Tills has also perfected the art of war against space: the bookshelf stack. Behold, a mighty phalanx of bookshelves wedged between floor and ceiling: a triumphant conquest of dead space, reclaimed for king and country! or maybe for the sanity of the storekeeper.

But surely there is no more fitting source of bookporn than the so-called “pubic triangle” of Edinburgh. This is the western flank of the Old Town, famous as much for its proliferation of shady bars and lapdance parlours as for its astonishing concentration of second-hand bookstores. A heady mix of booze, bosoms and books, indeed; many of these establishments have been proudly balancing flesh-sleaze with bibliophilic erotica for decades. Here is Edinburgh Books, whose central room is presided over gravely by Clarence, resident water-buffalo:

and whose enormous space combines creative shelving, miscellaneous taxidermic creations and national pride:

and here is Armchair Books, a marvellous, eccentric place. Does that door ajar not entice? and seduce?

and upon entry, deliver untold delights, proffered to its lustful clientele atop a bed of luxurious Oriental carpets?

(They are, they declare, under sporadic, “feeble but sinister attack” by the government. I believe them).

so get thee to Edinburgh, where book and bosom meet in countless suggestive ways. I guarantee you will come away enraptured–and, given the range of excellent and well-priced merchandise, utterly spent.

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 Slovakia, a building frozen in time since one fateful day in 1943 in which every teacher and child in the school was spirited away to the concentration camps. Their abrupt departure left the halls and classrooms desolate; the books, their pages fluttering to stillness, decayed wordlessly until their discovery half a century later.

It’s an arresting theme, and the photographs wield the symbolism without feeling overly contrived. There are a few that do border on artifice: this one, for example, frozen into an impossible grace, feels to me the most laboured.

But mostly, the photos capture without contrivance a world of timeworn books, with a deep sensitivity to the textures of aging. Intimate shots of spines and sheets evoke fust and mildew, dusty sandpaper under the skin, old gnarl and crackle, fragility. Words and alphabets peek coyly out from between books and pages. One of the exhibits, an oval furl of sheets, spirals like a prisoner’s thumbprint.

The exhibition opened first at the Slovak National Museum, and the Cambridge installment of it is the first in the UK. It’s due to reach further next year, travelling to New York, Moscow, Sydney and beyond.

But there was something about seeing it in the Caius library which really brought home to me the sense that an exhibition is made as much of the space it occupies as of its content. The exhibition designer, Daniel Weil, made his intent explicit: to take advantage of the contrast between the photos of decaying books and the actual books of the Caius library. Each of Dojc’s photos is housed in a kind of skeletal bookcase of its own, suspended in front of a translucent wire mesh through and between which the viewer can glimpse the solid bookcases and books of the Caius library.

At the end of the hall, a massive mural of the abandoned synagogue artfully extends the perspective lines to a vanishing point lodged in a distant past.

And the hushed silence of the library completes the experience. Even footsteps sound blasphemous here. Tiptoeing through the long hallway, amidst all these books suspended in their ghostly shelves, and wreathed in tragedy and history: one feels as though some boorish step could break the spell and bring the whole thing crashing down into the present.

The Last Folio Exhibition is running from 11 to 5.30pm every day from the 10th to 27th of November 2009, in the Gonville and Caius Lower Library, Cambridge University. Entrance is free!

even though it was bought over by Oxford’s Blackwell’s in 1999. (growl)

What I love about Heffers is the impossible cunning of its architecture. It takes its two floors of allocated building space and somehow, by some astonishing & satanic feat of interior design, engineering and L-dimensional skulduggery, somehow pulls four floors out of the rabbit’s hat. In all the following photos you will be able to discern, among those stern concrete pillars, four levels of gorgeous bookery. (Click through to Flickr for exposition).

The skulduggery continues. We have here a space deceptively masquerading as a cafe from the top of the stairs, until you move closer, and lo! a hitherto hidden Book Cranny balloons into sight.

Heffers also has nested nooks — crannies within crannies;

its History section curls away into two cosy corners in the basement, segueing into Classics and Philosophy at its fringes;

and, right at the back — no doubt situated according to some greater, inscrutable design between Politics and Medicine — a resident skeleton.

Love Heffers! it’s one of a kind. If you can stagger past the Cambridge kitsch out front, creep past the alleged bestsellers and resist the stationery sirens, the lower mezzanine floor now features a brand new secondhand books section. And from past experience, a secondhand bookstore in a town stuffed with owlish academics is Not To Be Sniffed At.

The New Liberal Arts project, if you’ll recall, began earlier this year as a conversation about what a liberal arts education for the 21st century might look like, and ended up as a book, which now reads like a curriculum for a crazy, marvellous university. The bottom line is, all 200 copies of the book sold within 8 hours, and it’s now available freely as a PDF in the Snarkmarket store, which you should download and disseminate widely. And read. My entry on Translation is in there, a humble weed of an idea amidst a whole garden of inspiring entries, ranging from Journalism (But Not As You Know It!) to Attention Economics (Modules: Multitasking, Stillness), to Iteration (Working in Spirals), to Play (Seriously).

