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Robot Poetry

The sun is shining The wind moves Naked trees You dance     The poem above was written by a robot. The kicker is not that a robot created the poem but that it was constructed based on the image! That's right. Auto-generated poetry based on an image. It's one of the latest discoveries to come out of Microsoft Research Asia where a pair of Microsoft researches teamed up with a pair of professors at Kyoto University to discover the 'poet in the machine' The team: took an imaginative approach to the quest of generating poetic language in response to...

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Of Interest: The Book, A Pop-Up book, Handbook for Tyranny, The Art of Reading, The Illustrated Dust Jacket

The Book: An Homage by Burkhard Spinnen. Illustrations by Line Haven. Translated by Aaron Kerner. Published by David R. Godine, 2018. First American Edition. A German bibliophile spreads the love including musings on Book Usage (The Loaned Book, The Vanished Book, The Book Left Behind...) on the Book Trade and on The Book Collection Note: As of this writing the book is less than $3 on Amazon   Zahhak: The Legend Of The Serpent King (A Pop-Up Book). Published by Fantagraphics, 2017. Art and Design by Hamid Rahmanian. Paper Engineer: Simon Arizpe. When Robert Sabuda blurbs "This is on of the...

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City of San Francisco steps it up for local booksellers

Stop the Presses! In what I hope is just the beginning of city and municipal support for independent booksellers all across this land, the City of San Francisco, partnering  with nonprofit Working Solutions and the Small Business Development Center, awarded grants to 11 bookstores. You heard it right. 11 bookstores receiving grants from the city they reside in to keep up the good work. The grants range from $2-12,000 and are as much for the role bookshops play as a social hub then as "simply places to purchase reading material." If  that doesn't seem like a big enough gift from...

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Bruce Lee’s Reading Life

Who knew that Bruce Lee was known to carry a book with him every where he went and that his spare time was consumed with reading and visiting  bookstores? And that before he went all in with kung fu he even dreamed of owning a used bookstore. The latest installment of The Libraries of Famous Men series at the Art of Manliness is devoted to Bruce Lee and his deep relationship with books and includes this "sampling of Bruce’s favorite authors and most interesting titles." Western Philosophy: Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume Meditations on...

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