See How The Gutenberg Press Worked: Demonstration Shows the Oldest Functioning Gutenberg Press in Action

in Books, History | July 15th, 2016

Peo­ple have spo­ken for decades, and with great cer­tain­ty, of the impend­ing death of print. But even here into the 21st cen­tu­ry, press­es con­tin­ue to run around the world, putting out books and peri­od­i­cals of all dif­fer­ent shapes, sizes, and print runs. The tech­nol­o­gy has endured so well in part because it has had so long to evolve. Every­one knows that print­ing began with some­thing called the Guten­berg Press, and many know that Guten­berg him­self (Johannes, a Ger­man black­smith) unveiled his inven­tion in 1440, intro­duc­ing mov­able type to the world. Ten years lat­er came the Guten­berg Bible, the first major book print­ed using it, still con­sid­ered among the most beau­ti­ful books ever mass-pro­duced.

But how did the Guten­berg press actu­al­ly work? In the video above, you can watch a demon­stra­tion of “the most com­plete and func­tion­ing Guten­berg Press in the world” at the Cran­dall His­tor­i­cal Print­ing Muse­um in Pro­vo, Utah. While it cer­tain­ly marked a vast improve­ment in effi­cien­cy over the hand-copy­ing used to make books before, it still required no small amount of labor on the part of an entire staff spe­cial­ly trained to apply the ink, square up the paper, and turn a not-that-easy-to-turn lever. The guide, who’s clear­ly put in the years mas­ter­ing his rou­tine, has both clear expla­na­tions and plen­ty of corny jokes at hand through­out the process.

One can hard­ly over­state the impor­tance of the machine we see in action here, which facil­i­tat­ed the spread of ideas all around Europe and the world and turned the book into what no less a technophile than Stephen Fry calls “the build­ing block of our civ­i­liza­tion.” He says that in an episode of the BBC series The Medieval Mind in which he explores the world of Guten­berg print­ing in even greater depth. We’ve grown so accus­tomed to the near-instan­ta­neous trans­fer of infor­ma­tion over the inter­net that deal­ing with print can feel like a has­sle. I myself just recent­ly resent­ed hav­ing to buy a print­er for work rea­sons, even though its sheer speed and clar­i­ty would have seemed like a mir­a­cle to Guten­berg, whose inven­tion — and the labor of the count­less skilled work­ers who oper­at­ed it — set in motion the devel­op­ments that let us spread ideas so impos­si­bly fast on sites like this today.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Presents the 550-Year-Old Guten­berg Bible in Spec­tac­u­lar, High-Res Detail

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

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

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 Face­book.

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Laurie Anderson’s Top 10 Books to Take to a Desert Island

in Art, Books, Music | June 29th, 2016

Her avant-garde per­for­mance art endeared her to the New York art world long before she dat­ed, then mar­ried, one of the most influ­en­tial men in rock and roll. Her work has at times been over­shad­owed by her more con­ven­tion­al­ly famous part­ner and col­lab­o­ra­tor, but after his death, she con­tin­ues to make chal­leng­ing, far ahead-of-its-time work and rede­fine her­self as a cre­ative force.

No, I don’t mean Yoko Ono, but the for­mi­da­ble Lau­rie Ander­son. In addi­tion to her exper­i­men­tal art, Ander­son is a film­mak­er, sculp­tor, pho­tog­ra­ph­er, writer, com­pos­er, and musi­cian. Her sur­prise elec­tron­ic hit “O Super­man” (above) from her debut 1982 album Big Sci­ence, “warns of ever-present death from the air in an era of jin­go­ism,” writes David Gra­ham at The Atlantic.

Ander­son her­self explains the song as based on a “beau­ti­ful 19th-cen­tu­ry aria by Massenet… a prayer to author­i­ty. The lyrics are a one-sided con­ver­sa­tion, like a prayer to God. It sounds sinister—but it is sin­is­ter when you start talk­ing to pow­er.”

“O Super­man” speaks, mock­ing­ly, to Amer­i­can mil­i­tary hege­mo­ny and to a par­tic­u­lar his­tor­i­cal event, the Iran hostage cri­sis. As such, it is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of much of her work, meld­ing clas­si­cal instincts and musi­cian­ship with elec­tron­ic exper­i­men­ta­tion and a dark­ly com­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty that she often wields like a crit­i­cal scalpel on U.S. polit­i­cal attitudes—from her huge, five-record 1984 live album Unit­ed States (with songs like “Yan­kee See” and “Demo­c­ra­t­ic Way”) to her 2010 project Home­land.

