Place Holders, 2013 There is no doubting Jordan Buscher has the book love in her veins. Give her some oil paint and canvas and she is off to the books. About her work she says: The paintings in this body of work use collections and arrangements of books to implant ordinary objects with psychological meanings. The groupings of books, stacked or on shelves, act as a stand in for one person’s accumulated knowledge and memories. Some stacks of books remain blank: full of potential or conversely, impenetrable. Other groups of books include painted words and images to act as clues...
Little Free Library Love at the Seattle Design Festival
This year's Seattle Design Festival included A Little Free Library Design/Build Competition called Libraries on the Loose! The challenge: To design, build and steward a Little Free Library (LFL) prototype that promotes community and literacy in Seattle’s neighborhoods! The budget was $150 and all entrants had to submit documentation of their efforts including assembly instructions. One goal was to establish an inexpensive prototype that could serve as a template for future LFL builders. Twenty teams entered and the winner was “Spinning Stories” by Johnston Architects. Gotta love the umbrella. From the call for entries: Little Free Libraries are small-scale book shelters that function as “take-a-book, leave a-book” gathering places....
Book Patrol is now offering social media services for the book set
Are you a bookseller who has been helplessly watching your online sales decline while still hoping for that early promise of selling books online to return? Are you a book or arts related organization looking to do more for your members at a reasonable cost? Are you a publisher looking to do more for your authors or a distributor looking to do more for your clients? Are you a library or museum with amazing collections that get very little exposure or interaction? If you answered yes to any of the questions above and are having trouble finding the time or...
Move over floating libraries here comes a floating school
During the monsoon season in Bangladesh it is almost impossible to get around. Every year from late June to October one third of the country goes underwater! Consequently, flooding is "the main reason for school drop outs in rural Bangladesh" says Mosammat Reba Khatun. For the last ten years Mosammat has been the teacher on a floating school on the Gumani river in northwest Bangladesh. She teaches 90 students, mostly girls, Bengali, Maths and English. The school collects children from their homes, teaches them on board and returns them at the end of the session. On teaching on the floating school Mossammat says: The teaching...
Project Hieroglyph: Helping turn Science Fiction toward Utopia
Project Hieroglyph is "a global collective of writers and researchers" whose aim is to turn the dystopian tide of recent science fiction toward creative inspiration. Born in 2011 from a Neal Stephenson article entitled “Innovation Starvation,” in which he called for "a return to inspiration in contemporary science fiction" the project now includes some of best writers, thinkers, and minds on the planet and its first publication, Hieroglyph, is about to hit the shelves. The name of Project Hieroglyph comes from the notion that certain iconic inventions in science fiction stories serve as modern “hieroglyphs” – Arthur Clarke’s communications satellite, Robert...