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

in Books, Literature, Music | January 12th, 2018

Haru­ki Muraka­mi read­ers, or even those of us who’ve just read about his nov­els, know to expect cer­tain things from his books: cats, ears, wells, strange par­al­lel real­i­ties, and above all music. And not just any music, but high­ly delib­er­ate selec­tions from the West­ern clas­si­cal, pop, and jazz canons, all no doubt pulled straight from the shelves of the writer’s vast per­son­al record library. That per­son­al library may well have grown a few records vaster today, giv­en that it’s Murakami’s 69th birth­day. To mark the occa­sion, we’ve round­ed up a few hit playlists of music from the Nor­we­gian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chron­i­cle, and 1Q84 author’s work as well as his life.

At the top of the post we have a Youtube playlist of songs from the artists fea­tured in Murakami’s non-fic­tion Por­trait in Jazz books, still, like most of his essay­is­tic writ­ing, untrans­lat­ed into Eng­lish. We orig­i­nal­ly high­light­ed it in a post on his for­mi­da­ble love of that most Amer­i­can of all musi­cal tra­di­tions, which got him run­ning a jazz bar in Tokyo years before he became a nov­el­ist. Just above, you’ll find a 96-song Spo­ti­fy playlist of the songs fea­tured in his nov­els, fea­tur­ing jazz record­ings by the likes of Miles Davis, Duke Elling­ton, and Thelo­nious Monk, the clas­si­cal com­po­si­tions of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Haydn, and pop num­bers from the Beach Boys, Elvis Pres­ley, Hall and Oates, and Michael Jack­son.

Final­ly, you can close out this musi­cal Muraka­mi birth­day with the Spo­ti­fy playlist above of music from his own vinyl col­lec­tion — though at 3,350 songs in total, it will prob­a­bly extend the cel­e­bra­tion beyond a day. Even that lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence sure­ly rep­re­sents only a frac­tion of what Muraka­mi keeps on his shelves, all of it offer­ing poten­tial mate­r­i­al for his next inex­plic­a­bly grip­ping sto­ry. And though the Eng­lish-speak­ing world still awaits its trans­la­tion of Murakami’s lat­est nov­el Killing Com­menda­tore, which came out in Japan last year, you can hear the music it name-checks in the Youtube playlist below. Some­thing about the mix — Richard Strauss, Sheryl Crow, the Mod­ern Jazz Quar­tet, Duran Duran — sug­gests we’re in for anoth­er Murakami­an read­ing expe­ri­ence indeed:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to the World of Haru­ki Muraka­mi Through Doc­u­men­taries, Sto­ries, Ani­ma­tion, Music Playlists & More

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

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

A Pho­to­graph­ic Tour of Haru­ki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Mem­o­ry, and Real­i­ty Meet

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Lists the Three Essen­tial Qual­i­ties For All Seri­ous Nov­el­ists (And Run­ners)

Read Online Haru­ki Murakami’s New Essay on How a Base­ball Game Launched His Writ­ing Career

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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Notations: John Cage Publishes a Book of Graphic Musical Scores, Featuring Visualizations of Works by Leonard Bernstein, Igor Stravinsky, The Beatles & More (1969)

in Books, Music | January 10th, 2018

If you know just one piece by avant-garde com­pos­er and all-around ora­cle of inde­ter­mi­na­cy John Cage, you know 1952’s 4′33″, which con­sists, for that length of time, of no delib­er­ate­ly played sounds at all. You’d think that if any piece could be played with­out a score, Cage’s sig­na­ture com­po­si­tion could, but he did make sure to write one, and we fea­tured it here on Open Cul­ture a few years ago. Look at that score, of sorts, and you’ll sense that Cage had an inter­est not just in uncon­ven­tion­al music, but in equal­ly uncon­ven­tion­al ways of notat­ing that music. Hence the Nota­tions project, Cage’s 1969 book col­lect­ing pieces of scores by 269 dif­fer­ent com­posers and accom­pa­ny­ing them with short texts.

