What Makes James Joyce’s Ulysses a Masterpiece: Great Books Explained

in Books, History, Literature | October 17th, 2023

Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve often fea­tured the work of gal­lerist-Youtu­ber James Payne, cre­ator of the chan­nel Great Art Explained. Not long ago we wrote up his exam­i­na­tion of the work of René Magritte, the Bel­gian sur­re­al­ist painter respon­si­ble for such endur­ing images as Le fils de l’homme, or The Son of Man. Payne uses that famous image of a bowler-hat­ted every­man whose face is cov­ered by a green apple again in the video above, but this time to rep­re­sent a lit­er­ary char­ac­ter: Leopold Bloom, the pro­tag­o­nist of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It is that much-scru­ti­nized lit­er­ary mas­ter­work Payne has tak­en as his sub­ject for his new chan­nel, Great Books Explained.

Indeed, few great books are regard­ed as need­ing as much expla­na­tion as Ulysses. It was once described, Payne reminds us, as “spir­i­tu­al­ly offen­sive, anar­chic, and obscene,” yet “in the hun­dred years since, the book has tri­umphed over crit­i­cism and cen­sor­ship to become one of the most high­ly regard­ed works of art in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.”

The strength of both this acclaim and this con­dem­na­tion still today inspires a mix­ture of curios­i­ty and trep­i­da­tion. But as Payne sees it, Ulysses is ulti­mate­ly “a nov­el about wan­der­ing, and we as read­ers should feel free to wan­der around the book, dip in and out of episodes, read it out aloud, and let the words wash over us like music.” It’s also “an exper­i­men­tal work, often strange and some­times shock­ing, but it is con­sis­tent­ly wit­ty, and packed with a tremen­dous sense of fun.”

That lat­ter qual­i­ty belies the sev­en years of lit­er­ary labor Joyce put into the book, all of it dis­tilled into the events of a sin­gle day in Dublin, June 16, 1904, as expe­ri­enced by Bloom, an “ordi­nary adver­tis­ing agent” and a Jew among Catholics; the “rebel­lious and mis­an­throp­ic intel­lec­tu­al” Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s alter-ego and the hero of his pre­vi­ous nov­el A Por­trait of the Artist as a Young Man; and Leopold’s “pas­sion­ate, amorous, frank-speak­ing” wife Mol­ly. (Payne rep­re­sents Dedalus with Raoul Hauss­man­’s The Art Crit­ic and Mol­ly with Han­nah Höch’s Indi­an Dancer.) In this frame­work, Joyce deliv­ers kalei­do­scop­ic detail, from the quo­tid­i­an to the mytho­log­i­cal and the sex­u­al to the scat­o­log­i­cal, all with a for­mal and lin­guis­tic brava­do that has kept the read­ing expe­ri­ence of Ulysses fresh for 101 years and count­ing.

Relat­ed con­tent:

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Down­load as a Free Audio Book & Free eBook

Why Should You Read James Joyce’s Ulysses?: A New TED-ED Ani­ma­tion Makes the Case

Every­thing You Need to Enjoy Read­ing James Joyce’s Ulysses on Blooms­day

The Very First Reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses: “A Work of High Genius” (1922)

Read the Orig­i­nal Seri­al­ized Edi­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918)

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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A Lavishly Illustrated Catalog of All Hummingbird Species Known in the 19th Century Gets Restored & Put Online

in Art, Books, Nature | October 12th, 2023

If you don’t live in a part of the world with a lot of hum­ming­birds, it’s easy to regard them as not quite of this earth. With their wide array of shim­mer­ing col­ors and fre­net­ic yet eeri­ly sta­ble man­ner of flight, they can seem like qua­si-fan­tas­ti­cal crea­tures even to those who encounter them in real­i­ty. They cer­tain­ly cap­tured the imag­i­na­tion of Eng­lish ornithol­o­gist John Gould, who between the years of 1849 and 1887 cre­at­ed A Mono­graph of the Trochilidæ, or Fam­i­ly of Hum­ming-Birds, a cat­a­log of all known species of hum­ming­bird at the time. As you might expect, this is just the kind of old book you can peruse at the Inter­net Archive, but now there’s also an online restora­tion that returns Gould’s illus­tra­tions to their orig­i­nal glo­ry.

