160,000+ Medieval Manuscripts Online: Where to Find Them

in Books, History | December 17th, 2020

“Manuscripts are the most important medium writing has ever had,” declares the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at the Universität Hamburg. Under the influence of a certain presentist bias, this can be hard to believe. We are conditioned by what Marshall McLuhan described as The Gutenberg Galaxy: each of us is in some way what he called (in gendered language) a “Gutenberg Man.” From this point of view, “manuscript technology,” as he wrote in 1962, does “not have the intensity or power of extension to create publics on a national scale.” It seems quaint, archaic, too rarified to have much influence.

It may be the case, as McLuhan writes, that the printing press and the modern nation state arose together, but this is not necessarily an unqualified measure of progress. Print has had a few hundred years—however, “for thousands of years,” Universität Hamburg reminds us, “manuscripts have had a determining influence on all cultures that were shaped by them.” McLuhan himself was a distinguished scholar and a devoted Catholic who no doubt understood this very well. One suspects lesser writers might avoid the manuscript, in its incredible complexity, because it’s not only a different kind, it is a different species of media altogether.

Manuscript culture is its own field of study for good reason. We are generally talking about texts written on parchment or vellum, which are, after all, treated animal skins. Paper is easier to reproduce, but has a much shorter shelf life. No two manuscripts are the same, some differ from each other wildly: variants, interpolations, redactions, erasures, palimpsests, etc. are standard, requiring special training in editorial methods. Then there’s the languages and the handwriting…. It can be forbidding, but there are other, more surmountable reasons this field has been so hermetic until the recent past.

The primary sources have been inaccessible, hidden away in special collections, and the scholarship and pedagogy have been cloistered behind university walls. Open access digital publishing and free online courses and materials have changed the situation radically. And it is rapidly becoming the case that most manuscript libraries have major, and expanding, online collections, often scanned in high resolution, sometimes with transcriptions, and usually with additional resources explaining provenance and other such important details.

Indeed, there are thousands of manuscript pages online from well over a thousand years, and you’ll find them digitized at the links to several venerable institutions of preservation and higher learning below. There is, of course, no reason we cannot appreciate this long historical tradition for purely aesthetic reasons. So many Medieval manuscripts are works of art in their own right. But if we want to get into the gritty details, we can start by learning how such illuminated medieval manuscripts were made: a lost art, but not, thanks to the durability of parchment, a lost tradition.

Learn even more at the links below.

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

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

Behold the Beautiful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketchbook: A Window Into How Illuminated Manuscripts Were Made (1494)

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

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The Dune Graphic Novel: Experience Frank Herbert’s Epic Sci-Fi Saga as You’ve Never Seen It Before

in Books, Comics/Cartoons, Literature, Sci Fi | December 16th, 2020

Like so many major motion pictures slated for a 2020 release, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune has been bumped into 2021. But fans of Frank Herbert’s epic science-fiction saga haven’t had to go entirely without adaptations this year, since last month saw the release of the first Dune graphic novel. Written by Kevin J. Anderson and Frank Herbert’s son Brian Herbert, co-authors of twelve Dune prequel and sequel novels, this 160-page volume constitutes just the first part of a trilogy intended to visually retell the story of the first Dune book. This tripartite breakdown seems to have been a wise move: the many adaptors (and would-be) adaptors of the linguistically, mythologically, and technologically complex novel have found out over the decades, it’s easy to bite off more Dune than you can chew.

Audiences, too, can only digest so much Dune at a sitting themselves. “The particular challenge to adapting Dune, especially the early part, is that there is so much information to be conveyed — and in the novel it is done in prose and dialog, rather than action — we found it challenging to portray visually,” says Anderson in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter.

“Fortunately, the landscape is so sweeping, we could show breathtaking images as a way to convey that background.” This is the landscape of the desert planet Arrakis, source of a substance known as “spice.” Used as a fuel for space travel, spice has become the most precious substance in the galaxy, and its control is bitterly struggled over by numerous royal houses. (Any resemblance to Earth’s petroleum is, of course, entirely coincidental.)

The main narrative thread of the many running through Dune follows Paul Atreides, scion of the House Atreides. With his family sent to run Arrakis, Paul finds himself at the center of political intrigue, planetary revolution, and even a clandestine scheme to create a superhuman savior. Though Herbert and Anderson have produced a faithful adaptation, the graphic novel “trims the story down to its most iconic touchstone scenes,” as Thom Dunn puts it in his Boing Boing review (adding that it happens to focus in “a lot of the same scenes as David Lynch did with his gloriously messy film adaptation”). This streamlining also employs techniques unique to graphic novels: to retain the book’s shifting omniscient narration, for example, “differently colored caption boxes present inner monologues from different characters like voiceovers so as not to interrupt the scene.”

