The Library of Esoterica: Taschen’s Visual History of Tarot, Astrology & Witchcraft

in Art, Books, Religion | April 18th, 2022

Gen­er­a­tions and gen­er­a­tions of Amer­i­cans dis­sat­is­fied with life in their home­towns have act­ed on the same migra­to­ry impulse: to go west. Many have done so in order to make their for­tunes, but a fair few have been seek­ing vari­eties of sat­is­fac­tion alto­geth­er less tan­gi­ble. In the human spirt in gen­er­al and the Amer­i­can spir­it in par­tic­u­lar, there is a yearn­ing for “secret knowl­edge” of real­i­ty’s hid­den work­ings. Those whose spir­its most yearn for that knowl­edge tend to end up in Cal­i­for­nia, the log­i­cal end of Amer­i­can civ­i­liza­tion. There they’ve found vibrant com­mu­ni­ties of yogis, spir­i­tu­al­ists, Aene­r­i­ans, theosophists, heal­ers, Unar­i­ans, alchemists, Rosi­cru­cians, witch­es, tarot read­ers, astrologers… the list goes on.

More recent­ly, Cal­i­for­nia has also been home to Taschen’s Amer­i­can head­quar­ters, the acclaimed pub­lish­ers of lav­ish­ly pro­duced books on art and cul­ture with no com­punc­tion about explor­ing the fringes of human expe­ri­ence. A cou­ple of years ago we fea­tured their visu­al his­to­ry of tarot Divine Decks here on Open Cul­ture; now they’ve put out a three-vol­ume cof­fee-table Library of Eso­ter­i­ca that includes books on not just tarot but astrol­o­gy and witch­craft as well.

Assem­bled and designed to Taschen’s usu­al aes­thet­i­cal­ly painstak­ing stan­dard, the set comes edit­ed by writer and film­mak­er Jes­si­ca Hund­ley, who used the oppor­tu­ni­ty to open the most “inclu­sive and seduc­tive way into these prac­tices, which is through the art” they’ve inspired.

That’s what she told Los Ange­les Times’ Steffie Nel­son, who writes that “Hund­ley has been fas­ci­nat­ed by alter­na­tive spir­i­tu­al­i­ties and the occult since she was a goth-punk teenag­er on the East Coast.” Lat­er she moved to Los Ange­les, “drawn to the city’s lega­cy of eso­teric explo­ration and its renown as a place where dreams are made man­i­fest and iden­ti­ty is muta­ble.” This  pro­jec­t’s world­wide search for art and oth­er mate­ri­als relat­ed to these fields of eso­ter­i­ca began at Los Ange­les’ own Philo­soph­i­cal Research Soci­ety, found­ed in the nine­teen-thir­ties by mys­tic Man­ly P. Hall. With its rich­ly repro­duced imagery and accom­pa­ny­ing explana­to­ry essays, the Library of Eso­ter­i­ca offers a read­ing expe­ri­ence liable to open any­one’s doors of per­cep­tion. The age of Aquar­ius may be over, but there’s a seek­er born every minute.

The Library of Eso­ter­i­ca can be pur­chased as a com­plete col­lec­tion. Or you can pur­chase sep­a­rate install­ments on Astrol­o­gy, Tarot and Witch­craft.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Divine Decks: A Visu­al His­to­ry of Tarot: The First Com­pre­hen­sive Sur­vey of Tarot Gets Pub­lished by Taschen

The Artis­tic & Mys­ti­cal World of Tarot: See Decks by Sal­vador Dalí, Aleis­ter Crow­ley, H.R. Giger & More

Exquis­ite Water­col­ors of Demons, Mag­ic & Signs: Behold the Com­pendi­um Of Demonolo­gy and Mag­ic from 1775

Aleis­ter Crow­ley: The Wickedest Man in the World Doc­u­ments the Life of the Bizarre Occultist, Poet & Moun­taineer