A Mono­graph of the Trochilidæ “is con­sid­ered one of the finest exam­ples of ornitho­log­i­cal illus­tra­tion ever pro­duced, as well as a sci­en­tif­ic mas­ter­piece,” writes the site’s cre­ator, Nicholas Rougeux (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his dig­i­tal restora­tions of British & Exot­ic Min­er­al­o­gy and Euclid­’s Ele­ments).

“Gould’s pas­sion for hum­ming­birds led him to trav­el to var­i­ous parts of the world, such as North Amer­i­ca, Brazil, Colom­bia, Ecuador, and Peru, to observe and col­lect spec­i­mens. He also received many spec­i­mens from oth­er nat­u­ral­ists and col­lec­tors.” Tak­en togeth­er, the work’s five vol­umes — one of them pub­lished as a sup­ple­ment years after his death — cat­a­log 537 species, doc­u­ment­ing their appear­ance with 418 hand-col­ored lith­o­graph­ic plates.

All these images were “ana­lyzed and restored to their orig­i­nal vibrant col­ors in a process that took near­ly 150 hours to com­plete. As much of the orig­i­nal plate was pre­served — includ­ing the del­i­cate col­ors of the scenic back­grounds in each vignette.” You can view and down­load them at the site’s illus­tra­tions page, where they come accom­pa­nied by Gould’s own text and clas­si­fied accord­ing to the same scheme he orig­i­nal­ly used. You may not know your Phaëthor­nis from your Spheno­proc­tus, to say noth­ing of your Cyanomyia from your Smarag­dochry­sis, but after see­ing these small won­ders of the nat­ur­al world as Gould did (all arranged into a chro­mat­ic spec­trum by Rougeux to make a strik­ing poster), you may well find your­self inspired to learn the dif­fer­ences — or at least to put a feed­er out­side your win­dow.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Hum­ming­bird Whis­per­er: Meet the UCLA Sci­en­tist Who Has Befriend­ed 200 Hum­ming­birds

Explore an Inter­ac­tive Ver­sion of The Wall of Birds, a 2,500 Square-Foot Mur­al That Doc­u­ments the Evo­lu­tion of Birds Over 375 Mil­lion Years

What Kind of Bird Is That?: A Free App From Cor­nell Will Give You the Answer

A Beau­ti­ful­ly Designed Edi­tion of Euclid’s Ele­ments from 1847 Gets Dig­i­tized: Explore the New Online, Inter­ac­tive Repro­duc­tion

Explore an Inter­ac­tive, Online Ver­sion of the Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed, 200-Year-Old British & Exot­ic Min­er­al­o­gy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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How to Read Five Books Per Month & Become a Serious Reader: Tips from Deep Work Author Cal Newport

in Books, Life | October 5th, 2023

If those who have read Cal New­port’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Suc­cess in a Dis­tract­ed World — and even more so, those who’ve been mean­ing to read it — share any one desire, it’s sure­ly the desire to read more books. And for those who have read­ing habits sim­i­lar to New­port’s, it would­n’t actu­al­ly have been a Her­culean task to read more than 400 books over the past sev­en years since Deep Work’s pub­li­ca­tion in 2016. For­mi­da­ble though that total num­ber may sound, it would only require read­ing about five books per month, and in the video above, a clip from his pod­cast Deep Ques­tions, New­port explains his strate­gies for doing just that.