As if telling the story of Dune at a graphic novel’s pace wasn’t task enough, Anderson, Herbert and their collaborators also have to convey its unusual and richly imagined world — in not just words, of course, but images. “Dune has had a lot of visual interpretations over the years, from Lynch’s bizarre pseudo-period piece treatment to the modern televised mini-series’ more gritty interpretation,” writes Polygon’s Charlie Hall. While “Villeneuve’s vibe appears to take its inspiration from more futuristic science fiction — all angles and chunky armor,” the graphic novel’s artists Raúl Allén and Patricia Martín “opt for something a bit more steampunk.” These choices all further what Brian Herbert describes as a mission to “bring a young demographic to Frank Herbert’s incredible series.” Such readers have shown great enthusiasm for stories of teenage protagonists who grow to assume a central role in the struggle between good and evil — not that, in the world of Dune, any conflict is quite so simple.

A Side-by-Side, Shot-by-Shot Comparison of Denis Villeneuve’s 2020 Dune and David Lynch’s 1984 Dune

Why You Should Read Dune: An Animated Introduction to Frank Herbert’s Ecological, Psychological Sci-Fi Epic

The 14-Hour Epic Film, Dune, That Alejandro Jodorowsky, Pink Floyd, Salvador Dalí, Moebius, Orson Welles & Mick Jagger Never Made

Moebius’ Storyboards & Concept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

The Dune Coloring & Activity Books: When David Lynch’s 1984 Film Created Countless Hours of Peculiar Fun for Kids

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 ( 3 ) |

David Byrne Turns His Acclaimed Musical American Utopia into a Picture Book for Grown-Ups, with Vivid Illustrations by Maira Kalman

in Art, Books, Current Affairs, Life | December 15th, 2020

Whatever your feelings about the sentimental, lighthearted 1960 Disney film Pollyanna, or the 1913 novel on which it’s based, it’s fair to say that history has pronounced its own judgment, turning the name Pollyanna into a slur against excessive optimism, an epithet reserved for adults who display the guileless, out-of-touch naïveté of children. Pitted against Pollyanna’s effervescence is Aunt Polly, too caught up in her grown-up concerns to recognize, until it’s almost too late, that maybe it’s okay to be happy.

Maybe we all have to be a little like practical Aunt Polly, but do we also have a place for Pollyannas? Can that not also be the role of the modern artist? David Byrne hasn’t been waiting for permission to spread joy in his late career. Contra the common wisdom of most adults, a couple years back Byrne began to gather positive news stories under the heading Reasons to Be Cheerful, now an online magazine.

Then, Byrne had the audacity to call a 2018 album, tour, and Broadway show American Utopia, and the gall to have Spike Lee direct a concert film with the same title, and release it smack in the middle of 2020, a year all of us will be glad to see in hindsight. Byrne’s two-year endeavor can be seen as his answer to “American Carnage,” the grim phrase that began the Trump era.

As if all that weren’t enough, American Utopia is now an “impressionistic, sweetly illustrated adult picture book,” as Lily Meyer writes at NPR, “a soothing and uplifting, if somewhat nebulous, experience of art.” Working with artist Maira Kalman, Byrne has turned his conceptual musical into something like a “book-length poem… filled with charming illustrations of trees, dancers, and party-hatted dogs.”

Byrne’s project is not naive, Maria Popova argues at Brain Pickings, it’s Whitmanesque, a salvo of irrepressible optimism against “a kind of pessimistic ahistorical amnesia” in which we “judge the deficiencies of the present without the long victory ledger of past and fall into despair.” American Utopia doesn’t articulate this so much as perform it, either with bare feet and gray suits onstage or the vivid colors of Kalman’s drawings, “lightly at odds,” Meyer notes, “with Byrne’s words, transforming their plain optimism into a more nuanced appeal.”

American Utopia the book, like the musical before it, was written and drawn before the pandemic. Do Byrne and Kalman still have reasons to be cheerful post-COVID? Just last week, they sat down with Isaac Fitzgerald for Live Talks LA to discuss it. You can see the whole, hour-long conversation just above. Kalman confesses she’s still in “quiet shock,” but finds hope in historical perspective and “incredible people out there doing fantastic things.”

