Image via LOCResponding to complaints by parents the Turkish government has pulled all used books from their Free Class Books Project. From Education Minister Nimet Çubukçu:The course books distributed within the scope of the Free Class Books Project cannot be used, as the schools lack the infrastructure to control and protect the books. As the parents do not find the used books hygienic, giving a group of students new books and others used books does not serve our educational needsThis is one wacky story and I have to wonder if something got lost in the translation. If indeed used books are unsanitary and need to...
Penny-seller rakes in millions: Thrift Recycling gets hefty investment
ERRATA: The original post mistakenly referred to Thrift Recycling Management as the parent company for Thrift Books. I have been informed that Thrift Books and Thrift Recycling Management are two separate and distinct companies. My apologies to the folks at Thrift Books for the error. The funding was secured by Thrift Recycling Management and the original story has been amended.*******************************************Thrift Recycling Management has announced that it has secured an $8.5 million investment led by venture capital firm QuestMark Partners. According to the press release "The funds will accelerate growth and help position TRM to be the dominant player in the recycled consumer goods space."They currently sell...
Can I Help You?
"Bookstore" by Jon Christopher Hughes(click to enlarge)This eerily cool photograph appeared on the cover of the 1996 Spring/Summer issue of the Cincinnati Poetry Review.
In the Stacks: Private Libraries at the Museum of the City of New York
For the third installment of In the Stacks we visit the Museum of the City of New York which recently released 50,000 digital images from their outstanding collection.What is becoming increasingly clear in the early stages of this new series is that the plethora of material available at many of these digital destinations warrant more than one trip. Rather than overcrowd the initial posts Book Patrol will return, in due time, to select archives to bring you more book goodness.So, here on the the first visit to the Museum of the City of New York, we focus on the private...
Books, Blocks and Bullets
On How My Brazilian Library Feeds from Fragments of a Concrete RealityFrom review in the Irish Times on An ominous note is even more clearly sounded in a 2008 sculpture, On How My Brazilian Library Feeds from Fragments of a Concrete Reality. Books and journals about Brazilian architecture and culture are interspersed with polished concrete blocks in stacks like tower blocks. Walk around to the rear of the stacks, look closely and you see that the blocks are studded with embedded bullets: a subtle but very effective image. Books, blocks and bullets are presented as a continuum. Perhaps Garaicoa is alluding...