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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The Books on Barack Obama’s Summer Reading List: Naipaul, Ondaatje & More

in Books | August 20th, 2018

Pho­to by Pete Souza via obamawhitehouse.archive.gov

As the cur­rent pres­i­dent grinds his ax on Twit­ter, the for­mer one reads and reflects. Yes­ter­day, Barack Oba­ma post­ed on Face­book his sum­mer read­ing list, a mix of nov­els, mem­oirs, and instruc­tive non-fic­tion. He writes:

One of my favorite parts of sum­mer is decid­ing what to read when things slow down just a bit, whether it’s on a vaca­tion with fam­i­ly or just a qui­et after­noon. This sum­mer I’ve been absorbed by new nov­els, revis­it­ed an old clas­sic, and reaf­firmed my faith in our abil­i­ty to move for­ward togeth­er when we seek the truth. Here’s what I’ve been read­ing:

Tara Westover’s Edu­cat­ed is a remark­able mem­oir of a young woman raised in a sur­vival­ist fam­i­ly in Ida­ho who strives for edu­ca­tion while still show­ing great under­stand­ing and love for the world she leaves behind.

Set after WWII, Warlight by Michael Ondaat­je is a med­i­ta­tion on the lin­ger­ing effects of war on fam­i­ly.

With the recent pass­ing of V.S. Naipaul, I reread A House for Mr Biswas, the Nobel Prize win­ner’s first great nov­el about grow­ing up in Trinidad and the chal­lenge of post-colo­nial iden­ti­ty.

An Amer­i­can Mar­riage by Tayari Jones is a mov­ing por­tray­al of the effects of a wrong­ful con­vic­tion on a young African-Amer­i­can cou­ple.

Fact­ful­ness by Hans Rosling, an out­stand­ing inter­na­tion­al pub­lic health expert, is a hope­ful book about the poten­tial for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inher­ent bias­es.

POTUS’ pre­vi­ous lists of rec­om­mend­ed books can be found 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:

Barack Oba­ma Shares a List of Enlight­en­ing Books Worth Read­ing

The 5 Books on Pres­i­dent Obama’s 2016 Sum­mer Read­ing List

A Free POTUS Sum­mer Playlist: Pres. Oba­ma Curates 39 Songs for a Sum­mer Day

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A Visionary 115-Year-Old Color Theory Manual Returns to Print: Emily Noyes Vanderpoel’s Color Problems

in Art, Books | August 8th, 2018

Nobody can doubt that we can live in an age of screen-read­ing, nor that it has brought a few prob­lems along with its con­sid­er­able con­ve­niences. To name just one of those prob­lems, each of us reads on our own screen, and each screen repro­duces the infor­ma­tion fed into it to dis­play dif­fer­ent­ly. A col­or, for instance, might well not look quite the same to any giv­en read­er of an e‑book as it did to the design­er who orig­i­nal­ly chose it. This imbues with a new rel­e­vance the old dorm-room philo­soph­i­cal ques­tion of whether what I call “blue” real­ly looks the same as what you call “blue,” and at least the more con­trol­lable nature of old-fash­ioned print books takes the issue of screen vari­a­tion out of the equa­tion.

Hence the val­ue in bring­ing back to print cer­tain visu­al­ly-ori­ent­ed books, even when we can already read them on our screens. This goes espe­cial­ly for vol­umes like Emi­ly Noyes Van­der­poel’s Col­or Prob­lems: a Prac­ti­cal Man­u­al for the Lay Stu­dent of Col­or, which deals direct­ly with issues of col­or in the phys­i­cal world and its rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Van­der­poel, an artist and his­to­ri­an, first pub­lished the book “under the guise of flower paint­ing and dec­o­ra­tive arts, sub­jects that were appro­pri­ate for a woman of her time,” writes Colos­sal’s Kate Sierzputows­ki. But “the study pro­vid­ed an exten­sive look at col­or the­o­ry ideas of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry,” and one whose tech­niques proved silent­ly influ­en­tial over time. “Many of the includ­ed stud­ies pre­dict design and art trends that wouldn’t occur for sev­er­al decades, such as a con­cen­tric square for­mat that pre­dates Joseph Albers’s Homage to the Square by fifty years.”

