In this newscast, we are discussing a couple of medieval books and finds, a digitized astronomical manuscript from Uzbekistan, and a 20,000-book library, that you can buy with a mansion attached 🙂
Our book scanning cradle for smartphones and DSLR cameras was just updated to the Mark V version. Besides some minor changes, the most important thing is that the whole structure is almost perfectly stable now!
Pavel and I decided to try a different format. In this podcast series, we are not inviting any guests and just talk about some bookish topics. This time Pavel went to the Russian State Library to see some worm-eaten books.
There a distinctive difference between color-sorted and color-coded libraries. However, the second may be a subset of the first. But in any case, we'd like to talk about libraries sorted by the colors of their books' covers today.
Do you know what bookplates and ex-libris are? These prints or stamps that mark the book's ownership. Here is a twist: the Utopian Libraries project by a Russian artist Dmitry Babenko includes only bookplates of nonexistent libraries.
Those living at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century saw library books in a different light than us. For many, library books had the potential to transmit some of the most infectious diseases circulating in society at the time.
The first time I learned about phase boxes, I was on a tour of The Leeds Library. It was conducted by their bookbinder, Brian Cole, who ventured up from the depths of the library basement to show us around.
