Salvador Dalí & Walt Disney’s Short Animated Film, Destino, Set to the Music of Pink Floyd

in Animation, Film, Music | August 24th, 2018

In 1945, Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí began collaborating on an animated film. 58 years later, with Dalí long gone and Disney gone longer still, it came out. The delayed arrival of Destino had to do with money trouble at the Walt Disney Studios not long after the project began, and it seems that few laid eyes on its unfinished materials again until Disney’s nephew Roy E. Disney came across them in 1999. Completed, it premiered at the 2003 New York Film Festival and received an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short Film. Now, fifteen years later, we know for sure that Destino has found a place in the culture, because someone has mashed it up with Pink Floyd.

Unlike The Wizard of Oz, which has in Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon the best-known inadvertent soundtrack of all time, the seven-minute Destino can hardly accommodate an entire album. But it does match nicely with “Time,” Dark Side of the Moon’s fourth track, in length as well as in theme.

Though in many ways a more visual experience than a narrative one — if completed in the 1940s, it might have become part of a Fantasia-like “package film” — Destino does tell a story, showing a graceful woman who catches the eye of Chronos, the mythical personification of time itself. This allows the film to indulge in some clock imagery, which one might expect from Dalí, though it also includes clocks of the non-melting variety.

Only with “Time” as its soundtrack does Destino include the sound of clocks as well. All the ringing and bonging that opens the song came as a contribution from famed producer Alan Parsons, who worked on Dark Side of the Moon as an engineer. Before the album’s sessions, he’d happened to go out to an antique shop and record its clocks as a test of the then-novel Quadraphonic recording technique. The transition from Parsons’ clocks to Nick Mason’s drums fits uncannily well with the opening of Destino, as does much that follows. “Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time,” sings David Gilmour. “Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines.” Though Disney and Dalí came up with much more than half a page of scribbled lines, both of them probably assumed Destino had come to naught. Or might they have suspected that the project would find its way in time?

You can watch a documentary on the Disney-Dali collaboration here.

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Dark Side of the Rainbow: Pink Floyd Meets The Wizard of Oz in One of the Earliest Mash-Ups

The “Lost” Pink Floyd Soundtrack for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Only American Film, Zabriskie Point (1970)

Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” Provides a Soundtrack for the Final Scene of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Songs by David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads & More Re-Imagined as Pulp Fiction Book Covers

in Books, Creativity, Design, Music | August 24th, 2018

As David Bowie himself implied in a 1975 interview, “Young Americans” doesn’t have much of a narrative.

Rather, it’s a portrait of ambivalence, viewed at some remove.

The same cannot be said for Young Americans, the wholly imaginary midcentury pulp novel.

One look at the lurid cover, above, and one can guess the sort of steamy passages contained within. Bowie’s sweaty palmed classmates at Bromley Technical High School could probably have recited them from memory!

Ditto Alison. The tawdry paperback, not Elvis Costello’s evergreen 1977 ballad. There’s a reason its spine is falling apart, and it’s not because young lads like Elvis Costello are fearful their hearts might prove untrue. That skimpy pink bikini top and hip huggers get-up is appealing to an entirely different organ.

Here we must reiterate that these books do not exist and never did.

Though there’s a lot of fun to be had in pretending that they do.

Screenwriter Todd Alcott, the true author of these digital mashups, is keenly attuned to the overripe visual language of midcentury paperbacks.

He’s also got quite a knack for extracting lyrics from their original context and rendering them in the period font, magically retooling them as the sort of suggestive quotes that once beckoned from drugstore book racks.

