The New York Public Library Creates a List of 125 Books That They Love

in Books, Libraries, Literature, Podcasts | February 17th, 2020

The New York Pub­lic Library sure knows how to cel­e­brate a quasqui­cen­ten­ni­al. In hon­or of its own 125th anniver­sary, it’s rolling out a num­ber of treats for patrons, vis­i­tors, and those who must admire it from afar.

In addi­tion to the expect­ed author talks and live events, Patience and For­ti­tude, the icon­ic stone lions who flank the main branch’s front steps, are dis­play­ing some read­ing mate­r­i­al of their own—Toni Morrison’s 1987 nov­el Beloved and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age clas­sic The Great Gats­by, from 1925.

Donors who kick in $12.50 or more to help the library con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing such pub­lic ser­vices as ear­ly lit­er­a­cy class­es, free legal aid, and job train­ing cours­es will be reward­ed with a cheer­ful red stick­er bear­ing the easy to love slo­gan “♥ read­ing.”

The cov­er image of Ezra Jack Keats’ 1962 Calde­cott Award-win­ning pic­ture book The Snowy Day, which at 485,583 check­outs holds the title for most pop­u­lar book in the cir­cu­lat­ing col­lec­tion, graces spe­cial edi­tion Library and Metro­Cards.

And a team of librar­i­ans drew up a list of 125 books from the last 125 years that inspire a life­long love of read­ing.

The list is delib­er­ate­ly inclu­sive with regard to authors’ gen­der, race, and sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion as well as lit­er­ary genre. In addi­tion to nov­els and non-fic­tion, you’ll find mem­oir, poet­ry, fan­ta­sy, graph­ic nov­els, sci­ence fic­tion, mys­tery, short sto­ries, humor, and one children’s book, Har­ry Pot­ter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which the judges decid­ed “tran­scends age cat­e­gories.” (A sim­i­lar list geared toward younger read­ers will be released lat­er this year.)

The list was drawn from a pool con­tain­ing any­thing pub­lished after May 23rd, 1895, the day attor­ney John Bigelow’s plan to com­bine the resources of the Astor and Lenox libraries and the Tilden Trustin into The New York Pub­lic Library was offi­cial­ly incor­po­rat­ed.

The selec­tion cri­te­ria can be viewed here.

Obvi­ous­ly, the list—and any per­ceived omissions—will gen­er­ate pas­sion­ate debate amongst book lovers, a prospect the library rel­ish­es, though it’s enlist­ed one of its most ardent sup­port­ers, author Neil Gaiman, whose Amer­i­can Gods made the final cut, to remind any dis­grun­tled read­ers of the spir­it in which the picks were made:

The New York Pub­lic Library has put togeth­er a list of 125 books that they love—the librar­i­ans and the peo­ple in the library. That’s the cri­te­ria. You may not love them, but they do. And that’s excit­ing. The thing that gets peo­ple read­ing is love. The thing that makes peo­ple pick up books they might not oth­er­wise try, is love. It’s per­son­al rec­om­men­da­tions, the kind that are tru­ly meant. So here are 125 books that they love. And some­where on this list you will find books you’ve nev­er read, but have always meant to, or have nev­er even heard of. There are 125 chances here to change your own life, or to change some­one else’s, curat­ed by the peo­ple from one of the finest libraries in the world. Read with joy. Read with love. Read!

To real­ly get the most out of the list, tune in to the NYPL’s The Librar­i­an Is In pod­cast, which will be devot­ing an episode to one of the fea­tured titles each month.

The cur­rent episode kicks things off with co-hosts Frank Col­lerius and Rhon­da Evans’ favorites from the list:

Maus by Art Spiegel­man

Beloved by Toni Mor­ri­son

Invis­i­ble Man by Ralph Elli­son

The Haunt­ing of Hill House by Shirley Jack­son

The House of Mirth by Edith Whar­ton

Har­ry Pot­ter and the Sor­cer­er’s Stone by J.K. Rowl­ing

In Cold Blood by Tru­man Capote

Their Eyes Were Watch­ing God by Zora Neale Hurston

Read­ers, have a look at the com­plete list of the New York Pub­lic Library’s 125 Books for Adult Read­ers, and leave us a com­ment to let us know what titles you wish had been includ­ed. Or bet­ter yet, tell us which as-yet unread title you’re plan­ning to read in hon­or of the New York Pub­lic Library’s 125th year:

George Orwell, 1984

Saul Bel­low, The Adven­tures of Augie March

W.H. Auden, The Age of Anx­i­ety

Ron Cher­now, Alexan­der Hamil­ton

Erich Maria Remar­que, All Qui­et on the West­ern Front

James Pat­ter­son, Along Came a Spi­der

Michael Chabon, The Amaz­ing Adven­tures of Kava­lier & Clay

Neil Gaiman, Amer­i­can Gods

Mary Oliv­er, Amer­i­can Prim­i­tive

Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None

Mag­gie Nel­son, The Arg­onauts

Sylvia Plath, Ariel

Ian McE­wan, Atone­ment

Anne Car­son, Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Red

Toni Mor­ri­son, Beloved

Ray­mond Chan­dler, The Big Sleep

Tom Wolfe, The Bon­fire of the Van­i­ties

Eve­lyn Waugh, Brideshead Revis­it­ed

Colm Tóibín, Brook­lyn

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

J.D. Salinger, The Catch­er in the Rye

Clau­dia Rank­ine, Cit­i­zen

Sta­cy Schiff, Cleopa­tra

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Langston Hugh­es, The Col­lect­ed Poems of Langston Hugh­es