One of Anderson’s most recent pieces, Dirt­day, “responds,” she says above, to “a very trag­ic sit­u­a­tion… a decade after 9/11… so much fear. Dirt­day was real­ly inspired by try­ing to look at that fear… almost from a point of view of ‘what is it when a whole nation gets hyp­no­tized?’” Her art may be polit­i­cal­ly oppo­si­tion­al, but she also admits, that “as a sto­ry­teller, I find my ‘col­leagues’ in pol­i­tics, you know, a lit­tle bit clos­er than I thought.” The admis­sion belies Anderson’s abil­i­ty to incor­po­rate mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives into her com­plex nar­ra­tives, as all great writ­ers do. And great writ­ers begin as read­ers, their work in dia­logue with the books that move and shape them.

So what does Lau­rie Ander­son read? Below, you’ll find a list of her top ten books, curat­ed by One Grand, a “book­store in which cel­e­brat­ed thinkers, writ­ers, artists, and oth­er cre­ative minds share the ten books they would take to their metaphor­i­cal desert island.” Her choic­es include great com­ic sto­ry­tellers, like Lau­rence Sterne, and chron­i­clers of the lum­ber­ing beast that is the U.S., like Her­man Melville. Oth­er well-known nov­el­ists, like Nabokov and Annie Dil­lard, sit next to Bud­dhist texts and cre­ative non­fic­tion. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing list, and if you’re as intrigued and inspired by Ander­son­’s work as I am, you’ll want to read, or re-read, every­thing on it.

Skip on over to One Grand to read Anderson’s com­plete, wit­ty com­men­taries on each of her choic­es.

Also check out, UBUweb, which has a nice col­lec­tion of Lau­rie Ander­son­’s ear­ly video work.

via The New York Times Mag­a­zine

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pat­ti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rim­baud to Susan Son­tag

David Fos­ter Wallace’s Sur­pris­ing List of His 10 Favorite Books, from C.S. Lewis to Tom Clan­cy

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

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

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Hear Anaïs Nin Read From Her Celebrated Diary: A 60-Minute Vintage Recording (1966)

in Books, Letters | June 28th, 2016

Image by George Leite, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

At one time, writer Anaïs Nin’s rep­u­ta­tion large­ly rest­ed on her pas­sion­ate, long-term love affair with nov­el­ist Hen­ry Miller, whom she also finan­cial­ly sup­port­ed while he wrote his best-known nov­els and became, writes Sady Doyle, a “dar­ling of the avant-garde.” Nin her­self was a mar­gin­al­ized, “unfash­ion­able” writer, whose “frank por­tray­als of ille­gal abor­tions, extra­mar­i­tal affairs and incest” brought such crit­i­cal oppro­bri­um down on her that “by 1954, Nin believed the entire pub­lish­ing indus­try saw her as a joke.” She had good rea­son to think so.

Miller’s noto­ri­ous­ly cen­sored books won him cult lit­er­ary sta­tus, and inspired the Beats, Nor­man Mail­er, Philip Roth, and many more hedo­nis­tic male writ­ers seek­ing to turn their lives into art. Nin’s equal­ly explic­it work was met, she lament­ed, “with indif­fer­ence, with insults.” Crit­ics either ignored her nov­els, sev­er­al of them self-pub­lished, or dis­missed them as vul­gar, art­less, and worse. One head­line, Doyle notes, called Nin “a mon­ster of self-cen­tered­ness whose artis­tic pre­ten­tions now seem grotesque.”

All of that changed when Nin pub­lished the first vol­ume of her diary in 1966. There­after, she achieved glob­al fame as a fem­i­nist icon, and the next ten years saw the pub­li­ca­tion of an addi­tion­al six vol­umes of her jour­nals, then sev­er­al more excerpts after her death in 1977. Most notably, Hen­ry and June appeared in 1986 (sub­se­quent­ly made into a film by Philip Kauf­man), a book which—in con­junc­tion with the pub­li­ca­tion of her and Miller’s let­ters the fol­low­ing year—fur­ther added to the mythol­o­gy of the two pas­sion­ate­ly erot­ic writ­ers.

