A New Edition of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 That’s Only Readable When You Apply Heat to Its Pages: Pre-Order It Today

in Books | January 14th, 2019

Ray Brad­bury’s Fahren­heit 451, a nov­el of a near­ly book­less dystopi­an future in which “fire­men” go around burn­ing any last vol­umes they can find, lends itself well to high­ly phys­i­cal spe­cial edi­tions. Last year we fea­tured an asbestos-bound, fire­proof ver­sion, 200 copies of which were pub­lished at the book’s first print­ing in 1953. The year before we fea­tured an exper­i­men­tal edi­tion per­haps even more faith­ful­ly reflec­tive of the sto­ry’s premise, one whose all-black pages only reveal the neg­a­tive space around the text with the appli­ca­tion of heat.

“Graph­ic design stu­dio Super Terrain’s edi­tion of Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi clas­sic Fahren­heit-451 took the inter­net by storm,” writes Elec­tric Lit­er­a­ture, “thanks to a video show­ing how its all-black pages become read­able text when exposed to an open flame.”

Now, “for only $451  —  get it?  —  you can pre­order one to keep on a spe­cial­ly-heat­ed shelf in your home!” As not­ed in that post, you could also expose its text using some­thing oth­er than an open flame (a hair dry­er, for exam­ple), but that would hard­ly put you as much in the mind of the nov­el­’s “fire­men” with their book-erad­i­cat­ing flamethrow­ers. What­ev­er you use to heat up the pages, they revert right back to their car­bonized-look­ing black as soon as they cool down.

In Fahren­heit 451, says Super Ter­rain’s man­i­festo for this unusu­al edi­tion of the nov­el, Brad­bury “ques­tions the cen­tral role played by books in cul­ture and expos­es the pos­si­ble drifts of a soci­ety ruled by imme­di­a­cy. This tyran­ny of hap­pi­ness pre­vents any form of con­tes­ta­tion that could be nur­tured by reflex­ion, mem­o­ry or cul­ture in books or works of art.” This black-paged book “could be part of Bradbury’s fic­tion as a trick to keep and hide away the books from the pyro­ma­ni­ac fire­men. By set­ting the book on fire, the read­er plunges into the nov­el and becomes the hyphen between real­i­ty and fic­tion.” How rel­e­vant has all of this remained in our “time of con­tin­u­ous flow of images, self­ies, fake news, tweets and oth­er ‘digest-digest-digests’ ”? Strike a match, flick on your lighter, or pow­er up your hair dry­er — all, of course, under adult super­vi­sion if nec­es­sary — and find out for your­self.

via Elec­tric Lit­er­a­ture

Relat­ed Con­tent:

To Read This Exper­i­men­tal Edi­tion of Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451, You’ll Need to Add Heat to the Pages

Ray Brad­bury Reveals the True Mean­ing of Fahren­heit 451: It’s Not About Cen­sor­ship, But Peo­ple “Being Turned Into Morons by TV”

Father Writes a Great Let­ter About Cen­sor­ship When Son Brings Home Per­mis­sion Slip to Read Ray Bradbury’s Cen­sored Book, Fahren­heit 451

An Asbestos-Bound, Fire­proof Edi­tion of Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451 (1953)

Hear Ray Bradbury’s Clas­sic Sci-Fi Sto­ry Fahren­heit 451 as a Radio Dra­ma

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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Marie Kondo v. Tsundoku: Competing Japanese Philosophies on Whether to Keep or Discard Unread Books

in Books | January 11th, 2019

By now we’ve all heard of Marie Kon­do, the Japan­ese home-orga­ni­za­tion guru whose book The Life-Chang­ing Mag­ic of Tidy­ing Up became an inter­na­tion­al best­seller in 2011. Her advice about how to straight­en up the home, brand­ed the “Kon­Mari” method, has more recent­ly land­ed her that brass ring of ear­ly 21st-cen­tu­ry fame, her own Net­flix series. A few years ago we fea­tured her tips for deal­ing with your piles of read­ing mate­r­i­al, which, like all her advice, are based on dis­card­ing the items that no longer “spark joy” in one’s life. These include “Take your books off the shelves,” “Make sure to touch each one,” and that you’ll nev­er read the books you mean to read “some­time.”

