Why Butt Trumpets & Other Bizarre Images Appeared in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts

in Art, Books, History | December 8th, 2020

In illuminated manuscripts, Medieval Europe can seem more like Monty Python and the Holy Grail than the grim tales of grey-faced, mildewed kings, monks, knights, and peasants turned out by the Hollywood dozen. Yes, life could be brutal, bloody, disease-ridden, but it could also be absurdist and unintentionally hilarious, qualities that reach their apex in the weirdness of Hieronymus Bosch’s “painful, horrible” musical instruments in his Garden of Earthly Delights.

While Bosch painted his nightmarish cacophonies, Medieval scribes’ cats peed and left inky footprints on 15th century manuscripts, within whose illustrated pages, rabbits play church organs, valiant knights do battle with giant snails, and a naked man blows a trumpet with his rear end (a precursor to the man in Bosch’s painting with a flute stuck in his rear.) “These bizarre images,” TED Ed notes, “painted with squirrel-hair brushes on vellum or parchment by monks, nuns, and urban craftspeople, populate the margins of the most prized books from the Middle Ages.”

The animated video lesson at the top by Michelle Brown “explores the rich history and tradition of illuminated manuscripts” in their eccentricity and seeming silliness. The animal motifs in marginal illustrations were neither aimless doodles nor inside jokes. They were allegorical figures descended from the menageries of Medieval bestiaries, repeated thematically to represent human vices and virtues. Rabbits, for example, represented lust, and their music-making was a virtuous sublimation of the same.

These associations weren’t always so clear, especially when they were explicitly religious. The porcupine picking fruit from its spine could represent either devil or savior, depending on context. The unicorn, which can only be killed with its head in the lap of a virgin, might stand for sexual temptation or the sacrifice of Christ. But the few readers in this manuscript culture would have recognized the references and allusions, although, like all signs, the illustrations communicate several different, even contradictory, meanings at once.

And what of the butt trumpet? It is “likely shorthand to express disapproval with, or add an ironic spin to, the action in the text.” The butt trumpet, ladies and gentlemen, is as advertised: that most venerable of expressions, the fart joke, to which there is no witty reply and which—as scatological humor can do—might be slyly subversive political critique. Literate or not, Medieval Europeans spoke a language of symbols that stood in for whole folk traditions and theologies. The butt trumpet, however, is just objectively, crudely funny, probably as much to the artists who drew them as to those of us, hundreds of years later, encountering them for the first time. See several more examples here and learn more about Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts here.

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

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A Look into the Wondrous Life & Expansive Work of the Late Jan Morris, Who Wrote the Entire World

in Books, Travel | December 3rd, 2020

Jan Morris spent her long life and career writing about the world. Her voluminous body of work includes books about countries like Spain, the United States, and her ancestral homeland of Wales; cities like Oxford, Trieste, and Sydney; and even city-states like Hong Kong and her beloved (if sometimes resented) Venice. And yet, as she declared on CBS Sunday Morning twenty years ago, “I hate being called a travel writer, and I don’t believe I am one. When I go to a place, I describe its effect upon my own sensibility. I’m not telling the reader what they’re going to find there; I’m just telling people what effect the place has had upon me.” To The Paris Review she called herself a “a belletrist, an old-fashioned word,” and a belletrist “mostly concerned with place.”

“It’s hard not to be fascinated by Jan Morris,” says Observer editor Robert McCrum in the BBC profile just above. This would be true of any writer who had seen and considered so much of the Earth, which in Morris’ case also happens to include the top of Mt. Everest, conquered in 1953 along with the history-making expedition of Sir Edmund Hillary.

She reached the summit as a he, having lived for her first forty or so years as James Morris; becoming Jan, in her perception, constituted a journey of another kind. “I have interpreted this thing romantically, coyly, and tweely as some sort of a quest that has been imposed upon me,” she said in a 1974 talk-show appearance promoting her narrative of transition Conundrum — “an arrogant book, an egotistical book about myself, and I’m afraid that you must take it or leave it.”

Just as Morris never called herself a travel writer, she never spoke of having undergone a sex change. “I did not change sex,” she told her final interviewer, The Guardian’s Tim Adams. “I really absorbed one into the other. I’m a bit of each now.” For her many readers, this greatly deepens her value as an observer. “I’ve written as an outsider, always,” as she puts it to McCrum. “I’ve never pretended to get inside the spirit, or the thoughts of other cultures, other people, other cities, even. I’m always the onlooker.” And yet this very nature made her, among other things, “the kindest, shrewdest and most indefatigable master portraitist of cities,” as her fellow writer of place Pico Iyer tweeted in response to the news of her death on November 20 at the age of 94.

