We live in an age, we’re often told, when our ability to conjure up an image is limited only by our imagination. These days, this notion tends to refer to artificial intelligence-powered systems that generate visual material from text prompts, like DALL‑E and the many others that have proliferated in its wake. But however technologically impressive they are, they also reveal that our imagination has its limits, giving form only to what we can put into words. To be inspired properly again, we must explore farther afield, in the visual realms of other times and places, which we can easily do on a site like Public.work.
Jason Kottke describes Public.work as “an image search engine that boasts 100,000 ‘copyright-free’ images from institutions like the NYPL, the Met, etc. It’s fast with a relatively simple interface and uses AI to auto-categorize and suggest possibly related images (both visually and content-wise). And it’s fun to just visually click around on related images.”
These journeys can take you from vintage magazine covers to foreign children’s books, lifelike foreign landscapes to elaborate world maps, Japanese woodblock prints to roadside Americana — or such has been my experience, at any rate.
“On the downside,” Kottke adds, “their sourcing and attribution isn’t great — especially when compared to something like Flickr Commons.” According to librarian Jessamyn West, Public.work isn’t exactly a search engine, but an interface for a site called Cosmos, which describes itself as “a Pinterest alternative for creatives” meant to create “a more mindful internet.”
Getting the full story behind any particular images you find there will require you to put a bit of energy into research, or at least to locate the fruits of research done elsewhere on the internet. As for what you do with them, that will, of course, depend on your own creative instincts. Enter Public.work here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
If you haven’t heard of Hugo Gernsback, you’ve surely heard of the Hugo Award. Next to the Nebula, it’s the most prestigious of science fiction prizes, bringing together in its ranks of winners such venerable authors as Ursula K. Le Guin, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Neil Gaiman, Isaac Asimov, and just about every other sci-fi and fantasy luminary you could think of. It is indeed fitting that such an honor should be named for Gernsback, the Luxembourgian-American inventor who, in April of 1926, began publishing “the first and longest-running English-language magazine dedicated to what was then not quite yet called ‘science fiction,’” notes University of Virginia’s Andrew Ferguson at The Pulp Magazines Project. Amazing Stories provided an “exclusive outlet” for what Gernsback first called “scientifiction,” a genre he would “for better and for worse, define for the modern era.” You can read and download hundreds of Amazing Stories issues, from the first year of its publication to the last, at the Internet Archive.
Like the extensive list of Hugo Award winners, the back catalog of Amazing Stories encompasses a host of geniuses: Le Guin, Asimov, H.G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and many hundreds of lesser-known writers. But the magazine “was slow to develop,” writes Scott Van Wynsberghe. Its lurid covers lured some readers in, but its “first two years were dominated by preprinted material,” and Gernsback developed a reputation for financial dodginess and for not paying his writers well or at all.
By 1929, he sold the magazine and moved on to other ventures, none of them particularly successful. Amazing Stories soldiered on, under a series of editors and with widely varying readerships until it finally succumbed in 2005, after almost eighty years of publication. But that is no small feat in such an often unpopular field, with a publication, writes Ferguson, that was very often perceived as “garish and nonliterary.”
In hindsight, however, we can see Amazing Stories as a sci-fi time capsule and almost essential feature of the genre’s history, even if some of its content tended more toward the young adult adventure story than serious adult fiction. Its flashy covers set the bar for pulp magazines and comic books, especially in its run up to the fifties. After 1955, the year of the first Hugo Award, the magazine reached its peak under the editorship of Cele Goldsmith, who took over in 1959. Gone was much of the eyepopping B‑movie imagery of the earlier covers. Amazing Stories acquired a new level of relative polish and sophistication, and published many more “literary” writers, as in the 1959 issue above, which featured a “Book-Length Novel by Robert Bloch.”
This trend continued into the seventies, as you can see in the issue above, with a “complete short novel by Gordon Eklund” (and early fiction by George R.R. Martin). In 1982, Ferguson writes, Amazing Stories was sold “to Gary Gygax of D&D fame, and would never again regain the prominence it had before.” The magazine largely returned to its pulp roots, with covers that resembled those of supermarket paperbacks. Great writers continued to appear, however. And the magazine remained an important source for new science fiction—though much of it only in hindsight. As for Gernsback, his reputation waned considerably after his death in 1967.
