Reports of traditional books’ death are greatly exaggerated, thanks in part to the success of print-on-demand publishing and other digital innovations.
As thrilled as we are about the survival of the printed page—it’s a relief to have something to read after Wi-Fi fails during the zombie invasion—the craftsmanship that goes into hand-printed, hand-bound volumes is an almost-lost art.
A well-deployed tune could elevate these lovely visuals to the realms of the advanced elegy.
YouTube user, Kraftsman Sheng, attempts to remedy the situation by reproducing the video (sans attribution) with a soundtrack of his own choosing—pianist Roger Williams’ syrupy 1965 rendition of “Softly As I Leave You,” below.
An unconventional choice, to be sure. I should think something baroque would go better with all of this meticulous folding, cutting, and binding.
Though perhaps something a little more robust could highlight the hardcore heroism of the artisans toiling to keep this ancient art alive. Electric Lit has a round up of great book-inspired punk songs, of which “Time” by Richard Hell and the Voidoids seems particularly apt.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Bruce Springsteen turns 67 today. And next week his long-awaited memoir, Born to Run, will finally get into readers’ hands. In advance of that literary event, we’re looking back at a 2014 interview with The New York Times, printed shortly before Springsteen published his children’s book, Outlaw Pete.
The interview takes you inside Springsteen’s literary world, revealing what books he reads, which books he loves, and what authors have shaped his songwriting (and likely his own literary style): The Times asks: “Who is your favorite novelist of all time, and your favorite novelist writing today?;” “Who are your favorite New Jersey writers?;” “What’s your favorite memoir by a musician?;” “What book, if any, most influenced your decision to become a songwriter and musician or contributed to your artistic development?” The books he namechecks along the way include the following:
In early October, The New York Public Library will unveil a new book delivery system that features 24 cars, running on 950-feet of vertical and horizontal track, moving millions of books through 11 different levels of the library, at a rate of 75 feet per minute. This new $2.6 million book transport system replaces a clunkier old one where “boxes of research materials were placed on a series of conveyor belts.”
Image by Jonathan Blanc/NYPL
Says Matt Knutzen, director of the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Divisions within the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, “This new dependable and efficient system will ensure a seamless delivery of research items from our storage facility to the researchers who need them.” “Our priorities include preserving our materials and making them increasingly accessible to the public in an inspiring space for research – our recent storage expansion, our restoration of the Reading Room, and the installation of this system are all elements of that work.”
Above, you can watch the new system at work, chugging away, climbing to new heights, and delivering books to happy readers.
We’ve popularly come to think of the Victorian era as one in which a prudish, sentimental conservatism ruled with imperial force over the arts and culture. But that broad picture ignores the strong countercurrent of weird eroticism in the work of aesthetes like Dante Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, and Aubrey Beardsley.
Beardsley’s elegant, bawdy illustrations of Wilde’s erotic play Salomescandalized British society, as did the play itself. His penchant for occult subjects and a wickedly sensuous style resonated well into the 20th century. Salome was a highlight of the Aesthetic movement,” writes the Met, “and an early manifestation of Art Nouveau in England.” By the 1920s, Beardsley was perhaps one of the most influential of literary illustrators.
Irish artist Harry Clarke took directly from Beardsley in work like his richly-detailed 1926 edition of Goethe’s Faust. And in 1922, British artist John Austen modernized Hamlet by drawing on Clarke’s earlier work, as well as, quite clearly, on Beardsley. As artist John Coulthart remarks, “If you’re going to borrow a style then you may as well take from the best.” Like Beardsley’s Salome and Clarke’s Faust, Austen’s Hamlet “is often rated as his chef d’oeuvre, and with good reason, he manages to lend some visual splendor to a play whose concerns are a lot more introspective than the usual illustration standards of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (just as T.S. Eliot had critically argued two years earlier).
