bibliostructures

Here are some cool things Richard Prince owns: Nabokov’s desk copy of the Olympia Press first edition of Lolita, heavily corrected and annotated; a letter written by Sylvia Plath the day before she killed herself; the only known copy of Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key to retain its original dust cover ($175,000 to you, sir); Jimi Hendrix’s letters to his dad; Neal Cassady’s copy of On the Road; Kerouac’s previously unknown original scroll manuscript of Big Sur (twice as long as the published book); the manuscript of The Godfather as well as the letter in which the editor suggested changing the title from The Mafia to The Godfather; letters by Thomas Pynchon written in the late Sixties, while he was at work on Gravity’s Rainbow, and… I’ll stop for a moment and let you catch your breath.Is there a logic to it? Or is this just a man who loves reading, and has the money to indulge his tastes?

“A slight logic,” Prince admits. “An artificial limit. The collection is supposed to start in 1949, the year I was born. Since Orwell’s 1984 was published in 1949 – I’ve got a great copy – I decided to end it in 1984. I thought that’d be funny. I set that up about five years ago. There’s also obviously some art books, but mostly there’s photography, and there are three cultural aspects – beats, hippies and punks – any book that has to do with those social movements, as well as fine literature. Some authors are very specific, like Kerouac, Kesey, Richard Brautigan. I love Brautigan. But I do go outside – I have Hemingway. You have to have a Joyce.” That’s how you tell when someone has a real collecting kink: “I have Hemingway” – as frankly fetishistic as his paintings of masked nurses.

Is there an end point? Now he has a “dream copy” of Ulysses and can spend Saturday mornings alphabetising in his own personal two-storey library, where is there to go?

“I think the end point will come when the catalogue is done. I’ll design it and it’ll be an artist’s book. Probably three volumes. I’ll be able to enjoy the collection sitting down on a chair in my place. Anyway, I’m beginning to think it needs someone to take care of it, someone who can really take care of it. Eventually it’ll either go up for auction, or to an institution, or an institution will come and say we want to run the library, keep it intact. So those are the three options, and whether or not I will cherry-pick 15 of the books and some of the letters, I don’t know. It’s going to be very difficult to part with my letters from Kerouac to Neal Cassady…”

From an article by Hari Kunzru in the Telegraph

Richard Prince bag with Henny Youngman jokes for Louis Vuitton

Darwin, taking his first steps over the line between tradition and evolution, found himself occupying ground near those battle lines of class and religious warfare. He moved carefully. Didn’t announce his apostasy. Still, it’s possible to approximate the timing of this intellectual conversion: March of 1837, soon after his talks with Gould and Owen. Species changed, one into another. He knew it. He just didn’t know how.

On the cover he labeled it simply “B.” Notebook “A,” begun about the same time was devoted to geology. As a heading on the first page of “B” he wrote “Zoonomia,” in genufelction to a book of that title published forty years earlier by his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin.

Months afterward he made another note, regarding the curious characteristics of his South American fossils and the Galapagos species he’d seen: “These facts origin (especially latter) of all my views.” But for new, he was keeping those views to himself.

He didn’t use the word “evolution,” not until later, not for decades. In July of that year he began what he called his notebooks on the “transmutation” of species. The first of them was a pocket-size booklet bound in brown leather with a metal clasp, small enough to be carried in a jacket, private enough to hold wild ideas and heretical doubts.

From a new book on Charles Darwin by David Quammen. “The Kiwi’s Egg. Charles Darwin and Natural Selection. A Fresh Look at Darwin’s Most Radical Idea and the Mysteriously Slow Process by Which He Revealed It.”

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” – or arguably, “web.”Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”
Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. “This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.
Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. “The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century,” Mr. Kelly said. “It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions.”
 
