bookporn #45: edinburgh

It’s been a while since my last bookporn installment. But I had the good fortune to visit Edinburgh over the summer–and what an unexpected windfall it was. The city itself is gorgeous, a tangle of medieval streets sprawled over an ex-volcanic landscape—cobblestones, narrow alleyways, tiny tea shops, and deceitful roads which mysteriously turn out to [...]

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Last Folio, or, bookporn #44: the necrophilia edition

[First posted at HNN as an exhibition review] Books are beautiful, even in death and deathly times. So says a new photo exhibition of dying books, immortalized in print and on display in Cambridge University’s Gonville & Caius Library. Entitled Last Folio, the exhibition presents Yuri Dojc‘s photographs from an old Jewish school in eastern [...]

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bookporn #43: heffers, cambridge

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 [...]

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New Liberal Arts, or, bookporn #42: Bourgeois Paper

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 – [...]

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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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