Watch Häx­an, the Clas­sic Cin­e­mat­ic Study of Witch­craft Nar­rat­ed by William S. Bur­roughs (1922)

Athe­ists & Agnos­tics Also Fre­quent­ly Believe in the Super­nat­ur­al, a New Study Shows

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Gallery of Fantastical Alchemical Drawings

in Art, Books, History, Internet Archive, Libraries | March 31st, 2022

I once had to tell a ten-year-old that the Har­ry Pot­ter book series was not a his­tor­i­cal lit­er­ary clas­sic but a recent pub­lish­ing phe­nom­e­non that occurred in my life­time. She was amazed, but she was­n’t sil­ly for think­ing that the books might date from a far­away past. They do, after all, make fre­quent ref­er­ence to fig­ures from cen­turies when alche­my flour­ished in Europe, and magi­cians like Paracel­sus and Nicholas Flamel (both of whom appear in Pot­ter books and spin-offs) plied their soli­tary craft, such as it was. Should we call it mag­ic, ear­ly sci­ence, occult reli­gion, out­sider art, or some admix­ture of the above?

We can call it “black mag­ic,” but the term was not, as the Chris­tians thought, a ref­er­ence to the dev­il, but to the soil of the Nile. “Derived from the Ara­bic root ‘kimia,’” writes the Pub­lic Domain Review, “from the Cop­tic ‘khem’ (refer­ring to the fer­tile black soil of the Nile delta), the word ‘alche­my’ alludes to the dark mys­tery of the pri­mor­dial or First Mat­ter (the Khem).”

Find­ing this first sub­stance con­sti­tutes “the alchemist’s cen­tral goal – along with the dis­cov­ery of the Stone of Knowl­edge (The Philosopher’s Stone) and the key to Eter­nal Youth.”

In the descrip­tion above, we can see the roots of Rowling’s fic­tions and the ori­gins of many a world-shap­ing mod­ern myth. Alchemists study and change mat­ter to pro­duce cer­tain effects – just as ear­ly sci­en­tists did – and it may sur­prise us to learn just how fer­vent­ly some well-known ear­ly sci­en­tists, most espe­cial­ly Isaac New­ton, pur­sued the alchem­i­cal course. But the essence of alche­my was imag­i­na­tion, and the artists who depict­ed alchem­i­cal rit­u­als, mag­i­cal crea­tures, mys­ti­cal sym­bols, etc. had no short­age of it, as we see in the images here, drawn from Well­come Images and the Man­ley Palmer Hall col­lec­tion at the Inter­net Archive.

The images are strange, sur­re­al, cryp­tic, and seem to ref­er­ence no known real­i­ty. They are the inspi­ra­tion for cen­turies of occult art and eso­teric lit­er­a­ture. But each one also had prac­ti­cal intent — to illus­trate mys­te­ri­ous, often secre­tive process­es for dis­cov­er­ing the foun­da­tions of the uni­verse, and prof­it­ing from them. If these tech­niques look noth­ing like our mod­ern meth­ods for doing the same, that’s for good rea­son, but it does­n’t mean that alche­my has noth­ing to do with sci­ence. It is, rather, sci­ence’s weird dis­tant ances­tor. See more alchem­i­cal images at the Pub­lic Domain Review.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Bril­liant Col­ors of Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made with Alche­my

Videos Recre­ate Isaac Newton’s Neat Alche­my Exper­i­ments: Watch Sil­ver Get Turned Into Gold

Isaac Newton’s Recipe for the Myth­i­cal ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ Is Being Dig­i­tized & Put Online (Along with His Oth­er Alche­my Man­u­scripts)