Among Morris’ work not filed under “travel” one finds subjects like Abraham Lincoln, the Japanese Battleship Yamato, and the rise and fall of the British Empire. To my mind, this historical perspective did a good deal to make her a model “city critic,” and one whose work lights the way for writers of place to come. She continued publishing that work up until the end — and indeed will continue past it, a deliberately posthumous volume called Allegorizings having been completed years ago. “When I die, which I’m going to one of these days, I think people will be able to say that I’ve written an awful lot of books about the whole world at a particular moment,” Morris said in a recent interview on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. She enjoyed a longer moment, not to mention a wider expanse, than most; through her writing, we’ll carry on enjoying it ourselves.

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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A 1913 Children’s Book Lampoons Duchamp, Picasso & Other Avant-Garde Artists: Read The Cubies’ ABC Online

in Art, Books, History | December 3rd, 2020

Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring premiered in 1913, and its violent break from musical and choreographic tradition, so the story goes, pushed the genteel Parisian audience to violent rebellion. That tale may have grown taller over the past century, but public distaste for then-novel trends in all forms of “modern art” has left a paper trail. Here we have a particularly amusing exhibit, and long an obscure one: The Cubies’ ABC, a picture book by a couple named Mary Mills and Earl Harvey Lyall. They were inspired by another major cultural event of 1913, the International Exhibition of Modern Art, or “Armory Show,” which offered the United States of America its first look at groundbreaking work by Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, and Wassily Kandinsky, among a host of other foreign artists.

The Lyalls, evidently, were not impressed. In order to ridicule what they seem to have considered the pretensions of the avant-garde, they came up with the Cubies, a trio of angular, wild-haired troublemakers bent on discarding all established conventions in the name of Ego, the Future, and Intuition.

Those three concepts get their own pages in this alphabetically organized book, as do artists — not that the authors would unironically grant them the title — like Duchamp, “the Deep-Dyed Deceiver, who, drawing accordions, labels them stairs”; Kandinsky, painter of “Kute ‘improvisations’ ”; and even Gertrude Stein, “eloquent scribe of the Futurist soul.” X stands, of course, for “the Xit,” a direction “Xtremely alluring when Cubies invite us to study their Art.”

“We tend to forget, now that the Cubists and Futurists have become as integral to the history of art as the painters of the Dutch Golden Age and the Italian Renaissance, how hostile most people — even most artists — felt toward the non-representational innovations of the artists on display at the Armory,” says the Public Domain Review, where you can read The Cubies’ ABC in full.

You can also buy a copy of the reprint organized by gallerist Francis Naumann in commemoration of the Armory show’s centenary. “People in those days thought that they could stop modern art in its tracks,” says Naumann in a New Yorker piece on the book. Did the Lyalls think the Cubies’ antics would land a decisive blow against abstraction and subjectivity? Then again, could they have imagined us enjoying them more than a hundred years later, in a time unknowable to even the most far-sighted Futurist?

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Toni Morrison’s 1,200 Volume Personal Library is Going on Sale: Get a Glimpse of the Books on Her Tribeca Condo Shelves

in Books, Literature | November 27th, 2020

Images by Brown Harris Stevens

I will tell you how I began to be a writer.

I was a reader.

—Toni Morrison

Those of us who might have grown up harboring literary ambitions may have been humbled and inspired when we first read Toni Morrison. She proves over and again, in novels, essays, and otherwise, the courage and dedication that serious writing requires. She has also shown us the courage it takes to be a serious reader. “Delving into literature is not escape,” she said in a 2002 interview. It is “always a provocative engagement with the contemporary, the modern world. The issues of the society we live in.”

In her seminal text on reading, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison showed us how to read as she does. “As a reader (before becoming a writer),” she wrote, “I read as I had been taught to do. But books revealed themselves rather differently to me as a writer,” in the space of imaginative empathy. “I have to place enormous trust in my ability to imagine others and my willingness to project consciously into the danger zones such others may represent for me.”

Critical readers risk vulnerability, open themselves to shock and surprise: “I want to draw a map… to open as much space for discovery… without the mandate for conquest.” This attitude makes criticism an act of “delight, not disappointment,” Morrison wrote, despite the different, and unequal, positions we come from as readers. “It’s that being open,” she said in 2009, “not scratching for it, not digging for it, not constructing something but being open to the situation and trusting that what you don’t know will be available to you.”