Nin had kept her diaries reli­gious­ly since age 11, and has become known as “modernity’s most pro­lif­ic and per­cep­tive diarist,” writes Maria Popo­va, a dis­tinc­tion that has led to a tremen­dous resur­gence in pop cul­ture pop­u­lar­i­ty in our time, when well-craft­ed self-rev­e­la­tion is de rigeur for artists, activists, online per­son­al­i­ties, and aspi­rants of all kinds. Hen­ry Miller is now “a mar­gin­al­ized and large­ly for­got­ten Amer­i­can writer” (or so claims his biog­ra­ph­er Arthur Hoyle), and Nin has become a “patron saint of social media,” writes Doyle, a “pro­to-Lena-Dun­ham.” Pithy quo­ta­tions from her diaries—properly cred­it­ed or not—constantly cir­cu­late on Tum­blr, Face­book, and Twit­ter.

A new gen­er­a­tion just dis­cov­er­ing Anaïs Nin can access her work in any num­ber of ways—from hip, meme-heavy Tum­blr accounts like Fuck Yeah Anais Nin to more for­mal online venues like the Anais Nin Blog, which aggre­gates biogra­phies, pod­casts, schol­ar­ship, bib­li­ogra­phies, con­tro­ver­sies, and any­thing else one might want to know about the author. Anaïs Nin fans can also hear the author her­self read from her famous diary in the audio here. At the top of the post, hear Nin’s read­ing, record­ed in ’66, the year of the first volume’s pub­li­ca­tion. The com­plete record­ing runs about 60 min­utes.

After the acclaim of Nin’s diaries, and the celebri­ty she enjoyed in her last decade, her rep­u­ta­tion once again suf­fered, posthu­mous­ly, as biog­ra­phers and crit­ics sav­aged her life and work in moral­is­tic tor­rents of what would today be called “slut-sham­ing.” But Nin is now once again right­ly revered as a writer ful­ly ded­i­cat­ed to the art, no mat­ter the recep­tion or the audi­ence. The aston­ish­ing stream of words that flowed from her, record­ing every detail of her expe­ri­ences, “seems noth­ing less than phe­nom­e­nal,” wrote Noel Young of Nin’s non­stop let­ter writ­ing. When it came to the detailed, insight­ful, and acute­ly philo­soph­i­cal record­ing of her life, “the act of writ­ing may have even sur­passed the act of liv­ing.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Simone de Beau­voir Explains “Why I’m a Fem­i­nist” in a Rare TV Inter­view (1975)

Hen­ry Miller Makes a List of “The 100 Books That Influ­enced Me Most”

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

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100,000 Free Art History Texts Now Available Online Thanks to the Getty Research Portal

in Art, Books, Web/Tech | June 15th, 2016

paul klee getty portal

“I have always imag­ined that Par­adise will be a kind of library,” Jorge Luis Borges famous­ly wrote. Were he alive today, he might well regard the inter­net as becom­ing more par­a­disi­a­cal all the time, at least in the sense that it keeps not just gen­er­at­ing new texts, but absorb­ing exist­ing ones and mak­ing them avail­able free to read­ers.

And while his well-known sto­ry “The Library of Babel” envi­sions a mag­i­cal or extreme­ly high-tech library con­tain­ing all pos­si­ble texts (which the inter­net has start­ed to make a real­i­ty), recent addi­tions to the vast library of the inter­net have done him one bet­ter by incor­po­rat­ing not just pages of let­ters, but intri­cate­ly designed and lav­ish­ly illus­trat­ed art texts as well.

raven matisse

Take the Get­ty Research Por­tal, which has just, for its fourth anniver­sary, unveiled a new design and a total vol­ume count sur­pass­ing 100,000. “In assem­bling a vir­tu­al cor­pus of dig­i­tized texts on art, archi­tec­ture, mate­r­i­al cul­ture, and relat­ed fields from numer­ous part­ners, the Por­tal aspires to offer a more expan­sive col­lec­tion than any sin­gle library could pro­vide,” writes project con­tent spe­cial­ist Annie Rana at the Get­ty’s blog The Iris. “Fur­ther­more, with these freely down­load­able mate­ri­als, schol­ars and researchers can now be in pos­ses­sion of copies of rare books and oth­er titles with­out hav­ing to trav­el to far-flung locales.”

