Nestled in a café-bar-museum-event space in Fort Mason — San Francisco’s water-front, weathered military campus with sweeping views of the Golden Gate Bridge —is a floor to ceiling library housing the Long Now Foundation’s Manual for Civilisation. A crowd-curated collection of the 3,500 books “most essential to sustain or rebuild a civilisation,” the Manual for Civilisation began with one question: If you were stranded on an island (or small hostile planetoid), what books would you want to have ...