Font has been important to him since the age of 13, when a school art project required him to combine text with an image:

I decided that I wanted the text to look like the text I’d seen in an ad for a John Lennon album, so I copied that font style. I didn’t know that the font style had a name, but I knew that my instincts for how to draw those letters didn’t match how the letters ended up looking. The font, as it turns out, was Franklin Gothic, and, as a 13-year-old, all I remember was that I would start to draw the “S” and then realize that my “S” didn’t look like Franklin Gothic’s “S,” and that the curvy letters, like “G” and “O,” didn’t look right when they sat on the lines I’d made for the other letters, because of course for a font, the curvy letters have to be a little bit bigger than the straight letters, or else they end up looking too small. I became fascinated with that kind of thing, how one font would give off one kind of feeling, and other one would give off a completely different feeling. And it turns out there’s a reason for all of that, that every font carries with it a specific cultural connotation whether the reader is aware of it or not. When I drive down the street in LA, I see billboards and I can’t just look at one and say “Okay, got it,” I get a whole other layer of meaning from them because their design and font choices tell me a whole history of the people who designed them.

While Alcott discovers many of his visuals online, he has a soft spot for the battered originals he finds in second hand shops. Their wear and tear confers the sort of verisimilitude he seeks. The rest is equal parts inspiration, Photoshop, and a growing understanding of a design form he once dismissed as the tawdry fruit of Low Culture:

I’d never understood pulp design until I started this project. As I started looking at it, I realized that the aesthetic of pulp is so deeply attached to its product that it’s impossible to separate the two. And that’s what great design is, a graphic representation of ideas. When I started examining the designs, to see why some work and some don’t, I was overwhelmed with the sheer amount of artistry involved in the covers. Pulp was a huge cultural force, there were dozens of magazines and publishers, cranking out stuff every month for decades, detective stories and police stories and noir stories and mysteries. It employed thousands of artists, writers and painters and illustrators. And the energy of the paintings is just off the charts. It had to be, because any given book cover had to compete with the ten thousand other covers that were on display. It had to grab the viewer fast, and make that person pick up the book instead of some other book. I love all kinds of midcentury stuff, but nothing grabs you the way a good pulp cover does.

Not all of his mash ups traffic in mid-century drugstore rack nymphomania.

New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” is the ideal recipient of the abstract approach so common to psychology and philosophy titles of the period.

Needless to say, Alcott’s covers are also a tribute to the musicians he lists as authors, particularly those dating to his New Wave era youth—Bowie, Costello, Joy Division, Talking Heads, King Crimson…

I know I could find more popular contemporary artists to make tributes for, but these are the artists I love, I connect to their work on a deep level, and I try to make things that they would see and think “Yeah, this guy gets me.”

My favorite thing is when people think the pieces are real. That’s the highest compliment I can receive. I’ve had band members contact me and say “Where did you find this?” or “I don’t even remember doing this album” or “Where did you find this?” That’s when I know I’ve successfully combined ideas.

Todd Alcott’s Mid-Century Mash Up Book Covers can be purchased as prints from his Etsy store.

All images published with the permission of Todd Alcott.

French Bookstore Blends Real People’s Faces with Book Cover Art

36 Abstract Covers of Vintage Psychology, Philosophy & Science Books Come to Life in a Mesmerizing Animation

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in NYC on Monday, September 24 for another monthly installment of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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V.S. Naipaul Writes an Enraged Letter to His Publisher After a Copy-Editor Revises His Book, A Turn in the South

in Literature, Writing | August 24th, 2018

Photo by Faizul Latif Chowdhury, via Wikimedia Commons

There are many ways for travel writers to get their subject badly wrong. Perhaps the worst is solely relying on uninformed observation rather than seeking the wisdom and experience of knowledgeable locals. To his credit, celebrated Nobel prize-winning novelist V.S. Naipaul—who passed away on August 11th at age 85—met, mingled, and spoke freely with individuals from every walk of life (including Eudora Welty) in the process of writing A Turn in the South, a travelogue of his sojourn through the much-mythologized and maligned Southern states of the U.S.

Naipaul’s voice alone might have overwhelmed the work with the extremely harsh, some have said bigoted, judgments he became known for in novels like A Bend in the River, Guerillas, and The Enigma of Arrival. Instead, he won praise from reviewers like Southern historian C. Vann Woodward, who wrote that Naipaul “brings new understanding of the subject to his reader.” Woodward also noted that Naipaul “confesses to ‘writing anxieties’ about undertaking this book on people unknown to him.”

