Explore an Interactive, Online Version of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, a 200-Year-Old Guide to the Colors of the Natural World

in Art, Biology, Books, Science | September 27th, 2018

In a post ear­li­er this year, we brought to your atten­tion Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours. Used by artists and nat­u­ral­ists alike, the guide orig­i­nal­ly relied on writ­ten descrip­tion alone, with­out any col­or to be found among its pages. Instead, in the late eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, Ger­man min­er­al­o­gist Abra­ham Got­t­lob Wern­er painstak­ing­ly detailed the qual­i­ties of the 110 col­ors he sur­veyed, by ref­er­ence to where they might be found on ani­mals, veg­eta­bles, and min­er­als. The col­or “Pearl Gray,” for exam­ple, might be locat­ed on the “Backs of black head­ed and Kittwake Gulls,” the “Back of Petals of Pur­ple Het­at­i­ca,” or on “Porce­lain Jasper.”

The lit­er­ary pos­si­bil­i­ties of this approach may seem vast. But its use­ful­ness to those engaged in the visu­al arts—or in close obser­va­tion of new species in, say, the Gala­pa­gos Islands—may have been some­what lack­ing until Scot­tish painter Patrick Syme updat­ed the guide in 1814 with col­or swatch­es, most of them using the very min­er­als Wern­er described.

It was the sec­ond edi­tion of Syme’s guide that accom­pa­nied Charles Dar­win on his 1831 voy­age aboard the HMS Bea­gle, where he “used it to cat­a­logue the flo­ra and fau­na that lat­er inspired his the­o­ry of nat­ur­al selec­tion,” as his­to­ri­an Daniel Lewis writes at Smith­son­ian.

While we might think of tax­onomies of col­or as prin­ci­pal­ly guid­ing artists, web design­ers, and house painters, they have been indis­pens­able for sci­en­tists. “They can indi­cate when a plant or ani­mal is a dif­fer­ent species or a sub­species,” Lewis notes; “in the 19th cen­tu­ry, the use of col­or to dif­fer­en­ti­ate species was impor­tant for what it said about evo­lu­tion and how species changed over time and from region to region.” For his­to­ri­ans of sci­ence, there­fore, Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours rep­re­sents an essen­tial tool in the ear­ly devel­op­ment of evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy.

Oth­er col­or dic­tio­nar­ies fol­lowed, “designed to give peo­ple around the world a com­mon vocab­u­lary to describe the col­ors of every­thing from rocks and flow­ers to stars, birds, and postage stamps.” Some of these were high­ly spe­cial­ized, such as the two-vol­ume set cre­at­ed by the French Soci­ety of Chrysan­themists in 1905. All of them, how­ev­er, strove to meet the high bar set by Wern­er when it came to lev­el of detailed descrip­tion. These are guides that speak in human terms, in con­trast to the nomen­cla­ture most often used today, which “is real­ly a machine lan­guage,” Kelsey Cam­bell-Dol­laghan writes at Fast Com­pa­ny, “numer­i­cal hex codes craft­ed to com­mu­ni­cate with soft­ware on com­put­ers and print­ers.”

In recog­ni­tion of Wern­er and Syme’s con­tri­bu­tion to col­or nomen­cla­ture, Smith­son­ian Books recent­ly repub­lished the 1814 edi­tion of their guide, and the revised 1821 edi­tion has been avail­able for some time as scans at the Inter­net Archive. Now it has received a 21st update thanks to design­er Nicholas Rougeux, who has cre­at­ed an online inter­ac­tive ver­sion of the book, “with addi­tions like data visu­al­iza­tions of its 100 col­ors and inter­net-sourced pho­tographs of the ani­mals and min­er­als that the book references”—a fea­ture its cre­ators could nev­er have dreamed of. You can read Werner’s com­plete text, see all of the col­ors as illus­trat­ed and cat­e­go­rized by Syme, and even pur­chase through Rougeux’s site cool 36” x 24” posters like that above, start­ing at $27.80.

It’s true, view­ing the book online has its draw­backs, relat­ed to how Syme’s paint swatch­es are trans­lat­ed into hex codes, then dis­played dif­fer­ent­ly depend­ing on var­i­ous screen set­tings. But Rougeux has tried to com­pen­sate for this dif­fer­ence between print and screen. On a pub­licly acces­si­ble Google Doc, he has pro­vid­ed the hex codes “for each of the 18th-cen­tu­ry hues, from Skimmed Milk (#e6e1c9) to Veinous Blood Red (#3f3033).” Not near­ly as poet­ic as Werner’s descrip­tions, but it’s what we have to work with these days when ref­er­ence books get writ­ten for com­put­ers as much as they do for humans.

