Discover the Oldest Book of the Americas: A Close Look at the Astronomical Maya Codex of Mexico

in Astronomy, Books, History | November 5th, 2025

From the mighty Maya civ­i­liza­tion, which dom­i­nat­ed Mesoamer­i­ca for more than three and a half mil­len­nia, we have exact­ly four books. Only one of them pre­dates the arrival of Span­ish con­quis­ta­dors in the six­teenth cen­tu­ry: the Códice Maya de Méx­i­co, or Maya Codex of Mex­i­co, which was cre­at­ed between 1021 and 1152. Though incom­plete, and hard­ly in good shape oth­er­wise, its art­work — col­ored in places with pre­cious mate­ri­als — vivid­ly evokes an ancient world­view now all but lost. In the video above from the Get­ty Muse­um and Smarthis­to­ry, art his­to­ri­ans Andrew Turn­er and Lau­ren Kil­roy-Ewbank tell us what we’re look­ing at when we behold the remains of this sacred Mayan book, the old­est ever found in the Amer­i­c­as.

“This book has a con­tro­ver­sial his­to­ry,” says Turn­er. “It was long con­sid­ered to be a fake due to the strange cir­cum­stances in which it sur­faced.” After its dis­cov­ery in a pri­vate col­lec­tion in Mex­i­co City in the nine­teen-six­ties, it was rumored to have been loot­ed from a cave in Chi­a­pas.

At first pro­nounced a fake by experts, due to its lack of resem­blance to the oth­er extant Mayan texts, it was only ver­i­fied as the gen­uine arti­cle in 2018. For a non-spe­cial­ist, the ques­tion remains: what is the Códice about? Its pur­pose, as Kil­roy-Ewbank puts it, is astro­nom­i­cal, relay­ing as it does “infor­ma­tion about the cycle of the plan­et Venus” — which, as Turn­er adds, “was con­sid­ered a dan­ger­ous plan­et” by the Mayans.


The Códice con­tains records of Venus’ 584-day cycle over the course of 140 years, tes­ti­fy­ing to the scruti­ny Mayan astronomers gave to its com­pli­cat­ed pat­tern of ris­ing and falling. They thus man­aged to deter­mine — as many ancient civ­i­liza­tions did not — that it was both the Morn­ing Star and the Evening Star, although they seem to have been more inter­est­ed in what its move­ments revealed about the inten­tions of the deities they saw as con­trol­ling it, and thus the like­li­hood of events like war or famine. Those gods weren’t benev­o­lent: one page shows “a fright­ful skele­tal deity that has a blunt knife stick­ing out of his nasal cav­i­ty,” hold­ing “a giant jagged blade up” with one hand and “the hair of a cap­tive whose head he’s fresh­ly sev­ered” with the oth­er. That’s hard­ly the sort of image that comes to our mod­ern minds when we gaze up at the night sky, but then, we don’t see things like the Mayans did.

via Aeon

Relat­ed con­tent:

A 16th-Cen­tu­ry Astron­o­my Book Fea­tured “Ana­log Com­put­ers” to Cal­cu­late the Shape of the Moon, the Posi­tion of the Sun, and More

A 400-Year-Old Ring that Unfolds to Track the Move­ments of the Heav­ens

Behold the Astro­nom­icum Cae­sareum, “Per­haps the Most Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Book Ever Print­ed” (1540)

The Ancient Astron­o­my of Stone­henge Decod­ed

Explore the Flo­ren­tine Codex: A Bril­liant 16th Cen­tu­ry Man­u­script Doc­u­ment­ing Aztec Cul­ture Is Now Dig­i­tized & Avail­able Online

How the Ancient Mayans Used Choco­late as Mon­ey

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Aldous Huxley to George Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949)

in Books, Literature, Sci Fi | October 27th, 2025

In 1949, George Orwell received a curi­ous let­ter from his for­mer high school French teacher.

Orwell had just pub­lished his ground­break­ing book Nine­teen Eighty-Four, which received glow­ing reviews from just about every cor­ner of the Eng­lish-speak­ing world. His French teacher, as it hap­pens, was none oth­er than Aldous Hux­ley, who taught at Eton for a spell before writ­ing Brave New World (1931), the oth­er great 20th-cen­tu­ry dystopi­an nov­el.

Hux­ley starts off the let­ter prais­ing the book, describ­ing it as “pro­found­ly impor­tant.” He con­tin­ues, “The phi­los­o­phy of the rul­ing minor­i­ty in Nine­teen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been car­ried to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion by going beyond sex and deny­ing it.”

Then Hux­ley switch­es gears and crit­i­cizes the book, writ­ing, “Whether in actu­al fact the pol­i­cy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indef­i­nite­ly seems doubt­ful. My own belief is that the rul­ing oli­garchy will find less ardu­ous and waste­ful ways of gov­ern­ing and of sat­is­fy­ing its lust for pow­er, and these ways will resem­ble those which I described in Brave New World.” (Lis­ten to him read a dra­ma­tized ver­sion of the book here.)

Basi­cal­ly, while prais­ing Nine­teen Eighty-Four, Hux­ley argues that his ver­sion of the future was more like­ly to come to pass.

