On books and libraries

Another love letter to books and the reading of them. See also here and here. Above, church converted into bookstore, Maastrict, Netherlands, via BoingBoing. Below, NPR on Werner Herzog on books:

“Herzog… hands out a required-and-recommended reading list — a broad one, covering matter from the Roman poet Virgil to Ernest Hemingway to the Warren Report — about which he’s quite serious. “Because nobody reads — and I keep preaching, ‘Read, read, read, read,’ ” he tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “If you don’t read, you will never be a filmmaker. Those who watch television or are too much on the Internet, they lose the world. And those who read, they win it.” Via NPR. Below, photo of Herzog at Book Soup.

Philip Pullman on cuts to libraries and culture:

“I love the public library service for what it did for me as a child and as a student and as an adult. I love it because its presence in a town or a city reminds us that there are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about, things that have the power to baffle the greedy ghost of market fundamentalism, things that stand for civic decency and public respect for imagination and knowledge and the value of simple delight. Leave the libraries alone. You don’t understand their value.” Via FalseEconomy.org. Photo via Vanity Fair.

Above, by architect Gianni Botsford. Below, Trinity College Dublin and another library from Candida Hyffer’s Libraries.