To Browse and to Borrow

photo by Caitlin Donohue for  SFBG.com

I LOVE this story! Just when everyone is predicting the death of the book, one brave soul opens a lending library. You know, for a small fee you get to borrow books. How positively 19th Century! The San Francisco Bay Guardian reports on the miraculous existence of Ourshelves, which was born from one woman's love for international literature.

Our heroine is a fan of hard-to-find European authors. She points me towards a slim volume by Hungarian author László Krasnahorkai entitled Animalinside and speaks reverently of Scottish poet W.S. Graham. “He’s not even in print here,” she tells me disbelievingly.

Tucked in the back of art and antiques shop Viracocha, Ourselves started as a personal quest and quickly became a beloved project, evidenced by donations from the SF Public Library and the famously reclusive writer Michael Chabon, who let founder Kristina Kearns pick what she wanted from his personal collection. Vivre le livre!

Building Devoted to Literature Wins top Architecture Prize

The Museum of Modern Literatue in southern Germany has won the prestigious Stirling Architecture Prize for outstanding achievement in design, reports Deutshe-Welle.

The site, completed in 2006, contains

"more than 1,300 objects, including letters, documents and personal items from famous 20th century authors, are on exhibit at the museum. Friedrich Nietzsche's death mask and original manuscripts by Franz Kafka and Alfred Doblin," reports, DW. The building won praise for its "simultaneously rich and restrained" design, achieved on a budget of 12 million Euros. ($17 million).

British Library to Digitize Unavailable Books
In an inevitable move, the venerable British Library announced that it will digitize 18th and 19th-century works that have been out of print and unavailable to the public for centuries, reports the BBC. When the scanning gets underway, up to 50,000 pages per day will be digitized, adding an untold amount of pages for scholars and fans to study and peruse.
The first 25 million pages are expected to take two years to complete, comments the BBC.
The books will be fully text-searchable.