The HomeStudio Etsy store has cute gifts for curious Valentines. 

Get lost in the book art of photographer Catherine MacBride 

This beautiful library by Li Xiaodong Atelier is nestled in the small village of Huairou in China. Its interior features plenty of cozy nooks and crannies to read in and great care was taken with the exterior to make sure that it would blend with its natural surroundings. I really want to hang out there even though I can’t read a word of Chinese. They’ve gotta have some picture books, don’t they?

The series Wonderland is photographer Kirsty Mitchell’s tribute to her bookworm mother.

Mitchell on her work:

My mother was an English teacher and spent over thirty years inspiring generations of children with her stories and plays. She was rarely seen without her head in a book, or writing in her own vast diaries, which she had kept since I was young. She was lost to a brain tumour that left her too ill to be brought home to England from the small French village where she and my father had retired. Instead of a funeral full of her ex pupils, we had to make do with a tiny family gathering which left me heart broken, and needing to do something that would never let her be forgotten.

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(h/t L’acte Gratuit)

Selected work from Structuralism by Casey Curran.

Curran on his work:

With any kinetic object, specific laws are needed to produce a functioning structure, and as with this rule there is a similar parallel to the structural relationship between text and visual art. Each must follow determined laws of interdependence. To produce a truth-seeming version of realty (cohesive mental structure) the mind produces symbols categorized as expansive narratives from shared experiences. Each narrative in its own right possesses a semiotic relationship to written and visual vocabulary, which should be thought of as nothing more then a group of signs inter-changeable with real life experiences. This interchange exists as a cohesive framework allowing one symbol to substitute another. In art and in literature ‘reality’ is composed of these coded semiotic relations. My work confronts these structural relationships and departs from the readily available patterns of literature, art, mechanics and mathematical notion. By fusing the signing systems of each of these ‘vocabularies’ a new vision of ‘reality’ is expressed. It is my hope that through participation and critical analysis each work creates a new symbol to a more expansive sphere of thought.

Some people have a dream home, I have a dream library. Any one of the incredible libraries in the Flavorwire gallery of 20 Beautiful Private Libraries would fulfill that dream.

Flavorwire has put together a terrific gallery of the 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World. Unfortunately, none of them are anywhere near me.

I love this Books font by Chan Hwee Chong

Flavorwire has put together a fantastic gallery of the world’s most beautiful university libraries.

This series of beautifully designed classic Penguin books has an interesting theme:

Only God can create humans, and only humans can create monsters. 

The titles include R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau. They were designed by Rachel Spoon.

Annie Leibovitz’s new book Pilgrimage is all about discovery. For her, it was about rediscovering her creativity and personal passion for photography after a tumultuous year that brought her to the brink of financial collapse. For those who join her on her journey, it’s about discovering new places and gleaning insights about figures from history through their personal spaces and objects. 

From The New York Times:

She took her camera to Virginia Woolf’s house, photographing the surface of her writing table, and into her garden, capturing the wide, roiling water of the River Ouse, in which Woolf drowned herself. She photographed Dr. Freud’s sumptuously carpeted patient’s couch in London, and Darwin’s odd specimen collection. Eleanor Roosevelt’s bedroom, with its simple white coverlets, in her cozy cottage, Val-Kill, stands in contrast to a silver serving dish, its rich patina rippling with light. Abraham Lincoln’s elegant top hat and the white kid gloves, stiff with age, he had in his pocket when he was shot, make a startling appearance. Ms. Leibovitz visited Louisa May Alcott’s house, and photographed the view from Emerson’s bedroom window. The photo Ms. Leibovitz took of Emily Dickinson’s only surviving dress hovers near the book’s opening pages like a beneficent spirit, a beautifully detailed, embroidered white ghost.

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There’s still time to see Mary Ellen Bartley’s solo show Books at the Cordon Potts Gallery in San Francisco. It runs until October 29.