Take a Virtual Tour of Jane Austen’s Library

in Books, Libraries, Literature | August 12th, 2019

Jane Austen read vora­cious­ly and as wide­ly as she could in her cir­cum­scribed life. Even so, she told her niece Car­o­line, she wished she had “read more and writ­ten less” in her for­ma­tive years. Her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh made clear that no mat­ter how much she read, her work was far more than the sum of her read­ing: “It was not,” he wrote in his 1870 biog­ra­phy, “what she knew, but what she was, that dis­tin­guished her from oth­ers.” What she was not, how­ev­er, was the own­er of a great library.

Mem­bers of Austen’s fam­i­ly were well-off, but she her­self lived on mod­est means and nev­er made enough from writ­ing to become finan­cial­ly inde­pen­dent. She owned books, of course, but not many. Books were expen­sive, and most peo­ple bor­rowed them from lend­ing libraries. Nonethe­less, schol­ars have been able to piece togeth­er an exten­sive list of books Austen sup­pos­ed­ly read—books men­tioned in her let­ters, nov­els, and an 1817 bio­graph­i­cal note writ­ten by her broth­er Hen­ry in her posthu­mous­ly pub­lished Northang­er Abbey.

Austen read con­tem­po­rary male and female nov­el­ists. She read his­to­ries, the poet­ry of Mil­ton, Wordsworth, Byron, Cow­per, and Sir Wal­ter Scott, and nov­els writ­ten by fam­i­ly mem­bers. She read Chaucer, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Spencer, and Woll­stonecraft. She read ancients and mod­ern. “Despite her desire to have ‘read more” in her youth,” write Austen schol­ars Gillian Down and Katie Halsey, “recent schol­ar­ship has estab­lished that the range of Austen’s read­ing was far wider and deep­er than either Hen­ry or James Edward sug­gest.”

Austen may not have had a large library of her own, but she did have access to the hand­some col­lec­tion at God­mer­sham Park, the home of her broth­er Edward Austen Knight. “For a total of ten months spread over fif­teen years,” Rebec­ca Rego Bar­ry writes at Lapham’s Quar­ter­ly, “Austen vis­it­ed her broth­er at his Kent estate. The brim­ming book­shelves at God­mer­sham Park were a par­tic­u­lar draw for the nov­el­ist.” In the last eight years of her life, Jane lived with her moth­er and sis­ter Cas­san­dra at Edward’s Chaw­ton estate, in a vil­la that had its own library.

Recon­struct­ing these shelves show us the books Austen would have reg­u­lar­ly had in view, though schol­ars must use oth­er evi­dence to show which books she read. In 2009, Down and Halsey curat­ed an exhi­bi­tion focused on her read­ing at Chaw­ton. Ten years lat­er, we can see the library at God­mer­sham Park recre­at­ed in a vir­tu­al ver­sion made joint­ly by Chaw­ton House and McGill University’s Bur­ney Cen­ter.

Called “Read­ing with Austen,” the inter­ac­tive site lets us to nav­i­gate three book-lined walls of the library. “Users can hov­er over the shelves and click on any of the antique books,” writes Bar­ry, “sum­mon­ing bib­li­o­graph­ic data and avail­able pho­tos of per­ti­nent title pages, book­plates, and mar­gin­a­lia. Dig­ging deep­er, one can peruse a dig­i­tal copy of the book and deter­mine the where­abouts of the orig­i­nal.”

These vol­umes are what we might expect from an Eng­lish coun­try gen­tle­man: books of law and agri­cul­ture, his­tor­i­cal reg­is­ters, trav­el­ogues, polit­i­cal the­o­ry, and clas­si­cal Latin. There is also Shake­speare, Swift, and Voltaire, Austen’s own nov­els, and some of the con­tem­po­rary fic­tion she par­tic­u­lar­ly loved. The Bur­ney Cen­ter “tried,” says direc­tor Peter Sabor, “to imag­ine Jane Austen actu­al­ly walk­ing around the library…. We’re basi­cal­ly look­ing over her shoul­der as she looks at the book­shelf.” It’s not exact­ly quite like that at all, but the project can give us a sense of how much Austen trea­sured libraries.

She wrote about libraries as a sign of lux­u­ry. In an ear­ly unfin­ished nov­el, “Cather­ine,” she has a furi­ous char­ac­ter exclaim in reproach, “I gave you the key to my own Library, and bor­rowed a great many good books of my Neigh­bors for you.” Austen may have feared los­ing library and lend­ing access, and she longed for a king­dom of books all her own. Dur­ing her final vis­it to God­mer­sham Park in 1813, she wrote to her sis­ter, “I am now alone in the Library, Mis­tress of all I sur­vey.”

