A largish electronic calculator

My latest Astral Weeks is up at the L.A. Times, on Eoin Colfer's And Another Thing..., the next installment in the late Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. (Alas, I wish I liked it more.)

I love how the description of the Guide itself, 30 years on, sounds infinitely less fantastic:

"[Ford Prefect] had a device that looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million 'pages' could be summoned at a moment's notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON'T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters. . . . The reason why it was published in the form of a micron sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in."

This description, written back when a line about humans being "so amazingly primitive they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea" would feel au courant, now easily conjures a hand-held device, something like a Kindle crossed with a Blackberry.

Londoners! Invisible Library to disappear soon...

Some nice pics of people scribbling in the Invisible Library are up at Londonist. And here's what the site has to say:

Sometimes we hear of an idea that's so brilliantly simple, we wonder why nobody's tried it before. And so it is with the Invisible Library exhibition at Tenderpixel on Cecil Court. The illustration collective INK have chosen 40 books that don't exist in the real world - only within the pages of other, real-world books - and brought them to life by illustrating their covers.

But it doesn't stop there. These books are unwritten, apart from the opening or closing pages, and you're invited to go in and add to their stories. The exhibition's already been running for several weeks so if your creative juices aren't running, you can always read what others have done (we recommend taking a look at Oolon Colluphid's "Who is This God Person, Anyway?", part of which has been filled in by someone who's clearly never read any Douglas Adams). Other fake works come from Roberto Bolano, John Wyndham and Vladimir Nabokov.

Invisible Library runs until 11 July at Tendepixel, 10 Cecil Court WC2N. Gallery open Tuesday-Saturday 10.30am-7pm. For more information, visit Tenderpixel or INK Illustration's websites.