Ter­ry Pratch­ett, The Col­or of Mag­ic

Alice Walk­er, The Col­or Pur­ple

Wal­ter Mosley, Dev­il in a Blue Dress

Erik Lar­son, The Dev­il in the White City

Frank Her­bert, Dune

Michael Ondaat­je, The Eng­lish Patient

Alyssa Cole, An Extra­or­di­nary Union

Ray Brad­bury, Fahren­heit 451

J.R. R. Tolkien, The Fel­low­ship of the Ring

N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Sea­son

Ali­son Bechdel, Fun Home

George R. R. Mar­tin, A Game of Thrones

James Bald­win, Giovanni’s Room

Arund­hati Roy, The God of Small Things

Flan­nery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find

Edwin G. Bur­rows and Mike Wal­lace, Gotham

John Stein­beck, The Grapes of Wrath

F. Scott Fitzger­ald, The Great Gats­by

Mar­garet Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

J.K. Rowl­ing, Har­ry Pot­ter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Shirley Jack­son, The Haunt­ing of Hill House

Car­son McCullers, The Heart Is a Lone­ly Hunter

Dave Eggers, A Heart­break­ing Work of Stag­ger­ing Genius

Dou­glas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas

Edith Whar­ton, The House of Mirth

Mar­i­lynne Robin­son, House­keep­ing

Allen Gins­berg, Howl

Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Tru­man Capote, In Cold Blood

Bev­er­ly Jenk­ins, Indi­go

Jhumpa Lahiri, Inter­preter of Mal­adies

Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air

Ralph Elli­son, Invis­i­ble Man

Gore Vidal, Julian

Khaled Hos­sei­ni, The Kite Run­ner

Ursu­la K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Dark­ness

Mary Karr, The Liars’ Club

Kate Atkin­son, Life After Life

Tra­cy K. Smith, Life on Mars

Vladimir Nabokov, Loli­ta

Art Spiegel­man, Maus

David Sedaris, Me Talk Pret­ty One Day

John Berendt, Mid­night in the Gar­den of Good and Evil

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Chil­dren

Mar­tin Amis: Mon­ey

Michael Lewis: Mon­ey­ball

Jonathan Lethem, Moth­er­less Brook­lyn

Vir­ginia Woolf, Mrs. Dal­loway

Ele­na Fer­rante, My Bril­liant Friend

J.D. Robb, Naked in Death

Richard Wright, Native Son

Eliz­a­beth Strout, Olive Kit­teridge

Jack Ker­ouac, On the Road

Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez, One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude

Jeanette Win­ter­son, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Adam John­son, The Orphan Master’s Son

Per Pet­ter­son, Out Steal­ing Hors­es

Octavia E. But­ler, Para­ble of the Sow­er

Mar­jane Satrapi, Perse­po­lis

Annie Dil­lard, Pil­grim at Tin­ker Creek

Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Com­plaint

Gra­ham Greene, The Qui­et Amer­i­can

Daphne du Mau­ri­er, Rebec­ca

Kazuo Ishig­uro, The Remains of the Day

Louise Erdrich, The Round House

Amor Towles, Rules of Civil­i­ty

Alice Munro, Run­away

John Ash­bery, Self-Por­trar­it in a Con­vex Mir­ror

Stephen King, The Shin­ing

Annie Proulx, The Ship­ping News

Rachel Car­son, Silent Spring

Nali­ni Singh, Slave to Sen­sa­tion

Joan Did­ion, Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem

Leslie Fein­berg, Stone Butch Blues

John Cheev­er, The Sto­ries of John Cheev­er

Albert Camus, The Stranger

Ernest Hem­ing­way, The Sun Also Ris­es

Patri­cia High­smith, The Tal­ent­ed Mr. Rip­ley

George Saun­ders, Tenth of Decem­ber

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watch­ing God

Chin­ua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Cix­in Liu, The Three-Body Prob­lem

Harp­er Lee, To Kill a Mock­ing­bird

Denis John­son, Train Dreams

Hen­ry James, The Turn of the Screw

Milan Kun­dera, The Unbear­able Light­ness of Being

Col­son White­head, The Under­ground Rail­road

Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel

Jef­frey Eugenides, The Vir­gin Sui­cides

Jen­nifer Egan, A Vis­it from the Goon Squad

Isabel Wilk­er­son, The Warmth of Oth­er Suns

Alan Moore and Dave Gib­bons, Watch­men

Ray­mond Carv­er, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Don DeLil­lo, White Noise

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Haru­ki Muraka­mi, The Wind-Up Bird Chron­i­cle

Hilary Man­tel, Wolf Hall

Max­ine Hong Kingston, The Woman War­rior

Via Lit Hub

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New York Pub­lic Library Announces the Top 10 Checked-Out Books of All Time

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets You Down­load 180,000 Images in High Res­o­lu­tion: His­toric Pho­tographs, Maps, Let­ters & More

New York Pub­lic Library Card Now Gives You Free Access to 33 NYC Muse­ums

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join Ayun’s com­pa­ny The­ater of the Apes in New York City this March for her book-based vari­ety series, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, and the world pre­miere of Greg Kotis’ new musi­cal, I AM NOBODY. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

An Archive of Handwritten Traditional Mexican Cookbooks Is Now Online

in Books, Food & Drink, History | February 12th, 2020

“The search for authen­tic Mex­i­can food—or rather, the strug­gle to define what that meant—has been going on for two hun­dred years,” writes Jef­frey Pilch­er at Guer­ni­ca. Argu­ments over nation­al cui­sine first divid­ed into fac­tions along his­tor­i­cal lines of con­quest. Indige­nous, corn-based cuisines were pit­ted against wheat-based Euro­pean foods, while Tex-Mex cook­ing has been “indus­tri­al­ized and car­ried around the world,” its processed com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion pos­ing an offense to both indige­nous peo­ples and Span­ish elites, who them­selves lat­er “sought to ground their nation­al cui­sine in the pre-His­pan­ic past” in order to fend off asso­ci­a­tions with glob­al­ized Mex­i­can food of the chain restau­rant vari­ety.

