bookporn #41: books from heaven, books from earth

This is Tian Shu (天书) by Xu Bing (徐冰), often translated as Book from the Sky, but sometimes called Book from Heaven. It’s perhaps the most widely known contemporary work by a Chinese artist, so it’s a little mortifying that I only just discovered it this morning, reading about this and that in the Australian [...]

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bookporn #40: ISEAS, Singapore

I thought it was about time I bookporned the place I’ve become attached to (in both senses of the word): the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, in all its vasty, lofty glory.

Its glory is not confined to the mere aesthetic; it is a place where a Southeast Asian specialist can dissolve quietly [...]

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bookporn #39: Ethnic Travel, Insight Into Vietnam

Hanoi is without question, for me, the crazed, dirty, artsy, gutsy, eccentric capital and lifeblood of Southeast Asia. Take Paris. Grime down the buildings and filth the gutters; change all the signboards into Vietnamese; add a million streetside phở vendors, a million ardent touts, merchants and basket carriers, citywide communist broadcasts twice a day and [...]

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bookporn #38: the food edition, or, how I am a sucker for gimmicks

I am not generally a complete sucker for gimmicks. BUT.

In Suntec City, a colossal, scrupulously modern shopping complex in Singapore, there lie the fruits of the labour of sheer genius. Behold, the Food Republic: a Singaporean hawker center made to look like a library.

This is clearly a ploy: it is a pernicious, utterly unholy conspiracy [...]

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bookporn #37: singapore national library, or, Contraband

the Singapore National Library is quite a marvel: steel and glass wrought into elegance manifest. It is much taller than its 16 storeys suggest, for each floor is lavish – positively indulgent – with its space. From certain angles on the outside it looks almost like bookshelves

from other angles, more like science fiction –

And [...]

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bookporn #36: asian civilizations museum, singapore

Islamic calligraphy comes in a bewildering, beautiful array of scripts. Copying the Qur’an is a sacred act, and — so I suppose — extreme calligraphic exertions are one way of demonstrating extreme piety. One of the most demanding scripts is the ghubar script — literally, “dust script” — and it requires that the scribe produce [...]

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bookporn #35: lankester antiques & books, saffron walden

an excursion out into the Cambridge hinterlands yields a Find in the town of Saffron Walden: Lankester Antiques and Books, which is exactly what it says on the tin:

that is to say, a stacked and dangling jumble of curios, oddities and knick-knacks, hemmed in sternly by shelves of books — all seeming to tremble on [...]

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bookporn #34: from estonia with love

This isn’t full-fledged bookporn; it’s something more coy, more demure. Maybe it’s like the difference between the feathered and sequined blond tarts grinding up against the dancing pole on stage, dollar bills spilling out of their cleavages … and the pretty brunette in t-shirt and jeans working behind the bar, who, when she turns around [...]

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bookporn #33: kroch library, cornell university

this is totally overdue. While I was in the States a couple of months ago, I spent 8 days in Cornell University, otherwise known as the Mecca of Southeast Asian Studies, and discovered that the Kroch Library had the most prostitutional opening hours I’ve ever encountered — 7am to 2am, staffed throughout, and the beautiful, [...]

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bookporn #32: NYC bookstore (I): somewhere on broadway

a most excellent bookstore somewhere on Broadway, NYC, whose name I can neither remember nor decipher from the shopwindow. A glorious, crammed place! Wallspace and floorspace are colonized with equal vigour: books and DVDs line the slender, precarious staircase that dissects the shop down the middle; books are stuffed into every shelf crevice and occupy [...]

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