Posted in Bookporn on October 5, 2009 | 5 Comments »
A bookporn entry in commemoration of my return to England — I present a bookshop in Cambridge that should have ascended its luscious throne a long time ago: Heffers. Heffers began as a family business, and continues to lay claim to over a hundred continuous years of Cambridge bookselling, since 1876
even though it was bought [...]
Posted in Bookporn on July 25, 2009 | 1 Comment »
My much-delayed copy of Snarkmarket’s New Liberal Arts came in the post yesterday! And it occasions a post I should have written some time ago, but which, like many of my thoughts these days, emerged as a tweet and fell promptly into dormancy.
The New Liberal Arts project, if you’ll recall, began earlier this year as [...]
Posted in Bookporn on May 5, 2009 | 8 Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in Bookporn on December 31, 2008 | 6 Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in Bookporn on December 20, 2008 | 1 Comment »
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 [...]
Posted in Bookporn on December 1, 2008 | 7 Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in Bookporn on November 15, 2008 | 1 Comment »
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 [...]
Posted in Bookporn on November 8, 2008 | 3 Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in Bookporn on August 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
Posted in Bookporn on August 9, 2008 | 2 Comments »
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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