Looking at Italian designer Bruno Petronzi's bookshelf designs I am immediately reminded of The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus.Many book people face a constant struggle to house, arrange and bring order to their books and once they get somewhat comfortable with how things are, once they feel some semblance of biblio-control, more books appear and beg for attention. Many booksellers face this challenge on a daily basis.Petronzi's designs convey this struggle perfectly. They combine the human form with the bookshelf and the inseparable connection of weight and illumination.Thanks to the blog on the bookshelf for the lead
Shelfari’s Looking Good
The book social network site Shelfari has relaunced
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
Jason Kottke has a nice appreciation of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, noting in particular its modern design:To contemporary eyes, the HP looks almost modern. The text is very readable. The typography, layout, and the way the text flows around the illustration; none of it looks out of the ordinary. When compared to other books of the time [...] its modernity is downright eerie. The most obvious difference is the absence of the blackletter typeface. Blackletter was a popular choice because it resembled closely the handwritten script that preceded the printing press, and I imagine its use smoothed the transition to books...
1) Children's Books.2) Art and Photography.3) Cookbooks.4) Graphic novels, comics, Manga5) Poetry.6) Craft, Hobby, How-To, and Instructional books7) Any book in which its design is inherent to the experience of reading it.
The Visual Library of Last Resort –
"a tremendous amount of printed material disappears from the public sphere of information when it exits the library.""The Reanimation Library is a small, independent library based in Brooklyn. It is a collection of books that have fallen out of mainstream circulation. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles across the country and given new life as resource material for artists, writers, and other cultural archeologists."reanimation library"The Reanimation Library acts as a laboratory for investigating how the representation of analog information can be integrated into a digital environment. We understand that to a...