But as a big a fan base as Kon­do now com­mands around the world, not every­one agrees with her meth­ods, espe­cial­ly when she applies them to the book­shelf. “Do NOT lis­ten to Marie Kon­do or Kon­mari in rela­tion to books,” the nov­el­ist Anakana Schofield post­ed to Twit­ter ear­li­er this month. “Fill your apart­ment & world with them. I don’t give a shite if you throw out your knick­ers and Tup­per­ware but the woman is very mis­guid­ed about BOOKS. Every human needs a v exten­sive library not clean, bor­ing shelves.” Fur­ther­more, “the notion that books should spark joy is a LUDICROUS one. I have said it a hun­dred times: Lit­er­a­ture does not exist only to com­fort and pla­cate us. It should dis­turb + per­turb us. Life is dis­turb­ing.”

Wash­ing­ton Post book crit­ic Ron Charles crit­i­cizes Kon­do’s book pol­i­cy from a dif­fer­ent angle. “I have a sin­gle cab­i­net full of chipped mugs, but I have a house full of books — thou­sands of books. To take every sin­gle book into my hands and test it for spark­i­ness would take years. And dur­ing that time, so many more books will pour in.” That phe­nom­e­non will be famil­iar to read­ers of Open Cul­ture, since we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured tsun­doku, a pun­nish Japan­ese com­pound word that means the books that amass unread here and there in one’s home.

Though they might have emerged from the same wider cul­ture, the Kon­Mari method and the con­cept of tsun­doku could hard­ly be more direct­ly opposed. But now that Schofield, Charles, and many oth­ers have voiced their per­spec­tives, the bat­tle lines are drawn: must books spark joy in the moment to earn their keep, or can they be allowed to pile up in the name of poten­tial future use­ful­ness — or at least use­ful dis­tur­bance and per­tur­ba­tion?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Change Your Life! Learn the Japan­ese Art of Declut­ter­ing, Orga­niz­ing & Tidy­ing Things Up

Orga­ni­za­tion Guru Marie Kondo’s Tips for Deal­ing with Your Mas­sive Piles of Unread Books (or What They Call in Japan “Tsun­doku”)

“Tsun­doku,” the Japan­ese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the Eng­lish Lan­guage

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 Books That Samuel Beckett Read and Really Liked (1941–1956)

in Books, Literature | January 11th, 2019

becket list 1

Samuel Beck­ett, Pic, 1″ by Roger Pic. Via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Clad in a black turtle­neck and with a shock of white hair, Samuel Beck­ett was a gaunt, gloomy high priest of mod­ernism. After the 1955 pre­miere of Samuel Beckett’s play Wait­ing for Godot (watch him stage a per­for­mance here), Ken­neth Tynan quipped, ”It has no plot, no cli­max, no denoue­ment; no begin­ning, no mid­dle and no end.” From there, Beckett’s work only got more aus­tere, bleak and despair­ing. His 1969 play Breath, for instance, runs just a minute long and fea­tures just the sound of breath­ing.

An intense­ly pri­vate man, he man­aged to mes­mer­ize the pub­lic even as he turned away from the lime­light. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1969 (after being reject­ed in 1968), his wife Suzanne, fear­ing the onslaught of fame that the award would bring, decried it as a “cat­a­stro­phe.”

A recent­ly pub­lished col­lec­tion of his let­ters from 1941–1956, the peri­od lead­ing up to his inter­na­tion­al suc­cess with his play Wait­ing for Godot, casts some light on at least one cor­ner of the man’s pri­vate life – what books were pil­ing up on his bed stand. Below is an anno­tat­ed list of what he was read­ing dur­ing that time. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, he real­ly dug Albert Camus’s The Stranger. “Try and read it,” he writes. “I think it is impor­tant.” He dis­miss­es Agatha Christie’s Crooked House as “very tired Christie” but prais­es Around the World in 80 Days: “It is live­ly stuff.” But the book he reserves the most praise for is J.D. Salinger’s Catch­er in the Rye. “I liked it very much indeed, more than any­thing for a long time.”