Try to imag­ine how she might have felt as you peruse the library’s hap­haz­ard­ly arranged con­tents. Con­sid­er which of these books she might have read and which she might have shelved and why. Enter the “Read­ing with Austen” library project here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Jane Austen Fic­tion Man­u­script Archive Is Online: Explore Hand­writ­ten Drafts of Per­sua­sion, The Wat­sons & More

Down­load the Major Works of Jane Austen as Free eBooks & Audio Books

15-Year-Old Jane Austen Writes a Satir­i­cal His­to­ry Of Eng­land: Read the Hand­writ­ten Man­u­script Online (1791)

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

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A 9th Century Manuscript Teaches Astronomy by Making Sublime Pictures Out of Words

in Art, Books, Poetry | July 23rd, 2019

Con­crete or visu­al poet­ry does not get much respect these days. Terse­ly defined at the Poet­ry Foun­da­tion as “verse that empha­sizes non­lin­guis­tic ele­ments in its mean­ing” arranged to cre­ate “a visu­al image of the top­ic,” the form looks like a clever but friv­o­lous nov­el­ty in our very seri­ous times. It has seemed so in times past as well.

When Guil­laume Apol­li­naire pub­lished his 1918 Cal­ligrammes, his major col­lec­tion of poems after he fought on the front lines of the first world war, he includ­ed sev­er­al visu­al poems. Crit­ics like Louis Aragon, “at his most hard-nosed,” notes Stephen Romer at The Guardian, “crit­i­cized it sharply for its aes­theti­cism and friv­o­li­ty.”

Apol­li­naire also wrote of war as a daz­zling spec­ta­cle, a ten­den­cy that “raised the hack­les of crit­ics.” One can see there is moral mer­it to the objec­tion, even if it mis­reads Apol­li­naire. But why should visu­al poet­ry not cred­i­bly illus­trate phe­nom­e­na we find sub­lime, just as well as it illus­trates pot­ted Christ­mas trees?

Indeed, the form has always done so, argues pro­lif­ic visu­al poet Karl Kemp­ton, until it took a “dystopi­an” turn after World War I. In his vast his­to­ry of visu­al poet­ry, Kemp­ton reach­es back into ancient Bud­dhist, Sufi, Euro­pean, and Indige­nous cul­tur­al his­to­ry. Forms of visu­al poet­ry, he writes, “are asso­ci­at­ed with ongo­ing tra­di­tions and numer­ous unfold­ing path­ways trace­able to humankind’s ear­li­est sur­viv­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion marks.”

Not as ancient as the exam­ples into which Kemp­ton first dives, the pages here from a man­u­script called the Aratea nonethe­less show us a use of the form that dates back over 1000 years, and incor­po­rates “near­ly 2000 years of cul­tur­al his­to­ry,” writes the Pub­lic Domain Review. “Mak­ing use of two Roman texts on astron­o­my writ­ten in the 1st cen­tu­ry BC, the man­u­script was cre­at­ed in North­ern France in about 1820.”

The text that has been arranged into images wasn’t orig­i­nal­ly poet­ry, though one might argue that arrang­ing it thus makes us read it that way. Instead, the words are tak­en from Hygi­nus’ Astro­nom­i­ca, a “star atlas and book of sto­ries” of somewhat uncer­tain ori­gin. The poems in lined verse below each image are by 3rd cen­tu­ry BC Greek poet Ara­tus (hence the title), “trans­lat­ed into Latin by young Cicero.”

If this feels like hefty mate­r­i­al for a lit­er­ary pro­duc­tion that might seem more whim­si­cal than awe-inspir­ing, we must con­sid­er that the manuscript’s first—and nec­es­sar­i­ly few—readers would have seen it dif­fer­ent­ly. The text is a visu­al mnemon­ic device, the red dots show­ing the posi­tions of the stars in the con­stel­la­tions: an aes­thet­ic ped­a­gogy that threads togeth­er visu­al per­cep­tion, mem­o­ry, imag­i­na­tion, and cog­ni­tion.

“The pas­sages used to form the images describe the con­stel­la­tion which they cre­ate on the page,” the Pub­lic Domain Review writes, “and in this way they become tied to one anoth­er: nei­ther the words nor the images would make full sense with­out the oth­er to com­plete the scene.” We are encour­aged to read the stars through art and lit­er­a­ture and to read poet­ry with an illus­trat­ed mytho­log­i­cal star chart in hand.

The Aratea is a fas­ci­nat­ing man­u­script not only for its visu­al­ly poet­ic illu­mi­na­tions, but also for its sig­nif­i­cance across sev­er­al spans of time. Its phys­i­cal exis­tence is nec­es­sar­i­ly tied to the British Library where it resides. One of the institution’s first arti­facts, it was “sold to the nation in 1752 under the same Act of Par­lia­ment which cre­at­ed the British Muse­um.”