Though he consulted and quoted local voices in his survey of the South, it is ultimately Naipaul’s voice that organizes the work, and his precise, erudite prose the reader hears. It was a voice he took great pride in, as he should. For his many faults, Naipaul was a masterful literary stylist. One wonders, then, why a copy editor at Knopf would feel it necessary to make extensive revisions to the manuscript of A Turn in the South before its publication.

Copy-editing is an essential function, writes Letters of Note, without which many books would go to print “peppered with redundant hyphens, needless repetition, misplaced semicolons,” etc. But it is also a task that should interfere as little as possible with the matters of diction, style, and syntax that characterize an authorial voice. Like a conscientious backpacker, a good copy editor should endeavor to leave almost no trace unless the text is full of serious problems.

Clearly, as Naipaul’s irritated letter below shows, something went wrong. Upon receiving the copy-edited text, he writes, he was obliged to restore the original from memory. Naipaul assures Knopf’s editor-in-chief Sonny Mehta that he understands the English language and its history very well, and knows that, unlike French, it has no “court rules,” and can be bent any number of ways without breaking. He implies it is the job of every “serious or dedicated” writer in English to use the language as they see fit, and the job of an editor to mostly get out of the way.

No doubt this relationship can prove complicated and frustrating for both parties. Still, though we only get Naipaul’s side of the story, it’s hard not to take it when he points out he had written 20 books by that time, all of them acclaimed for the quality of their writing. “My name goes on my book,” he declares. (So does the name “Knopf,” Mehta might have replied.) “I am responsible for the way the words are put together.” Read the letter in full below. And see Literary Hub for Naipaul’s Ten Rules of Writing if you’re interested in his prescriptions for clear English prose—advice he had earned license to take or leave in his own work.

10 May 1988

Dear Sonny,

The copy-edited text of A Turn in the South came yesterday; it is such an appalling piece of work that I feel I have to write about it. This kind of copy-editing gets in the way of creative reading. I spend so much time restoring the text I wrote (and as a result know rather well). I thought it might have been known in the office that after 34 years and 20 books I knew certain things about writing and didn’t want a copy-editor’s help with punctuation or the thing called repetition; and certainly didn’t want help with ways of getting round repetition. It is utterly absurd to have someone pointing out to me repetitions in the use of “and” or “like” or “that” or “she”. I didn’t want anyone undoing my semi-colons; with all their different ways of linking.

It happens that English — the history of the language — was my subject at Oxford. It happens that I know very well that these so-called “rules” have nothing to do with the language and are really rules about French usage. The glory of English is that it is without these court rules: it is a language made by the people who write it. My name goes on my book. I am responsible for the way the words are put together. It is one reason why I became a writer.

Every writer has his own voice. (Every serious or dedicated writer.) This is achieved by the way he punctuates; the rhythm of his phrases; the way the writing reflects the processes of the writer’s thought: all the nervousness, all the links, all the curious associations. An assiduous copy-editor can undo this very quickly, can make A write like B and Ms C.

And what a waste of spirit it is for the writer, who is in effect re-doing bits of his manuscript all the time instead of giving it a truly creative, revising read. Consider how it has made me sit down this morning, not to my work, but to write this enraged letter.

Yours

Vidia

via Letters of Note

Cormac McCarthy’s Three Punctuation Rules, and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

Oscar Wilde Offers Practical Advice on the Writing Life in a Newly-Discovered Letter from 1890

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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10 Great German Expressionist Films: From Nosferatu to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

in Film | August 23rd, 2018

In 1913, Germany, flush with a new nation’s patriotic zeal, looked like it might become the dominant nation of Europe and a real rival to that global superpower Great Britain. Then it hit the buzzsaw of World War I. After the German government collapsed in 1918 from the economic and emotional toll of a half-decade of senseless carnage, the Allies forced it to accept draconian terms for surrender. The entire German culture was sent reeling, searching for answers to what happened and why.

