Teen Sleuth Haunted Library

The article Shelf Life in last Sunday’s New York Times magazine – insinuating that “traditional” book owners are pretentious phonies for shelving, stacking and throwing their books around their houses – is hypocritical (does it get any more pretentious than the author’s minimal yet highly curated little tableau of her Ebooks on display on that Conran’s shelf?), obvious, boring and annoying. I am countering it with excerpts from Roger Ebert’s online journal entry Books do Furnish a Life, and Steven Heller ‘s Observer piece Decorative Books: The End of Print, in support of those who phonily, pretentiously and unapologetically display their “traditional books”.

Excerpted from design observer:

When ink on paper finally goes the way of the Dodo (or the eight track), as certain dodos have predicted, heaps of printed papers will remain on earth. So the question will be what to do with what’s left? Ray Bradbury suggests in his 1953 dystopian science-fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451, that incineration is an option, but in truth the looming paper redundancy does not demand such hot draconian measures. When every bit of recorded human knowledge is digitized and available through Google or Jeeves alternative uses must be found for untold metric tons of paper, and particularly all those pesky books. So what is needed is the repurposing of these venerable materials into useful life-enhancing goods. Any suggestions?   Continue reading →