Behold, the seamless combination of three of our favorite things: books, caffeinated beverages, and odd design. No, reader, you’re not hallucinating. This really is a Manhattan coffee shop (a branch of the D’Espresso chain) decorated to look like a library turned on its side. Our friends at Fast Company Design report that “[t]he “books” are actually tiles printed with sepia-toned photos of bookshelves at a local travel bookstore that ring the room, including the floor, walls and ceiling.” The wall on the left (or should we say the floor?) bears a “dark hardwood herringbone pattern.” Another awesome detail: The light fixtures hang sideways from a wall whose windows look like skylights.
We’ve always been big readers here at Flavorpill, but with the eBook craze flying around, we may have neglected our ink-and-paper pals down at the local library as of late. But they’re not about to take that lying down. Library news has been all over the interwebs recently, and as a pledge of our loyalty, we bring you the latest from the world of overdue books. Read More »
I’ve often wished that I could have read the first few pages of the ingeniously-titled “Life of Packaging – Fragments of an Autobiography: Volume IX – The Styrofoam Years.” This fictional title, brought to life in the fictional pages of Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! , along with “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy” in Philip K Dick’s Man in the High Castle, and the host of metafictional books conjured up by Dickens, Stephen King, and Haruki Murakami in their own novels, have eluded the general public for the simple fact that they don’t exist — they are perfectly-formed fragments of the fantasy world that the author dangles tantalizingly in front of the readers, but that is never fully graspable.
Until now.
Readers, take my hand as we go through the looking glass and emerge in a reality where these metafictional titles really do exist, courtesy of the Invisible Library. Read More »
As we mentioned earlier, the long list of finalists for the Man Booker International Prize was announced today by judging panel chair Jane Smiley in a press conference held at the New York Public Library. Flavorwire pal Ron Hogan did some great Twittereporting from the conference; there’s a lot of chatter around the scarcity of East Asian and Middle Eastern writers on this and past Booker Int’l lists.
Speaking of lists and Brits, The Times has a piece on 10 literary one-hit wonders. Apparently, “one-hit” refers exclusively to novels, because the list includes Oscar Wilde, J.D. Salinger, and Sylvia Plath. Who needs plays, short stories, or poetry?
The REANIMATION LIBRARY is a small, independent collection based in BROOKLYN where you can find a strange collection of books that have fallen out of mainstream circulation. In the beginning it was just a personal resource for ANDREW BECCONE — a young indie musician who scanned art from random old books to create fliers for his band. But now the space is open to the public, so that artists, writers, and other cultural archeologists can use the books as source material.
Before you make the field trip to Gowanus, check out a sampling of some of Beccone’s favorite finds after the jump.