You can read a dig­i­tized ver­sion of Col­or Prob­lems at the Inter­net Archive (or embed­ded right above), but know that pub­lish­er The Cir­ca­di­an Press and Sacred Bones Records recent­ly raised well over $200,000 on Kick­starter to repub­lish the book in its full paper glo­ry. “With this new edi­tion we have tak­en metic­u­lous mea­sures to repro­duce the orig­i­nal arti­fact at an afford­able price,” says the pro­jec­t’s about page. “Work­ing with the His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety that Emi­ly Noyes Van­der­poel helped estab­lish, we are the first to invest the time, mon­ey, and love it takes to repli­cate this bril­liant col­lec­tion of col­or stud­ies accu­rate­ly. Using the most cur­rent dig­i­tal meth­ods and archival print­ing pro­duc­tion, we aim to final­ly do jus­tice to Vanderpoel’s for­got­ten lega­cy as vision­ary and pio­neer.”

This new edi­tion will also fea­ture an intro­duc­tion by design schol­ar Alan P. Bru­ton meant to “reflect on her incred­i­ble body of work from the van­tage point of 21st cen­tu­ry art his­to­ry and wom­en’s move­ments, help­ing to illus­trate that Van­der­poel remains one of the most impor­tant, under­rat­ed, and con­tem­porar­i­ly rel­e­vant artists of her time and of the last cen­tu­ry.” Had Van­der­poel pub­lished Col­or Prob­lems thir­ty years lat­er, writes John F. Ptak in his exam­i­na­tion of the book, “we’d call it some sort of constructivist/constructionist art form. But since the art­work in the book comes a decade before the first non-rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al art­work in human his­to­ry (or so), I don’t know exact­ly what to call it.” Its repub­li­ca­tion will allow gen­er­a­tions of new read­ers, see­ing it in the way Van­der­poel intend­ed it to be seen, to come to con­clu­sions like Ptak’s: “I still do not know what this book is try­ing to tell me, but I do know that it is remark­able.”

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

A Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­ors: Dutch Book From 1692 Doc­u­ments Every Col­or Under the Sun

Goethe’s The­o­ry of Col­ors: The 1810 Trea­tise That Inspired Kandin­sky & Ear­ly Abstract Paint­ing

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

The Female Pio­neers of the Bauhaus Art Move­ment: Dis­cov­er Gertrud Arndt, Mar­i­anne Brandt, Anni Albers & Oth­er For­got­ten Inno­va­tors

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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Meet Ellen Rubin (aka The Popuplady) and Her Collection of 9,000 Pop-Up Books

in Art, Books, Design, History | August 2nd, 2018

It’s unusu­al to encounter a pop-up book for sale in a thrift store.

Their enthu­si­as­tic child own­ers tend to work them so hard, that even­tu­al­ly even sen­ti­men­tal val­ue is trashed.

Stuck slid­er bars and torn flaps scotch the ele­ment of sur­prise.

Scenes that once sprang to crisp atten­tion can bare­ly man­age a flac­cid 45° angle.

One good yank and Cinderella’s coach gives way for­ev­er, leav­ing an unsight­ly crust of dried glue.

Their nat­ur­al ten­den­cy toward obso­les­cence only serves to make author Ellen G. K. Rubin’s inter­na­tion­al col­lec­tion of more than 9000 pop-up and move­able books all the more aston­ish­ing.

