Calculated serendipity…
The folks at namelessletter have devised a way to spread around something at least as nice as joy– they’ve figured out how to inspire surprise and wonder. To quote from their manifesto:
Namelessletter is a collaborative art project where people from all horizons leave personalized bookmarks in books with the goal of seeing other readers discover them.
All kinds of bookmarks are accepted (creativity is the limit). They can be left in different places such as libraries, bookstores, etc.
Participants send copies of their creations to Nameless Letter, which posts them… By way of example, this one was left (carefully placed) in a copy of Lord of the Rings:
And this one, in Haircutting for Dummies:
See many more at namelessletter.
As we ruminate on radical juxtaposition, we might offer a birthday tip o’ the hat to poet, author, and critic Edgar Allan Poe, born on this date in 1809 in Boston. In the late 1830’s, after the first chapters of a short but extraordinarily eventful life, Poe (by this time married to his cousin and living in Philadelphia) began to publish the horror tales (“The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The tell-Tale Heart”) and the mysteries (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter”) that have earned him the title of “father” of both genres. Poe died in Baltimore (in what were surely karmically-appropriately mysterious circumstances) in 1849.
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”
