Hunter S. Thompson Chillingly Predicts the Future, Telling Studs Terkel About the Coming Revenge of the Economically & Technologically “Obsolete” (1967)

in Books, Politics, Radio | July 18th, 2017

Half a century ago, Hunter S. Thompson got his big journalistic break with a book called Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. In it he provided a curious and fearful public with a look into the inner workings of one of the most outwardly menacing social movements of the day, based on knowledge gained not by merely observing the Hell’s Angels but by getting on a hog and spending a year as a quasi-member himself. This gave him opportunity both to develop what would become his style of “gonzo journalism” in the long form and to catch an early glimpse of bigger trouble ahead in America.

“To see the Hell’s Angels as caretakers of the old ‘individualist’ tradition ‘that made this country great’ is only a painless way to get around seeing them for what they really are,” Thompson writes in that book, calling them “the first wave of a future that nothing in our history has prepared us to cope with. The Angels are prototypes. Their lack of education has not only rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy, but it has also given them the leisure to cultivate a powerful resentment… and to translate it into a destructive cult which the mass media insists on portraying as a sort of isolated oddity” destined for extinction.

Studs Terkel, after reading that passage out loud in a 1967 interview with Thompson (stream it online here), calls it “the key” to the entire book. “Here we have technology, we have the computer, we have labor-saving devices,” he says to Thompson, but we also “have the need for more and more college education for almost any kind of job, and we have this tremendous mass of young who find themselves obsolete.” But Thompson replies that the real consequences have only started to manifest: “The people who are being left out and put behind won’t be obvious for years. Christ only knows what’ll happen in, say, 1985 — a million Hell’s Angels. They won’t be wearing the colors; they’ll be people who are just looking for vengeance because they’ve been left behind.”

The Angels, wrote Susan McWilliams in a much-circulated Nation piece late last year, “were clunky and outclassed and scorned, just like the Harley-Davidsons they chose to drive.” And “just as there was no rational way to defend Harleys against foreign-made choppers, the Angels saw no rational grounds on which to defend their own skills or loyalties against the emerging new world order of the late 20th century.” The result? An “ethic of total retaliation. The Angels, rather than gracefully accepting their place as losers in an increasingly technical, intellectual, global, inclusive, progressive American society, stuck up their fingers at the whole enterprise. If you can’t win, you can at least scare the bejeesus out of the guy wearing the medal.”

Six years later, Terkel invited Thompson back into his studio for another interview (click here to listen) that followed straight on from the first. Ostensibly there to talk about Thompson’s book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (which followed his best-known work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), the two, having cracked open a beer, get into what the Studs Terkel Radio Archive blog describes as “the sense of surrealism in ‘real’ life,” which becomes “a very serious conversation about the direction in which our country was heading. After Thompson recounted his experience of talking to Richard Nixon about football” — the only subject permitted — “Studs responds, ‘Isn’t this what we’re faced with now? … That fantasy and fact become one.’ ”

What’s a reporter to do in such an environment? Terkel seems to see in Thompson the perfect kind of “subjective” journalist, one “who can make literal what is psychic in our lives,” for a time that has lost its own objectivity. “Has there ever been any such thing as objective journalism?” he asks. “It’s probably the highest kind of journalism, if you can do it.” Thompson replies. “Nobody I know has ever done it, and I don’t have time to learn it.” But the distinctive suite of journalistic skills he did possess primed him to perceive certain realities — and perceive them with a distinctive vividness — that have only become more real in the decades since. What, for instance, did he learn from covering the 1972 presidential campaign? “Power corrupts… but it’s also a fantastic high.”

Hunter S. Thompson Gets Confronted by The Hell’s Angels: Where’s Our Two Kegs of Beer? (1967)

Hunter S. Thompson’s Conspiratorial 9/11 Interview: “The Public Version of the News is Never Really What Happened”

Hunter S. Thompson Gets in a Gunfight with His Neighbor & Dispenses Political Wisdom: “In a Democracy, You Have to Be a Player”

Read 18 Lost Stories From Hunter S. Thompson’s Forgotten Stint As a Foreign Correspondent

Read 11 Free Articles by Hunter S. Thompson That Span His Gonzo Journalist Career (1965–2005)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Stream a 24 Hour Playlist of Charles Dickens Stories, Featuring Classic Recordings by Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles & More

in Audio Books, Books, Literature | July 17th, 2017

Children, cast off your fingerless mitts and gather round the mercifully cold hearth for some old timey, seasonally inappropriate listening.

