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.
Book Club is a new bookstore and wine bar in the infamous Alphabet City neighborhood of Lower Manhattan’s East Village. While I will grant that the East Village is not the bizzaro-crazy place of my feckless youth, its demise is exaggerated. The funky shops, bars, and hangouts of the gritty glory days are mostly gone, but cozy local bookstores like the Book Club take the sting out of the loss.
The bookshop stocks a general-interest inventory of some 3,000 titles, from children’s and YA to fiction, history and sci-fi and fantasy. There is also a locally focused section featuring books about New York and the East Village, as well as a variety of gifts and non-book items such as greeting cards, games and candles.
Like most denizens of the area, proprietors Erin Neary and Nat Esten are relative newcomers to the Village, but they are committed to making the Book Club a community hub at 197 East 3rd Street.
Winter Landscape with Skaters or Winterlandschap met Ijsvermaak is a c.1608 oil on oak painting by the Dutch artist Hendrick Avercamp in the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.The painting shows ice skaters of all sorts enjoying a day on a frozen river. People dressed up stand among villagers going about their daily chores. A dog chews on a dead carcass in the lower left corner. A boat sails away on a sled in the background as a group of fishermen make efforts to free a frozen sailboat in the foreground. A bird trap is seen to the left among other farm implements and the whole scene is overshadowed by a church to the left.
Winter Landscape with Skaters is considered one of Avercamp’s earliest works, and is painted in a style strongly reminiscent of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1565 painting Winter Landscape with Ice skaters and Bird trap. Some aspects of this picture are taken directly from Bruegel’s works, such as the “bird trap” which also appears in other works by Avercamp. He was influenced in his subject by the Little Ice Age, particularly the cold winter of 1607–08, and was the first of the Dutch painters to specialize in snow scenes.
French artist Francine Leclercq has given the 17th century work a 21st century update with gif animation.
Regular visitors to TBTP are likely aware of my slight obsession with coffee. When I travel, the first thing that I look for anywhere are good coffee spots. My preference is always in-house roasters, but I will settle for someplace with a connection with a specialty coffee roastery. In recent years, I’ve started roasting my own coffee with a small machine that will do batches of 250 grams at a time, but when I’m away from home I’m all about sourcing local coffee.
TBTP habitués may also be aware that one of the many places that I have lived over the decades is the state of Georgia. Although I didn’t live in Atlanta, I did spend lots of quality time there. So when I’m in the Peach State finding coffee destinations is a priority. The newest, and most interesting, coffeehouse in Atlanta is Refuge Coffee in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood near downtown.
The nonprofit specialty coffee company promotes the organization’s goal of providing a friendly, safe and agenda-free space where the refugee community can find jobs, training and opportunities, and where consumers find solid specialty coffees and light bites.
Opened on Monday, Feb. 3, the Refuge cafe fills a neighborhood coffee void left by the December closure of a Condesa Coffee. Coincidentally, one hundred years ago the old building housed one of the city’s best coffeehouse
The Refuge training program, which ideally runs for one full year, continues to be a full-time commitment for participants, who also earn a living wage during training. They have already employed refugees from 12 countries.
If you’re in Atlanta, be sure to check them out.
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