Biblio-Mat

The Biblio-Mat is a coin-operated vending machine that dispenses a random secondhand book, installed at The Monkey's Paw antiquarian bookstore in Toronto, Canada. The bookstore's owner, Stephen Fowler, conceived the idea of a machine that would sell books at random rather than by title, and the visual artist Craig Small designed and built the machine, which began operating in November 2012 inside a cabinet of salvaged machine parts, gears and a mechanical arm that delivers each book with a brass bell and a puff of steam. Each purchase costs a few dollars regardless of the book dispensed, and the Biblio-Mat has become a minor tourist attraction and a widely shared example of playful, artisanal engineering applied to the traditional book trade.