“Part of a larg­er mis­cel­lany of sci­en­tif­ic works,” includ­ing sev­er­al notes and com­men­taries on nat­ur­al phi­los­o­phy, as the British Library describes it, the medieval text uses clas­si­cal sources to con­tem­plate the heav­ens in a form that is not only pre-Chris­t­ian and pre-Roman, but per­haps, as Kemp­ton argues, dates to the ori­gins of writ­ing itself.

via The Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold Fan­tas­ti­cal Illus­tra­tions from the 13th Cen­tu­ry Ara­bic Man­u­script Mar­vels of Things Cre­at­ed and Mirac­u­lous Aspects of Things Exist­ing

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

700 Years of Per­sian Man­u­scripts Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­able Online

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

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Alexis de Tocqueville’s Prediction of How American Democracy Could Lapse Into Despotism, Read by Michel Houellebecq

in Books, History, Politics | July 19th, 2019

Michel Houelle­bec­q’s third nov­el Plat­form, which involves a ter­ror­ist bomb­ing in south­east Asia, came out the year before a sim­i­lar real-life inci­dent occurred in Thai­land. His sev­enth nov­el Sub­mis­sion, about the con­ver­sion of France into a Mus­lim coun­try, came out the same day as the mas­sacre at the offices of Islam-pro­vok­ing satir­i­cal week­ly Char­lie Heb­do. His most recent nov­el Sero­tonin, in which farm­ers vio­lent­ly revolt against the French state, hap­pened to come out in the ear­ly stages of the pop­ulist “yel­low vest” move­ment. Houelle­becq has thus, even by some of his many detrac­tors, been cred­it­ed with a cer­tain pre­science about the social and polit­i­cal dan­gers of the world in which we live today.

So too has a coun­try­man of Houelle­bec­q’s who did his writ­ing more than 150 years ear­li­er: Alex­is de Toc­queville, author of Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca, the endur­ing study of that then-new coun­try and its dar­ing­ly exper­i­men­tal polit­i­cal sys­tem. And what does per­haps France’s best-known liv­ing man of let­ters think of Toc­queville, one of his best-known pre­de­ces­sors? “I read him for the first time long ago and real­ly found it a bit bor­ing,” Houelle­becq says in the inter­view clip above, with a flat­ness rem­i­nis­cent of his nov­els’ dis­af­fect­ed nar­ra­tors. “Then I tried again two years ago and I was thun­der­struck.”

As an exam­ple of Toc­queville’s clear-eyed assess­ment of democ­ra­cy, Houelle­becq reads aloud this pas­sage about its poten­tial to turn into despo­tism:

I seek to trace the nov­el fea­tures under which despo­tism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the obser­va­tion is an innu­mer­able mul­ti­tude of men, all equal and alike, inces­sant­ly endeav­or­ing to pro­cure the pet­ty and pal­try plea­sures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, liv­ing apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his chil­dren and his pri­vate friends con­sti­tute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fel­low cit­i­zens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touch­es them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in him­self and for him­self alone; and if his kin­dred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his coun­try.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tute­lary pow­er, which takes upon itself alone to secure their grat­i­fi­ca­tions and to watch over their fate. That pow­er is absolute, minute, reg­u­lar, prov­i­dent, and mild. It would be like the author­i­ty of a par­ent if, like that author­i­ty, its object was to pre­pare men for man­hood; but it seeks, on the con­trary, to keep them in per­pet­u­al child­hood: it is well con­tent that the peo­ple should rejoice, pro­vid­ed they think of noth­ing but rejoic­ing. For their hap­pi­ness such a gov­ern­ment will­ing­ly labors, but it choos­es to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that hap­pi­ness; it pro­vides for their secu­ri­ty, fore­sees and sup­plies their neces­si­ties, facil­i­tates their plea­sures, man­ages their prin­ci­pal con­cerns, directs their indus­try, reg­u­lates the descent of prop­er­ty, and sub­di­vides their inher­i­tances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of think­ing and all the trou­ble of liv­ing?

Being a writer, Houelle­becq nat­u­ral­ly points out the deft­ness of Toc­queville’s style: “It’s mag­nif­i­cent­ly punc­tu­at­ed. The dis­tri­b­u­tion of colons and semi­colons in the sec­tions is mag­nif­i­cent.” But he also has com­ments on the pas­sage’s phi­los­o­phy, pro­nounc­ing that it “con­tains Niet­zsche, only bet­ter.” The oper­a­tive Niet­zschean con­cept here is the “last man,” described in Thus Spoke Zarathus­tra as the pre­sum­able end point of mod­ern soci­ety. If con­di­tions con­tin­ue to progress in the way they have been, each and every human being will become this last man, a weak, com­fort­able, com­pla­cent indi­vid­ual with noth­ing left to fight for, who desires noth­ing more than his small plea­sure for the day, his small plea­sure for the night, and a good sleep.

Safe to say that nei­ther Niet­zsche nor Toc­queville looked for­ward, nor does Houelle­becq look for­ward, to the world of ener­vat­ed last men into which democ­ra­cy could deliv­er us. Houelle­becq also reads aloud anoth­er pas­sage from Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca, one that now appears on the Wikipedia page for soft despo­tism, describ­ing how a demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­ern­ment might gain absolute pow­er over its peo­ple with­out the peo­ple even notic­ing:

After hav­ing thus suc­ces­sive­ly tak­en each mem­ber of the com­mu­ni­ty in its pow­er­ful grasp and fash­ioned him at will, the supreme pow­er then extends its arm over the whole com­mu­ni­ty. It cov­ers the sur­face of soci­ety with a net­work of small com­pli­cat­ed rules, minute and uni­form, through which the most orig­i­nal minds and the most ener­getic char­ac­ters can­not pen­e­trate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shat­tered, but soft­ened, bent, and guid­ed; men are sel­dom forced by it to act, but they are con­stant­ly restrained from act­ing. Such a pow­er does not destroy, but it pre­vents exis­tence; it does not tyr­an­nize, but it com­press­es, ener­vates, extin­guish­es, and stu­pe­fies a peo­ple, till each nation is reduced to noth­ing bet­ter than a flock of timid and indus­tri­ous ani­mals, of which the gov­ern­ment is the shep­herd.