Stephanie Noell, Spe­cial Col­lec­tions Librar­i­an at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas San Anto­nio (UTSA), explains how these lines were drawn cen­turies ear­li­er dur­ing the “culi­nary cul­tur­al exchange” of the colo­nial peri­od: “[C]onquistador Bernal Diaz del Castil­lo referred to corn dish­es as the ‘mis­ery of maize cakes.’ On the oth­er side, the Nahuas were not impressed by the Spaniards’ wheat bread, describ­ing it as ‘famine food.’” What­ev­er we point to—corn, wheat, etc.—and call “Mex­i­can food,” we are sure to be cor­rect­ed by some­one in the know.

Cook­ing, as every­one knows, is not only region­al and polit­i­cal, but also deeply per­son­al– tied to fam­i­ly gath­er­ings and passed through gen­er­a­tions in hand­writ­ten recipes, some­times jeal­ous­ly guard­ed lest they be stolen and turned into fast food. But thanks to UTSA Libraries, we have access to hun­dreds of such recipes. An ini­tial dona­tion of 550 cook­books has grown to include “over 2,000 titles in Eng­lish and Span­ish,” notes UTSA, “doc­u­ment­ing the his­to­ry of Mex­i­can cui­sine from 1789 to the present, with most books dat­ing from 1940–2000.” Many of the books, like that below from 1960, con­sist of hand­writ­ten con­tent next to cut-and-paste recipes and ideas from mag­a­zines.

The col­lec­tion spans “region­al cook­ing, healthy and veg­e­tar­i­an recipes, cor­po­rate adver­tis­ing cook­books, and man­u­script recipe books.” The old­est cook­book, belong­ing to some­one named “Doña Ignaci­ta,” whom Noell believes to have been the kitchen man­ag­er of a wealthy fam­i­ly, “is a hand­writ­ten recipe col­lec­tion in a note­book,” writes Nils Bern­stein at Atlas Obscu­ra, “com­plete with liq­uid stains, doo­dles, and pages that nat­u­ral­ly fall open to the most-loved recipes.” Like the oth­er man­u­script cook­books in the col­lec­tion, “nev­er intend­ed for pub­lic scruti­ny,” this one “pro­vides essen­tial insight on how real house­holds cooked on a reg­u­lar basis.”

“I’ve had stu­dents in tears going through these,” says Noell, “because it’s so pow­er­ful to see that con­nec­tion with how their fam­i­ly makes cer­tain dish­es and where they orig­i­nat­ed.” On the oth­er hand, we also have gener­ic “Cor­po­rate Cook­books” like Rec­etario Bim­bo, a book of sand­wich recipes from the well-known bread com­pa­ny Bim­bo. Recent pub­li­ca­tions like the ultra-hip, 2017 Fies­ta: Veg­an Mex­i­can Cook­book, which promis­es “over 75 authen­tic veg­an-Mex­i­can food recipes includ­ed,” strain the word “authen­tic” to its break­ing point. (“Want to feel all the great ben­e­fits from the keto­genic diet?” the book’s blurb asks, a ques­tion that prob­a­bly nev­er occurred to either Aztecs or Con­quis­ta­dors.)

The UTSA Mex­i­can Cook­books col­lec­tion is open to the pub­lic and any­one can vis­it it in per­son, but Noell wants “any­body with an inter­net con­nec­tion to be able to see these works.” UTSA has been busy dig­i­tiz­ing the 100 man­u­script cook­books in the col­lec­tion, and has scanned about half so far, with Doña Ignacita’s 1789 note­book com­ing soon. While these aren’t like­ly to resolve debates about what con­sti­tutes authen­tic Mex­i­can cooking—as if such a thing exist­ed in a mono­lith­ic, time­less form—they are sure to be of very keen inter­est to chefs, home cooks, his­to­ri­ans, and enthu­si­asts of the his­to­ry of Mex­i­can food. Enter the dig­i­tal col­lec­tion of man­u­script cook­books here.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Archive of 3,000 Vin­tage Cook­books Lets You Trav­el Back Through Culi­nary Time

82 Vin­tage Cook­books, Free to Down­load, Offer a Fas­ci­nat­ing Illus­trat­ed Look at Culi­nary and Cul­tur­al His­to­ry

The Futur­ist Cook­book (1930) Tried to Turn Ital­ian Cui­sine into Mod­ern Art

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Old Book Illustrations: An Online Database Lets You Download Thousands of Illustrations from the 19th & 20th Centuries

in Art, Books | February 11th, 2020

The Gold­en Age of Illus­tra­tion is typ­i­cal­ly dat­ed between 1880 and the ear­ly decades of the 20th cen­tu­ry. This was “a peri­od of unprece­dent­ed excel­lence in book and mag­a­zine illus­tra­tion,” writes Art­cy­clo­pe­dia; the time of artists like John Ten­niel, Beat­rix Pot­ter (below), Arthur Rack­ham, and Aubrey Beard­s­ley. Some of the most promi­nent illus­tra­tors, such as Beard­s­ley and Har­ry Clarke (see one of his Poe illus­tra­tions above), also became inter­na­tion­al­ly known artists in the Art Nou­veau, Arts and Crafts, and Pre-Raphaelite move­ments.