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

A Field Guide to Strange Medieval Monsters

in Books, History | March 29th, 2022

What should you do if you come across a man­ti­core? Would you even know how to iden­ti­fy it? An unlike­ly occur­rence, you say? Per­haps. But if you lived in Europe in the Mid­dle Ages – and you were the type to believe such tales – you might expect to see one some­day. Wouldn’t it be use­ful to have a field guide? You’d want it on paper (or parch­ment): no one’s car­ry­ing smart­phones in misty 13th cen­tu­ry York or over the rocky high­lands of 15th cen­tu­ry Lom­bardy. You could con­sult a reign­ing expert of the time, such as Sir John Man­dev­ille, who either saw such things as blem­myae (head­less humans with faces in their chests) near Ethiopia, or made them up. But this didn’t mat­ter much. Truth and fic­tion did­n’t have such rigid bound­aries. Yet books were rare, and any­way, few peo­ple could read. If only there were YouTube.…

“Medieval zool­o­gy is bizarre,” says the nar­ra­tor of the video above — a brief “Field Guide to Bizarre Medieval Mon­sters” — “because half the crea­tures don’t even exist, and those that do look very, very strange.” Your aver­age medieval Euro­pean could­n’t vis­it zoos full of exot­ic ani­mals (rare excep­tions like the Tow­er of Lon­don Menagerie notwith­stand­ing), nor could they trav­el the world and see what crea­tures thrived in oth­er climes.

They were forced to rely on the gar­bled accounts, or out­right lies, of sailors, mer­chants, and oth­er trav­el­ers, and the odd illus­tra­tions found in illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts. These blend­ed trav­el­ogue, native folk ele­ments, the weird imag­in­ings of alche­my and demonolo­gy, and the myths and leg­ends of medieval romance to cre­ate “a world where mythol­o­gy and biol­o­gy blend togeth­er.”

Drag­ons, uni­corns, dog-head­ed saints.… You’ll find these and many more in the video field guide at the top and oth­ers online from the Cleve­land Muse­um of Art and Medievalists.net, which describes our friend the man­ti­core as a crea­ture “hav­ing the head of a man, the body of a lion, and the tail of a scor­pi­on.”

Many ancient and medieval mon­sters were hybrids of dif­fer­ent ani­mals, such as the Tarasque, which our field guide nar­ra­tor explains lies “some­where between a drag­on and a tor­toise.”

To find out its ori­gins, you’ll have to keep watch­ing. To read the orig­i­nal sources of this bizarre medieval zool­o­gy, see the British Library’s Medieval Mon­ster’s col­lec­tion, which includes aviaries, bes­tiaries, mis­cel­la­nies, books of hours, and psalters, like the big page above from the Lut­trell Psalter, a strik­ing exam­ple of mon­strous illus­tra­tion. While we may nev­er expect to see any of these crea­tures in the flesh, we can see more of them on the page (or screen) than any­one who lived in medieval Europe.

via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Brian Eno Creates a List of 20 Books That Could Rebuild Civilization

in Books | March 10th, 2022

Cre­ative Com­mons image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Artist and music pro­duc­er Bri­an Eno wrote one of my very favorite books: A Year with Swollen Appen­dices, which takes the form of his per­son­al diary of the year 1995 with essay­is­tic chap­ters (the “swollen appen­dices”) on top­ics like “edge cul­ture,” gen­er­a­tive music, new ways of , pre­ten­sion, CD-ROMs (a rel­e­vant top­ic back then), and pay­ment struc­tures for record­ing artists (a rel­e­vant top­ic again today). It also includes a fair bit of Eno’s cor­re­spon­dence with Stew­art Brand, once edi­tor of the Whole Earth Cat­a­log and now pres­i­dent of the Long Now Foun­da­tion, “a coun­ter­point to today’s accel­er­at­ing cul­ture” meant to “help make long-term think­ing more com­mon” and “cre­ative­ly fos­ter respon­si­bil­i­ty in the frame­work of the next 10,000 years.”

