To my mind, each of these describes the same world: de Chirico, Brancusi, Gaudi, the 1973 Czech film Fantastic Planet, Borges' “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Satie ’ s Trois Gymnopédies, Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Gulliver's Travels , Cirque du Soleil , Brian Quinette’s Invisible Library, both the Codex Seraphianus and the Voynich Manuscript, the library at Alexandria, the game of chess and the numbered (but not the titled) chapters of Calvino's If, on a Winter's Night, a Traveler . And Barcelona.
The redesign of the San Francisco Public Library in the 1990s drastically reduced shelf space. Administrators planned to cull thousands of books and send them to a landfill. Books were to be chosen based on how long they had gone without being checked out. To save as many books as possible, heroic librarians snuck into the stacks at night and stamped threatened books with false withdrawal dates!
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