“Within a decade,” writes Van Wynsberghe, “science fiction pundits were debating whether or not he had created a ‘ghetto’ for hack writers.” In 1986, novelist Brian Aldiss called Gernsback “one of the worst disasters ever to hit the science fiction field.” His 1911 novel, the ludicrously named Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 is considered “one of the worst science fiction novels in history,” writes Matthew Lasar. It may seem odd that the Oscar of the sci-fi world should be named for such a reviled figure. And yet, despite his pronounced lack of literary ability, Gernsback was a visionary. As a futurist, he made some startlingly accurate predictions, along with some not-so-accurate ones. As for his significant contribution to a new form of writing, writes Lasar, “It was in Amazing Stories that Gernsback first tried to nail down the science fiction idea.” As Ray Bradbury supposedly said, “Gernsback made us fall in love with the future.” Enter the Amazing Stories Internet Archive here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
The world has changed dramatically over the past 500 years, albeit not quite as dramatically as how we see the world. That’s just what’s on display at the David Rumsey Map Collection, whose more than 131,000 historical maps and related images are available to browse (or download) free online. Since we last featured it here on Open Culture, the collection has added at least 40,000 items to its digital holdings, making it an even more valuable resource for not just understanding how humanity has viewed the world throughout the ages, but how we’ve imagined it — and, for that matter, how we’ve imagined other worlds from Mars to Narnia to Krypton.
Among the site’s new features is a “search by text-on-maps” feature, which you can activate by clicking the “by Text on Maps” button next to the search window at the top of the page. This lets you compare and contrast the ways particular places have been labeled on the variety of maps in the collection: not just proper names like Cairo, Madrid, and Yosemite, but also more general terms like “gold mine,”“lighthouse” or “dragons.” Arguably, we look at maps more often here in the twenty-first century than we ever did before, though seldom if ever do we depart from whichever mapping app we happen to keep on our phones. It’s worth stepping back in cartographical time to remember that there were once as many ways of understanding the world as there were depictions of it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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 Facebook.
Depending on how you reckon it, the “American century” has already ended, is now drawing to its close, or has some life left in it yet. But whatever its boundaries, that ambiguous period has been culturally defined by one medium above all: film, or more broadly speaking, motion pictures. These very words might start a series of clips rolling in your mind, a highlight reel of industrial developments, political speeches, protest marches, sports victories, NASA missions, and foreign wars. But that represents just a tiny fraction of America on film, much more of which you can easily discover with a visit to the Prelinger Archives.
Rick Prelinger founded the Prelinger Archives in 1982 with the mission of preserving “ephemeral films.” According to the program of a 2002 series he introduced at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive a couple of decades later, these are “typically educational, industrial, or amateur films,” often made to serve a “pragmatic and narrow purpose. It is only by chance that many of them survive.”
These pieces of “throwaway media” — of which the Prelinger Archives now has some 30,000 — include newsreel-type documentaries, works of political propaganda, instructional productions for use in schools and workplaces, and a great many home movies that offer candid glimpses into everyday American lives.
If you really want to see the United States, as we’ve previously said here on Open Culture, you’ve got to drive across the country. What holds true in life also holds true in film, and the Prelinger Archives’ digitization and uploading have made it possible to experience the history of the great American road trip through the eyes — or the eight-millimeter cameras — of travelers who took it in the forties, fifties, and sixties, rolling through sites of interest from the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore to the Corn Palace. If a culture is preserved most clearly through its ephemera, then there’s a whole lot more America awaiting us in the Prelinger Archives.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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 Facebook.
Since the J. Paul Getty Museum launched its Open Content program back in 2013, we’ve been featuring their efforts to make their vast collection of cultural artifacts freely accessible online. They’ve released not just digitized works of art, but also a great many art history texts and art books in general. Just this week, they announced an expansion of access to their digital archive, in that they’ve made nearly 88,000 images free to download on their Open Content database under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). That means “you can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.”
The Getty suggests that you “add a print of your favorite Dutch still life to your gallery wall or create a shower curtain using the Irises by Van Gogh.” But if you search the open content in their archive yourself, you can surely get much more creative than that.
The portal’s interface lets you search by creation date (with a timeline graph stretching back to the year 6000 BC), medium (from agate and alabaster to woodcut and zinc), object type (including paintings, photographs, and sculptures, of course, but also akroteria, horse trappings, and tweezers), and culture. The selection reflects the wide mandate of the Getty’s collection, which encompasses as many of the civilizations of the world as it does the eras of human history.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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 Facebook.
Or rather, it can hardly be easier unless you start with the NYPL digital collections’ public domain picks, a section of the site that, as of this writing, organizes thousands and thousands of its holdings into thirteen browsable and intriguing categories.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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 Facebook.
Earlier this year, Oxford professor of English literature Marion Turner published The Wife of Bath: A Biography. Even if you don’t know anything about that book’s subject, you’ve almost certainly heard of her, and perhaps also of her traveling companions like the Knight, the Summoner, the Nun’s Priest, and the Canon’s Yeoman. These are just a few of the pilgrims whose storytelling contest structures Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century magnum opus The CanterburyTales, whose influence continues to reverberate through English literature, even all these centuries after the author’s death. In commemoration of the 623rd anniversary of that work, the British Library has opened a vast online Chaucer archive.
