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

in Books, Literature, Maps | November 7th, 2018

Plot, setting, character… we learn to think of these as discrete elements in literary writing, comparable to the strategy, board, and pieces of a chess game. But what if this scheme doesn’t quite work? What about when the setting is a character? There are many literary works named and well-known for the unforgettable places they introduce: Walden, Wuthering Heights, Howards End…. There are invented domains that seem more real to readers than reality: Faulkner’s Yoknapatowpha, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex… There are works that describe impossible places so vividly we believe in their existence against all reason: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, China Miéville’s The City and the City, Jorge Luis Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”….

What sustains our belief in the integrity of fictional places? The fact that they seem to act upon events as much as the people who live in them, for one thing. And, just as often, the fact that so many authors and illustrators draw elaborate maps of literary settings, making their features real to us and embedding them in our minds.

A new book, The Writer’s Map, edited by Huw Lewis-Jones, offers lovers of literary maps—whether in non-fiction, realism, or fantasy—the opportunity to pore over maps of Thomas More’s Utopia (said to be the first literary map), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Branwell Brontë’s Verdopolis (above), and so many more.

The book is filled with essays about literary mapping by writers and map-makers, and it touches on the way authors themselves view imaginative mapping. “For some writers making a map is absolutely central to the craft of shaping and telling their tale,” writes Lewis-Jones. For others, making maps is also a way to avoid the painful task of writing, which Philip Pullman calls “a matter of sullen toil.” Drawing, on the other hand, he says, “is pure joy. Drawing a map to go with a story is messing around, with the added fun of coloring it in.” David Mitchell agrees: “As long as I was busy dreaming of topography,” he says of his maps, “I didn’t have to get my hands dirty with the mechanics of plot and character.”

It may surprise you to hear that writers hate to write, but writers are people, after all, and most people find writing tedious and difficult in some part. What all of the writers featured in this collection share is that they love indulging their imaginations, making real their lucid dreams, whether through the diversion of drawing maps or the grind of grammar and syntax. Many of these maps, like Thoreau’s drawing of Walden Pond or Johann David Wyss’s illustration of the desert island in The Swiss Family Robinson, accompanied their books into publication. Many more remained secreted in authors’ notebooks.

There are many such “private treasures” in The Writer’s Map, notes Atlas Obscura: “J.R.R. Tolkien’s own sketch of Mordor, on graph paper; C.S. Lewis’s sketches; unpublished maps from the notebooks of David Mitchell… Jack Kerouac’s own route in On the Road….” Do we read a literary map differently when it wasn’t meant for us? Can maps be sly acts of misdirection as well as whimsical visual aids? Should we treat them as paratextual and unnecessary, or are they central, when an author chooses to include them, to our understanding of a story? Such questions, and many, many more, are taken up in The Writer’s Map, a long overdue survey of this longstanding literary tradition.

via Atlas Obscura

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

William Faulkner Draws Maps of Yoknapatawpha County, the Fictional Home of His Great Novels

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

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What Are the Most Influential Books Written by Scholars in the Last 20 Years?: Leading Academics Pick “The New Canon”

in Books | November 7th, 2018

It’s a fraught time to be an academic. Budgets have been slashed, departments decimated, political battles sensationalized by partisan opportunists, social media posts intensified into test cases for speech. Yet as corporatism and culture wars have pushed their way into academia in the past twenty plus years, more scholarship has seemed to make its way out into the mainstream, with books by academic historians like Eric Foner and Ibram X. Kendi, literary scholars like Stephen Greenblatt and bell hooks, sociologists like Robert Putnam, scientists like Richard Dawkins, economists like Thomas Piketty, legal scholars like Michelle Alexander, and so on, topping bestseller lists and winning National Book Awards.

Such books distill difficult ideas without dumbing them down, in accessible and often urgent prose. Their popularity speaks to how they address the pressing issues of their times, and undercuts the stereotype of academics as jargon-spewing, out-of-touch inhabitants of ivory towers. And they often have the power to not only radically alter public discourse, but to inspire mass movements and shift public policy.

