"If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender." — Vladimir Nabokov Can we use the book format to capture our thoughts? Vladimir Nabokov's memoirs and interviews and Marcel Proust's Cahiers versus The School of Life's pop self-help book "How to think More Effectively" which references both. What does it mean to "think effectively" and why do we view the world through rectangles? Show notes: The Libro Illegibile  (Unreadable Book) by Bruno Munari and those Ellezi Klipi staplers. The image for this episode is not the Starry Night Cracker, I mentioned, but a sketch I made of a black swallowtail. Also included: Marcel Proust, Kenya Hara, and Virginia Woolf.

Books about print culture and design are often unavailable as audio books, so I am reading excerpts from some of my favourite books and essays on this podcast without editorial notes for a series I'm calling 'Print Reading Club'. This podcast is not affiliated with the author or the publisher of this work. This is 'Amateurs Rush In' from Lisa Gitelman's book Paper Knowledge from 2014. What happened when children, artists, and other amateurs got access to D.I.Y. print and radio technology? This essay is about, among other things, novelty printing, 'zines, HP Lovecraft, and the dawn of the Couch Potato. Lisa Gitelman is a media historian whose research concerns American print culture, techniques of inscription, and the new media of yesterday and today.   This is read by Robin Mitchell Cranfield, a book designer, illustrator, and typography instructor. Image: Detail of a type specimen from 'A Descriptive and Illustrated Pamphlet of the Novelty Job Printing Presses' by Benjamin O. Woods and Company, 1875. Via archive.org. This image does not appear in the book.

How the book changed the way we live and relate to each other, inspired by Kenya Hara and his essay, "Books as Information Sculpture". Also: Alice and Wonderland, Michel de Montaigne, audiobooks, and Ray and Charles Eames' film, Powers of Ten. The text version is on my web site. A version of this essay appeared in Amphora Magazine. I don’t think it’s cool to spend the present anticipating the future. — Kenya Hara