But exten­sive book illus­tra­tion as the pri­ma­ry visu­al cul­ture of print pre­cedes this peri­od by sev­er­al decades. One of the most revered and pro­lif­ic of fine art book illus­tra­tors, Gus­tave Doré, did some of his best work in the mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry.

Oth­er French illus­tra­tors, such as Alphonse de Neuville and Emile-Antoine Bayard, made impres­sive con­tri­bu­tions in the 1860s and 70s—for exam­ple, to Jules Verne’s lav­ish­ly illus­trat­ed, 54-vol­ume Voy­ages Extra­or­di­naires.

As Col­in Mar­shall wrote in a recent post here, these copi­ous illus­tra­tions (4,000 in all) served more than a just dec­o­ra­tive pur­pose. A less than “ful­ly lit­er­ate pub­lic” ben­e­fit­ed from the pic­ture-book style. So too did read­ers hun­gry for styl­ish visu­al humor, for doc­u­men­tary rep­re­sen­ta­tions of nature, archi­tec­ture, fash­ion, etc., before pho­tog­ra­phy became not only pos­si­ble but also inex­pen­sive to repro­duce. What­ev­er the rea­son, read­ers through­out the nine­teenth and ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­turies would gen­er­al­ly expect their read­ing mate­r­i­al to come with pic­tures, and very fine­ly ren­dered ones at that.

The online data­base Old Book Illus­tra­tions has cat­a­logued thou­sands of these illus­tra­tions, lift­ed from their orig­i­nal con­text and search­able by artist name, source, date, book title, tech­niques, for­mats, pub­lish­ers, sub­ject, etc. “There are also a num­ber of col­lec­tions to browse through,” notes Kot­tke, “and each are tagged with mul­ti­ple key­words.” Not all of the work rep­re­sent­ed here is up to the unique­ly high stan­dards of a Gus­tave Doré (below), Aubrey Beard­s­ley, or John Ten­niel, all of whom, along with hun­dreds of oth­er artists, get their own cat­e­gories. But that’s not entire­ly the point of this library.

Old Book Illus­tra­tions presents itself as a schol­ar­ly resource, includ­ing a dig­i­tized Dic­tio­nary of the Art of Print­ing and short arti­cles on some of the most famous artists and sig­nif­i­cant texts from the peri­od. The site’s pub­lish­ers are also trans­par­ent about their selec­tion process. They are guid­ed by their “rea­sons per­tain­ing to taste, con­sis­ten­cy, and prac­ti­cal­i­ty,” they write. The archive might have broad­ened its focus, but “due to obvi­ous legal restric­tions, [they] had to stay with­in the lim­its of the pub­lic domain.”

Like­wise, they note that the dig­i­tized images on the site have been restored to “make them as close as pos­si­ble to the per­fect print the artist prob­a­bly had in mind when at work.” Vis­i­tors who would pre­fer to see the illus­tra­tions as “time hand­ed them to us” can click on “Raw Scan” to the right of the list of res­o­lu­tion options at the top of each image. (See a processed and unprocessed scan above and below of fash­ion illus­tra­tor and humorist Charles Dana Gib­son’s “over­worked Amer­i­can father” on “his day off in August.”)

All of the images on Old Book Illus­tra­tions are avail­able in high res­o­lu­tion, and the site authors intend to add more arti­cles and to make avail­able in Eng­lish arti­cles on French Roman­ti­cism unavail­able any­where else. “We are not the only image col­lec­tion on the web,” they write, “nei­ther will we ever be the largest one. We hope how­ev­er to be a des­ti­na­tion of choice for vis­i­tors more par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in Vic­to­ri­an and French Roman­tic illus­tra­tions.” They give vis­i­tors who fit that descrip­tion plen­ty of incen­tive to keep com­ing back.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Jules Verne’s Most Famous Books Were Part of a 54-Vol­ume Mas­ter­piece, Fea­tur­ing 4,000 Illus­tra­tions: See Them Online

Aubrey Beardsley’s Macabre Illus­tra­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Sto­ries (1894)

Har­ry Clarke’s Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Illus­tra­tions for Edgar Allan Poe’s Sto­ries (1923)

Jules Verne’s Most Famous Books Were Part of a 54-Vol­ume Mas­ter­piece, Fea­tur­ing 4,000 Illus­tra­tions: See Them Online

Gus­tave Doré’s Splen­did Illus­tra­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)

Illus­tra­tions from the Sovi­et Children’s Book Your Name? Robot, Cre­at­ed by Tarkovsky Art Direc­tor Mikhail Romadin (1979)

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Jules Verne’s Most Famous Books Were Part of a 54-Volume Masterpiece, Featuring 4,000 Illustrations: See Them Online

in Art, Books, Sci Fi | February 10th, 2020

Not many read­ers of the 21st cen­tu­ry seek out the work of pop­u­lar writ­ers of the 19th cen­tu­ry, but when they do, they often seek out the work of Jules Verne. Jour­ney to the Cen­ter of the Earth, Twen­ty Thou­sand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days: fair to say that we all know the titles of these fan­tas­ti­cal French tales from the 1860s and 70s, and more than a few of us have actu­al­ly read them. But how many of us know that they all belong to a sin­gle series, the 54-vol­ume Voy­ages Extra­or­di­naires, that Verne pub­lished from 1863 until the end of his life? Verne described the pro­jec­t’s goal to an inter­view­er thus: “to con­clude in sto­ry form my whole sur­vey of the world’s sur­face and the heav­ens.”