Assem­bling the book from mate­ri­als archived at the Foun­da­tion for Con­tem­po­rary Arts, Cage did include a page of one of his own scores, though not that of 4′33″ but of Music of Changes, a piano piece he’d com­posed the year before it for his friend David Tudor.

Tudor, a pianist as well as a com­pos­er of exper­i­men­tal music in his own right, also gets a page in Nota­tions from his 1958 work Solo for Piano (Cage) for Inde­ter­mi­na­cy. Lest this sound like a too-neat struc­ture of reci­procity, rest assured that in the com­po­si­tion of the book’s text, as Cage explains in the book’s intro­duc­tion, inde­ter­mi­na­cy ruled, with “a process employ­ing I‑Ching chance oper­a­tions” dic­tat­ing the num­ber of words to be writ­ten, about which scores, and in what size and type­face as well.

Nota­tions, which also includes scores from the Bea­t­les, Leonard Bern­stein, Paul Bowles, Charles Ives (from whose archive Cage picked a blank piece of song paper), Gyor­gy Ligeti, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Steve Reich, Igor Stravin­sky, Toru Takemit­su, and many oth­ers, inspired a more recent fol­low-up project called Nota­tions 21, which you can learn about in the video just below. A col­lab­o­ra­tion between musi­col­o­gist and com­pos­er There­sa Sauer and design­er Mike Per­ry, that 2009 book col­lects more than a hun­dred pieces of cre­ative nota­tion from some of the com­posers fea­tured in Cage’s orig­i­nal, but also many who weren’t com­pos­ing or indeed even alive in his day.

Nota­tions 21 stands as a tes­ta­ment to Cage’s endur­ing influ­ence as not just a com­pos­er but as the pro­mot­er of a world­view all about har­ness­ing the forces of chance to enrich our lives, and to put us in a clear­er frame of mind to see what comes next. “Musi­cal nota­tion is one of the most amaz­ing pic­ture-lan­guage inven­tions of the human ani­mal,” Ross Lee Finney writes in the text of the orig­i­nal Nota­tions. “It didn’t come into being of a moment but is the result of cen­turies of exper­i­men­ta­tion. It has nev­er been quite sat­is­fac­to­ry for the composer’s pur­pos­es and there­fore the exper­i­ment con­tin­ues.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Curi­ous Score for John Cage’s “Silent” Zen Com­po­si­tion 4’33”

Watch Gyor­gy Ligeti’s Elec­tron­ic Mas­ter­piece Artiku­la­tion Get Brought to Life by Rain­er Wehinger’s Bril­liant Visu­al Score

Watch Clas­si­cal Music Come to Life in Art­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Scores: Stravin­sky, Debussy, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart & More

The Genius of J.S. Bach’s “Crab Canon” Visu­al­ized on a Möbius Strip

Dis­cov­er the 1126 Books in John Cage’s Per­son­al Library: Fou­cault, Joyce, Wittgen­stein, Vir­ginia Woolf, Buck­min­ster Fuller & More

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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Introducing the Librarian Action Figure: The Caped Crusader Who Fights Against Anti-Intellectualism, Ignorance & Censorship Everywhere

in Books, Random | January 4th, 2018

We’ve fea­tured action fig­ures that pay trib­ute to some cul­tur­al icons like Edvard Munch, Vin­cent Van Gogh and Fri­da Kahlo. But now comes a new action fig­ure that hon­ors a less appre­ci­at­ed cul­tur­al force–all of the great librar­i­ans, those cru­saders for the print­ed and elec­tron­ic word, who “keep it all orga­nized for us and let us know about the best of it.” Stand­ing almost four inch­es tall and made of hard vinyl, the librar­i­an action fig­ure is based on Seat­tle librar­i­an Nan­cy Pearl. She has “a remov­able cape that sym­bol­izes how much of a hero a librar­i­an real­ly is.” The action fig­ure should come in handy in your own fights again anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism, cen­sor­ship and igno­rance. Enjoy!

via Boing Boing

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:

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

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

Before the Book­mo­bile: When Librar­i­ans Rode on Horse­back to Deliv­er Books to Rur­al Amer­i­cans Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion

Let Me Librar­i­an That for You: What Peo­ple Asked Librar­i­ans Before Google Came Along

The Boston Pub­lic Library Will Dig­i­tize & Put Online 200,000+ Vin­tage Records

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The David Bowie Book Club Gets Launched by His Son: Read One of Bowie’s 100 Favorite Books Every Month

in Books | January 1st, 2018


Cast as the star of 1976’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, David Bowie trav­eled to New Mex­i­co for the shoot, meet­ing with direc­tor Nico­las Roeg soon upon arrival. “I took with me hun­dreds and hun­dreds of books,” Bowie said to The Face mag­a­zine a few years lat­er. “And I had these cab­i­nets” — a mod­ern­ized Jacobean trav­el­ing library — “and they were rather like the box­es that ampli­fiers get packed up in, and I was going through all these books and they were pour­ing out all over the floor — there were just moun­tains of books. And Nick was sit­ting there watch­ing me and he said, ‘Your great prob­lem, David, is that you don’t read enough.’ ”

Due to Bowie’s hyper-seri­ous state of mind in those days, he went on to recall, “it did­n’t occur to me at the time that it was a joke.” Though he changed his ways of think­ing and even dropped the trav­el­ing library, Bowie seems to have main­tained his for­mi­da­ble read­ing habits for the rest of his life. (In 1987, he even posed for one of the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion’s “READ” posters.) A few years ago we fea­tured his Top 100 Book List, whose vari­ety encom­pass­es every­thing from The Out­sider to Sex­u­al Per­son­ae to A Con­fed­er­a­cy of Dunces.

“My dad was a beast of a read­er,” Bowie’s son Dun­can Jones, an avid Twit­ter user, tweet­ed last week. “One of his true loves was Peter Ackroyd’s sojourns into the his­to­ry of Britain & its cities. I’ve been feel­ing a build­ing sense of duty to go on the same lit­er­ary marathon in trib­ute to dad.” And so Jones’ infor­mal David Bowie book club begins with Ack­roy­d’s 1985 post­mod­ern nov­el Hawksmoor, which tells the par­al­lel sto­ries of an ear­ly 18th-cen­tu­ry Lon­don archi­tect and a late 20th-cen­tu­ry Lon­don detec­tive and which Joyce Car­ol Oates called “a wit­ty and macabre work of the imag­i­na­tion, intri­cate­ly plot­ted, obses­sive in its much-reit­er­at­ed con­cerns with mankind’s fall­en nature.”

Jones calls the book “an amuse cerveau before we get into the heavy stuff,” the “heavy stuff” pre­sum­ably includ­ing oth­er such Bowie picks as White Noise, A Clock­work Orange and Last Exit to Brook­lyn. If you’d like to par­tic­i­pate in the Jones-led dis­cus­sion of Hawksmoor on his Twit­ter page, you’ve got until the first of Feb­ru­ary to get it read. If you feel like you don’t read enough, con­sid­er this the Bowiest pos­si­ble way to ful­fill a new year’s res­o­lu­tion to do more of it.

Note: Sep­a­rate­ly you can also check out The Bowie Book Club Pod­cast where two friends spend a month read­ing a book on Bowie’s list. Find those episodes here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

David Bowie Urges Kids to READ in a 1987 Poster Spon­sored by the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion

Bri­an Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion & 59 Books For Build­ing Your Intel­lec­tu­al World

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

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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Invisible Cities Illustrated: Artist Illustrates Each and Every City in Italo Calvino’s Classic Novel

in Art, Books | December 28th, 2017

If you want to read a book about cities, you still can’t do much bet­ter than a slim, plot­less work of fic­tion by Ita­lo Calvi­no where­in the explor­er Mar­co Polo tells the emper­or Kublai Khan of what he’s seen in his trav­els across the world. Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in Ital­ian in 1972, Invis­i­ble Cities has inspired gen­er­a­tions of read­ers, hail­ing from all across the world them­selves, to think in entire­ly new ways not just about cities but about trav­el, place, per­cep­tion, real­i­ty, myth, and lit­er­a­ture itself. Though very much a work con­cerned with what’s seen only in the imag­i­na­tion, the book has also inspired artists to try their hand at ren­der­ing the 55 fic­ti­tious cities Polo describes with­in.