Want to learn to read like that? You can. And you can also, if you have the cash, own and read the books in Morrison’s personal library, the books she thumbed over and read in that same spirit of critical empathy. The over 1,200 books collected at her Tribeca condo can be purchased in their entirety for a price negotiated with her family. In the photos here from realtor Brown Harris Stevens, who currently list her five million dollar, 3 bedroom apartment in a separate sale, certain titles leap out from the spines:

Biographies of Paul Robeson and Charles Dickens, Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, Eric J. Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations, Angela Davis’ An Autobiography, Cornel West’s Democracy Matters. (Her library seems to be enviably alphabetized, something I’ve meant to get around to for a couple decades now….)

Michelle Sinclair Colman at Galerie lists several more titles in the library, including The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, “books about and by the Obamas and the Clintons, W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gayl Jones, Henry Dumas, James Baldwin, and Mark Twain.” On her nightstand, undisturbed, sit Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, David Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Story, and Stephen King’s Revival.

Some other points of interest:

She owned a beautiful gold illustrated copy of Song of Solomon with the bookmark on Chapter Four.
She displayed multiple-framed Dewey Decimal catalog library cards of her novels.
She edited as she read.

And…

She had a few never-returned library books. The most interesting was a copy of her own book, The Bluest Eye, from the Burnaby Public Library with copious notes, underlines, cross-outs on every single page.

Were these her own notes, underlines, and cross-outs? It isn’t clear, but should you purchase the library, which cannot be pieced out but only owned as a whole, you can find out for yourself. We hope this historic collection will one day end up in a library, maybe digitized for everyone to see. But for now, those of us who can’t afford the purchase price can be content with this rare glimpse into Morrison’s sanctuary, where she did so much writing, thinking, and maybe most importantly for her, so much reading. Images on this page come from Brown Harris Stevens.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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

in Art, Books, History, Science | November 23rd, 2020

Sometimes beautiful things come out of terrible circumstances. This does not justify more terrible circumstances. But as evidence of the resilience, resourcefulness, and creativity of human beings—and more specifically of mothers in dire straits—we offer the following: A Curious Herbal, Elizabeth Blackwell’s finely illustrated, engraved, and colored “herbal,” the term for a “book of plants, describing their appearance, their properties and how they may be used for preparing ointments,” the British Library writes.

Born sometime around 1700 to a successful merchant family in Scotland, Elizabeth married Alexander Blackwell, a “shady character” who proceeded to drag her through a series of misadventures involving him posing as a doctor and a printer, despite the fact that he’d had no training in either profession.

Blackwell incurred several hefty fines from the authorities, which he could not pay, and he was finally remanded to debtor’s prison, an institution that often left women with young children to fend for themselves.

“With Alexander in prison, Elizabeth was forced to rely on her own resources to keep herself and her child.” Fortunately, she had been prepared with life skills during her prosperous upbringing, having learned a thing or two about business and “received tuition in drawing and painting, as many well-to-do young women then did.” Blackwell realized a publishing opportunity: finding no high-quality herbals available, she decided to make her own in “a rare triumph of turning desperation into inspiration,” Maria Popova writes.

After befriending the head curator Chelsea Physic Garden — a teaching facility for apprentice apothecaries established several decades earlier — she realized that there was a need for a handbook depicting and describing the garden’s new collection of mysterious plants from the New World. A keen observer, a gifted artist, and an entrepreneur by nature, she set about bridging the world’s need and her own.

The gorgeous book, A Curious Herbal (1737–39), was not all Blackwell’s work, though she completed all of the illustrations from start to finish. She also enlisted her husband’s help, visiting his cell to have him “supply each plant’s name in Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and German.” Blackwell produced 500 illustrations in total. She advertised “by word of mouth,” notes the British Library, “and in several journals” and “showed herself an adept businesswoman, striking mutually advantageous deals with booksellers that ensured the financial success of the herbal.”

Blackwell not only benefited her family and her readers, but she also gave her book to posterity—though she couldn’t have known it at the time. Her herbal has been digitized in full by the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The herbal will also give back to the natural world she lovingly rendered (including plants that have since gone extinct). Popova has made a selection of the illustrations available as prints to benefit The Nature Conservancy. See Blackwell’s digitized book in full here and order prints at Brain Pickings.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch How to Be at Home, a Beautiful Short Animation on the Realities of Social Isolation in 2020

in Animation, Books, Film, Life, Poetry | November 23rd, 2020

I think, as social primates, we want to feel a strong sense of belonging either in a relationship or to a community—or both. But also intrinsic to our humanity is a feeling that we are truly alone.

—Filmmaker Andrea Dorfman, 2010

When they first became friends, poet Tanya Davis and filmmaker Andrea Dorfman talked a lot about the pleasures and hardships of being alone. Davis had just gone through a break up, and Dorfman was just embarking on a relationship after four years of flying solo.

