‘Bookfighting’: Art with books gets physical

If you've hung around Book Patrol long enough you know I've got a hankering for the representation of books in art. Now thanks to the French artist Yves Duranthon the relationship between books and art just got a whole lot more physical. It's called 'bookfighting' and earlier this month about 40 people gathered at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris to get it on. Think dodgeball in a cage as combatants throw the book at each other trying to score points. And where might such a wild idea come from? Duranthon credits the Japanese writer Yuichi Yokoyama whose novel Combats...

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Plant this Book

In 1968 Richard Brautigan published Please Plant This Book a collection of eight seed packets, each bearing an original poem related to its contents. Now almost 50 years later the Argentine publisher Pequeño Editor has unveiled a book that you can actually plant! The project is called Tree Book Tree and is designed to teach kids a little about the origin of paper books and sustainability. For its first release it took the popular children's book "Mi papá estuvo en la selva" (My dad was in the jungle), by Gusti Llimpi and Anne Decis, which is a true story about the...

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Presidents and their libraries

"To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgement in creating their own future." - Franklin Roosevelt At the dedication of his library on June 30, 1941 Earlier this month it was announced the President Barack Obama's Presidential...

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