A fantastic piece in The New Yorker on a new publishing initiative called Inkling to make books more web-friendly by dividing them up into small chunks similar to index cards. Books are hard for search engines to get into — they are big and baggy to borrow from H. James …
I’ve just returned from a fantastic conference in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum on Women’s Writing Instruments in the Eighteenth Century. We learned about the types of things that a woman would have at her desk when she sat down to write, including seals, wax, ink, quills, knives, …
A wonderful exhibit currently running at the Foley Gallery in New York called “Beautiful Evidence,” one that brings together a profound sense of the scientific and the whimsical. Books don’t seem to tell us the truth here, but make us wonder. These are curiosities in the Renaissance sense of the term.
Ahh, dusty books. A charming piece in the Times Higher Education on the days when students used to go to libraries to do research. Now we just sit at our computers. Where’s the fun in that? It’s on old quip of course. And not at all accurate. Yes, some professors …
A nice story at the NY Times on N. America’s most highly regarded paper maker, Timothy Barrett. His paper, which he harvests from Japanese kozo trees in Iowa, is used for some of the most valuable archival projects, from Mozart scores to the U.S. Constitution. Beyond being a nice reminder …
I’m sure many saw this classic New Yorker cover recently. A lot of people mentioned it to me. Look, they were saying, a funny cartoon about the death of the book. But what I like most about it is the way it highlights one of the ways through which books …
A funny new project by Giles Turnbull who along with a few friends decided to send their Twitter posts as postcards instead of electronically. It gives a renewed vitality to the word “post.” One of the most basic things it shows is just how expensive printed communication is by comparison. …
I’ve written before how the death of the book is connected with the death of a range of other analogue technologies. Nostalgia for the cinema projector and celluloid is as intense as anything by Sven Birkerts. The latest in a long line of dead products is now a major corporation: …
Meet Little Printer. He’s cute, little, and smart. He prints out your own customized newspaper (more like ticker tape). You program an app to deliver information from various sources (The Guardian, Twitter, Dictionary.com) and the thermal-powered device prints it all on a spool of paper a couple of times a …
Here’s a link to the book artist Bruno Munari’s books for kids called prelibri. They are wordless constructions that use different materials to convey to children the tactility of reading.