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?

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 Colin Marshall | 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

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 Colin Marshall | 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.

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 Josh Jones | 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.

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 Colin Marshall | 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.

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

The e‑Book Imagined in 1935

in Books, History, Technology | January 29th, 2020

What is the future of the book? Will it retain more or less the same basic paper-between-covers form as it has since the days of the Gutenberg Bible? Will it go entirely digital, becoming readable only with compatible electronic devices? Or will we, in the comfort of our armchairs, read them on glass-screened microfilm projectors? That last is the bet made, and illustrated as above, by the April 1935 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics magazine. “It has proved possible to photograph books, and throw them on a screen for examination,” says the article envisioning “a device for applying this for home use and instruction,” exhumed by Matt Novak at Smithsonian.com.

As The Atlantic’s Megan Garber writes, “The whole thing, to our TV-and-tablet-jaded eyes, looks wonderfully quaint. (The projector! The knobs! The semi-redundant reading lamp! The smoking jacket!)” But then, “what speaks to our current, hazy dreams of convergence more eloquently than the ability to sit back, relax, and turn books into television?”

And indeed, the original illustration includes a caption telling us how such a device will allow you to “read a ‘book’ (which is a roll of miniature film), music, etc., at your ease.” That may sound familiar to those of us who think nothing of flipping back and forth between books, web sites, movies, television shows, and social media — all to our customized music-and-podcast soundtrack of choice — on our computers, tablets, and phones today.

Everyday Science and Mechanics wasn’t looking into the distant future. As Novak notes, microfilm had been patented in 1895 and first practically used in 1925; the New York Times began copying its every edition onto microfilm in 1935, the same year this article appeared. As impractical as it may look now, this home “e‑reader” could theoretically have been put into use not long thereafter. As it happened, the first e‑readers — the handheld digital ones of the kind we know today — wouldn’t come on the market for another 70 years, and their widespread adoption has only occurred in the past decade. But for many, good old Gutenberg-style paper-between-covers remains the way to read. It may be that the book has no one future form, but a variety that will exist at once — a variety that, absent a much stronger retrofuturism revival, will probably not include microfilm, ground-glass screens, and smoking jackets.

via Smithsonian.com

1930s Fashion Designers Predict How People Would Dress in the Year 2000

Did Stanley Kubrick Invent the iPad in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

9 Science-Fiction Authors Predict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, William Gibson, Philip K. Dick & More Imagined the World Ahead

Napoleon’s Kindle: See the Miniaturized Traveling Library He Took on Military Campaigns

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renaissance Invention Created to Make Books Portable & Help Scholars Study (1588)

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 Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear Christopher Tolkien (RIP) Read the Work of His Father J.R.R. Tolkien, Which He Tirelessly Worked to Preserve

in Books, Literature | January 17th, 2020

J.R.R. Tolkien is responsible for the existence of Middle-earth, the richly realized fictional setting of the Lord of the Rings novels. But he also did his bit for the existence of the much less fictional Christopher Tolkien, his third son as well as, in J.R.R.‘s own words, his “chief critic and collaborator.” Christopher spent much of his life returning the favor, dedicating himself to the organization, preservation, and publication of his father’s notes on Middle-earth’s elaborate geography, history, and mythology until his own death this past Wednesday at the age of 95.

Most fans of Tolkien père came to know the work of Tolkien fils through The Silmarillion, the collection of the former’s previously unpublished mythopoeic writings on Middle-Earth and the universe that contains it. That book came out in 1977, four years after J.R.R. Tolkien’s death, and for a time thereafter, write The New York Times’ Katharine Q. Seelye and Alan Yuhas, “Tolkien fans and scholars wondered how much of The Silmarillion was the work of the father and how much was the work of the son.”

In response, “Christopher produced the 12-volume The History of Middle-Earth (1996), a compilation of drafts, fragments, rewrites, marginal notes and other writings culled from 70 boxes of unpublished material.”

Christopher Tolkien didn’t just take over J.R.R. Tolkien’s duties as the steward of Middle-earth; he more or less grew up in the place, and even provided comments, at his father’s request, on the work that would become The Lord of the Rings. The power of J.R.R. Tolkien’s storytelling, one often hears, owes in part to the writer’s thorough grounding in literary and linguistic subjects like English and Germanic philology, heroic verse, Old Norse, Old Icelandic, and medieval Welsh. Christopher Tolkien, in turn, made himself into what Seelye and Yhuas call “an authority, above all, on the reams of writing that his father produced.” You can hear Christopher Tolkien read authoritatively from the work of J.R.R. Tolkien in the videos presented here.

The first three clips from the top come two vinyl LPs released in 1977 and 1988 by Caedmon Records (the proto-audiobook label that also put out Edgar Allan Poe read by Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone as well as Hemingway and Faulkner read by Hemingway and Faulkner). All of their selections come from The Silmarillion, the Tolkien text that would never have seen the light of day if not for Christopher’s efforts (and those of Guy Gavriel Kay, who would later become a fantasy novelist himself). But as a tribute to the man’s life so rigorously devoted to a body of work that has fascinated so many, what could be more suitable than the video above, his reading of the very end of the final book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King. Christopher Tolkien kept his father’s flame alive, and thanks to his work that flame will survive him — and generations of Tolkien readers to come.

110 Drawings and Paintings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Middle-Earth and Beyond

Map of Middle-Earth Annotated by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings

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 Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People, Presented in an Interactive Infographic

in Books, Productivity | January 16th, 2020

Click the image above to access the interactive infographic.
The daily life of great authors, artists and philosophers has long been the subject of fascination among those who look upon their work in awe. After all, life can often feel like, to quote Elbert Hubbard, “one damned thing after another” — a constant muddle of obligations and responsibilities interspersed with moments of fleeting pleasure, wrapped in gnawing low-level existential panic. (Or, at least, it does to me.) Yet some people manage to transcend this perpetual barrage of office meetings, commuter traffic and the unholy allure of reality TV to create brilliant work. It’s easy to think that the key to their success is how they structure their day.

Mason Currey’s blog-turned-book Daily Rituals describes the workaday life of great minds from W.H. Auden to Immanuel Kant, from Flannery O’Connor to Franz Kafka. The one thing that Currey’s project underlines is that there is no magic bullet. The daily routines are as varied as the people who follow them– though long walks, a ridiculously early wake up time and a stiff drink are common to many.

One school of thought for creating is summed up by Gustave Flaubert’s maxim, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Haruki Murakami has a famously rigid routine that involves getting up at 4am and writing for nine hours straight, followed by a daily 10km run. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.” He admits that his schedule allows little room for a social life.

Then there’s the fantastically prolific Belgian author George Simenon, who somehow managed to crank out 425 books over the course of his career. He would go for weeks without writing, followed by short bursts of frenzied activity. He would also wear the same outfit everyday while working on his novel, regularly take tranquilizers and somehow find the time to have sex with up to four different women a day.

Most writers fall somewhere in between. Toni Morrison, for instance, has a routine that that seems far more relatable than the superman schedules of Murakami or Simeon. Since she juggled raising two children and a full time job as an editor at Random House, Morrison simply wrote when she could. “I am not able to write regularly,” she once told The Paris Review. “I have never been able to do that—mostly because I have always had a nine-to-five job. I had to write either in between those hours, hurriedly, or spend a lot of weekend and predawn time.”

Above is a way cool infographic of the daily routines of 26 different creators, created by Podio.com. And if you want to see an interactive version of the same graphic but with rollover bits of trivia, just click here. You’ll learn that Voltaire slept only 4 hours a day and worked constantly. Victor Hugo preferred to take a morning ice bath on his roof. And Maya Angelou preferred to work in an anonymous hotel room.

Note: The infographic above is very light on women. For anyone interested in the daily habits of female creators, see this post and Mason Currey’s related book: The Daily Rituals of 143 Famous Female Creators.

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

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Daily Routine: The Discipline That Fueled Her Imagination

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

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

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

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

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

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

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

The e‑Book Imagined in 1935

Hear Christopher Tolkien (RIP) Read the Work of His Father J.R.R. Tolkien, Which He Tirelessly Worked to Preserve

The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People, Presented in an Interactive Infographic

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search