OC Getty Portal Kandinsky

More than twen­ty insti­tu­tions now share their col­lec­tions at the Get­ty Research Por­tal: recent join­ers include the Art Insti­tute of Chicago’s Ryer­son and Burn­ham Libraries, the Bib­lio­the­ca Hertziana-Max Planck Insti­tute for Art His­to­ry in Rome, the Her­zog August Bib­lio­thek in Wolfen­büt­tel, the Menil Library Col­lec­tion in Hous­ton, the Solomon R. Guggen­heim Muse­um Library and Archives in New York, and the War­burg Insti­tute Library in Lon­don. But wait, says Rana, there’s more, or at least more on the way: “Dia­logues with art libraries and insti­tu­tions in India, Iran, and Japan are in the works as the project also looks to increase inter­na­tion­al cov­er­age.”

OC Getty Portal The Building in Japan

Still, the selec­tion of items looks quite inter­na­tion­al already. The post high­lights a few items of high poten­tial inter­est to Open Cul­ture read­ers, such as Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven illus­trat­ed by Edouard Manet and trans­lat­ed into French by Stéphane Mal­lar­mé, as well as a mono­graph on, an exhi­bi­tion cat­a­log about the work of, and writ­ings by the Russ­ian abstract painter and art the­o­rist Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky. But even though the Get­ty Research Por­tal seems only to have plans to grow larg­er and larg­er, every­one brows­ing through it will sure­ly find some­thing suit­ed to their artis­tic inter­ests, from Paul Klee (top) to Roy Licht­en­stein to Japan­ese archi­tec­ture and every­thing in between; you have only to step through the por­tal to find it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1.8 Mil­lion Free Works of Art from World-Class Muse­ums: A Meta List of Great Art Avail­able Online

815 Free Art Books from World Class Muse­ums: The Met, the Guggen­heim, the Get­ty & LACMA

Down­load 448 Free Art Books from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

The Guggen­heim Puts 109 Free Mod­ern Art Books Online

Down­load Over 250 Free Art Books From the Get­ty Muse­um

Down­load 35,000 Works of Art from the Nation­al Gallery, Includ­ing Mas­ter­pieces by Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Rem­brandt & More

Read Free Dig­i­tal Art Cat­a­logues from 9 World-Class Muse­ums, Thanks to the Pio­neer­ing Get­ty Foun­da­tion

Google Puts Over 57,000 Works of Art on the Web

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. 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 Face­book.

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Free: Download 5.3 Million Images from Books Published Over Last 500 Years

in Archives, Art, Books | May 31st, 2016

Dance Records of the Month 1917

Back in 2014, we brought to your atten­tion an image archive rival­ing the largest of its kind on the web: the Inter­net Archive Book Images col­lec­tion at Flickr. There, you’ll find mil­lions of “pub­lic domain images, all extract­ed from books, mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers pub­lished over a 500 year peri­od.”

At the time, the col­lec­tion con­tained 2.6 mil­lion pub­lic domain images, but “even­tu­al­ly,” we not­ed in a pre­vi­ous post, “this archive will grow to 14.6 mil­lion images.” Well, it has almost dou­bled in size since our first post, and it now fea­tures over 5.3 mil­lion images, thanks again to Kalev Lee­taru, who head­ed the dig­i­ti­za­tion project while on a Yahoo-spon­sored fel­low­ship at George­town Uni­ver­si­ty.

Records of Big Game 1910

Rather than using opti­cal char­ac­ter recog­ni­tion (OCR), as most dig­i­ti­za­tion soft­ware does to scan only the text of books, Leetaru’s code reversed the process, extract­ing the images the Inter­net Archive’s OCR typ­i­cal­ly ignores. Thou­sands of graph­ic illus­tra­tions and pho­tographs await your dis­cov­ery in the search­able data­base. Type in “records,” for exam­ple, and you’ll run into the 1917 ad in “Colom­bia Records for June” (top) or the creepy 1910 pho­to­graph above from “Records of big game: with their dis­tri­b­u­tion, char­ac­ter­is­tics, dimen­sions, weights, and horn & tusk mea­sure­ments.” Two of many gems amidst util­i­tar­i­an images from dull cor­po­rate and gov­ern­ment record books.

