“A man will turn over half a library to make one book.”*…
Continuing yesterday’s focus on books…
Marioka Shoten is a bookstore that sells only one book at a time (but sells multiple copies of it) for a week. The bookseller Yoshiyuki Morioka carefully selects a title from novels, manga, biographies and graphic novels for showcasing every week. With the extreme approach to curation, the bookstore is a blend of a shop, a gallery and a meeting place with an essence of minimalism…
From Rishikesh Sreehari (@rishikeshshari), “Single Room with a Single Book,” in his fascinating newsletter 10 + 1 Things.
See also, “Japanese bookshop stocks only one book at a time,” in @guardian.
* Samuel Johnson
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As we contemplate curation, we might send rational birthday greetings to Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire; he was born on this date in 1694. The Father of the Age of Reason, he produced works in almost every literary form: plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works– more than 2,000 books and pamphlets (and more than 20,000 letters). He popularized Isaac Newton’s work in France by arranging a translation of Principia Mathematica to which he added his own commentary.
A social reformer, Voltaire used satire to criticize the intolerance, religious dogma, and oligopolistic privilege of his day, perhaps nowhere more sardonically than in Candide.
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