The forest¶
The forest is a picture of a library. Every book in the corpus is one tree, and the shape of the tree is the shape of the book.
A tree is a book¶
- The trunk is the work. A longer book stands taller.
- The limbs are its sections: chapters, acts, or dated entries. A book with more chapters carries more limbs.
- The leaves are its passages, the chunks the corpus was indexed into. Hamlet has 420 leaves on 305 limbs.
Diaries grow as diaries: one limb per calendar year, spiraling up the trunk, with the entries hung along it by date.
The trees are grown, not drawn. Wood grows toward the passages it has to reach, and each limb's thickness follows the pipe model: a limb is as thick as all the wood it carries. Switch the season to winter to see the wood without the leaves.
A genre is a species¶
Each genre grows as a real tree species, with that tree's bark, leaf shape and habit: how tall it stands, how wide it spreads, whether it keeps a central leader or forks low.
| Species | Genres |
|---|---|
| English oak, Quercus robur | Philosophy |
| Horse chestnut, Aesculus hippocastanum | English literature, American literature, Biography |
| Silver fir, Abies alba | Science fiction, Natural history |
| London plane, Platanus × acerifolia | French literature, World literature, Spanish literature |
| Blackthorn, Prunus spinosa | Horror, German literature |
| Stone pine, Pinus pinea | Ancient and classical, Sacred texts |
| Silver birch, Betula pendula | Russian literature, Letters, Diaries |
| Weeping willow, Salix babylonica | Shakespeare, Drama |
| Lombardy poplar, Populus nigra 'Italica' | Travel, Technical reference |
The species is named on each grove's signpost and under each genre in the book list.
Groves, roads and the hub¶
The trees of a genre stand together in a grove. Trees in a grove are placed as close as their wood allows: crowns interleave, but no branch passes through another tree.
The groves stand on two circular brick ring roads, the smaller groves outside the inner ring and the larger ones outside the outer. Up to six straight spokes run from the hub out through both rings. Where a spoke meets a ring there is a small paved plaza.
Each grove has a stop on its ring, a paved disc with the grove's mark painted on it: a round seal in the grove's color with a glyph for the genre, a steamboat for American literature, an owl for philosophy, a skull for Shakespeare. A signpost beside the stop names the grove and its species. Tap the signpost to list the grove's books.
At the hub stands the corpus redwood: one tree for the whole library, 3.4 m taller for every doubling of the corpus, with one limb per book reaching toward that book's own tree. Its plaque lists every book. Home is on its plaza.
A compass rose is inlaid in the hub's plaza around the redwood: sixteen points radiating from the trunk, with north in red. Its north is the forest's north, the same north the sun, the stars and the sundial use.
Exhibits¶
Eight exhibits stand in roadside glades on short spurs off the rings. They are gold diamonds on the minimap and entries in the atlas.
| Exhibit | What it is |
|---|---|
| Mysterium Cosmographicum | Kepler's nested Platonic solids, his 1596 model of the solar system |
| The Flame of Knowledge | A sculpture by George B. Suchanek, 1964, scanned from his plaster model and cast here in silver |
| Helical Rotor, Darrieus Rotor, Savonius Tower | Three wind sculptures, each a real vertical-axis rotor design, turning in the wind |
| Double Helix | B-DNA, right-handed, on a spike |
| Weather Mast | An instrument mast that reads the forest's wind |
| Armillary Sundial | A brass ring dial built for 39° N. Its rod points at the celestial pole, and the rod's shadow on the hour ring tells local solar time |
Each exhibit has a plaque standing between the piece and the road. Tap the plaque to read it at reading size; it does not open on its own.
The corpus¶
The forest is a snapshot of the corpus at build time. It holds 253 books in 20 genres. Which books they are, and how they were ingested, is documented on the GutenbergKG site under Books in the corpus. The chunk counts on the cards come from that index; the forest does not re-read the books.