You can see the full list below. It was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished online by Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Press in 2011. Books with an aster­isk next to the title can be found in our col­lec­tion of 700 Free eBooks.

Andro­maque* by Jean Racine: “I read Andro­maque again with greater admi­ra­tion than ever and I think more under­stand­ing, at least more under­stand­ing of the chances of the the­atre today.”

Around the World in 80 Days* by Jules Verne: “It is live­ly stuff.”

The Cas­tle by Franz Kaf­ka: “I felt at home, too much so – per­haps that is what stopped me from read­ing on. Case closed there and then.”

The Catch­er in the Rye by J.D. Salinger: “I liked it very much indeed, more than any­thing for a long time.”

Crooked House by Agatha Christie: “very tired Christie”

Effi Briest* by Theodor Fontane: “I read it for the fourth time the oth­er day with the same old tears in the same old places.”

The Hunch­back of Notre Dame* by Vic­tor Hugo

Jour­ney to the End of the Night by Louis-Fer­di­nand Céline

Lautrea­mont and Sade by Mau­rice Blan­chot: “Some excel­lent ideas, or rather start­ing-points for ideas, and a fair bit of ver­biage, to be read quick­ly, not as a trans­la­tor does. What emerges from it though is a tru­ly gigan­tic Sade, jeal­ous of Satan and of his eter­nal tor­ments, and con­fronting nature more than with humankind.”

Man’s Fate by Andre Mal­raux

Mos­qui­toes by William Faulkn­er: “with a pref­ace by Que­neau that would make an ostrich puke”

The Stranger by Albert Camus: “Try and read it, I think it is impor­tant.”

The Temp­ta­tion to Exist by Emil Cio­ran: “Great stuff here and there. Must reread his first.”

La 628-E8* by Octave Mir­beau: “Damned good piece of work.”

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

via Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Press

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Samuel Beck­ett Directs His Absur­dist Play Wait­ing for Godot (1985)

Mon­ster­piece The­ater Presents Wait­ing for Elmo, Calls BS on Samuel Beck­ett

Rare Audio: Samuel Beck­ett Reads Two Poems From His Nov­el Watt

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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The Largest J.R.R. Tolkien Exhibit in Generations Is Coming to the U.S.: Original Drawings, Manuscripts, Maps & More

in Art, Books, Maps | January 7th, 2019

“I first took on The Lord of the Rings at the age of eleven or twelve,” writes The New York­er’s Antho­ny Lane. “It was, and remains, not a book that you hap­pen to read, like any oth­er, but a book that hap­pens to you: a chunk bit­ten out of your life.” The pre­teen years may remain the most oppor­tune ones in which to pick up the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, but what­ev­er the peri­od in life at which they find their way in, most read­ers who make the jour­ney through Mid­dle-earth nev­er real­ly leave the place. And it hard­ly requires cov­er­ing much more ground to get from hun­ger­ing to know every­thing about the world of The Lord of the Rings — one rich with its own ter­rain, its own races, its own lan­guages — to hun­ger­ing to know how Tolkien cre­at­ed it.

Now the count­less Lord of the Rings enthu­si­asts in Amer­i­ca have their chance to behold the mate­ri­als first-hand. The exhi­bi­tion Tolkien: Mak­er of Mid­dle-Earth, which runs from Jan­u­ary 25th to May 12th of this year at New York’s Mor­gan Library and Muse­um, will assem­ble “the most exten­sive pub­lic dis­play of orig­i­nal Tolkien mate­r­i­al for sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions,” draw­ing from “the col­lec­tions of the Tolkien Archive at the Bodleian Library (Oxford), Mar­quette Uni­ver­si­ty Libraries (Mil­wau­kee), the Mor­gan, and pri­vate lenders.”

All told, it will include “fam­i­ly pho­tographs and mem­o­ra­bil­ia, Tolkien’s orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions, maps, draft man­u­scripts, and designs relat­ed to The Hob­bit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Sil­mar­il­lion.”

