Tag Archives: Books

Saturday, 11th Feb 2012

The Art of Google Books

This hits so many of my buttons it’s untrue. As you probably know, Google have undertaken a program of digitising libraries full of books. Those which are out of copyright are available to search through online. As with any massive undertaking, and this one is really massive, there will be errors. And some of those errors will be really interesting.

The Art of Google Books is similar in many ways to John Rafman‘s 9-eyes and other experiments in searching Google Street View for that which can be considered “art”. I’d go so far as to say it’s similar to panning for gold – ploughing through endless pages of perfectly scanned books looking for that unique error, that glitch in the sand, the place where the mechanised system produced something wrong or different to the norm and the algorithm let it through.

There are currently 54 pages of Google Book Art to browse through. Here’s a small selection that caught my eye.


Torn page, partially digitized in color.


Links (added by Google) through tape


Distorted Text


Black-and-white printed plate of the Aurora Borealis, photographed in color with rippling neon effect.

via Bruce Sterling, I think

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Tuesday, 7th Feb 2012

Darryl Cunningham’s Science Tales to pre-order

Darryl’s book, which he’s been serialising as a work-in-progress on his blog over the last year, is out in April. You can pre-order the UK edition from The Amazon from today.

Darryl Cunningham turns his questioning mind and sharp intelligence to de-coding the myths and lies that have shaped some of the most fiercely-debated issues of the past fifty years. A graphic milestone of investigative reporting, Science Tales takes on controversies surrounding climate change, electro-convulsive therapy, the moon landing, the MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) vaccine, homeopathy, evolution, the tobacco industry and science denialism.

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Wednesday, 11th Jan 2012

Hard Times For Our Times

This piece of work by James Bridle was brought to my attention by Anna when discussing similar things the other day. I like it a lot.

The work is based on Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times, originally subtitled For These Times. It consists of 50 identical-looking paperback books, where every text is different. The transformations are stylistic, algorithmic, and literary.

Some copies appear with distorted and pixelated text, or with pages missing or transposed. Some copies have been robo-translated into other languages: I cannot speak to their accuracy. One copy has been translated into another language and back into English, to produce word salad (Yes, there is a lolcat version). In some the words have been changed: a building enlarged here, a dress changes colour, a character lives or dies. Sometimes, whole chapters have been rewritten to alter the outcome, or move the action to another town, another country. Sometimes a word, sometimes more. Each one different.

For the why, read the rest of the page. The last bit made me smile:

My favourite thing: several copies have already been stolen from the gallery. They will inevitably re-enter the food chain at some point, becoming someone’s Hard Times.

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Animated Bookshop

Back in 2004 there was an art thing where Chris Cobb sorted all the books in a bookshop by colour (NPR interview). I was reminded of that when watching this video which takes that insanity to the next level and animates it. Lovely stuff.

via Eddie Campbell

It got me thinking about why books, specifically when placed on shelves in groups, are fascinating. I think it’s because when the order of them is logical according to the contents, the patterns they make physically are so random. There is order and chaos on a bookshelf. When you sort them by their colour or shape you reverse that.

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Monday, 7th Nov 2011

Faber book covers

This is a lovely thing. Faber and Faber have gotten a Flickr account and shared 319 book covers through it. So many wonders.

I particularly like how they appear to be ordered by colour.

via Coulthart

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Friday, 21st Oct 2011

Ed Wood’s porny paperbacks

Ed Wood was a writer of pornographic pulp fiction.

The paperbacks are truly rare, even in an age of mass-searchable used book engines, and google ferocity. Ed Wood’s sleaze fiction is also as strange, idiosyncratic and out of step with his times and mores as his infamous movies. Wood would write porn inter-spliced with lengthy philosophical, sociological and psychological discourse, he’d write first person narratives of life as a transvestite in the buttoned up America of the 1950’s. He’d riff on psychosexual themes, and unleash his id, his ego and his superego in turn, sometimes in the same chapter. He’d write about sex and the human condition without veneer or filters, offering up the damaged and anguished voice of a desperately soul-searching drunk with a sense of self-worth that would stand in dichotomy to his self-pity

More covers at the link. via Couthart

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Friday, 2nd Sep 2011

∞ Murakami’s Town of Cats

A short story by Haruki Murakami has been posted on the New Yorker’s site. Here’s the first paragraph.

At Koenji Station, Tengo boarded the Chuo Line inbound rapid-service train. The car was empty. He had nothing planned that day. Wherever he went and whatever he did (or didn’t do) was entirely up to him. It was ten o’clock on a windless summer morning, and the sun was beating down. The train passed Shinjuku, Yotsuya, Ochanomizu, and arrived at Tokyo Central Station, the end of the line. Everyone got off, and Tengo followed suit. Then he sat on a bench and gave some thought to where he should go. “I can go anywhere I decide to,” he told himself. “It looks as if it’s going to be a hot day. I could go to the seashore.” He raised his head and studied the platform guide.

It’s an 8,000 word excerpt from his major new work 1Q84 (pronounced ichi-kew-hachi-yon) which is published in the UK in two volumes in October. My copy is on order.

via Bounder

Update: There’s a short interview up there too.

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Wednesday, 27th Jul 2011

∞ Iain Sinclair and the Olympics

Great article on Iain Sinclair and the fury in his latest book, Ghost Milk:

His immediate argument is with the London Olympics; his broader target is those projects of civic enhancement that acclaim themselves as “regenerative” and find their expression most charismatically in architectural “grand projects”: domes, stadiums, mega-sculptures and super-cities. “We live,” Sinclair writes, “in the GP Era”, and for him the “GP” will always be a function of egotism and profit: a longing on the part of men in suits to leave behind a legacy, and a longing on the part of developers to make a quick buck. “Ghost milk” is Sinclair’s term for the cultural ooze that such projects exude: all those delivery documents, those primary strategic objectives, those maquettes and futuramas of the world-to-be. “Ghost milk,” he writes, means “CGI smears . . . Real juice from a virtual host. Embalming fluid. A soup of photographic negatives . . . The universal element in which we sink and swim.”

But it’s not all hagiographical. Robert Macfarlane delves into the paradoxes and contraditions of Sinclair which all makes for a very satisfying read.

via Stan’s Cafe

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∞ An interview with China Miéville

I’ve never read any of his work but having read this interview on BLDGBLOG I intend to. Very interesting chap.

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∞ A fascinating history of Catch-22

Fantastic piece in Vanity Fair delving deep into the world of publishing in late-1950s New York
that is romantic as it is alien. The article reeks of Man Men chic and is a delight to read. Note that Heller’s novel was called Catch-18 until just before publication date…

Catch-18 had more than doubled in length by the time Gottlieb saw any of it again. The original manuscript had expanded from 7 to 16 chapters, and Heller had added a whole new section consisting of 28 more chapters. The pages were a mix of typescript and legal-size notebook paper covered in Heller’s precise and rather crabbed handwriting. Though Gottlieb recalls editing sessions with Heller as “calm,” Michael Korda remembers passing by Gottlieb’s office and seeing parts of Heller’s novel “endlessly retyped, look[ing] at every stage like a jigsaw puzzle as [Heller, Gottlieb, and Nina Bourne] labored over it, bits and pieces of it taped to every available surface in Gottlieb’s cramped office. That, I thought, is editing, and I longed to do it.”

via Longreads

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