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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The Music, Books & Films Liberated into the Public Domain in 2020: Rhapsody in Blue, The Magic Mountain, Sherlock, Jr., and More

in Books, Film, Music | January 2nd, 2020

“I heard it as a sort of musi­cal kalei­do­scope of Amer­i­ca, of our vast melt­ing pot, of our undu­pli­cat­ed nation­al pep, of our blues, our met­ro­pol­i­tan mad­ness.” So said Por­gy and Bess com­pos­er George Gersh­win of Rhap­sody in Blue, the orches­tral piece he wrote back in 1924 and which has remained in the Amer­i­can canon ever since. It will sure­ly become even more wide­ly heard from this year on, since 1924 plus 95 — the term of a copy­right under cur­rent Unit­ed States law — equals 2020. Giv­en that Rhap­sody in Blue’s entrance into the pub­lic domain means that cre­ators can now freely do what they like with it, the piece will also, no doubt, under­go all man­ner of cre­ative rearrange­ment and repur­pos­ing in order to reflect the Amer­i­ca of the 2020s.

Copy­right terms did­n’t always last near­ly a cen­tu­ry. Before the 1998 Copy­right Term Exten­sion Act they last­ed only 75 years, and for the addi­tion­al two decades of wait­ing for works to enter the pub­lic domain we usu­al­ly blame Dis­ney. That enter­tain­ment giant did indeed do much of the lob­by­ing for copy­right exten­sion, seek­ing to retain its rights to Mick­ey Mouse’s 1928 debut Steam­boat Willie.

But as Duke Law’s Cen­ter for the Study of the Pub­lic Domain reports in a post on the works new­ly in pub­lic domain this year, “the Gersh­win Fam­i­ly Trust also pushed for the exten­sion, so that George and Ira Gershwin’s works from the 1920s and 1930s would remain under copy­right.” But now sev­er­al been lib­er­at­ed from it: not just Rhap­sody in Blue, but also stan­dards (with lyrics penned by Gersh­win’s broth­er Ira) like “Fas­ci­nat­ing Rhythm” and “Oh, Lady Be Good!”

2020’s is a promis­ing Pub­lic Domain Day indeed for fans of the Great Amer­i­can Song­book, what with the work of oth­er com­posers like Irv­ing Berlin (specif­i­cal­ly the pop­u­lar tune “Lazy,” well known from Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe’s per­for­mance in There’s No Busi­ness Like Show Busi­ness.) But the list of lit­er­ary works that have just gone pub­lic-domain is even more impres­sive, boast­ing inter­na­tion­al­ly acclaimed books like Thomas Man­n’s The Mag­ic Moun­tain, E.M. Forster’s A Pas­sage to India, Edith Whar­ton’s novel­la col­lec­tion Old New York, and the pil­lar of mod­ern dystopi­an lit­er­a­ture that is Yevge­ny Zamy­at­in’s We (in Eng­lish trans­la­tion by Gre­go­ry Zil­boorg). In many works of 1924, we can see the roots of the art we make and enjoy in 2020.

That holds espe­cial­ly true in the realm of film, which this year con­tributes to the pub­lic domain pic­tures from two mas­ters of silent com­e­dy: Harold Lloyd’s Girl Shy and Hot Water, and Buster Keaton’s The Nav­i­ga­tor and Sher­lock, Jr. That last film has the hon­or of being pre­served by the Unit­ed States Library of Con­gress for its cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance, as well as of hav­ing been named by the Amer­i­can Film Insti­tute one of the fun­ni­est motion pic­tures in Amer­i­can his­to­ry. You can learn more about all that entered the pub­lic domain this year (and what might, but for changes in the law, have entered it) at the Cen­ter for the Study of the Pub­lic Domain and the Pub­lic Domain review. But even more impor­tant than what enters the increas­ing­ly kalei­do­scop­ic melt­ing pot of the pub­lic domain, of course, is what we do with it. Future George Gersh­wins, Thomas Manns, and Buster Keatons, take note.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gersh­win Plays Gersh­win: Hear the Orig­i­nal Record­ing of Rhap­sody in Blue, with the Com­pos­er Him­self at the Piano (1924)

Ella Fitzger­ald Sings ‘Sum­mer­time’ by George Gersh­win, Berlin 1968

The Gen­er­al, “Per­haps the Great­est Film Ever Made,” and 20 Oth­er Buster Keaton Clas­sics Free Online

Safe­ty Last, the 1923 Movie Fea­tur­ing the Most Icon­ic Scene from Silent Film Era, Just Went Into the Pub­lic Domain

Rare 1940 Audio: Thomas Mann Explains the Nazis’ Ulte­ri­or Motive for Spread­ing Anti-Semi­tism