Published by Dover’s Calla Editions (and recently back in print), Austen’s illustrated Hamlet takes the fine, spare lines of Beardsley—well represented in his Poe edition—and clothes them, so to speak, with Clarke’s “manga faces, spiny fingers and swathes of black.” Each of the three artists has a different take on the macabre: Beardsley’s subtle symbolism giving way to Clarke’s surrealism and the heavy iconography in Austen’s Hamlet, permeated by the play’s archetypal images of “masks, swords and skulls.” Austen would soon leave behind the influence of both artists, adopting a much blockier style for literary illustrations later in the decade. In many ways, he represents a bridge between the elegant Art Nouveau aesthetics of Beardsley and the modernism of Art Deco, by way of Clarke’s unique gothic style.
Other popular ingredients of the period include tongue, English walnuts, flowers, and of course, cheese, with nary an avocado in sight.
Author Eva Greene Fuller had a clear preference for spreadable consistencies, an insistence on “perfect bread in suitable condition” and an eye for detail, evident in such suggested garnishes as smilax and maidenhair fern.
Naturally, there are some misfires amid the 400, at least as far as modern palates and sensibilities are concerned.
The Mexican Sandwich calls for a spoonful of baked beans mixed with catsup and butter, served atop a large square cracker.
The Oriental Sandwich features a spread made of cream cheese, maple syrup, and sliced maraschino cherries.
The Dyspeptic Sandwich is the only one to use gluten-free bread… sprinkled with brown bread crumbs.
The Popcorn Sandwich sounds quite tasty except for the titular ingredient, which is passed through a meat chopper and combined with sardines, prior to being spread with Parmesan and slid under the broiler.
As for peanut butter, it’s a mix-your-own affair, using chopped peanuts and the cook’s choice of mayonnaise, sweetened whipped cream, sherry or port wine.
And children are sure to approve of the School Sandwich, a simple concoction of buttered white bread and brown sugar.
Chop raw beef and onions very fine, season with salt and pepper and spread on lightly buttered brown bread.
Bummers Custard Sandwich
Take a cake of Roquefort cheese and divide in thirds; moisten one third with brandy, another third with olive oil and the other third with Worcestershire sauce. mix all together and place between split water biscuits toasted. Good for a stag lunch.
Aspic Jelly Sandwich
Soak one box (two ounces) of gelatin in one cup of chicken liquor until softened; add three cupfuls of chicken stock seasoned with a little parsley, celery, three cloves, a blade of mace and a dash of salt and pepper. Strain into a dish and add a little shredded breast of chicken; set in a cold place to harden; when cold, slice in fancy shaped and place on slightly butter whole wheat bread. Garnish with a stick of celery.
Violet Sandwich
Cover the butter with violets over night; slice white bread thin and spread with the butter. Put slices together and cover with the petals of the violets.
We can learn much about how a historical period viewed the abilities of its children by studying its children’s literature. Occupying a space somewhere between the purely didactic and the nonsensical, most children’s books published in the past few hundred years have attempted to find a line between the two poles, seeking a balance between entertainment and instruction. However, that line seems to move closer to one pole or another depending on the prevailing cultural sentiments of the time. And the very fact that children’s books were hardly published at all before the early 18th century tells us a lot about when and how modern ideas of childhood as a separate category of existence began.
Grenby notes that “the reasons for this sudden rise of children’s literature” and its rapid expansion into a booming market by the early 1800s “have never been fully explained.” We are free to speculate about the social and pedagogical winds that pushed this historical change.
Or we might do so, at least, by examining the children’s literature of the Victorian era, perhaps the most innovative and diverse period for children’s literature thus far by the standards of the time. And we can do so most thoroughly by surveying the thousands of mid- to late 19th century titles at the University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. Their digitized collectioncurrently holds over 6,000 books free to read online from cover to cover, allowing you to get a sense of what adults in Britain and the U.S. wanted children to know and believe.
Several genres flourished at the time: religious instruction, naturally, but also language and spelling books, fairy tales, codes of conduct, and, especially, adventure stories—pre-Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew examples of what we would call young adult fiction, these published principally for boys. Adventure stories offered a (very colonialist) view of the wide world; in series like the Boston-published Zig Zag and English books like Afloat with Nelson, both from the 1890s, fact mingled with fiction, natural history and science with battle and travel accounts. But there is another distinctive strain in the children’s literature of the time, one which to us—but not necessarily to the Victorians—would seem contrary to the imperialist young adult novel.