It so hap­pens that Eno now sits on the Long Now Foundation’s board and has had a hand in some of its projects. Nat­u­ral­ly, he con­tributed sug­gest­ed read­ing mate­r­i­al to the foun­da­tion’s Man­u­al of Civ­i­liza­tion, a col­lec­tion of books human­i­ty could use to rebuild civ­i­liza­tion, should it need rebuild­ing. Eno’s full list, which spans his­to­ry, pol­i­tics, phi­los­o­phy, soci­ol­o­gy, archi­tec­ture, design, nature, and lit­er­a­ture, runs as fol­lows:

If you’d like to know more books that have shaped Eno’s think­ing, do pick up a copy of A Year with Swollen Appen­dices. Like all the best diarists, Eno makes plen­ty of ref­er­ences to his day-to-day read­ing mate­r­i­al, and at the very end — beyond the last swollen appen­dix — he includes a bib­li­og­ra­phy (below), on which you’ll find more from Christo­pher Alexan­der, a reap­pear­ance of Rorty’s Con­tin­gency, Irony and Sol­i­dar­i­ty, and even Stew­ard Brand’s own How Build­ings Learn (on a tele­vi­sion ver­sion of which the two would col­lab­o­rate). You can find other writ­ers and thinker­s’s con­tri­bu­tions to the Man­u­al of Civ­i­liza­tion here.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

Jump Start Your Cre­ative Process with Bri­an Eno’s “Oblique Strate­gies”

Bri­an Eno on Cre­at­ing Music and Art As Imag­i­nary Land­scapes (1989)

What Books Could Be Used to Rebuild Civ­i­liza­tion?: Lists by Bri­an Eno, Stew­art Brand, Kevin Kel­ly & Oth­er For­ward-Think­ing Minds

What Books Should Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Read?: Tell Us Your Picks; We’ll Tell You Ours

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

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

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 21 ) |

Free Coloring Books from The Public Domain Review: Download & Color Works by Hokusai, Albrecht Dürer, Harry Clarke, Aubrey Beardsley & More

in Art, Books, Creativity, History | March 4th, 2022

Did you some­how miss that the Pub­lic Domain Review has got­ten in on the adult col­or­ing book craze?

If so, don’t feel bad. There were prob­a­bly a lot of oth­er news items vying for your atten­tion back in March of 2020, when the first vol­ume was released “for diver­sion, enter­tain­ment and relax­ation in times of self-iso­la­tion.”

By the time the sec­ond vol­ume made its debut less than two months lat­er, the first had been down­loaded some 30,000 times.

Tell your scarci­ty men­tal­i­ty to stand down. You may be late to the par­ty, but all 40 images can still be down­loaded for free, “to ease and aid plea­sur­able focus in these odd­est of times.”

It’s our belief that odd times call for odd images so we’re repro­duc­ing some of our favorites below, though be advised there are also plen­ty of calm­ing botan­i­cal prints and grace­ful maid­ens for those crav­ing a less chal­leng­ing col­or­ing expe­ri­ence.

Behold Saint Antho­ny Tor­ment­ed by Demons by Mar­tin Schon­gauer (c. 1470–75), above!

And below, the 13-year-old Michelangelo’s repro­duc­tion in tem­pera on a wood pan­el. Biog­ra­phers Gior­gio Vasari and Ascanio Con­divi both told how the young artist vis­it­ed the fish mar­ket, seek­ing inspi­ra­tion for the demons’ scales. Per­haps you will be inspired by the bare­ly teenaged High Renais­sance master’s palette, though it’s YOUR col­or­ing page, so you do you.

In “Fill­ing in the Blanks: A Pre­his­to­ry of the Adult Col­or­ing Craze”, his­to­ri­ans Melis­sa N. Mor­ris and Zach Carmichael recount how pub­lish­er Robert Say­er’s illus­trat­ed book, The Florist, “for the use & amuse­ment of Gen­tle­men and Ladies” was pub­lished with the explic­it under­stand­ing that read­ers were meant to col­or in its botan­i­cal­ly semi-inac­cu­rate images:


Com­prised of pic­tures of var­i­ous flow­ers, the author gives his (pre­sum­ably) adult read­ers detailed instruc­tions for paint mix­ing and col­or choice (includ­ing the delight­ful sound­ing “gall-stone brown”).

