On the weekend we stumbled across this neat bookstore in Toronto. It’s called the Monkey’s Paw and is listed as an “antiquarian shop specializing in uncommon books and paper artifacts from the age of print” (x). It definitely lived up to that description. We found books about satanism and witchcraft, cookbooks from the 40s, sex bibles and old penguin classics. It had that old book smell which made the experience even better.

What really drew us to this store though was the Biblio-Mat. What is the Biblio-Mat you ask? It’s a coin-operating vending machine that dispenses random, unusual books. A book-freakin-vending machine! For only a toonie!

This is the one I got:

There wasn’t a clear “synopsis” and there is nothing on the internet about it (though I didn’t look too hard) but it looks like a mans document of his travels prior to 1914 in places like: Spain, Athens, Jerusalem, Egypt, Pompeii, Paris etc.

Above is a video I found showing how the Biblio-Mat works created by Craig Small.

So that was a neat experience that I wanted to share here on my book blog! It deviates away from my normal type of posts but it was too cool not to share.