Walking Paper

Speaking of book covers, I saw a few of Harland Miller’s enormous fictional Penguin book cover paintings in Rotterdam the other week. My favorite one is “Wake Up and Smell the Coffin” also by Poe but I couldn’t find a good image.

Caleb Tucker-Raymond’s curiosity was piqued by books covered in Buckram cloth at Multnomah County Library:

From some point after its incoporation to the early 80s, the Library Association of Portland, which later became Multnomah County Library, operated its own bindery. Besides visually and texturally uniting runs of periodicals and sets of reference books on the shelves, the bindery, together with the mending department, breathed new life into well-read books.

He’s started a collection of these striking covers which is fun to browse. Thanks, Caleb!

A nice book themed cafe at McNally Jackson Books in NYC.

via super relax

Rick Roche writes:

We are breaking with our past at Thomas Ford. One thing that you could always count on was that the reference books were here on the shelves. As good as that was in the past, the problem now is that the reference books are here on the shelves, but no one is here using them. They are just sitting. So we are liberating them. We’re going to let them out to anyone with a card, just like other books, magazines, CDs, and DVDs.

The primary objection I have heard is “What if a book from a set doesn’t return, isn’t the set ruined?” This is a possibility, maybe even a probability in time. Still having books sit idle seems a greater sorrow in a public library focused on current utility and not archival conservation. I think the greater good will be served by this service. I look froward to seeing some smiles when I let someone take a volume of Contemporary Literary Criticism or The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

I’m continually impressed by this library’s focus on making its services and resources as convenient and useful as possible.

Over at our INFLUX blog Amanda and I have been writing a series of posts about easy to do website improvements. Here are the first three.

#01 Wrangling Content
#02 Navigation & Wayfinding
#03 Online Card Application