German Expressionism came about to articulate these lacerating questions roiling in the nation’s collective unconscious. The first such film was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), about a malevolent traveling magician who has his servant do his murderous bidding in the dark of the night. The storyline is all about the Freudian terror of hidden subconscious drives, but what really makes the movie memorable is its completely unhinged look. Marked by stylized acting, deep shadows painted onto the walls, and sets filled with twisted architectural impossibilities — there might not be a single right angle in the film – Caligari’s look perfectly meshes with the narrator’s demented state of mind.

Subsequent German Expressionist movies retreated from the extreme aesthetics of Caligari but were still filled with a mood of violence, frustration and unease. F. W. Murnau’s brilliantly depressing The Last Laugh (1924) is about a proud doorman at a high-end hotel who is unceremoniously stripped of his position and demoted to a lowly bathroom attendant. When he hands over his uniform, his posture collapses as if the jacket were his exoskeleton. You don’t need to be a semiologist to figure out that the doorman’s loss of status parallels Germany’s. Fritz Lang’s M (1931), a landmark of early sound film, is the first serial killer movie ever made. But what starts out as a police procedural turns into something even more unsettling when a gang of distinctly Nazi-like criminals decide to mete out some justice of their own.

German Expressionism ended in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. They weren’t interested in asking uncomfortable questions and viewed such dark tales of cinematic angst as unpatriotic. Instead, they preferred bright, cheerful tales of Aryan youths climbing mountains. By that time, the movement’s most talented directors — Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau — had fled to America. And it was in America where German Expressionism found its biggest impact. Its stark lighting, grotesque shadows and bleak worldview would go on on to profoundly influence film noir in the late 1940s after another horrific, disillusioning war. See our collection of Free Noir Films here.

You watch can 10 German Expressionist movies – including Caligari, Last Laugh and M — for free below.

Nosferatu — Free — German Expressionist horror film directed by F. W. Murnau. An unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. (1922)
The Student of Prague — Free — A classic of German expressionist film. German writer Hanns Heinz Ewers and Danish director Stellan Rye bring to life a 19th-century horror story. Some call it the first indie film. (1913)
Nerves — Free — Directed by Robert Reinert, Nerves tells of “the political disputes of an ultraconservative factory owner Herr Roloff and Teacher John, who feels a compulsive but secret love for Roloff’s sister, a left-wing radical.” (1919)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — Free — This silent film directed by Robert Wiene is considered one of the most influential German Expressionist films and perhaps one of the greatest horror movies of all time. (1920)
Metropolis — Free — Fritz Lang’s fable of good and evil fighting it out in a futuristic urban dystopia. An important classic. An alternate version can be found here. (1927)
The Golem: How He Came Into the World — Free — A follow-up to Paul Wegener’s earlier film, “The Golem,” about a monstrous creature brought to life by a learned rabbi to protect the Jews from persecution in medieval Prague. Based on the classic folk tale, and co-directed by Carl Boese. (1920)
The Golem: How He Came Into the World — Free — The same film as the one listed immediately above, but this one has a score created by Pixies frontman Black Francis. (2008)
The Last Laugh - Free — F.W. Murnau’s classic chamber drama about a hotel doorman who falls on hard times. A masterpiece of the silent era, the story is told almost entirely in pictures. (1924)
Faust — Free - German expressionist filmmaker F.W. Murnau directs a film version of Goethe’s classic tale. This was Murnau’s last German movie. (1926)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans — Free — Made by the German expressionist director F.W. Murnau. Voted in 2012, the 5th greatest film of all time. (1927)
M — Free — Classic film directed by Fritz Lang, with Peter Lorre. About the search for a child murderer in Berlin. (1931)

For more classic films, peruse our larger collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in December, 2014.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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Fritz Lang’s “Licentious, Profane, Obscure” Noir Film, Scarlet Street (1945)