“A lot of what I’ve writ­ten could be sit­u­at­ed with­in this sce­nario,” Houelle­becq says, adding that in his gen­er­a­tion the “defin­i­tive trans­for­ma­tion of soci­ety into indi­vid­u­als” has been more com­plete than Toc­queville or Niet­zsche would have imag­ined.

In addi­tion to lack­ing a fam­i­ly, Houelle­becq (whose sec­ond nov­el was titled Atom­ized) also men­tions hav­ing “the impres­sion of being caught up in a net­work of com­pli­cat­ed, minute, and stu­pid rules” as well as “of being herd­ed toward a uni­form kind of hap­pi­ness, toward a hap­pi­ness which does­n’t real­ly make me hap­py.” In the end, adds Houelle­becq, the aris­to­crat­ic Toc­queville “is in favor of the devel­op­ment of democ­ra­cy and equal­i­ty, while being more aware than any­one else of its dan­gers.” That the 19th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca Toc­queville knew avoid­ed them he cred­it­ed to the “habits of the heart” of the Amer­i­can peo­ple. We cit­i­zens of demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­tries, whichev­er demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­try we live in, would do well to ask where the habits of our own hearts will lead us next.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alex­is De Tocqueville’s Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Most Insight­ful Study of Amer­i­can Democ­ra­cy

How to Know if Your Coun­try Is Head­ing Toward Despo­tism: An Edu­ca­tion­al Film from 1946

George Orwell’s Final Warn­ing: Don’t Let This Night­mare Sit­u­a­tion Hap­pen. It Depends on You!

Is Mod­ern Soci­ety Steal­ing What Makes Us Human?: A Glimpse Into Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathus­tra by The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life

The His­to­ry of West­ern Social The­o­ry, by Alan Mac­Far­lane, Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

Hunter S. Thomp­son Gets in a Gun­fight with His Neigh­bor & Dis­pens­es Polit­i­cal Wis­dom: “In a Democ­ra­cy, You Have to Be a Play­er”

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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An Animated Introduction to the Magical Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges

in Books, Literature | July 18th, 2019

“Read­ing the work of Jorge Luis Borges for the first time is like dis­cov­er­ing a new let­ter in the alpha­bet, or a new note in the musi­cal scale,” writes the BBC’s Jane Cia­bat­tari. Borges’ essay-like works of fic­tion are “filled with pri­vate jokes and eso­ter­i­ca, his­to­ri­og­ra­phy and sar­don­ic foot­notes. They are brief, often with abrupt begin­nings.” His “use of labyrinths, mir­rors, chess games and detec­tive sto­ries cre­ates a com­plex intel­lec­tu­al land­scape, yet his lan­guage is clear, with iron­ic under­tones. He presents the most fan­tas­tic of scenes in sim­ple terms, seduc­ing us into the fork­ing path­way of his seem­ing­ly infi­nite imag­i­na­tion.”

If that sounds like your idea of good read, look a lit­tle deep­er into the work of Argenti­na’s most famous lit­er­ary fig­ure through the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above. Mex­i­can writer and crit­ic Ilan Sta­vans, the lesson’s cre­ator, begins his intro­duc­tion to Borges by describ­ing a man who “not only remem­bers every­thing he has ever seen, but every time he has seen it in per­fect detail.” Many of you will imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­nize Funes the Mem­o­ri­ous, the star of Borges’ 1942 sto­ry of the same name — and those who don’t will sure­ly want to know more about him.

Sta­vans goes on to describe a library “built out of count­less iden­ti­cal rooms, each con­tain­ing the same num­ber of books of the same length,” that as a whole “con­tains every pos­si­ble vari­a­tion of text.” He also men­tions a rumored “lost labyrinth” that turns out to be “not a phys­i­cal maze but a nov­el,” and a nov­el that reveals the iden­ti­ty of the real labyrinth: time itself. Borges enthu­si­asts know which places Sta­vans is talk­ing about, mean­ing they know in which of Borges’ sto­ries — which their author, stick­ing to a word from his native Span­ish, referred to as fic­ciones — they orig­i­nate.