A few years ago we fea­tured “See­ing Calvi­no,” a joint effort by artists Matt Kish, Leighton Con­nor, Joe Kuth to illus­trate, among oth­er ele­ments of the Calvi­no canon, each and every one of Invis­i­ble Cities’ fan­tas­ti­cal, often impos­si­ble col­lec­tions of struc­tures, lives, and, ideas. More recent­ly, the Peru-based archi­tect and artist Kari­na Puente has, with her Invis­i­ble Cities Project, put her­self to work on a sim­i­lar endeav­or. Each of Puente’s intri­cate ren­der­ings takes about a week to pro­duce, and as she tells Arch­dai­ly, “they are not only drawn – I use dif­fer­ent types of paper and draw on each one before cut­ting them out with exac­to knives. All the draw­ings are com­posed of lay­ers of paper which are cut out and glued.”

At the top we have Puente’s city of Dorotea where, bear­ing in mind the rules of its infra­struc­tur­al divi­sion by gates, draw­bridges, and canals and those of the mar­riages between the trad­ing fam­i­lies that reside there, “you can then work from these facts until you learn every­thing you wish about the city in the past, present, and future.” In the mid­dle is Isaura, a city built on a deep sub­ter­ranean lake whose gods, “accord­ing to some peo­ple, live in the depths,” and to oth­ers live in the asso­ci­at­ed buck­ets, pump han­dles, wind­mill blades, pipes, and every oth­er built ele­ment of this “city that moves entire­ly upward.”

Just above you can see Zobei­de, laid out accord­ing to a series of dreams of “a woman run­ning at night through an unknown city,” pur­sued but nev­er found, altered to con­form to each dream until new arrivals “could not under­stand what drew these peo­ple to Zobei­de, this ugly city, this trap.” While at first Polo’s descrip­tions of the cities all across Khan’s empire may strike read­ers as com­plete­ly fan­tas­ti­cal, they’ll soon hear echoes of the places they live in in these metaphor­i­cal metrop­o­lis­es. And if they take a look at Puente’s illus­tra­tions as they read, they’ll see them as well.

Vis­it Puente’s Invis­i­ble Cities Project here.

via Arch­dai­ly

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Invis­i­ble Cities Illus­trat­ed: Three Artists Paint Every City in Ita­lo Calvino’s Clas­sic Nov­el

Hear Ita­lo Calvi­no Read Selec­tions From Invis­i­ble Cities, Mr. Palo­mar & Oth­er Enchant­i­ng Fic­tions

Expe­ri­ence Invis­i­ble Cities, an Inno­v­a­tive, Ita­lo Calvi­no-Inspired Opera Staged in LA’s Union Sta­tion

Watch Ani­ma­tions of Two Ita­lo Calvi­no Sto­ries: “The False Grand­moth­er” and “The Dis­tance from the Moon”

Ita­lo Calvi­no Offers 14 Rea­sons We Should Read the Clas­sics

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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Mark Twain on Why “Travel is Fatal to Prejudice, Bigotry and Narrow-Mindedness, and Many of Our People Need It Sorely on These Accounts” (1869)

in Books, Travel | December 26th, 2017

Pub­lic Domain image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Human­i­ty has come up with many neg­a­tive stereo­types of Amer­i­cans, some of them not entire­ly ground­less: the wide­ly held belief, for exam­ple, that Amer­i­cans don’t get out much. I admit the truth of that one as an Amer­i­can myself — albeit an Amer­i­can who now lives in Asia — because I cer­tain­ly did drag my feet on get­ting a pass­port and get­ting out there in the world at first. Per­haps I can take com­fort in the fact that no less a colos­sus of Amer­i­can let­ters began his inter­na­tion­al trav­els even lat­er than I did, though when he did get around to it, he got even more out of it: not only The Inno­cents Abroad, one of the best-loved trav­el books of all time, but an insight into what makes trav­el so vital a pur­suit in the first place.

