intelligent life magazine asked 4 companies to "create the bookshop of their dreams." Each were given the same instructions: to design a general-interest bookshop, selling fiction, non-fiction and e-books, in store and online, on a typical European high-street site, with two floors of 1,000 square feet each. The budget was £100,000—modest, we knew, but independent booksellers aren’t minted and that figure was ring-fenced for the fit-out; they could assume there would be further funds for training staff or running events. The four participants were Gensler, 20.20 , Burdifilek and Coffey Architects. Here are the sketches and some of the highlights of...
The Definitive Guide to Banned Books Vol. 1
Designed by datadial for Love Reading
BLOOKS = Objects made in the emulation of books
Book as cigarette lighter The word "Blook" first surfaced as a word in 2001 when Jeff Jarvis coined it to represent a printed book derived from a blog. In 2006 the word was short-listed for inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary and was a runner-up for Word of the Year. Now, thanks to Mindell Dubansky, it has a new meaning: objects made in the emulation of books, either by hand or commercial manufacture. Dubansky, who is head of the Sherman Fairchild Center for Book Conservation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is waving the BLOOK flag on a new blog devoted to these bookish gems....
Shakespeare Altered: Imagining other looks for the Bard
Everyone knows who he is and everyone has an image in their mind of what he looks like. Now let's open our mind and enjoy a sampling of what Shakespeare would look like if... The wonderful site Érase una vez compiles a selection of images featuring some of the "most picturesque, comic, absurd or ironic" images of the Bard. From Top Gun to the Terminator here is Willie in all his glory. More images here: Hey, William, is that you? (The other faces of Shakespeare)
Rapper’s Delight: A Strong Vocabulary
click here for hi-res version Matthew Daniels has created a pretty nifty flow chart with Pop Chart Lab ranking the size of the vocabulary of today's leading hip-hop artists. Daniel explains the project: Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever. I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. I used each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. That way, prolific artists, such as Jay-Z, could be compared to newer artists, such as Drake. 35,000 words covers...