Our bodies are the poetry of years gone by.

vintageanchor:

“I have changed
I am a dandelion puffball blur. My hair,
scribbles of white lines. My face. Lines/crisscross and zigzag my face.
My eyes. I am looking into eyes/whose color has turned lighter, hazy brown.
Wind and time are blowing me out.”

― Maxine Hong Kingston, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

Phone booths re-purposed as micro-libraries in New York City. (via Designboom)

Universities [in England] have raised almost £50m (approximately $77m) from fining students for overdue library books in the past six years. (via The Guardian)

Publisher’s Weekly Names “Worst Book Ever”: Before you get all riled up about how we’ve previously called two other books (How to Avoid Huge Ships and Dildo Cay) the Worst Book Ever, you should know that sometimes PWxyz makes mistakes. Please forgive us our mis-pronouncement and come, walk with us down the hallowed halls of literary infamy, for we have a whopper of a book to show you.

In 1987, The Book Services Ltd published a slim, 144-page cookbook called Microwave for One. The book is by Sonia Allison, who has quite a few publications under her belt. But she’s best known for her masterpiece of tragedy, a book whose title and cover is so rife with sadness that one almost has the urge to brush the invisible tears from Ms. Allison’s face as she leans over her microwave and her food spread. (via PWxyz)

(via The Guardian / image Felix Clay)

As crimes go it was not the most heinous of offences, but Islington council’s principal law clerk, Sidney Porrett, made it his mission to nab the perpetrators.

“I had to catch these two monkeys,” he said. “They were a couple of darlings, make no mistake.”

The darlings in question were the playwright Joe Orton and his boyfriend – later murderer – Kenneth Halliwell, and the crimes were taking library books and returning them with comedy collages on the dustjackets.

After a fruitless investigation that involved undercover librarians, Porrett eventually caught the pair in an elaborate sting operation and they went down for six months each.

(via The Book Bench)

The morning of day twelve of the Occupy Wall Street protest, a few people are waving signs and shouting slogans. Mostly, though, everyone is just hanging out. They take naps, play board games, and pick up books from the haphazardly organized library that occupies a bench on the side of Zuccotti Park. There is no rhyme or reason to the selection: a volume of Walter Benjamin’s writing sits beside Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Prep”; the only books that are sectioned off are the children’s books. All together, about one hundred titles—along with back issues of Harper’s—await protesters and passersby—in the spirit of the affair, you needn’t be an “insider” to borrow.

(via Flavorwire)

Under the influence of characters, setting, and plot, a number of artists have recently taken it upon themselves to recreate book covers of some of the most beloved literature, often with fantastic results. Whether it be through illustration or painting, collage or embroidery, reimagined cover art isn’t limited to the cardboard backings of books, but takes on a life of its own that ranges from extravagant and crafty, with kaleidoscopic-colored thread twirling on the page, to simple but powerful, with bold graphic designs and eerie color pallets. And while each piece is aesthetically different, these book covers have one thing in common — they all pay homage to the authors and works we hold so dear. See 20 of our favorite works inspired by the likes of J.D Salinger, The Brothers Grimm and Roald Dahl after the jump.