Spotify has pulled together 67 Charles Dickens audio classics into a massive playlist for your summertime listening enjoyment–nearly 24 hours worth. That should last the long cross-country drive to see grandma.

Big gorillas like Oliver Twist and Great Expectations figure prominently. Sir Laurence Olivier, preparing to step into the part of Mr. Micawber, calls David Copperfield “a novel which I think must be almost the most famous ever written.”

Still true half a century later? Immaterial. Olivier’s use of “I think” and “almost” leaves room enough for a sort of genial, general agreement.

Some of the introductions give unintentionally hilarious added value, such as host Frank Craven’s attempt to contextualize a Lux Radio Theater presentation starring Orson Welles as Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities excerpt. The author’s work was often published in serial form, he tells listeners:

Records tell us of how crowds thronged the wards of New York City to receive news of their favorite heroine or hero. For already, the names of Dickens’ characters were household words, as much, I imagine, as Lux Toilet Soap is a household word throughout America today, and for very much the same reason–the ability to find approval among people of all kinds of ages and every walk of life, not only among women who are anxious to preserve their loveliness but with every member of the family, young and old. Lux Toilet Soap is quick to make friends and to keep them.

How disappointed the sponsors must’ve been that in the whole of A Tale of Two Cities, there’s not a single reference to soap. (For the record, Oliver Twist has one and David Copperfield has two…)

Lesser known treats include Emlyn Williams, a Welsh actor who spent three decades performing as Dickens in a touring solo show, reading “Mr. Chops,” a tale of a circus dwarf, ill used by society. Dickens himself performed the story on his popular lecture tours. More recently actor Simon Callow mined it for a one man show. Sturdy material.

The 24-hour playlist (the first one above) will be added to our list of Free Audio Books. If you need to download Spotify’s free software, grab it here.

8+ Hours of Classic Charles Dickens Stories Dramatized, Starring Orson Welles, Boris Karloff, Richard Burton & More

Charles Darwin & Charles Dickens’ Four-Hour Work Day: The Case for Why Less Work Can Mean More Productivity

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

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

An 8‑Hour Marathon Reading of 500 Emily Dickinson Poems

in Books, Life, Literature, Poetry | July 7th, 2017

It’s unlikely that reclusive poet Emily Dickinson would have wanted much fuss made over her birthday while still alive to celebrate it.

But with the lady safely ensconced in Amherst’s West Cemetery’s plot 53 for more than a century, fans can observe the day in the manner they see fit.

The Library of Congress’ Poetry and Literature Center threw in with the Folger Library in celebration of her 184th, inviting poetry lovers to the free marathon reading of her work, above (and below).

Poet Eleanor Heginbotham cited Dickinson’s letter to her editor, abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson–“Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?”–before priming the breakfast crowd on what they should expect from the 8 hour marathon:

We’re just going to have a day with no discussion beyond… And it will be frustrating that we can’t ask questions, we can’t stop and say, “Oh, my goodness. Let’s do that one over again.” We’re just going to read and read and read. And from this moment on, the voice of Emily Dickinson, through those of you in this room, that’s the only voice we’re going to hear, and won’t that be fun?

Yes, though you may want to pack a nutritious snack to keep your energy up. The reading slots were secured by means of an online sign up sheet, and while such egalitarianism is laudable, it does not necessarily confer performance chops on the inexperienced.

Naturally, there are stand outs.

Marianne Noble, Associate Professor of Literature at American University, is a highlight with Poem 75, (2:36:40, above). Her Emily Rocks t‑shirt is pretty rad too.

Professor Heginbotham is another sort of treat with Poem 416, 30 minutes and 40 seconds into the second video, below.

All told, the volunteer readers held the podium for 8 hours, making it through 500 poems, slightly less than a third of the poet’s output.

A transcript of the event, with the readers’ names recorded before their chosen verses can be found here.

Single tickets for the Folger’s 2017 Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute, co-hosted by poet and feminist literary critic, Sandra M. Gilbert, go on sale August 1.

This marathon reading of Dickinson’s poems will be added to our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

The Second Known Photo of Emily Dickinson Emerges

Bill Murray Reads Poetry at a Construction Site: Emily Dickinson, Billy Collins & More

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Discuss Emily Dickinson with her informally at Pete’s Mini Zinefest in Brooklyn this Saturday. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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

in Art, Books | July 6th, 2017

Almost exactly 155 years ago, Lewis Carroll told three young sisters a story. He’d come up with it to enliven a long boat trip up the River Thames, and one of the children aboard, a certain Alice Liddell, enjoyed it so much that she insisted that Carroll commit it to paper. Thus, so the legend has it, was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland born, although Lewis Carroll, then best known as Oxford mathematics tutor Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, hadn’t taken up his famous pen name yet, and when he did write down Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it took its first form as Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. You can read that handwritten manuscript, complete with illustrations.