Men­tal Floss’ Emi­ly Pet­sko also high­lights the pres­ence of “orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions of Smaug the drag­on (from The Hob­bit), Sauron’s Dark Tow­er of Barad-dûr (described in The Lord of the Rings and The Sil­mar­il­lion), and oth­er rec­og­niz­able char­ac­ters,” as well as that of Tolkien’s draft man­u­scripts that “pro­vide a win­dow into his cre­ative process, as well as the vivid, expan­sive worlds he cre­at­ed.” You can see more of the things Tolkien­ian that will soon come avail­able for pub­lic view­ing at the Mor­gan in the exhi­bi­tion’s trail­er at the top of the post.

“The Lord of the Rings has remained com­i­cal­ly divi­sive,” Lane writes. “It is either adored, with vary­ing degrees of guilt, or robust­ly despised, often by those who have yet to open it.” But after see­ing an exhi­bi­tion like Tolkien: Mak­er of Mid­dle-Earth, even Tolkien’s harsh­est crit­ics may well find them­selves per­suad­ed to acknowl­edge the scale and depth of the books’ achieve­ment, as well as the ded­i­ca­tion and even brav­ery of its cre­ator. As Lane puts it, “The Lord of the Rings may be the final stab at epic, and there is invari­ably some­thing risky, if not down­right ris­i­ble, in a last gasp.” But “Tolkien believed that he could repro­duce the epic form under mod­ern con­di­tions,” the fruit of that belief con­tin­ues to enrap­ture read­ers of all ages more than 60 years lat­er.

If you can’t wait for the exhi­bi­tion, you might want to have a look at Wayne G. Ham­mond and Christi­na Scul­l’s book, J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illus­tra­tor. It’s already pub­lished.

via AM New York and Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

110 Draw­ings and Paint­ings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Mid­dle-Earth and Beyond

Dis­cov­er J.R.R. Tolkien’s Per­son­al Book Cov­er Designs for The Lord of the Rings Tril­o­gy

Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Read From The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit

Map of Mid­dle-Earth Anno­tat­ed by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings

An Atlas of Lit­er­ary Maps Cre­at­ed by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Mid­dle Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Trea­sure Island & More

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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Bill Gates, Book Critic, Names His Top 5 Books of 2018

in Books | January 7th, 2019

Before we get too far into 2019, let’s quick­ly recap the five books that made it to the top of Bill Gates’ read­ing list in 2018. Over on his blog, Gates Notes, the Microsoft co-founder offers up these picks. He writes:

Edu­cat­ed, by Tara West­over. Tara nev­er went to school or vis­it­ed a doc­tor until she left home at 17. I nev­er thought I’d relate to a sto­ry about grow­ing up in a Mor­mon sur­vival­ist house­hold, but she’s such a good writer that she got me to reflect on my own life while read­ing about her extreme child­hood. Melin­da and I loved this mem­oir of a young woman whose thirst for learn­ing was so strong that she end­ed up get­ting a Ph.D. from Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty. [More here.]

Army of None, by Paul Scharre. Autonomous weapons aren’t exact­ly top of mind for most around the hol­i­days, but this thought-pro­vok­ing look at A.I. in war­fare is hard to put down. It’s an immense­ly com­pli­cat­ed top­ic, but Scharre offers clear expla­na­tions and presents both the pros and cons of machine-dri­ven war­fare. His flu­en­cy with the sub­ject should come as no sur­prise: he’s a vet­er­an who helped draft the U.S. government’s pol­i­cy on autonomous weapons. [More here.]

Bad Blood, by John Car­rey­rou. A bunch of my friends rec­om­mend­ed this one to me. Car­rey­rou gives you the defin­i­tive insider’s look at the rise and fall of Ther­a­nos. The sto­ry is even cra­zier than I expect­ed, and I found myself unable to put it down once I start­ed. This book has every­thing: elab­o­rate scams, cor­po­rate intrigue, mag­a­zine cov­er sto­ries, ruined fam­i­ly rela­tion­ships, and the demise of a com­pa­ny once val­ued at near­ly $10 bil­lion. [More here.]

