MoMA’s Artists’ Cookbook (1978) Reveals the Meals of Salvador Dalí, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois & More

in Art, Books, Food & Drink | October 20th, 2016

If we can consider some cooks artists, surely we can consider some artists cooks. Madeleine Conway and Nancy Kirk surely operated on that assumption when they put together The Museum of Modern Art Artists’ Cookbook, which collects 155 recipes from 30 such figures not primarily known for their culinary acumen as Salvador Dalí, Willem de Kooning, Louise Bourgeois, Andy Warhol, Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude. (“Strangely,” write the wags at Phaidon, “there are no wraps.”)

Published in 1978, the Artists’ Cookbook has long since left print, though pricey second-hand copies of the MoMA-issued edition and somewhat more affordable copies of the spiral-bound trade edition still circulate: Nick Harvill Libraries, for instance offers one for $125.

“Simplicity is a recurring theme,” says their site of the recipes contained within, which include Dalí’s red salad, de Kooning’s seafood sauce, Bourgeois’ French cucumber salad, Andy Warhol’s perhaps predictable boiling method for Campbell’s canned soup, Frankenthaler’s poached stuffed striped bass, Lichtenstein’s not entirely serious “primordial soup” (involving “8cc hydrogen” and “5cc ammonia”), and Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s complete “quick and easy filet mignon dinner party.”

Taken as a whole, the project captures not just a distinctive moment in American culture when you could publish a cookbook with pretty much any theme — we’ve previously featured Dalí’s own, which came out in 1973, and the rock-star-oriented Singers & Swingers in the Kitchen, from 1967 — but an equally distinctive moment, and place, in American art. MoMA, as you might expect, brought in the artists with whom they had the closest connections, which in the mid-1970s meant a particularly influential couple of generations who mostly rose to prominence, and stayed in prominence, in New York City.

That’s not to say that the contributors to The Museum of Modern Art Artists’ Cookbook were born into the art world. Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova quotes excerpts of the book’s interviews with the artists about their early culinary lives: Bourgeois rues the “wasted hours” spent cooking for her father (“in those days a man had the right to have his food ready for him at all times.” De Kooning recalls his childhood in poverty in Holland where, “when you had dinner, it was always brown beans.” Dalí and Warhol put their eccentricities on display, the former with his all-white table (“white porcelain, white damask, and white flowers in crystal vases”) and the latter with his declaration that “airplane food is the best food.” De gustibus, as they say in food and art alike, non disputandum est.

via Phaedon/Brain Pickings

The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook: Philosopher Ponders Making Omelets in Long Lost Diary Entries

Alice B. Toklas Reads Her Famous Recipe for Hashish Fudge (1963)

Ernest Hemingway’s Summer Camping Recipes

Leo Tolstoy’s Family Recipe for Macaroni and Cheese

1967 Cookbook Features Recipes by the Rolling Stones, Simon & Garfunkel, Barbra Streisand & More

An Archive of 3,000 Vintage Cookbooks Lets You Travel Back Through Culinary Time

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, 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.

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

in Art, Books, History, Science | October 13th, 2016

The great Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, it is said, drew his conceptions of god and the universe from his work as an optician, grinding lenses day after day. He lived a life singularly devoted to glass, in which his “evenings to evenings are equal.” So wrote Jorge Luis Borges in a poetic appreciation of Spinoza, of which he later commented, “[Spinoza] is polishing crystal lenses and is polishing a rather vast crystal philosophy of the universe. I think we might consider those tasks parallel. Spinoza is polishing his lenses, Spinoza is polishing vast diamonds, his ethics.”

The polishing of lenses, and work in optics generally, has a long philosophical pedigree, from the experiments of Renaissance artists and scholars, to the natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution who made their own microscopes and pondered the nature of light. Over a century after Spinoza’s birth, polymath artist and thinker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published his great work on optics, just one of many directions he turned his gaze. Unlike Spinoza, Goethe had little use for concepts of divinity or for systematic thinking.

But unlike many freethinking aristocratic dilettantes who were a fixture of his age, Goethe–-writes poet Philip Brantingham—“was a universal genius, one of those talents whose works transcend race, nation, language-and even time.” It’s a dated concept, for sure, but when we think of genius in the old Romantic sense, we most often think of Goethe, as a poet, philosopher, and scientist. When he turned his attention to optics and the science of color, Goethe refuted the theories of Newton and created some enduring scientific art, which would later inspire philosophical iconoclasts like Wittgenstein and expressionist painters like Wassily Kandinsky.

