There is a category of invention that is hard to recognise as an invention because it seems like a description of how things obviously are.
Alphabetical order is the clearest…
Almost everything about how a book feels - whether it stays open, how it turns, how heavy it is for its size - was decided during manufacture rather than design.…
Source: Wikipedia
There is a grim regularity to the history of libraries. They accumulate for generations, they hold material that exists nowhere else, and then something happens to them — and…
Before printing, every copy of every text was made by hand and therefore differed from every other copy. Almost everything below follows from that changing. Here are sixteen.
1. Paper…
What these have in common is a building doing something it was not built for, and a business that decided the space was worth the inconvenience. Here are fifteen worth…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The burning of the Library of Alexandria is one of history's most powerful images: a single night of fire consuming the accumulated wisdom of the ancient world, irreplaceable…