In Hux­ley’s seem­ing­ly dystopi­an World State, the elite amuse the mass­es into sub­mis­sion with a mind-numb­ing drug called Soma and an end­less buf­fet of casu­al sex. Orwell’s Ocea­nia, on the oth­er hand, keeps the mass­es in check with fear thanks to an end­less war and a hyper-com­pe­tent sur­veil­lance state. At first blush, they might seem like they are dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed but, in fact, an Orwellian world and a Hux­leyan one are sim­ply two dif­fer­ent modes of oppres­sion.

While we haven’t quite arrived at either dystopi­an vision, the pow­er of both books is that they tap into our fears of the state. While Hux­ley might make you look askance at The Bach­e­lor or Face­book, Orwell makes you recoil in hor­ror at the gov­ern­ment throw­ing around phras­es like “enhanced inter­ro­ga­tion” and “sur­gi­cal drone strikes.”

You can read Huxley’s full let­ter below.

Wright­wood. Cal.

21 Octo­ber, 1949

Dear Mr. Orwell,

It was very kind of you to tell your pub­lish­ers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much read­ing and con­sult­ing of ref­er­ences; and since poor sight makes it nec­es­sary for me to ration my read­ing, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nine­teen Eighty-Four.

Agree­ing with all that the crit­ics have writ­ten of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how pro­found­ly impor­tant the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ulti­mate rev­o­lu­tion? The first hints of a phi­los­o­phy of the ulti­mate rev­o­lu­tion — the rev­o­lu­tion which lies beyond pol­i­tics and eco­nom­ics, and which aims at total sub­ver­sion of the indi­vid­u­al’s psy­chol­o­gy and phys­i­ol­o­gy — are to be found in the Mar­quis de Sade, who regard­ed him­self as the con­tin­u­a­tor, the con­sum­ma­tor, of Robe­spierre and Babeuf. The phi­los­o­phy of the rul­ing minor­i­ty in Nine­teen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been car­ried to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion by going beyond sex and deny­ing it. Whether in actu­al fact the pol­i­cy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indef­i­nite­ly seems doubt­ful. My own belief is that the rul­ing oli­garchy will find less ardu­ous and waste­ful ways of gov­ern­ing and of sat­is­fy­ing its lust for pow­er, and these ways will resem­ble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occa­sion recent­ly to look into the his­to­ry of ani­mal mag­net­ism and hyp­no­tism, and have been great­ly struck by the way in which, for a hun­dred and fifty years, the world has refused to take seri­ous cog­nizance of the dis­cov­er­ies of Mes­mer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.

Part­ly because of the pre­vail­ing mate­ri­al­ism and part­ly because of pre­vail­ing respectabil­i­ty, nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry philoso­phers and men of sci­ence were not will­ing to inves­ti­gate the odd­er facts of psy­chol­o­gy for prac­ti­cal men, such as politi­cians, sol­diers and police­men, to apply in the field of gov­ern­ment. Thanks to the vol­un­tary igno­rance of our fathers, the advent of the ulti­mate rev­o­lu­tion was delayed for five or six gen­er­a­tions. Anoth­er lucky acci­dent was Freud’s inabil­i­ty to hyp­no­tize suc­cess­ful­ly and his con­se­quent dis­par­age­ment of hyp­no­tism. This delayed the gen­er­al appli­ca­tion of hyp­no­tism to psy­chi­a­try for at least forty years. But now psy­cho-analy­sis is being com­bined with hyp­no­sis; and hyp­no­sis has been made easy and indef­i­nite­ly exten­si­ble through the use of bar­bi­tu­rates, which induce a hyp­noid and sug­gestible state in even the most recal­ci­trant sub­jects.

With­in the next gen­er­a­tion I believe that the world’s rulers will dis­cov­er that infant con­di­tion­ing and nar­co-hyp­no­sis are more effi­cient, as instru­ments of gov­ern­ment, than clubs and pris­ons, and that the lust for pow­er can be just as com­plete­ly sat­is­fied by sug­gest­ing peo­ple into lov­ing their servi­tude as by flog­ging and kick­ing them into obe­di­ence. In oth­er words, I feel that the night­mare of Nine­teen Eighty-Four is des­tined to mod­u­late into the night­mare of a world hav­ing more resem­blance to that which I imag­ined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased effi­cien­cy. Mean­while, of course, there may be a large scale bio­log­i­cal and atom­ic war — in which case we shall have night­mares of oth­er and scarce­ly imag­in­able kinds.

Thank you once again for the book.

Yours sin­cere­ly,

Aldous Hux­ley

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Aldous Hux­ley Nar­rate His Dystopi­an Mas­ter­piece, Brave New World

Aldous Hux­ley Tells Mike Wal­lace What Will Destroy Democ­ra­cy: Over­pop­u­la­tion, Drugs & Insid­i­ous Tech­nol­o­gy (1958)

George Orwell Iden­ti­fies the Main Ene­my of the Free Press: It’s the “Intel­lec­tu­al Cow­ardice” of the Press Itself

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

Aldous Hux­ley to George Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

Aldous Huxley’s Most Beau­ti­ful, LSD-Assist­ed Death: A Let­ter from His Wid­ow

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions.