We’ve featured Goethe’s most important scientific work, Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors), in a previous post. Now we can bring you the superior images above, from a first edition scan at Stockholm’s Hagerstromer Medical Library, who host a collection of scanned illustrations from dozens of first editions of naturalist texts. The collection spans a once suppressed physiology text by Descartes—another optics theorist—to Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring, the book that “launched the modern conservationist movement.” In-between, find scans of illustrations and photographs from the works of Carl Linnaeus, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, and dozens of other natural philosophers and scientists who made significant contributions to medical science.

In the case of Goethe’s Theory of Colors (1810), we get a high-quality look at the images in what the author himself considered his best work. “Known as a fierce attack on Newton’s demonstration that white light is composite,” writes the Hagerstromer Library, “Goethe’s colour theory remains an epochmaking work.” Goethe’s illustrations came directly from “a large number of observations of subjective colour-perceptions, recorded with all the exactness of a scientist and the keen insight of an artist.” It’s partly the bridging of sciences and the arts—of Enlightenment and Romanticism—that has made Goethe such a remarkable figure in European intellectual history. But as many of the finely illustrated, carefully observed texts at the Hagerstromer Medical Library show, he wasn’t alone in that regard.

In addition to these classic texts, the Hagerstromer also hosts the Wunderkammer, an eclectic archive of (often quite bizarre) naturalist images and illustrations from the 16th to the 20th centuries. One MetaFilter user describes the collection thus:

Wunderkammer is a collection of high resolution images from old books in the Hagströmer Medical Library. Some of my favorites are sea anemones, nerve cells, rooster chasing off a monster, 16th Century eye surgery, muscles and bones of the hand and arm, elephant-headed humanoid and cupping. It can also be browsed by tag, broken up into subject (e.g. beast), emotion (e.g. strange), technique (e.g. chromolithography) and era (e.g. 18th Century).

via Metafilter

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

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

Henri Matisse Illustrates James Joyce’s Ulysses (1935)

in Art, Books, Literature | October 10th, 2016

Last year, fans of modernist Irish literature and impressionist art saw a must-own volume go under the hammer at Bonhams. “In 1935 the French artist, Henri Matisse, was commissioned to illustrate an edition of Ulysses for subscribers to the Limited Edition Club in America,” announced Artlyst. “Each of the 1,000 copies was signed by Matisse and 250 were also signed by James Joyce. A copy of the book signed by both men is estimated at £6,000 to £8,000.”

In the event it went for £6,250, not a bad deal considering the hands that wrote those signatures and the rarity, signed or unsigned, of this unusual book itself. (It certainly beats, say, $37,000.) Brainpickings’ Maria Popova writes that, after first spotting the Matisse-illustrated Ulysses here on Open Culture, “I gathered up my year’s worth of lunch money and was able to grab one of the last copies available online — a glorious leather-bound tome with 22-karat gold accents, gilt edges, moire fabric endpapers, and a satin page marker.” Versions signed by Matisse are apparently available–at a steep price–on Amazon.

Popova adds that “the Matisse drawings inside it, of course, are the most priceless of its offerings — doubly so because, for all their beauty, they’re a tragicomedy of quasi-collaboration.” From whence the tragicomedy? Publishing lore has it that, despite the provision of a full French translation of the Ulysses text, Matisse made his illustrative etchings — in the fashion of many an undergraduate with a paper due — without ever having got around to reading the book himself.

“I’ve never ‘read’ Joyce’s Ulysses, and it’s quite plausible that I never will,” Matisse’s countryman Pierre Bayard would write seventy years later in his bestselling How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Yet “I feel perfectly comfortable when Ulysses comes up in conversation, because I can situate it with relative precision in relation to other books. I know, for example, that it is a retelling of the Odyssey, that its narration takes the form of a stream of consciousness, that its action unfolds in Dublin over the course of a single day, etc.” — all things that Matisse, too, probably knew about Ulysses.

He certainly knew that it supposedly retold the story of the Odyssey, and so, in a now-ingenious-looking strategy to not just talk about an unread book but to illustrate it, he went to the source. Or rather, he went to one of the countless cultural, literary, historical, and linguistic sources upon which Joyce drew to compose his masterpiece, basing his art directly on Homer’s epic poem, in its own way a work more talked about than read. Joyce himself, who once described much of the textual content of Ulysses as intended to “keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant,” may well have admired Matisse’s clarity of vision, no matter how much-non reading it took to refine.

