Graphic Novels Tell the Story of David Bowie, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Jean-Michel Basquiat & Other Artists and Thinkers

in Art, Books, Comics/Cartoons | August 19th, 2020

If you’re fascinated by certain artists and thinkers, you can learn about them from books. Anyone who has a significant cultural or intellectual influence on humanity sooner or later gets a biography written about them, and usually more than one. But how many get their own graphic novels? The versatility of the “comic book,” long unsuspected by many Western readers, has been more and more widely discussed in recent decades. Some of those readers, however, won’t believe what can be done with the form until they see what can be done with it. So why not show them the graphic novel on the life of David Bowie published not long ago — and if they remain unconvinced, why not show them the other one?

Few subjects demand a visual form as much as Bowie, because of the centrality of his ever-changing appearance to his artistic project as well as the need to evoke the effervescent cultural periods he lived through and did more than his part to define.

Hence the importance of Michael Allred’s BOWIE: Stardust, Rayguns, & Moonage Daydreams and Nejib’s Haddon Hall as graphic-novel contributions to the growing field of Bowieology. Comic artists and writers have also done well by other figures with places in music history: John Coltrane and Billie Holliday, for example, the subjects of Paolo Parisi’s Coltrane and Blues for Lady Day: The Story of Billie Holiday.

We’ve previously featured both of those books here on Open Culture, as well as Parisi’s Basquiat: A Graphic Novel. Conveying the life of a fellow artist, even one who worked in a different medium, poses a unique set of challenges to the graphic novelist. But it’s one thing to depict the work of another, and something else again to visually reimagine it, as in BOOM! Studios’ adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel involving not a few biographical elements in the first place. Other respected works of literature lately to undergo graphic novelization include James Joyce’s Ulysses in Rob Berry’s Ulysses Seen, and the “weird fiction” of H.P. Lovecraft in the equally weird Lovecraft Anthology.

You can also read a graphic-novel adaptation of a source work never completed in the first place — but never completed, one must note, by Salvador Dalí and the Marx Brothers. A collaboration between pop-culture scholar Josh Frank, artist Manuela Pertega, and comedian Tim Heidecker, Giraffes on Horseback Salad realizes on the page a film that not only was never, but quite possibly could never have been made. For readers closer to worldly reality, there’s Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick’s Feynman: A Biography, which tells and shows the life of world-famous theoretical physicist, teacher, and bon vivant Richard Feynman. Never before, surely, has a comic book had to legibly and convincingly depict quantum electrodynamics, safe-cracking, and bongo-paying — to name just three of Feynman’s pursuits.

Bound by Law?: Free Comic Book Explains How Copyright Complicates Art

iTunes Terms & Conditions Adapted into a Graphic Novel: Read It Free Online

Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Novel Adaptation

Read the Entire Comic Book Adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

A Comic Book Adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Poignant Poem, “Annabel Lee”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 ) |

When Edward Gorey Designed Book Covers for Classic Novels: See His Ironic-Gothic Take on Dickens, Conrad, Poe & More

in Art, Books | August 12th, 2020

Twenty years after his death, it’s cooler than ever to like Edward Gorey. This is evidenced not just by the frequent posting of his intensively crosshatched, Victorian- and Edwardian-period-inflected, grimly comic art on social media, but by the number of artists who now claim him as an influence. Where, one wonders, did they come across Gorey in the first place? Having published more than a hundred books in his lifetime (if often in small runs from obscure presses), he certainly put the work out there to be found.

But it was the much more well-known books of other writers like Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, and Herman Melville that first propagated Gorey’s sensibility of, as The New York Times’ Steven Kurutz puts it, “camp-macabre, ironic-gothic or dark-whimsy.”

Gorey designed the covers for these books and others between 1953 to 1960, when he worked at the art department of publishers Doubleday Anchor. He had been tasked specifically with their new series of paperbacks meant to be “serious,” as opposed to the abundance of cheap, lowbrow, and often salaciously packaged novels that had inspired the term “pulp fiction.”

Of the first 200 titles in this series, says Goreyography, “about a fourth of these have line drawn covers by Gorey.” Even when other artists (the lineup of whom included Leonard Baskin, Milton Glaser, Philippe Julian, and Andy Warhol) drew the illustration, “Gorey then designed the finished product lending a uniform appearance to the whole line.” You can see a variety of Gorey’s Doubleday Anchor paperback covers at Lithub, the most Goreyesque of which (such as Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent at the top of the post) not only bear his illustrations but contain nothing not drawn by Gorey, text and colophon included.

