A Book Store in Toronto has come up with a solution to a) get rid of old and unusual stock and b) attract book lovers to its quirky doors.
The Monkey’s Paw, self-named as “Toronto’s most idiosyncratic second-hand bookshop,” has had created and installed , a vending machine, called the Biblio-mat, that dispenses random books of its choice in exchange for the nominal sum of $2.00 each.
The machine is the brain child of Steven Fowler, although to be fair he was all for building a box and sticking a poor unsuspecting employee in it and handing out books in exchange for bucks. Thankfully, friend and preventer of staff abuse, Craig Small, co-founder of The Juggernaut, an animation studio in Toronto, made him see sense and built him this wonderful, satisfyingly clunky, machine.
The invitation on the machine is to ‘collect all 112 million titles’ … Brilliant! We can see it catching on, insert a couple of quid and anything that the shop owner wants to get rid of will be dispensed! Shall we call it the tombola-mat?
Oh and for Tom Waits fans, the sound track is rather cool…