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The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time, According to 750,000 Readers in the UK (2003)

in Books, Literature | October 20th, 2025

In the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, the read­ers of Europe went mad for epis­to­lary nov­els. France had, to name the most sen­sa­tion­al exam­ples, Mon­tesquieu’s Let­tres per­sanes, Rousseau’s Julie, and Lac­los’ Les Liaisons dan­gereuses; Ger­many, Goethe’s Die Lei­den des jun­gen Werther and Hölder­lin’s Hype­r­i­on. The Eng­lish proved espe­cial­ly insa­tiable when it came to long-form sto­ries com­posed entire­ly out of let­ters: soon after its pub­li­ca­tion in 1740, Samuel Richard­son’s Pamela — by some reck­on­ings, the first real Eng­lish nov­el — grew into an all-encom­pass­ing cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non, which Richard­son him­self out­did eight years lat­er with Claris­sa. Alas, when the BBC sur­veyed the pub­lic two and three-quar­ter cen­turies lat­er to deter­mine the most beloved nov­el in the U.K., nei­ther of those books even made the top 100.

With the pos­si­ble excep­tions of Bram Stok­er’s Drac­u­la (#104) and Mary Shel­ley’s Franken­stein (#171) — two works of nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry hor­ror that make use of a vari­ety of tex­tu­al forms, let­ters includ­ed — the rank­ings pro­duced by “The Big Read” includ­ed prac­ti­cal­ly no epis­to­lary nov­els. (Nor did eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry works of any oth­er kind make the cut.) What hap­pened to the lit­er­ary genre that had once caused such a nation­al craze? For one thing, Jane Austen hap­pened: nov­els like Pride and Prej­u­dice, Emma, and Per­sua­sion revealed just how rich a sto­ry could become when its nar­ra­tion breaks away from the pen of any char­ac­ter in par­tic­u­lar, gain­ing the abil­i­ty to know more about them than they know about them­selves. Not for noth­ing did all three of those books per­form well on The Big Read the bet­ter part of 200 years after they came out; Pride and Prej­u­dice even came in at num­ber two.

The top spot was tak­en by J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy: an under­stand­able out­come, giv­en not just its ambi­tion but also its mas­sive and endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty and influ­ence. Still, one does won­der if Peter Jack­son’s block­buster film adap­ta­tions, released in the years lead­ing up to the poll, might have had some­thing to do with it. Sim­i­lar sus­pi­cions adhere to the likes of Cap­tain Corel­li’s Man­dolin (#19), Amer­i­can Psy­cho (#185), The Beach (#103), and Brid­get Jones’s Diary (#75), all of which pro­vid­ed the basis for major motion pic­tures around the turn of the mil­len­ni­um. Umber­to Eco’s The Name of the Rose, one of a scat­ter­ing of trans­lat­ed nov­els to make the list, also got the Hol­ly­wood treat­ment, but it’s worth remem­ber­ing that the book itself sold so well that its Eng­lish trans­la­tor could use his roy­al­ties to build an addi­tion to his Tus­can vil­la called the “Eco Cham­ber.”

Apart from Austen, the oth­er nov­el­ists with mul­ti­ple books on The Big Read­’s top 100 include Stephen King, who also has three; Thomas Hardy, with four; and Charles Dick­ens, with sev­en. Those are, in any case, some of the nov­el­ists for adults. The abid­ing British appre­ci­a­tion for chil­dren’s lit­er­a­ture shows in the high rank­ings of Roald Dahl, who secured a great many votes with even less­er works like The Twits and Dan­ny, the Cham­pi­on of the World; J. K. Rowl­ing, who would have ben­e­fit­ed from the height of Har­ry Pot­ter mania in any case; and the pro­lif­ic Dame Jacque­line Wil­son, whose four­teen nov­els on the list place her sec­ond only to Sir Ter­ry Pratch­et­t’s fif­teen. It could be that his com­ic-fan­ta­sy sen­si­bil­i­ty, sat­u­rat­ed with both the out­landish and the mun­dane, res­onat­ed unique­ly with the British psy­che. Or, as Pratch­ett him­self says in the BBC’s Big Read tele­vi­sion broad­cast, “it could just be that I’m quite pop­u­lar.”