See the inter­ac­tive Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours here.

via Fast Com­pa­ny

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colour, the 19th-Cen­tu­ry “Col­or Dic­tio­nary” Used by Charles Dar­win (1814)

Goethe’s Col­or­ful & Abstract Illus­tra­tions for His 1810 Trea­tise, The­o­ry of Col­ors: Scans of the First Edi­tion

The Vibrant Col­or Wheels Designed by Goethe, New­ton & Oth­er The­o­rists of Col­or (1665–1810)

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

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Download Classic Japanese Wave and Ripple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japanese Artists from 1903

in Art, Books, Design, History | September 18th, 2018

Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese art may please so many of us, even those of us with lit­tle inter­est in Japan itself, because of the way it inhab­its the realm between rep­re­sen­ta­tion and abstrac­tion. But then, it does­n’t just inhab­it that realm: it has set­tled those bor­der­lands, made them its own, for much longer than most cul­tures have been doing any­thing at all. The space between art, strict­ly defined, and what we now call design has also seen few achieve­ments quite so impres­sive as those made in Japan, going all the way back to the rope mark­ings on the clay ves­sels used by the islands’ Jōmon peo­ple in the 11th cen­tu­ry BC.

Those ancient rope-on-clay mark­ings can eas­i­ly look like pre­de­ces­sors of the “wave pat­terns” still seen in Japan­ese art and design today. Since time almost immemo­r­i­al they have appeared on “swords (both blades and han­dles) and asso­ci­at­ed para­pher­na­lia (known as ‘sword fur­ni­ture’), as well as lac­quer­ware, Net­suke, reli­gious objects, and a host of oth­er items.”

So says the Pub­lic Domain Review, which has fea­tured a series of three books full of ele­gant wave and rip­ple designs orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in 1903 and now avail­able to down­load free at the Inter­net Archive (vol­ume one, vol­ume two, vol­ume three).

Called Hamon­shū, the books were pro­duced by the artist Mori Yuzan, “about whom not a lot is known,” adds the Pub­lic Domain review, “apart from that he hailed from Kyoto, worked in the Nihon­ga style” — or the “Japan­ese paint­ing” style of Japan­ese paint­ing, which emerged dur­ing the Mei­ji peri­od, a time of rapid West­ern­iza­tion in Japan.

He “died in 1917. The works would have act­ed as a kind of go-to guide for Japan­ese crafts­men look­ing to adorn their wares with wave and rip­ple pat­terns.” Though they do con­tain text, they require no knowl­edge of the Japan­ese lan­guage to appre­ci­ate the many illus­tra­tions they present.

Tak­en togeth­er, Mori’s books offer a com­plete spec­trum from tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese-style rep­re­sen­ta­tion — espe­cial­ly of land, water, moun­tains, sky, and oth­er nat­ur­al ele­ments — to a taste of the infi­nite vari­ety of abstract pat­terns that result. Such imagery remains preva­lent in Japan more than a cen­tu­ry after the pub­li­ca­tion of Hamon­shū, as any vis­i­tor to Japan today will see.

But now that the Inter­net Archive has made the books freely avail­able online (vol­ume one, vol­ume two, vol­ume three), they’ll sure­ly inspire work not just between rep­re­sen­ta­tion and abstrac­tion as well as between art and design, but between Japan­ese aes­thet­ics and those of every oth­er cul­ture in the world as well.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

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

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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Why You Should Read One Hundred Years of Solitude: An Animated Video Makes the Case

in Animation, Books, Literature | September 5th, 2018

Maybe we read some cel­e­brat­ed lit­er­ary works the way we eat kale or quinoa—you don’t exact­ly love it but they say it’s, like, a super­food. Not so Gabriel Gar­cia Marquez’s One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude. When I first start­ed read­ing the nov­el, I couldn’t stop. Twelve hours and a cou­ple pots of cof­fee lat­er, I want­ed to read it again right away. It’s a page-turner—not some­thing one often says of lit­er­ary fic­tion beloved by high­brow crit­ics and academics—but I mean it as the high­est pos­si­ble com­pli­ment.

The book has every fea­ture of a binge-wor­thy soap opera: char­ac­ters we love and love to hate, doomed affairs, sex, vio­lence, end­less fam­i­ly squab­bling, tragedy, intrigue, melo­dra­ma…. Again, this is no crit­i­cism; Mar­quez loved telen­ov­e­las and even wrote a script for one. He want­ed his work to reach as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble, to thrill and enter­tain. But he did­n’t with­hold any lit­er­ary nutri­ents either.


The novel’s poet­ic lan­guage, his­tor­i­cal scope, and the­mat­ic and sym­bol­ic com­plex­i­ty has led crit­ics like William Kennedy to com­pare it to the book of Gen­e­sis, and led no small num­ber of read­ers to wild­ly pre­fer it to the Bible or any oth­er ancient book of mythol­o­gy.

If you’re one of the two or three peo­ple who hasn’t read the nov­el, and you don’t find all this praise ful­ly con­vinc­ing, con­sid­er the case made by Fran­cis­co Díez-Buzo in the TED-Ed ani­mat­ed video above.

The sto­ry, we learn, arrived as an epiphany Mar­quez had while he and his fam­i­ly were on the road to a vaca­tion des­ti­na­tion. He turned the car around, aban­doned the trip, and start­ed writ­ing immediately—an exam­ple of the total com­mit­ment many writ­ers promise them­selves they’ll one day get around to maybe work­ing on. Eigh­teen months and many pots of cof­fee lat­er, One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude appeared, intro­duc­ing a world­wide read­er­ship to Mar­quez, mag­i­cal real­ism, and Latin Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture, pol­i­tics, and his­to­ry.

