Julia Powles writes:
At the heart of Cambridge University, there’s a library tower filled with 200,000 forgotten books. Rumoured by generations of students to hold the campus collection of porn, Sir Gilbert Scott’s tower is, in fact, filled with pocket books. Guides, manuals, tales and pamphlets for everyday life, deemed insufficiently scholarly for the ordinary collection, they stand preserved as an extraordinary relic of past preoccupations.
One new guide in the handbook tradition – and one that is decidedly on point for 2015 – is the slim, black, cloth-bound volume, Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest, published by MIT Press. A collaboration between technologist Finn Brunton and philosopher Helen Nissenbaum, both of New York University, Obfuscation packs utility, charm and conviction into its tightly-composed 100-page core. This is a thin book, but its ambition is vast.
Read more on The Guardian.