In total, more than 750,000 read­ers par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Big Read poll. Find read­ers’ top 100 books below:

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prej­u­dice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Mate­ri­als, Philip Pull­man
4. The Hitch­hik­er’s Guide to the Galaxy, Dou­glas Adams
5. Har­ry Pot­ter and the Gob­let of Fire, JK Rowl­ing
6. To Kill a Mock­ing­bird, Harp­er Lee
7. Win­nie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nine­teen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Char­lotte Bron­të
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuther­ing Heights, Emi­ly Bron­të
13. Bird­song, Sebas­t­ian Faulks
14. Rebec­ca, Daphne du Mau­ri­er
15. The Catch­er in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Wil­lows, Ken­neth Gra­hame
17. Great Expec­ta­tions, Charles Dick­ens
18. Lit­tle Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Cap­tain Corel­li’s Man­dolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tol­stoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Mar­garet Mitchell
22. Har­ry Pot­ter And The Philoso­pher’s Stone, JK Rowl­ing
23. Har­ry Pot­ter And The Cham­ber Of Secrets, JK Rowl­ing
24. Har­ry Pot­ter And The Pris­on­er Of Azk­a­ban, JK Rowl­ing
25. The Hob­bit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Mid­dle­march, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irv­ing
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Stein­beck
30. Alice’s Adven­tures In Won­der­land, Lewis Car­roll
31. The Sto­ry Of Tra­cy Beaker, Jacque­line Wil­son
32. One Hun­dred Years Of Soli­tude, Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez
33. The Pil­lars Of The Earth, Ken Fol­lett
34. David Cop­per­field, Charles Dick­ens
35. Char­lie And The Choco­late Fac­to­ry, Roald Dahl
36. Trea­sure Island, Robert Louis Steven­son
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Per­sua­sion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Her­bert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Mont­gomery
42. Water­ship Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gats­by, F Scott Fitzger­ald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexan­dre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revis­it­ed, Eve­lyn Waugh
46. Ani­mal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christ­mas Car­ol, Charles Dick­ens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Good­night Mis­ter Tom, Michelle Mago­ri­an
50. The Shell Seek­ers, Rosamunde Pilch­er
51. The Secret Gar­den, Frances Hodg­son Bur­nett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Stein­beck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karen­i­na, Leo Tol­stoy
55. A Suit­able Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swal­lows And Ama­zons, Arthur Ran­some
58. Black Beau­ty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Pun­ish­ment, Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky
61. Noughts And Cross­es, Mal­o­rie Black­man
62. Mem­oirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Gold­en
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dick­ens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCol­lough
65. Mort, Ter­ry Pratch­ett
66. The Mag­ic Far­away Tree, Enid Bly­ton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Ter­ry Pratch­ett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Ter­ry Pratch­ett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Gold­ing
71. Per­fume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Phil­an­thropists, Robert Tres­sell
73. Night Watch, Ter­ry Pratch­ett
74. Matil­da, Roald Dahl
75. Brid­get Jones’s Diary, Helen Field­ing
76. The Secret His­to­ry, Don­na Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dick­ens
80. Dou­ble Act, Jacque­line Wil­son
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Cap­ture The Cas­tle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gor­meng­hast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arund­hati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacque­line Wil­son
87. Brave New World, Aldous Hux­ley
88. Cold Com­fort Farm, Stel­la Gib­bons
89. Magi­cian, Ray­mond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Ker­ouac
91. The God­fa­ther, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Mag­ic, Ter­ry Pratch­ett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coel­ho
95. Kather­ine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jef­frey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacque­line Wil­son
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Mid­night’s Chil­dren, Salman Rushdie

Relat­ed con­tent:

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

The 10 Great­est Books Ever, Accord­ing to 125 Top Authors (Down­load Them for Free)

The New York Times Presents the 100 Best Books of the 21st Cen­tu­ry, Select­ed by 503 Nov­el­ists, Poets & Crit­ics

29 Lists of Rec­om­mend­ed Books Cre­at­ed by Well-Known Authors, Artists & Thinkers: Jorge Luis Borges, Pat­ti Smith, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, David Bowie & More

The 100 Best Nov­els: A Lit­er­ary Crit­ic Cre­ates a List in 1898

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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The Aberdeen Bestiary, One of the Great Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts, Now Digitized in High Resolution & Made Available Online

in Books, History | October 9th, 2025

For thou­sands of years, ordi­nary peo­ple all over the world not only worked side-by-side with domes­tic ani­mals on a dai­ly basis, they also observed the wild fau­na around them to learn how to nav­i­gate and sur­vive nature. The close­ness pro­duced a keen appre­ci­a­tion for ani­mal behav­ior that informs the folk tales of every con­ti­nent and the pop­u­lar texts of every reli­gion. Our delight in ani­mal sto­ries sur­vives in children’s books, but in grown-up lan­guage, ani­mal com­par­isons tend to be nasty and dehu­man­iz­ing. The demean­ing adjec­tive “bes­tial” con­veys a typ­i­cal atti­tude not only toward peo­ple we don’t like, but toward the ani­mal world as well. Orwell’s Ani­mal Farm and Kafka’s Meta­mor­pho­sis have become the stan­dard ref­er­ences for mod­ern ani­mal alle­go­ry.

Ear­ly lit­er­a­ture shows us a range of dif­fer­ent atti­tudes, where ani­mals are treat­ed as equals, with char­ac­ter traits both good and bad, or as noble mes­sen­gers of a god or gods rather than live­stock, mov­ing scenery, or exploitable resources.

We might refer in an east­ern con­text to the Jata­ka Tales, fables of the Buddha’s many rebirths in the human and ani­mal worlds that pro­vide their read­ers with moral lessons. In the Chris­t­ian west, we have the medieval bestiary—compendiums of ani­mals, both real and mythological—that intro­duced read­ers to a moral typol­o­gy through “read­ing” what ear­ly Chris­tians thought of as the “book of nature.”