Carroll presented the fictional Alice’s namesake with the manuscript, according to the British Library, as an early Christmas present in 1864. When his friends encouraged him to publish it, he performed a few revisions, “removing some of the family references included for the amusement of the Liddell children,” adding a couple of chapters (the beloved Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter’s tea party being among their new material), and enlisting John Tenniel, a Punch magazine cartoonist known for his illustrations of Aesop’s Fables, to create professional art to accompany it. The result, retitled Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, came out in 1865 and has never gone out of print.

Though Tenniel’s vivid renderings of Alice and the eccentric characters she encounters have remained definitive, plenty of other artists, including Salvador Dalí and Ralph Steadman, have attempted the surely almost irresistible challenge of illustrating Carroll’s highly imaginative story. But today, says Skidmore College professor Catherine J. Golden at The Victorian Web, “critics have reevaluated Carroll’s caricature-style illustration. Carroll expertly intertwines his handwritten text with his pictures to advance the growth motif. His conception of the mouse’s ‘tale’ shaped like an actual mouse’s ‘tail’ is an excellent example of emblematic verse.”

Tenniel, Golden argues, “essentially refashioned with realism and improved upon many of Carroll’s sketchy or anatomically incorrect illustrations, adding domestic interiors and landscapes that appealed to middle-class consumers of the 1860s.” Even “late twentieth-century graphic novel adaptations of Alice in Wonderland recall many of Carroll’s inventive designs as well as those of Tenniel,” which gives Carroll’s original manuscript more claim to having provided the visual basis, not just the textual one, for the following century and a half of sequels official and unofficial, as well as adaptations, reenvisionings, and reimaginings of this “Christmas gift to a dear child in memory of a summer day.”

You can view Carroll’s original manuscript, complete with illustrations, here.

Lewis Carroll’s Photographs of Alice Liddell, the Inspiration for Alice in Wonderland

Photo of the Real Alice in Wonderland Circa 1862

See Ralph Steadman’s Twisted Illustrations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on the Story’s 150th Anniversary

The First Film Adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (1903)

Lewis Carroll’s Classic Story, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Told in Sand Animation

When Aldous Huxley Wrote a Script for Disney’s Alice in Wonderland

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Splendid Book Design of the 1946 Edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

in Books, Design | July 6th, 2017

In 1929, the book publisher George Macy founded The Limited Editions Club (LEC), an imprint tasked with publishing finely illustrated limited editions of classic books. In the years to come, Macy worked with artists like Matisse and Picasso, and photographers like Edward Weston, to produce books with artistic illustrations on their inner pages. And sometimes The Limited Editions Club even turned its design focus to other parts of the book. Take for example this 1946 edition of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and its pretty amazing spine design.

Created by Clarence P. Hornung, the design captures the essence of Gibbon’s classic, showing Roman pillars progressively crumbling as your eyes move from Volume 1 to Volume 7. George Macy later called the collection, which also features illustrations by the great 18th-century printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi, “the most herculean labor of our career.”

Find more information about this 1946 edition here. Or, if you have deep pockets, purchase a copy here.

Note: an earlier version of this post appeared on our site in June 2015.

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!

630 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free

The History of Rome in 179 Podcasts

Free Courses in Ancient History, Literature & Philosophy

Rome Reborn: Take a Virtual Tour Through Ancient Rome, 320 C.E.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Digital Archive of Soviet Children’s Books Goes Online: Browse the Artistic, Ideological Collection (1917–1953)

in Books, History, K-12 | July 5th, 2017

At both a geographical and historical distance, the Soviet Union doesn’t look like much of a place for kids. If you grew up during the Cold War in, say, the United States, you might well have the impression (of which The Simpsons’ “Worker and Parasite” remains the defining crystallization) of a gray, harshly utilitarian land behind the Iron Curtain concerned with nothing more whimsical than bread lines and production quotas. But if you grew up in the Soviet Union, at least at one of the right times and in one of the right places, you might feel a now much-discussed nostalgia, not for the economic difficulties of your Soviet childhood, but for the sensibilities of the vanished society you grew up in. An online interactive database called Playing Soviet: The Visual Languages of Early Soviet Children’s Books, 1917–1953 provides a kid’s-eye view into the early decades of that society.

