![]() compendium of all other books, and some librarian must have examined that book this librarian is analogous to a god.” Somewhere in there, his narrator observes, “there must exist a book that is the. The idea is classic Borges, evoking a sense of the infinite despite the easily calculable (if still mind-numbingly large) number of books. These “fever dreams,” as employees called them, bring to mind Jorge Luis Borges’s sublime story “The Library of Babel,” in which the writer describes a “total” library - a huge stockpile of every possible arrangement of a 25-symbol alphabet in 410-page books with 40-line pages and 80-letter lines. It wasn’t, but it gives you a sense of the man’s penchant for grandiose ideas. “This is the most critical project in Amazon’s history,” Bezos is said to have declared. Project Fargo was even more ambitious: a proposal to fill a warehouse with one of every product ever manufactured. And Lexington had no idea about its near miss with biblical importance. ![]() Called the Alexandria Project, a k a Noah’s Ark, the initiative never got out of dry dock. ![]() About a quarter of the way into “The Everything Store,” Brad Stone’s engrossing chronicle of the rise of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, he reveals that in the late 1990s, Bezos seriously contemplated trying to collect two copies of every book ever printed and store them in a warehouse in Lexington, Ky. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |