Does this therefore become a “Chaircase”? Regardless, its super nifty and I’d totally sit in it, reading.
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I wish our Prime Minister and his cronies believed this. |

Oh dear, I can’t agree more. This, and more wall space for my art, is, in part, why we bought a house.
Source: incomparableme
This town boasts the highest number of used, second-hand and antiquarian bookshops in the UK… maybe the world. I forget. At any rate, there are just tonnes of them. In fact, inside the outer wall of Hay Castle is a Pound/50p book shop that is entirely based on the Honour System. I believe I picked up a hard-back “Yes, Minister” book there.
Hay castle, Hay-on-Wye.
It always makes me think of Thornfield Hall with its Gothic derelict look.
I’d really like to install a library like this in my house. I don’t have nearly a glorious-enough space for this, though, unless one day we installed it around the window in the master bedroom. Hm. Well, maybe one day.

I could go for something like this, too. Just sayin’. ;)
IN 1962 Ezra Jack Keats started a quiet revolution that in its own way had as much influence as some of the decade’s louder protests. An author and illustrator, Keats published “The Snowy Day,” about a small boy’s delight in his first snowstorm. Nothing radical there. But the story differed profoundly from virtually all the mainstream American picture books preceding it: Peter, the little boy, was black.
Keats was not, which still surprises some who hear that the Jewish Museum in New York has mounted a retrospective of his work. Celebrating the book’s 50th anniversary and traveling to three other museums, the show, “The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats,” tells the story of how a white Jew — Keats was born Jacob Ezra Katz — created a black character who helped change the face of children’s books.
This is a great book and beautifully and simply illustrated.
The Library Phantom strikes again—but for the last time! As RadioLab’s Robert Krulwich reports, via This is Central Station, a woman has been leaving tiny paper sculptures in libraries and museums across Edinburgh.
These gorgeous pieces, details from a few of which you can see above, were secreted away with a few clues here and there. The sculptor wrote in a final statement that she offered them as “[a] tiny gesture in support of the special places,” a truly valuable sentiment as the very idea of libraries as distinct and public institutions comes increasingly under attack.
An American named Jesse Anderson has developed a computer program that tests whether enough monkeys typing on enough typewriters could ever reproduce the works of William Shakespeare. Anderson used Amazon’s cloud computing system to set up millions of “monkeys” (which are actually simple computer programs) that randomly bang out nine-character combinations. The program cross-references these results against the works of Shakespeare. When a nine-character combination matches anything written by the Bard, that section is removed from the monkeys’ “to do” list.
Anderson’s monkeys are doing quite well so far. They’ve been hammering away for just over a month, and have already succeeded in reproducing “The Tempest,” “As You Like It,” “Love’s Labour’s Lost” and quite a few other plays and poems to the letter. They should have the rest of Shakespeare’s works done in no time.
| — | John Lundberg, “Monkeys, Shakespeare and the Infinite Library” (via thelifeguardlibrarian) |