1912 Book of Home Building

Search “library” and you’ll arrive at a fas­ci­nat­ing assem­blage, from the fash­ion­able room above from 1912’s “Book of Home Build­ing and Dec­o­ra­tion,” to the rotund, mourn­ful, soon-to-be carved pig below from 1882’s “The Amer­i­can Farmer: A Com­plete Agri­cul­tur­al Library,” to the nifty Nau­tilus draw­ing fur­ther down from an 1869 British Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry pub­li­ca­tion. To see more images from any of the sources, sim­ply click on the title of the book that appears in the search results. The orga­ni­za­tion of the archive could use some improve­ment: as yet mil­lions of images have not been orga­nized into the­mat­ic albums, which would great­ly stream­line brows­ing through them. But it’s a minor gripe giv­en the num­ber and vari­ety of free, pub­lic domain images avail­able for any kind of use.

American Farmer Library 1882

More­over, Lee­taru has planned to offer his code to insti­tu­tions, telling the BBC, “Any library could repeat this process. That’s actu­al­ly my hope, that libraries around the world run this same process of their dig­i­tized books to con­stant­ly expand this uni­verse of images.” Schol­ars and archivists of book and art his­to­ry and visu­al cul­ture will find such a “uni­verse of images” invalu­able, as will edi­tors of Wikipedia. “What I want to see,” Lee­taru also said, “is… Wikipedia have a nation­al day of going through this [col­lec­tion] to illus­trate Wikipedia arti­cles.”

Museum of Natural History 1869

Short of that, indi­vid­ual edi­tors and users can sort through images of all kinds when they can’t find freely avail­able pic­tures of their sub­ject. And, of course, sites like Open Culture—which rely main­ly on pub­lic domain and cre­ative com­mons images—benefit great­ly as well. So, thanks, Inter­net Archive Book Images Col­lec­tion! We’ll check back lat­er and let you know when they’ve grown even more.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load for Free 2.6 Mil­lion Images from Books Pub­lished Over Last 500 Years on Flickr

Old Book Illus­tra­tions: Free Archive Lets You Down­load Beau­ti­ful Images From the Gold­en Age of Book Illus­tra­tion

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

The Get­ty Adds Anoth­er 77,000 Images to its Open Con­tent Archive

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

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The British Library Digitizes 300 Literary Treasures from 20th Century Authors: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce & More

in Books, Letters, Literature | May 31st, 2016

First Edition Ulysses

As a young col­lege stu­dent, I spent hours wan­der­ing through my university’s library, look­ing in a state of awe at the num­ber of books con­tained there­in by writ­ers whose names I knew or who seemed vague­ly famil­iar, and by hun­dreds, thou­sands, more I’d nev­er heard of. Always con­tent to immerse myself in seclud­ed cor­ners for days on end with a good book, I could­n’t have felt more at home.

The inter­net was in its infan­cy, and my online life at the time con­sist­ed of awk­ward, plain-text emails sent once or twice a week and the occa­sion­al clunky, slow-load­ing web­site, promis­ing much but deliv­er­ing lit­tle. Excitable futur­ists made extrav­a­gant pre­dic­tions about how hyper­text and inter­ac­tiv­i­ty would rev­o­lu­tion­ize the book. These seemed like intrigu­ing but unnec­es­sary solu­tions in search of a prob­lem.

To the book­ish, the book is a per­fect­ed tech­nol­o­gy that can­not be improved upon except by the pub­lish­ing of more books. While inter­ac­tive texts—with linked anno­ta­tions, biogra­phies, his­tor­i­cal pre­cis, crit­i­cal essays, and the like—have much enhanced life for stu­dents, they have not in any way improved upon the sim­ple act of read­ing for plea­sure and edification—an activ­i­ty, wrote Vir­ginia Woolf, requir­ing noth­ing more than “the rarest qual­i­ties of imag­i­na­tion, insight, and judg­ment.”