21 Lessons for the 21st Cen­tu­ry, by Yuval Noah Harari. I’m a big fan of every­thing Harari has writ­ten, and his lat­est is no excep­tion. While Sapi­ens and Homo Deus cov­ered the past and future respec­tive­ly, this one is all about the present. If 2018 has left you over­whelmed by the state of the world, 21 Lessons offers a help­ful frame­work for pro­cess­ing the news and think­ing about the chal­lenges we face. [More here.]

The Head­space Guide to Med­i­ta­tion and Mind­ful­ness, by Andy Pud­di­combe. I’m sure 25-year-old me would scoff at this one, but Melin­da and I have got­ten real­ly into med­i­ta­tion late­ly. The book starts with Puddicombe’s per­son­al jour­ney from a uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent to a Bud­dhist monk and then becomes an enter­tain­ing explain­er on how to med­i­tate. If you’re think­ing about try­ing mind­ful­ness, this is the per­fect intro­duc­tion. [More here.]

Find oth­er Gates picks from pre­vi­ous sea­sons in the Relat­eds below.

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:

Bill Gates Names 5 Books You Should Read This Sum­mer

Bill Gates Rec­om­mends Five Books for Sum­mer 2017

5 Books Bill Gates Wants You to Read This Sum­mer (2016)

Bill Gates, Book Crit­ic, Names His Top 5 Books of 2015

Sum­mer 2014

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How a Word Enters the Dictionary: A Quick Primer

in Books, Creativity, English Language, History, K-12 | January 7th, 2019

Giv­en that you’re read­ing this on the Inter­net, we pre­sume you’ll be able to define many of the over 800 words that were added to the Mer­ri­am-Web­ster dic­tio­nary in 2018:

bio­hack­ing

bougie

binge­able

guac

hangry

Lat­inx

mock­tail

zoo­dles

But what about some of the humdingers lex­i­cog­ra­ph­er Kory Stam­per, for­mer asso­ciate edi­tor for Mer­ri­am-Web­ster and author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dic­tio­nar­ies, unleash­es in the above video?

pre­scrip­tivism

descrip­tivism

sprachge­fühl

ety­mo­log­i­cal fal­li­cist

(Bonus: bird strike)

And here we thought we were flu­ent in our native tongue. Face palm, to use anoth­er newish entry and an exam­ple of descrip­tivism. (It’s when the dic­tio­nary fol­lows the culture’s lead, accord­ing nov­el­ty its due by offi­cial­ly rec­og­niz­ing words that have entered the par­lance, rather than pre­scrib­ing the way cit­i­zens should be speak­ing.)

To hear Stam­per tell it, dic­tio­nary writ­ing is a dream gig for read­ers as well as word lovers.

Part of every day is spent read­ing, flag­ging any unfa­mil­iar words that may pop up for fur­ther research.

Did teenage slang give rise to it?

Was it born of busi­ness trends or tech indus­try advances?

Stam­per is adamant that lan­guage is not fixed, but rather a liv­ing organ­ism. Words go in and out of fash­ion, and take on mean­ings beyond the ones they sport­ed when first includ­ed in the dic­tio­nary. (Have a look at “extra” to see some evo­lu­tion­ary effects of the Eng­lish lan­guage and back it up with a peek inside the Urban Dic­tio­nary.)

Before a word pass­es dic­tio­nary muster, it must meet three cri­te­ria: it must have crossed into wide­spread use, it seems like­ly to stick around for a while, and it must have some sort of sub­stan­tive mean­ing, as opposed to being known sole­ly for its length (“antidis­es­tab­lish­men­tar­i­an­ism”), or some oth­er struc­tur­al won­der.

“Iouea” con­tains all five reg­u­lar vow­els and no oth­er let­ters. The fact that it exists to describe a genus of sea sponges may seem some­what beside the point to all but marine biol­o­gists.

What new words will enter the lex­i­con in 2019?