A project of the Cotsen Collection at Princeton’s Firestone Library, the archive contains a variety of fully digitized children’s books that show one venue in which, amid these years of “Russia’s accelerated violent political, social and cultural evolution,” in the words of the database’s front page, certain kinds of graphic art could flourish. “The illustration and look of Soviet children’s books was of tantamount importance as a vehicle for practical and concrete information in the new Soviet regime.”

This ambitious effort, driven by “directives for a new kind of children’s literature” to be “founded on the assumption that the ‘language of images’ was immediately comprehensible to the mass reader, far more so than the typed word,” brought in a great many artists and designers such as Alexander Deineka, El Lissitzky, and Vladimir Lebedev, tasking them all with creating “imaginative models for Soviet youth in the new languages of Soviet modernism.”

Mental Floss’ Shaunacy Ferro notes how many of the books “were designed to indoctrinate children into the world of the ‘right’ way to think about Soviet culture and history,” pointing to a volume called How the Revolution Was Victorious, which meant “to ensure the correct interpretation of the anti-governmental coup among the young generation of new Soviet readership.” Some of the other reading material that resulted, like 1930’s industrially focused What Are We Building? or the slightly earlier How Senka Ezhik Made a Knife, wears its instructional value on its sleeve (or rather, its cover). Others, like 1925’s The Little Octobrist Rascal or that same year’s China-set A Cup of Tea, offer higher doses of playfulness mixed in with the ideology.

Playing Soviet also includes the work of Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose Whom Should I Be?, a representative book from the “golden age” of Soviet Children’s literature, we featured here on Open Culture earlier this year. Russia Beyond the Headlines’ Alexandra Gueza highlights Mayakovsky’s What is Good and What is Bad? (“in which he explains that walking in the rain and thunderstorms is bad, cleaning your teeth is good, fighting with the boys is bad, while studying is good”) and October 1917–1918: Heroes and Victims of the Revolution, whose “good guys” include “a worker, a Red Army soldier, a sailor, a seamstress” and whose “bad guys” include “a factory owner, a landowner, a rich farmer, a priest, a merchant.” Goodnight Moon it certainly isn’t, but then, how many American children’s books had to attempt a fundamental reinvention of society?

via Hyperallergic

Soviet-Era Illustrations Of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1976)

Enter an Archive of 6,000 Historical Children’s Books, All Digitized and Free to Read Online

Hayao Miyazaki Picks His 50 Favorite Children’s Books

The First Children’s Picture Book, 1658’s Orbis Sensualium Pictus

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Bill Gates Recommends Five Books for Summer 2017

in Books | June 22nd, 2017

Summer just officially got underway. So that means it’s time for Bill Gates, once again, to serve up a new Summer Reading List. This list will help you “think deeper about what it means to truly connect with other people and to have purpose in your life.” Or “what it’s like to grow up outside the mainstream: as a child of mixed race in apartheid South Africa, as a young man trying to escape his impoverished life in rural Appalachia, or as the son of a peanut farmer in Plains, Georgia.”

So, with no further ado, here’s Bill Gates’ five recommended reads for the summer. In what follows, this is all Bill speaking:

Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah. As a longtime fan of The Daily Show, I loved reading this memoir about how its host honed his outsider approach to comedy over a lifetime of never quite fitting in. Born to a black South African mother and a white Swiss father in apartheid South Africa, he entered the world as a biracial child in a country where mixed race relationships were forbidden. Much of Noah’s story of growing up in South Africa is tragic. Yet, as anyone who watches his nightly monologues knows, his moving stories will often leave you laughing.

The Heart, by Maylis de Kerangal. While you’ll find this book in the fiction section at your local bookstore, what de Kerangal has done here in this exploration of grief is closer to poetry than anything else. At its most basic level, she tells the story of a heart transplant: a young man is killed in an accident, and his parents decide to donate his heart. But the plot is secondary to the strength of its words and characters. The book uses beautiful language to connect you deeply with people who may be in the story for only a few minutes.…

Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance. The disadvantaged world of poor white Appalachia described in this terrific, heartbreaking book is one that I know only vicariously. Vance was raised largely by his loving but volatile grandparents, who stepped in after his father abandoned him and his mother showed little interest in parenting her son. Against all odds, he survived his chaotic, impoverished childhood only to land at Yale Law School. While the book offers insights into some of the complex cultural and family issues behind poverty, the real magic lies in the story itself and Vance’s bravery in telling it.

Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari. I recommended Harari’s previous book Sapiens in last summer’s reading list, and this provocative follow-up is just as challenging, readable, and thought-provoking. Homo Deus argues that the principles that have organized society will undergo a huge shift in the 21st century, with major consequences for life as we know it. So far, the things that have shaped society—what we measure ourselves by—have been either religious rules about how to live a good life, or more earthly goals like getting rid of sickness, hunger, and war. What would the world be like if we actually achieved those things? I don’t agree with everything Harari has to say, but he has written a smart look at what may be ahead for humanity.

A Full Life, by Jimmy Carter. Even though the former President has already written more than two dozen books, he somehow managed to save some great anecdotes for this quick, condensed tour of his fascinating life. I loved reading about Carter’s improbable rise to the world’s highest office. The book will help you understand how growing up in rural Georgia in a house without running water, electricity, or insulation shaped—for better and for worse—his time in the White House. Although most of the stories come from previous decades, A Full Life feels timely in an era when the public’s confidence in national political figures and institutions is low.

via Gates Notes

100 Novels All Kids Should Read Before Leaving High School

Bill Gates Lists His Favorite Books of 2016

5 Books Bill Gates Wants You to Read This Summer

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Art of the Marbler: An Enchanting Film on the Centuries-Old Craft of Making Handmade Marbled Paper

in Art, Books | June 14th, 2017

The current mode of scandal in business and politics involves email and tweets rather than memoranda. But we do not yet live a paperless world, even if you haven’t dusted your printer in months. Book production and sales continue to rise, for example, defying predictions of a few years back that eBooks would overtake print. Even if we have to someday make paper in laboratories rather than forests and mills, it’s hard to imagine readers ever letting go of the pleasures of its textures and smells, or of simple, yet satisfying acts like placing a favorite paper bookmark in the creases.

We do, however, seem to live in a largely stationary-less world, and we have for some time. As the fine art of making artisanal papers recedes into history, so too does the printing of books with marbled covers and pages.

Yet, if you have on your shelf hardback books anywhere from 30 to 130 years old, you no doubt have a few with marbled patterns on them or in them. And if you’ve ever wondered about this strange art form, wonder no more. The 1970 British educational film, “The Art of the Marbler,” above, offers a broad overview of this fascinating “material which has covered books for many centuries.”

Produced by Bedfordshire Record Office of Cockerell Marbling and directed by K.V. Whitbread, the short film is a marvel of quaintness. It effortlessly achieves the kind of quirk Wes Anderson’s films strive for simply by being itself. We learn that every marbled paper, unlike Christmas wrapping paper, is a “separate and unique original.” And that the process is precious and specialized, and nearly all done by hand. Lest we become too enamored of the idea that marbling is strictly a historical curiosity these days, the mesmerizing video above from 2011 by Seyit Uygur shows us up close how his parents perform the art of Ebru, Turkish for paper marbling.

Marbling, the “printmaking technique that basically looks like capturing a galaxy on a page,” as Emma Dajska writes at Rookie, became quite popular in the Islamic world, where intricate patterns stood in lieu of portraits. But the process originated neither in England nor Turkey, but in China and, later, Japan, where it is known as Suminagashi, or “floating ink.” The Japanese technique, as you can see in the video tutorial above from Chrystal Shaulis, is very different from British Marbling or Turkish Ebru, seeming to combine the methods of Jackson Pollack with those of the Zen gardener. However it’s done, the results, as “The Art of the Marbler” tells and shows us, are each one a “unique original.”

“The Art of the Marbler” will be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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

How Ink is Made: The Process Revealed in a Mouth-Watering Video

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

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

Hunter S. Thompson Chillingly Predicts the Future, Telling Studs Terkel About the Coming Revenge of the Economically & Technologically “Obsolete” (1967)

Stream a 24 Hour Playlist of Charles Dickens Stories, Featuring Classic Recordings by Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles & More

An 8‑Hour Marathon Reading of 500 Emily Dickinson Poems

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

The Splendid Book Design of the 1946 Edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

A Digital Archive of Soviet Children’s Books Goes Online: Browse the Artistic, Ideological Collection (1917–1953)

Bill Gates Recommends Five Books for Summer 2017

The Art of the Marbler: An Enchanting Film on the Centuries-Old Craft of Making Handmade Marbled Paper

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search