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 Voynich Manuscript: A New Documentary Takes a Deep Dive Into the Mysteries of the Bizarre Manuscript

in Books, History | January 1st, 2020

If you’re a reg­u­lar read­er of Open Cul­ture, you know we like to bring you the lat­est attempts to deci­pher the leg­endary Voyn­ich Man­u­script, a strange medieval book whose lan­guage has baf­fled schol­ars for cen­turies. Like many oth­er ear­ly 15th cen­tu­ry texts, the Voyn­ich seems to com­bine med­i­cine, alche­my, her­bol­o­gy, botany, zool­o­gy, astrol­o­gy, and oth­er forms of folk knowl­edge in a com­pendi­um. But it’s filled with bizarre illus­tra­tions (see an online ver­sion here) and writ­ten in a lan­guage no one can read. Is it a lost ances­tor tongue? The secret code of a cult? Is it a hoax? Why was it made and by whom?

Researchers have tried to trans­late the Voyn­ich lan­guage as vari­ant forms Latin, Ara­bic, and Sino-Tibetan. An AI iden­ti­fied it as Hebrew. This year a father and son team con­vinc­ing­ly made the case for Old Tur­kic. No Voyn­ich trans­la­tion has been defin­i­tive­ly accept­ed by a schol­ar­ly con­sen­sus, and per­haps none ever will. This may say as much about the mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich as it does about the niche research area, in which aca­d­e­m­ic lin­guists, cod­i­col­o­gists, and all man­ner of ama­teur sleuths try to make a name for them­selves as Jean-François Cham­pol­lions of Voyn­ich stud­ies.

The hour-long doc­u­men­tary above tells the sto­ry of both the manuscript’s enig­mas and the cult of fas­ci­na­tion that has grown up around them. We first learn the ori­gin of the name: Acquired by Pol­ish book­seller Wil­frid Voyn­ich in 1912, the man­u­script passed into the care of his wife Ethel, an Irish artist and nov­el­ist, upon his death in 1930. Ethel died 30 years lat­er in New York, leav­ing the man­u­script behind, sealed in a bank vault. “Its fate had trou­bled both Mrs. Voyn­ich and her hus­band before her.”

Wil­fred Voyn­ich has often been sus­pect­ed as the man­u­scrip­t’s true author, but its mate­ri­als have been car­bon dat­ed to the ear­ly 1400s, and its first con­firmed own­er, an alchemist from Prague named George Baresch, lived in the 17th cen­tu­ry. Oth­er pro­posed authors have includ­ed Queen Eliz­a­beth I’s advi­sor John Dee, an alchemist and occult philoso­pher, and Fran­cis­can fri­ar and philoso­pher Roger Bacon, who was renowned as a wiz­ard almost two cen­turies before the extant Voyn­ich could have been pro­duced.

Evi­dence for these claims is often ten­u­ous, but the wealth of spec­u­la­tion to which the Voyn­ich has giv­en rise only deep­ens the mys­tery of its cre­ation. As more Voyn­ich schol­ars under­take frus­trat­ing, and often fruit­less, inves­ti­ga­tions, they add to the manuscript’s lore, itself so rich as to occa­sion anoth­er, two-hour, fol­low-up video from our doc­u­men­tar­i­an, who goes by the name The His­to­crat on YouTube. See the fur­ther “Deep Dive” on the Voyn­ich manuscript’s many his­tor­i­cal owners—both con­firmed and rumored—just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Explore Online the Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script: The 15th-Cen­tu­ry Text That Lin­guists & Code-Break­ers Can’t Under­stand

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence May Have Cracked the Code of the Voyn­ich Man­u­script: Has Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy Final­ly Solved a Medieval Mys­tery?

The Writ­ing Sys­tem of the Cryp­tic Voyn­ich Man­u­script Explained: British Researcher May Have Final­ly Cracked the Code

Has the Voyn­ich Man­u­script Final­ly Been Decod­ed?: Researchers Claim That the Mys­te­ri­ous Text Was Writ­ten in Pho­net­ic Old Turk­ish

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

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

in Animation, Books, Literature, Sci Fi | December 30th, 2019

A vision of human­i­ty’s future with­out most of the high tech­nol­o­gy we expect from sci­ence fic­tion, but with a sur­feit of reli­gions, mar­tial arts, and medieval pol­i­tics we don’t; pro­nun­ci­a­tion-unfriend­ly names and terms like “Bene Gesser­it,” “Kwisatz Hader­ach,” and “Muad’Dib”; a sand plan­et inhab­it­ed by giant killer worms: near­ly 55 years after its pub­li­ca­tion, Dune remains a strange piece of work. But apply­ing that adjec­tive to Frank Her­bert’s high­ly suc­cess­ful saga of inter­stel­lar adven­ture and intrigue high­lights not just the ways in which its intri­cate­ly devel­oped world is unfa­mil­iar to us, but the ways in which it is famil­iar — and has grown ever more so over the decades.

“Fol­low­ing an ancient war with robots, human­i­ty has for­bid­den the con­struc­tion of any machine in the like­ness of a human mind,” says Dan Kwartler in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed intro­duc­tion to the world of Dune above. This edict “forced humans to evolve in star­tling ways, becom­ing bio­log­i­cal com­put­ers, psy­chic witch­es, and pre­scient space pilots,” many of them “reg­u­lar­ly employed by var­i­ous noble hous­es, all com­pet­ing for pow­er and new plan­ets to add to their king­doms.” But their super­hu­man skills “rely on the same pre­cious resource: the spice,” a mys­ti­cal crop that also pow­ers space trav­el, “mak­ing it the cor­ner­stone of the galac­tic econ­o­my.”

Her­bert sets Dune — the first of five books by him and many suc­ces­sors by his son Bri­an Her­bert and Kevin J. Ander­son — on the desert plan­et Arrakis, where the noble House Atrei­des finds itself relo­cat­ed. Before long, its young scion Paul Atrei­des “is cat­a­pult­ed into the mid­dle of a plan­e­tary rev­o­lu­tion where he must prove him­self capa­ble of lead­ing and sur­viv­ing on this hos­tile desert world.” Not that Arrakis is just some rock cov­ered in sand: an avid envi­ron­men­tal­ist, Her­bert “spent over five years cre­at­ing Dune’s com­plex ecosys­tem. The plan­et is check­ered with cli­mate belts and wind tun­nels that have shaped its rocky topog­ra­phy. Dif­fer­ing tem­per­ate zones pro­duce vary­ing desert flo­ra, and almost every ele­ment of Dune’s ecosys­tem works togeth­er to pro­duce the plan­et’s essen­tial export.”

Her­bert’s world-build­ing “also includes a rich web of phi­los­o­phy and reli­gion,” which involves ele­ments of Islam, Bud­dhism, Sufi mys­ti­cism, Chris­tian­i­ty, Judaism, and Hin­duism, all arranged in con­fig­u­ra­tions the likes of which human his­to­ry has nev­er seen. What Dune does with reli­gion it does even more with lan­guage, draw­ing for its vocab­u­lary from a range of tongues includ­ing Latin, Old Eng­lish, Hebrew, Greek, Finnish, and Nahu­atl. All this serves a sto­ry deal­ing with themes both eter­nal, like the decline of empire and the mis­placed trust in hero­ic lead­ers, and increas­ing­ly top­i­cal, like the con­se­quences of a feu­dal order, eco­log­i­cal change, and wars over resources in inhos­pitable, sandy places. At the cen­ter is the sto­ry of a man strug­gling to attain mas­tery of not just body but mind, not least by defeat­ing fear, described in Paul’s famous line as the “mind-killer,” the “lit­tle-death that brings total oblit­er­a­tion.”

The scope, com­plex­i­ty, and sheer odd­i­ty of Her­bert’s vision has repeat­ed­ly tempt­ed film­mak­ers and the film indus­try — and repeat­ed­ly defeat­ed them. Per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly Alexan­der Jodor­owsky could­n’t get his plans off the ground for a 14-hour epic Dune involv­ing Pink Floyd, Sal­vador Dalí, Moe­bius, Orson Welles, and Mick Jag­ger. In 1984 David Lynch man­aged to direct a some­what less ambi­tious adap­ta­tion, but the nev­er­the­less enor­mous­ly com­plex and expen­sive pro­duc­tion came out as what David Fos­ter Wal­lace described as “a huge, pre­ten­tious, inco­her­ent flop.” Dune will return to the­aters in Decem­ber 2020 in a ver­sion direct­ed by Denis Vil­leneuve, whose recent work on the likes of Arrival and Blade Run­ner 2049 sug­gests on his part not just the nec­es­sary inter­est in sci­ence fic­tion, but the even more nec­es­sary sense of the sub­lime: a grandeur and beau­ty of such a scale and stark­ness as to inspire fear, much as every Dune read­er has felt on their own imag­ined Arrakis.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Moe­bius’ Sto­ry­boards & Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

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

Why You Should Read The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Bulgakov’s Rol­lick­ing Sovi­et Satire

Why You Should Read One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude: An Ani­mat­ed Video Makes the Case

Why You Should Read Crime and Pun­ish­ment: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Dostoevsky’s Moral Thriller

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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