S e e . A l s o

Nicholson Baker ponders Wikipedia

emijlin — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:03:35 +0000

The Charms of Wikipedia

By Nicholson Baker

Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

by John Broughton

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It’s fact-encirclingly huge, and it’s idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it’s free, and it’s fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, “Diogenes of Sinope,” or “turnip,” or “Crazy Eddie,” or “Bagoas,” or “quadratic formula,” or “Bristol Beaufighter,” or “squeegee,” or “Sanford B. Dole,” and you’ll have knowledge you didn’t have before. It’s like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.

More people use Wikipedia than Amazon or eBay—in fact it’s up there in the top-ten Alexa rankings with those moneyed funhouses MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. Why? Because it has 2.2 million articles, and because it’s very often the first hit in a Google search, and because it just feels good to find something there—

An archive of archives.

emijlin — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 04:26:06 +0000

Tour the stacks and the reading rooms of libraries around the world thanks to Curious Expeditions. Seen as a collection, the library - The Library - becomes abstract. In these photographs, virtually devoid of people, The Library is a concept : it is ‘potential’ energy as opposed to kinetic energy - the latent spring in the mind, coiled but waiting there, on the infinitely high shelves. Trying to decipher the magnetism of these images - having almost nothing to with a desire to actually read all of the books in each room - but each vaulted hall a physical manifestation of the phenomenon of the figurative mental space - the freedom to be found in endless rumination.

Portraits, Paris 2002

emijlin — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 02:38:53 +0000

Joseph Feldman, What Were You Thinking ?

emijlin — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 01:12:11 +0000

In 1975, Joseph Feldman, a 58-year-old lawyer in New York City, was discovered to have stolen 15,000 books from the New York Public Library. He had rented an apartment specifically to store these books, and it took 20 men, 7 truckloads over 3 days to remove them all.

Books covered the stove. Books filled the bathtub and sinks.
This incident leads me to a series of inquiries, some of which will be posted here, while the others will float around in my mind like chapter headings to a long lost book buried deep within a stack piled high in an apartment somewhere in the West Village.
Breaking News

Doorway at 164 Waverly Place

emijlin — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 01:04:36 +0000

Through this door passed many thousands of books. On the way in, brought under secret cover, under coats, inside waistbands, inside satchels. Then on the way out in large cardboard boxes, headed for a truck set to rumble the lot of them back to the Public Library.