As the year winds down there is no shortage of Top Ten and Best Of lists to be had for books but what I haven't seen yet is a list of the top book related videos of the year.Well, here is my vote for the best book related video of the year.This Is Where We Live is an animated film produced by Apt Studios and Asylum Films in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the UK publisher 4th Estate.This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.Absolutely fantastic.Thanks to Classical Bookworm for the lead
The Chinese Book Burner and the Great Wall of Books
Qin Shi Huang, is one of the most notorious and prolific book burners in history. During his reign from 221 BC - 210 BC, Qin Shi Huang outlawed Confucianism and ordered the burning of pretty much all the books that came before him including the classic works of the Hundred Schools of Thought. It is also believed that he buried alive many of the scholars of the day. All in his quest to unite China.This the same guy who built the Great Wall.Jorge Luis Borges wrote an essay on Qin Shi Huang, 'The Wall and the Books' (La muralla y...
They’re Alive : Edith Kollath’s Breathing Books
Bre Pettis takes us on a short video tour of Edith Kollath's latest exhibit Property and Evidence: The Whole Story which is currently on view at Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery.Beside featuring her amazing breathing books the exhibit also recounts Kollath's experience with the TSA who detained her and confiscated the books when she tried to get through security at Newark airport to return to her home in Germany. She was on the way home to show the books in an exhibit; which she missed.Kollath recounts the experience herePress release for the exhibitThanks to Neatorama for the lead
"To See Existing Things In a New Way" : The Book-Inspired Jewelry of Janna Syvanoja
I recently found myself lost in the pages of a glorious exhibition catalog titled DESIGNED FOR DELIGHT: Alternative Aspects of Twentieth-Century Decorative Arts (Flammarion, 1997) which documents a traveling exhibition organized by the Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts. In the section "Inversion and Transformation," a beautiful and evocative photograph of a necklace by Finnish artist Janna Syvanoja entitled "Books" (1990) mesmerized me. The necklace captures the experience of viewing a row of books with gilt edges from above. There is a lyrical simplicity to it all. She isolates one aspect of our experience of the book and revels in its...
"Language of the Birds"
A new permanent installation by artists Brian Goggin and Dorka Keehn was unveiled last Sunday in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood.Language of the Birds consists of "23 illuminated white polycarbonate books suspended in midair with their pages opened as if startled into flight." Etched in the concrete below, as if they fell from the pages above, are words and phrases from over 90 local authors.The installation is powered by solar panels that are mounted on top of nearby City Lights bookstore.The unveiling was accompanied by a performance art piece that included "dancers, a marching band and two nearly naked nymphs...