First, New­port rec­om­mends choos­ing “more inter­est­ing books”: that is to say, fol­low your own inter­ests instead of ask­ing, “What book is going to impress oth­er peo­ple if they heard I read it?” Read a wide vari­ety of books, chang­ing up the genre, sub­ject, and even for­mat — paper ver­sus audio, for exam­ple — every time. (For my part, I’d also rec­om­mend read­ing across sev­er­al lan­guages, match­ing the ambi­tions of your select­ed books to your skill lev­el in each one.)

Then, sched­ule reg­u­lar read­ing ses­sions: “Very few peo­ple tack­le phys­i­cal exer­cise with the mind­set of, ‘If I have time and I’m in the mood, I’ll do it.’ As we know from long expe­ri­ence, that means you will do exact­ly zero hours of exer­cise. The same is true for read­ing.”

This hard­ly means you just have to grit your teeth and read. You can “put rit­u­als around read­ing that make it more enjoy­able”: New­port spends his Fri­day nights in his study with a book and a glass of bour­bon, and in the sum­mer­time reads on his out­door couch with a cup of cof­fee. Also sat­is­fy­ing is mak­ing the “clos­ing push,” the final binge when “you’re at that last hun­dred pages, you have some momen­tum, you’ve been work­ing on this book for a while, you can see the fin­ish line.” But none of these strate­gies can have much of an effect if you don’t “take every­thing inter­est­ing off your phone.” Unlike most mil­len­ni­als, New­port has nev­er par­tic­i­pat­ed in social media, with the pos­i­tive side effect that read­ing books has become “my default activ­i­ty when I don’t have some­thing else to do.”

If you’d like to know more about how New­port, who’s also a father and a pro­fes­sor of com­put­er sci­ence, fits read­ing into his life, have a look at his dis­cus­sion of how to become a seri­ous read­er. This involves build­ing a “train­ing regime,” begin­ning with short spurts of whichev­er books you hap­pen to find most excit­ing and work­ing your way up to longer ses­sions with more com­plex read­ing mate­r­i­al. He also has a video of advice for becom­ing a dis­ci­plined per­son in gen­er­al, in which he employs his own spe­cial­ized con­cepts, like iden­ti­fy­ing “deep life buck­ets” and, from them, draw­ing “key­stone habits.” But as with so much in life, being dis­ci­plined in prac­tice is a mat­ter of iden­ti­ty. If you first “con­vince your­self that you are a dis­ci­plined per­son,” you’ll feel a con­stant, moti­vat­ing need to live up to that label. In order to read more, then, declare your­self a read­er: not just one who reads a lot, ide­al­ly, but one who reads well.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Case for Delet­ing Your Social Media Accounts & Doing Valu­able “Deep Work” Instead, Accord­ing to Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Cal New­port

How to Read Many More Books in a Year: Watch a Short Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tur­ing Some of the World’s Most Beau­ti­ful Book­stores

Carl Sagan on the Impor­tance of Choos­ing Wise­ly What You Read (Even If You Read a Book a Week)

Joseph Brodsky’s List of 83 Books You Should Read to Have an Intel­li­gent Con­ver­sa­tion

7 Tips for Read­ing More Books in a Year

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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Behold the Jacobean Traveling Library: The 17th Century Forerunner to the Kindle

in Books, Design | September 27th, 2023

Image cour­tesy of the Uni­ver­si­ty at Leeds

In the strik­ing image above, you can see an ear­ly exper­i­ment in mak­ing books portable–a 17th cen­tu­ry pre­cur­sor, if you will, to the mod­ern day Kin­dle.

Accord­ing to the library at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Leeds, this “Jacobean Trav­el­ling Library” dates back to 1617. That’s when William Hakewill, an Eng­lish lawyer and MP, com­mis­sioned the minia­ture library–a big book, which itself holds 50 small­er books, all “bound in limp vel­lum cov­ers with coloured fab­ric ties.” What books were in this portable library, meant to accom­pa­ny noble­men on their jour­neys? Nat­u­ral­ly the clas­sics. The­ol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy, clas­si­cal his­to­ry and poet­ry. The works of Ovid, Seneca, Cicero, Vir­gil, Tac­i­tus, and Saint Augus­tine. Many of the same texts that showed up in The Har­vard Clas­sics (now avail­able online) three cen­turies lat­er.

