Very cool article via BoingBoing on a gentleman who built a beautiful, fully functioning, printing press for the San Francisco International Airport using steel, bamboo, oak, cork, and rope.  Check out the full details with plenty of pictures on the artist’s site here.

Another great site that I recently just discovered is You Are Not So Smart.  The site very succinctly dispels many of the misconceptions that we have of ourselves and those around us by examining the psychological underpinnings of common individual and societal beliefs and actions (sort of the psychological version of Myth Busters).  Have been reading a number of the older posts and found the one on Deindividuation very interesting.

As a huge fan of William Gibson’s work, I have managed to acquire just about every edition published of his work (most signed) and a wonderful assortment of other oddball magazines, ephemera and foreign editions.  However, in the good dozen years or so I’ve been collecting Gibson, I’ve never even seen turn up for sale the book every serious Gibson collector covets, Agrippa (a book of the dead).  A little history and details from Wikipedia to illustrate just how rare and cool this book truly is (I highly recommend reading the whole wikipage on it):

Agrippa (a book of the dead) is a work of art created by speculative fiction novelist William Gibson, artist Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos Jr. in 1992. The work consists of a 300-line semi-autobiographical electronic poem by Gibson, embedded in an artist’s book by Ashbaugh. Gibson’s text focused on the ethereal nature of memories (the title is taken from a photo album). Its principal notoriety arose from the fact that the poem, stored on a 3.5″ floppy disk, was programmed to erase itself after a single use; similarly, the pages of the artist’s book were treated with photosensitive chemicals, effecting the gradual fading of the words and images from the book’s first exposure to light. 

The deluxe edition came in a 16 by 21½-inch (41 cm × 55 cm) metal mesh case sheathed in Kevlar and designed to look like a buried relic. Inside is a book of 93 ragged and charred pages sewn by hand and bound in stained and singed linen by Karl Foulkes; the book gives the impression of having survived a fire; it was described by Peter Schwenger as “a black box recovered from some unspecified disaster.”  The edition includes pages of DNA sequences set in double columns of 42 lines each like the Gutenberg Bible, and copperplate aquatint etchings by Ashbaugh editioned by Peter Pettingill on Fabriano Tiepolo paper.  Fewer than 95 deluxe editions of Agrippa are extant, although the exact number is unknown and is the source of considerable mystery.

All that said, one seems to have finally popped up on the market!   Barnaby Rudge Booksellers out of California have acquired a copy and are offering it up on ABE (update: only 2 days after the orginal post, the book has sold) for the fine sum of $5,500.00.   Having rarely appeared in the past decade, this copy is definitely destined to be the cornerstone treasure of a great William Gibson collection (unfortunately just not mine).  Although out of my price range at the moment, it’s always comforting to know that copies are out there, even if they only appear few and far between.