Most of the more than 15,000 academic books published each year—by university presses or tiny independents—reach only “their core audience of disciplinary specialists.” A few resonate outside their fields yet still fail to find an audience outside higher education circles (nor are they really meant to).

But some books by scholars, like those by the authors named above, “enter the public consciousness,” writes The Chronicle of Higher Education, and thus deserve to be described as “influential” in a broad sense, “like On the Origin of Species or Das Kapital or The Interpretation of Dreams,” as Yale professor of psychology Paul Bloom writes (while also pointing out that none of these books’ authors were professional academics). Under the banner of forming a “New Canon,” the Chronicle asked Bloom and a number of other scholars—including Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics and author of several best-selling popular books—to name what they believed were the most influential scholarly books of the past 20 years.

Each respondent was asked “to select books—academic or not, but written by scholars—from within or outside their own fields.” Each wrote a brief defense of their choice and, in some cases, of their criteria for “influence.” You can read these blurbs at the Chronicle’s site, and just below, see a full list of the picks. Some of the books, the Chronicle concedes, fall “slightly outside our time frame, but we included them anyway.”

Some of them are typically academic works, like Mark Greif’s choice of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling, a book unlikely to inspire a Netflix documentary. Others, like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, an impetus for Ava DuVernay’s 13th, were written for the widest of readerships. Do these distinctions make books like Alexander more “influential” than those like Sedgewick’s? It all depends, I suppose, on what we mean by the word—and by what, or whom, or how, or why, or how many we think need to be influenced.

The Better Angels of our Nature, by Steven Pinker

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert Putnam

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander

The History Manifesto, by Jo Guldi and David Armitage

Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America, Jonathan Levy

What Art Is, by Arthur Danto

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, by Yuval Noah Harari

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, by Dorothy Roberts

The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, by Antonio R. Damasio

Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, by Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton

A Brief History of NeoLiberalism, by David Harvey

Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed The Movement, by Kimberle Crenshaw and Neil Gotanda

The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick, by Jessica Riskin

Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, by Barbara Ransby

Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, by Bernard Williams

War Powers: How the Imperial Presidency Hijacked the Constitution, by Peter Irons

Age of Fracture, by Daniel T. Rodgers

Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship, by Daniel T. Rodgers

The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson

Read about all of the books at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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Umberto Eco Explains Why We Make Lists

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Edward Gorey Talks About His Love Cats & More in the Animated Series, “Goreytelling”

in Animation, Books, Literature | November 6th, 2018

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My childhood discovery of Edward Gorey proved revelatory. I recognized my own bewilderment in the blank expressions of his obsessively-rendered Edwardian children. His characters, imprisoned in starched collars and stays, stared at the world through hollow eyes, struck dumb by alternating currents of absurdity and horror. Every youngster with budding goth and New Romantic sensibilities found themselves drawn into Gorey’s weird worlds. Confessed Goreyphiles like Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman took much from a style Steven Kurutz describes as “camp-macabre, ironic-gothic or dark whimsy.”

He gave his readers permission to be odd and haunted, and to laugh about it, but he never seemed to have needed such permission himself. He was as sui generis as he was mysterious, the scowling older gentleman with the long white beard assumed the role of an anti-Santa, bestowing gifts of guilt-free, solitary indulgence in dark fantasy.

But the man himself remained shrouded, and that was just as well. Learning more about him as an adult, I have been struck by just how closely he resembles some of his characters, or rather, by how much he was, in work and life, entirely himself.

A fashionably bookish hermit and Wildean aesthete, a man to whom, “by his own admission… nothing happened,” Gorey organized his life in New York around reading, seeing films, and attending George Balanchine’s ballets. (He rarely missed a performance over the course of three decades, then moved to his famed Cape Cod house when Balanchine died in the mid-80s.) “Despite being a lifelong Anglophile, he made just one brief visit to Scotland and England,” writes Kurutz, “his only trip abroad.”

