A Bookseller’s Prayer Please God don’t make me go in here.I promise to take care of all my booksand be as nice as possible to all my customers. I promise to treat each book and each customer asa special gift from you.Please God don’t make me go in there. Flickr set from mistermajik2000 Thanks to Library Stuff for the lead
Continue readingHow many unsolicited home improvement magazines arrive in your mailbox? I would guess these companies have figured out how many one home should receive to maintain the cultural desire needed for them to succeed; just enough to keep you thinking that your lacking something or in need of something. In Private Residence Umbirico re-photographs selected details of the images contained in these magazines to explore the “fictional narratives found in the images of idealized rooms,”…
Continue readingCensored BookBarton Lidice Benes26.7 x 20.3 12.71974Book Tied in Rope, nailed, gessoed and painted “I was once on a train to Philadelphia reading a biography of Nixon, and I started scratching it out as I read it, and by the time I got to Philadelphia I had scratched the whole book out. After that I started nailing books shut and tying them up.” The piece appeared in the 1990 traveling exhibition Book Arts in the…
Continue readingWorshipers at Jimbocho, Tokyo’s book district, home to over 100 bookshops. Image 1 courtesy perkeImage 2 courtesy aptronym
Continue readingDavid McKie’s piece in the Guardian today “My obsession with spines” deals with a strain of bibliomania that affects many of us book types. The need to know what is on the shelf behind that person in the picture. He talks about recent images in the Guardian and his desire to identify all the titles lurking on the shelves in the background. He calls it a “form of voyeurism, a lust to discover guilty secrets.”…
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