Since 2009 the non-profit organization Clean the World has been working with hotels to recycle used soap and other toiletry products left behind by their customers into new sanitized soap that is then distributed to people without easy access to soap to prevent disease. The group has distributed 53 million bars of soap and saved 20 million pounds of waste from being discarded. Their hotel partners include Hilton, Hyatt, Best Western, Marriott, and other prominent hotel groups.
I never seem to tire of the many iterations of the “bookface” project. You probably have seen versions produced by bored bookshop staff across Europe. Or, perhaps you have stumbles upon #BookfaceFriday, or simply #Bookface, a meme in which you replace your face (or another part of your body) with a book, creating a clever and literary trompe l’oeil.
German filmmaker Jacco Kliesch took the meme to the next level in this short film, created in collaboration with the staff of the public library in Erlangen, Germany. “For two days,” he writes, “we were carefully lining up faces, objects and body parts—each time trying to create a perfect melding of life and art.”
“Banal Story”
by
Ernest Hemingway
So he ate an orange, slowly spitting out the seeds. Outside, the snow was turning to rain. Inside, the electric stove seemed to give no heat and rising from his writing-table, he sat down upon the stove. How good it felt! Here, at last, was life.
He reached for another orange. Far away in Paris, Mascart had knocked Danny Frush cuckoo in the second round. Far off in Mesopotamia, twenty-one feet of snow had fallen. Across the world in distant Australia, the English cricketers were sharpening up their wickets. There was Romance.
Patrons of the arts and letters have discovered The Forum, he read. It is the guide, philosopher, and friend of the thinking minority. Prize short-stories—will their authors write our best-sellers of to-morrow?
You will enjoy these warm, homespun, American tales, bits of real life on the open ranch, in crowded tenement or comfortable home, and all with a healthy undercurrent of humor.
I must read them, he thought.
He read on. Our children’s children—what of them? Who of them? New means must be discovered to find room for us under the sun. Shall this be done by war or can it be done by peaceful methods?
Or will we all have to move to Canada?
Our deepest convictions—will Science upset them? Our civilization—is it inferior to older orders of things?
And meanwhile, in the far-off dripping jungles of Yucatan, sounded the chopping of the axes of the gum-choppers.
Do we want big men—or do we want them cultured? Take Joyce. Take President Coolidge. What star must our college students aim at? There is Jack Britton. There is Dr. Henry Van Dyke. Can we reconcile the two? Take the case of Young Stribling.
And what of our daughters who must make their own Soundings? Nancy Hawthorne is obliged to make her own Soundings in the sea of life. Bravely and sensibly she faces the problems which come to every girl of eighteen.
It was a splendid booklet.
Are you a girl of eighteen? Take the case of Joan of Arc. Take the case of Bernard Shaw. Take the case of Betsy Ross.
Think of these things in 1925—Was there a risqué page in Puritan history? Were there two sides to Pocahontas? Did he have a fourth dimension?
Are modern paintings—and poetry—Art? Yes and No. Take Picasso.
Have tramps codes of conduct? Send your mind adventuring.
There is Romance everywhere. Forum writers talk to the point, are possessed of humor and wit. But they do not try to be smart and are never long-winded.
Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual. He laid down the booklet.
And meanwhile, stretched flat on a bed in a darkened room in his house in Triana, Manuel Garcia Maera lay with a tube in each lung, drowning with the pneumonia. All the papers in Andalucia devoted special supplements to his death, which had been expected for some days. Men and boys bought full-length colored pictures of him to remember him by, and lost the picture they had of him in their memories by looking at the lithographs. Bull-fighters were very relieved he was dead, because he did always in the bull-ring the things they could only do sometimes. They all marched in the rain behind his coffin and there were one hundred and forty-seven bull-fighters followed him out to the cemetery, where they buried him in the tomb next to Joselito. After the funeral every one sat in the cafés out of the rain, and many colored pictures of Maera were sold to men who rolled them up and put them away in their pockets.
Mads Lynnerup Everything Has Been Done (2019)
‘In this video a book lights on fire, as it gets opened. The book was published by Colpa Press in San Francisco and is in a limited edition of 50 in which 10 out of the 50 books has the potential of lighting on fire, when opening the book. Every book comes in a sealed bag, so there’s no way to tell what books will light on fire or not.
The recently opened Kitap Koala bookstore in Istanbul’s Şişli district offers 30,000 books to its customers with the commitment to give all of its profits to animal shelters and cover the medical needs of stray animals all over Turkey.
The goal of the Kitap Koala project is to sell books to contribute to the literacy of society and to create a fund to support the medical needs of the stray animals in the meantime, according to a staff member of the bookstore.
“Kitap Koala was founded as a result of a childhood dream. It was an idea of an ambulance responding to wounded and helpless stray animals. When we realized that it would not be sustainable through donations, we turned it to a social enterprise model,” said operations director Selinay Şahin (pictured above).
The booksellers have created a nationwide network of animal rights volunteers who find cats and dogs in need. They then inform Kitap Koala staff who commit funds for veterinary care. The booksellers also send food to animal shelters and treatment facilities. As part of the practice, they also provide animal food to individual volunteers who feed stray animals in their locality.
These days most of us are all to familiar with autonomous robots. Whether it’s the helpful little vacuum cleaner scurrying underfoot or the creepy robotic towers wandering and beeping around the supermarket doing what nobody seems to know, robots are popping up everywhere. Now the AROUND B robot is coming to bookstores to make book browsing uncomfortable.
When a customer enters a bookstore and begins browsing, AROUND B will guide them and carry their book selections to a seating area, where they can go through their books. When the customer is done browsing and is certain they want to purchase a book, they can simply place the book into AROUND B’s storage unit, and the mini robot will carry the book to the cashier. On the other hand, the books that didn’t make the cut and are left behind, AROUND B picks them up and takes them to a common section, wherein the employees can easily gather the books and put them back in their respective section.
I’m no Luddite, but it seems like yet another way to eliminate employees and cut jobs.
Lisel Mueller
1924-2020
1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea. 2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of course I do not remember this. 3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me. The world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws. 4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building with bells. A wide-bosomed teacher took me in. 5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth. 6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones and primrose marshes, a short train ride away. 7) My country was struck by history more deadly than earthquakes or hurricanes. 8) My father was busy eluding the monsters. My mother told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets. 9) I moved into the too bright days, the too dark nights of adolescence. 10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed behind in darkness. 11) In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually I caught up with them. 12) When I met you, the new language became the language of love. 13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry. The daughter became a mother of daughters. 14) Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it. Knots tying threads to everywhere. The past pushed away, the future left unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate present. 15) Years and years of this. 16) The children no longer children. An old man's pain, an old man's loneliness. 17) And then my father too disappeared. 18) I tried to go home again. I stood at the door to my childhood, but it was closed to the public. 19) One day, on a crowded elevator, everyone's face was younger than mine. 20) So far, so good. The brilliant days and nights are breathless in their hurry. We follow, you and I.
Travel Between The Pages 