But though “The Library of Babel” (which in recent years has tak­en a dig­i­tal form online) and “The Gar­den Fork­ing Paths” count as two par­tic­u­lar­ly notable exam­ples of what Sta­vans calls “Borges’ many explo­rations of infin­i­ty,” he found so many ways to explore that sub­ject through­out his writ­ing career that his lit­er­ary out­put func­tions as a con­scious­ness-alter­ing sub­stance. It does to the right read­ers, that is, a group that includes such oth­er mind-bend­ing writ­ers as Umber­to Eco, Rober­to Bolaño, and William Gib­son, none of whom were quite the same after they dis­cov­ered the fic­ciones. Behold Borges’ mir­rors, mazes, tigers, and chess games your­self — there­by catch­ing a glimpse of infin­i­ty — and you, too, will nev­er be able to return to the read­er you once were. Not that you’d want to.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jorge Luis Borges Explains The Task of Art

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Nor­ton Lec­tures On Poet­ry (And Every­thing Else Lit­er­ary)

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to H.P. Love­craft and How He Invent­ed a New Goth­ic Hor­ror

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

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

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Beatles Songs Re-Imagined as Vintage Book Covers and Magazine Pages: “Drive My Car,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” & More

in Books, Design, Music | July 17th, 2019

What makes the Bea­t­les the best-known rock band in his­to­ry? None can deny that they com­posed songs of unsur­passed catch­i­ness, a qual­i­ty demon­strat­ed as soon as those songs hit the air­waves. But the past 55 or so years have shown us that they also pos­sess an endur­ing pow­er to inspire: how many begin­ning musi­cians, fired up by their enjoy­ment of the Bea­t­les, play their first notes each day? The trib­utes to the music of the Bea­t­les keep com­ing in non-musi­cal forms as well: take, for exam­ple, these Bea­t­les songs turned into vin­tage book cov­ers and mag­a­zine pages by screen­writer and self-described “graph­ic-arts prankster” Todd Alcott.

“ ‘Dri­ve My Car’ re-imag­ines the clas­sic 1965 Bea­t­les song as a clas­sic 1965 adver­tise­ment for an actu­al car,” Alcott writes of the work at the top of the post, “mash­ing up the image from an ad for a 1966 Chevro­let Cor­vair with the lyrics from the song.”

Below that, “Lucy in the Sky with Dia­monds” makes of that num­ber a mass-mar­ket book cov­er “in the style of Erich von Daniken’s clas­sic 1970s alien-vis­i­ta­tion book Char­i­ots of the Gods?” Below, Alcot­t’s inter­pre­ta­tion of “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows” per­fect­ly re-cre­ates the look (and, with that vis­i­ble cov­er wear, the feel) of a heady 1960s sci­ence-fic­tion nov­el.

Tomor­row Nev­er Knows does sound like a plau­si­ble piece of spec­u­la­tive fic­tion from that era, but Alcott has made use of much more than these songs’ titles. Even casu­al Bea­t­les fans will notice how much of their lyri­cal con­tent he man­ages to work into his designs, for which the 1967 Nation­al Enquir­er cov­er pas­tiche he put togeth­er for the 1967 sin­gle “A Day in the Life” (“com­plete with pho­tos of Tory Browne, the Guin­ness heir about whom the song was writ­ten”) offered an espe­cial­ly rich oppor­tu­ni­ty. Just when the Bea­t­les broke up in real life, the era of the new-age self-help book began, and after see­ing what Alcott did with “Hel­lo Good­bye” using the dis­tinc­tive visu­al brand­ing of that pub­lish­ing trend, you’ll won­der why no one cashed in on such a com­bi­na­tion at the time.

You can see all of Alcot­t’s Bea­t­les book cov­er and mag­a­zine page designs, and buy prints of them in var­i­ous sizes, over at Etsy. Oth­er selec­tions include “Rocky Rac­coon” as an 1880s dime nov­el (pub­lish­ers of which includ­ed a firm named Bea­dles) and “Rev­o­lu­tion” as a Sovi­et his­to­ry book. Open Cul­ture read­ers will know Alcott from his pre­vi­ous for­ays into retro music-to-book graph­ic design, which took the songs of David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Radio­head and oth­ers and re-imag­ined them as sci-fi nov­els, pulp-fic­tion mag­a­zines, and oth­er arti­facts of print cul­ture from times past. In the case of the Bea­t­les, Alcot­t’s for­mi­da­ble skill at evok­ing a high­ly spe­cif­ic era of recent his­to­ry with an image under­scores, by con­trast, the time­less­ness of the songs that inspired them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Short Film on the Famous Cross­walk From the Bea­t­les’ Abbey Road Album Cov­er

How The Bea­t­les’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band Changed Album Cov­er Design For­ev­er

Songs by David Bowie, Elvis Costel­lo, Talk­ing Heads & More Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers

Clas­sic Songs by Bob Dylan Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: “Like a Rolling Stone,” “A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall” & More

Clas­sic Radio­head Songs Re-Imag­ined as a Sci-Fi Book, Pulp Fic­tion Mag­a­zine & Oth­er Nos­tal­gic Arti­facts

Pulp Cov­ers for Clas­sic Detec­tive Nov­els by Dashiell Ham­mett, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie & Ray­mond Chan­dler

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Behold Fantastical Illustrations from the 13th Century Arabic Manuscript Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing

in Art, Books, History | July 16th, 2019

Reli­gion, his­to­ry, med­i­cine, poet­ry, ethnog­ra­phy, zool­o­gy, cos­mol­o­gy, polit­i­cal philosophy—in many a medieval text, these cat­e­gories all seem to melt togeth­er. Or rather, they don’t exist sep­a­rate­ly in the way we think of them, as labels on a library shelf and cours­es in a cat­a­logue. The same log­i­cal rules do not apply—the appeal to author­i­ty, for exam­ple is not a fal­la­cy so much as a pri­ma­ry method­ol­o­gy. If knowl­edge came from the right prophet, schol­ar, or sage, it could be trust­ed, a mode of think­ing that gave rise to mon­sters, phan­toms, and out­landish beings of all kinds.

