Books

Morioka Shoten is a tiny bookstore of “a Single Room with a Single Book” in Tokyo. It sells only one book; more precisely, multiple copies of one title that changes weekly, with a small book-inspired art exhibition on the walls.

Morioka Shoten is a bookstore with a single book
available at a time, for six days.
Morioka Shoten is a bookstore with a single room
with an event to gather every night.
Morioka Shoten,
a single room with a single book

Recently it occurred to me that I could use fore-edge indexing as a way to track the structure of a book. I was reading a book and it was going splendidly and then all the sudden I got bogged down. I suspected it had something to do with pacing and chapter length. So I did a fore-edge index and soon I had visual evidence of my suspicion: swelling chapters broke up the flow.

Most of us give little thought to the back of the book—it’s just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in this delightful and witty history, hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. In the pages of the index, we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. Here, for the first time, is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past.

Stripe partners with millions of the world’s most innovative businesses. These businesses are the result of many different inputs. Perhaps the most important ingredient is “ideas.”

Stripe Press highlights ideas that we think can be broadly useful. Some books contain entirely new material, some are collections of existing work reimagined, and others are republications of previous works that have remained relevant over time or have renewed relevance today.

Nobody would disagree with the author of this tweet, Simon Kuestenmacher — of course it’s nice to have your map available while you are reading along.

The reason it doesn’t generally happen is not, surprise, surprise, that publishers had never thought of it — it’s because it’s very expensive. Every book should of course have maps set up like this, and every book should cost another $5 or so for each tip-in pull-out in it. Four or five maps and you’ll be getting to the point where it’s cheaper to buy a second copy and use your scissors to cut the maps out. Once you’ve done that, maybe you can Scotch-tape them together as similar handy pull-outs!

I doubt many people give any thought to indices. I suspect that in the popular mind indexes are merely tools for readers. I am not so sure that many scholars think of them as more than that. This concerns me. An index is, and can be, more. Because the creation of an index often comes near the end of a project, when time and patience are scarce, scholars hurry through them. There is no obvious reward for putting much time into one. I understand this. The creation of an index, however, is an art. Indexes are an opportunity to reveal to readers the layers of a work, as well as its priorities. They help both scholars and everyday readers see your argument and the nuance around it. They may be only tools, but they are indispensable to any good nonfiction and, especially, any academic book.

I never wanted to be a designer, always a writer.

Between the Words is an exploration of visual rhythm of punctuation in well-known literary works. All letters, numbers, spaces, and line breaks were removed from entire texts of classic stories...leaving only the punctuation in one continuous line of symbols in the order they appear in texts. The remaining punctuation was arranged in a spiral starting at the top center with markings for each chapter and classic illustrations at the center.

“Reading is first and foremost non-reading,” writes Pierre Bayard in his book, How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. “Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.”

In that spirit, I made a list of 20 good-looking books published in 2023 that I didn’t manage to read this year.

I adore these. It seems strange there aren’t white pigments used? The claims seem to be that it’s all silver and gold ink – wow.

I drew this diagram last week when I found myself reading a writer who seems to be interested in all the things I seem to be interested in, but they write about them in ways that drive me absolutely nuts. This kind of writer is frustrating because they are both annoying and valuable — I can’t ignore them completely because they have things that I want! These are the writers I skim. I skate over their text with a razor blade, scanning for good quotes and sources and links I can steal, scraping their footnotes and bibliographies. (A writer in this category can become a creative nemesis who motivates me to outdo them.)

But few tyros come to it saying to themselves “I’ve got to get a job in a production department” — and in this they are missing out on what is really the single most distinctive part of book publishing. Any business needs people to market and sell the product, and has to have skilled folks out there buying raw materials: it’s the shaping of the raw material into the salable product that makes this business radically different from that one. Because even with computers and e-books, authors’ manuscripts do not automatically turn into books.

When Charlie Munger — Warren Buffet’s longtime partner at Berkshire Hathaway — died last month at 99, I mentioned that a new edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack was about to be published by Stripe Press (a subsidiary of the very same Stripe of e-payments renown).

The hardcover edition is out, but Stripe has also made the entire book available on this marvelous website. The site is beautiful, fun, and clever, and reminds me greatly of the web edition of The Steve Jobs Archive’s Make Something Wonderful. Both are damning condemnations of the state of e-books.

...Compare the Kindle preview of Poor Charlie’s Almanack to the website edition. It’s like comparing a matchbook to a blowtorch. With the e-book editions — Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, whatever — you can merely read these books. With the web editions, you experience them.

And therein lies the joy of reference books: You as the reader can make them comply with the demands of your knowledge, intellect and time constraints, not vice versa. We have all continued slogging through books we weren’t really enjoying because we were a third of the way through and it didn’t seem right to not finish them. (Yes, this is an example of the sunk cost fallacy—it’s also a very human fallacy, especially in an environment in which reading is gamified by completion). 

Nobody has ever scolded themselves for failure to complete a reference book. They are intended to be used as the reader demands—nothing more. You owe no obeisance to the author; there is no pretense of a conversation.

...Curated well, organized logically, illustrated with appropriate diagrams and maps, reference books can be a joy. And I suspect they’re a joy that many of us share, even if we are loath to say so publicly for fear of being labeled midwitted.

Just as Cage did with music, it’s time to re-imagine what a book experience can be.