In a Proust Questionnaire he answered for Vanity Fair, Gorey wrote that his favorite journey was “looking out the window.” The supreme love of his life, he wrote: his cats. Those beloved creatures are the subject of the third episode of Goreytelling, at the top, an animated web series consisting of short excerpts from an upcoming documentary simply titled Gorey, directed by Christopher Seufert, who spent several years recording his conversations with Gorey. The very Gorey-like animations are by Benjamin and Jim Wickey.

If you’ve ever wondered what Edward Gorey sounded like, wonder no more. Hear his solidly Midwestern accent (Gorey grew up in Chicago) as he describes the travails of living with adorable, frustrated predators who destroy the furniture and throw themselves on his drawing table, ruining his work. Further up, he tells the story of a mummy’s head he kept wrapped up in his closet, and just above he tells a story about The Loathesome Couple a 1977 book he wrote based a series of real-life murders of British children by a married couple. “A lot people,” he says, would tell him “this one book of yours, I really find a little… much.”

Goreyphiles out there, and they number in the millions, will thoroughly enjoy these animations. Gorey the documentary promises to bring us even closer to the curmudgeonly author and artist. His life makes for a quirky series of vignettes, but ultimately Gorey was a “Magellan of the imagination,” says cultural critic and biographer Mark Dery. “He journeyed vastly between his ears…. So that’s where you have to look for the life. On the psychic geography of his unconscious,” and in the pages of his over 100 satisfyingly unsettling books.

via Laughing Squid

Alfred Hitchcock Meditates on Suspense & Dark Humor in a New Animated Video

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

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The “Most Secretive Library in the World”: The Future Library Will Collect 100 Original Manuscripts by Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell & More, to Be Read for the First Time in 2114

in Books, Libraries, Literature | November 5th, 2018

Should intelligent life of some form or another still inhabit the planet in the year 6939, such beings might come upon an “800-pound tube of an alloy of copper and chromium called Cupaloy” that was buried 50 feet beneath what was once Queens. The first time capsule, lowered under the Westinghouse exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair contains “35 items one might find in any run-of-the-mill Smith family household,” as Jinwoo Chong writes at Untapped Cities, “including copies of Life magazine, a Sears and Roebuck catalog, cigarettes and seeds of wheat, corn, alfalfa and soy.”

The Future Library, a time capsule-like project presently in the works, takes a very different approach to the concept. “A forest is growing in Norway,” explains an introductory video on creator Katie Paterson’s website. “In 100 years it will become an anthology of books.” The books that will be printed from 1,000 trees planted in Nordmarka, north of Oslo, will not, however, transmit mining and navigational instructions, but a full range of human emotion and personal experience. Or so we might assume. Unlike the 1939 time capsule, we’ll never know what’s inside them.

Scottish artist Paterson has planned a library of 100 creative works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry—one manuscript submitted every year until 2114, when she intends them all to be printed in 3,000 copies each and read for the first time. Almost none of us will be there to witness the event, yet “the timescale is… not vast in cosmic terms,” she says. “It is beyond our current lifespans, but close enough to come face to face with it, to comprehend and relativize,” unlike the incomprehensible future of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine or the far-off world for which Westinghouse designed their capsule.

Nonetheless, technological, and perhaps even evolutionary, change has increased exponentially in the past several decades, as have the possibilities for global extinction events. Margaret Atwood, the first author to submit an unpublished, unread manuscript to the Future Library in 2014, is characteristically less than sanguine about the existence of future readers for her manuscript, entitled Scribbler Moon. “It’s very optimistic to believe that there will still be people in 100 years,” she says in the short video above, and “that those people will still be reading.” Atwood imagines a near-future that may not even recognize our time.

Which words that we use today will be different, archaic, obsolete? Which new words will have entered the language? We don’t know what footnotes we will need. Will they have computers? Will they call them something else? What will they think smartphones are? Will that word still exist?