Most every read­er now has a vol­ume of Octavio Paz or Pablo Neru­da on the shelf, and nov­els by Mar­quez, Mario Var­gas Llosa, or Isabelle Allende. Before Cien años de soledad arrived, how­ev­er, this was rarely so out­side of Span­ish-speak­ing coun­tries. The nov­el cre­at­ed a glob­al appetite for rich Latin Amer­i­can tra­di­tions of sto­ry­telling and lyri­cal poet­ry. New trans­la­tions from the region began appear­ing every­where.

Like Faulkner’s entire cor­pus com­pressed into one vol­ume, the epic tale of sev­en gen­er­a­tions of Buendías in the fic­tion­al Colom­bian town of Macon­do is vast and sprawl­ing. It “is not an easy book to read,” says Díez-Buzo. Here, as you might expect, I dis­agree. It is hard­er not to read it once you’ve picked it up. But you will need to read it again, and again, and again.

So packed is the book with detail, allu­sion, his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ence, and nar­ra­tive that you could read it for the rest of your life and nev­er exhaust its lay­ers of mean­ing. As Harold Bloom put it, “every page is rammed full of life beyond the capac­i­ty of any sin­gle read­er to absorb… There are no wast­ed sen­tences, no mere tran­si­tions, in this nov­el, and you must notice every­thing at the moment you read it.” Pablo Neru­da called it “the great­est rev­e­la­tion in the Span­ish lan­guage since Don Quixote of Cervantes”—the found­ing text of Span­ish-lan­guage lit­er­a­ture and, indeed, of the nov­el form itself.

The super­nat­ur­al and the sur­re­al suf­fuse each page, rais­ing even mun­dane encoun­ters to a myth­ic dimen­sion, stag­ing his­to­ry as time­less dra­ma, played out over and over again through each gen­er­a­tion. In each rep­e­ti­tion, fan­tas­tic and fatal changes also “pro­duce a sense of his­to­ry,” says Díez-Buzo, “as a down­ward spi­ral the char­ac­ters seem pow­er­less to escape.”

It is this his­to­ry that Mar­quez described, when he accept­ed the Nobel Prize in 1982, as “a bound­less realm of haunt­ed men and his­toric women, whose unend­ing obsti­na­cy blurs into leg­end.” Marquez’s own fam­i­ly his­to­ry, full of “haunt­ed men and his­toric women,” served as a mod­el for his suc­ces­sion of fic­tion­al ances­tors. Latin Amer­i­cans, he said, “have not had a moment’s rest,” yet in the face of colo­nial­ist bru­tal­i­ty, civ­il war, dic­ta­tor­ships, “oppres­sion, plun­der­ing and aban­don­ment,” he declared, “we respond with life.” By some strange act of mag­ic, Mar­quez con­tained all of that life in one extra­or­di­nary nov­el.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez’s Extra­or­di­nary Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech, “The Soli­tude Of Latin Amer­i­ca,” in Eng­lish & Span­ish (1982)

New Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Dig­i­tal Archive Fea­tures More Than 27,000 Dig­i­tized Let­ters, Man­u­script Pages, Pho­tos & More

Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Describes the Cul­tur­al Mer­its of Soap Operas, and Even Wrote a Script for One

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

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Discover “Journey of the Universe,” a Multimedia Project That Explores Humanity’s Place in the Epic History of the Cosmos

in Astronomy, Books, History | September 5th, 2018

Today we know what no pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion knew: the his­to­ry of the uni­verse and of the unfold­ing of life on Earth. Through the aston­ish­ing achieve­ments of nat­ur­al sci­en­tists world­wide, we now have a detailed account of how galax­ies and stars, plan­ets and liv­ing organ­isms, human beings and human con­scious­ness came to be.

With this knowl­edge, the ques­tion of what role we play in the 14-bil­lion-year his­to­ry of the uni­verse impos­es itself with greater poignan­cy than ever before. In ask­ing our­selves how we will tell the sto­ry of Earth to our chil­dren, we must inevitably con­sid­er the role of human­i­ty in its his­to­ry, and how we con­nect with the intri­cate web of life on Earth.

In Jour­ney of the Uni­verse–a mul­ti­me­dia edu­ca­tion­al project that fea­tures a book, film and free online courses–evolutionary philoso­pher Bri­an Thomas Swimme and his­to­ri­an of reli­gions Mary Eve­lyn Tuck­er pro­vide an ele­gant, sci­ence-based nar­ra­tive to tell this epic sto­ry, lead­ing up to the chal­lenges of our present moment. The authors describe the ori­gins of humans on Earth, how we devel­oped a sym­bol­ic con­scious­ness, and how our abil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­cate using sym­bols make humans a “plan­e­tary pres­ence.”

We are now faced with a new dynamic—one where the sur­vival of the species and entire ecosys­tems depend pri­mar­i­ly on human activ­i­ty, and the choic­es humans make.

