the future at hand, as the radical agent of change, as the barbarian.
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| — | Richard Nash on the business of literature. Complement with a history of reading. |
Braided book art by Math Monahan
Using a system of braided books, I am attempting to create a structure that possesses its power and agency only when it exist between academic book and art object. By allowing the tension of the circle arrangement to hold the object together, without adhesives or restraint, the pages slowly unbraid themselves over time giving the installation the opportunity to become books, again, in their original form.
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To me, this post might be just as important as the bible.
One of my classes. My elderly teacher taught us this because he really cared about books.
Why does no one teach us these things anymore?
I get so uppity when someone breaks the binding on my books.
I’m pretty sure my mom taught me this before she taught me how to even read the book.
The one harry potter book my sister read before me has a broken binding and it makes me so ill
Has your cat ever walked across your keyboard? Well, it’s not a new problem. Medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel recently Tweeted this photo of a 15th century book with… you guessed it… cat paw prints in ink on the pages! We’re part of a long and glorious historical movement, friends.
Source: Dr. Marty Becker
A Bookshelf that grows
Rotterdam-based Dutch designer Reinier de Jong has created a clever storage solution with the REK bookcase, which “grows” with your expanding book collection. Using a sliding mechanism, the puzzle-like bookshelf pulls out and become wider when necessary to accommodate new books—with nooks of various sizes, users will also be able to arrange their books neatly according to size.
This is a great time to be a reader. The amount of good writing freely available online far exceeds what even the most dedicated consumer might have hoped to encounter a generation ago within the limits of printed media.
[Yet] only 1 per cent is of value to the intelligent general reader… . Another 4 per cent of the internet counts as entertaining rubbish. The remaining 95 per cent has no redeeming features. But even the 1 per cent of writing by and for the elite is an embarrassment of riches, a horn of plenty, a garden of delights.
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| — | The Browser’s Robert Cottrell on writing in the age of the internet (via explore-blog) |