Verne intend­ed to edu­cate, but at the same time to enter­tain and even artis­ti­cal­ly impress: “My object has been to depict the earth, and not the earth alone, but the uni­verse,” he said. “And I have tried at the same time to real­ize a very high ide­al of beau­ty of style.” This he accom­plished with great suc­cess in a time and place with­out even what we would now con­sid­er a ful­ly lit­er­ate pub­lic.

As philoso­pher Marc Sori­ano writes of the 1860s when Verne began pub­lish­ing, “The dri­ve for lit­er­a­cy in France has been under­way since the Guizot Law of 1833, but there is still much to do. Any well-advised edi­tor must aid his read­ers who have not yet achieved a good read­ing pro­fi­cien­cy.”

Hence the need for illus­tra­tions: beau­ti­ful illus­tra­tions, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly and nar­ra­tive­ly faith­ful illus­tra­tions, and above all a great many illus­tra­tions: over 4,000 of them, by the count of Arthur B. Evans in his essay on the series’ artists, “an aver­age of 60+ illus­tra­tions per nov­el, one for every 6–8 pages of text.” Still today, “most mod­ern French reprints of the Voy­ages Extra­or­di­naires con­tin­ue to fea­ture their orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions — recap­tur­ing the ‘feel’ of Verne’s socio-his­tor­i­cal milieu and evok­ing that sense of far­away exoti­cism and futur­is­tic awe which the orig­i­nal read­ers once expe­ri­enced from these texts. And yet, to date, the bulk of Vern­ian crit­i­cism has vir­tu­al­ly ignored the cru­cial role played by these illus­tra­tions in Verne’s oeu­vre.”

Evans iden­ti­fies four dif­fer­ent types of illus­tra­tions in the series: “ren­der­ings of the pro­tag­o­nists of the sto­ry — e.g., por­traits like the one of Impey Bar­bi­cane in De la terre à la lune”; “panoram­ic and post­card-like” views of the “exot­ic locales, unusu­al sights, and flo­ra and fau­na which the heroes encounter dur­ing their jour­ney, like the one from Vingt mille lieues sous les mers depict­ing divers walk­ing on the ocean floor”; “doc­u­men­ta­tion­al” illus­tra­tions like “the map of the Polar regions (hand-drawn by Verne him­self) for his 1864 nov­el Les Voy­ages et aven­tures du cap­i­taine Hat­teras”; and por­tay­als of “a spe­cif­ic moment of action in the narrative—e.g., the one from Voy­age au cen­tre de la terre where Prof. Liden­brock, Axel, and Hans are sud­den­ly caught in a light­ning storm on a sub­ter­ranean ocean.”

Verne and his edi­tor Pierre-Jules Het­zel com­mis­sioned these illus­tra­tions from no few­er than eight artists, a group includ­ing Edouard Riou, Alphonse de Neuville, Emile-Antoine Bayard (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), and Léon Benett — all well-known artists in late 19th-cen­tu­ry France, and made even more so by their work in the Voy­ages Extra­or­di­naires. You can browse a com­plete gallery of the series’ orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions here, and if you like, enrich the expe­ri­ence with this exten­sive essay by Ter­ry Har­pold on “read­ing” these images in con­text.

Togeth­er with the sto­ries them­selves, on the back of which Verne remains the most trans­lat­ed sci­ence-fic­tion author of all time, they allow Har­pold to make the cred­i­ble claim that “the tex­tu­al-graph­ic domain con­sti­tut­ed by these objects is unmatched in its breadth and vari­ety; no oth­er cor­pus asso­ci­at­ed with a sin­gle author is com­pa­ra­ble.” Human knowl­edge of the uni­verse has widened and deep­ened since Verne’s day, but for sheer intel­lec­tu­al and adven­tur­ous won­der about what that uni­verse might con­tain, has any writer, from any era or land, out­done him since?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Émile-Antoine Bayard’s Vivid Illus­tra­tions of Jules Verne’s Around the Moon: The First Seri­ous Works of Space Art (1870)

Jules Verne Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts What the 20th Cen­tu­ry Will Look Like in His Lost Nov­el, Paris in the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry (1863)

How French Artists in 1899 Envi­sioned Life in the Year 2000: Draw­ing the Future

Hear Rick Wakeman’s Musi­cal Adap­ta­tion of Jules Verne’s Jour­ney to the Cen­tre of the Earth, “One of Prog Rock’s Crown­ing Achieve­ments”

Petite Planète: Dis­cov­er Chris Marker’s Influ­en­tial 1950s Trav­el Pho­to­book Series

The Art of Sci-Fi Book Cov­ers: From the Fan­tas­ti­cal 1920s to the Psy­che­del­ic 1960s & Beyond

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 or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

The Graphic Novel Adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

in Books, Comics/Cartoons, Literature | February 6th, 2020

Since its pub­li­ca­tion just over half a cen­tu­ry ago, Slaugh­ter­house-Five has seen bans and burn­ings, gone through var­i­ous adap­ta­tions, and all the while held its place in the Amer­i­can lit­er­ary canon. Some­thing about Kurt Von­negut’s sto­ry of the invol­un­tar­i­ly time-trav­el­ing optometrist Bil­ly Pil­grim, who like his cre­ator sur­vived the fire­bomb­ing of Dres­den in the Sec­ond World War, con­tin­ues to res­onate with read­ers even as that war (and so very many nov­els about it) pass out of liv­ing mem­o­ry. Von­negut him­self loved George Roy Hill’s 1972 film of the nov­el, but alas, hav­ing died in 2007, he did­n’t stick around long enough to see Slaugh­ter­house-Five — or, to use its full title, Slaugh­ter­house-Five, or The Chil­dren’s Cru­sade: A Duty-Dance with Death — turned into a graph­ic nov­el.