Weav­ing togeth­er the find­ings of mod­ern sci­ence togeth­er with endur­ing wis­dom found in the human­is­tic tra­di­tions of the West, Asia, and indige­nous peo­ples, the authors explore cos­mic evo­lu­tion as a pro­found­ly won­drous process based on cre­ativ­i­ty, con­nec­tion, and inter­de­pen­dence, and they envi­sion an unprece­dent­ed oppor­tu­ni­ty for the world’s peo­ple to address the daunt­ing eco­log­i­cal and social chal­lenges of our times.

Devel­oped over sev­er­al decades, and inspired by the authors’ long col­lab­o­ra­tion with Thomas Berry, Jour­ney of the Uni­verse boasts an impres­sive ros­ter of sci­ence advi­sors includ­ing Ursu­la Good­e­nough, Craig Kochel, and Ter­ry Dea­con.

Jour­ney of the Uni­verse is a mul­ti­me­dia edu­ca­tion­al project that includes:

1.) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse: A Sto­ry for Our Time Spe­cial­iza­tion avail­able on Cours­era, cre­at­ed by Yale.  This is a col­lec­tion of three Mas­sive Online Open Cours­es that take stu­dents through the sci­en­tif­ic and cul­tur­al cos­mol­o­gy found through­out Jour­ney of the Uni­verse, as well as deep into its lin­eage with cul­tur­al his­to­ri­an and cos­mol­o­gist Thomas Berry:

Course 1: Jour­ney of the Uni­verse: The Unfold­ing of Life

Course 2: Jour­ney of the Uni­verse: Weav­ing Knowl­edge and Action

Course 3: The World­view of Thomas Berry: The Flour­ish­ing of the Earth Com­mu­ni­ty

2) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse Film, win­ner of the 2012 San Francisco/Northern Cal­i­for­nia Emmy® Award for best doc­u­men­tary. You can watch the trail­er for the film above

3) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse Book, pub­lished by Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press. Trans­lat­ed into French, Ital­ian, Span­ish, Ger­man, Turk­ish, Chi­nese, Kore­an, Indone­sian.

4) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse Con­ver­sa­tion Series, a twen­ty-part edu­ca­tion­al series inte­grates the per­spec­tives of the sci­ences and the human­i­ties into a retelling of our 13.7 bil­lion year sto­ry. In a series of one-on-one inter­views, sci­en­tists, his­to­ri­ans, and envi­ron­men­tal­ists explore the unfold­ing sto­ry of the uni­verse and Earth and the role of the human in respond­ing to our present chal­lenges.

Devin O’Dea lives in San Fran­cis­co where he serves as the man­ag­er of the Jour­ney of the Uni­verse project: a col­lab­o­ra­tive, mul­ti­me­dia con­ver­sa­tion that draws togeth­er sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies with human­is­tic insights con­cern­ing the nature of the uni­verse.  Devin wel­comes all inter­ests and feed­back to Jour­ney mate­ri­als at devin@journeyoftheuniverse.org.

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

in Books, Comedy, Design | September 3rd, 2018

Screen­writer Todd Alcott has been very busy since we intro­duced you to his hilar­i­ous Mid-Cen­tu­ry Pulp Fic­tion Cov­er project last month.

To restate what should be obvi­ous from the sec­ond, if not first glance, none of Alcott’s titles are real. His aes­thet­i­cal­ly con­vinc­ing mock-ups pay trib­ute to favorite songs by favorite artists: David Bowie, Talk­ing Heads, Joy Divi­sion, Elvis Costel­lo…

The start of the school year finds him in a Dylan mood, ren­der­ing some of his best known hits in a vari­ety of pulp genre for­mats:

Bob Dylan is the per­fect sub­ject for this project, because his work has always been all about quo­ta­tion and repur­pos­ing. From the very begin­ning, he took old songs, changed the lyrics and called them his own…. And it’s not just the melodies, he’s also not shy about lift­ing phras­es and whole lines from oth­er sources. One of the fun things about being a Bob Dylan fan is being able to spot the influ­ences. It’s not just lift­ing lines from clas­sic blues songs, where we don’t real­ly know who “wrote” the orig­i­nals, it’s real, iden­ti­fi­able, copy­right-pro­tect­ed mate­r­i­al. And you nev­er know where it’s going to come from, a book about the Yakuza from Japan, a cook­book, an old Time Mag­a­zine arti­cle, or 1940s noir pic­tures.

I was watch­ing a clas­sic Robert Mitchum noir, Out of the Past, and Mitchum is talk­ing to some­one, and they men­tion San Fran­cis­co, and Mitchum says “I always liked San Fran­cis­co, I was there for a par­ty once.” 

And I was like “Wait, what?” Because that’s a line from a real­ly obscure Dylan song, “Maybe Some­day,” off his album Knocked-Out Loaded. 

I was like “Wait, why did that line stick in Dylan’s mind? Why did he decide to quote that? Is it just the way Mitchum says it? What hap­pened there?” And sud­den­ly a song I had­n’t thought about much became a lot more inter­est­ing.

