The smell of old books is…. science! Vanillin and toluol are the sweet and vanilla-like aromas that old books have.
🔗: https://bit.ly/4pVGRQA
It was just another sunny summer day in Haarlem, Netherlands, when an unusual request landed in Dutch antiquarian bookseller Pieter de Vries' inbox.
A woman named Natalia, identifying herself as being with a company called “2077AI,” was looking to source what she described as a “fairly large order” of books. Attached was a spreadsheet listing more than 3,000 ISBNs along with instructions to match titles, prepare quotes and estimate shipping costs directed to China.
De Vries barely looked at it, dismissing the message as spam or phishing without reading past the first few lines. It wasn't until weeks later, when a Dutch journalist investigating the procurement request contacted him, that he learned of the request's connection to artificial intelligence.
On this day, 7 August 1936, revolutionaries in Spain conducted a ceremonial "execution" of the huge Catholic Monument of the Sacred Heart near Madrid, in a location considered the exact centre of Spain.
The statue was shot by a firing squad of working-class people who had risen up against a right-wing and fascist military rebellion, and launched a social revolution.
The Catholic Church, which for many years had been a brutal and oppressive force in Spain, supported the fascists in their campaign of mass murder and terror against workers and peasants.
Catholic officials described the fascist rebellion as a “crusade”, and supported mass executions of tens of thousands of people. Catholic officials like Cardinal Isidre Gomà even supported Franco’s mass executions of anti-fascist Catholic priests, for example in the Basque country.
Learn more about the Spanish civil war and working-class anti-clericalism in our podcast episodes 39-40: https://workingclasshistory.com/2020/06/17/e39-the-spanish-civil-war-an-introduction/
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