Writers for the project are chosen by the Future Library’s board of trustees. After the canny selection of Atwood, they chose the equally on-the-nose David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, who calls the library “the Ark of Literature.” It is a strange ark, filled with animals few people living now will likely ever see. “The world’s most secretive library,” The Guardian calls it. In 2016, Icelandic novelist and poet Sjón submitted his mysterious text. The fourth work came from Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, who named the project “a secular act of faith.”

The latest writer chosen is Man Booker-winning South Korean novelist Han Kang, who described the Future Library as a literal expression of the writer’s thoughts on their duty to posterity: “I cannot survive 100 years from now, of course. No one who I love can survive, either. This relentless fact has made me reflect on the essential part of my life. Why do I write? Who am I talking to, when I write?” Did Jane Austen imagine her readers of 100 years later? Could she ever have imagined us?

Not only is the Future Library an act of literary faith, but it is an ecological one. “The next 96 years do not look promising for the seedlings,” writes Merve Emre at The New York Times, “which are more vulnerable than their ancestors to all manner of man-made disasters.” The project symbolically binds together the fates of the book and the trees, making “the physicality of culture palpable by insisting that we confront the long, laborious process of preserving language.”

In 2020, the collection of manuscripts will be moved to a “Silent Room” in Oslo, a “womb-shaped chamber facing the forest, lined with wood from its trees.” Visitors can come and venerate these secretive future relics in their ribbon-wrapped gray boxes. But their contents—should the ambitious endeavor go as planned—will remain as elusive as the shape of our collective future 100 years from now.

via NYTimes

Bertrand Russell’s Advice to People Living 1,000 Years in the Future: “Love is Wise, Hatred is Foolish”

Aldous Huxley to George Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

157 Animated Minimalist Mid-Century Book Covers

in Animation, Books, Design | November 5th, 2018

Graphic and motion designer Henning M. Lederer can’t get enough of those minimalist midcentury book covers.

Apparently, the over-the-top pulp scenarios that inspire fellow period cover enthusiast Todd Alcott leave Lederer cold.

He’s drawn to the stark, the geometric, the abstract. No heaving bosoms, no forbidden love, though there’s no denying that sex was a topic of great clinical interest to several of the authors featured above, including psychiatrists Charles Rycroft, H. R. Beech, and R.D. Laing.

Visually, the psycho-analytic titles appear interchangeable with the more straightforward texts in this, Lederer’s third in a series of lightly animated period book covers:

The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation

Medical Complications During Pregnancy

Generalized Thermodynamics

Pinwheels, ripples, and scrolling harlequin patterns abound. Stare at them long enough if you want to cure your insomnia or become one with the universe.

Tilman Grundig’s soundtrack ensures that the playing field will stay level. No title is singled out for extra sonic attention.

That said, Noise by Rupert Taylor, an expert consultant in acoustics and noise control, stands apart for the humor and narrative sensibility of its visual representation.

Perhaps that’s why Lederer saved it for last.

To date, he’s animated 157 covers. Enjoy them all above.

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

French Bookstore Blends Real People’s Faces with Book Cover Art

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in NYC on Monday, November 12 for another monthly installment of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Growing Up Surrounded by Books Has a Lasting Positive Effect on the Brain, Says a New Scientific Study

in Books | November 2nd, 2018

Image by George Redgrave, via Flickr Commons

Somewhere in the annals of the internet–if this sprawling, near-sentient thing we call the internet actually has annals–there is a fine, fine quote by filmmaker John Waters:

We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them. Don’t let them explore you until they’ve explored the secret universes of books. Don’t let them connect with you until they’ve walked between the lines on the pages.
Books are cool, if you have to withhold yourself from someone for a bit in order for them to realize this then do so.

I like to think all of us here on Open Culture are on the same page as Mr. Waters and there’s reason to celebrate: researchers at the Australian National University have reported that growing up in a household filled with books can lead to proficiency in literacy, numeracy, and information communication technology, even if you don’t go on to university.

