Featuring the latest in robotics and 3D technology the BFS-Auto is a lightning fast, hi-definition scanner that just might change the playing field. Developed at the noted Ishikawa Oku Laboratory at the University of Tokyo the BFS-Auto digitally scans books at an amazing rate of 250 pages a minute without modifying the book by cutting !Let's repeat: it scans 250 pages a minute in hi-definition without damaging the book. No more hands in the picture, no more fuzzy pages and no more destruction. In fact the scanner has the ability to "restore a captured image which is distorted because of page curling to a...
God’s Word Saves WWI Soldier
North-east France, 1917. German infantryman Kurt Geiler was sleeping as he usually did with his bible underneath his head when the bomb hit.Though a 4cm piece of shrapnel beat up the bible Geiler was unharmed and was one of the few who survived.The bible has become a ‘family anti-war memorial’ and is still in the possession of Geiler family more at Retronaut: Life-saving Bible from WWI h/t Reading Copy
The Return of Mother Nature: The Miniature World of Lori Nix
Circulation Desk, 2012Lori Nix things big and works small. Her project "The City", which began in 2005, seeks to recreate in miniature everyday urban spaces in a post apocalyptic world. The people are gone and what remains are these deteriorating spaces and their ever-changing relationship with the natural world. Nix says:I have imagined a city of our future, where something either natural or as the result of mankind, has emptied the city of it's human inhabitants. Art museums, Broadway theaters, laundromats and bars no longer function. The walls are deteriorating, the ceilings are falling in, the structures barely stand, yet Mother Nature is slowly...
The Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center
This installment of In The Stacks takes us to The Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center. The museum was founded by Yang Pei Ming who started collecting posters in 1995, the year the Chinese government ceased the long-standing practice of creating these propaganda-laced posters.The collection is "dedicated to documenting the changes of modern China as depicted on thousands upon thousands of striking posters from 1910 to 1990."The collection holds 6000 posters produced from 1940 to 1990. The museum also holds a significant collection of Shanghai Lady Calendar posters from 1910 to 1940.Shanghai Lady Calendar posterNPR's Shanghai correspondent Frank Langfitt pays a visit to the museumPreviously on In...
Advertising on the dust jacket
Dust jacket used by The Book Inn Lending Library, Seattle Washington ca. 1930's. Long before the Kindle Lending Library there were actual brick and mortar lending libraries. These were not public libraries but part of the offerings of book and department stores. Most charged a daily, weekly or monthly rate and many used their own printed dust jackets to both protect the book and as a revenue stream.Above is one used by The Book Inn Lending Library in Seattle. It features a slew of local advertising from neighborhood merchants (the library was in the now trending Ballard neighborhood). The ads feature the usual suspects;...