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)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxl9lsCS5G1qap6kyo1_500.jpg)
Universities [in England] have raised almost £50m (approximately $77m) from fining students for overdue library books in the past six years. (via The Guardian)
(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.
In the investigative documentary Food, Inc. viewers learn that corporate agriculture harasses and intimidates farmers who try to save patented soybean seeds. This makes it difficult for local growers to develop their own crops, which requires that seeds from the strongest plants are saved year to year. As if in response, a small number of public libraries around the country are beginning to do for seeds what they have long done for books.
(via Boing Boing)
An anonymous sculptor has been leaving gorgeous carved-book sculptures in Scotland’s libraries, along with little notes of encouragement. Some are left out in the open; others are hidden away and may have sat a long time before being discovered.
(via The Millions)
Public domain e-books are dear to me as a writer (where would I be without my fixes of Dreiser and other favorites?), and the man most responsible for them is now dead.
Vinton Cerf and colleagues gave us the Internet, with Al Gore cheering them on. But it was Michael Stern Hart of Project Gutenberg who popularized the Net as a book library. He died September 6 at age 64 at his home in Urbana, Illinois, after a long series of health woes, with more than 36,000 free Gutenberg books on the Web, in 60 languages, as his legacy.
Andrew Carnegie built an impressive 2,509 libraries around the turn of the 20th century. Now Rick Brooks and Todd Bol are on a mission to top his total with their two-foot by two-foot Little Free Libraries.
The diminutive, birdhouse-like libraries, which Brooks and Bol began installing in Hudson and Madison, Wisconsin, in 2009, are typically made of wood and Plexiglas and are designed to hold about 20 books for community members to borrow and enjoy. Offerings include anything from Russian novels and gardening guides to French cookbooks and Dr. Seuss.
Now here’s an idea right in Utne Reader’s wheelhouse: “a non-profit project promoting independent publishers to public libraries all over the United States.” It’s known as Hey Small Press! Founded by Don Antenen, who works at a public library in Kentucky, and Kate Hensley, Hey Small Press! has a three-fold method:
One: we select and review ten new or upcoming titles per month. Two: we send our list to public librarians and encourage them to order the titles. Three: we also make available all our reviews to the public. Our goal is for readers across the country to walk into their public library every month with our list of small press books and encourage librarians to order them.
“Among the many things the Japanese people are mourning this week are their libraries,” writes The Book Bench’s Macy Halford in memoriam. The 9.0-magnitude earthquake that kickstarted a ring of Pacific tsunamis, displaced thousands of people, and terminally damaged multiple nuclear reactors recently has also shaken the Japanese library system to its knees. Read more …