“When these covers first appeared against the backdrop of mass-market covers in general,” according to Goreyography, “they were hailed as ‘modern’ and ‘arty.’ Print magazine praised ‘a feeling of unity… a quality of their own.’ ” The end of Gorey’s time at Doubleday didn’t mean the end of his work on others’ books: in the 1970s, for example, he contributed suitably eerie cover and interior art to John Bellairs’ young-adult novel The House with a Clock in Its Walls and five of the sequels that would follow it. It was in Bellairs’ books that I first encountered the visions of Edward Gorey. More than a few readers of my generation and the generations since could say the same — and also that we’ve been pleasurably haunted by them ever since.

See more covers over at Lithub.

Lemony Snicket Reveals His Edward Gorey Obsession in an Upcoming Animated Documentary

Edward Gorey Talks About His Love Cats & More in the Animated Series, “Goreytelling”

The Best of the Edward Gorey Envelope Art Contest

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 ) |

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

in Art, Books, History | August 7th, 2020

The cards of the tarot, first created for play around 600 years ago and used in recent centuries for occult divination of truths about life, the universe, and everything, should by all rights be nothing more than a historical curiosity today. Yet something about the tarot still compels, even to many of us in the ever more digital, ever more data-driven 21st century. Taschen, publisher of lavish art and photo books, know this: hence, as we featured last year here on Open Culture, products like their box-set reissue of the tarot deck designed by Salvador Dalí. (There must be a meaningful overlap between Taschen’s demographic and Dalí’s fans, given that the publisher more recently put out the most complete collection of his paintings between two covers.)

Dalí isn’t the only artist whose interpretations of the Fool, the Hierophant, the Lovers, the Hanged One, and the other arcana have graced a tarot deck. H.R. Giger, the artist responsible for the biomechanical creepiness of Alien, designed one in the 1990s; more recently, we’ve featured decks illustrated with visions inspired by the novels of Philip K. Dick and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.

But all these together — even including the “Thoth deck” designed by occultist Aleister Crowley and the Sola-Busca deck, the earliest known complete set of tarot cards — represent only a small fraction of the story of tarot’s place in the past six centuries of civilization. That story is told, and more importantly shown, in Taschen’s new book Divine Decks: A Visual History of Tarot.

The first volume in Taschen’s “Library of Esoterica,” the book “gathers more than 500 cards and works of original art from around the world in the ultimate exploration of a centuries-old art form.” An image gallery on Taschen’s web site gives a small sampling of the range of tarot decks found within, including ones created in 1930s England, 1970s Italy, and 2010s Brooklyn. One was intended as a promotional item for an American paper company in the 1960s; another, with different purposes, announces itself as the “Black Power Tarot.” This in addition to such well-known examples as Crowley’s Thoth deck and the venerable Sola-Busca, both lushly reproduced in its pages. And the tarot lives on, as I’m reminded whenever I pass one of the many storefronts here in Seoul offering tarot readings. In any case, it’s certainly come a long way from 15th-century Europe. You can get a copy of Divine Decks: A Visual History of Tarot on Taschen’s website.

H.R. Giger’s Tarot Cards: The Swiss Artist, Famous for His Design Work on Alien, Takes a Journey into the Occult

The Tarot Card Deck Designed by Salvador Dalí

The Thoth Tarot Deck Designed by Famed Occultist Aleister Crowley

Twin Peaks Tarot Cards Now Available as 78-Card Deck

Philip K. Dick Tarot Cards: A Tarot Deck Modeled After the Visionary Sci-Fi Writer’s Inner World

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 ) |

Roald Dahl Gives a Tour of the Small Backyard Hut Where He Wrote All of His Beloved Children’s Books

in Books, Writing | August 6th, 2020

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, The Witches, Matilda: Roald Dahl wrote these and all his other beloved children’s books in a hut. Just fifteen feet long and ten feet wide, it served him for 35 years as an office in which no meetings were held and no calls taken. For four hours a day, broken into two-hour morning and afternoon sessions, it was just Dahl in there — Dahl and his paper, his pencils, his sharpener, his coffee, his cigarettes, his increasingly eccentric collection of artifacts from his own life, and here and there the occasional spider web and goat dropping. It was all part of an effort, explains Dahl’s biographer Jeremy Treglown, “not only to recreate his own early childhood but to improve on it.”

“As a boy in the 1920s,” Treglown writes, “Roald used to hide up in a tree in order to write his diary.” But the hut, constructed right behind his Buckinghamshire home, “was a more substantial place to work, where he could commemorate, and fantasize about, his past.”