Though Woolf would like­ly have been unim­pressed with all that talk of hyper­tex­tu­al inno­va­tion, I imag­ine she would have mar­veled at the online world for offer­ing some­thing to the read­er we have nev­er had until the past cou­ple decades: free and instant access to thou­sands of books, from lit­er­ary clas­sics to biogra­phies to his­to­ries to poetry—all gen­res upon which Woolf offered advice about how to read on their own terms. With­out the anx­ious admis­sions process and cost­ly tuition, any­one with a com­put­er now has access to a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the aver­age col­lege library.

And now any­one with a com­put­er has access to a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the British Library’s rare col­lec­tions as well, thanks to the ven­er­a­ble institution’s new online col­lec­tion: “Dis­cov­er­ing Lit­er­a­ture: 20th Cen­tu­ry.”

orwell rejection

Read­ers of our site will know of Open Culture’s affin­i­ty for 20th cen­tu­ry mod­ernist lit­er­a­ture, like that of Vir­ginia Woolf, and for the dystopi­an fic­tion of George Orwell. These authors and greats of more recent vin­tage are all well-rep­re­sent­ed in the British Library col­lec­tion. You’ll find such trea­sures as a scanned first edi­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses, first Amer­i­can edi­tion of Antho­ny Burgess’ A Clock­work Orange, and first edi­tion of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. These are just a few of the clas­sic nov­els avail­able in the “over 300 trea­sures” of the col­lec­tion, writes the British Library.

woolf cover

The online library offers a par­adise for read­ers, cer­tain­ly. And also a heav­en for schol­ars. Includ­ed among the rare first edi­tions and crit­i­cal essays and inter­views on the site’s main page are “online for the first time… lit­er­ary drafts… note­books, let­ters, diaries, news­pa­pers and pho­tographs from Vir­ginia Woolf, Ted Hugh­es, Angela Carter and Hanif Kureishi among oth­ers.”

Some incred­i­ble high­lights include:

And as if all this—and so many more 20th cen­tu­ry lit­er­ary treasures—weren’t enough, the col­lec­tion also tucks in some won­der­ful arti­facts from pre­vi­ous eras, such as a col­lec­tion of man­u­script poems by John Keats, includ­ing the Odes and Robert Burton’s ency­clo­pe­dic 1628 study of depres­sion, The Anato­my of Melan­choly.

“Until now,” says Anna Lobben­berg, the Library’s Dig­i­tal Pro­grammes Man­ag­er, “these trea­sures could only be viewed in the British Library Read­ing Rooms or on dis­play in exhibitions—now Dis­cov­ery Lit­er­a­ture: 20th Cen­tu­ry will bring these items to any­one in the world with an inter­net con­nec­tion.” It tru­ly is, for the lover of books, a brave new world (a book whose 1932 orig­i­nal dust jack­et you can see here).

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library Puts Over 1,000,000 Images in the Pub­lic Domain: A Deep­er Dive Into the Col­lec­tion

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

Vir­ginia Woolf Offers Gen­tle Advice on “How One Should Read a Book”

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

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Stephen King’s The Shining Is Now an Opera, and The Tickets Are All Sold Out

in Books, Opera | May 25th, 2016

As a sto­ry, The Shin­ing cer­tain­ly pass­es the test of adapt­abil­i­ty: we’ve fea­tured not just the anno­tat­ed copy of Stephen King’s orig­i­nal nov­el that Stan­ley Kubrick used to make his well-known film adap­ta­tion, but its Simp­sons par­o­dy, its reimag­ined feel-good Hol­ly­wood trail­er, its remake in minia­ture as a long-form Aesop Rock music video, and even a board game based on the book. Now The Shin­ing has tak­en its lat­est form live on stage as a pro­duc­tion of the Min­neso­ta Opera, whose dig­i­tal pro­gram you can read above.

“I can’t recall an opera in which the vil­lain is a build­ing,” writes Ron Hub­bard in a review for the St. Paul Pio­neer Press, “but that’s the case with The Shin­ing, an adap­ta­tion of Stephen King’s nov­el about a haunt­ed hotel and a fam­i­ly that win­ters with­in it. While ghosts play a promi­nent role in many operas, the spir­its occu­py­ing the remote Rocky Moun­tain hotel in The Shin­ing are ser­vants to one pow­er­ful, malev­o­lent mas­ter: the build­ing itself.” Hub­bard high­lights the elab­o­rate design that recre­ates the for­bid­ding Over­look Hotel with a “state­ly set,” “swirling, spooky pro­jec­tions,” and build­ing ele­ments that “roll in and out behind screens swirling with pat­terns, cre­at­ing an unset­tling, kalei­do­scop­ic effect.”