The most lav­ish of them all, the Aberdeen Bes­tiary, which dates from around 1200, was once owned by Hen­ry VIII. Now, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Aberdeen has dig­i­tized the text and made it freely avail­able to read­ers online. Begin­ning with the key cre­ation sto­ries from the book of Gen­e­sis, the book then dives into its descrip­tions of ani­mals, begin­ning with the lion, the pard (pan­ther), and the ele­phant.

You’ll notice that these are not ani­mals that your typ­i­cal medieval Euro­pean read­er would have encoun­tered. One impor­tant dif­fer­ence between the bes­tiary and the fable is that the for­mer draws many of its beasts from hearsay, con­jec­ture, or pure fic­tion. But the intent is part­ly the same. These “were teach­ing tools,” notes Claire Voon at Hyper­al­ler­gic, and the Aberdeen Bes­tiary con­tains illus­trat­ed “lengthy tales of moral behav­ior.”

Like the sto­ries of Aesop, the bes­tiary presents impor­tant lessons, mix­ing in the fab­u­lous with the nat­u­ral­ist. As Voon describes the Aberdeen Bes­tiary:

The illus­tra­tions are impres­sive­ly var­ied, depict­ing com­mon ani­mals from tiny ants to ele­phants, as well as fan­tas­tic beasts, from the leocro­ta to the phoenix. Even the moral qual­i­ties of the hum­ble sea urchin are hon­ored with para­graphs of dis­cus­sion. Beyond this array of crea­tures, the bes­tiary details the appear­ances and qual­i­ties of var­i­ous trees, gems, and humans. Some of these may seem com­i­cal to 21st-cen­tu­ry eyes: a swarm of bees, for instance, resem­bles an order­ly line of shut­tle­cocks stream­ing into their hives. Yet oth­er paint­ings are impres­sive for their near-accu­ra­cy, such as one image of a bat that shows how its mem­bra­nous wings con­nect its fin­gers, legs, and tail. All of these rich details would have helped read­ers bet­ter under­stand the nat­ur­al world as it was defined at the time of the book’s cre­ation. 

Incred­i­bly ornate and bear­ing the marks of dozens of scrib­al hands, the book, his­to­ri­ans believe, was orig­i­nal­ly pro­duced for a wide audi­ence, then tak­en by Henry’s librar­i­ans from a dis­solved monastery. Nev­er ful­ly com­plet­ed, it remained in the Roy­al Library for 100 years after Hen­ry. “I doubt if the Tudor mon­archs took it out for a reg­u­lar read,” says Aberdeen Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor Jane Ged­des. Now an open pub­lic doc­u­ment, it returns to its “orig­i­nal pur­pose of edu­ca­tion,” writes Voon, “although for us, of course, it illu­mi­nates more about the past than the present.” See the high res scans here.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Medieval Mas­ter­piece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­able Online

The Medieval Man­u­script That Fea­tures “Yoda”, Killer Snails, Sav­age Rab­bits & More: Dis­cov­er The Smith­field Dec­re­tals

How to Make a Medieval Man­u­script: An Intro­duc­tion in 7 Videos

When Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Recy­cled & Used to Make the First Print­ed Books

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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What’s the Most Banned Book of the 2024–25 School Year?: A Clockwork Orange

in Books | October 7th, 2025

If you hap­pen to be a high school stu­dent in Flori­da who’s eager to read A Clock­work Orange, that urge may turn out to be hard­er to sat­is­fy than you imag­ine. Antho­ny Burgess’ har­row­ing, lin­guis­ti­cal­ly inven­tive nov­el of a grim near future has come out on top in PEN Amer­i­ca’s lat­est rank­ing of banned books: that is, books removed or pre­vent­ed even from enter­ing pub­lic school libraries, most com­mon­ly in the state of Flori­da, with Texas and Ten­nessee as run­ners-up. Fur­ther down the list appears anoth­er wide­ly known dystopi­an saga, Mar­garet Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; Toni Mor­rison’s tale of Depres­sion-era race rela­tions The Bluest Eye; and even such long-pop­u­lar “young adult” stan­dards as Judy Blume’s For­ev­er… and Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wall­flower.

Since its pub­li­ca­tion in 1962, “A Clock­work Orange has faced mul­ti­ple book ban­ning attempts due to the sex­u­al vio­lence it depicts,” says Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty’s Banned Books Project. “In 1973, a book­seller in Orem, Utah, was arrest­ed for sell­ing the nov­el along with two oth­er ‘obscene’ books.”

Bans fol­lowed “in 1976 in Auro­ra, Col­orado, in 1977 in West­port, Con­necti­cut, and in 1982 in Annis­ton, Alaba­ma. As recent­ly as 2019, mem­bers of the Flori­da Cit­i­zens Alliance” — in yet anoth­er exam­ple of the sur­pris­ing ten­den­cy toward cul­tur­al author­i­tar­i­an­ism in the Sun­shine State — “have lob­bied to ban the book along with almost one hun­dred oth­er ‘porno­graph­ic’ nov­els.”