Per­haps we should look to the past. We set Merriam-Webster’s Time Trav­el­er dial back 100 years to dis­cov­er the words that debuted in 1919. There’s an abun­dance of good­ies here, some of whose WWI-era con­text has already expand­ed to accom­mo­date mod­ern mean­ing (anti-stress, fan­boy, super­pimp, unbuffered). Read­ers, care to take a stab at fresh­en­ing up some oth­er can­di­dates:

apple-knock­er

buck­shee

cape­skin

culti­gen

game­tophore

inter­ro­gee

micromethod

neu­ro­pro­tec­tive

out­gas

pre­re­turn

putsch

sce­nar­ist

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

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

“Lynchi­an,” “Kubrick­ian,” “Taran­ti­noesque” and 100+ Film Words Have Been Added to the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary

Dic­tio­nary of the Old­est Writ­ten Language–It Took 90 Years to Com­plete, and It’s Now Free Online

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City Jan­u­ary 14 as host of The­ater of the Apes book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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11,000 Digitized Books From 1923 Are Now Available Online at the Internet Archive

in Archives, Books | January 4th, 2019

Whether your inter­est is in win­ning argu­ments online or con­sid­er­ably deep­en­ing your knowl­edge of world cul­tur­al and intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry, you will be very well-served by at least one gov­ern­ment agency from now into the fore­see­able future. Thanks to the expi­ra­tion of the so-called “Micky Mouse Pro­tec­tion Act,” the U.S. Copy­right Office will release a year’s worth of art, lit­er­a­ture, schol­ar­ship, pho­tog­ra­phy, film, etc. into the pub­lic domain, start­ing with 1923 this year then mov­ing through the 20th cen­tu­ry each sub­se­quent year.

And thanks to the ven­er­a­ble online insti­tu­tion the Inter­net Archive, we already have almost 11,000 texts from 1923 in mul­ti­ple dig­i­tal for­mats, just a click or two away.

A cur­so­ry sur­vey pro­duced Wm. A. Haussmann’s trans­la­tion of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Arthur Stan­ley Eddington’s The Math­e­mat­i­cal The­o­ry of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty, Wal­do Lincoln’s His­to­ry of the Lin­coln Fam­i­ly, cov­er­ing the President’s ances­tors and descen­dants from 1637 to 1920…

…Lynn Thorndike’s A His­to­ry of Mag­ic and Exper­i­men­tal Sci­ence, Vol­ume I, Chan­dra Chakraberty’s An Inter­pre­ta­tion of Ancient Hin­du Med­i­cine, Edward McCurdy’s trans­la­tions of Leonar­do da Vinci’s Note­books, Nan­dal Sinha’s trans­la­tion of The Vais­esi­ka Sutras of Kana­da, Win­ston Churchill’s The World Cri­sis, Hen­ry Adams Bel­lows’ trans­la­tion of The Poet­ic Edda, a col­lec­tion of Mussolini’s polit­i­cal speech­es from 1914–1923, and Thom’s Irish Who’s Who, which cat­a­logues “promi­nent men and women in Irish life at home and abroad,” but telling­ly leaves out James Joyce, who had just pub­lished Ulysses, to some infamy, the pre­vi­ous year. (It does include William But­ler Yeats.)

1923 turns out to have been a par­tic­u­lar­ly rich lit­er­ary year itself, with many of the 20th century’s finest writ­ers pub­lish­ing major and less­er-known works (see here and here, for exam­ple). Brows­ing and focused search­ing through the archive—by top­ic, col­lec­tion, cre­ator, and language—will net many a lit­er­ary clas­sic or over­looked gem by some famous author. But you’ll also find much in this enor­mous col­lec­tion of dig­i­tized books that you would nev­er think to look for, like brows­ing the shelves of a Bor­ge­sian uni­ver­si­ty library with an entire wing devot­ed to the year 1923.

