Japanese architect Shinsuke Fujii has designed a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that’s meant to withstand the shocks of an earthquake. The bookcase is integral to the structural stability of the building, and its shelves even act as a ladder to reach high shelves. Perhaps Jorge Luis Borges was right, and paradise is indeed “a kind of library” – so why not make it earthquake-proof?
An Earthquake-Proof Library
Sans Serif
Garamond or Helvetica? Times New Roman or Le Monde Journal? The stories behind your favorite fonts.
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Words & Symbols
Mairead Small Staid writes on the history and poetics of the ampersand, “a logogram masquerading as a letter, a letter that is also a word—like a and I and even o, but no—a letter that is only a word, the plainest word of all.”
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The Poetry of Tim Riggins
“I used to go out in the brush sometimes,/So far out there no one could hear me,/And just burn.” In the new issue of Gulf Coast, Nico Alvarado writes poems from the perspective of Friday Night Lights’s Tim Riggins including “Tim Riggins Speaks of Waterfalls” and “Tim Riggins Invents a New Number.”
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Reading with the Jetsons
Ever dreamt of using a sophisticated library where robots fetch your books for you? Well, you bespectacled futurist, guess what. (h/t The Paris Review)
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Crowdfunding Publishing
There’s been a lot of discussion about self-publishing books, but what about crowdfunding? Online publisher Unbound is proving it could work and has already raised over £1 million and funded 54 books. The model itself couldn’t really be any simpler – “the author pitches an idea and if enough readers support it, the book goes ahead. Once it has been printed, the book’s net profits are then split 50/50.”