These conversations led to a collaboration, 2010’s How to Be At Alone (see below), a whimsical videopoem that combines live action and animation to consider some of solitude’s sweeter aspects, like sitting on a bench as signal to the universe that one is available for impromptu conversation with a stranger.

That bench reappears in their 2020 follow up, How to Be At Home, above. Now it is cordoned off with black and yellow caution tape, a familiar public health measure in 2020.

As with the earlier project, a large part of Davis’ purpose was to reflect and reassure, both herself, and by extension, others.

Although she has become a poster child for the joys of solitude, she also relishes human contact, and found herself missing it terribly while sheltering alone in the early days of the pandemic. Writing the new poem gave her “an anchor” and a place to put her anxiety.

Dorfman notes that the project, which was commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada as part of a short film collection about Canadians navigating life during the pandemic, was “essentially catalyzed by COVID.”

As she embarked on the project, she wondered if the pandemic would be over by the time it was complete. As she told the CBC’s Tom Power:

There was this feeling that this could go away in a month, so this better be finished soon, so it’s still relevant. So as an artist, as a filmmaker, I thought, “I have to crank this out” but there’s no fast and easy way to do animation. It just takes so long and as I got into it and realized that this was going to be a marathon, not a sprint, the images just kept coming to me and I really just made it up as I went along. I’d go into my studio every day not knowing what lay ahead and I’d think, “Okay, so, what do we have up next? What’s the next line? And I’d spend maybe a week on a line of the poem, animating it.

It appears to have been an effective approach.

Dorfman’s painted images ripple across the fast turning pages of an old book. The titles change from time to time, and the choices seem deliberate—The Lone Star Ranger, Le Secret du Manoir Hanté, a chapter in The Broken Halo—“Rosemary for Remembrance.”

“It’s almost as though the way the poem is written there are many chapters in the book. (Davis) moves from one subject to another so completely,” Dorfman told the University of King’s College student paper, The Signal.

In the new work, the absence of other people proves a much heavier burden than it does in How To Be Alone.

Davis flirts with many of the first poem’s settings, places where a lone individual might have gone to put themselves in proximity to other humans as recently as February 2020:

Public transportation

The gym

A dance club

A description from 2010:

The lunch counter, where you will be surrounded by chow-downers, employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town, and they, like you, will be alone.

Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.

In 2020, she struggles to recreate that experience at home, her phone serving as her most vital link to the outside world, as she scrolls past images of a Black Lives Matter protests and a masked essential worker:

I miss lunch counters so much I’ve been eating [pickles and] toasted sandwiches while hanging unabashedly with my phone.

See How to Be at Home and the 29 other films that comprise The Curve, the National Film Board of Canada series about life in the era of COVID-19 here.

How to be at Home

By Tanya Davis

If you are, at first, really fucking anxious, just wait. It’ll get worse, and then you’ll get the hang of it. Maybe.

Start with the reasonable feelings – discomfort, lack of focus, the sadness of alone

you can try to do yoga

you can shut off the radio when it gets to you

you can message your family or your friends or your colleagues, you’re not supposed to leave your home anyway, so it’s safe for you

There’s also the gym

you can’t go there but you could pretend to

you could bendy by yourself in your bedroom

And there’s public transportation

probably best to avoid it

but there’s prayer and meditation, yes always

employ it

if you have pains in your chest ‘cause your anxiety won’t rest

take a moment, take a breath

Start simple

things you can handle based on your interests

your issues and your triggers

and your inner logistics

I miss lunch counters so much I’ve been eating [pickles and] toasted sandwiches while hanging unabashedly with my phone

When you are tired, again of still being alone

make yourself a dinner

but don’t invite anybody over

put something green in it, or maybe orange

chips are fine sometimes but they won’t keep you charged

feed your heart

if people are your nourishment, I get you

feel the feelings that undo you while you have to keep apart

Watch a movie, in the dark

and pretend someone is with you

watch all of the credits

because you have time, and not much else to do

or watch all of the credits to remember

how many people come together

just to tell a story

just to make a picture move

And then, set yourself up dancing

like it’s a club where everyone knows you

and they’re all gonna hold you

all night long

they’re gonna dance around you and with you and on their own

it’s your favourite song

with the hardest bass and the cathartic drums

your heart pumps along/hard, you belong

you put your hands up to feel it

With the come down comes the weeping

those downcast eyes and feelings

the truth is you can’t go dancing, not right now

not at any club or party in any town

The heartbreak of this astounds you

it joins old aches way down in you

you can visit them, but please don’t stay there

Go outside if you’re able, breathe the air

there are trees for hugging

don’t be embarrassed

it’s your friend, it’s your mother, it’s your new crush

lay your cheek against the bark, it’s a living thing to touch

Sadly, leave all benches empty

appreciate the kindness in the distance of strangers

as you pine for company and wave at your neighbours

savour the depths of your conversations

the layers uncovered

in this strange space and time

Society is afraid of change

and no one wants to die

not now, from a tiny virus

not later from the world on fire

But death is a truth we all hate to know

we all get to live, and then we all have to go

In the meantime, we’re surrounded, we’re alone

each a thread woven in the fabric, unravelling in moments though

each a solo entity spinning on its axis, forgetting that the galaxy includes us all