Per­haps you will bring some of Sayer’s sug­gest­ed col­ors to bear on the above image from Parisian book­seller Richard Breton’s Les songes dro­la­tiques de Pan­ta­gru­el (1565), a col­lec­tion of 120 grotesque wood­cut fig­ures intend­ed as a trib­ute to the bawdy writer (and priest!) François Rabelais, or a pos­si­bly just a can­ny mar­ket­ing ploy.

Next, let’s col­or this perky fel­low from Gio­van­ni Bat­tista Nazari’s famous alchem­i­cal trea­tise on metal­lic trans­mu­ta­tion, Del­la tra­mu­ta­tione metal­li­ca sog­ni tre from 1599. 

The “winged pig in the world” by Dutch engraver and map­mak­er Cor­nelis Anthon­isz doesn’t look very cheer­ful, does he? He’s on top of the impe­r­i­al orb, but he’s also an alle­go­ry of the cor­rupt world. Hope­ful­ly, this will get sort­ed by the time pigs fly.

As to Ambroise Paré’s 1598 ren­der­ing of a “cam­phur” … well, let’s just say THIS is what a prop­er uni­corn should look like.

Accord­ing to an anno­tat­ed check­list that accom­pa­nied the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Museum’s Clois­ters’ 75th Anniver­sary exhi­bi­tion Search for the Uni­corn, Paré, a pio­neer­ing French bar­ber sur­geon, claimed that it live(d) in the Ara­bi­an Desert, and that its horn can cure var­i­ous mal­adies, espe­cial­ly poi­son­ing.”

There’s a lot to unpack there. Think about it as you col­or.

Hoku­sai, Albrecht Dür­er, and Aubrey Beard­s­ley, are among the artists whose work you’ll encounter, “arranged in vague order of dif­fi­cul­ty — from a sim­ple 17th-cen­tu­ry kimono pat­tern to an intri­cate thou­sand-flow­ered illus­tra­tion.”

Down­load Vol­ume 1 of the Pub­lic Domain Review Col­or­ing book in US Let­ter or A4 for­mat.

And here is Vol­ume 2 in US Let­ter or A4 for­mat.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Free Col­or­ing Books from 101 World-Class Libraries & Muse­ums: Down­load and Col­or Hun­dreds of Free Images

A Free Shake­speare Col­or­ing Book: While Away the Hours Col­or­ing in Illus­tra­tions of 35 Clas­sic Plays

Down­load 150 Free Col­or­ing Books from Great Libraries, Muse­ums & Cul­tur­al Insti­tu­tions: The British Library, Smith­son­ian, Carnegie Hall & More

The Dro­lat­ic Dreams of Pan­ta­gru­el: 120 Wood­cuts Envi­sion the Grotesque Inhab­i­tants of Rabelais’ World (1565)

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel: 120 Woodcuts Envision the Grotesque Inhabitants of Rabelais’ World (1565)

in Art, Books, History | March 3rd, 2022

George Orwell lives on, to vary­ing degrees of apt­ness, in the form of the word Orwellian. David Lynch has, with­in his life­time, made nec­es­sary the term Lynchi­an. Though few of us will leave such adjec­ti­val lega­cies of our own, we should at least aspire to do so, and that task requires look­ing back to the orig­i­nal mas­ter: François Rabelais. Mer­ri­am-Web­ster defines Rabelaisian as “marked by gross robust humor, extrav­a­gance of car­i­ca­ture, or bold nat­u­ral­ism.” Rabelais expressed this sen­si­bil­i­ty at great length in La vie de Gar­gan­tua et de Pan­ta­gru­el, a pen­ta­l­o­gy of elab­o­rate satir­i­cal nov­els pub­lished from the 1530s to the 1560s — and more recent­ly endorsed by Harold Bloom, Joseph Brod­sky, Hen­ry Miller, and Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe.