Vladimir Nabokov Creates a Hand-Drawn Map of James Joyce’s Ulysses

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, 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 ) |

Anthony Burgess Names the 99 Best Novels in English Between 1939 & 1983: Orwell, Nabokov, Huxley & More

in Books, Literature | October 6th, 2016

Image via Wikimedia Commons

In 1983, Anthony Burgess took up a commission from a Nigerian publishing company and, in two weeks, delivered to them the manuscript for Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 — A Personal Choice. Published the following year, the book delivers exactly what its title, subtitle, and sub-subtitle promises: the finest novels English-language writers produced between the years 1939 and 1983, according to the preferences of the writer of more than a few novels himself, including A Clockwork Orange, Earthly Powers, and 1985.

Burgess wrote that last one, so its own title may suggest, as a tribute to George Orwell’s 1984, one of those 99 novels. “Nineteen eighty four has arrived, but George Orwell’s glum prophecy has not been fulfilled,” Burgess declared in a New York Times piece published as that year began. Yet “for 35 years a mere novel, an artifact meant primarily for diversion, has been scaring the pants off us all. Evidently the novel is a powerful literary form which is capable of reaching out into the real world and modifying it. It is a form which even the nonliterary had better take seriously.”

Prolific in his literary consumption as well as production, Burgess got plenty of practice taking the novel seriously in his capacity as a book reviewer. “It was clear that certain novels had to be reviewed whether I wished to review them or not,” he writes. “A new Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh — this was the known brand-name which would grant an expected satisfaction. But the unknown had to be considered as well. After all, both Greene and Waugh produced first novels. V. S. Naipaul’s first novel went totally unreviewed.” Greene appears among the 99 for The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter, Waugh for Brideshead Revisited and Sword of Honor, and Naipaul for A Bend in the River.

What makes these novels, and Burgess’ other 93 picks, so good? “The primary substance I have considered in making my selection is human character,” meaning that their authors have created “human beings whom we accept as living creatures filled with complexities and armed with free will” — and who thus, to a great extent, shape the story independently of authorial intention. “At best there will be a compromise between the narrative line you have dreamed up and the course of action preferred by the characters,” writes Burgess, as if addressing his colleagues in the enterprise of presenting “the preoccupations of real human beings through invented ones.”

You can see Burgess’ full list of 99 novels below, which includes such other favorite writers here at Open Culture as J.G. Ballard, Aldous Huxley (who scores three hits), James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov, all of whom, beyond their duty to character, “have managed language well, have clarified the motivations of action, and have sometimes expanded the bounds of imagination. And they entertain or divert, which means to turn our faces away from the repetitive patterns of daily life and look at humanity and the world with a new interest and even joy.” Only one question remains: why exactly 99? “The reader can decide on his own 100th,” Burgess replies. “He may even choose one of my own novels.”

Note: you can purchase online used copies of Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 — A Personal Choice. It runs about 160 pages. Now here’s the basic list.

Achebe, Chinua — A Man of the People — (1966)

Aldiss, Brian — Life in the West (1980)

Amis, Kingsley — Lucky Jim (1954)

Amis, Kingsley — The Anti-Death League (1966)

Baldwin, James — Another Country (1962)

Ballard, J.G. — The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)

Barth, John — Giles Goat-Boy (1966)

Bellow, Saul — The Victim (1947)

Bellow, Saul — Humboldt’s Gift (1975)

Bowen, Elizabeth — The Heat of the Day (1949)

Bradbury, Malcolm — The History Man (1975)

Braine, John — Room at the Top (1957)

Cary, Joyce — The Horse’s Mouth (1944)

Chandler, Raymond — The Long Goodbye (1953)

Compton-Burnett, Ivy — The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)

Cooper, William — Scenes from Provincial Life (1950)

Davies, Robertson — The Rebel Angels (1982)

Deighton, Len — Bomber (1970)

Durrell, Lawrence — The Alexandria Quartet (1957)

Ellison, Ralph — Invisible Man (1952)

Faulkner, William — The Mansion (1959)

Fleming, Ian — Goldfinger (1959)

Fowles, John — The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)

Frayn, Michael — Sweet Dreams (1973)

Golding, William — The Spire (1964)

Gordimer, Nadine — The Late Bourgeois World (1966)

Gray, Alasdair — Lanark (1981)

Green, Henry — Party Going (1939)

Greene, Graham — The Power and the Glory (1940)

Greene, Graham — The Heart of the Matter (1948)

