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Tag: libraries

Sergio García Sánchez’s “On the Same Page”

Sergio García Sánchez‘s cover illustration, coloured by his partner Lola Moral, for the recent fiction issue of The New Yorker is lovely.

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Nighthawks at the Library by Tom Gauld

Tom Gauld for The Guardian.

(Is this a Semisonic joke as well as an Edward Hopper one? Or am I just showing my age?)

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Our Town’s Libraries by Tom Gauld

Tom Gauld for the New York Times.

Tom’s new book, coincidentally called Revenge of the Librarians, is out now.

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BOOKFACE | Corpus Libris

If you’re a fan of #bookfacefriday on Instagram, you will likely enjoy this short film made in collaboration with the public library in the German city of Erlangen…

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Irma Boom’s Library

Ilvy Njiokiktjien for the New York Times

The New York Times visits Dutch designer and bookmaker Irma Boom‘s new library of experimental books:

Irma Boom pays careful attention to word choice. The Dutch designer, one of the world’s pre-eminent bookmakers, is loath to say “client” and refers to her projects as “commissions.” She also doesn’t call herself an artist.

Never mind that Ms. Boom, 56, was once in a group exhibition at the Pompidou Center, or that many of her books are in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. Her belief that she is not an artist could be a matter of culture — a product of her “Dutch rigor,” as the architect Rem Koolhaas, a close friend and collaborator, said.

But there are many who would at least consider Ms. Boom’s books works of art. Among them were the jurors of the Johannes Vermeer Award, the Dutch state prize for the arts, which she won in 2014. “Her books transcend the level of mere information carriers,” the jury’s report stated. “They are small or larger objects to admire, tempting us to read them with close attention.” She received 100,000 euros to put toward a “special project,” as the prize stipulates. “I cannot simply go and shop at Prada,” Ms. Boom said.

So Ms. Boom has used the prize for the quixotic, endless undertaking of creating a library of what she called “only the books that are experimental.” Above her studio here, the recently opened library is made up almost entirely of books from the 1600s and 1700s, and the 1960s and ’70s.

Those eras are when bookmaking wasn’t held back by conventions, Ms. Boom said, and when books “breathed freedom” in content and form. (Many of today’s e-books, by contrast, represent a “provisional low point” in the art of bookmaking, writes Mr. Koolhaas in the catalog “Irma Boom: The Architecture of the Book.”) Her library includes poetry collections, as well as exhibition catalogs that experimented with form — a book bound with bolts, for example, or contained within what seems like a three-ring binder.

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James Gleick on What Libraries Can (Still) Do

James Gleick (The Information, Faster) on libraries, and James Palfrey’s book BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google, at the NYRB Blog:

In the midst of an information explosion, librarians are still the most versatile information specialists we have. And the purest. In his new book, BiblioTech, a wise and passionate manifesto, John Palfrey reminds us that the library is the last free space for the gathering and sharing of knowledge: “Our attention cannot be bought and sold in a library.” As a tradition barely a century and a half old in the United States, it gives physical form to the principle that public access to knowledge is the foundation of democracy.

The problem of libraries now—and it is a problem—involves some paradoxes, which need to be sorted out. For one thing, as Palfrey says, librarians will need to cherish their special talent as “stewards” while letting go of the instinct to be “collectors.” Knowledge in physical form needs to be handled carefully, preserved, and curated. But with digital information pouring into iPhones and Kindles in petabytes—via Twitter and Instagram and YouTube, not to mention Amazon’s self-publishing factories—libraries need to rethink old habits. They cannot collect everything, or even a small fraction of everything. “That model is already too hard to keep up,” Palfrey says. “A network of stewards can accomplish vastly more than a disconnected (even sometimes competitive) group of collectors ever can.”