Rabelais died in the 1550s, hence the still-unre­solved ques­tions about the author­ship of the fifth and final Gar­gan­tua and Pan­ta­gru­el book: was it com­plet­ed from his notes? Was it, in fact, a fab­ri­ca­tion by anoth­er writer?

Such was the pub­lic’s hunger for the Rabelaisian that mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent “fifth books” were pub­lished. The sat­is­fac­tion of that same insa­tiable demand seems also to have moti­vat­ed the pub­li­ca­tion of Les Songes Dro­la­tiques de Pan­ta­gru­el ou sont con­tenues plusieurs fig­ures de l’in­ven­tion de maitre François Rabelais. This slim vol­ume, writes the Pub­lic Domain Review’s Adam Green, “is made up entire­ly of images — 120 wood­cuts depict­ing a series of fan­tas­ti­cal­ly bizarre and grotesque fig­ures, rem­i­nis­cent of some of the more inven­tive and twist­ed cre­ations of Brueghel or Bosch.”

There is no main text, just a pref­ace where­in pub­lish­er Richard Bre­ton writes that “the great famil­iar­i­ty I had with the late François Rabelais has moved and even com­pelled me to bring to light the last of his work, the dro­lat­ic dreams of the very excel­lent and won­der­ful Pan­ta­gru­el.” Yet, as Green explains, “the book’s won­der­ful images are very unlike­ly to be the work of Rabelais him­self — the attri­bu­tion prob­a­bly a clever mar­ket­ing ploy.” You can view these amus­ing and grotesque images at the Pub­lic Domain Review, and in the con­text of the book as pre­served at the Inter­net Archive. “Be warned,” says Intrigu­ing His­to­ry, the artist “seems to enjoy the use of a lot of phal­lic imagery, along with frogs, fish and ele­phants.” But who is the artist?

“The cre­ator of the prints is now wide­ly thought to be François Desprez,” writes Green, “a French engraver and illus­tra­tor” who pub­lished a cou­ple of sim­i­lar­ly imag­i­na­tive sets of images with Bre­ton in 1567. Who­ev­er made them, these Rabelaisian wood­cuts remained sur­re­al enough through the cen­turies to catch the eye of none oth­er than Sal­vador Dalí, who in 1973 paid trib­ute to them with a set of lith­o­graphs of his own. (You can see more exam­ples at the Lock­port St. Gallery.) As far as the title, an exe­ge­sis at Poe­mas del río Wang offers a clar­i­fi­ca­tion: “Dro­lat­ic is an adjec­tive of dream,” and so “we must ask what kind of dream is this. It is cer­tain­ly the dream of rea­son, as it gives birth to mon­sters” — mon­sters, as a satirist like Rabelais well under­stood, not alto­geth­er unlike our­selves.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Bizarre Car­i­ca­tures & Mon­ster Draw­ings

H.P. Lovecraft’s Mon­ster Draw­ings: Cthul­hu & Oth­er Crea­tures from the “Bound­less and Hideous Unknown”

Visu­al­iz­ing Dante’s Hell: See Maps & Draw­ings of Dante’s Infer­no from the Renais­sance Through Today

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

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

Behold Fan­tas­ti­cal Illus­tra­tions from the 13th Cen­tu­ry Ara­bic Man­u­script Mar­vels of Things Cre­at­ed and Mirac­u­lous Aspects of Things Exist­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The New Herbal: A Masterpiece of Renaissance Botanical Illustrations Gets Republished in a Beautiful 900-Page Book

in Art, Biology, Books, History | February 24th, 2022

We’ve all have heard of the fuch­sia, a flower (or genus of flow­er­ing plant) native to Cen­tral and South Amer­i­ca but now grown far and wide. Though even the least botan­i­cal­ly lit­er­ate among us know it, we may have occa­sion­al trou­ble spelling its name. The key is to remem­ber who the fuch­sia was named for: Leon­hart Fuchs, a Ger­man physi­cian and botanist of the six­teenth cen­tu­ry. More than 450 years after his death, Fuchs is remem­bered as not just the name­sake of a flower, but as the author of an enor­mous book detail­ing the vari­eties of plants and their med­i­c­i­nal uses. His was a land­mark achieve­ment in the form known as the herbal, exam­ples of which we’ve fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture from ninth- and eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry Eng­land.

