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February 1, 2021, 1:02pm In news that makes you say “Why?”: last week, the ACLU of Indiana filed a lawsuit against the Jackson County Public Library, on behalf of a man who was banned for life from the library over an original Trump-critical poem he left at the library. The suit claims that Jackson County Public Library has violated the man’s First Amendment rights, as well as the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Richard England, 68, has attended the Seymour branch of the Jackson County Public Library twice a week for over a decade, befriending several library employees. ...

January 29, 2021, 1:01pm Here’s something wonderful: Karabuk University’s library, in Karabuk, Turkey, is designed to look like a row of large books on a shelf. It’s so cheerful—and there is a pleasure and clarity in something stating what it is. Others have noticed the joy of buildings like this: architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour coined the term “duck architecture” in their 1972 book Venturi, Brown and Izenour personally liked decorated sheds more than ducks, though they declared both valid—but I’m ducks all the way. Let’s mainstream duck ar...

January 8, 2021, 12:26pm Here’s some surprising end-of-2020 good news: books are doing . . . well? According to NPD BookScan, unit sales of print books in the United States rose 8.2% in 2020. Units hit 750.9 million this year—57.2 million up from last year. This is fairly surprising, given the pandemic was expected to take a huge toll on sales; but online sales and sales through non-bookstore outlets offset the losses suffered by physical retailers. And there’s even happier news from across the pond: the Booksellers Association announced that despite the pandemic, the number of independ...

Talk about a pivot: after philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he grew unhappy, abandoned his teaching post at Cambridge, and started teaching elementary school in rural Austria. The dictionary he created for his students during his time in Austria, Wörterbuch für Volksschulen (Dictionary for Elementary Schools), is both a useful tool for students and a document of how Wittgenstein’s philosophy was radically altered through working with children. Now, 100 years later, the first English translation of Wörterbuch, Word Book, has been pub...

December 11, 2020, 1:52pm For Chanukah this year, we’re looking back—not back to the Maccabees, but still pretty far back. Today we’re “shining a light” (ha ha ha) on some medieval manuscripts that deal with Chanukah. Enjoy! The David Bar Pesah Mahzor, 14 th-century Germany. This 1156-page two-volume text is named after its scribe and decorator, who had a very particular design style: the initial words of many prayers and poems in the Mahzor are rendered in distinctive black-and-red embellished calligraphy, and sometimes given full-page multicolor illuminated word panels. The text c...