Harris, Wilson — Heartland (1964)

Hartley, L.P. — Facial Justice (1960)

Heller, Joseph — Catch-22 (1961)

Hemingway, Ernest — For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

Hemingway, Ernest — Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Hoban, Russell — Riddley Walker (1980)

Hughes, Richard — The Fox in the Attic (1961)

Huxley, Aldous — After Many a Summer (1939)

Huxley, Aldous — Ape and Essence (1948)

Huxley, Aldous — Island (1962)

Isherwood, Christopher — A Single Man (1964)

Johnson, Pamela Hansford — An Error of Judgement (1962)

Jong, Erica — How to Save Your Own Life (1977)

Joyce, James — Finnegans Wake (1939)

Lessing, Doris — The Golden Notebook (1962)

Lodge, David — How Far Can You Go? (1980)

Lowry, Malcolm — Under the Volcano (1947)

MacInnes, Colin — The London Novels (1957)

Mailer, Norman — The Naked and the Dead (1948)

Mailer, Norman — Ancient Evenings (1983)

Malamud, Bernard - The Assistant (1957)

Malamud, Bernard — Dubin’s Lives (1979)

Manning, Olivia — The Balkans Trilogy (1960)

Maugham, Somerset — The Razor’s Edge (1944)

McCarthy, Mary — The Groves of Academe (1952)

Moore, Brian — The Doctor’s Wife (1976)

Murdoch, Iris — The Bell (1958)

Nabokov, Vladimir — Pale Fire (1962)

Nabokov, Vladimir — The Defence (1964)

Naipaul, V.S. — A Bend in the River (1979)

Narayan, R.K. — The Vendor of Sweets (1967)

Nye, Robert — Falstaff (1976)

O’Brien, Flann — At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

O’Connor, Flannery — Wise Blood (1952)

O’Hara, John — The Lockwood Concern (1965)

Orwell, George — Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Peake, Mervyn — Titus Groan (1946)

Percy, Walker — The Last Gentleman (1966)

Plunkett, James — Farewell Companions (1977)

Powell, Anthony — A Dance to the Music of Time (1951)

Priestley, J.B. — The Image Men (1968)

Pynchon, Thomas — Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

Richler, Mordecai — Cocksure (1968)

Roberts, Keith — Pavane (1968)

Roth, Phillip — Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)

Salinger, J.D. — The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

Sansom, William — The Body (1949)

Schulberg, Budd — The Disenchanted (1950)

Scott, Paul — Staying On (1977)

Shute, Nevil — No Highway (1948)

Sillitoe, Alan — Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)

Snow, C.P. - Strangers and Brothers (1940)

Spark, Muriel — The Girls of Slender Means (1963)

Spark, Muriel — The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)

Styron, William — Sophie’s Choice (1979)

Theroux, Alexander — Darconville’s Cat (1981)

Theroux, Paul — The Mosquito Coast (1981)

Toole, John Kennedy — A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)

Updike, John — The Coup (1978)

Vidal, Gore — Creation (1981)

Warner, Rex — The Aerodrome (1941)

Waugh, Evelyn — Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Waugh, Evelyn — Sword of Honor (1952)

White, T.H. — The Once and Future King (1958)

White, Patrick — Riders in the Chariot (1961)

Williamson, Henry — A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (1951)

Wilson, Angus — The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)

Wilson, Angus — Late Call (1964)

Wouk, Herman — The Caine Mutiny (1951)

Anthony Burgess’ Lost Introduction to Joyce’s Dubliners Now Online

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The 100 Best Novels: A Literary Critic Creates a List in 1898

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, 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 ( 2 ) |

A Master List of 800 Free Classic eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices

in Books, Education, Literature | October 5th, 2016

Maybe you’re an eBooks holdout, a late adopter, a disdainer of the book as a branded “device”? I get it. Is there anything more ridiculous than putting down a book because its batteries have run out? No amount of crowing about the supremacy of tech will make me love the smell and feel of paper less…

And yet…

Within the charming heft of printed books reside their limitation. Traveling students, researchers, or avid readers must lug several pounds of bound paper along with them on long journeys, or to work sessions at the local coffee shop. An eReader or smartphone can hold an entire library—which one can expand ad infinitum, it seems, on the fly.

This feature—along with the ease of copying quotes and passages and sending them across platforms—eventually sold me on the eBook as a robust supplement to print. And if it sounds like I’m making a sales pitch, I am: for hundreds of free books, available to read on the device of your choosing. Entry-level Kindle, budget smartphone, or latest, fanciest iPad—most all will accommodate the range of formats available in our collection of 800 Free eBooks.