Appar­ent­ly three oth­er Jacobean Trav­el­ling Libraries were made. They now reside at the British Library, the Hunt­ing­ton Library in San Mari­no, Cal­i­for­nia, and the Tole­do Muse­um of Art in Tole­do, Ohio.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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:

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 Sev­er­al Books at Once (1588)

The Har­vard Clas­sics: Down­load All 51 Vol­umes as Free eBooks

The Fiske Read­ing Machine: The 1920s Pre­cur­sor to the Kin­dle

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The Story of Lorem Ipsum: How Scrambled Text by Cicero Became Used by Typesetters Everywhere

in Books, Design | September 21st, 2023

In high school, the lan­guage I most fell in love with hap­pened to be a dead one: Latin. Sure, it’s spo­ken at the Vat­i­can, and when I first began to study the tongue of Vir­gil and Cat­ul­lus, friends joked that I could only use it if I moved to Rome. Tempt­ing, but church Latin bare­ly resem­bles the clas­si­cal writ­ten lan­guage, a high­ly for­mal gram­mar full of sym­me­tries and puz­zles. You don’t speak clas­si­cal Latin; you solve it, labor over it, and gloat, to no one in par­tic­u­lar, when you’ve ren­dered it some­what intel­li­gi­ble. Giv­en that the study of an ancient lan­guage is rarely a con­ver­sa­tion­al art, it can some­times feel a lit­tle alien­at­ing.

And so you might imag­ine how pleased I was to dis­cov­er what looked like clas­si­cal Latin in the real world: the text known to design­ers around the globe as “Lorem Ipsum,” also called “filler text” and (erro­neous­ly) “Greek copy.”

The idea, Priceo­nom­ics informs us, is to force peo­ple to look at the lay­out and font, not read the words. Also, “nobody would mis­take it for their native lan­guage,” there­fore Lorem Ipsum is “less like­ly than oth­er filler text to be mis­tak­en for final copy and pub­lished by acci­dent.” If you’ve done any web design, you’ve prob­a­bly seen it, look­ing some­thing like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, con­secte­tur adip­isc­ing elit, sed do eius­mod tem­por inci­didunt ut labore et dolore magna ali­qua. Ut enim ad min­im veni­am, quis nos­trud exerci­ta­tion ullam­co laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea com­mo­do con­se­quat. Duis aute irure dolor in rep­re­hen­der­it in volup­tate velit esse cil­lum dolore eu fugiat nul­la pariatur. Excep­teur sint occae­cat cup­i­datat non proident, sunt in cul­pa qui offi­cia deserunt mol­lit anim id est labo­rum.

When I first encoun­tered this text, I did what any Latin geek will—set about try­ing to trans­late it. But it wasn’t long before I real­ized that Lorem Ipsum is most­ly gib­ber­ish, a gar­bling of Latin that makes no real sense. The first word, “Lorem,” isn’t even a word; instead it’s a piece of the word “dolorem,” mean­ing pain, suf­fer­ing, or sor­row. So where did this mash-up of Latin-like syn­tax come from, and how did it get so scram­bled? First, the source of Lorem Ipsum—tracked down by Ham­p­den-Syd­ney Direc­tor of Pub­li­ca­tions Richard McClintock—is Roman lawyer, states­men, and philoso­pher Cicero, from an essay called “On the Extremes of Good and Evil,” or De Finibus Bono­rum et Mal­o­rum.