On his side were items like “his father’s silver and tortoiseshell paper knife,” a “tablet fragment with a cuneiform inscription found in Babylon” — a souvenir from his time in the King’s African Rifles — and, “saved from operations,” pieces of his own femur and spine. In his hut, Dahl wrote “surrounded by these fetishes, snugly wrapped in a sleeping bag, sitting in an old armchair, his feet on a trunk which was filled with blocks and tied to a leg of the chair, to prevent it from slipping.”

“I couldn’t possibly work in the house, especially when there used to be a lot of children around,” says Dahl in the 1982 clip at the top of the post as he approaches his hut. “Even when there aren’t children, there are vacuum cleaners and people bustling about.” He then goes in to demonstrate his writing routine, which involves the pouring of coffee, sharpening of precisely six pencils “to a fierce point” (a step that had its own procrastination value), the brushing away of the previous day’s eraser dust (onto the floor, where it has remained ever since), and the situation with the armchair and sleeping bag. “Finally you get settled, you get into a sort of nest, you get really comfortable,” Dahl says. “And then you’re away.”

The footage also includes views of Dahl’s much more traditionally well-appointed main house, including its billiards table around which he and his local friends would gather for a twice-weekly session. The game had its influence on Dahl’s writing life, and indeed his writing hut. Among his “snooker pals” was builder Wally Saunders, whom Dahl hired to put it up in the first place (and whose formidable stature and ear size would, nearly thirty later, inspire the title character of The BFG). As he explains on the British Children’s program Going Live, he even covered his handmade wooden writing surfaces, which he placed across the armrests of his chair, with green baize, a material he found easy on the eyes.

When Dahl died in 1990, his writing hut went untouched for two decades. But eventually, as explained in this ITV News clip, the simple building couldn’t withstand further exposure to the elements. So began the project to move the interior of the hut, eraser dust and all, to the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Buckinghamshire. Luckily for Wes Anderson, this happened after he came to Dahl’s home to seek permission to adapt The Fantastic Mr. Fox from the writer’s widow Felicity. So compelling did she find Anderson’s vision that she even allowed him into the “hallowed writing hut,” the ideal space in which to commune with Dahl’s spirit. The hut may now no longer be whole, but that same spirit continues to course through the imaginations of generation after generation of young readers.

When Roald Dahl Hosted His Own Creepy TV Show Way Out, a Companion to Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone (1961)

The Recipes of Iconic Authors: Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Roald Dahl, the Marquis de Sade & More

Roald Dahl, Who Lost His Daughter to Measles, Writes a Heartbreaking Letter about Vaccinations: “It Is Almost a Crime to Allow Your Child to Go Unimmunised”

The Daily Habits of Famous Writers: Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami, Stephen King & More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 ) |

How Vladimir Nabokov Wrote Lolita, “My Most Difficult Book”: A 1989 Documentary

in Books, Literature, Television | July 21st, 2020

How many of us could write a book with the impact of Lolita? The task, as revealed in the BBC Omnibus documentary above, lay almost beyond even the formidable literary powers of Vladimir Nabokov — almost, but obviously not quite. It did push him into new aesthetic, cultural, and compositional realms, as evidenced by his memories of drafting the novel on index cards in roadside motels (and when faced with especially noisy or drafty accommodations, in the backseat of the parked car) while road-tripping though the United States. The documentary’s subject is the exiled aristocrat novelist’s experience writing and publishing Lolita, the book that would make him world-famous — as well as the experience that brought him to the time and place that made such a cultural coup possible.

Aired in 1989, a dozen years after Nabokov’s death, My Most Difficult Book features interviews with the novelist’s Ferrari-driving son and translator Dmitri, his scholar-biographer Brian Boyd, and his younger admirer-colleagues including Martin Amis, A.S. Byatt, and Edmund White. That last describes Nabokov’s novels as “great systems of meaning in which every element refers to every other one,” and Lolita marked a new height in his achievement in that form.

But the book’s popularity, or at least its initial wave of popularity, may be better explained by the controversy surrounding the elements of its by now well-known premise: the refined middle-aged European narrator, the coarse twelve-year-old stepdaughter whom he contrives to sexually possess — and succeeds in sexually possessing — as they drive across America, a vast land whose look, feel, and language Nabokov took pains to capture and repurpose.

