I just finished reading local graphic novelist Jason Shiga’s Bookhunter, a noirish 1970s library action-detective story loosely based on an actual high-profile 1996 rare book theft. While Bookhunter works best in print, Shiga also makes it available to read online, either via a page-at-a-time interface, or as a single long page (best for high-bandwidth users).
The Stranger book editor Paul Constant writes about a somewhat less interesting brand of book thief in his article “Flying Off the Shelves: The Pleasures and Perils of Chasing Book Thieves”, based on his encounters with book thieves while working in Seattle independent bookstores:
Posted by Anirvan“In my eight years working at an independent bookstore, I lost count of how many shoplifters I chased through the streets of Seattle while shouting ‘Drop the book!’ I chased them down crowded pedestrian plazas in the afternoon, I chased them through alleys at night, I even chased one into a train tunnel. I chased a book thief to the waterfront, where he shouted, ‘Here are your fucking books!’ and threw a half-dozen paperbacks, including Bomb the Suburbs and A People’s History of the United States, into Puget Sound, preferring to watch them slowly sink into the muck rather than hand them back to the bookseller they were stolen from. He had that ferocious, orgasmic gleam in his eye of somebody who was living in the climax of his own movie: I suppose he felt like he was liberating them somehow.”
BuzzFeed is running a roundup of stories about innovative bookshelf design.
I’ve been keeping an eye on alternashelves ever since a friend bought a love seat with book storage built in (sort of like this); it was a minor revelation that shelving didn’t always need to look like, well, shelving.
Maybe they’re not as exciting as the flexitubes or the brace case, but I’m mostly lusting after more-efficient-than-pretty solutions like ceiling bookshelves, or maybe a couple of Sapien bookcases I can use to clean up those piles of books around the house.
So little space, so many books…
Posted by Anirvan