The noto­ri­ety of A Clock­work Orange in this regard prob­a­bly owes some­thing to the steely lurid­ness of Stan­ley Kubrick­’s film adap­ta­tion, which was banned in Eng­land by Kubrick him­self. It makes, in any case, for an iron­ic object of a book ban, giv­en its themes. Burgess was inspired to write this nov­el of juve­nile ultra-delin­quen­cy, as he explains in the inter­view clip above, by “talk in the nine­teen-six­ties of the pos­si­bil­i­ty of get­ting these young thugs and not putting them in jail, because jail is need­ed for pro­fes­sion­al crim­i­nals, but rather putting them through a course of con­di­tion­ing” to make them behave less like organ­isms than machines: the “clock­work oranges” of the title. The state, it seemed, “was all too ready to take over our brains and turn us into good lit­tle cit­i­zens with­out the pow­er of choice” — a process that plau­si­bly begins by restrict­ing the choice of read­ing mate­r­i­al.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Clock­work Orange Author Antho­ny Burgess Lists His Five Favorite Dystopi­an Nov­els: Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Island & More

Antho­ny Burgess Names the 99 Best Nov­els in Eng­lish Between 1939 & 1983: Orwell, Nabokov, Hux­ley & More

Why Maya Angelou’s Mem­oir I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings Became One of the Most Banned Books of All Time

The Brook­lyn Pub­lic Library Gives Every Teenag­er in the U.S. Free Access to Cen­sored Books

America’s First Banned Book: Dis­cov­er the 1637 Book That Mocked the Puri­tans

The New York Pub­lic Library Pro­vides Free Online Access to Banned Books: Catch­er in the Rye, Stamped & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically & Knowing Pseudoscience When You See It

in Books, Science | September 29th, 2025

Though he died too young, Carl Sagan left behind an impres­sive­ly large body of work, includ­ing more than 600 sci­en­tif­ic papers and more than 20 books. Of those books, none is more wide­ly known to the pub­lic — or, still, more wide­ly read by the pub­lic — than Cos­mos, accom­pa­nied as it was by Cos­mos: A Per­son­al Voy­age, a com­pan­ion tele­vi­sion series on PBS. Sagan’s oth­er pop­u­lar books, like Shad­ows of For­got­ten Ances­tors or Con­tact (the basis of the 1997 Hol­ly­wood movie) are also well worth read­ing, but we per­haps ignore at our great­est per­il The Demon-Haunt­ed World: Sci­ence as a Can­dle in the Dark. Pub­lished in 1995, the year before Sagan’s death, it stands as his tes­ta­ment to the impor­tance of crit­i­cal, sci­en­tif­ic think­ing for all of us.

The Demon-Haunt­ed World is the sub­ject of the Genet­i­cal­ly Mod­i­fied Skep­tic video above, whose host Drew McCoy describes it as his favorite book. He pays spe­cial atten­tion to its chap­ter in which Sagan lays out what he calls his “baloney detec­tion kit.” This assem­bled metaphor­i­cal box of tools for diag­nos­ing fraud­u­lent argu­ments and con­struct­ing rea­soned ones involves these nine prin­ci­ples:

  • Wher­ev­er pos­si­ble there must be inde­pen­dent con­fir­ma­tion of the “facts.”
  • Encour­age sub­stan­tive debate on the evi­dence by knowl­edge­able pro­po­nents of all points of view.
  • Argu­ments from author­i­ty car­ry lit­tle weight — “author­i­ties” have made mis­takes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Per­haps a bet­ter way to say it is that in sci­ence there are no author­i­ties; at most, there are experts.
  • Spin more than one hypoth­e­sis. If there’s some­thing to be explained, think of all the dif­fer­ent ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly dis­prove each of the alter­na­tives.
  • Try not to get over­ly attached to a hypoth­e­sis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way sta­tion in the pur­suit of knowl­edge. Ask your­self why you like the idea. Com­pare it fair­ly with the alter­na­tives.
  • See if you can find rea­sons for reject­ing it. If you don’t, oth­ers will.
  • If what­ev­er it is you’re explain­ing has some mea­sure, some numer­i­cal quan­ti­ty attached to it, you’ll be much bet­ter able to dis­crim­i­nate among com­pet­ing hypothe­ses. What is vague and qual­i­ta­tive is open to many expla­na­tions.
  • If there’s a chain of argu­ment, every link in the chain must work (includ­ing the premise) — not just most of them.
  • Occam’s Razor. This con­ve­nient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypothe­ses that explain the data equal­ly well to choose the sim­pler. Always ask whether the hypoth­e­sis can be, at least in prin­ci­ple, fal­si­fied…. You must be able to check asser­tions out. Invet­er­ate skep­tics must be giv­en the chance to fol­low your rea­son­ing, to dupli­cate your exper­i­ments and see if they get the same result.