A cunning Snarkmarketing ploy: in affecting the semblance of universal digital accessibility (PDFs for everyone!), Snarkmarket has actually shored up the glorious, bourgeois exclusivity of the Book (200 copies for the monied, internet-savvy classes), the beautiful, irreplaceable paperness of it –

because, you see, it is such a very beautiful book. And it contains a paper-only secret on page 9. Alienated readers unite! Endless struggle! Seize the beautiful books from the clutches of the undeserving internet bourgeoisie! All copies belong to the Party! (Only please let me keep my copy, it’s so very lovely).

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 Journal of Anthropology.

Tian Shu, a modern art installation four years in the making (1987-1991), is comprised of a display of books spread in a large rectangle across the ground, above which voluptuous scrolls unroll in long, pregnant arcs. The books — four hundred of them — are handmade with reverential adherence to the standards of traditional Ming dynasty fonts, bookbinding, typesetting and stringing techniques. The fifty-foot scrolls are printed in the style of Chinese outdoor newspapers.

To make them, Xu painstakingly carved Chinese characters into square woodblocks, in just the way his ancient printing predecessors would have done, had them typeset and printed, and the printed pages mounted and bound into books and scrolls.

The result is a truly spectacular display of bookmanship — volumes fit for an emperor’s library.

Yet, there’s the astonishing, Borgesian catch:

Out of the three or four thousand Chinese characters used in these volumes and scrolls, not a single one of them is a real Chinese character.

They are made up of recognizable radicals and typical atomic components of Chinese characters, but Xu laboured to ensure that while they all retain the unmistakable look of Chinese script, they are all, so to speak, nonsense. They do not exist in any dictionary, and do not mean anything. Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers alike approach the books with the same sense of wonder at their beauty, and the same sense of incomprehension at their content — though, for Chinese readers, the frustrated impulse to read might detract somewhat from their aesthetic enjoyment of the art piece. I’ve heard that some Chinese readers have spent days attempting to locate a character they can read — to no avail. It’s a piece of art whose meaning is to be found in its meaninglessness.

Some twenty years later, in 2006, Xu Bing followed up on Tian Shu with another installation called Di Shu (地书) – literally, Book from the Ground, or Book from Earth. Where Tian Shu is understood by none, Chinese or non-Chinese speakers alike, Di Shu was composed to be understood by all, irrespective of their language and nation. As Xu himself says,

我的艺术多与文字有关，这是从二十年前的一部叫《天书》的作品开始的。称它为“天书”，因为它是一本包括我自己在内，世上没有人能读懂的书。现在我用这套 “标识语言”，又写了一本说什么语言的人都能读懂的书。我称它为《地书》。事实上，这两本书有共同之处 : 不管你讲什么语言，也不管你是否受过教育，它们平等地对待世界上的每一个人。

“I have created many works of art relating to language. This [piece of work - Di Shu ] has its origins in a piece I made twenty years ago, called Tian Shu. I called it Tian Shu because it it is a book legible to no one on this earth, including myself. Now I am using a “language of signs” to write a book that any speaker of any language can understand; I call it Di Shu. In truth, though, these two books have something in common: No matter what language you speak, or what level of education you have attained, they treat all people of this world equally.”

Whether from Heaven or Earth, both his art pieces — and in this way they are something of backhanded tributes to the written word — are to be understood (or not understood, in the case of the Tian Shu) by the educated and non-educated alike.

For me, amongst other things, Tian Shu is the purest veneration of the written word and the form of the book: not for the knowledge they contain and convey, but simply the very fact that they are, and that they are, or can be, so beautiful, without even reading a word, and even without meaning anything at all. This is, in short, bookporn at its most essential! Who among us has not walked into a bookstore or a library which contains not a single book one can read, but which nonetheless takes our breath away? Who has not been touched by beautiful calligraphy, by brushstroked words on fine paper, by sensuous lines of scripts that dance provocatively on the page, inviting comprehension? Beauty can move without language. Here is my internet Hat taken off to 徐冰先生. May he continue to frustrate the literate, create beautiful things, and do his bit for bookporn around the world.

Pictures from xubing.com and Google Images.

Its glory is not confined to the mere aesthetic; it is a place where a Southeast Asian specialist can dissolve quietly into a very special brand of ecstasy. Many historians know this ecstasy; Southeast Asian historians can only know it in very few circumstances. This ecstasy, roughly speaking, arises when one is reading a particularly obscure book on, say, Javanese religious rituals, and comes across a wildly seductive reference in the footnotes (you know! the ones that say coyly to you, via their long, explicit titles: “I will tell you everything you want to know”). One leaps out of the chair with a feral look in one’s eyes and dashes to the library catalogue, and pounds the search keywords in with animal desperation, with shaking hands….