Free: F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, the 1927 Masterpiece Voted the 5th Best Movie of All Time

Watch Nosferatu, the Seminal Vampire Film, Free Online (1922)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

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The Beach Party Film: A Short Appreciation of One of the Oddest Subgenres in Film History

in Film | August 23rd, 2018

Dallas, TX cinephile Andrew Saladino has a fabulous film critique channel called The Royal Ocean Film Society, which he’s been operating since 2016, following in the footsteps of Every Frame a Painting (RIP) and Press Play (RIP). In this recent essay, he turns his eye to the mostly forgotten and never particularly good “dead genre” known as the Beach Party film.

You’ve probably seen one, or at least a parody of one, somewhere along the way–formulaic and harmless surf’n’fun films sold to teens, set in a world with very few adults, and most probably starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello as the central will-they-or-won’t-they romantic couple. These weren’t troubled juvenile delinquents like ones played by Marlon Brando or James Dean–these were squeaky clean kids. These weren’t movies *about* teens like John Hughes films, he points out, but they were sold to teens.

The Beach Party genre drew from two early films–Gidget (1959) and Where the Boys Are (1960)–and dumbed them down into pure formula. And hell yes they were successful after the premiere of the first Frankie and Annette team-up, Beach Party (1963).

Saladino uses his essay to make a case for the films not as great cinema–his greatest compliment is “they’re not evil”–but as the beginning of modern marketing practices in Hollywood. And if you take a glance at the superhero and YA dystopian fantasy genres still filling up our multiplexes, these marketing ideas are still with us. Especially in how a good idea is copied over and over until audiences stop coming.

It was American International Pictures, home to filmmakers Roger Corman (now considered an indie film legend), James Nicholson, and Samuel Z. Arkoff, that started it all. Cheaply made, these films would start with a cool poster, raise funds based on the promise of the artwork, and only then would they write a script. (If you don’t think that happens anymore, check out Snakes on a Plane.)

Of interest to the casual viewer these days are the various cameos of older stars in some of these films as comic relief. Vincent Price stars in the original Beach Party. Buster Keaton, Don Rickles, and Paul Lynde appear in Beach Blanket Bingo (1965).

One can also watch these for the musical acts: surf guitarist Dick Dale appears in Beach Party:

And Stevie Wonder pops up in Muscle Beach Party:

The original AIP run of beach party films topped out at seven, but in total Saladino counts over 30 films from various indie companies that finally ran aground in 1967 with the execrable (and Mystery Science Theater 3000/em> favorite) Catalina Caper, which features an allegedly very coked out Little Richard. Then it was on to another fad–outlaw racing films apparently.

Andrew Saladino has many other essays worth checking out on his site, and he funds it all through a Patreon account, so do check him out.

via Messy Nessy

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Pablo Picasso’s Masterful Childhood Paintings: Precocious Works Painted Between the Ages of 8 and 15

in Art | August 23rd, 2018

It’s hard to imagine from this historical distance how upsetting Pablo Picasso’s 1907 modernist painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was to Parisian society at its debut. On its 100th anniversary, Guardian critic Jonathan Jones described it as “the rift, the break that divides past and future.” The painting caused an uproar, even among the artist’s peers. It was a moment of culture shock, notes PBS. Its five nude figures, broken into proto-cubist planes and angles with faces painted like African masks, met “with almost unanimous shock, distaste, and outrage.”

Henri Matisse, himself often credited with ushering in modernist painting with his flattened fields of color, “is angered by the work, which he considers a hoax, an attempt to paint the fourth dimension.” Much of the outrage was purported to come from middle-class moral qualms about the painting’s subject, “the sexual freedom depicted in a brothel.”

This is a little hard to believe. Nude women in brothels, “odalisques,” had long been a favorite subject of some of the most revered European painters. But where the women in these paintings always appear passive, if not submissive, Picasso’s nudes pose suggestively and meet the viewers gaze, actively unashamed.

What likely most disturbed those first viewers was the perceived violence done to tradition. While we cannot recover the tender sensibilities of early 20th-century Parisian critics, we can, I think, experience a similar kind of shock by looking at work Picasso had done ten years earlier, such as the 1896 First Communion, further up, and 1897 study Science and Charity at the top, conservative genre paintings in an academic style, beautifully rendered with exquisite skill by a then 15-year-old artist. See an earlier drawing, Study for a Torso, above, completed in 1892 when Picasso was only 11.

Given his incredible precocity, it may seem hardly any wonder that Picasso innovated scandalously new means of using line, color, and composition. He was a prodigious master of technique at an age when many artists are still years away from formal study. Where else could his restless talent go? He painted a favorite subject in 1900, in the loose, impressionist Bullfight, above, a return of sorts to his first oil painting, Picador, below, made when he was 8. Further down, see a drawing from the following year in his early development, “Bullfight and Pigeons.”

This piece, with its realistic-looking birds carefully drawn upside-down atop a loose sketch of a bullfight, appeared in a 2006 show at the Philips Collection in Washington, DC featuring childhood artworks from Picasso and Paul Klee. Contrary, perhaps, to our expectations, curator Jonathan Fineberg remarks of this drawing that “9‑year-old Picasso’s confident, playful scribble” gives us more indication of his talent than the finely-drawn birds.

“It’s not just that Picasso could render well, because you could teach anybody to do that,” Fineberg says. Maybe not anybody, but the point stands—technique can be taught, creative vision cannot. “It’s not about skill. It’s about unique qualities of seeing. That’s what makes Picasso a better artist than Andrew Wyeth. Art is about a novel way of looking at the world.” You may prefer Wyeth, or think the downward comparison unfair, but there’s no denying Picasso had a very “novel way of seeing,” from his earliest sketches to his most revolutionary modernist masterpieces. See several more highly accomplished early works from Picasso here.

The Gestapo Points to Guernica and Asks Picasso, “Did You Do This?;” Picasso Replies “No, You Did!”

How To Understand a Picasso Painting: A Video Primer

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The Assassin’s Cabinet: A Hollowed Out Book, Containing Secret Cabinets Full of Poison Plants, Made in 1682

in Books, History | August 23rd, 2018

Hasn’t every child dreamed of a having a hollowed-out book on their shelf, inside of which they can hide whatever forbidden objects of mischief they like without fear of discovery? The idea surely goes back many generations, and possibly even to the era when not many adults, let along children, owned any books at all. A decade ago, a hollowed-out book dated 1682 went up on the auction block at German house Hermann Historica, and these photos of its elaborate design have captivated the imaginations of even we 21st-century beholders. But what are all the spaces within meant to contain?

Herrman Historica’s listing describes the item as “a hollow book used as secret poison cabinet,” a conclusion presumably arrived at after examining its drawers’ “handwritten paper labels with the Latin names of different poisonous plants (among them castor-oil plant, thorn apple, deadly nightshade, valerian, etc.).” My Modern Met’s Jessica Stewart adds that “calling it an assassin’s cabinet may be a bit exaggerated,” noting that “many of these plants, while poisonous, were also part of herbal remedies —making it equally possible we are looking at an ornate medicine cabinet.”

Book Addiction breaks down the nature and uses of the plants meant to be stored in the drawers, including Hyoscyamus Niger, which in medieval times “was often used in combination with other plants to a make ‘magic brews’ with psychoactive properties”; Aconitum Napellus, which in ancient Roman times “was a such a common poison of choice among murders and assassins that its cultivation was prohibited”; and Cicuta Virosa, which some have speculated “was the hemlock used by the ancient Greek Republic as the state poison but as it is a native of northern Europe this may not be true,” but “is so toxic that a single bite into its root can be fatal” regardless.

Strong stuff, whether for killing or curing. The ambiguity between those two purposes has surely stoked our modern interest in this secretly repurposed book, as has its nature as what Herrman Historica calls an “elaborately worked Kunstkammer object” — a “cabinet of curiosities” of the kind that has long fascinated mankind — “with strong reference to the memento mori theme.” That reference comes chiefly in the form of not just the proud-looking skeleton on the inside cover, but the label on the bottle provided its own compartment in the book: “Statutum est hominibus semel mori,” or “It is a fact that man must die one day.” But did the owner of this book and the tools hidden within want to hasten that day, or delay it?

1,000-Year-Old Illustrated Guide to the Medicinal Use of Plants Now Digitized & Put Online

Wearable Books: In Medieval Times, They Took Old Manuscripts & Turned Them into Clothes

Old Books Bound in Human Skin Found in Harvard Libraries (and Elsewhere in Boston)

Discover the Jacobean Traveling Library: The 17th Century Precursor to the Kindle

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renaissance Invention Created to Make Books Portable & Help Scholars Study (1588)

Wonderfully Weird & Ingenious Medieval Books

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

The History of Cartography, “the Most Ambitious Overview of Map Making Ever Undertaken,” Is Free Online

in History, Maps | August 22nd, 2018

“Cartography was not born full-fledged as a science or even an art,” wrote map historian Lloyd Brown in 1949. “It evolved slowly and painfully from obscure origins.” Many ancient maps made no attempt to reproduce actual geography but served as abstract visual representations of political or theological concepts. Written geography has an ancient pedigree, usually traced back to the Greeks and Phoenicians and the Roman historian Strabo. But the making of visual approximations of the world seemed of little interest until later in world history. As “mediators between an inner mental world and an outer physical world”—in the words of historian J.B. Harley—the maps of the ancients tended to favor the former. This is, at least, a very general outline of the early history of maps.

Harley’s definition occurs in the first chapter of Volume One of The History of Cartography, a massive six-volume, multi-author work tracing map making from prehistoric times up to the twentieth century; “the most ambitious overview of map making ever undertaken,” Edward Rothstein writes at The New York Times.

The University of Chicago project, begun in the mid-80s, combines “essays based on original research by authoritative scholars with extensive illustrations of rare and unusual maps.” Unlike histories like Brown’s, however, this one aims to move beyond “a deeply entrenched Eurocentricity.” The project includes non-Western and pre-medieval maps, presenting itself as “the first serious global attempt” to describe the cartography of African, American, Arctic, Asian, Australian, and Pacific societies as well as European. In so doing, it illuminates many of those “obscure origins.”

You might expect such an ambitious offering to come with an equally ambitious pricetag, and you’d be right. But rather than pay over $200 dollars for each individual book in the series, you can read and download Volumes One through Three and Volume Six as free PDFs at the University of Chicago Press’s site. In these extraordinary scholarly works, you’ll find maps reproduced nowhere else—like the Star Fresco from Jordan just above—with deeply learned commentary explaining how they correspond to very different ways of seeing the world.

At the links below, see images of maps from all over the globe and throughout recorded human history, and begin to see the history of cartography in very different ways yourself.

Volume 1

Gallery of Color Illustrations

Volume 2: Part 1

Gallery of Color Illustrations (Plates 1–24)
Gallery of Color Illustrations (Plates 25–40)

Volume 2: Part 2

Gallery of Color Illustrations (Plates 1–16)
Gallery of Color Illustrations (Plates 17–40)

Volume 2: Part 3

Gallery of Color Illustrations (Plates 1–8)
Gallery of Color Illustrations (Plates 9 –24)

Volume 3: Part 1

Gallery of Color Illustrations (Plates 1–24)
Gallery of Color Illustrations (Plates 25–40)

Volume 3: Part 2

Gallery of Color Illustrations (Plates 41–56)
Gallery of Color Illustrations (Plates 57–80)

Download 67,000 Historic Maps (in High Resolution) from the Wonderful David Rumsey Map Collection

A Map Showing How the Ancient Romans Envisioned the World in 40 AD

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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