As McCoy points out, these tech­niques of mind have to do with can­cel­ing out the man­i­fold bias­es present in our think­ing, those nat­ur­al human ten­den­cies that incline us to accept ideas that may or may not coin­cide with real­i­ty as it is. If we take no trou­ble to cor­rect for these bias­es, Sagan came to believe, we’ll become easy marks for all the trick­sters and char­la­tans who hap­pen to come our way. And that’s just on the micro lev­el: on the macro lev­el, vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to delu­sion can bring down entire civ­i­liza­tions.

“Like all tools, the baloney detec­tion kit can be mis­used, applied out of con­text, or even employed as a rote alter­na­tive to think­ing,” Sagan cau­tions. “But applied judi­cious­ly, it can make all the dif­fer­ence in the world — not least in eval­u­at­ing our own argu­ments before we present them to oth­ers.” McCoy urges us to heed these words, adding that “this kit is not some per­fect solu­tion to the world’s prob­lems, but as it’s been uti­lized over the last few cen­turies” — for its basic pre­cepts long pre­date Sagan’s par­tic­u­lar artic­u­la­tion — “it has enabled us to cre­ate tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions and use­ful explana­to­ry mod­els of our world more quick­ly and effec­tive­ly than ever before.” The walls of baloney may always be clos­ing in on human­i­ty, but if you fol­low Sagan’s advice, you can at least give your­self some breath­ing room.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Carl Sagan on the Impor­tance of Choos­ing Wise­ly What You Read (Even If You Read a Book a Week)

Carl Sagan’s Syl­labus & Final Exam for His Course on Crit­i­cal Think­ing (Cor­nell, 1986)

Carl Sagan Pre­dicts the Decline of Amer­i­ca: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “With­out Notic­ing, Back into Super­sti­tion & Dark­ness” (1995)

Richard Feyn­man Cre­ates a Sim­ple Method for Telling Sci­ence From Pseu­do­science (1966)

How to Spot Bull­shit: A Man­u­al by Prince­ton Philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt (RIP)

Crit­i­cal Think­ing: A Free Course

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Explore a New Digital Edition of Printing Types, the Authoritative History of Printing & Typography from 1922

in Books, Design | September 24th, 2025

Times New Roman has been around since 1931, longer than most of us have been alive — and for longer than many of us have been alive, word-pro­cess­ing appli­ca­tions have come with it as the default font. We tend, there­fore, to regard it less as some­thing cre­at­ed than as some­thing for all intents and pur­pos­es eter­nal, but there was a time when pub­lish­ers had to active­ly adopt it. The first Amer­i­can firm to start using Times New Roman was the Mer­ry­mount Press, which had already made a high­ly pres­ti­gious name for itself with pub­li­ca­tions like the ele­gant Book of Com­mon Prayer financed by no less a cap­tain of indus­try than J. Pier­pont Mor­gan. But oth­er print­ers knew Mer­ry­mount for a book that would have inspired in them an equal­ly wor­ship­ful impulse.

“Released in 1922 with a lat­er revi­sion in 1937,” Print­ing Types: Their His­to­ry, Forms and Use “became known as the stan­dard work on the his­to­ry of [print­ing and typog­ra­phy] and a basic book for all inter­est­ed in the graph­ic arts. This two-vol­ume work spans near­ly 450 years and includes detailed analy­ses of the print­ers and type design­ers and their work.”

So writes the design­er Nicholas Rougeux, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his dig­i­tal edi­tions of vin­tage books like Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants; British & Exot­ic Min­er­al­o­gy; A Mono­graph of the Trochilidæ, or Fam­i­ly of Hum­ming-Birds; Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours; Euclid’s Ele­ments, and Pierre-Joseph Red­outé’s col­lec­tions of rose and lily illus­tra­tions. His lat­est project to go live is a painstak­ing­ly assem­bled dig­i­tal edi­tion of Print­ing Types, which you can explore here.

That book was also orig­i­nal­ly the work of one man, Mer­ry­mount Press founder Daniel Berke­ley Updike. “Dur­ing his tenure at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty, he taught a course on Tech­nique of Print­ing in the Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness Admin­is­tra­tion for five years,” Rougeux writes, “the lec­tures of which served as the basis for Print­ing Types.” In the book, Updike offers a his­to­ry of “the art of typog­ra­phy from the dawn of West­ern print­ing in the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry to the begin­ning of the twen­ti­eth — focus­ing pri­mar­i­ly on Euro­pean print­ing in Ger­many, France, Italy, the Nether­lands, Spain, and Eng­land as well as the Unit­ed States.” In trac­ing “the devel­op­ment of type design,” he also dis­cuss­es “the impor­tance of each his­toric peri­od and the lessons they con­tain for con­tem­po­rary design­ers.”

Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in 1922 and exten­sive­ly revised in 1937, Print­ing Types long stood as the author­i­ta­tive his­to­ry of typog­ra­phy in the Latin alpha­bet, with its “more than 360 fac­sim­i­le illus­tra­tions show­cas­ing exam­ples of typog­ra­phy, bor­ders, flow­ers, and pages pulled from the books cov­ered.” Track­ing down the sources of those illus­tra­tions con­sti­tut­ed no small part of the painstak­ing pro­duc­tion of Rougeux’s dig­i­tal edi­tion, and the 100 of them most high­ly praised by Updike have also been made avail­able for pur­chase in poster form. For those who do a lot of work with text, in print or dig­i­tal forms, it could pro­vide just as much moti­va­tion as an actu­al copy of Print­ing Types on the shelf to find our way beyond the defaults.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Typog­ra­phy Told in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

See How The Guten­berg Press Worked: Demon­stra­tion Shows the Old­est Func­tion­ing Guten­berg Press in Action

Dis­cov­er the First Illus­trat­ed Book Print­ed in Eng­lish, William Caxton’s Mir­ror of the World (1481)

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

Behold a Dig­i­ti­za­tion of “The Most Beau­ti­ful of All Print­ed Books,” The Kelm­scott Chaucer

Fonts in Use: Enter a Giant Archive of Typog­ra­phy, Fea­tur­ing 12,618 Type­faces

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Seven Philosophy Books for Beginners: Where to Start

in Books, Philosophy | August 26th, 2025

One espe­cial­ly appeal­ing aspect of phi­los­o­phy, as a field of study, is that you don’t have to go any­where to learn it but the library. And these days, you don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have to go there, now that so many philo­soph­i­cal texts have become freely avail­able on the inter­net. In the video above, phi­los­o­phy YouTu­ber Jared Hen­der­son rec­om­mends sev­en books through which any­one can get a sol­id intro­duc­tion to the sub­ject. They are as fol­lows: Bertrand Rus­sell’s The Prob­lems of Phi­los­o­phy, Simon Black­burn’s Think, the com­plete works of Pla­to, Mar­cus Aure­lius’ Med­i­ta­tions, St. Augustine’s Con­fes­sions, René Descartes’ Med­i­ta­tions on First Phi­los­o­phy, and John Stu­art Mill’s On Lib­er­ty.

Why these books? Though writ­ten for the gen­er­al pub­lic, The Prob­lems of Phi­los­o­phy has also proven use­ful to Hen­der­son in teach­ing intro­duc­to­ry cours­es, not least thanks to Rus­sel­l’s elo­quent defense of philo­soph­i­cal study itself. Think, a more recent­ly writ­ten broad sur­vey, “intro­duces you to some top­ics that almost every­one is inter­est­ed in: free will, the prob­lems of knowl­edge and ratio­nal­i­ty, the exis­tence of God, the exis­tence of the self, the prob­lems of ethics.” And giv­en the scope of Pla­to’s writ­ings, if you care­ful­ly read through them all, you’ll be “a remark­ably dif­fer­ent per­son at the end of that process.”

The name of Mar­cus Aure­lius, who ruled the Roman Empire in the mid­dle of the sec­ond cen­tu­ry, has late­ly become an even bet­ter-known than it already was thanks to a resur­gence of pub­lic inter­est in Sto­icism. Hen­der­son rec­om­mends his Med­i­ta­tions as an exam­ple of “phi­los­o­phy as a way of life.” In the Con­fes­sions, Augus­tine blends “poet­ry, the­ol­o­gy, and phi­los­o­phy in a real­ly com­pelling way,” deal­ing with such mat­ters as “the nature of time,” “moti­va­tion and the will” and “the meta­physics of evil.” Descartes’ Med­i­ta­tions offers not just a primer on skep­ti­cism, but also the con­test for the famous line “I think, there­fore I am.” Mil­l’s On Lib­er­ty opens the path to trace mod­ern, much-thrown-around polit­i­cal notions (includ­ing the tit­u­lar one) back to their sources.

These books, as Hen­der­son stress­es, con­sti­tute a start­ing point, not a goal in them­selves. Read them, and you’ll get a much clear­er sense of what phi­los­o­phy deals with, but also where your own philo­soph­i­cal inter­ests lie. The field has a long his­to­ry, after all, and in that time it has grown so vast that no one, no mat­ter how seri­ous­ly ded­i­cat­ed, can walk all of its intel­lec­tu­al paths. What­ev­er the par­tic­u­lar realm of phi­los­o­phy to which your incli­na­tions take you, don’t be sur­prised if you find your­self revis­it­ing these very same books time and again. Nobody ever tru­ly mas­ters Pla­to, Mar­cus Aure­lius, Descartes, or Mill, and on some lev­el, phi­los­o­phy itself keeps its prac­ti­tion­ers eter­nal novices. The impor­tant thing is to cul­ti­vate and main­tain what the Zen Bud­dhists call “begin­ner’s mind” — but then, that’s a whole oth­er branch of phi­los­o­phy.

Relat­ed con­tent:

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Course

Philoso­phers Name the Best Phi­los­o­phy Books: From Sto­icism and Exis­ten­tial­ism, to Meta­physics & Ethics for Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Edin­burgh

Emi­nent Philoso­phers Name the 43 Most Impor­tant Phi­los­o­phy Books Writ­ten Between 1950–2000: Wittgen­stein, Fou­cault, Rawls & More

A Flow­chart of Philo­soph­i­cal Nov­els: Read­ing Rec­om­men­da­tions from Haru­ki Muraka­mi to Don DeLil­lo

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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