The Popuplady—an hon­orif­ic she sports with pride—would like to cor­rect three com­mon­ly held beliefs about the objects of her high­ly spe­cial­ized exper­tise:

  1. They are not a recent phe­nom­e­non. One item in her col­lec­tion dates back to 1547.
  2. They were not orig­i­nal­ly designed for use by chil­dren (as a 1933 flip book with pho­to illus­tra­tions on how women can become bet­ter sex­u­al part­ners would seem to indi­cate.)
  3. They were once con­ceived of as excel­lent edu­ca­tion­al tools in such weighty sub­jects as math­e­mat­ics, astron­o­my, med­i­cine… and, as men­tioned above, the boudoir.

A Yale trained physician’s assis­tant, she found that her hob­by gen­er­at­ed much warmer inter­est at social events than her dai­ly toil in the area of bone mar­row trans­plants.

And while paper engi­neer­ing may not be not brain surgery, it does require high lev­els of artistry and tech­ni­cal prowess. It galls Rubin that until recent­ly, paper engi­neers went uncred­it­ed on the books they had ani­mat­ed:

Paper engi­neers are the artists who take the illus­tra­tions and make them move. They are pup­pet­mas­ters, but they hand the strings to us, the read­er.

As seen in Atlas Obscu­ra’s video, above, Rubin’s col­lec­tion includes a mov­ing postage stamp, a num­ber of wheel-shaped volvelles, and a one-of-a-kind ele­phant-themed mini-book her friend, paper engi­neer, Edward H. Hutchins, cre­at­ed from ele­phant dung paper she found on safari.

She has curat­ed or served as con­sul­tant for a num­ber of pop-up exhi­bi­tions at venues includ­ing the Brook­lyn Pub­lic Library, the Biennes Cen­ter of the Lit­er­ary Arts and the Smithsonian’s Nation­al Muse­um of Amer­i­can His­to­ry. See a few more exam­ples from her col­lec­tion, which were dis­played as part of the latter’s Paper Engi­neer­ing: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn exhi­bi­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Raven: a Pop-up Book Brings Edgar Allan Poe’s Clas­sic Super­nat­ur­al Poem to 3D Paper Life

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

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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

in Books, Literature, Sci Fi | July 31st, 2018

Even by the extreme stan­dards of dystopi­an fic­tion, the premise of Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451 can seem a lit­tle absurd. Fire­men whose job is to set fires? A soci­ety that bans all books? Writ­ten less than a decade after the fall of the Third Reich, which announced its evil inten­tions with book burn­ings, the nov­el explic­it­ly evokes the kind of total­i­tar­i­an­ism that seeks to destroy culture—and whole peoples—with fire. But not even the Nazis banned all books. Not a few aca­d­e­mics and writ­ers sur­vived or thrived in Nazi Ger­many by hew­ing to the ide­o­log­i­cal ortho­doxy (or at least not chal­leng­ing it), which, for all its ter­ri­fy­ing irra­tional­ism, kept up some sem­blance of an intel­lec­tu­al veneer.

The nov­el also recalls the Sovi­et vari­ety of state repres­sion. But the Par­ty appa­ra­tus also allowed a pub­lish­ing indus­try to oper­ate, under its strict con­straints. Nonethe­less, Sovi­et cen­sor­ship is leg­endary, as is the sur­vival of banned lit­er­a­ture through self-pub­lish­ing and mem­o­riza­tion, vivid­ly rep­re­sent­ed by the famous line in Mikhail Bulgokov’s The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta, “Man­u­scripts don’t burn.”

Bul­gakov, writes Nathaniel Rich at Guer­ni­ca, is say­ing that “great lit­er­a­ture… is fire­proof. It sur­vives its crit­ics, its cen­sors, and even the pas­sage of time.” Bul­gakov wrote from painful expe­ri­ence. When his diary was dis­cov­ered by the NKVD in 1929, then returned to him, he “prompt­ly burned it.” Some­time after­ward, dur­ing the long com­po­si­tion of his posthu­mous­ly pub­lished nov­el, he burned the man­u­script, then lat­er recon­struct­ed it from mem­o­ry.

