by Ann Kjellberg, editor On April 24, 2019, at 9 AM, the owner of the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge powered up the above Rube Goldberg device, and kept it running all day and all night to deliver into readers’ waiting hands a single book: the final report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Said Harvard Book Store owner Linda Seamonson, holding a copy out for a reporter, “it’s still warm.” The report had been made available for free that morning on the Justice Department web site: you could read it easily on a laptop or, a bit more uncomfortably, a mobile device; you could print out all four hundred pages on eight-and-a-half-by-eleven; you could wait a few weeks for a commercially published copy of the public-domain text (from Melville House, Scribner, or Skyhorse). But in the interim Paige M. Gutenborg, the nom de guerre of Harvard Book Store’s Espresso Book Machine, had a moment in the sun serving eager people who like to read (underline, make notes in, carry around) a physical book with the latest news.
As always, something worth knowing...
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