675px-Cicero_-_Musei_Capitolini

Why Cicero? Put most sim­ply, writes Priceo­nom­ics, “for a long time, Cicero was every­where.” His fame as the most skilled of Roman rhetori­cians meant that his writ­ing became the bench­mark for prose in Latin, the stan­dard Euro­pean lan­guage of the Mid­dle Ages. The pas­sage that gen­er­at­ed Lorem Ipsum trans­lates in part to a sen­ti­ment Latin­ists will well under­stand:

Nor is there any­one who loves or pur­sues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occa­sion­al­ly cir­cum­stances occur in which toil and pain can pro­cure him some great plea­sure.

Dolorem Ipsum, “pain in and of itself,” sums up the tor­tu­ous feel­ing of try­ing to ren­der some of Cicero’s com­plex, ver­bose sen­tences into Eng­lish. Doing so with tol­er­a­ble pro­fi­cien­cy is, for some of us, “great plea­sure” indeed.

But how did Cicero, that mas­ter styl­ist, come to be so bad­ly man­han­dled as to be near­ly unrec­og­niz­able? Lorem Ipsum has a his­to­ry that long pre­dates online con­tent man­age­ment. It has been used as filler text since the six­teenth cen­tu­ry when—as McClin­tock theorized—“some type­set­ter had to make a type spec­i­men book, to demo dif­fer­ent fonts” and decid­ed that “the text should be insen­si­ble, so as not to dis­tract from the page’s graph­i­cal fea­tures.” It appears that this enter­pris­ing crafts­man snatched up a page of Cicero he had lying around and turned it into non­sense. The text, says McClin­tock, “has sur­vived not only four cen­turies of let­ter-by-let­ter reset­ting but even the leap into elec­tron­ic type­set­ting, essen­tial­ly unchanged.”

The sto­ry of Lorem Ipsum is a fas­ci­nat­ing one—if you’re into that kind of thing—but its longevi­ty rais­es a fur­ther ques­tion: should we still be using it at all, this man­gling of a dead lan­guage, in a medi­um as vital and dynam­ic as web pub­lish­ing, where “con­tent” refers to hun­dreds of design ele­ments besides font. Is Lorem Ipsum a quaint piece of nos­tal­gia that’s out­lived its use­ful­ness? In answer, you may wish to read Karen McGrane’s spir­it­ed defense of the prac­tice. Or, if you feel it’s time to let the gar­bled Latin go the way of man­u­al type­set­ting machines, con­sid­er per­haps as an alter­na­tive “Niet­zsche Ipsum,” which gen­er­ates ran­dom para­graphs of most­ly verb-less, inco­her­ent Niet­zsche-like text, in Eng­lish. Hey, at least it looks like a real lan­guage.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Learn Latin?: 5 Videos Make a Com­pelling Case That the “Dead Lan­guage” Is an “Eter­nal Lan­guage”

What Ancient Latin Sound­ed Like, And How We Know It

Can Mod­ern-Day Ital­ians Under­stand Latin? A Youtu­ber Puts It to the Test on the Streets of Rome

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

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A Mesmerizing Look at the Making of a Late Medieval Book from Start to Finish

in Books, Design, History | September 4th, 2023

Hand bind­ing a book, using pri­mar­i­ly 15-cen­tu­ry meth­ods and mate­ri­als sounds like a major under­tak­ing, rife with pit­falls and frus­tra­tion.

A far more relax­ing activ­i­ty is watch­ing Four Keys Book Arts’ word­less, 24-minute high­lights reel of self-taught book­binder Den­nis tack­ling that same assign­ment, above. (Bonus — it’s a guar­an­teed treat for those prone to autonomous sen­so­ry merid­i­an response tin­gles.)

Den­nis, whose oth­er recent for­ays into bespoke book­bind­ing include a num­ber of ele­gant match­box sized vol­umes and upcy­cling three Dun­geons & Drag­ons rule­books into a tome bound in veg­etable tanned goatskin, labored on the late-medieval Goth­ic repro­duc­tion for over 60 hours.