Basically, being around books is good for you.

You can read the full study by Joanna Sikora here at Social Science Research, which used data from 160,000 adults from 31 countries. The data came from a survey that asked people ages 25 to 65 to think back on being 16 years old. How many books were they surrounded by at home during that time?

The average number at home was 115 books, though in Norway the average size was 212 books and in Turkey it was 27. Needless to say, no matter the size of the library, having books in the home was a good thing. The researches also found that literacy rates climbed as the number of books climbed, but at some point–350 books to be exact–these rates plateau’d.

In comparison, a person who had not grown up around books but had earned a university degree wound up being just as literate as someone with a large home library and only nine years of schooling.

According to Sikora, “Early exposure to books in [the] parental home matters because books are an integral part of routines and practices that enhance lifelong cognitive competencies.”

What does that bode for a more digital future? The study seems to suggest that while books are not going away any time soon, it is indeed this book-based literacy that leads many of us to online sites like Open Culture, where we spend our time reading articles like this one. (Instead of, you know, watching cat videos or playing Fortnite.)

So the next time you fret that your stack of unread books is a bad thing, don’t worry. It’s doing wonders for your mental health, whether you know it or not.

Boston Public Library Launches a Crowdsourced Project to Transcribe 40,000 Documents from Its Anti-Slavery Collection: You Can Now Help

China’s New Luminous White Library: A Striking Visual Introduction

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 12 ) |

The Model Book of Calligraphy (1561–1596): A Stunningly Detailed Illuminated Manuscript Created over Three Decades

in Art, Books, History | November 1st, 2018

Whenever a technology develops just enough to become interesting, someone inevitably pushes it to extremes. In the case of that reliable and long-lived technology known as the book, writers and artists were looking for ways to maximize its potential as a device for conveying the written word and the drawn image as far back as the 16th century. One particularly glorious example, The Model Book of Calligraphy, has come available online, to view or download, thanks to the Getty. This decades-spanning collaboration shows off not just the artistic writing implied by the title but illustrations whose vividness and detail remain striking even today.

“In the 1500s, as printing became the most common method of producing books, intellectuals increasingly valued the inventiveness of scribes and the aesthetic qualities of writing,” says the Getty’s site.

“From 1561 to 1562, Georg Bocskay, the Croatian-born court secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, created this Model Book of Calligraphy in Vienna to demonstrate his technical mastery of the immense range of writing styles known to him.”

Three decades later, “Emperor Rudolph II, Ferdinand’s grandson, commissioned Joris Hoefnagel” — a Flemish artist well known at the time for his specialization in subjects to do with natural history — “to illuminate Bocskay’s model book. Hoefnagel added fruit, flowers, and insects to nearly every page, composing them so as to enhance the unity and balance of the page’s design. It was one of the most unusual collaborations between scribe and painter in the history of manuscript illumination.”

What we see when we flip through (or zoom in to great levels of digital detail on) The Model Book of Calligraphy’s 184 pages may look like a unified work executed all at once (see them all at the bottom of this page), but it actually combines the sensibilities of not just two creators separated by not just the art forms in which they specialized but more than thirty years of time. Hoefnagel, however, didn’t stay entirely out of the realm of the textual: though most of what he brought to the manuscript takes the form of illuminations, he also added an entirely new section on writing the alphabet. He understood the importance of not just well-crafted pictures and text but their appealing integration, a concept familiar to any designer working in today’s forms of cutting-edge media — as books were four centuries ago. You can purchase print editions that reproduce portions or the entirety of The Model Book of Calligraphy.

via The Public Domain Review

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

Learn Calligraphy from Lloyd Reynolds, the Teacher of Steve Jobs’ Own Famously Inspiring Calligraphy Teacher

The Art of Handwriting as Practiced by Famous Artists: Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Kooning & More