Can you freely download the latest New York Times bestsellers? Not here, and I’d hope—for the sake of those hard-working writers—that you’d pay to read new releases. Can you carry along with you on your next business trip or vacation the works of Aristotle and Freud, several novels by Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad, the masterworks of Hegel, Hume, and Kant, the complete Shakespeare, and Proust’s multi-volume À la recherche du temps perdu? Quite easily. Here’s a small sample of what’s on our list:

Austen, Jane - Pride & Prejudice
- iPad/iPhone — Kindle + Other Formats
Carroll, Lewis - Through the Looking-Glass
- iPad/iPhone — Kindle + Other Formats
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
- iPad/iPhone — Kindle + Other Formats — Original Magazine Version
Dostoevsky, Fyodor - Brothers Karamazov
- iPad/iPhone — Kindle + Other Formats
Eliot, George - Middlemarch
- iPad/iPhone — Kindle + Other Formats
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - Tales of the Jazz Age
- iPad/iPhone — Kindle + Other Formats
Freud, Sigmund - Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis for Beginners
- iPad/iPhone — Kindle + Other Formats — Read Online Now
Tolstoy, Leo - Anna Karenina
- iPad/iPhone — Kindle + Other Formats
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
- iPad/iPhone — Kindle + Other Formats — Read Online Now
Wollstonecraft, Mary — A Vindication of the Rights of Women
- iPad/iPhone — Kindle + Other Formats — Read Online Now

See the full list of 800 offerings here. They may lack the sensory pleasure of print, but the ability to carry an entire library of classic literature in your pocket has its advantages, to say the least. And if your travels include long drives, you’ll also want to check out our master list of Free Audio Books.

Note: If you need help uploading .mobi files to your Kindle, you might find it useful to watch this video.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Hear a Playlist of the 336 Songs Mentioned in Bruce Springsteen’s New Memoir, Born to Run

in Books, Music | September 30th, 2016

Image by Michele Lucon, via Wikimedia Commons

FYI: Earlier this week, Bruce Springsteen released his highly-anticipated memoir, Born to Run. It comes accompanied by a companion album, Chapter and Verse. And now a Spotify playlist that features every single song referenced in the pages of the book–his own or others’. There’s lots of Springsteen–most of his discography, in fact–but also great tracks from Aretha Franklin, Van Morrison, Cream, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan and more. If you need Spotify’s free software, download it here. Then settle in and enjoy 22 hours of music. You can start streaming the music below:

For anyone interested, the novelist Richard Ford has a review of Born to Run (the autobiography) in The New York Times. Ford’s Bascombe trilogy appears on Springsteen’s List of His 20 Favorite Books.

Looking for free, professionally-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free trial with Audible.com, you can download two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.

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!

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

When L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz Series Was Banned for “Depicting Women in Strong Leadership Roles” (1928)

in Books, K-12, Literature, Politics | September 28th, 2016

We’ve reached the final stretch of the most infuriating, unsettling election I’ve ever experienced. And we find the U.S. so polarized that—as The Wall Street Journal chillingly demonstrates in their “Blue Feed Red Feed” feature—the left and right seem to live in two entirely different realities. Still, one would have to work very hard on either side, I think, to deny the role sexism has played. One candidate, a known and well-documented misogynist, leads millions of supporters calling for his opponent’s death, imprisonment, and humiliation. That opponent, of course, happens to be the first woman to run on a major party ticket in a general election.

Do many Americans still have a problem with accepting women as leaders? I personally don’t think there’s much of an argument there, and people who see the question as redundant marvel at how long archaic attitudes about women in power have persisted. At least these days we can openly have the—often highly inflamed—conversation about sexism in business, entertainment, and government. And we can support a cultural industry thriving on strong female characters in fiction, film, and television. Not so much in 1928, when the Chicago Public Library banned The Wizard of Oz, writes Kristina Rosenthal at the University of Tulsa Department of Special Collections, “arguing that the story was ungodly for ‘depicting women in strong leadership roles.’”

First published in 1900, L. Frank Baum’s fantasy novel initiated a series of 13 Oz-themed sequels, all of which became immensely popular after MGM’s 1939 film adaptation. (You can find them all in text and audio format here.) And yet, “throughout the years the books have been opposed for their positive portrayals of femininity.” Various libraries used similar excuses to ban the books throughout the 50s and 60s. The Detroit public library banned the Oz books in 1957, stating they had “no value for children of today.” The ban remained in place until 1972. One Florida librarian circulated a memo to her colleagues calling the books “unwholesome,” among other things, and causing a run on local bookstores as children desperately tried to find them.