Herein our fall

from grace from each other from god whatever, doesn’t matter

the disaster is that we believe we’re separate

we’re not

As evidenced by viruses taking down societies

as proven by the loneliness inherent in no gatherings

as palpable as the vacancy in the space of one person hugging

If this disruption undoes you

if the absence of people unravels you

if touch was the tether that held you together

and now that it’s severed you’re fragile too

lean into loneliness and know you’re not alone in it

lean into loneliness like it is holding you

like it is a generous representative of a glaring truth

oh, we are connected

we forget this, yet we always knew.

How to Be at Home will be added to the Animation section of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Powell’s Books Unveils a New Perfume That Smells Like Old Books

in Books, Random | November 10th, 2020

Missing the scent of used book stores during quarantine? Powell’s Books has you covered with their new unisex fragrance: “Like the crimson rhododendrons in Rebecca, the heady fragrance of old paper creates an atmosphere ripe with mood and possibility. Invoking a labyrinth of books; secret libraries; ancient scrolls; and cognac swilled by philosopher-kings, Powell’s by Powell’s delivers the wearer to a place of wonder, discovery, and magic heretofore only known in literature.” You can pre-order it here…

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Meticulous, Elegant Illustrations of the Nature Observed in England’s Countryside

in Art, Books, Nature | November 5th, 2020

If you happen to have grown up in the English countryside, you probably retain a certain sensitivity to and affinity for nature. This can express itself in any number of ways, most often by a compulsion to garden, no matter how urban the setting in which you now live. But Jo Brown has shown how to base a career on it: an artist and illustrator — and “birder wildlifer mushroomer,” according to her Twitter bio — she has long kept a “nature journal” documenting the flora and fauna encountered in the countryside around her home in Devon.

“At the end of April 2019, Jo posted a video of her journal so far on Twitter,” says her web site. “It went viral and her followers jumped from 9K followers to 20K followers in two days.” A glance at any given page reveals what so impressed them. “Each page of Brown’s notebook contains a pen and colored pencil drawing that begins at the pages’ edges, appearing to grow from the corner or across the paper,” writes Colossal’s Grace Ebert.

“Sometimes captured through close-ups that mimic scientific illustrations, the delicate renderings depict the detail of a buff-tailed bumblebee’s fuzzy torso and the red tendrils of a round-leaved sundew. Brown notes the common and Latin names for each species and common characteristics, in addition to where and when she spotted it.”

In other words, the nature journal showcases at once its creator’s keen eye, well-trained hand, and formidable knowledge of the natural world. It also stands as a prime example of the art of notebooking.

Using to its fullest advantage her ruled Moleskine notebook (the brand of choice for those invested in doing their jotting and sketching on the go for a couple of decades now), Brown effectively delivers a master class in the vivid, legible, and elegant — dare we say organic? — organization of both visual and textual information in the space of a small page.

You can take a closer look at how she does it on her web site as well as her feeds on both Twitter and Instagram. More recently, her journal has been published in book form as Secrets of a Devon Wood. Few nature-lovers, perhaps, can equal Jo Brown as an artist, but everyone can enjoy the gloriously varied realm of life that surrounds them just as much as she does. “All that’s required,” she says, “is a little patience and quiet observation.”

via Kottke/Colossal

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Why Butt Trumpets & Other Bizarre Images Appeared in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts

A Look into the Wondrous Life & Expansive Work of the Late Jan Morris, Who Wrote the Entire World

A 1913 Children’s Book Lampoons Duchamp, Picasso & Other Avant-Garde Artists: Read The Cubies’ ABC Online

Toni Morrison’s 1,200 Volume Personal Library is Going on Sale: Get a Glimpse of the Books on Her Tribeca Condo Shelves

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

Watch How to Be at Home, a Beautiful Short Animation on the Realities of Social Isolation in 2020

Powell’s Books Unveils a New Perfume That Smells Like Old Books

The Meticulous, Elegant Illustrations of the Nature Observed in England’s Countryside

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