“Indie graph­ic nov­el house BOOM! Stu­dios announced plans to pub­lish a graph­ic ver­sion of Kurt Vonnegut’s clas­sic sci-fi/an­ti­war nov­el,” reports Pub­lish­ers Week­ly’s Calvin Reid, nam­ing the adap­tors as writer Ryan North, artist Albert Monteys, and col­orist Ricard Zaplana. Nerdis­t’s Matthew Hart writes that it’s “unclear at this point what’s been includ­ed and what’s been dropped for BOOM!’s Slaugh­ter­house-Five graph­ic nov­el adap­ta­tion, it seems like the sto­ry is in good hands.” [Update: You can now pur­chase a copy of Slaugh­ter­house-Five graph­ic nov­el online here.]

The images released so far “show­case a world paint­ed with appro­pri­ate­ly mut­ed col­ors, and pop­u­lat­ed by some of the most icon­ic moments from the nov­el. The graph­ic novel’s inter­pre­ta­tion of Bil­ly Pil­grim will pos­si­bly ignite some dis­agree­ment amongst read­ers, how­ev­er, as his face can be jux­ta­posed with Vonnegut’s.”

For a nov­el con­sid­ered a “clas­sic” longer than read­ers who dis­cov­er it today have been alive, Slaugh­ter­house-Five has its own uncon­ven­tion­al way with real­i­ty. Not only does Von­negut make its pro­tag­o­nist “unstuck in time,” he also works into its cast real char­ac­ters from his own life. Take Bernard O’Hare, shown here in pan­els from the graph­ic nov­el. As Von­negut’s offi­cial­ly des­ig­nat­ed “bud­dy” in the the 106th Infantry Divi­sion, O’Hare was tak­en pris­on­er along with him in Dres­den and held cap­tive in a meat­pack­ing plant known as Schlachthof Fuenf. When Von­negut com­plet­ed the man­u­script he let O’Hare and his wife Mary read it, and the lat­ter urged the author to write about how “all the men who fought in the Sec­ond World War were just babies.” Hence the nov­el­’s sub­ti­tle, which befits the plain­spo­ken sen­si­bil­i­ty of Kurt Von­negut, a man who believed in call­ing things what they were — and thus would sure­ly have reject­ed the label “graph­ic nov­el” in favor of “com­ic book.”

Pur­chase a copy of Slaugh­ter­house-Five: The Graph­ic Nov­el online.

via Pub­lish­ers Week­ly

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Kurt Von­negut Read Slaugh­ter­house-Five, Cat’s Cra­dle & Oth­er Nov­els

Why Should We Read Kurt Von­negut? An Ani­mat­ed Video Makes the Case

Kurt Von­negut Maps Out the Uni­ver­sal Shapes of Our Favorite Sto­ries

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Incensed Let­ter to the High School That Burned Slaugh­ter­house-Five

Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graph­ic Nov­el Adap­ta­tion

Read Ulysses Seen, A Graph­ic Nov­el Adap­ta­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses

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 or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Most Complete Collection of Salvador Dalí’s Paintings Published in a Beautiful New Book by Taschen: Includes Never-Seen-Before Works

in Art, Books | February 5th, 2020

Sal­vador Dali was that rare avant-garde artist whose work earned the respect of near­ly every­one, even those who hat­ed him per­son­al­ly. George Orwell called Dali a “dis­gust­ing human being,” but added “Dali is a draughts­man of very excep­tion­al gifts…. He has fifty times more tal­ent than most of the peo­ple who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paint­ings.”

Walt Dis­ney was very keen to work with Dali. And Dali’s own per­son­al hero and intel­lec­tu­al father fig­ure, Sig­mund Freud—no lover of mod­ern art—found the artist’s “unde­ni­able tech­ni­cal mas­tery” so com­pelling that he rethought his long­stand­ing neg­a­tive opin­ion of Sur­re­al­ism.

It’s hard to imag­ine that Orwell, Dis­ney, and Freud would agree on much else, but when it came to Dali, all three saw what is uni­ver­sal­ly appar­ent: as an artist, he was “not a fraud,” as Orwell grudg­ing­ly admit­ted.

It is also clear that Dali was a “very hard work­er.” For all the time he spent in absolute­ly shame­less self-promotion—a full career’s worth of activ­i­ty for many a cur­rent celebrity—Dali still found the time to leave behind hun­dreds of high­ly accom­plished can­vas­es, draw­ings, pho­tographs, films, mul­ti­me­dia projects, and more. A trip to the Dali Muse­um in Tam­pa, Flori­da can be a dis­ori­ent­ing expe­ri­ence.