The Guardian:

But there is power in reading slowly, something the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li tells her creative writing students at Princeton University. “They say, ‘I can read 100 pages an hour’,” she says. “But I say, ‘I don’t want you to read 100 pages an hour. I want you to read three pages an hour’.”

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

[Reading] slow enough, that is, to remember verbatim everything she has read. “We on Camiroi are only a little more intelligent than you on Earth,” one of the adults says. “We cannot afford to waste time on forgetting or reviewing, or pursuing anything of a shallowness that lends itself to scanning.”

As humans, we're surrounded by objects. We pay very little attention to the vast majority of them but they're there, they're all around us. Dieter Rams famously said that "Good design is as little design as possible" and he's not wrong. Good design is design that does its job without getting in your way. But good design can—and sometimes should—also stand out because good design is the embodiment of passion, of caring for a craft, of loving the process.

And that's precisely why I love everything Craig Mod does. I think I first stumbled on his work almost a decade ago at this point and what really caught my attention was the love for the process. From the newsletters to the essays to the books, everything is deliberate and you can just see that he just cares. The feeling I get is that there's almost a sense of responsibility when putting something out into the world and that's something I can relate to.

All of the wooden shelves used for storing books were on the warehouse's first floor. We decided to keep these shelves as they were to form a library, and we also created a small lecture hall for holding talks by writers and makers. Although contemporary society is moving away from books and towards computers and information technology, people nevertheless have a strong feeling of connection to – and nostalgia for – trees and things that are made from wood. La kagu is a space where visitors can really get a sense of the culture of books. When they step inside, some even say that they can smell wood.

This is a list of all the books I've reviewed since 2001. Enjoy!

Economics
History
Philosophy
Biography / Memoir
Tech History
Business History
Fiction
Science Fiction
Science / Physics
Biology / Anthropology
Space
China
Politics / Sociology
Ideas, broadly
Essays
Investing
Writing
Other

We would need a system that enables people to:

• Publish a list of books they would be willing to discuss with other people to the open web. Antilibraries – collections of books you haven't read yet but would like to read – are particularly well suited to this proposition.
• See which books people in their social network want to discuss, and/or subscribe to other people's lists
• Be notified when 4+ people in their network have the same book on their discussion list – possibly via an email thread?
• Coordinate and schedule a time to read and discuss the book with that group.

I have to think that “Against Rereading,” by Oscar Schwartz, is a massive troll, because the alternative — that Schwartz believes himself to be so omnicompetent a reader, so perfect in his perception, so masterful in his judgment, that he absorbs all that even the greatest book has to offer with a single reading — is unpleasant to contemplate. Or maybe there’s one more possibility: that — like Kafka’s hunger artist, who never found a food he liked — Schwartz has never been sufficiently interested in a book to return to it. 

But surely he makes one important point: the problem with our culture today is definitely all those people who don’t want ceaseless novelty. Definitely.

I’m almost certain he’s just trolling, though.

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of U.S. copyright restrictions, and free of cost.

Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.

I am inclined to believe that the physical aspect of reading a printed book is a significant benefit in one’s retention of its content, but I’m not aware of any proof of this: research is slight and rather ambiguous, suggestive rather than probative. I also believe that writing something out by hand forces you to work at a speed similar to that of careful thought and that this improves your prose — but can anyone prove that? What I do believe/know is that we have not been reading or writing for long enough for any kind of evolutionary changes to have taken place in our brains to make one format obviously better than any other format.

As of June 2023, I've asked 9,000+ authors to share five of their favorite books around a topic, theme, or mood and why they love each book. This infuses each book with a bit of magic and meaning.

Then, we give readers fun and unique ways to follow their curiosity down rabbit holes. Try our bookshelf on science fiction or life satisfaction. At every step, you can meet the person who recommended that book, the book list it came from, and what they are passionate about.

Remem monitors your conversation for references to past events, and then displays video of that event in the lower left corner of your field of vision. If you say "remember dancing the conga at that wedding?", Remem will bring up the video. If the person you’re talking to says "the last time we were at the beach," Remem will bring up the video. And it’s not only for use when speaking with someone else; Remem also monitors your subvocalizations. If you read the words "the first Szechuan restaurant you ate at," your vocal cords will move as if you’re reading aloud, and Remem will bring up the relevant video.
There’s no denying the usefulness of software that can actually answer the question "where did I put my keys?" But Whetstone is positioning Remem as more than a handy virtual assistant: they want it to take the place of your natural memory.

A few years ago I walked into a bookstore and noticed something peculiar: I found that every book was okay. In fact, books had gotten pretty damn good! A random book in a random bookstore is likely to have an interesting cover with good typography inside. They’re not beautiful objects or anything and, sure, the paper is ehhhh and okay yes they’re using the same boring book fonts that you’ve seen ten million times but there’s nothing about these books that get in the way of my reading. So the baseline for modern book design is pretty high.

This made me wonder why the same isn’t true for websites.

...And yet! I do truly believe that a website can be as well designed as any book, just as thoughtful, just as brilliant. Yet in 2023 it feels like we’ve let websites be one of two things: either confused, junky bloatware or simple white posters with black text and a big checkout button. But the web can be so much more!

He told himself that he would have to start reading thicker books: they lasted longer, and made more comfortable pillows.