But De His­to­ria Stir­pi­um Com­men­tarii Insignes, as this work was known upon its ini­tial 1542 pub­li­ca­tion in Latin, has worn uncom­mon­ly well through the ages. Or rather, Fuchs’ per­son­al, hand-col­ored orig­i­nal has, com­ing down to us in 2022 as the source for Taschen’s The New Herbal. “A mas­ter­piece of Renais­sance botany and pub­lish­ing,” accord­ing to the pub­lish­er, the book includes “over 500 illus­tra­tions, includ­ing the first visu­al record of New World plant types such as maize, cac­tus, and tobac­co.”

Buy­ers also have their choice of Eng­lish, Ger­man, and French edi­tions, each with its own trans­la­tions of Fuchs’ “essays describ­ing the plants’ fea­tures, ori­gins, and med­i­c­i­nal pow­ers.” (You can also read a Dutch ver­sion of the orig­i­nal online at Utrecht Uni­ver­si­ty Library Spe­cial Col­lec­tions.)

Nat­u­ral­ly, some of the infor­ma­tion con­tained in these near­ly five-cen­tu­ry-old sci­en­tif­ic writ­ings will be a bit dat­ed at this point, but the appeal of the illus­tra­tions has nev­er dimmed. “Fuchs pre­sent­ed each plant with metic­u­lous wood­cut illus­tra­tions, refin­ing the abil­i­ty for swift species iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and set­ting new stan­dards for accu­ra­cy and qual­i­ty in botan­i­cal pub­li­ca­tions.” Over 500 of them go into the book: “Weigh­ing more than 10 pounds,” writes Colos­sal’s Grace Ebert, “the near­ly 900-page vol­ume is an ode to Fuchs’ research and the field of Renais­sance botany, detail­ing plants like the leafy gar­den bal­sam and root-cov­ered man­drake.”

Taschen’s repro­duc­tions of these works of botan­i­cal art look to do jus­tice to Leon­hart Fuchs’ lega­cy, espe­cial­ly in the bril­liance of their col­ors. It’s enough to rein­force the assump­tion that the man has received trib­ute not just through fuch­sia the flower but fuch­sia the col­or as well. But such a dual con­nec­tion turns out to be in doubt: the col­or’s name derives from rosani­line hydrochlo­ride, also known as fuch­sine, orig­i­nal­ly a trade name applied by its man­u­fac­tur­er Renard frères et Franc. The name fus­chine, in turn, derives from fuchs, the Ger­man trans­la­tion of renard. The New Herbal is, of course, a work of botany rather than lin­guis­tics, but it should nev­er­the­less stim­u­late in its behold­ers an aware­ness of the inter­con­nec­tion of knowl­edge that fired up the Renais­sance mind.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed con­tent:

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Dis­cov­er Emi­ly Dickinson’s Herbar­i­um: A Beau­ti­ful Dig­i­tal Edi­tion of the Poet’s Col­lec­tion of Pressed Plants & Flow­ers Is Now Online

A Beau­ti­ful 1897 Illus­trat­ed Book Shows How Flow­ers Become Art Nou­veau Designs

His­toric Man­u­script Filled with Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Cuban Flow­ers & Plants Is Now Online (1826)

A Curi­ous Herbal: 500 Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Med­i­c­i­nal Plants Drawn by Eliz­a­beth Black­well in 1737 (to Save Her Fam­i­ly from Finan­cial Ruin)

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Haruki Murakami’s Five Favorite Books

in Books | February 23rd, 2022

Image bySo­ci­ety for Cul­ture, Art and Inter­na­tion­al Coop­er­a­tion Adli­gat, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