This archive comes as a culmination of what the Guardian’s Caroline Davies describes as “a two and a half year project to upload 25,000 images of the often elaborately illustrated medieval manuscripts.” Among these artifacts are “complete copies of Chaucer’s poems but also unique survivals, including fragmentary texts found in Middle English anthologies or inscribed in printed editions and incunabula (books printed before 1501).”
If you’re looking for The Canterbury Tales, you’ll find no fewer than 23 versions of it, the earliest of which “was written only a few years after Chaucer’s death in roughly 1400.” Also digitized are “rare copies of the 1476 and 1483 editions of the text made by William Caxton,” now considered “the first significant text to be printed in England.”
Four centuries later, designer-writer-social reformer William Morris collaborated with celebrated painter Edward Burne-Jones to create an edition W. B. Yeats once called “the most beautiful of all printed books”: the Kelmscott Chaucer, previously featured here on Open Culture, which you can also explore in the British Library’s new archive (as least as soon as its ongoing cyber attack-related issues are resolved). As its wider contents reveal, Chaucer was the author of not just The Canterbury Tales but also a variety of other poems, the classical-dream-vision story collection The Legend of Good Women, an instruction manual for an astrolabe, and translations of The Romance of the Rose and The Consolation of Philosophy. And his Trojan epic Troilus and Criseyde may sound familiar, thanks to the inspiration it gave, more than 200 years later, to a countryman by the name of William Shakespeare.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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 Facebook.
Today, if you want to get started in home brewing, shop for a synthesizer, find out what cybernetics is, order non-genetically-modified seeds, start your own mushroom farm, learn how to repair a Volkswagen, subscribe to libertarian publications, purchase the work of Marshall McLuhan, sign up for an outdoor excursion, read an essay on zen Buddhism, compare home-birth setups, gather homeschooling materials, build a geodesic dome, you go to one place first: the internet. Half a century ago, when the personal computer had only just come into existence, that wouldn’t have been an option. But provided you were sufficiently tapped into the counterculture, you could open up the nineteen-seventies equivalent of the internet: The Whole Earth Catalog.
Launched by Stewart Brand in 1968, the Whole Earth Catalog curated and presented the products and services of a wide variety of businesses all between the covers of one increasingly weighty printed volume offering what its slogan called “access to tools.”
While certain of its sections reflected the most literal meaning of the term “tools” — you could’ve kept a pretty robust farm going with all the implements on offer, and no doubt more than a few readers tried to do so — the larger enterprise seemed to run on the goal of expanding the definition of what a tool could be, as well as the range of possibilities it could open to its user. Even subscribers who never bought a product could receive an education from the catalog’s often eccentric but always informative descriptions of those products.
“Behind the information, the advice, the hints, and the facts, this book is about coming to see things as they are, through your own eyes, instead of the hired eyes of some expert or other. It’s about training yourself to trust yourself, and trusting yourself to train yourself, until you‘re able to claim your right as a human to be competent with your hands.” These words come from writer and documentarian Gurney Norman’s capsule review, in the spring 1970 Whole Earth Catalog, of Joan Ranson Shortney’s book, How to Live on Nothing (described therein as “our best-selling book”). But Norman could just as well have been describing the Whole Earth Catalog itself, which was all about the ability of individuals and small groups, equipped with not just technology new and old but also deep reserves of optimism and humor, to determine their own destiny.
“The Whole Earth Catalog offered a vision for a new social order,” writes the New Yorker’s Anna Wiener, “one that eschewed institutions in favor of individual empowerment, achieved through the acquisition of skills and tools. The latter category included agricultural equipment, weaving kits, mechanical devices, books like Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia, and digital technologies and related theoretical texts, such as Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics and the Hewlett-Packard 9100A, a programmable calculator.” Other sections might offer Gravity’s Rainbow; an Apple II home computer; something called “self-therapeutic rubber”; and even a hot tub. “Many a newcomer to California remembers forever the trauma of first being invited — at a perfectly ordinary party — to strip and enter a steaming tub full of strangers,” writes Brand in the Next Whole Earth Catalog of fall 1980, which may sound a bit late in the game for that sort of thing.
But then, the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalog, first animated by the free-enterprise-and-free-love nineteen-sixties and seventies, has long outlasted its original cultural moment — and indeed the catalog itself, which ceased publication in 1998. But now, thanks to Gray Area and the Internet Archive, you can read and download many issues of not just the Whole Earth Catalog but also its successor publications, from CoEvolution Quarterly to Whole Earth Magazine, in anew online collection spanning the years 1970 to 2002. To browse it is to enter a countercultural time machine, experiencing both the preposterousness and the prescience of the counterculture as if for the first time. But then, for the vast majority of its visitors here in the twenty-first century — who know that counterculture only indirectly, through its wide but diffuse influence on everything up to and including the internet — it will be the first time. Enter the collection here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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 Facebook.
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