So for my Dylan cov­ers, I try to car­ry on that tra­di­tion of tak­ing quotes and repur­pos­ing them. So “Just Like a Woman” becomes a sto­ry in a sci­ence-fic­tion pulp, and “Like a Rolling Stone” becomes an expose on juve­nile delin­quen­cy, and “Rainy Day Women” becomes a post-apoc­a­lyp­tic adven­ture sto­ry. 

In a way, it’s what this project is all about, tak­ing dis­card­ed pieces of cul­ture and stick­ing them back togeth­er with new ref­er­ences to make them breathe again.

“Just Like a Woman”’s lyrics have nev­er sat par­tic­u­lar­ly well with fem­i­nists. (“There’s no more com­plete cat­a­logue of sex­ist slurs,” author Mar­i­on Meade wrote in The New York Times.)

I think it’s fair to say that Alcott’s bux­om flame-haired cyborg leans in to that crit­i­cism. The cov­er of this faux sci­ence fic­tion mag also harkens back to a time when the depic­tion of sexy female robots left some­thing to the imag­i­na­tion.

From a design stand­point, it’s a great illus­tra­tion of the heavy lift­ing a sin­gle well-cho­sen punc­tu­a­tion change can do.

The magazine’s title is an extra gift to Dylan fans.

The Blonde-on-Blonde Chron­i­cles con­tin­ue with Rainy Day Women #12 & 35. Does it mat­ter that the breast-plat­ed, and for all prac­ti­cal pur­pos­es bot­tom­less war­riors are raven tressed?

Only if tongue’s not firm­ly in cheek.

The night­mare vision of Dylan’s sev­en-minute protest song “A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall” makes for a smooth tran­si­tion to a dis­as­ter nov­el of the 1970s.

In a 1963 radio inter­view with author Studs Terkel, Dylan assert­ed that the song wasn’t direct­ly relat­ed to the nuclear fears all-per­va­sive at the time:

It’s not the fall­out rain. It isn’t that at all. The hard rain’s gonna fall is in the last verse…That means all the lies, you know, that peo­ple get told on their radios and in news­pa­pers. All you have to think for a minute, you know. Try­ing to take people’s brains away, you know. Which maybe has been done already. I hate to think it’s been done. All the lies, which I con­sid­er poi­son.

This writer can think of anoth­er rea­son cit­i­zens might find them­selves fight­ing for their lives in a row­boat lev­el with the very tip­py top of the Empire State Build­ing. So, I sus­pect, can Alcott.

Or maybe we’re wrong and cli­mate change is noth­ing but fake news.

Alcott gets some mileage out of anoth­er rain-based lyric on Maggie’s Farm, a steamy rur­al romp whose creased cov­er is also part and par­cel of the genre.

Who’s that young punk on the cov­er of Like a Rolling Stone? Beats me, but the girl’s a dead ringer for Warhol super­star, Edie Sedg­wick, the pur­port­ed inspi­ra­tion for the song that shares the novel’s name. Ms. Sedgwick’s real life fig­ure was much less volup­tuous, but if the genre cov­ers that sparked this project demon­strate any­thing, it’s that sex sells.

Visions of Johan­na is pos­i­tive­ly under­stat­ed in com­par­i­son. While many pulp authors toiled in obscu­ri­ty, let us pre­tend that Nobel Prize win­ner and (faux) pulp-nov­el­ist Dylan wouldn’t have. Espe­cial­ly if he had a series like the pseu­do­ny­mous Brett Halliday’s pop­u­lar Mike Shayne mys­ter­ies. At that lev­el, the cov­er wouldn’t real­ly need quotes.

Though what harm would there be? There’s plen­ty of neg­a­tive space here. Read­ers, which line would you splash across the cov­er if you were this prankster, Alcott?

Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so qui­et?

We sit here strand­ed, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it

And Louise holds a hand­ful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it

Lights flick­er from the oppo­site loft

In this room the heat pipes just cough

The coun­try music sta­tion plays soft

But there’s noth­ing, real­ly noth­ing to turn off

Just Louise and her lover so entwined

And these visions of Johan­na that con­quer my mind

In the emp­ty lot where the ladies play blindman’s bluff with the key chain

And the all-night girls they whis­per of escapades out on the “D” train

We can hear the night watch­man click his flash­light

Ask him­self if it’s him or them that’s real­ly insane

Louise, she’s all right, she’s just near

She’s del­i­cate and seems like the mir­ror

But she just makes it all too con­cise and too clear

That Johanna’s not here

The ghost of ’lec­tric­i­ty howls in the bones of her face

Where these visions of Johan­na have now tak­en my place

Now, lit­tle boy lost, he takes him­self so seri­ous­ly

He brags of his mis­ery, he likes to live dan­ger­ous­ly

And when bring­ing her name up

He speaks of a farewell kiss to me

He’s sure got a lot­ta gall to be so use­less and all

Mut­ter­ing small talk at the wall while I’m in the hall

How can I explain?