These exam­ples bring to mind the exiled intel­lec­tu­als in Bradbury’s nov­el, who have mem­o­rized whole books in order to one day recon­struct lit­er­ary cul­ture. Europe’s total­i­tar­i­an regimes pro­vide essen­tial back­ground for the novel’s plot and imagery, but its key con­text, Brad­bury him­self not­ed in a 1956 radio inter­view, was the anti-Com­mu­nist para­noia of the U.S. in the ear­ly 1950s. “Too many peo­ple were afraid of their shad­ows,” he said, “there was a threat of book burn­ing. Many of the books were being tak­en off the shelves at that time.” Read­ing the nov­el as a chill­ing vision of a future when all books are banned and burned makes the arti­fact pic­tured above par­tic­u­lar­ly poignant—an edi­tion of Fahren­heit 451 bound in fire­proof asbestos.

Released in 1953 by Bal­lan­tine in a lim­it­ed run of two-hun­dred signed copies, the books were “bound in Johns-Manville Qin­ter­ra,” notes Lau­ren Davis at io9, “a chryso­lite asbestos mate­r­i­al.” Now the fire­proof cov­ers, with their “excep­tion­al resis­tance to pyrol­y­sis,” are “much sought after by col­lec­tors” and go for upwards of $20,000. A fire­proof Fahren­heit 451, on the one hand, can seem a lit­tle gim­micky (its pages still burn, after all). But it’s also the per­fect man­i­fes­ta­tion of a lit­er­al inter­pre­ta­tion of the nov­el as a sto­ry about ban­ning and book burn­ing. All of us who have read the nov­el have like­ly read it this way, as a vision of a repres­sive total­i­tar­i­an night­mare. As such, it feels like a prod­uct of mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry fears.

Rather than fear­ing mass book burn­ings, we seem, in the 21st cen­tu­ry, on the verge of being washed away in a sea of infor­ma­tion (and dis- and mis-infor­ma­tion). We are inun­dat­ed with writing—in print and online—such that some of us despair of ever find­ing time to read the accu­mu­lat­ing piles of books and arti­cles that dai­ly sur­round us, phys­i­cal­ly and vir­tu­al­ly. But although books are still pub­lished in the mil­lions, with sales ris­ing, falling, then ris­ing again, the num­ber of peo­ple who actu­al­ly read seems in dan­ger of rapid­ly dimin­ish­ing. And this, Brad­bury also said, was his real fear. “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a cul­ture,” he claimed, “just get peo­ple to stop read­ing them.”

We’ve mis­read Fahren­heit 451, Brad­bury told us in his lat­er years. It is an alle­go­ry, a sym­bol­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a gross­ly dumb­ed-down soci­ety, huge­ly oppres­sive and destruc­tive in its own way. The fire­men are not lit­er­al gov­ern­ment agents but sym­bol­ic of the forces of mass dis­trac­tion, which dis­sem­i­nate “fac­toids,” lies, and half-truths as sub­sti­tutes for knowl­edge. The nov­el, he said, is actu­al­ly about peo­ple “being turned into morons by TV.” Add to this the pro­lif­er­at­ing amuse­ments of the online world, video games, etc. and we can see Brad­bury’s Fahren­heit 451 not as a dat­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tion of 40s fas­cism or 50s repres­sion, but as a too-rel­e­vant warn­ing to a dis­tractible soci­ety that deval­ues and destroys edu­ca­tion and fac­tu­al knowl­edge even as we have more access than ever to lit­er­a­ture of every kind.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Ray Brad­bury Explains Why Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion (in Which Case We Need More Lit­er­a­ture!)

Helen Keller Writes a Let­ter to Nazi Stu­dents Before They Burn Her Book: “His­to­ry Has Taught You Noth­ing If You Think You Can Kill Ideas” (1933)

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

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