I love finding inspiration in all kinds of places, not just by reading (although I'm a total book/magazine-aholic as well). For example, a fear museum. I've not seen it myself (its in Lausanne, Switzerland), but found Ingmar Weber writing about it on his blog:
"[It] was an exhibition on fear in the Roman museum. 10 small rooms devoted to 10 different human fears, ranging from the fear of death to the fear of everything different (… this room appropriately partly draw its exhibits from posters of a Swiss nationalistic party). One particularly creative idea: In each room you had to find a numeric code to open the door to the next exhibition room. Pretty cool idea, but the task was generally rather trivial to achieve. Still, lots of “cool” ideas, including an upright coffin with a mirror on its bottom and some flowers of condolence devoted … to you. There was also a room on the fear of loneliness, which would have been impossible to exit if you were alone (as you had to press a button on one end to see the code displayed in vitrine about 2 meters away, impossible to see while you were pressing the button). The last room was about the fear of the illogical. It literally didn’t make a lot of sense. Eventually you had to exit through a door with something like a “authorized personal only” sign. There was also a door with a code, but it didn’t lead anywhere. Bizarre. Creative."