Oh, it’s so hard to get on

And these visions of Johan­na, they kept me up past the dawn

Inside the muse­ums, Infin­i­ty goes up on tri­al

Voic­es echo this is what sal­va­tion must be like after a while

But Mona Lisa mus­ta had the high­way blues

You can tell by the way she smiles

See the prim­i­tive wall­flower freeze

When the jel­ly-faced women all sneeze

Hear the one with the mus­tache say, “Jeeze

I can’t find my knees”

Oh, jew­els and binoc­u­lars hang from the head of the mule

But these visions of Johan­na, they make it all seem so cru­el

The ped­dler now speaks to the count­ess who’s pre­tend­ing to care for him

Sayin’, “Name me some­one that’s not a par­a­site and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him”

But like Louise always says

“Ya can’t look at much, can ya man?”

As she, her­self, pre­pares for him

And Madon­na, she still has not showed

We see this emp­ty cage now cor­rode

Where her cape of the stage once had flowed

The fid­dler, he now steps to the road

He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed

On the back of the fish truck that loads

While my con­science explodes

The har­mon­i­cas play the skele­ton keys and the rain

And these visions of Johan­na are now all that remain

You can see more of Todd Alcott’s Mid-Cen­tu­ry Pulp Fic­tion Cov­er project, and pick up archival qual­i­ty prints from his Etsy shop.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Bob Dylan Pota­to Chips, Any­one?: What They’re Snack­ing on in Chi­na

Bob Dylan Hates Me: An Ani­ma­tion

Ayun Hal­l­i­day - no rela­tion to Brett — is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 24 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The New York Public Library Puts Classic Stories on Instagram: Start with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis Soon

in Books, K-12, Libraries, Literature, Technology | August 27th, 2018

I’d be hap­py if I could think that the role of the library was sus­tained and even enhanced in the age of the com­put­er. —Bill Gates

The New York Pub­lic Library excels at keep­ing a foot in both worlds, par­tic­u­lar­ly when it comes to engag­ing younger read­ers.

Vis­i­tors from all over the world make the pil­grim­age to see the real live Win­nie-the-Pooh and friends in the main branch’s hop­ping children’s cen­ter.

And now any­one with a smart­phone and an Insta­gram account can “check out” their dig­i­tal age take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land—no library card required. See Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Work­ing with the design firm Moth­er, the library has found a way to make great page-turn­ing use of the Insta­gram Sto­ries plat­form—more com­mon­ly used to share blow-by-blow pho­to­graph­ic evi­dence of road trips, restau­rant out­ings, and hash-tagged wed­dings.

The Won­der­land expe­ri­ence remains pri­mar­i­ly text-based.

In oth­er words, sor­ry, har­ried care­givers! There’s no hand­ing your phone off to the pre-read­ing set this time around!

No trip­py Dis­ney teacups…

Sir John Ten­niel’s clas­sic illus­tra­tions won’t be spring­ing to ani­mat­ed life. Instead, you’ll find con­cep­tu­al artist Magoz’s bright min­i­mal­ist ding­bats of key­holes, teacups, and pock­et watch­es in the low­er right hand cor­ner. Tap your screen in rapid suc­ces­sion and they func­tion as a crowd-pleas­ing, all ages flip book.

Else­where, ani­ma­tion allows the text to take on clever shapes or reveal itself line by line—a pleas­ant­ly the­atri­cal, Cheshire Cat like approach to Carroll’s impu­dent poet­ry.

Remem­ber the famous scene where the Duchess and the Cook force Alice to mind a baby who turns into a pig? Grab some friends and hunch over the phone for a com­mu­nal read aloud! (It’s on page 75 of part 1)

Speak rough­ly to your lit­tle boy,

 And beat him when he sneezes:

 He only does it to annoy,

 Because he knows it teas­es

CHORUS

 (In which the cook and the baby joined)

 ‘Wow! wow! wow!’ 

Nav­i­gat­ing this new media can be a bit con­fus­ing for those whose social media flu­en­cy is not quite up to speed, but it’s not hard once you get the hang of the con­trols.

Tap­ping the right side of the screen turns the page.

Tap­ping left goes back a page.

And keep­ing a thumb (or any fin­ger, actu­al­ly) on the screen will keep the page as is until you’re ready to move on. You’ll def­i­nite­ly want to do this on ani­mat­ed pages like the one cit­ed above. Pre­tend you’re play­ing the flute and you’ll save a lot of frus­tra­tion.

The library plans to intro­duce your phone to Char­lotte Perkins Gilman’s short sto­ry “The Yel­low Wall­pa­per” and Franz Kafka’s The Meta­mor­pho­sis via Insta­gram Sto­ries over the next cou­ple of months. Like Alice, both works are in the pub­lic domain and share an appro­pri­ate com­mon theme: trans­for­ma­tion.