In most libraries, the Southeast Asian historian stares in tearful rage at the ‘Search revealed no results, nearest holding is 3 billion miles away’, and sinks to one’s knees, weeping uncontrollably. In ISEAS library, one saunters, at most, two or three shelves down, extracts the obscure little tome from its place, and saunters back to one’s table, with aforementioned ecstasy oozing from every pore.

A word of caution: given the multitudinous nature of footnotes and references, this can result in one’s table breaking under the weight of the books you have brought back for yourself to follow up on, and can also cause brain failure and chronic depression as a consequence of trying to read all of them and realizing that you can never finish. Small price to pay for an awesome library.

Happy 2009!

This bookstore was literally around the corner from where I stayed: Ethnic Travel, Insight Into Vietnam, it’s called, and somehow rises quite appropriately to its rather belaboured title:

It is a floor-to-ceiling wall of books, shuddering like jelly on the flimsiest and most skeletal bookshelf they could get away with. It might have been made of bamboo, and possibly toothpicks. The bookshop was being minded by a tiny, wide-eyed Vietnamese girl who spoke not a jot of English apart from “You buy now?” Tiny as she was, she trundled the precarious mobile front of the bookshelf back and forth across the room for us, picking up the books which, dislodged by the jerky motion of the shelf, tumbled out along the way, and stuffing them back into their places with total aplomb.

The bookstore sells and buys used books, specializes in travel guides, and is clearly aimed at the bewildered non-Vietnamese-speaking clutches of people who wander the streets of Hanoi, their alienness betrayed each time they flinch at the deranged traffic as they cross the road (locals navigate the sea of madness without so much as a flicker of the eyelid). Once inside, though, you could be in any used bookstore in the world, and only two things indicate you might in fact be Asia: the Buddhist altar discreetly commanding the only empty square of display space in the top corner of the room, and the presence of books like these slotted among the normal offerings:

A peek inside the book will reveal an extremely suspect, grainy, photocopied quality to the pages — not that you need anymore than ‘Slaugkternouse-Five’ on the spine to tell you that this book has not seen the inside of a kosher printing press in its entire lifetime. Piracy is alive and kicking, even if it no longer involves eyepatches and peglegs. Welcome to Southeast Asia.

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 to make me spend all my time and money eating there, despite the fact that it is 45 minutes by bus from where I live, on the other side of the island, and despite the fact that everything selling there is about 20% more expensive than your standard hawker fare.

Authentic library lamps!!!!! 1 bazillion points for effort. The only thing that arrests my irrational lust, which mingles uncertainly with my more general lust for hawker food, is that the books are, alas, not real:

even when they are, in fact, three dimensional –

Still, is it too much to ask that more restaurants cater in similarly imaginative ways to the violently rapturous bibliophiles among us? If you live in Singapore, I exhort you to go. If you visit Singapore, I will escort you myself. Any excuse.

_{NB: This is a largely aesthetic experience. The food is not the best you can get in Singapore, but that’s not saying much, since it is, after all, Singapore. If you want real food, you want to visit Kuala Lumpur.}

from other angles, more like science fiction –

And what a building it is from the inside! Surely there can’t be many other public libraries that would place their rare books, untouchable collections and archive material on the very top two floors of the building, its research library on the next top five floors of the building, and the books for the masses in the basement? — Rather than the other way around, with the archive boxes squirrelled away into the dark, windowless basements that literally bury the researchers with the past, and the books for normal people out in the sunshine?

But in the Singapore National Library, as an academic researcher, you find yourself enticed – nay, positively obliged – into those lofty glass towers of scholarship. And you sit at vast desks that command such spectacular views over the city, and you wonder that perhaps it is only in Singapore, whose 43-year-old modern history is in many respects so scant and yet so hard-won, where the past is so literally elevated to such heights, and where its value to Singaporeans (and of course, to the Government) is made so utterly, architecturally explicit, in the way that they do best: corporately…

and now the Contraband:

I only got this one shot before being assaulted (quite politely, however) by the librarians. It’s the highest floor of the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library that can be accessed without permission, on the 11th floor – the Singapore (of course) and Southeast Asian collection, where I shall be spending much of my weekends in the coming weeks – and it is truly marvellous.

Behold, this fifteenth century Ottoman Turkish scroll, which resides on the third floor of the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore. It is astoundingly beautiful, and also crazy. There are two levels of wording on the scroll. The large Arabic letters, unravelling in perfect thulth script across the scroll, form a prayer, beginning with the invocation of Allah’s blessings on Muhammad, followed by the names of the twelve Shiite Imams and an invocation to ‘Ali. But those letters are shaped from smaller words: in fact, no less than the words of the entire Qur’an, painstakingly inscribed in tiny tiny ghubar script according to the design of the larger prayer (most certainly best viewed large):

Some scholars suggest that this sort of words-inside-words calligraphy carried particular appeal for Islamic mystics, for when they read out the larger (and briefer) text, it would be as if that single prayer contained within it the whole, unabridged word of God and His glory.

Personally, I think it’s 100% showing off. Also, 1 million % devastatingly awesome. I have never wanted to steal something so much in my life.