Try ordering a copy of Earth Platinum from your local bookshop and they’ll get quite the surprise. There were only 31 printed and the price tag is $100,000 USD. It would also take quite the delivery truck at 1.8 metres tall and weighing 150 kilograms. I viewed this copy ten years ago …
With its dinghies, dilutants, solutions and snowfall, is this a poem? Or is it a painting? Given how much I enjoy looking at it, I don't really mind if it’s neither or both. The intertwined words and phrases …
2,000 pieces of white porcelain formed into letters of the English alphabet, and components of Chinese characters, are suspended from the ceiling of the museum. Liu, one of China's best-known contemporary ceramic …
Current reading of this book from 1873 provides us with a reminder to keep on seeing things afresh, to keep on learning and to keep on reinterpreting. Abbi Parcell, a PhD candidate, has been reading this book …
Step into the world of Igor Gazdík (1943–2006) – art historian, librarian and bibliophile – in this innovative display of books. Once housed in a block of flats, today in the gallery space, the collection offers visitors …
Something magical happens when letters and the book become the raw material of art, so says the curator of temporary exhibition Alphabets Alive! Next to the carefully crafted lettersets and exacting alphabet books, I found the irregularity of print rather charming …
While the building is being renovated, the hands of the town hall clock have been brought down to our level and are now on display in the Central Library. Viewing them up close, is a completely different prospect …
This is the collected volume of Shakespeare’s plays, bought for Birmingham’s public collection in 1881, is the only copy of this historic book purchased as part of a programme of education and inclusion …
In 1852, marine biologist and naturalist Philip Henry Gosse made his first serious attempt to create a marine aquarium. It was instantly popular, both as a scientific means of looking at the sea, but also as an incongruous and fashionable …
The only dog ever enlisted in the Royal Navy was Just Nuisance, a Great Dane that served in HMS Afrikander, a shore establishment in Simon’s Town (South Africa) between 1939 and 1944. His escapades and heroics …
This is a map of movement –a cartographic history of the migration of the Aztec from Aztlán to Tenochtitlan. It’s the only map of its kind thought to exist. The footprints on the map tell …
This is Mount Fuji, but not as you might know it, seen here from above. It was printed as a keepsafe for pilgrims to the Sengen Shrine on Japan’s highest mountain …
Convicts, lunatics and drunkards - step forward to register your vote. Female mayors, doctors and teachers - stay away …
I was rather taken with this chair – a super way to present sound to visitors, intimately whispering in their ears, rather than blasting out all over the place …
There’s sometimes an expectation that everything that appears in a book is ‘correct’. But mistakes get into printed books all the time. Even in libraries. Spot the typo in the top-left corner of this catalogue of…