Despite the already siz­able body of work we might have seen on view or repro­duced, how­ev­er, the edi­tors of Taschen’s newest, updat­ed edi­tion of Dali: The Paint­ings have “locat­ed paint­ed works by the mas­ter that had been inac­ces­si­ble for years,” as the influ­en­tial arts pub­lish­er notes, “so many, in fact, that almost half the fea­tured illus­tra­tions appear in pub­lic for the first time.” In addi­tion to the “opu­lent” pre­sen­ta­tion of the art­work, the book (which expands on a first edi­tion pub­lished last year) also “con­tex­tu­al­izes Dali’s oeu­vre and its mean­ings by exam­in­ing con­tem­po­rary doc­u­ments, from writ­ings and draw­ings to mate­r­i­al from oth­er facets of his work, includ­ing bal­let, cin­e­ma, fash­ion, adver­tis­ing, and objets d’art.”

The first sec­tion of the book reveals how Dali found his own style by mas­ter­ing every­one else’s. He “deployed all the isms… with play­ful mas­tery” and “would bor­row from pre­vail­ing trends before ridi­cul­ing and aban­don­ing them.” Dali want­ed us to know that he could have paint­ed any­thing he want­ed, throw­ing into even high­er relief the con­found­ing dream log­ic of his cho­sen sub­jects. Per­haps Dali him­self made it impossible—as Orwell had want­ed to do—to sep­a­rate Dali the per­son from the tech­ni­cal achieve­ments of his art.

As the artist him­self saw things, his life and work were all wrapped up togeth­er in a sin­gu­lar per­for­mance. At the age of sev­en, he wrote, he had decid­ed he want­ed to be Napoleon. “Since then,” Dali mock-humbly con­fessed, “my ambi­tion has steadi­ly grown, and my mega­lo­ma­nia with it. Now I want only to be Sal­vador Dali, I have no greater wish.” A great part of Dali’s mag­net­ism, of course, is due to what he calls his “mega­lo­ma­nia,” or rather to his uncom­pro­mis­ing life’s work of becom­ing ful­ly, com­plete­ly, him­self.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Sal­vador Dali Met Sig­mund Freud, and Changed Freud’s Mind About Sur­re­al­ism (1938)

Sal­vador Dalí’s Tarot Cards Get Re-Issued: The Occult Meets Sur­re­al­ism in a Clas­sic Tarot Card Deck

Sal­vador Dalí & Walt Disney’s Short Ani­mat­ed Film, Des­ti­no, Set to the Music of Pink Floyd

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Met Puts 650+ Japanese Illustrated Books Online: Marvel at Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji and More

in Archives, Art, Books | February 5th, 2020

There are cer­tain Japan­ese wood­block prints many of us can pic­ture in our minds: Hoku­sai Kat­sushika’s The Great Wave off Kana­gawa, Uta­gawa Hiroshige’s Sud­den Show­er over Shin-Ōhashi bridge and Atake, Kita­gawa Uta­maro’s Three Beau­ties of the Present Day. Even when we find vast archives of such works, known as ukiyo‑e or “pic­tures of the float­ing world,” we tend to appre­ci­ate the works them­selves one piece at a time; we imag­ine them on walls, not in books. But it was in books that much of the work of ukiyo‑e mas­ters first appeared in the first place. Hoku­sai, Hiroshige, and Uta­maro, as the three are usu­al­ly called, “are best known today for their wood­block prints, but also excelled at illus­tra­tions for deluxe poet­ry antholo­gies and pop­u­lar lit­er­a­ture.”

So writes John Car­pen­ter, Cura­tor of the Depart­ment of Asian Art at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, describ­ing the “fell swoop” in which the Met acquired “a superb col­lec­tion of Japan­ese books to com­ple­ment its excel­lent hold­ings in paint­ings and prints of the Edo peri­od (1615–1868).” Once the per­son­al col­lec­tion of Arthur and Char­lotte Ver­sh­bow, these books came into the muse­um’s pos­ses­sion in 2013, and have now come avail­able to browse on and even down­load from its web site.

Car­pen­ter describes the col­lec­tion as “par­tic­u­lar­ly strong in works by ukiyo‑e artists, but includes rep­re­sen­ta­tive exam­ples of all the var­i­ous schools of Japan­ese art. Includ­ed in the col­lec­tion of some 250 titles — more than 400 vol­umes — are numer­ous mas­ter­pieces of wood­block print­ing, many of which are near­ly impos­si­ble to find in such fine con­di­tion today.”

You’ll find in the Met’s online col­lec­tion not just the vol­umes from the Ver­sh­bow col­lec­tion, but “over 650 eigh­teenth- and nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Japan­ese illus­trat­ed books” in total. Selec­tions include edi­tions of Uta­maro’s Gifts of the Ebb Tide (The Shell Book), Hiroshige’s Pic­ture Book of the Sou­venirs of Edo (the name of Tokyo in his day), and Hoku­sai’s One Hun­dred Views of Mount Fuji. You can also find books full of the work of ukiyo‑e mas­ters of whom you may not have heard, such as Kat­sukawa Shun­shō’s Mir­ror of Yoshi­wara Beau­ties, Kitao Masanobu’s A New Record Com­par­ing the Hand­writ­ing of the Cour­te­sans of the Yoshi­wara, and Uta­gawa Kunisada’s That Pur­ple Image in Mag­ic Lantern Shows. Though few of us today know Kunisada’s name, in the ear­ly to mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry his pop­u­lar rep­u­ta­tion far exceed­ed those of Hoku­sai, Hiroshige, and Uta­maro — not least because of how many could enjoy his work in books like these. Enter the col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000+ His­toric Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Smith­son­ian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

