Yesterday, I visited Bhutan’s National Library. It’s a beautiful building and in addition to an eclectic collection of English books (mostly books about Buddhism and Himalayan spirituality), there was a very interesting collection of traditionally hand-written and bound Bhutanese and Tibetan texts, some on the pre-Buddhist Bon religion.
One of the highlights of the visit was seeing the largest published book in the world, called “Bhutan”. I could not look through the large copy on display as it was closed and the person in charge said it’s pages are turned once a month. I checked out the small version and looked at the many pictures in it.
from: (http://web.media.mit.edu/~mike/fp/bhutan/im-book/bb1.jpg)
This book is conceived by David Salesin, a computer science faculty (yeay!) at MIT who decided to donate proceedings from it’s sale to further education in Bhutan. A printed copy costs $15,000 and weighs 133 pounds! Check here for more info.
After visiting the museum, walking down the main streets of Thimphu, I saw a couple of fun uses of phrase that I will include here:
