How to save those wet, damaged books? The question has to be asked. Above, you can watch a visual primer from the Syracuse University Libraries—people who know something about taking care of books. It contains a series of tips, some intuitive, some less so, that will give you a clear action plan the next time water and paper meet.
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Imagine you could talk to Hieronymus Bosch, the authors of the Book of Revelation, or of the Voynich Manuscript—a bizarre 15th century text written in an uncrackable code; that you could solve centuries-old mysteries by asking them, “what were you thinking?” You might be disappointed to hear them say, as does Luigi Serafini, author and illustrator of the Codex Seraphinianus, “At the end of the day [it’s] similar to the Rorschach inkblot test. You see what you want to see. You might think it’s speaking to you, but it’s just your imagination.”
If you were a longtime devotee of an intensely symbolic, mythic text, you might refuse to believe this. It must mean something, fans of the Codex have insisted since the book’s appearance in 1981.
It shares many similarities with the Voynich Manuscript, save its relatively recent vintage and living author: both the Seraphinianus and the Voynich seem to be compendiums of an otherworldly natural science and art, and both are written in a wholly invented language.
Serafini tells Wired he thinks Voynich is a fake. “The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II loved ancient manuscripts; somebody swindled him and spread the rumor that it was original. The idea of made-up languages is not new at all.” As for his own made-up language in the Codex, he avers, “I always said that there is no meaning behind the script; it’s just a game.” But it is not a hoax. Though he hasn’t minded the money from the book’s cult popularity, he created the book, he says, “trying to reach out to my fellow people, just like bloggers do.” It is, he says, “the product of a generation that chose to connect and create a network, rather than kill each other in wars like their fathers did.”
The Codex, writes Abe Books, who made the short video review above, is “essentially an encyclopedia about an alien world that clearly reflects our own, each chapter appears to deal with key facets of this surreal place, including flora, fauna, science, machines, games and architecture.” That’s only a guess given the unintelligible language.
The illustrations seem to draw from Bosch, Leonardo da Vinci, and the medieval travelogue as much as from the surrealism of contemporary European artists like Fantastic Planet animator René Laloux.
Serafini has been delighted to see an extensive internet community coalesce around the book, and has had his fun with it. He “now states,” writes Dangerous Minds, “that a stray white cat that joined him while he created the Codex in Rome in the 1970s was actually the real author, telepathically guiding Serafini as he drew and ‘wrote.’” You can now, thanks to a recent, relatively affordable edition published by Rizzoli, purchase your copy of the Codex. Buy now, I’d say. First editions of the book now fetch upwards of $6000, and its popularity shows no sign of slowing.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
The expression “Don’t quit your day job” is often used as an insult, implying that the recipient’s creative skills aren’t up to attracting a career-supporting audience. But it can also be practical advice in certain cases, especially those of artists possessed of a sensibility too particular and strange to bear direct exposure to the marketplace. So it was with Henry Darger, who deliberately passed his 81 years in near-absolute obscurity, working increasingly menial janitorial jobs by day and, when not attending one of his five daily masses, obsessing over his art the rest of the time. That art took various forms, most notably The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco–Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, which has been described as the longest work of fiction ever written — and the strangest.
As described in the video above from Fredrik Knudsen (and in the 2004 feature-length documentary In the Realms of the Unreal), its 15,145 pages relate the adventures of a set of immaculately virtuous little girls against the backdrop of an apocalyptic, ultra-violent religious war. When Darger’s landlords discovered the work after his death, they also turned up a variety of drawings, paintings, and collages, many of them at least obliquely related to the story.
Against backdrops alternately idyllic and harrowing, the Vivian girls often appear naked, sometimes bewilderingly outfitted with male genitalia. Though clearly composed without formal training of any kind, Darger’s visual compositions demonstrate an askew kind of proficiency, or at least a kind of staggering evolution over the course of decades. Whatever the appeal of his work, there’s never been an artist like him. Nor could there be, given the highly specific stretch of history occupied by his long yet rigidly bounded life.
Not long after Darger’s birth in the Chicago of 1892, the death of his mother followed by the incapacitation of his father plunged him into a childhood of Dickensian-sounding hardship, spent in institutions with names like the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children. An aggrieved loner seemingly afflicted by what we would now call mental health difficulties from the start, he took a kind of refuge in the fantasy cohering in his head, one shaped equally by mass print media phenomena like Winnie Winkle and Little Annie Rooney, Civil War photographs, and ultra-devout Catholicism. Since his posthumous discovery and elevation to the status of the ultimate “outsider artist,” there’s been no end of speculation about his personal habits, sexual proclivities, and state of mind. But with all such questions beyond resolution, we can, for the moment, leave the last word to the artist himself: “It’s better to be a sucker who makes something than a wise guy who is too cautious to make anything at all.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Magyar, which is spoken and written in Hungary, ranks among the hardest European languages to learn. (The U.S. Foreign Service Institute puts it in the second-to-highest level, accompanied by the dreaded asterisk labeling it as “usually more difficult than other languages in the same category.”) But once you master its vowel harmony system, its definite and indefinite conjugation, and its eighteen grammatical cases, among other notorious features, you can finally enjoy the work of writers like Nobel Laureates Imre Kertész and László Krasznahorkai in the original. Alas, no degree of mastery will be much help if you want to understand a much older — and, in its way, much more notorious — Hungarian text, the Rohonc Codex.
“Little is known about this book before it was bequeathed to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1838,” writes The Art Newspaper’s Garry Shaw. “Its 448 pages bear illustrations covering Biblical themes and an as yet unreadable text, written using around 150 different symbols.”
Like the famously cryptic Voynich Manuscript, muchcoveredhereonOpenCulture, “there has been much speculation over what language, if any, is encoded — ranging from old Hungarian to Sanskrit, or even a specially invented one — as well as debate over the book’s origin and date of creation.” Most colorfully, some attribute it to the notorious nineteenth-century forger Sámuel Literáti Nemes.
Download this PDF scan of the Rohonc Codex, and you can behold for yourself both its often charmingly simple medieval-style illustrations — many of which exhibit a mixture of Christian, Pagan, and Muslim symbolism — and the fiendishly regular-looking script against which generations of would-be decipherers have banged their heads. Here in the twenty-twenties, perhaps artificial intelligence can do its part, as has been attempted with the Voynich Manuscript, to build upon earlier analyses. One of those, conducted in the early nineteen-seventies, determined that, whatever the language in which the Rohonc Codex was written, it shows no traces of case endings. To enthusiasts of bizarre manuscripts, that discovery probably means little, but to students of Magyar, nothing could come as a greater relief.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Though it isn’t the kind of thing one hears discussed every day, serious Disney fans do tend to know that Goofy’s original name was Dippy Dawg. But how many of the non-obsessive know that Mickey’s faithful pet Pluto was first called Rover? (We pass over in dignified silence the quasi-philosophical question of why the former dog is humanoid and the latter isn’t.) It is Rover, as distinct from Pluto, who passes into the public domain this new year, one of a cast of now-liberated characters including Blondie and Dagwood as well as Betty Boop — who, upon making her debut in Fleischer Studios’ Dizzy Dishes of 1930, has a somewhat canoid appearance herself. You can see them all in the video above from Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, with much more information available in their blog post marking this year’s “Public Domain Day.”
The year 1930, write the Center’s Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, was one “of detectives, jazz, speakeasies, and iconic characters stepping onto the cultural stage — many of whom have been locked behind copyright for nearly a century.”
Novels that come available this year include William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, and Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage; among the films are Lewis Milestone’s Best Picture-winning All Quiet on the Western Front, Victor Heerman’s Marx Brothers picture Animal Crackers, and Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s L’Âge d’Or. In music, compositions like “I Got Rhythm” and “Embraceable You” by the Gershwin Brothers as well as recordings like “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” by Marian Anderson and “Sweet Georgia Brown” by Ben Bernie and His Hotel Roosevelt Orchestra have also, at long last, gone public.
Reflection on some of these works themselves suggests something about the importance of the public domain. With the title of Cakes and Ale, another book in this year’s crop, Somerset Maugham makes reference to “a classic public domain work, in this case Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night”; so, for that matter, does Faulkner, given that the line “as I lay dying” comes from the Odyssey. “To tell new stories, we draw from older ones,” write Jenkins and Boyle. “One work of art inspires another — that is how the public domain feeds creativity.” Today, we’re free to take explicit inspiration for our own work from Nancy Drew, “Just a Gigolo,” Blondie, Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, Hitchcock’s Murder!, and much else besides. And by all means use Rover, but if you also want to bring in Dippy Dawg, you’re going to have to wait until 2028.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
One can easily imagine a reader enjoying both The Lord of theRings and Dune. Both of those works of epic fantasy were published in the form of a series of long novels beginning in the mid-twentieth century; both create elaborate worlds of their own, right down to details of ecology and language; both seriously (and these days, unfashionably) concern themselves with the theme of what constitutes heroic action; both have even inspired multiple big-budget Hollywood spectacles. The reader equally dedicated to the work of J. R. R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert turns out to be a more elusive creature than we may expect, but perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us, given Tolkien’s own attitude toward Dune.
“It is impossible for an author still writing to be fair to another author working along the same lines,” Tolkien wrote in 1966 to a fan who’d sent him a copy of Herbert’s book, which had come out the year before. “In fact I dislike DUNE with some intensity, and in that unfortunate case it is much the best and fairest to another author to keep silent and refuse to comment.”
That lack of elaboration has, if anything, only stoked the curiosity of Lord of the Rings and Dune enthusiasts alike, as evidenced by this thread from a few years ago on the r/tolkienfans subreddit. Was it the materialism and Machiavellianism implicit in Dune’s worldview? The preponderance of invented names and coinages that surely wouldn’t meet the etymological standard of an Oxford linguist?
Maybe it was the aristocratic isolation — a kind of anti-fellowship — of its protagonist Paul Atreides, who comes to possess the equivalent of Tolkien’s Ring of Power. “In Dune, Paul willingly takes the (metaphorical) ring and wields it,” writes Evan Amato at The Culturist. “He leads, transforms, and conquers. The universe bends to his vision. He suffers for it, yes, and questions it, but he never truly rejects the call to rule. Contrast this with the world of Middle-earth, where all Tolkien’s heroes do the opposite. When Frodo offers the Ring to Aragorn, he refuses. Even Samwise, humble as he is, feels the surge of the Ring’s power, and lets it go.” Assuming he managed to get through the first Dune novel, Tolkien could hardly have approved of the narrative’s moral arc. Whether his or Herbert’s vision puts up the more realistic allegory for humanity’s lot is another matter entirely.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
If you’re a regular listener, you know that Ezra Klein wraps up his podcast interviews with a familiar question: what three books would you recommend to the audience? When Klein interviewed Brian Eno in October, the producer had these three books to offer.
First up was Printing and the Mind of Man, a catalog from an exhibition held at the British Museum in 1963. “It was about the history of printing, but actually, the book is about the most important books in the Western canon and the impact that they had when they were released.” “It’s such a fascinating book because you really start to understand where the big, fundamental ideas that made Western culture came from.”
Next came A Pattern Language by the architect Christopher Alexander. “It’s really a book about habitat, about what makes spaces welcoming and fruitful, or hostile and barren.” Eno has returned to the book again and again over the years. “Over the course of my life, I’ve bought, I would say, 60 copies of that book because I always give it to anyone who is about to renovate a house or about to build a house. It’s a great read, and you would love it.”
His third recommendation was Naples ’44, a war diary kept by Norman Lewis, a British intelligence officer sent to Naples during World War II. “He kept a diary, and this is the most fabulous diary you’ll ever read. It’s just hilariously funny, deeply moving, and totally confusing—and you realize that Naples was, like, another planet.”
Understandably, Klein couldn’t let the interview end without also asking what albums influenced Eno most. In response, Eno offered The Rural Blues, a series of recordings of Black American music from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. It’s the same music that later inspired pop and rock musicians in England when Eno came of age. He also pointed to the Velvet Underground’s self-titled third album, calling it a “beautiful, beautiful record, beautifully controversial in many ways.” He then added: “In fact, probably without that record, I wouldn’t have been a pop musician.” Many other musicians have said the same.
And finally, despite being an atheist, Eno selected a gospel recording act known as The Consolers, best known for their 1955 track “Give Me My Flowers.” You can listen to more of their greatest hits here.
From the mighty Maya civilization, which dominated Mesoamerica for more than three and a half millennia, we have exactly four books. Only one of them predates the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century: the Códice Maya de México, or Maya Codex of Mexico, which was created between 1021 and 1152. Though incomplete, and hardly in good shape otherwise, its artwork — colored in places with precious materials — vividly evokes an ancient worldview now all but lost. In the video above from the Getty Museum and Smarthistory, art historians Andrew Turner and Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank tell us what we’re looking at when we behold the remains of this sacred Mayan book, the oldest ever found in the Americas.
“This book has a controversial history,” says Turner. “It was long considered to be a fake due to the strange circumstances in which it surfaced.” After its discovery in a private collection in Mexico City in the nineteen-sixties, it was rumored to have been looted from a cave in Chiapas.
At first pronounced a fake by experts, due to its lack of resemblance to the other extant Mayan texts, it was only verified as the genuine article in 2018. For a non-specialist, the question remains: what is the Códice about? Its purpose, as Kilroy-Ewbank puts it, is astronomical, relaying as it does “information about the cycle of the planet Venus” — which, as Turner adds, “was considered a dangerous planet” by the Mayans.
The Códice contains records of Venus’ 584-day cycle over the course of 140 years, testifying to the scrutiny Mayan astronomers gave to its complicated pattern of rising and falling. They thus managed to determine — as many ancient civilizations did not — that it was both the Morning Star and the Evening Star, although they seem to have been more interested in what its movements revealed about the intentions of the deities they saw as controlling it, and thus the likelihood of events like war or famine. Those gods weren’t benevolent: one page shows “a frightful skeletal deity that has a blunt knife sticking out of his nasal cavity,” holding “a giant jagged blade up” with one hand and “the hair of a captive whose head he’s freshly severed” with the other. That’s hardly the sort of image that comes to our modern minds when we gaze up at the night sky, but then, we don’t see things like the Mayans did.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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