Byrne takes us on one of his fascinating investigations into the history of thought, referencing a theorist named Aby Warburg who saw in the sum total of art a kind “animated life” that connects us, past, present, and future, and who reminded him, “Yes, there are other ways of thinking about things!” Perhaps the visionary and the Pollyannaish need not be so far apart. See several more of Kalman and Byrne’s beautifully optimistic pages from American Utopia, the book, at Brain Pickings.

David Byrne Launches Reasons to Be Cheerful, an Online Magazine Featuring Articles by Byrne, Brian Eno & More

David Byrne Curates a Playlist of Great Protest Songs Written Over the Past 60 Years: Stream Them Online

Watch Life-Affirming Performances from David Byrne’s New Broadway Musical American Utopia

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

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

A Visual History of The Rolling Stones Documented in a Beautiful, 450-Page Photo Book by Taschen

in Books, Music | December 14th, 2020

There is a certain look that screams rock ‘n’ roll—one part outlaw biker, one part psychedelic magician, one part pimp, one part circus performer…. But where did it come from? We could trace it back to Link Wray, Little Richard, Elvis, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. But the Rolling Stones refined and perfected the look, as they refined and perfected the slurred, shambling barroom blues that became a signature sound at their peak. Even punks who rejected the rock star image couldn’t help looking like Keith Richards at times. It’s unavoidable. The Beatles turned rock into immaculate chamber pop. The Stones turned it into pure, raw, greasy sleaze, and bless them for it.

“Early on,” says photographer Ethan Russell, who photographed them during 1969 and 1972 tours, “the Rolling Stones had this phenomenal edginess in their image, and they were able to carry it into the age of imagery and stay out in front of it. The way the Stones have inhabited their images is one reason they have been able to stay a relevant act over all these years.”

For the band’s 50th anniversary in 2012, they came up with the idea of a massive photo book with Taschen that collects hundreds of photographs from the span of their career. The photos “range from the Stones’ nascent days as blues-crazed boy musicians in houndstooth jackets,” notes The New York Times, “to their most recent years as the leather-faced but stylishly venerable elders of rock ‘n’ roll.”

The book also charts the band’s lineup changes along the way, capturing brilliant and tragic Brian Jones, underrated Mick Taylor, and understated Bill Wyman, who left in the early 90s. Over the years, a couple dozen famous photographers have immortalized them: David Bailey, Herb Ritts, Peter Beard, Andy Warhol, David LaChapelle, Annie Leibovitz, Gered Mankowitz, Cecil Beaton, Anton Corbijn, and so many more—all represented here in glorious full-color spreads. The over 500-page book also includes essays from writers like David Dalton, Waldemar Januszczak, and Luc Sante and an appendix with a timeline, discography, and bios of the photographers.

The Rolling Stones also features images from the Stones’ archives in New York and London, adding “an equally extraordinary, more private side to their story,” writes Taschen. First published in 2012, the book will soon be reissued in an updated edition for 2020. Need a gift for the Stones superfan in your life? Consider a ringing endorsement from another rock star, Anthony Bourdain, who called the book his favorite: “iconic then, iconic now,” says Bourdain, “they wrote the book on what it meant to be rock stars: how to look, dress, behave.… They were the first rock and roll aristocrats.” Pick up a copy of Taschen’s The Rolling Stones on Amazon.

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

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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.

The Flute of Shame: Discover the Instrument/Device Used to Publicly Humiliate Bad Musicians During the Medieval Period

Why Knights Fought Snails in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

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.

Watch the Rise and Fall of the British Empire in an Animated Time-Lapse Map ( 519 A.D. to 2014 A.D.)

Watch Sir Edmund Hillary Describe His Everest Ascent, on the 60th Anniversary of His Climb

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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 ( None ) |

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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Hear Toni Morrison (RIP) Present Her Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech on the Radical Power of Language (1993)

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

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

160,000+ Medieval Manuscripts Online: Where to Find Them

The Dune Graphic Novel: Experience Frank Herbert’s Epic Sci-Fi Saga as You’ve Never Seen It Before

David Byrne Turns His Acclaimed Musical American Utopia into a Picture Book for Grown-Ups, with Vivid Illustrations by Maira Kalman

A Visual History of The Rolling Stones Documented in a Beautiful, 450-Page Photo Book by Taschen

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

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