The Inter­net Archive home­page looks as mod­est as it does ded­i­cat­ed, list­ing all of its top col­lec­tions rather than fore­ground­ing the huge tranche of new­ly-avail­able mate­r­i­al (and count­ing) on the 1923 shelves. But founder Brew­ster Kahle does not mince words in describ­ing its incred­i­ble impor­tance. “We have short­changed a gen­er­a­tion,” he says, “The 20th cen­tu­ry is large­ly miss­ing from the inter­net” (in legal­ly avail­able form, that is). Now and in the com­ing years, thou­sands of its sto­ries can be told by teach­ers, schol­ars, artists, and film­mak­ers with ever-broad­en­ing access to doc­u­men­tary his­to­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:   

An Avalanche of Nov­els, Films and Oth­er Works of Art Will Soon Enter the Pub­lic Domain: Vir­ginia Woolf, Char­lie Chap­lin, William Car­los Williams, Buster Keaton & More

The Library of Con­gress Makes Thou­sands of Fab­u­lous Pho­tos, Posters & Images Free to Use & Reuse

The Pub­lic Domain Project Makes 10,000 Film Clips, 64,000 Images & 100s of Audio Files Free to Use

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

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Haruki Murakami Day: Stream Seven Hours of Mixes Collecting All the Jazz, Classical & Classic American Pop Music from His Novels

in Books, Music | December 31st, 2018

What makes the nov­els of Haru­ki Muraka­mi — orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten in Japan­ese and almost unfail­ing­ly filled with some odd but deeply char­ac­ter­is­tic mix­ture of cats, wells, par­al­lel worlds, mys­te­ri­ous dis­ap­pear­ing women with well-formed ears, and much else besides — so beloved around the world? A large part of it must have to do with Murakami’s cul­tur­al ref­er­ences, some­times Japan­ese but most often west­ern, and even more so when it comes to music. “Almost with­out excep­tion,” writes The Week music crit­ic Scott Mes­low in an exten­sive piece on all the songs and artists name-checked in these nov­els, “Murakami’s musi­cal ref­er­ences are con­fined to one of three gen­res: clas­si­cal, jazz, and Amer­i­can pop.”

Even the very names of Murakami’s books, “includ­ing Nor­we­gian Wood, Dance Dance Dance, and South of the Bor­der, West of the Sun — derive their titles from songs, and his char­ac­ters con­stant­ly reflect on the music they hear.”

You’ll hear all these songs and many more in Mes­low’s three stream­ing mix­es, total­ing sev­en hours of lis­ten­ing, that just this month made up “Haru­ki Muraka­mi Day” on Lon­don-based inter­net radio sta­tion NTS. (We pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured NTS here on Open Cul­ture when they put up a twelve-hour “spir­i­tu­al jazz” expe­ri­ence fea­tur­ing John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Her­bie Han­cock, and many oth­ers, a fair few of whom sure­ly appear in Murakami’s own famous­ly large col­lec­tion of jazz records.)

Haru­ki Muraka­mi begins with Brook Ben­ton’s 1970 bal­lad “Rainy Night in Geor­gia,” the first song Muraka­mi ever includ­ed in a nov­el. In fact, he includ­ed it in his very first nov­el, 1978’s Hear the Wind Sing, which he wrote in the wee hours at his kitchen table after clos­ing up the Tokyo jazz bar he ran in those years before becom­ing a pro­fes­sion­al writer. He even cre­at­ed a radio DJ char­ac­ter, whose voice recurs through­out the nov­el, to announce it and oth­er songs (though his tech­niques for includ­ing his favorite music in his writ­ing have grown some­what sub­tler since). “Okay, our first song of the evening,” the DJ says. “This one you can just sit back and enjoy. A great lit­tle num­ber, and the best way to beat the heat” — or the cold, or what­ev­er the weath­er in your part of the world. Wher­ev­er that is, it’s sure to have plen­ty of Muraka­mi fans who want to lis­ten in.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Became a DJ on a Japan­ese Radio Sta­tion for One Night: Hear the Music He Played for Delight­ed Lis­ten­ers

A 3,350-Song Playlist of Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Per­son­al Record Col­lec­tion

A 96-Song Playlist of Music in Haru­ki Murakami’s Nov­els: Miles Davis, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More

A 26-Hour Playlist Fea­tur­ing Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Lat­est Nov­el, Killing Com­menda­tore

Haru­ki Murakami’s Pas­sion for Jazz: Dis­cov­er the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

Stream Big Playlists of Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Per­son­al Vinyl Col­lec­tion and His Strange Lit­er­ary Worlds

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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