Other groups decided that the books promoted witchcraft in charges similar to those levied at the Harry Potter series. In 1986, a group of Fundamentalist Christian families in Tennessee came together to remove the The Wizard of Oz from their schools’ curriculum, protesting “the novel’s depiction of benevolent witches.” They argued, writes Rosenthal, “that all witches are bad, therefore it is ‘theologically impossible ‘for good witches to exist.” Many seeking to ban the books since have similarly referred to their positive depictions of magic and “godless supernaturalism,” but the Tennessee case stands as a landmark in the Religious Right’s litigious crusade against the government. The attorney who represented plaintiff Vicki Frost called on “every born-again Christian to get their children out of public schools.”

It’s odd to think of whimsical children’s literature so seemingly innocuous as The Wizard of Oz books as territory in the long culture wars of the 20th century. But as we are reminded every year during Banned Books Week (September 25 − October 1, 2016), literature often arouses the ire of those incensed by change and difference. Yet their attempts to suppress certain books have always backfired, making the targets of their censorship even more popular and sought-after. If you’d like to read Baum’s Oz books now, you needn’t confront a gatekeeping librarian; simply head over to our post on the complete Wizard of Oz series, with free eBooks and audio books of all 14 female-centric fantasy classics.

via The Smithsonian

The Complete Wizard of Oz Series, Available as Free eBooks and Free Audio Books

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Explore 5,300 Rare Manuscripts Digitized by the Vatican: From The Iliad & Aeneid, to Japanese & Aztec Illustrations

in Archives, Books, History, Literature, Museums | September 26th, 2016

Hundreds of years before vast public/private partnerships like Google Arts & Culture, the Vatican served as one of the foremost conservators of cultural artifacts from around the world. In the era of the Holy Roman Empire, few of those works were available to the masses (excepting, of course, the city’s considerable public architecture and sculpture). But with over 500 years of history, Vatican Museums and Libraries have amassed a trove of artifacts that rival the greatest world collections in their breadth and scope, and these have slowly become public over time. In 1839, for example, Pope Gregory XVI founded the Egyptian Museum, an extensive collection of Egyptian and Mesopotamian artifacts including the famous Book of the Dead. We also have The Collection of Modern Religious Art, which holds 19th and 20th century impressionists, surrealists, cubists, expressionists, etc. In-between are large public collections from antiquity to the Renaissance.

When it comes to manuscripts, the Vatican Library is no less an embarrassment of riches. But unlike the art collections, most of these have been completely inaccessible to the public due to their rarity and fragility. That’s all going to change, now that ancient and modern conservation has come together in partnerships like the one the Library now has with Japanese company NTT DATA.

Their combined project, the Digital Vatican Library, promises to digitize 15,000 manuscripts within the next four years and the full collection of over 80,000 manuscripts in the next decade or so, consisting of codices mostly from the “Middle Age and Humanistic Period.” They’ve made some excellent progress. Currently, you can view high-resolution scans of over 5,300 manuscripts, from all over the world. We previously brought you news of the Library’s digitization of Virgil’s Aeneid. They’ve also shared a finely illustrated, bilingual (Greek and Latin) edition of its predecessor, The Iliad (top).

Further up, from a similar time but very different place, we see a Pre-Columbian Aztec manuscript, equally finely-wrought in its hand-rendered intricacies. You’ll also find illustrations like the circa 17th-century Japanese watercolor painting above, and the rendering of Dante’s hell, below, from a wonderful, if incomplete, series by Renaissance great Sandro Botticelli (which you can see more of here). Begun in 2010, the huge-scale digitization project has decided on some fairly rigorous criteria for establishing priority, including “importance and preciousness,” “danger of loss,” and “scholar’s requests.” The design of the site itself clearly has scholars in mind, and requires some deftness to navigate. But with simple and advanced search functions and galleries of Selected and Latest Digitized Manuscripts on its homepage, the Digital Vatican Library has several entry points through which you can discover many a textual treasure. As the site remarks, “the world’s culture, thanks to the web, can truly become a common heritage, freely accessible to all.” You can enter the collection here.

Botticelli’s 92 Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy

15,000 Colorful Images of Persian Manuscripts Now Online, Courtesy of the British Library

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

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