It’s easy to call these meth­ods prim­i­tive, but so-called medieval ways of think­ing are still very much with us, and thinkers hun­dreds and thou­sands of years ago have had sur­pris­ing­ly sci­en­tif­ic approach­es, despite lim­it­ed resources and tech­nolo­gies.

We find both the fan­tas­ti­cal and the sci­en­tif­ic woven togeth­er in medieval man­u­scripts, illu­mi­nat­ing and com­ment­ing on each oth­er. And we find exact­ly that in the works of Abu Yahya Zakariya’ ibn Muham­mad al-Qazwi­ni, Per­sian writer, physi­cian, astronomer, geo­g­ra­ph­er, and author of a 13th cen­tu­ry trea­tise called ‘Ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharā’ib al-mawjūdāt, or Mar­vels of Things Cre­at­ed and Mirac­u­lous Aspects of Things Exist­ing.

This work is “the most well-known exam­ple,” writes the Nation­al Library of Med­i­cine, “of a genre of clas­si­cal Islam­ic lit­er­a­ture that was con­cerned with ‘mirabil­ia’ or won­ders of cre­ation.” Draw­ing on 50 dif­fer­ent authors, includ­ing sev­er­al ancient Islam­ic geo­g­ra­phers and his­to­ri­ans, Qazwi­ni weaves myth, leg­end, and sci­ence, tying them togeth­er with sto­ries and poet­ry. The Qur’an and hadith are sig­nif­i­cant sources—for a sec­tion on “angelol­o­gy,” for exam­ple. When the cos­mog­ra­phy comes down to earth, mov­ing down through the ranks of humans, beasts, plants, and min­er­als, all sorts of weird, folk­loric ter­res­tri­al crea­tures show up.

The phoenix (or Simurgh), for exam­ple, and the Homa, or par­adise bird—which lands on someone’s head and instant­ly makes them king—sit com­fort­ably next to eagles, vul­tures, and ostrich­es, all of which are con­strued as mar­velous or mirac­u­lous in some way.

The trea­tise cov­ered all the won­ders of the world, and the vari­ety of the sub­ject mat­ter (humans and their anato­my, plants, ani­mals, strange crea­tures at the edges of the inhab­it­ed world, con­stel­la­tions of stars, zodi­a­cal signs, angels, and demons) pro­vid­ed great scope for the artist.

First writ­ten in Ara­bic in the late 1200s and ded­i­cat­ed to the gov­er­nor of Bagh­dad, the man­u­script was “immense­ly pop­u­lar” in the Islam­ic world. It was trans­lat­ed into Per­sian and Turk­ish and copied out in rich­ly illus­trat­ed edi­tions for cen­turies. The images here come from a Per­sian trans­la­tion, “thought to hail from 17th-cen­tu­ry Mughal India,” writes The Pub­lic Domain Review, and the art vivid­ly dis­plays the “eclec­tic mix of top­ics” in al-Qazwini’s book. These were sub­jects that “chal­lenged understanding”—often because they con­cerned things that do not exist, and often because they described nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­non that could not yet be explained.

“From humans and their anato­my to strange myth­i­cal crea­tures; from plants and ani­mals to con­stel­la­tions of stars and zodi­a­cal signs,” The Pub­lic Domain Review explains, the trea­tise pur­port­ed to sur­vey all the “known” world. Al-Qazwi­ni embell­ished his explo­rations for enter­tain­ment pur­pos­es, but he also cre­at­ed exten­sive tax­onomies and described prac­ti­cal sci­ence like the use of “a type of pitch or tar that we today know as asphalt,” San Francisco’s Asian Art Muse­um notes in their cat­a­logue descrip­tion of anoth­er illus­trat­ed man­u­script, in Ara­bic, from 1650. For al-Qazwi­ni and his read­ers, as for oth­er 13th-cen­tu­ry schol­ars, writ­ers, and read­ers around the world, the bound­aries between faith, fact, and fic­tion were per­me­able, and imag­i­na­tion some­times seems to have been the ulti­mate author­i­ty.

via The Pub­lic Domain Review 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

700 Years of Per­sian Man­u­scripts Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­able Online

The Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

Learn Islam­ic & Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy with 107 Episodes of the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast

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

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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

in Books, History | July 11th, 2019

The his­to­ry of the print­ed word is full of bib­li­o­graph­ic twists and turns, major his­tor­i­cal moments, and the sig­nif­i­cant print­ing of books now so obscure no one has read them since their pub­li­ca­tion. Most of us have only the sketchi­est notion of how mass-pro­duced print­ed books came into being—a few scat­tered dates and names. But every school­child can tell you the first book ever print­ed, and every­one knows the first words of that book: “In the begin­ning….”

