In 1965, a twelve-year-old in Southern California sat on his bed and stared at a cutaway drawing of the New York City subway until something shifted. Sixty years later, he built that drawing into an AI-powered personal library for a man who spent fifty years collecting books in boxes. This is the story of what books actually do — and why the problem with reading isn't that people don't want to, it's that finding the right one has too much friction.
IN THIS EPISODE
The $10 encyclopedia, the twenty-six volumes, and the page that changed everything
John Glanville's Beyond Ideas Infinite Bookshelf — fifty years of collecting, now a living library
How Compass AI turns a photograph of book spines into a complete reading journey
Why a visual thinker built an infographic into every book — and what that reveals about design philosophy
The data on books: 4 million titles published in 2025, 782 million print books sold in 2024 — the decline narrative is wrong
What John plans to bring to Lehigh University — and what you wish you'd had at nineteen
LINKS
Full essay → marksylvester.substack.com
EVERYWHERE Studio™ → everywherestudio.ai
Coastal Intelligence → coastalintelligence.ai
Mark Sylvester is a co-founder of Coastal Intelligence, an AI think tank and consultancy, based in Santa Barbara. EVERYWHERE Studio™ is his platform for thought leaders, because the ideas in your head belong everywhere.