Enter a Dig­i­tal Archive of 213,000+ Beau­ti­ful Japan­ese Wood­block Prints

Down­load Hun­dreds of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Wood­block Prints by Mas­ters of the Tra­di­tion

1,000+ His­toric Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Smith­son­ian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

Get Free Draw­ing Lessons from Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai, Who Famous­ly Paint­ed The Great Wave of Kana­gawa: Read His How-To Book, Quick Lessons in Sim­pli­fied Draw­ings

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 or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Evelyn Waugh’s “Victorian Blood Book”: A Most Strange & Macabre Illustrated Book

in Books, Libraries, Literature, Religion | January 30th, 2020

Most U.S. read­ers come to know Eve­lyn Waugh as the “seri­ous” writer of the saga Brideshead Revis­it­ed (and inspir­er of the 1981 minis­eries adap­ta­tion). This was also the case in 1954, when Charles Rolo wrote in the pages of The Atlantic that the nov­el “sold many more copies in the Unit­ed States than all of Waugh’s oth­er books put togeth­er.” Yet “among the lit­er­ary,” Waugh’s name evokes “a sin­gu­lar brand of com­ic genius… a riotous­ly anar­chic cos­mos, in which only the out­ra­geous can happen—and when it does hap­pen is out­ra­geous­ly divert­ing.”

The com­ic Waugh’s imag­i­na­tion “runs to… appalling and macabre inven­tions,” incor­po­rat­ing a “lunatic log­ic.” The sources of that imag­i­na­tion now reside at the Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas, Austin, who hold Waugh’s man­u­scripts and 3,500-volume library.

The nov­el­ist, the Ran­som Cen­ter notes, “was an invet­er­ate col­lec­tor of things Vic­to­ri­an (and well ahead of most of his con­tem­po­raries in this regard). Undoubt­ed­ly the sin­gle most curi­ous object in the entire library is a large oblong folio decoupage book, often referred to as the ‘Vic­to­ri­an Blood Book.’”

Waugh deeply admired Vic­to­ri­an art, and espe­cial­ly “those nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry ene­mies of tech­nol­o­gy, the Pre-Raphaelites,” writes Rolo. Still, like us, he may have looked upon scrap­books like these as bizarre and mor­bid­ly humor­ous, if also pos­sessed by an unset­tling beau­ty. (One 2008 cat­a­logue described them as “weird” and “rather ele­gant but very scary.”) More than any­thing, they resem­ble the kind of thing a goth teenag­er raised on Mon­ty Python and Emi­ly Dick­in­son might put togeth­er in her bed­room late at night. Such an artist would be car­ry­ing on a long “cher­ished tra­di­tion.”

“Vic­to­ri­an scrap­book­ing,” the Ran­som Cen­ter writes, “was almost exclu­sive­ly the province of women,” a way of orga­niz­ing infor­ma­tion, although “the esthet­ic aspect” could some­times be “sec­ondary.” The “Vic­to­ri­an Blood Book,” how­ev­er, is the work of a pater­fa­mil­ias named John Bin­g­ley Gar­land, “a pros­per­ous Vic­to­ri­an busi­ness­man who moved to New­found­land, went on to become speak­er of its first Par­lia­ment, and returned to Stone Cot­tage in Dorset to end his days.”

Inscribed to Bin­g­ley’s daugh­ter Amy on Sep­tem­ber 1, 1854, the book seems to have been a wed­ding present, made with seri­ous devo­tion­al intent:

How does one “read” such an enig­mat­ic object? We under­stand­ably find ele­ments of the grotesque and sur­re­al. But our eyes view it dif­fer­ent­ly from Vic­to­ri­an ones. As Gar­land’s descen­dants have writ­ten, “our fam­i­ly does­n’t refer to…‘the Blood Book;’ we refer to it as ‘Amy’s Gift’ and in no way see it as any­thing oth­er than a pre­cious reminder of the love of fam­i­ly and Our Lord.”

The “Blood Book“ ‘s actu­al title appears to have been Duren­stein!, which is the Aus­tri­an cas­tle where Richard the Lion­heart­ed was impris­oned. Assem­bled from hun­dreds of engrav­ings, many by William Blake, it appar­ent­ly depicts “the spir­i­tu­al bat­tles encoun­tered by Chris­tians along the path of life and the ‘blood’ to Chris­t­ian sac­ri­fice.” The “blood” is red India ink. The quo­ta­tions sur­round­ing each col­lage, accord­ing to the Gar­land fam­i­ly “are encour­ag­ing one to turn to God as our Sav­iour.”

One can imag­ine the “seri­ous” Waugh look­ing on this strange object with almost rev­er­en­tial affec­tion. He lapsed into a high­ly affect­ed, reac­tionary nos­tal­gia in his lat­er peri­od, announc­ing him­self “two hun­dred years” behind the times. One con­tem­po­rary declared, “He grows more old-fash­ioned every day.” But the sav­age­ly com­ic Waugh would not have been able to approach such a bizarre piece of folk col­lage art with­out an eye toward its use as mate­r­i­al for his own “appalling and macabre inven­tions.”

See a full scanned copy of the “Vic­to­ri­an Blood Book,” and down­load high-res­o­lu­tion images, online at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas, Austin’s Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

19th-Cen­tu­ry Skele­ton Alarm Clock Remind­ed Peo­ple Dai­ly of the Short­ness of Life: An Intro­duc­tion to the Memen­to Mori

Browse The Mag­i­cal Worlds of Har­ry Houdini’s Scrap­books

A Wit­ty Dic­tio­nary of Vic­to­ri­an Slang (1909)

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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