New York Times

Cellulose, a stiff chain of glucose units, is one of the most abundant natural polymers: it makes up 90 percent of cotton and half of wood. Plant cell walls are made of multiple strands of cellulose bound into fibers typically 5 to 10 nanometers thick. To make regular paper, wood chips are heated with chemicals or mechanical force to create pulp. Aggregated, 30-micrometer-thick bundles of cellulose fibers in the pulp are then intertwined to create sheets.The new nanopaper is made of much thinner 10-to-40-nanometer-thick fibers. Individual cellulose strands are very robust, Berglund says. “They have properties similar to Kevlar,” he notes. The hydroxyl groups and oxygen molecules on individual nanofibers attach to each other strongly. Even if a sudden impact ruptures the bonds between some of the nanofibers, the defect is small enough that the entire material does not fail. The paper can withstand nearly two-thirds more force than cast iron before it breaks.

The stretchiness comes from the pores in the mesh of nanofibers. When the nanopaper is stretched, there is enough space for the fibers to slip against each other. “You can stretch it up to 10 percent before it fails,” Berglund says. “Conventional paper can stretch a maximum of 3 to 4 percent, then it breaks.”

To make the nanopaper, Berglund and his colleagues first expose wood pulp to enzymes and mechanical force. This separates the pulp into cellulose microfibers. The pulp is passed through a device that uses high-pressure and high velocities in tiny microfluidic channels to create a uniform suspension of nanofibers in water. Finally, the researchers pass the suspension through a filter to create a gel, which they compress to make 100-micrometer-thick sheets.

Berglund says that the dilute, uniform suspension of the nanofibers is critical. It distributes the fibers homogeneously in the paper, making it strong. The porosity of the paper is also crucial. The researchers found that higher porosities led to paper that is stronger–that is, it handles more load per unit area–and tougher, which means that it does not crack easily.

MIT Technology Review

The apartment even comes with its own book, part of which is a fictional narrative that recalls “The Da Vinci Code” (without the funky religion or buckets of blood) and “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” the children’s classic by E. L. Konigsburg about a brother and a sister who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and discover – and solve – a mystery surrounding a Renaissance sculpture. It has its own soundtrack, too, with contributions by Kate Fenner, a young Canadian singer and songwriter with a lusty, alternative, Joni Mitchell-ish sound, with whom Mr. Clough fell in love during the project.  New York Times.

The architectural designer Eric Clough embedded 18 clues in the Fifth Avenue apartment of the Klinsky- Sherry family, leading them on a scavenger hunt through the rooms of their home.The hunt involved ciphers, riddles, poems and custom-built furniture with hidden drawers and panels. A book with a narrative about a mystery, hidden behind paneling in the front hall, offered clues.

Behind the panels, large white letters laser-cut into teal blue acrylic spell out the words of a poem written years ago by Steven B. Klinsky, the apartment’s owner, for his wife, Maureen Sherry, and their children.

Behind a drawing of a plane that hangs in a hallway is a little niche containing a scale model of the kitchen, a clue that leads to a musical score written for the apartment, which is hidden in a drawer above the stove.

In assembling talents for his project, Mr. Clough aimed high. His first choice for the author of the book that contains clues to the scavenger hunt in addition to the mystery story, was Jonathan Safran Foer, whose work contains its own sort of coded narrative pyrotechnics. Mr. Clough sent him a puzzle cube similar to this one, stamped with his firm’s phone number and the word “Please.”

A cross-section of a cellulose nanofibril film. Strong individual fibrils, and good adherence to one another, make for strong paper.

Researchers in Sweden and Japan have developed a much stronger paper, made from much smaller fibrils of cellulose. This “nanopaper,” they report in the journal Biomacromolecules, has a tensile strength greater than that of cast iron.

Marielle Henriksson of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and colleagues used enzymes and a gentle beating technique to produce fibrils on the order of tens of nanometers wide, roughly one-thousandth of the width of conventional fibers. The nanofibrils were then mixed with water, and the suspension was vacuum filtered to make paper.

The researchers report that the papers are rather porous, yet greatly resist tearing. They suggest that this property is a result of the high strength of individual fibrils and the way they adhere to one another. The researchers say that if it were developed commercially, the paper might have applications in construction or as a reinforcing material.

Henry Fountain. New York Times. June 10 2008