Painting of Asimov on his throne by Rowena Morill, via Wikimedia Commons “It’s difficult to make predictions,” they say, “especially about the future.” The witticism has been variously attributed. […]
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Earlier this year we informed readers that thousands of works of art and entertainment would soon enter the public domain—to be followed every year by thousands more. That […]
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Book historians and rare manuscript librarians do not have the most glamorous jobs by the usual standards. They deal with weathered, tattered, fragmentary scraps of text in archaic […]
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Plot, setting, character… we learn to think of these as discrete elements in literary writing, comparable to the strategy, board, and pieces of a chess game. But what […]
Read More →My childhood discovery of Edward Gorey proved revelatory. I recognized my own bewilderment in the blank expressions of his obsessively-rendered Edwardian children. His characters, imprisoned in starched collars […]
Read More →Should intelligent life of some form or another still inhabit the planet in the year 6939, such beings might come upon an “800-pound tube of an alloy of […]
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Back in August, we highlighted a new initiative by the New York Public Library. An institution that’s hip with our times, the NYPL released on Instagram a digital […]
Read More →“The Little Free Library: Billions and billions read.” In the 2013 Ted-X talk above, Todd Bol, founder of the Little Free Library movement, expressed the desire that one […]
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