For most Victorian students and readers, poetry was a daily part of life, and it was a central instructional and storytelling form in children’s lit. The A.L.O.E.’s Bible Picture Book from 1871, above, presents “Stories from the Life of Our Lord in Verse,” written “simply for the Lord’s lambs, rhymes more readily than prose attracting the attention of children, and fastening themselves on their memories.” Children and adults regularly memorized poetry, after all. Yet after the explosion in children’s publishing the former readers were often given inferior examples of it. The author of the Bible Picture Book admits as much, begging the indulgence of older readers in the preface for “defects in my work,” given that “the verses were made for the pictures, not the pictures for the verses.”
This is not an author, or perhaps a type of literature, one might suspect, that thinks highly of children’s aesthetic sensibilities. We find precisely the opposite to be the case in the wonderful Elfin Rhymes from 1900, written by the mysterious “Norman” with “40 drawings by Carton Moorepark.” Whoever “Norman” may be (or why his one-word name appears in quotation marks), he gives his readers poems that might be mistaken at first glance for unpublished Christina Rossetti verses; and Mr. Moorepark’s illustrations rival those of the finest book illustrators of the time, presaging the high quality of Caldecott Medal-winning books of later decades. Elfin Rhymes seems like a rare oddity, likely published in a small print run; the care and attention of its layout and design shows a very high opinion of its readers’ imaginative capabilities.
This title is representative of an emerging genre of late Victorian children’s literature, which still tended on the whole, as it does now, to fall into the trite and formulaic. Elfin Rhymes sits astride the fantasy boom at the turn of the century, heralded by hugely popular books like Frank L. Baum’s Wizard of Oz series and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. These, the Harry Potters of their day, made millions of young people passionate readers of modern fairy tales, representing a slide even further away from the once quite narrow, “remorselessly instructional… or deeply pious” categories available in early writing for children, as Grenby points out.
Where the boundaries for kids’ literature had once been narrowly fixed by Latin grammar books and Pilgrim’s Progress, by the end of the 19th century, the influence of science fiction like Jules Verne’s, and of popular supernatural tales and poems, prepared the ground for comic books, YA dystopias, magician fiction, and dozens of other children’s literature genres we now take for granted, or—in increasingly large numbers—we buy to read for ourselves. Enter the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature here, where you can browse several categories, search for subjects, authors, titles, etc, see full-screen, zoomable images of book covers, download XML versions, and read all of the over 6,000 books in the collection with comfortable reader views. Find more classics in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.
As he kicked off a summer vacation, President Obama released last week a free 39-song playlist for a summer day–essentially a soundtrack for a summer vacation. He also shared his summer reading list–five books which offer, notes the White House, “a mix of fiction and non-fiction, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning surf memoir, a psychological thriller, and a science fiction novel. They include:
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In the past, we’ve told you about Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School, which offers an unconventional crash-course in auteurship, teaching students everything from “the art of lock-picking,” to “the creation of one’s own shooting permits,” to the “athletic side of filmmaking.” As with any good curriculum, Herzog provides a required reading list, which asks students to pore over some unexpected books. When was the list time a film professor asked students to read Virgil’s Georgics, Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” or J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine?
If you haven’t heard of it, Herzog considers The Peregrineone of the great masterpieces of the 20th century. First published in 1967, this classic of British nature writing has “an intensity and beauty of prose that is unprecedented, it is one of the finest pieces of prose you can ever see anywhere,” says Herzog. Earlier this year, the filmmaker paid a visit to Stanford University and had a wide-ranging conversation with Prof. Robert Harrison (host of the podcast Entitled Opinions) about what makes The Peregrinesuch a wondrous work. The event was hosted by Stanford Continuing Studies and “Another Look Book Club,” which introduces you to the best books you’ve never read.
The conversation with Herzog officially begins at the 3:00 minute mark.
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