The trav­els Mark Twain recounts in the book began in 1867 on the char­tered ves­sel Quak­er City, which took him and a group of his coun­try­men through Europe and the Holy Land, an itin­er­ary includ­ing a stop at the 1867 Paris Exhi­bi­tion and jour­neys through the Papal States to Rome and through the Black Sea to Odessa, all fol­low­able on a hyper­text map at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­gini­a’s Mark Twain in His Times page. “In his account Mark Twain assumes two alter­nate roles,” says the Library of Amer­i­ca, “at times the no-non­sense Amer­i­can who refus­es to auto­mat­i­cal­ly ven­er­ate the famous sights of the Old World (pre­fer­ring Lake Tahoe to Lake Como), or at times the put-upon sim­ple­ton, a gullible vic­tim of flat­ter­ers and ‘frauds,’ and an awe-struck admir­er of Russ­ian roy­al­ty.”

Whether you read The Inno­cents Abroad in the Library of Amer­i­ca’s edi­tion or in one of a vari­ety of free for­mats down­load­able from Project Guten­berg, you’ll even­tu­al­ly come to Twain’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the entire project: not the writ­ing project with its hand­some remu­ner­a­tion and name-mak­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty, but the project of trav­el itself. Though many ele­ments of the Old World expe­ri­ence, as well as pro­longed expo­sure to his fel­low Amer­i­cans, put his for­mi­da­ble com­plain­ing abil­i­ty to the test, the “breezy, shrewd, and com­i­cal manip­u­la­tor of Eng­lish idioms and America’s mytholo­gies about itself and its rela­tion to the past” (as the Library of Amer­i­ca describes him) ulti­mate­ly admits that

I have no fault to find with the man­ner in which our excur­sion was con­duct­ed. Its pro­gramme was faith­ful­ly car­ried out—a thing which sur­prised me, for great enter­pris­es usu­al­ly promise vast­ly more than they per­form. It would be well if such an excur­sion could be got­ten up every year and the sys­tem reg­u­lar­ly inau­gu­rat­ed. Trav­el is fatal to prej­u­dice, big­otry and nar­row-mind­ed­ness, and many of our peo­ple need it sore­ly on these accounts. Broad, whole­some, char­i­ta­ble views of men and things can not be acquired by veg­e­tat­ing in one lit­tle cor­ner of the earth all one’s life­time.

Dis­tinct­ly Twain­ian words, of course, but many oth­er writ­ers have since also tried to express the unique­ly mind-expand­ing prop­er­ties of spend­ing time out­side your home­land. As Rud­yard Kipling mem­o­rably put it to his own coun­try­men, a few decades after The Inno­cents Abroad, in “The Eng­lish Flag,” “What should they know of Eng­land who only Eng­land know?”

Or as one writer friend of mine, well-known for the glob­al­ized nature of his books and well as of his own iden­ti­ty, once said, “If Amer­i­cans don’t trav­el, we’re like a man who lives in a hov­el assum­ing every­one else lives in a worse hov­el.” But it always comes back to Twain, who knew that “noth­ing so lib­er­al­izes a man and expands the kind­ly instincts that nature put in him as trav­el and con­tact with many kinds of peo­ple” — and who also knew that nobody quite real­ized “what a con­sum­mate ass he can become until he goes abroad.” We can all think of much worse rea­sons to head across the ocean than that.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Makes a List of 60 Amer­i­can Com­fort Foods He Missed While Trav­el­ing Abroad (1880)

A Jour­ney Back in Time: Vin­tage Trav­el­ogues

Free: Read 9 Trav­el Books Online by Mon­ty Python’s Michael Palin

Petite Planète: Dis­cov­er Chris Marker’s Influ­en­tial 1950s Trav­el Pho­to­book Series

Join Clive James on His Clas­sic Tele­vi­sion Trips to Paris, LA, Tokyo, Rio, Cairo & Beyond