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Ten Good Reasons the Book is Important

Over at Design Observer, writer Timothy Young gives 10 reasons why the book is still important. Number seven is that it is an object fixed in time:

“A book can tell us about its status in history. If we look through first editions of Moby Dick or Leaves of Grass, we find that they give away information not only about when they were created, but also about the worlds in which they were created, by way of advertisements, bindings, the quality of their paper, and watermarks on that paper. Such components are often not captured by scanning or are flattened out to make them of negligible use. In Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold—his saga about how libraries microfilmed runs of newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s and then discarded them—one of his chief complaints was that the filmers skipped advertising supplements and cartoons: things that had been deemed unimportant.”

Here’s the full list:

  1. It is a piece of technology that lasts
  2. It needs very little, if any, extra technology to be accessed
  3. The book retains evidence
  4. Books are true to form
  5. Each copy of a book is potentially unique
  6. Printed items are consumable goods
  7. A book is an object fixed in time
  8. A book can be an object of beauty and human craftsmanship
  9. When you are reading a book in a public place, other people can see what you are reading
  10. The Internet will never contain every book
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Our Public Library

Earlier this week, someone I know (you know who are!) suggested that people who work in publishing like to pay lip-service libraries while not actually making use of the services they offer. I can’t speak for everyone else in the industry, but this couldn’t be further from the truth as far as I’m concerned. I spent a lot time in libraries as a kid, and I use my local library now more than ever. There are two pretty simple reasons for this: I’m curious about stuff, and I can’t afford all the books I (or my curious kids) want to read!

All of which is to say, I’m very grateful for public libraries and, like many people, I find our politicians attitude to them deeply depressing. My local library is always busy. It is full of people — of all ages — making use of the quiet, uncommercialized space to read, work, or just sit. The computers in particular are in constant demand. It is an important part of our community.

In the face of planned service reductions, advocacy group Our Public Library has commissioned this animated short film on the Toronto Public Library, narrated by author Vincent Lam:

The film was made by James Braithwaite and Josh Raskin, the creative team behind the award-winning animated short, I Met the Walrus:

A city hall forum on the future of Toronto’s Public Library will be held in the Council Chamber at City Hall on Sunday, November 24th.

(via Ron Nurwisah)

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Libraries of the Future

You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, which collects many of Tom Gauld’s cartoons for The Guardian, is out in April.

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Midweek Miscellany

A long interview with Darwyn Cooke about his latest Donald Westlake/Richard Stark adaptation, The Score (out this week if you’re interested).

Shadows and Fog — Jimmy Stamp on Batman and architecture, for ArchDaily:

Since its inception, Gotham City has been presented as the embodiment of the urban fears that helped give rise to the American suburbs, the safe havens from the city that they are. Gotham City has always been a dark place, full of steam and rats and crime. A city of graveyards and gargoyles; alleys and asylums. Gotham is a nightmare, a distorted metropolis that corrupts the souls of good men. In the excellent book, Woody Allen on Woody Allen, the famously nebbish auteur discusses his moody, Brechtian comedy Shadows and Fog, which takes place over the course of a single night in a vaguely European village. “Once you get out in the night, there is a sense that civilization is gone…You start to realize that the city is just a superimposed man-made convention… All the civilization that protects you and enables you to lie to yourself about life is all man-made and superimposed.”

In other words, civilization ends at night. And in Gotham City, it is always night.

Home of the Free — Mark Lamster on the role of the modern library, for Metropolis magazine:

The pressure to accommodate “other needs” is especially strong at public libraries, which are increasingly taking on civic functions that far exceed the historical mission of serving books to readers. “Libraries are the new cathedrals of our society. They’re very important sanctuaries,” says the architect Bing Thom, whose new public library in Surrey, British Columbia, a suburb of Vancouver, was designed as a space of communal engagement. “People are living in smaller and smaller spaces, so the library becomes the place you escape to for socialization, for solitude, to take a breath. It’s the last space in society that’s free. Even for the homeless. There is a sense of democracy; it is a common space we all share.”