“There are a lot of literalists out there,” says Amis, “who will think that you can’t write a novel like Lolita without being a secret slaver after young girls.” That was as true in 1989 as it was in 1955, when the book was first published, and indeed as true as it is today. Well into middle age, we learn in the documentary, strangers would ask Dmitri what it was like to be the son of a “dirty old man,” and in archive interview footage we see Nabokov address the public conflation of himself and Humbert Humbert, Lolita’s pedophiliac narrator. A serious chess enthusiast, Nabokov describes himself as writing novels as he would solve chess problems he posed to himself. What could present a more rigorous challenge than to tell a story, at a high artistic level, from the perspective of a monster? But Nabokov, as he admitted to one interviewer, was indeed a monster, at least according to one definition offered by his much-consulted English dictionary: “A person of unnatural excellence.”

Hear Vladimir Nabokov Read From the Penultimate Chapter of Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita: Just Another Great Love Story?

The Notecards on Which Vladimir Nabokov Wrote Lolita: A Look Inside the Author’s Creative Process

Vladimir Nabokov’s Script for Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita: See Pages from His Original Draft

Vladimir Nabokov Marvels Over Different Lolita Book Covers

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 ) |

Cambridge University Professor Cooks 4000-Year-Old Recipes from Ancient Mesopotamia, and Lets You See How They Turned Out

in Books, Food & Drink, History, Life, Travel | July 13th, 2020

Those of us who’ve dedicated a portion of our isolation to the art of sourdough have not suffered for a lack of information on how that particular sausage should get made.

The Internet harbors hundreds, nay, thousands of complicated, contrary, often contradictory, extremely firm opinions on the subject. You can lose hours…days…weeks, agonizing over which method to use.

The course for Bill Sutherland’s recent culinary experiment was much more clearly charted.

As documented in a series of now-viral Twitter posts, the Cambridge University professor of Conservation Biology decided to attempt a Mesopotamian meal, as inscribed on a 3770-year-old recipe tablet containing humankind’s oldest surviving recipes.

As Sutherland told Bored Panda’s Liucija Adomaite and Ilona Baliūnaitė, the translated recipes, found in Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks: Highlights of the Yale Babylonian Collection, were “astonishingly terse” and “perplexing,” leading to some guess work with regard to onions and garlic.

In addition to 25 recipes, the book has photos and illustrations of various artifacts and essays that “present the ancient Near East in the light of present-day discussion of lived experiences, focusing on family life and love, education and scholarship, identity, crime and transgression, demons, and sickness.”

Kind of like a cradle of civilization Martha Stewart Living, just a bit less user friendly with regard to things like measurements, temperature, and cooking times. Which is not to say the instructions aren’t step-by-step:

Stew of Lamb

Meat is used.

You prepare water.

You add fat.

You add fine-grained salt, barley cakes, onion, Persian shallot, and milk.

You crush and add leek and garlic.

The meal, which required just a couple hours prep in Sutherland’s non-ancient kitchen sounds like something he might have ordered for delivery from one of Cambridge’s Near Eastern restaurants.

The lamb stew was the hit of the night.

Unwinding, a casserole of leeks and spring onion, looked inviting but was “a bit boring.”

Elamite Broth was “peculiar but delicious,” possibly because Sutherland substituted tomato sauce for sheep’s blood.

It’s an admittedly meaty proposition. Only 2 of the 25 recipes in the collection are vegetarian (“meat is not used.”)

And even there, to be really authentic, you’d have to sauté everything in sheep fat.

(Sutherland swapped in butter.)

via Bored Panda

Dictionary of the Oldest Written Language–It Took 90 Years to Complete, and It’s Now Free Online

Hear The Epic of Gilgamesh Read in the Original Akkadian and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her isolation projects are sourdough and an animation with free downloadable posters, encouraging the use of face coverings to stop the spread of COVID-19. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

16th Century Bookwheels, the E‑Readers of the Renaissance, Get Brought to Life by 21st Century Designers

in Books, History, Technology | July 3rd, 2020

Most of us, through our computers or our even our phones, have access to more books than we could ever read in one lifetime. That certainly wouldn’t have been the case in, say, the middle ages, when books — assuming you belonged to the elite who could read them in the first place — were rare and precious objects. Both books and literacy became more common during the Renaissance, though acquaintance with both could still be considered the sign of a potentially serious scholar. And for the most serious Renaissance scholars of all, Italian military engineer Agostino Ramelli designed the bookwheel, an elaborate mechanical device allowing the user to turn from one book to another in relatively quick succession.

First drawn by Ramelli in 1588 (and previously featured here on Open Culture in 2017) but never actually constructed by him, the bookwheel has attracted renewed attention in the 21st century. “In 2018, a group of undergraduate engineering students at the Rochester Institute of Technology set out to build two,” writes Atlas Obscura’s Claire Voon. “They began by diligently studying the Italian engineer’s illustration, then procured historically accurate materials, such as European beech and white oak.