Use these links to go direct­ly to part 1 and part 2 of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land on Insta­gram Sto­ries. Both parts are cur­rent­ly pinned to the top of the library’s Insta­gram account.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold Lewis Carroll’s Orig­i­nal Hand­writ­ten & Illus­trat­ed Man­u­script for Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land (1864)

Alice in Won­der­land: The Orig­i­nal 1903 Film Adap­ta­tion

The Psy­cho­log­i­cal & Neu­ro­log­i­cal Dis­or­ders Expe­ri­enced by Char­ac­ters in Alice in Won­der­land: A Neu­ro­science Read­ing of Lewis Carroll’s Clas­sic Tale

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 24 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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

in Books, Creativity, Design, Music | August 24th, 2018

As David Bowie him­self implied in a 1975 inter­view, “Young Amer­i­cans” does­n’t have much of a nar­ra­tive.

Rather, it’s a por­trait of ambiva­lence, viewed at some remove.

The same can­not be said for Young Amer­i­cans, the whol­ly imag­i­nary mid­cen­tu­ry pulp nov­el.

One look at the lurid cov­er, above, and one can guess the sort of steamy pas­sages con­tained with­in. Bowie’s sweaty palmed class­mates at Brom­ley Tech­ni­cal High School could prob­a­bly have recit­ed them from mem­o­ry!

Dit­to Ali­son. The tawdry paper­back, not Elvis Costello’s ever­green 1977 bal­lad. There’s a rea­son its spine is falling apart, and it’s not because young lads like Elvis Costel­lo are fear­ful their hearts might prove untrue. That skimpy pink biki­ni top and hip hug­gers get-up is appeal­ing to an entire­ly dif­fer­ent organ.

Here we must reit­er­ate that these books do not exist and nev­er did.

Though there’s a lot of fun to be had in pre­tend­ing that they do.

Screen­writer Todd Alcott, the true author of these dig­i­tal mashups, is keen­ly attuned to the over­ripe visu­al lan­guage of mid­cen­tu­ry paper­backs.

He’s also got quite a knack for extract­ing lyrics from their orig­i­nal con­text and ren­der­ing them in the peri­od font, mag­i­cal­ly retool­ing them as the sort of sug­ges­tive quotes that once beck­oned from drug­store book racks.

Font has been impor­tant to him since the age of 13, when a school art project required him to com­bine text with an image:

I decid­ed that I want­ed the text to look like the text I’d seen in an ad for a John Lennon album, so I copied that font style. I did­n’t know that the font style had a name, but I knew that my instincts for how to draw those let­ters did­n’t match how the let­ters end­ed up look­ing. The font, as it turns out, was Franklin Goth­ic, and, as a 13-year-old, all I remem­ber was that I would start to draw the “S” and then real­ize that my “S” did­n’t look like Franklin Goth­ic’s “S,” and that the curvy let­ters, like “G” and “O,” did­n’t look right when they sat on the lines I’d made for the oth­er let­ters, because of course for a font, the curvy let­ters have to be a lit­tle bit big­ger than the straight let­ters, or else they end up look­ing too small. I became fas­ci­nat­ed with that kind of thing, how one font would give off one kind of feel­ing, and oth­er one would give off a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent feel­ing. And it turns out there’s a rea­son for all of that, that every font car­ries with it a spe­cif­ic cul­tur­al con­no­ta­tion whether the read­er is aware of it or not. When I dri­ve down the street in LA, I see bill­boards and I can’t just look at one and say “Okay, got it,” I get a whole oth­er lay­er of mean­ing from them because their design and font choic­es tell me a whole his­to­ry of the peo­ple who designed them.

While Alcott dis­cov­ers many of his visu­als online, he has a soft spot for the bat­tered orig­i­nals he finds in sec­ond hand shops. Their wear and tear con­fers the sort of verisimil­i­tude he seeks. The rest is equal parts inspi­ra­tion, Pho­to­shop, and a grow­ing under­stand­ing of a design form he once dis­missed as the tawdry fruit of Low Cul­ture:

I’d nev­er under­stood pulp design until I start­ed this project.  As I start­ed look­ing at it, I real­ized that  the aes­thet­ic of pulp is so deeply attached to its prod­uct that it’s impos­si­ble to sep­a­rate the two. And that’s what great design is, a graph­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of ideas. When I start­ed exam­in­ing the designs, to see why some work and some don’t, I was over­whelmed with the sheer amount of artistry involved in the cov­ers. Pulp was a huge cul­tur­al force, there were dozens of mag­a­zines and pub­lish­ers, crank­ing out stuff every month for decades, detec­tive sto­ries and police sto­ries and noir sto­ries and mys­ter­ies. It employed thou­sands of artists, writ­ers and painters and illus­tra­tors. And the ener­gy of the paint­ings is just off the charts. It had to be, because any giv­en book cov­er had to com­pete with the ten thou­sand oth­er cov­ers that were on dis­play. It had to grab the view­er fast, and make that per­son pick up the book instead of some oth­er book. I love all kinds of mid­cen­tu­ry stuff, but noth­ing grabs you the way a good pulp cov­er does.

Not all of his mash ups traf­fic in mid-cen­tu­ry drug­store rack nympho­ma­nia.

New Order’s “Bizarre Love Tri­an­gle” is the ide­al recip­i­ent of the abstract approach so com­mon to psy­chol­o­gy and phi­los­o­phy titles of the peri­od.