You could say that Haru­ki Muraka­mi is a Japan­ese writer. And giv­en that he was born in Japan to Japan­ese par­ents, grew up in Japan, and lives in Japan still today, you’d have geog­ra­phy, cul­ture, and biol­o­gy on your side. Yet Alfred Birn­baum, one of Murakami’s own Eng­lish trans­la­tors, has called him “an Amer­i­can writer who hap­pens to write in Japan­ese.” To under­stand how this could be requires a con­sid­er­a­tion of not just Murakami’s writ­ing, but the writ­ers whose books inspired him. Take the hard-boiled nov­el­ist Ray­mond Chan­dler, whose The Long Good­bye appears on the list of Murakami’s five favorite books just post­ed at Lit­er­ary Hub.

“I have trans­lat­ed all the nov­els of Ray­mond Chan­dler,” Muraka­mi once said. “I like his style so much. I have read The Long Good­bye five or six times.” He must have read it for the first time in Kobe, where he grew up in the 1950s and 60s, and whose book­stores offered an abun­dance of pulp fic­tion left behind by depart­ing U.S. mil­i­tary per­son­nel. Chan­dler’s would have been one of the lit­er­ary voic­es he inter­nal­ized before sit­ting down to write his own first nov­el, Hear the Wind Sing, using the high­ly unusu­al method of begin­ning the sto­ry in Eng­lish, or what Eng­lish he com­mand­ed. He then trans­lat­ed this Philip Marlov­ian exper­i­ment back into Japan­ese, begin­ning a lit­er­ary career of four decades and count­ing.

A trans­la­tor when not writ­ing his own fic­tion, Muraka­mi has also ren­dered in his native lan­guage F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s The Great Gats­by, per­haps the most sym­bol­i­cal­ly Amer­i­can nov­el of them all. Lit­er­ary Hub quotes him as say­ing that “had it not been for Fitzgerald’s nov­el, I would not be writ­ing the kind of lit­er­a­ture I am today (indeed, it is pos­si­ble that I would not be writ­ing at all, although that is nei­ther here or there).” His prose is also the medi­um through which many Japan­ese read­ers have expe­ri­enced J.D. Salinger’s The Catch­er in the Rye: “I enjoyed it when I was sev­en­teen, so I decid­ed to trans­late it. I remem­bered it as being fun­ny, but it’s dark and strong. I must have been dis­turbed when I was young.”

None of Murakami’s top five books are Japan­ese, but not all of them Amer­i­can. The list also includes Franz Kafka’sThe Cas­tle, anoth­er book he encoun­tered as a Kobe teenag­er: “It gave me a tremen­dous shock. The world Kaf­ka described in that book was so real and so unre­al at the same time that my heart and soul seemed torn into two pieces.” Though the two writ­ers have their styl­is­tic dif­fer­ences, “so real and so unre­al at the same time” could just as well describe what­ev­er genre it is that Muraka­mi has invent­ed and con­tin­ues to advance today. “Most writ­ers get weak­er and weak­er as they age,” he once said, “but Dos­to­evsky didn’t. He kept get­ting big­ger and greater. He wrote The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov in his late fifties.” Muraka­mi is now in his ear­ly sev­en­ties, but who — even among those famil­iar with his inspi­ra­tions — would dare pre­dict what sort of nov­el he’ll give us next?

via Lit­er­ary Hub

Relat­ed con­tent:

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Trans­lates The Great Gats­by, the Nov­el That Influ­enced Him Most

David Fos­ter Wallace’s Sur­pris­ing List of His 10 Favorite Books, from C.S. Lewis to Tom Clan­cy

Bruce Spring­steen Lists 20 of His Favorite Books: The Books That Have Inspired the Song­writer & Now Mem­oirist

Stephen King Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Nov­els

Philip Roth (RIP) Cre­ates a List of the 15 Books That Influ­enced Him Most

The Books Samuel Beck­ett Read and Real­ly Liked (1941–1956)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast