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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read­ers Pre­dict in 1936 Which Nov­el­ists Would Still Be Wide­ly Read in the Year 2000

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.

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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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Read from The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit in Vin­tage Record­ings from the Ear­ly 1950s

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.

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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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dai­ly Habits of High­ly Pro­duc­tive Philoso­phers: Niet­zsche, Marx & Immanuel Kant

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.

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

in Books, K-12, Libraries | January 14th, 2020

Pub­lic libraries are unsung heroes of their com­mu­ni­ties. Many a busy work­ing adult can take their impor­tance for grant­ed. But par­ents of young chil­dren know—the library is a qui­et haven, place of won­der and dis­cov­ery, and free resource for all sorts of edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ences. Giv­en the impor­tance of libraries in kids’ lives, it’s no won­der that six of the top ten most-checked-out books—accord­ing to the New York Pub­lic Library—are children’s books.

The NYPL cal­cu­lat­ed the most checked out books in its his­to­ry in hon­or of its 125th anniver­sary. Giv­en that it hous­es the sec­ond largest col­lec­tion in the U.S., after the Library of Con­gress, and serves mil­lions in the most lin­guis­ti­cal­ly diverse city in the coun­try, its cir­cu­la­tion num­bers give us a rea­son­able sam­pling of near-uni­ver­sal tastes.

These include time­less clas­sics of children’s lit­er­a­ture: Ezra Jack Keats’ Calde­cott-win­ning The Snowy Day tops the list, “in print and in the Library’s cat­a­log con­tin­u­ous­ly since 1962”; The Cat in the Hat comes in at a close sec­ond. Where the Wild Things Are and The Very Hun­gry Cater­pil­lar round out the list of books for the very young.

Where is the stal­wart Good­night Moon, you may ask? Here we have a juicy bit of lore:

By all mea­sures, this book should be a top check­out (in fact, it might be the top check­out) if not for an odd piece of his­to­ry: extreme­ly influ­en­tial New York Pub­lic Library children’s librar­i­an Anne Car­roll Moore hat­ed Good­night Moon when it first came out. As a result, the Library didn’t car­ry it until 1972. That lost time bumped the book off the top 10 list for now. But give it time.

For now, Mar­garet Wise Brown’s 1947 clas­sic receives hon­or­able men­tion. Clas­sic kids’ books cir­cu­late a lot because they’re wide­ly read, but also because they’re short, which leads to more turnover, the Library points out. Length of time in print is also a fac­tor, which makes the pres­ence of Har­ry Pot­ter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, pub­lished in 1998, par­tic­u­lar­ly impres­sive.

  1. The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats: 485,583 check­outs
  2. The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss: 469,650 check­outs
  3. 1984 by George Orwell: 441,770 check­outs
  4. Where the Wild Things Are by Mau­rice Sendak: 436,016 check­outs
  5. To Kill a Mock­ing­bird by Harp­er Lee: 422,912 check­outs
  6. Char­lot­te’s Web by E.B. White: 337,948 check­outs
  7. Fahren­heit 451 by Ray Brad­bury: 316,404 check­outs
  8. How to Win Friends and Influ­ence Peo­ple by Dale Carnegie: 284,524 check­outs
  9. Har­ry Pot­ter and the Sor­cer­er’s Stone by J.K. Rowl­ing: 231,022 check­outs
  10. The Very Hun­gry Cater­pil­lar by Eric Car­le: 189,550 check­outs

Like J.K. Rowling’s mod­ern clas­sic, all of the remain­ing books on the list are novels—save out­lier How to Win Friends and Influ­ence Peo­ple by Dale Carnegie—and all are nov­els read exten­sive­ly by mid­dle and high school stu­dents, a fur­ther sign of the sig­nif­i­cance of pub­lic libraries.

Some stu­dents may only be required to read a small hand­ful of nov­els in their school career, and whether they fol­low through, and maybe go on to read more and more books, and maybe write a few books of their own, may depend upon those nov­els con­stant­ly cir­cu­lat­ing for every­one through insti­tu­tions like the New York Pub­lic Library.

See the full list above and learn more about the project at NPR and the NYPL.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets Patrons Check Out Ties, Brief­cas­es & Hand­bags for Job Inter­views

The New York Pub­lic Library Puts Clas­sic Sto­ries on Insta­gram: Start with Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land and Read Kafka’s The Meta­mor­pho­sis Soon

What Are the Most Stolen Books? Book­store Lists Fea­ture Works by Muraka­mi, Bukows­ki, Bur­roughs, Von­negut, Ker­ouac & Palah­niuk

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

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Artist Ed Ruscha Reads From Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in a Short Film Celebrating His 1966 Photos of the Sunset Strip

in Art, Books, Film, Literature, Philosophy | January 13th, 2020

In 1956, the Pop artist Ed Ruscha left Okla­homa City for Los Ange­les. “I could see I was just born for the job” of an artist, he would lat­er say, “born to watch paint dry.” The com­ment encap­su­lates Ruscha’s iron­ic use of cliché as a cen­ter­piece of his work. He called him­self an “abstract artist… who deals with sub­ject mat­ter.” Much of his sub­ject mat­ter has been com­mon­place words and phrases—decontextualized and fore­ground­ed in paint­ings and prints made with care­ful delib­er­a­tion, against the trend toward Abstract Expres­sion­ism and its ges­tur­al free­dom.

Anoth­er of Ruscha’s sub­jects comes with some­what less con­cep­tu­al bag­gage. His pho­to­graph­ic books cap­ture mid-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca gas sta­tions and the city he has called home for over 50 years. In his 1966 book, Every Build­ing on the Sun­set Strip, Ruscha “pho­tographed both sides of Sun­set Boule­vard from the back of a pick­up truck,” writes film­mak­er Matthew Miller. “He stitched the pho­tos togeth­er to make one long book that fold­ed out to 27 feet. That project turned into his larg­er Streets of Los Ange­les series, which spanned decades.”

Miller, inspired by work he did on a 2017 short film called Ed Ruscha: Build­ings and Words, decid­ed to bring togeth­er two of Ruscha’s long­stand­ing inspi­ra­tions: the city of L.A. and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which Ker­ouac sup­pos­ed­ly wrote as a con­tin­u­ous 120-foot long scroll—a for­mat, Miller noticed, much like Every Build­ing on the Sun­set Strip. (Ruscha made his own artist’s book ver­sion of On the Road in 2009). Miller and edi­tor Sean Leonard cut Ruscha’s pho­tographs togeth­er in the mon­tage you see above, com­mis­sioned by the Get­ty Muse­um, while Ruscha him­self read selec­tions from the Ker­ouac clas­sic.

The con­nec­tion between their style and their use of lan­guage feels real­ly strong, but at the end of the day, I sim­ply thought it’d be great to hear Ed Ruscha read On the Road. Some­thing about Ed’s voice just feels right. Some­thing about his work just feels right. It’s like the images, the words, and the forms he makes were always meant to be togeth­er.”

Miller describes the painstak­ing process of select­ing the pho­tos and “con­struct­ing a mini nar­ra­tive that evoked Ed’s sen­si­bil­i­ties” at Vimeo. The artist’s “per­spec­tive seemed to speak to the sig­nage and archi­tec­ture of the city, while Kerouac’s voice felt like it was pulling in all the live­ly char­ac­ters of the street.” It’s easy to see why Ruscha would be so drawn to Ker­ouac. Both share a fas­ci­na­tion with ver­nac­u­lar Amer­i­can speech and icon­ic Amer­i­can sub­jects of adver­tis­ing, the auto­mo­bile, and the free­doms of the road.

But where Ruscha turns to words for their visu­al impact, Ker­ouac rel­ished them for their music. “For a while,” Miller writes of his project, “it felt like the footage want­ed one thing and the voiceover want­ed anoth­er.” But he and Leonard, who also did the sound design, were able to bring image and voice togeth­er in a short film that frames both artists as mid-cen­tu­ry vision­ar­ies who turned the ordi­nary and seem­ing­ly unre­mark­able into an expe­ri­ence of the ecsta­t­ic.

173 works by Ruscha can be viewed on MoMA’s web­site.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Music from Jack Kerouac’s Clas­sic Beat Nov­el On the Road: Stream Tracks by Miles Davis, Dex­ter Gor­don & Oth­er Jazz Leg­ends

Roy Licht­en­stein and Andy Warhol Demys­ti­fy Their Pop Art in Vin­tage 1966 Film

A Brief His­to­ry of John Baldessari, Nar­rat­ed by Tom Waits

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

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Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

in Books, Education | January 10th, 2020

Below, you can hear jour­nal­ist David Epstein talks with Recode’s Kara Swish­er about his book, Range: Why Gen­er­al­ists Tri­umph in a Spe­cial­ized World. In it, “he argues that the world’s most suc­cess­ful ath­letes, artists, musi­cians, inven­tors, fore­cast­ers and sci­en­tists are more like­ly to be dab­blers, rather than peo­ple who set out to do what they do best from a young age — and, in fact, the peo­ple who have high­ly spe­cial­ized train­ing from an ear­ly age tend to have low­er life­time earn­ings over­all.” The #1 New York Times best­selling book makes the case that “in most fields—especially those that are com­plex and unpredictable—generalists, not spe­cial­ists, are primed to excel. Gen­er­al­ists often find their path late, and they jug­gle many inter­ests rather than focus­ing on one. They’re also more cre­ative, more agile, and able to make con­nec­tions their more spe­cial­ized peers can’t see.”

You can pick up a copy of Range: Why Gen­er­al­ists Tri­umph in a Spe­cial­ized World in print, or get it as a free audio book if you sign up for a 30-day free tri­al with Audible.com.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

Oxford’s Free Course Crit­i­cal Rea­son­ing For Begin­ners Teach­es You to Think Like a Philoso­pher

How to Focus: Five Talks Reveal the Secrets of Con­cen­tra­tion

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Vincent Van Gogh’s Favorite Books

in Art, Books | January 9th, 2020

Piles of French Nov­els, Vin­cent Van Gogh, 1887

Among lovers of Vin­cent van Gogh, the Dutch artist is as well known for his let­ter writ­ing as for his extra­or­di­nary paint­ing. “The per­son­al tone, evoca­tive style and live­ly lan­guage” of his cor­re­spon­dence, writes the Van Gogh Muse­um, “prompt­ed some peo­ple who were in a posi­tion to know to accord the cor­re­spon­dence the sta­tus of lit­er­a­ture. The poet W.H. Auden, who pub­lished an anthol­o­gy with a brief intro­duc­tion, wrote: ‘there is scarce­ly one let­ter by Van Gogh which I, who am cer­tain­ly no expert, do not find fas­ci­nat­ing.’”

Auden was, of course, an expert on the writ­ten word, though maybe not on Van Gogh, and he refined his lit­er­ary exper­tise the same way the painter did: by read­ing as copi­ous­ly as he wrote. “When it was too dark to paint,” writes Uni­ver­si­ty of Puer­to Rico pro­fes­sor of human­i­ties Jef­frey Her­li­hy Mera at the Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion, “Van Gogh read prodi­gious­ly and com­piled a tremen­dous amount of per­son­al cor­re­spon­dence.” Much of his writ­ing, espe­cial­ly his let­ters to his broth­er Theo, was in French, a lan­guage he learned in his teens and spoke in Bel­gium, Paris, and Arles.

Van Gogh’s com­mand of writ­ten French, how­ev­er, came from his read­ing of Vic­tor Hugo, Guy de Mau­pas­sant, and Émile Zola. “Vin­cent loved lit­er­a­ture,” the Van Gogh Muse­um writes. “In gen­er­al, the books he read reflect­ed what was going on in his own life. When he want­ed to fol­low in his father’s foot­steps and become a min­is­ter, he read books of a reli­gious nature. He devoured Parisian nov­els when he was con­sid­er­ing mov­ing to the French cap­i­tal.”

In his let­ters to Theo, he weaves togeth­er the sacred and pro­fane, describ­ing his spir­i­tu­al and cre­ative striv­ings and his unre­quit­ed obses­sions. In his read­ing, he test­ed his val­ues and desires. We get a sense of how Van Gogh’s read­ing com­ple­ment­ed his pious, yet roman­tic nature in the list of some of his favorites, below, com­piled by the Van Gogh Muse­um.

  • Charles Dick­ens, A Christ­mas Car­ol (1843)
  • Jules Michelet, L’amour (1858)
  • Émile Zola, L’Oeu­vre (1886)
  • Alphonse Daudet, Tar­tarin de Taras­con (1887)
  • The Bible
  • John Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes (1820)
  • George Eliot, Scenes of Cler­i­cal Life (1857)
  • Hen­ry Wadsworth Longfel­low, The Poet­i­cal Works of Hen­ry Wadsworth Longfel­low (1887)
  • Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen, What the Moon Saw (1862)
  • Thomas a Kem­p­is, The Imi­ta­tion of Christ (1471–1472)
  • Har­ri­et Beech­er Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cab­in (1851–1852)
  • Edmond de Goncourt, Chérie (1884)
  • Vic­tor Hugo, Les mis­érables (1862)
  • Hon­oré de Balzac, Le Père Gori­ot (1835)
  • Guy de Mau­pas­sant, Bel-Ami (1885)
  • Pierre Loti, Madame Chrysan­thème (1888)
  • Voltaire, Can­dide (1759)
  • Shake­speare, Mac­beth (c. 1606–1607)
  • Shake­speare, King Lear (1606–1607)
  • Charles Dick­ens, Hard Times (1854)
  • Emile Zola, Nana (1880)
  • Emile Zola, La joie de vivre (1884)

“Vin­cent read moral­is­tic books often favoured among mem­bers of the Protes­tant Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty” in which he was raised by his min­is­ter father. He looked also to the moral­i­ty of Charles Dick­ens, whose works he “read and reread… through­out his life.” Zola’s “rough, direct nat­u­ral­ism” appealed to Van Gogh’s desire “to give an hon­est depic­tion of what he saw around him: farm labour­ers, a weath­ered lit­tle old man, deject­ed or work­ing women, a soup kitchen, a tree, dunes and fields.”

In Alphonse Daudet’s 1887 Tar­tarin de Taras­con, “an enter­tain­ing car­i­ca­ture of the south­ern French­man,” Van Gogh sat­is­fied his “need for humor and satire.” Despite the stereo­type of the artist as per­pet­u­al­ly tor­tured, his let­ters con­sis­tent­ly reveal his good-natured sense of humor. From French his­to­ri­an Jules Michelet’s 1858 L’amour, the artist “found wis­dom he could apply to his own love life,” tumul­tuous as it was. He used Michelet’s insights “to jus­ti­fy his choic­es,” such as “when he fell in love with his cousin Kee Vos.”

In a let­ter to Theo, Vin­cent expressed his emo­tion­al strug­gles over Vos’s rejec­tion of him as “a great many ‘pet­ty mis­eries of human life,’ which, if they were writ­ten down in a book, could per­haps serve to amuse some peo­ple, though they can hard­ly be con­sid­ered pleas­ant if one expe­ri­ences them one­self.” He is at a loss for what to do with him­self, he writes, but “‘wan­der­ing we find our way,’ and not by sit­ting still.” For Van Gogh, “wan­der­ing” just as often took the form of sit­ting still with a good book.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Com­plete Archive of Vin­cent van Gogh’s Let­ters: Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed and Ful­ly Anno­tat­ed

Down­load Hun­dreds of Van Gogh Paint­ings, Sketch­es & Let­ters in High Res­o­lu­tion