For research on this type of bind­ing, he turned to book design­er J.A. Szir­mai’s The Archae­ol­o­gy of Medieval Book­bind­ing, and while the goal was nev­er 100% peri­od accu­ra­cy, Den­nis notes that the craft of tra­di­tion­al hand-bind­ing has remained vir­tu­al­ly unchanged for cen­turies:

The medieval binder would have found many of the tools and tech­niques to be very famil­iar. The sin­gle biggest anachro­nism is my use of syn­thet­ic PVA glue rather than peri­od-appro­pri­ate ani­mal glue. The sec­ond his­toric anom­aly is my use of mar­bled paper, though it could be argued that the ear­li­est Euro­pean mar­bled papers of the mid-17th cen­tu­ry do over­lap with this bind­ing style. The non­pareil pat­tern I have cho­sen for the end­pa­pers, though, dates from the 1820’s, and so is dis­tinct­ly out of place. But apart from those, vir­tu­al­ly all of the oth­er mate­ri­als in this book would have been avail­able to the medieval book­binder.

Those crav­ing a more step-by-step expla­na­tion should set time aside to view the longer videos, below, in which Den­nis shares such time-con­sum­ing, detail-ori­ent­ed tasks as trim­ming and tidy­ing the edges with a cab­i­net scraper and book­binder’s plough, sewing end­bands to sup­port and pro­tect the book’s head and the spine, and dec­o­rat­ing the leather cov­er with a hand-tooled flo­ral pat­tern embell­ished with gold foil high­lights. 

Rather than cut cor­ners, he lit­er­al­ly cuts cor­ners — the met­al clasp and cor­ner guards -  from a .8mm thick sheet of brass.

Only the final video is nar­rat­ed, so be sure to acti­vate closed cap­tion­ing / sub­ti­tles in the YouTube tool­bar to read his com­men­tary.

Mate­ri­als and tools used in this project:

Text Paper: Fab­ri­ano Accad­e­mia 120 gsm draw­ing paper, 65 x 50 cm, long grain

End­pa­pers: Four Keys Book Arts hand­made mar­bled paper, Fab­ri­ano Accad­e­mia 120 gsm draw­ing paper, red hand­made paper

Thread: Undyed Linen 25/3, unknown brand

Cords: Leather, unknown type, rough­ly 3 oz/ 1 mm

Wax: Nat­ur­al Beeswax

Glue: Mix of Acid-Free PVA and Methyl Cel­lu­lose, 3:2 ratio.

Paper Knife (made from an old kitchen knife)

Bone Fold­er (hand­made in-house)

Scrap book board, var­i­ous sizes/thickness

Press­ing Boards (1/2″ maple ply­wood, made in house)

Cast-Iron Book Press (Patrick Ritchie, Edin­burgh, cir­ca 1850)

Stain­less Steel rulers, var­i­ous sizes

Small Stan­ley Knife

Maple Lay­ing Press (hand­made in-house)

Small Car­pen­ter’s Square, unknown brand

Pen­cil (Black­wing)

Steel dividers, unknown brand

Lith­o­g­ra­phy Stone (cir­ca 1925)

Cot­ton Rag

Agate Bur­nish­er

Pierc­ing Cra­dle (hand­made in-house)

Awl

2″ nat­ur­al bris­tle brush, gener­ic

parch­ment release paper

blot­ting paper

Acetate bar­ri­er sheets, .01 gauge

Dahle Van­tage 12e Guil­lo­tine (found at a thrift store)

Scis­sors

Book­bind­ing Nee­dles

Sewing Frame (hand­made in-house)

Brass H‑Keys (hand­made in-house)

Linen sewing tapes, 12 mm

Pins

Watch a full playlist of Four Keys Book Arts’ Medieval Goth­ic Bind­ing videos here. See more of Den­nis book bind­ing projects on Four Keys Book Arts’ Insta­gram.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

When Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Recy­cled & Used to Make the First Print­ed Books

The Medieval Mas­ter­piece, the Book of Kells, Has Been Dig­i­tized and Put Online