With the help of modern power tools and processes, such as computer modeling and CNC routing, they brought it to life.” You can see the RIT bookwheels under construction and in action in the video above. (Its schematics, near-impossibly complex by the standards of Ramelli’s day, are also available at RIT’s web site.)

Others have also brought Ramelli’s design into reality. In the video just above, for example, we have writer Joshua Foer (previously featured here for his work on the science of memorization) taking his own reproduction for a spin. “It’s a ferris wheel for books,” Foer explains, “so that a scholar can have eight books in front of them, sort of like tabbed browsing before tabbed browsing.” The device’s cherry wood and laser-cut gears are certainly handsome, but what of its practicality? “I often read multiple books at one time, and this way I can have them all open in front of me.” Most all of us start more books than we can finish, and as we attempt to read them all in parallel, occasionally one or two do get forgotten. Hence one advantage, even in our modern times, of Ramelli’s book wheel: any book placed on it becomes as unignorable as the machine itself.

Discover the Jacobean Traveling Library: The 17th Century Precursor to the Kindle

The Art of Making Old-Fashioned, Hand-Printed Books

Wonderfully Weird & Ingenious Medieval Books

Wearable Books: In Medieval Times, They Took Old Manuscripts & Turned Them into Clothes

How to Memorize an Entire Chapter from “Moby Dick”: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 ) |

An Animated Introduction to the Pioneering Anthropologist Margaret Mead

in Books, History | July 2nd, 2020

Modern Western societies haven’t solved the problem of sex, but Samoa has the answer. Or at least it does according to the work of influential anthropologist Margaret Mead, subject of the animated introduction from Alain de Botton’s School of Life above. Her mentor Franz Boas, the founder of anthropology in the United States, saw not a world progressing “in a linear fashion from barbarism to savagery to civilization” but “teeming with separate cultures, each with their own unique perspectives, insights, and efficiencies.”

Though Mead’s time living among the natives on the distant islands of Samoa came at Boas’ suggestion, she already believed that “isolated cultures could serve as laboratories that would reveal ways of living that the modern world had forgotten about, but needed to remember.” The resulting book, 1928’s Coming of Age in Samoa, turned Mead into the most famous anthropologist in the world. In it she describes Samoan culture as “far more open and comfortable with sex than the modern United States. Little children in Samoa knew all about masturbation, and learned about intercourse and other acts through first-hand observation, but thought of it as no more scandalous or worthy of comment than death or birth.”

Mead also noted an acceptance of not just homosexuality but a natural shift in sexual orientation over time — a condition bound to intrigue a serious scholar who herself led a rather unconventional life, “simultaneously involved with successive husbands and her ever-present female lover.” Her analysis of Samoa, which informed the worldviews of such influential figures as childrearing guru Benjamin Spock, would take on an even broader appeal in the 1960s, when a rising counterculture sought inspiration in its push to transform Western society. Proponents of the “sexual revolution” and its loosening of norms found a natural ally in Mead, and traces of her life and work remain in fragments of the Summer of Love up to and including Hair, one of whose minor characters has her name.

Mead also comes up in Hunter Thompson’s 1971 epitaph for the counterculture, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The scene is the National District Attorneys Association’s Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, at which a participant suggests that Mead partakes in the substance known as marijuana. The “drug expert” onstage replies thus: “At her age, if she did smoke grass, she’d have one hell of a trip.” Though Mead publicly showed sympathy for addicts, whom she described as “casualties of a badly organized society,” her own experiences with mind-altering substances are less well documented. But then, her time in Samoa may well have been the only consciousness-expanding trip she needed.

A Complete Digitization of Eros Magazine: The Controversial 1960s Magazine on the Sexual Revolution

The History of Western Social Theory, by Alan MacFarlane, Cambridge University

Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss Remembered

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 ) |

Graphic Novels Tell the Story of David Bowie, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Jean-Michel Basquiat & Other Artists and Thinkers

When Edward Gorey Designed Book Covers for Classic Novels: See His Ironic-Gothic Take on Dickens, Conrad, Poe & More

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

Roald Dahl Gives a Tour of the Small Backyard Hut Where He Wrote All of His Beloved Children’s Books

How Vladimir Nabokov Wrote Lolita, “My Most Difficult Book”: A 1989 Documentary

Cambridge University Professor Cooks 4000-Year-Old Recipes from Ancient Mesopotamia, and Lets You See How They Turned Out

16th Century Bookwheels, the E‑Readers of the Renaissance, Get Brought to Life by 21st Century Designers

An Animated Introduction to the Pioneering Anthropologist Margaret Mead

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