13 Van Gogh’s Paint­ings Painstak­ing­ly Brought to Life with 3D Ani­ma­tion & Visu­al Map­ping

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

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The Vatican Library Goes Online and Digitizes Tens of Thousands of Manuscripts, Books, Coins, and More

in Books, History | January 6th, 2020

If any one of us ran our own coun­try, we’d sure­ly dri­ve no small amount of resources toward build­ing an impres­sive nation­al library. That would be true even if we ran a coun­try the size of the Vat­i­can, the small­est sov­er­eign state in the world — but one that, unsur­pris­ing­ly, punch­es well above its weight in terms of the size and his­tor­i­cal val­ue of its hold­ings. “It was in 1451 when Pope Nicholas V, a renowned bib­lio­phile him­self, attempt­ed to re-estab­lish Rome as an aca­d­e­m­ic cen­ter of glob­al impor­tance,” writes Aleteia’s Daniel Esparza. That for­mi­da­ble task involved first “build­ing a rel­a­tive­ly mod­est library of over 1,200 vol­umes, includ­ing his per­son­al col­lec­tion of Greek and Roman clas­sics and a series of texts brought from Con­stan­tino­ple.”

The Vat­i­can Apos­tolic Library, known as “VAT,” has grown a bit over the past five and a half cen­turies. Today it con­tains around 75,000 codices and 85,000 incunab­u­la (which Esparza defines as “edi­tions made between the inven­tion of the print­ing press and the 16th cen­tu­ry”) amid a total of over one mil­lion vol­umes.

And in the case of increas­ing­ly many of these doc­u­ments, you no longer have to make the jour­ney to Vat­i­can City to see them. Thanks to an ongo­ing dig­i­ti­za­tion project launched a decade ago, increas­ing­ly many have become search­able and down­load­able on Digi­VatLib, a data­base of the Vat­i­can Library’s dig­i­tized col­lec­tions includ­ing not just the afore­men­tioned codices and incunab­u­la but “archival mate­ri­als and inven­to­ries as well as graph­ic mate­ri­als, coins and medals.”

Back in 2016 we fea­tured a dig­i­tal col­lec­tion of 5,300 rare man­u­scripts dig­i­tized by the col­lec­tion, includ­ing the Ili­ad and Aeneid as well as Japan­ese and Aztec illus­tra­tions. The VAT’s scan­ning, upload­ing, and orga­niz­ing has con­tin­ued apace since, and though it pri­or­i­tizes man­u­scripts “from the Mid­dle Age and Human­is­tic peri­od,” its mate­ri­als tak­en togeth­er have a wider his­tor­i­cal and indeed cul­tur­al sweep, one that only gets wider with each page added. You can get start­ed explor­ing this wealth of doc­u­ments by scrolling down a lit­tle on Digi­VatLib’s front page, in the mid­dle of which you’ll find the lat­est dig­i­tized mate­ri­als as well as a host of select­ed man­u­scripts, a few of whose pages you see above. The VAT has enjoyed its sta­tus as one of the chief repos­i­to­ries of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion longer than any of us has been alive, but we can count our­selves in the first gen­er­a­tion of human­i­ty to see it open up to the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a 3D Vir­tu­al Tour of the Sis­tine Chapel, St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca and Oth­er Art-Adorned Vat­i­can Spaces

1,600-Year-Old Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­script of the Aeneid Dig­i­tized & Put Online by The Vat­i­can

How the Mys­ter­ies of the Vat­i­can Secret Archives Are Being Revealed by Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Explore 5,300 Rare Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tized by the Vat­i­can: From The Ili­ad & Aeneid, to Japan­ese & Aztec Illus­tra­tions

Behold 3,000 Dig­i­tized Man­u­scripts from the Bib­lio­the­ca Palati­na: The Moth­er of All Medieval Libraries Is Get­ting Recon­struct­ed Online

3,500 Occult Man­u­scripts Will Be Dig­i­tized & Made Freely Avail­able Online, Thanks to Da Vin­ci Code Author Dan Brown

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.

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