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Discover the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, the World’s Oldest Surviving Complete Printed Book (868 AD)

in Books, History | August 10th, 2023

It isn’t easy to say which book is the old­est in the world, because the answer depends on what, exact­ly qual­i­fies as a book. Dat­ing from the year 868, the Chi­nese Dia­mond Sūtra is known as “the world’s ear­li­est dat­ed, print­ed book,” the words used on the web site of the British Library, which owns the thing itself. It was found in north­west Chi­na, “in a holy site called the Mogao (or ‘Peer­less’) Caves or the ‘Caves of a Thou­sand Bud­dhas,’ which was a major Bud­dhist cen­tre from the 4th to 14th cen­turies,” its page explains. “In 1900, a monk named Wang Yuan­lu dis­cov­ered the sealed entrance to a hid­den cave, where tens of thou­sands of man­u­scripts, paint­ings and oth­er arti­facts had been deposit­ed and sealed up some­time around the begin­ning of the 11th cen­tu­ry.”

Includ­ed in this trea­sure trove, this copy of the Dia­mond Sutra “was brought to Eng­land by the explor­er Sir Aurel Stein in 1907.” With the form of not a‑book-as-we-know-it but “sev­en strips of yel­low-stained paper print­ed from carved wood­en blocks and past­ed togeth­er to form a scroll 16 feet by 10. 5 inch­es wide,” as Jere­my Nor­man writes at Historyofinformation.com, it may not seem all that impres­sive when seen from a dis­tance.

But “its text, print­ed in Chi­nese, is one of the most impor­tant sacred works of the Bud­dhist faith,” a dia­logue between the Bud­dha and one of his pupils on the “per­fec­tion of insight” and the nature of real­i­ty itself, titled for its poten­tial to cut like a dia­mond blade through the lay­ers of illu­sion in which we live.

Today, we need not exam­ine the Chi­nese Dia­mond Sutra only at a dis­tance, for the British Library has made a com­plete dig­i­ti­za­tion of the scroll avail­able on its “Vir­tu­al Books” page. For those who don’t read ninth-cen­tu­ry Chi­nese, the most inter­est­ing ele­ment will be the fron­tispiece, which, as Nor­man writes, “shows the Bud­dha expound­ing the sutra to an elder­ly dis­ci­ple called Sub­huti. That is the ear­li­est dat­ed book illus­tra­tion, and the ear­li­est dat­ed wood­cut print.” The British Library notes that “the finesse in the details evi­dences the fact that print­ing had already grown into a mature tech­nol­o­gy by the ninth cen­tu­ry in Chi­na,” long before such oth­er famous books as Shake­speare’s First Folio or even the Guten­berg Bible. This is an arti­fact of great his­tor­i­cal val­ue, reflect­ed by the degree of care with which it’s been con­served. But as a believ­er might add, why focus on the age of a book when the wis­dom it offers is time­less?

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Old­est Book Print­ed with Mov­able Type is Not The Guten­berg Bible: Jikji, a Col­lec­tion of Kore­an Bud­dhist Teach­ings, Pre­dat­ed It By 78 Years and It’s Now Dig­i­tized Online

Europe’s Old­est Intact Book Was Pre­served and Found in the Cof­fin of a Saint

The Medieval Mas­ter­piece The Book of Kells Has Been Dig­i­tized and Put Online

Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Presents the 550-Year-Old Guten­berg Bible in Spec­tac­u­lar, High-Res Detail

Behold a Dig­i­ti­za­tion of “The Most Beau­ti­ful of All Print­ed Books,” The Kelm­scott Chaucer

One of World’s Old­est Books Print­ed in Mul­ti-Col­or Now Opened & Dig­i­tized for the First Time