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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3,500 Occult Manuscripts Will Be Digitized & Made Freely Available Online, Thanks to Da Vinci Code Author Dan Brown

in Books | December 20th, 2017

If there’s one thing The Da Vin­ci Code’s Dan Brown and “The Library of Babel”’s Jorge Luis Borges have in com­mon it is a love for obscure reli­gious and occult books and arti­facts. But why do I com­pare Borges—one of the most high­ly-regard­ed, but dif­fi­cult, of Latin Amer­i­can poets and writers—to a famous Amer­i­can writer of enter­tain­ing paper­back thrillers? One rea­son only: despite the vast dif­fer­ences in their styles and reg­is­ters, Borges would be deeply moved by Brown’s recent act of phil­an­thropy, a dona­tion of €300,000 to Amsterdam’s Rit­man Library, also known as the Bib­lio­the­ca Philo­soph­i­ca Her­met­i­ca House of Liv­ing Books.

The gen­er­ous gift will enable the Rit­man to dig­i­tize thou­sands of “pre-1900 texts on alche­my, astrol­o­gy, mag­ic, and theos­o­phy,” reports Thu-Huong Ha at Quartz, includ­ing the Cor­pus Her­meticum (1472), “the source work on Her­met­ic wis­dom”; Gior­dano Bruno’s Spac­cio de la bes­tia tri­on­fante (1584); and “the first print­ed ver­sion of the tree of life (1516): A graph­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the sefirot, the 10 virtues of God accord­ing to the Kab­bal­ah.”

Brown, the Rit­man notes, “is a great admir­er of the library and vis­it­ed on sev­er­al occa­sions while writ­ing his nov­els The Lost Sym­bol and Infer­no.” Now he’s giv­ing back. Some of the rev­enue gen­er­at­ed by his best­selling nov­els, along with a €15,000 con­tri­bu­tion from the Dutch Prins Bern­hard Cul­tu­ur­fonds, will allow the library’s core col­lec­tion, “some 3,500 ancient books,” to come online soon in an archive called “Her­met­i­cal­ly Open.”

For now, the curi­ous can down­load the 44-page guide to the col­lec­tion as a free ebook, and watch the ani­mat­ed video at the top, a breezy explain­er of how the books will be trans­port­ed, dig­i­tized, and uploaded. Just above, see a trail­er for a doc­u­men­tary about the Rit­man, found­ed by busi­ness­man Joost R. Rit­man in 1984. The library holds over 20,000 vol­umes on mys­ti­cism, spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, reli­gion, alche­my, Gnos­ti­cism, and more.

Many a writer, like Brown, has found inspi­ra­tion among the Rit­man’s more acces­si­ble works (though, sad­ly, Borges, who was blind in 1984 and died two years lat­er, could not have appre­ci­at­ed it). Now, thanks to the Da Vin­ci Code author’s mag­na­nim­i­ty, a new gen­er­a­tion of schol­ars will be able to vir­tu­al­ly access, for exam­ple, the first Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the works of 17-cen­tu­ry Ger­man mys­tic Jakob Böhme, which librar­i­an and direc­tor Esther Rit­man describes as “trav­el­ling in an entire new world.”

In an intro­duc­to­ry essay, the Rit­man notes that aca­d­e­m­ic inter­est in occult and her­met­ic writ­ing has increased late­ly among schol­ars like W.J. Hane­graaff, who tells “the ‘neglect­ed’ sto­ry of how the intel­lec­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty since the Renais­sance has tried to come to terms with ‘eso­teric’ and ‘occult’ cur­rents present in West­ern cul­ture.” That those cur­rents are as much a part of the cul­ture as the sci­en­tif­ic or indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions need not be in doubt. The Her­met­i­cal­ly Open project opens up that his­to­ry with “an invi­ta­tion to any­one wish­ing to con­sult or study sources belong­ing to the field of Chris­t­ian-Her­met­ic Gno­sis for per­son­al, aca­d­e­m­ic or oth­er pur­pos­es.” Look for the dig­i­ti­za­tion project to hit the web in the com­ing months.