Behold the Beautiful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketchbook: A Window Into How Illuminated Manuscripts Were Made (1494)

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Patti Smith’s Award-Winning Memoir, Just Kids, Now Available in a New Illustrated Edition

in Books | October 31st, 2018

Hard to believe it’s almost a decade ago now since Patti Smith’s Just Kids took over Barnes & Noble displays, topped bestseller lists, won the National Book Award, and sent Wikipedia searches for “Patti Smith” into the stratosphere. A memoir of her gritty New York salad days with roommate/lover/best friend/soulmate/photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, the book immediately entered “that golden canon of classic New York stories about young people coming to the city to find out who they were meant to be,” as NPR’s Maureen Corrigan writes.

Indeed, Just Kids should be considered representative, its full text now a locus classicus of bohemian finding-yourself-in-New-York stories. (The embittered converse of the genre is forever crowned by Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That.”) But Smith didn’t rest on the many laurels the book garnered her. She released a widely-acclaimed album two years later, with a bonus track on the deluxe edition called “Just Kids,” then collaborated with Colombian artist José Antonio Suárez Londoño on the (sadly out-of-print) Hecatomb.

In 2015, Smith followed Just Kids with another memoir, M Train, a travelogue of sorts—of her literary pilgrimages and journeys through the city that embraced her. But as her work ethic shows, and as Just Kids documents in detail, she didn’t just luck out in the big city but fought her way to creative freedom and independence with zeal and real self-confidence, believing in the power of poetry and rock and roll, and of her place among the sixties royalty she encountered while “still a gangly twenty-two-year-old book clerk, struggling simultaneously with several unfinished poems.”

“I felt an inexplicable sense of kinship with these people,” she wrote, for example, of her run-ins with Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, and Jimi Hendrix ahead of Woodstock, a “feeling of prescience” that she might “one day walk in their path.” She saw “infinite possibilities” in the Chelsea Hotel’s plaster ceiling, “the mandala of my life.” You may call it faith, hubris, or delusion, but she sure showed us, and keeps showing us, that she earned her cred. Just Kids will inspire young artists for generations, not only through its first, explosive printing, but through a possible series on Showtime, who acquired the rights in 2015, and, now, in an illustrated edition just released last week.

The book resonates for its depictions of a bygone, decayed New York, when free spirits could scrape together their artistic selves with next to nothing, without having to craft their every move for social media. Smith’s vividly expressive writing brings that lost world alive in a wildly successful experiment, as she told KCRW in a 2010 interview, to “infuse truth with magic and love.”

She announced the book’s new edition on her Instagram, a forum she has taken to with aplomb, as anticipating the “30th year since Robert Mapplethorpe’s passing.” A poignant reminder, especially since she wrote the book, she once revealed, as a deathbed promise to her friend.

The full-color illustrated edition of Just Kids features never-before published photos, drawings, and other ephemera depicting major figures in Smith’s young life, like Sam Shepard, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as her and Mapplethorpe’s first Brooklyn apartment, the iconic Max’s Kansas City, and the fire escape of the Chelsea Hotel. Order a copy here.

Related Content:

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Patti Smith Reads Oscar Wilde’s 1897 Love Letter De Profundis: See the Full Three-Hour Performance

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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

What Are the Most Influential Books Written by Scholars in the Last 20 Years?: Leading Academics Pick “The New Canon”

Edward Gorey Talks About His Love Cats & More in the Animated Series, “Goreytelling”

The “Most Secretive Library in the World”: The Future Library Will Collect 100 Original Manuscripts by Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell & More, to Be Read for the First Time in 2114

157 Animated Minimalist Mid-Century Book Covers

Growing Up Surrounded by Books Has a Lasting Positive Effect on the Brain, Says a New Scientific Study

The Model Book of Calligraphy (1561–1596): A Stunningly Detailed Illuminated Manuscript Created over Three Decades

Patti Smith’s Award-Winning Memoir, Just Kids, Now Available in a New Illustrated Edition

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