The first Guten­berg Bible, print­ed in 1454 by Johannes Guten­berg, intro­duced the world to mov­able type, his­to­ry tells us. It is “uni­ver­sal­ly acknowl­edged as the most impor­tant of all print­ed books,” writes Mar­garet Leslie Davis, author of the recent­ly pub­lished The Lost Guten­berg: The Astound­ing Sto­ry of One Book’s Five-Hun­dred-Year Odyssey. In 1900, Mark Twain expressed the sen­ti­ment in a let­ter “com­ment­ing on the open­ing of the Guten­berg Muse­um,” writes M. Sophia New­man at Lithub. “What the world is to-day,” he declared, “good and bad, it owes to Guten­berg. Every­thing can be traced to this source.”

There is kind of an over­sim­pli­fied truth in the state­ment. The print­ed word (and the print­ed Bible, at that) did, in large part, deter­mine the course of Euro­pean his­to­ry, which, through empire, deter­mined the course of glob­al events after the “Guten­berg rev­o­lu­tion.” But there is anoth­er sto­ry of print entire­ly inde­pen­dent of book his­to­ry in Europe, one that also deter­mined world his­to­ry with the preser­va­tion of Bud­dhist, Chi­nese dynas­tic, and Islam­ic texts. And one that begins “before Johannes Guten­berg was even born,” New­man points out.

The old­est extant text ever print­ed with mov­able type pre­dates Guten­berg him­self (born in 1400) by 23 years, and pre­dates the print­ing of his Bible by 78 years. It is the Jikji, print­ed in Korea, a col­lec­tion of Bud­dhist teach­ings by Seon mas­ter Bae­gun and print­ed in mov­able type by his stu­dents Seok-chan and Dai­jam in 1377. (Seon is a Kore­an form of Chan or Zen Bud­dhism.) Only the sec­ond vol­ume of the print­ing has sur­vived, and you can see sev­er­al images from it here.

Impres­sive as this may be, the Jikji does not have the hon­or of being the first book print­ed with mov­able type, only the old­est sur­viv­ing exam­ple. The tech­nol­o­gy could go back two cen­turies ear­li­er. Mar­garet Davis nods to this his­to­ry, New­man con­cedes, writ­ing that “mov­able type was an 11th cen­tu­ry Chi­nese inven­tion, refined in Korea in 1230, before meet­ing con­di­tions in Europe that would allow it to flour­ish.” This is more than most pop­u­lar accounts of the print­ed word say on the mat­ter, but it’s still an inac­cu­rate and high­ly cur­so­ry sum­ma­ry of the evi­dence.

New­man her­self says quite a lot more. In essays at Lithub and Tri­cy­cle, she describes how print­ing tech­niques devel­oped in Asia and were tak­en up in Korea in the 1200s by the Goryeo dynasty, who com­mis­sioned a print­er named Choe Yun-ui to recon­struct a wood­block print of the mas­sive col­lec­tion of ancient Bud­dhists texts called the Tip­i­ta­ka after the Mon­gols burned the only Kore­an copy. By cast­ing “indi­vid­ual char­ac­ters in met­al” and arrang­ing them in a frame—the same process Guten­berg used—he was able to com­plete the project by 1250, 200 years before Gutenberg’s press.

This text, how­ev­er, did not sur­vive, nor did the count­less num­ber of oth­ers print­ed when the tech­nol­o­gy spread across the Mon­gol empire on the Silk Road and took root with the Mus­lim Uyghurs. It is pos­si­ble, though “no clear his­tor­i­cal evi­dence” yet sup­ports the con­tention, that mov­able type spread to Europe from Asia along trade routes. “If there was any con­nec­tion,” wrote Joseph Need­ham in Sci­ence and Civ­i­liza­tion in Chi­na, “in the spread of print­ing between Asia and the West, the Uyghurs, who used both block print­ing and mov­able type, had good oppor­tu­ni­ties to play an impor­tant role in this intro­duc­tion.”

With­out sur­viv­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion, this ear­ly his­to­ry of print­ing in Asia relies on sec­ondary sources. But “the entire his­to­ry of the print­ing press” in Europe” is like­wise “rid­dled with gaps,” New­man writes. What we do know is that Jikji, a col­lec­tion of Kore­an Zen Bud­dhist teach­ings, is the world’s old­est extant book print­ed with mov­able type. The myth of Johannes Guten­berg as “a lone genius who trans­formed human cul­ture,” as Davis writes, “endures because the sweep of what fol­lowed is so vast that it feels almost myth­ic and needs an ori­gin sto­ry to match.” But this is one inven­tive indi­vid­ual in the his­to­ry of print­ing, not the orig­i­nal, god­like source of mov­able type.

