theparisreview:

French cultural minister Aurélie Filippetti says the government is creating a fund to help struggling independent bookstores to ensure that France “never suffers the same fate as the United States.” Fair enough, France.

For more of this morning’s round up, click here.

containercorps:

Recordings is a series of books that are the result of a physical interaction between the printer and the offset press. Colors are added to the press during printing following a predetermined “score.” The act of printing becomes an act of performance, and the book is the evidence of its occurrence. Recordings conflate books and sculpture. They use the machinery of mechanical reproduction to create visual records of specific, unrepeatable conditions of color and change.

On Henry Darger’s 15,000-Page Novel

Kevin Miller showing us a page in one of the “Oz” books that was found in Henry Darger’s apartment…

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Charles Dickens, “The Pickwick Papers.” London: Macmillan and Company, 1907. Full tree-calf gilt, marbled endpapers and edges. (via The Subconscious Landscape of the Printed Book)

I Read Banned Books …

Even though Hyperallergic is primarily a blog about art and visual culture, there’s no question that we’re also super nerds who read a lot. So I felt it would be remiss if we didn’t pay at least a short tribute to Banned Books Week, an annual celebration of books and literacy and the freedom for everyone to read whatever the hell he or she wants, which unfortunately is still more of an ideal than a universal practice.