Need­less to say, Alcott’s cov­ers are also a trib­ute to the musi­cians he lists as authors, par­tic­u­lar­ly those dat­ing to his New Wave era youth—Bowie, Costel­lo, Joy Divi­sion, Talk­ing Heads, King Crim­son…

I know I could find more pop­u­lar con­tem­po­rary artists to make trib­utes for, but these are the artists I love, I con­nect to their work on a deep lev­el, and I try to make things that they would see and think “Yeah, this guy gets me.” 

My favorite thing is when peo­ple think the pieces are real. That’s the high­est com­pli­ment I can receive. I’ve had band mem­bers con­tact me and say “Where did you find this?” or “I don’t even remem­ber doing this album” or “Where did you find this?” That’s when I know I’ve suc­cess­ful­ly com­bined ideas.

Todd Alcott’s Mid-Cen­tu­ry Mash Up Book Cov­ers can be pur­chased as prints from his Etsy store.

All images pub­lished with the per­mis­sion of Todd Alcott.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

7 Rock Album Cov­ers Designed by Icon­ic Artists: Warhol, Rauschen­berg, Dalí, Richter, Map­plethor­pe & More

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

36 Abstract Cov­ers of Vin­tage Psy­chol­o­gy, Phi­los­o­phy & Sci­ence Books Come to Life in a Mes­mer­iz­ing Ani­ma­tion

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 24 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Assassin’s Cabinet: A Hollowed Out Book, Containing Secret Cabinets Full of Poison Plants, Made in 1682

in Books, History | August 23rd, 2018

Has­n’t every child dreamed of a hav­ing a hol­lowed-out book on their shelf, inside of which they can hide what­ev­er for­bid­den objects of mis­chief they like with­out fear of dis­cov­ery? The idea sure­ly goes back many gen­er­a­tions, and pos­si­bly even to the era when not many adults, let along chil­dren, owned any books at all. A decade ago, a hol­lowed-out book dat­ed 1682 went up on the auc­tion block at Ger­man house Her­mann His­tor­i­ca, and these pho­tos of its elab­o­rate design have cap­ti­vat­ed the imag­i­na­tions of even we 21st-cen­tu­ry behold­ers. But what are all the spaces with­in meant to con­tain?

Her­rman His­tor­i­ca’s list­ing describes the item as “a hol­low book used as secret poi­son cab­i­net,” a con­clu­sion pre­sum­ably arrived at after exam­in­ing its draw­ers’ “hand­writ­ten paper labels with the Latin names of dif­fer­ent poi­so­nous plants (among them cas­tor-oil plant, thorn apple, dead­ly night­shade, valer­ian, etc.).” My Mod­ern Met’s Jes­si­ca Stew­art adds that “call­ing it an assas­s­in’s cab­i­net may be a bit exag­ger­at­ed,” not­ing that “many of these plants, while poi­so­nous, were also part of herbal reme­dies —mak­ing it equal­ly pos­si­ble we are look­ing at an ornate med­i­cine cab­i­net.”

Book Addic­tion breaks down the nature and uses of the plants meant to be stored in the draw­ers, includ­ing Hyoscya­mus Niger, which in medieval times “was often used in com­bi­na­tion with oth­er plants to a make ‘mag­ic brews’ with psy­choac­tive prop­er­ties”; Aconi­tum Napel­lus, which in ancient Roman times “was a such a com­mon poi­son of choice among mur­ders and assas­sins that its cul­ti­va­tion was pro­hib­it­ed”; and Cicu­ta Virosa, which some have spec­u­lat­ed “was the hem­lock used by the ancient Greek Repub­lic as the state poi­son but as it is a native of north­ern Europe this may not be true,” but “is so tox­ic that a sin­gle bite into its root can be fatal” regard­less.

Strong stuff, whether for killing or cur­ing. The ambi­gu­i­ty between those two pur­pos­es has sure­ly stoked our mod­ern inter­est in this secret­ly repur­posed book, as has its nature as what Her­rman His­tor­i­ca calls an “elab­o­rate­ly worked Kun­stkam­mer object” — a “cab­i­net of curiosi­ties” of the kind that has long fas­ci­nat­ed mankind — “with strong ref­er­ence to the memen­to mori theme.” That ref­er­ence comes chiefly in the form of not just the proud-look­ing skele­ton on the inside cov­er, but the label on the bot­tle pro­vid­ed its own com­part­ment in the book: “Statu­tum est hominibus semel mori,” or “It is a fact that man must die one day.” But did the own­er of this book and the tools hid­den with­in want to has­ten that day, or delay it?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Napoleon’s Kin­dle: See the Minia­tur­ized Trav­el­ing Library He Took on Mil­i­tary Cam­paigns

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Wear­able Books: In Medieval Times, They Took Old Man­u­scripts & Turned Them into Clothes

Old Books Bound in Human Skin Found in Har­vard Libraries (and Else­where in Boston)

Dis­cov­er the Jacobean Trav­el­ing Library: The 17th Cen­tu­ry Pre­cur­sor to the Kin­dle

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renais­sance Inven­tion Cre­at­ed to Make Books Portable & Help Schol­ars Study (1588)

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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