Guten­berg makes sense as a con­ve­nient start­ing point for the growth and world­wide spread of cap­i­tal­ism and Euro­pean Chris­tian­i­ty. His inno­va­tion worked much faster than ear­li­er sys­tems, and oth­ers that devel­oped around the same time, in which frames were pressed by hand against the paper. Flows of new cap­i­tal enabled the rapid spread of his machine across Europe. The achieve­ment of the Guten­berg Bible is not dimin­ished by a fuller his­to­ry. But “what gets left out” of the usu­al sto­ry, as New­man tells us in great detail, “is star­tling­ly rich.”

“Only very recent­ly, most­ly in the last decade” has the long his­to­ry of print­ing in Asia been “acknowl­edged at all” in pop­u­lar cul­ture, though schol­ars in both the East and West have long known it. Korea has regard­ed Jikji “and oth­er ancient vol­umes as nation­al points of pride that rank among the most impor­tant of books.” Yet UNESCO only cer­ti­fied Jikji as the “old­est mov­able met­al type print­ing evi­dence” in 2001. The recog­ni­tion may be late in com­ing, but it mat­ters a great deal, nonethe­less. Learn much more about the his­to­ry, con­tent, and prove­nance of Jikji at this site cre­at­ed by “cyber diplo­mats” in Korea after UNESCO bestowed World Her­itage sta­tus on the book. And see a ful­ly dig­i­tized copy of the book here.

via Lithub

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The World’s Old­est Mul­ti­col­or Book, a 1633 Chi­nese Cal­lig­ra­phy & Paint­ing Man­u­al, Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online

1,000+ His­toric Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Smith­son­ian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

See How The Guten­berg Press Worked: Demon­stra­tion Shows the Old­est Func­tion­ing Guten­berg Press in Action

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

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

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A Witty Dictionary of Victorian Slang (1909)

in Books, English Language | July 3rd, 2019

In the intro­duc­tion to his Dic­tio­nary of Con­tem­po­rary Slang, Tony Thorne writes of the dif­fi­cul­ty of defin­ing infor­mal speech: “A sym­po­sium on slang held in France in 1989 broke up after sev­er­al days with­out hav­ing arrived at a def­i­n­i­tion accept­able to even the major­i­ty of par­tic­i­pants.” If you’re think­ing maybe this seems like tak­ing the sub­ject a lit­tle too seri­ous­ly, I’d agree. But if we trav­el back eighty years in time and across the Eng­lish Chan­nel, we’ll meet an eccen­tric lex­i­cog­ra­ph­er who approached the task in the right spir­it.

“Here is a numer­i­cal­ly weak col­lec­tion of ‘Pass­ing Eng­lish.’ ” writes James Red­ding Ware in the Pref­ace to his posthu­mous­ly-pub­lished 1909 Pass­ing Eng­lish of the Vic­to­ri­an Era, A Dic­tio­nary of Het­ero­dox Eng­lish, Slang and Phrase.

 

“It may be hoped that there are errors on every page, and also that no entry is ‘quite too dull.’” He goes on in a more seri­ous tone to sum­ma­rize the rapid lan­guage change occur­ring in Eng­land in the last few decades of the 19th cen­tu­ry:

Thou­sands of words and phras­es in exis­tence in 1870 have drift­ed away, or changed their forms, or been absorbed, while as many have been added or are being added. ‘Pass­ing Eng­lish’ rip­ples from count­less sources, form­ing a riv­er of new lan­guage which has its tide and its ebb, while its cur­rent brings down new ideas and car­ries away those that have drib­bled out of fash­ion. Not only is ‘Pass­ing Eng­lish’ gen­er­al ; it is local ; often very sea­son­ably local. 

Ware—a pen name of British writer Andrew Forrester—goes on to get very local indeed in his descrip­tions, from “Pet­ty Italia behind Hat­ton Gar­den” to “Anglo-Yid­dish.” The Pub­lic Domain Review high­lights the fol­low­ing quirky entries.

Got the Morbs – tem­po­rary melan­choly
Mut­ton Shunter – the police
Bat­ty-Fang – to thrash thor­ough­ly
Doing the Bear – court­ing that involves hug­ging
Maf­fick­ing – get­ting row­dy in the streets
Orf Chump – no appetite
Poked Up – embar­rassed
Nan­ty Nark­ing – great fun

Ware’s atti­tude may be appro­pri­ate­ly infor­mal, but his method­ol­o­gy is suit­ably rig­or­ous, and this com­pre­hen­sive lex­i­con was clear­ly a labor of love. His book is a seri­ous resource for schol­ars of the peri­od, and, hell, it’s also just great fun. Read and down­load the full dic­tio­nary at the Inter­net Archive.

via The Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read A Clas­si­cal Dic­tio­nary of the Vul­gar Tongue, a Hilar­i­ous & Infor­ma­tive Col­lec­tion of Ear­ly Mod­ern Eng­lish Slang (1785)

The Largest His­tor­i­cal Dic­tio­nary of Eng­lish Slang Now Free Online: Cov­ers 500 Years of the “Vul­gar Tongue”

The Very First Writ­ten Use of the F Word in Eng­lish (1528)

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

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