The Worm Eaten Book — Jennifer Schuessler visits the summer Rare Book School at University of Virginia in Charlottesville, for The New York Times:

Rare Book School isn’t just about pondering jaw-dropping masterpieces of printing. What makes the experience unique, students say, is the chance to see — and touch — a huge variety of objects from the school’s own 80,000-item teaching collection, including many that have been folded, stained, waterlogged, written in, worm-eaten or sometimes completely disemboweled.

And finally…

Filthy Lucre — Tim Parks on the complicated relationship between money and writing, for the NYRB:

Writers can deal with a modest income if they feel they are writing toward a body of readers who are aware of their work and buy enough of it to keep the publisher happy. But the nature of contemporary globalization, with its tendency to unify markets for literature, is such that local literary communities are beginning to weaken, while the divide between those selling vast quantities of books worldwide and those selling very few and mainly on home territory is growing all the time.

 

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Midweek Miscellany

I really enjoyed Naïve: Modernism and Folklore in Contemporary Graphic Design, so I really think I have to pick up  Echoes of the Future: Rational Graphic Design and Illustration, also published by Gestalten. A “compilation of recent graphic design and illustration that is inspired by our collective visual memory”,  the book includes work by Gianmarco Magnani, AKA Silence Television, who (calling all enterprising art directors) ought to be doing book covers (if he isn’t already):

But moving on…

“The only thing left on the high street that doesn’t want either your soul or your wallet” — Zadie Smith on libraries at the NYRB:

What kind of a problem is a library? It’s clear that for many people it is not a problem at all, only a kind of obsolescence. At the extreme pole of this view is the technocrat’s total faith: with every book in the world online, what need could there be for the physical reality? This kind of argument thinks of the library as a function rather than a plurality of individual spaces. But each library is a different kind of problem and “the Internet” is no more a solution for all of them than it is their universal death knell.

And on a sort of related note…

The Disease-Carrying Book — John Sutherland reviews How To Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain by Leah Price for the Literary Review:

The public library, introduced in Manchester with much municipal self-congratulation in the early 1850s, was ‘free’, unlike ‘leviathan’ circulating libraries such as Mudie’s and W H Smith’s that catered to the middle classes. The lower classes lick their index fingers to turn the page. A quaint ‘fumigator’ in which Victorian public libraries could decontaminate their stock is illustrated in Leah Price’s discussion of the disease-carrying book. Victorians were wedded to the ‘miasmic’ theory of disease. Yet it wasn’t air but spittle that was the vector of the dreaded consumption.

Reality is Elsewhere — Steve Wasserman on Amazon at The Nation:

For many of us, the notion that bricks-and-mortar bookstores might one day disappear was unthinkable. Jason Epstein put it best in Book Business, his incisive 2001 book on publishing’s past, present and future, when he offered what now looks to be, given his characteristic unsentimental sobriety, an atypical dollop of unwarranted optimism: “A civilization without retail bookstores is unimaginable. Like shrines and other sacred meeting places, bookstores are essential artifacts of human nature. The feel of a book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking writer to reader.” That sentiment is likely to strike today’s younger readers as nostalgia bordering on fetish. Reality is elsewhere.

Also at The Nation Michael Naumann on Germany’s bookstores and literary culture:

Since the late 1840s in Germany, the ambiguous character of books—simultaneously a commodity and a cultural work—has defined internal discussions in the publishing business. Putting aside the implicit hubris of German nationalism, the country’s self-aggrandizement as a veritable Kulturnation, the fact remains that in Germany the cultural definition of the “book” as a major source of intellectual, scientific, economic and aesthetic self-improvement has carried the day over the capitalist notion that a book is a commodity and therefore deserving of no special considerations. The book as such is sacred. One does not throw books away.

And finally…

The Graphic Modern: USA, Italy and Switzerland 1934–66 exhibition curated by Patricia Belen and Greg D’Onofrio of Kind Co. is on display at Fordham University at Lincoln Center, should you happen to be in New York between now and July 26th.

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