November 8, 2013 Look The Great Columbia Book Slide of 1934 By Sadie Stein In 1934, Columbia University moved its twenty-two miles of books to the newly built Butler Library. By means of a really long slide. Which actually looks less fun than it sounds, and was much too shallow for human use. (Which is probably good, considering this was on a college campus.) Not to be confused with the recreational-use book slide from the Panorama House: … or the bokstörten of the Stockholm Public Records Building:
October 31, 2013 Look Bride of Gertrudestein, and More Literary Halloween Ghouls By Timothy Leo Taranto Pause Play Play Prev | Next Tim Taranto hails from Upstate New York and attended Cornell. In addition to The Paris Review Daily, his work has appeared on the Rumpus and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Tim lives in Iowa City, where he is studying fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
October 29, 2013 Look Eyes Have It By Sadie Stein My high school had a volunteer program with a local children’s home, and periodically we would throw holiday parties and carnivals. For some reason I was usually working the craft table and we always had the kids make sock puppets. It wasn’t that anyone was under the illusion sock puppets were especially fun, and after the first few, the kids could hardly have wanted more, because it was always the same group of kids. But one of my schoolmate’s fathers had a line in sock manufacturing and donated them, and in the grand tradition of gift horses, we didn’t look these in their gaping, sock-puppet maws. We didn’t have very good glue; sometimes you could sort of get a clump of yarn “hair” to stick to the top of the sock, but more often than not the Elmer’s-stiffened skein would fall off immediately and somehow manage to adhere to the table or your fingers. Because the googly eyes were self-adhesive, they were the best accessory. So we would force them to take home dozens of glue-smeared socks festooned with the rolling eyes of maddened stallions, and that was the community service requirement, and I suppose college admissions people looked at that, and thought something, or would have were it not there. Here are classic books with googly eyes on them.
October 15, 2013 Look Author’s Best Friend: The Pets of Literary Greats By Timothy Leo Taranto Pause Play Play Prev | Next Tim Taranto hails from Upstate New York, and attended Cornell. In addition to The Paris Review Daily, his work has appeared on the Rumpus and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Tim lives in Iowa City, where he is studying fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
September 27, 2013 Look Eudora Welty, Photographer By Sadie Stein The Wiljax Gallery of Cleveland, Mississippi, is featuring a selection of Eudora Welty’s Depression-era photographic portraits, which the young writer developed and printed herself in her Jackson kitchen. It was the first time many of her subjects had been photographed; Welty reportedly tried to give copies to almost all of them. She would pursue photography through the 1950s; pictures she took were inspiration for several of her short stories.
September 26, 2013 Look Typewriter, Tip, Tip, Tip By Sadie Stein Paper Typerwriter, 2011, by Jennifer Collier. Vintage typewriter manual pages, gray board, and machine stitching. Via Art Made from Books: Altered Sculptured, Carved, Transformed.