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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Novelist Michael Chabon Digitally Re-Creates the Science Fiction & Fantasy Section of His Favorite 1970s Bookstore

in Books, History, Sci Fi | August 4th, 2023

Michael Chabon was born in 1963, which placed him well to be influ­enced by the unpre­dictable, indis­crim­i­nate, and often lurid cul­tur­al cross-cur­rents of the nine­teen-sev­en­ties. He seemed to have received much of that influ­ence at Page One, the local book­store in his home­town of Colum­bia, Mary­land — and it was to Page One that his imag­i­na­tion drift­ed dur­ing the long days of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic spent in his per­son­al library. “As I sat around com­muning with my tat­tered old friends,” he writes, “I dis­cov­ered that I retained a sharp rec­ol­lec­tion — title, author, cov­er design — of what felt like every sin­gle book that had ever appeared on those tall shelves along the left wall of Page One, toward the back, between 1972 and 1980.”

That was the store’s “Sci­ence Fic­tion & Fan­ta­sy” sec­tion, which in that peri­od was well-stocked with titles by such stars of those gen­res as Ray Brad­bury, Ursu­la K. LeGuin, Arthur C. Clarke, J. G. Bal­lard, C. J. Cher­ryh, Michael Moor­cock, and Philip K. Dick.

Or at least it did if Chabon’s dig­i­tal re-cre­ation “The Shelves of Time” is any­thing to go by. Down­load­able here in “small” (96 MB), “large” (283 MB) and “very large” (950 MB) for­mats, the lav­ish image func­tions as what Chabon calls a “time tele­scope,” offer­ing “a look back at the visu­als that embod­ied and accom­pa­nied my ear­ly aspi­ra­tions as a writer, and at the mass-mar­ket splen­dor of paper­back sf and fan­ta­sy in those days.”

“I’m the same age as Chabon, and I was also a book­store rat, star­ing at these exact same cov­ers and ago­niz­ing over which one I’d lay down my $1.25 for,” writes Ruben Bolling at Boing Boing. “Just look at those beau­ti­ful John Carter of Mars cov­ers. I col­lect­ed and cher­ished these, and the Tarzan series.” Bolling also high­lights the adap­ta­tions Chabon includes on these re-imag­ined shelves: there’s “the James Blish Star Trek series, just as I remem­ber it,” and also the nov­el­iza­tion of Star Wars, which he read before the open­ing of the film itself.  “So instead of expe­ri­enc­ing the movie as it should have been — as campy movie fun — I expe­ri­enced it as an adap­ta­tion of a lit­er­ary work.”

Despite being a cou­ple of decades younger, I, too, remem­ber these cov­ers vivid­ly. My own sci-fi-and-fan­ta­sy peri­od occurred in the late nineties, by which time these very same mass-mar­ket paper­backs from the sev­en­ties were turn­ing up in quan­ti­ty at used book­stores. For me, few images from these gen­res of that era could trig­ger read­ing mem­o­ries as rich as those Bal­lan­tine cov­ers of The Sheep Look Up, The Shock­wave Rid­er, and Stand on Zanz­ibar by John Brun­ner, a British spe­cial­ist in social and envi­ron­men­tal cat­a­stro­phe. Like many read­ers, I put this sort of thing aside after a few years, but Chabon has proven infi­nite­ly more ded­i­cat­ed: half a cen­tu­ry after his days haunt­ing Page One, his mis­sion to “drag the decay­ing corpse of genre fic­tion out of the shal­low grave where writ­ers of seri­ous lit­er­a­ture aban­doned it,” as crit­ic Ruth Franklin once described it, con­tin­ues apace.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed con­tent:

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

Nov­el­ist Michael Chabon Sang in a Punk Band Dur­ing the ’80s: New­ly Released Audio Gives Proof

600+ Cov­ers of Philip K. Dick Nov­els from Around the World: Greece, Japan, Poland & Beyond

The Dune Ency­clo­pe­dia: The Con­tro­ver­sial, Defin­i­tive Guide to the World of Frank Herbert’s Sci-Fi Mas­ter­piece (1984)

The Amaz­ing Adven­tures of Kava­lier and Clay: Ani­ma­tion Con­cepts

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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