Note: You can now see the first texts online. See our fol­low up post here:

1,600 Occult Books Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online, Thanks to the Rit­man Library and Da Vin­ci Code Author Dan Brown

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

Aleis­ter Crow­ley Reads Occult Poet­ry in the Only Known Record­ings of His Voice (1920)

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

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Andy Warhol’s Seven Hand-Illustrated Books: Charming, Little-Known, and Now Available to the World (1952–1959)

in Art, Books | December 1st, 2017

Got a knack for draw­ing, paint­ing, sculpt­ing, cre­at­ing hand­made objects of any kind? You’re maybe more like­ly to mon­e­tize your skill—with an Etsy or Pin­ter­est account, for example—than move to New York and try to make a go of it. Were such con­ve­nient means of set­ting up shop avail­able in the late 40’s, when Andy Warhol stud­ied art edu­ca­tion and com­mer­cial art at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh and Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty, respec­tive­ly, one won­ders whether the often bedrid­den, intro­vert­ed artist might have found it more appeal­ing to work from home in Pitts­burgh, and stay there.

Instead, he moved to New York and became a suc­cess­ful com­mer­cial artist by using his illus­tra­tion skills to mar­ket him­self. Before he was a “bell­wether of post-war and con­tem­po­rary art” with those famous silkscreen paint­ings in the 60s; before he made those famous films, dis­cov­ered (and invent­ed the con­cept of) art stars, and man­aged the Vel­vet Under­ground, Warhol cre­at­ed sev­en hand­made books “as part of his strat­e­gy to woo clients and forge friend­ships.” So writes Taschen books, who have col­lect­ed and reprint­ed Warhol’s art books in a sin­gle edi­tion. (Five of the sev­en have nev­er before been repub­lished.)

Warhol reserved the sig­na­ture books for “his most val­ued con­tacts. These fea­tured per­son­al, unique draw­ings and quirky texts reveal­ing his fond­ness for—among oth­er subjects—cats, food, myths, shoes, beau­ti­ful boys, and gor­geous girls.”

They are inti­mate and charm­ing, show­ing a side of the artist we don’t often see—but one we do see of so many con­tem­po­rary illus­tra­tors. His hand-drawn illus­tra­tions have a very 21st cen­tu­ry feel to them in their obses­sion with cats, cakes, fash­ion, and hap­py, nude zaftig beau­ties. Cre­at­ed between 1952 and 59, they could have come from any num­ber of illus­tra­tion or design sites. It’s easy to imag­ine a cur­rent-day Warhol mak­ing a liv­ing sell­ing work like this online.

Had he been able to do so, might he have become a dif­fer­ent kind of artist entire­ly? It’s impos­si­ble to say. I can imag­ine a num­ber of peo­ple for whom I might buy copies of Love Is a Pink Cake, 25 Cats Named Sam, or À la Recherche du Shoe Per­du, as a hol­i­day gift. But Warhol didn’t make copies of these books. He saved the mass pro­duc­tion for his lat­er gallery work. Instead the hand­made call­ing cards remain “lit­tle-known, much-cov­et­ed jew­els in the Warhol crown,” ear­ly exam­ples of “the artists’ off-the-wall char­ac­ter as well as his accom­plished drafts­man­ship, bound­less cre­ativ­i­ty, and innu­en­do-laced humor.”

You might not know it from can­vas­es like Eight Elvis­es, the Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe series, or Campbell’s Soup Cans, but Warhol had a par­tic­u­lar tal­ent for light, whim­si­cal hand-drawn illus­tra­tion. It’s a side of him­self he showed few peo­ple once he became the Andy Warhol most of us know. Thanks to Taschen’s new book, a recent gallery show­ing of Warhol’s draw­ings, a 2012 Chron­i­cle col­lec­tion of his quirky illus­tra­tions from the 50s, and, well, Pin­ter­est, it’s a side of him that can now belong to every­one.

You can now get your own copy of Andy Warhol: Sev­en Illus­trat­ed Books 1952–1959.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Big Ideas Behind Andy Warhol’s Art, and How They Can Help Us Build a Bet­ter World

Short Film Takes You Inside the Recov­ery of Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art

Miyaza­ki Meets Warhol in Campbell’s Soup Cans Reimag­ined by Design­er Hyo Taek Kim

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

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