As every opera enthu­si­ast soon finds out, no pro­duc­tion can sur­vive by design alone. But The Shin­ing, accord­ing to Hub­bard, earns full marks in oth­er areas as well, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to its “score full of dis­com­fit­ing themes that clash and col­lide to strong­ly sung and dis­arm­ing­ly believ­able por­tray­als of char­ac­ters alive and oth­er­wise.” He also empha­sizes that the source mate­r­i­al comes not from Kubrick­’s film, but King’s nov­el: “Stan­ley Kubrick took great lib­er­ties with the sto­ry, going so far as to change how the con­flict plays out and resolves. I actu­al­ly found this oper­at­ic ver­sion con­sid­er­ably creepi­er, in large part because we get to know the ghosts bet­ter.”

“The nov­el and the movie are vast­ly dif­fer­ent,” says libret­tist Mark Camp­bell in the video above, though they and they opera all tell “the sto­ry of Jack Tor­rance, who, because of eco­nom­ic rea­sons, accepts a job as the win­ter care­tak­er for a hotel in remote west­ern Col­orado.” And before long, as we know whether we’ve read the book or seen the movie, Jack “sub­mits to a num­ber of his demons” before the eyes of his ter­ri­fied and increas­ing­ly endan­gered fam­i­ly. But it remains, Camp­bell says, “the sto­ry of a man who wants to do good — he just did­n’t choose the right job, and end­ed up in a sit­u­a­tion that did every­thing it could to tear him apart.”

The Shin­ing the opera comes com­mis­sioned by Min­neso­ta Oper­a’s New Works Ini­tia­tive, “designed to invig­o­rate the oper­at­ic art form with an infu­sion of con­tem­po­rary works.” Giv­en its com­plete­ly sold-out suc­cess in St. Paul, where it pre­miered, we can safe­ly say that this pro­duc­tion has accom­plished the mis­sion of draw­ing vig­or from a per­haps unex­pect­ed source, and even that it stands a chance of bring­ing its chill­ing artistry (not to men­tion its promis­ing­ly warned-about “strong lan­guage, gun­shots, sim­u­lat­ed nudi­ty, the­atri­cal haze, and strobe light­ing”) to a city near you, prefer­ably in the dead of win­ter to best suit the sto­ry — a time that, in Min­neso­ta, already counts as for­bid­ding enough.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load & Play The Shin­ing Board Game

The Shin­ing and Oth­er Com­plex Stan­ley Kubrick Films Recut as Sim­ple Hol­ly­wood Movies

Watch a Shot-by-Shot Remake of Kubrick’s The Shin­ing, a 48-Minute Music Video Accom­pa­ny­ing the New Album by Aesop Rock

Watch The Simp­sons’ Hal­loween Par­o­dy of Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Anno­tat­ed Copy of Stephen King’s The Shin­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. 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 Face­book.

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5 Books Bill Gates Wants You to Read This Summer

in Books | May 19th, 2016

Bill Gates — Microsoft CEO turned phil­an­thropist and life­long learner—has just rec­om­mend­ed five books to put on your sum­mer read­ing list. If you’re look­ing for a light beach read, you’ve come to the wrong place. But if you have a Gates-like mind, you might find that these books will make you “think in new ways” and per­haps keep you up past your bed­time. On his web­site, the video above comes accom­pa­nied by rea­sons for read­ing each work. Below we’re quot­ing direct­ly from Mr. Gates:

Sev­en­eves, by Neal Stephen­son. I hadn’t read any sci­ence fic­tion for a decade when a friend rec­om­mend­ed this nov­el. I’m glad she did. The plot gets going in the first sen­tence, when the moon blows up. Peo­ple fig­ure out that in two years a cat­a­clysmic mete­or show­er will wipe out all life on Earth, so the world unites on a plan to keep human­i­ty going by launch­ing as many space­craft as pos­si­ble into orbit. You might lose patience with all the infor­ma­tion you’ll get about space flight—Stephenson, who lives in Seat­tle, has clear­ly done his research—but I loved the tech­ni­cal details.Sev­en­eves inspired me to rekin­dle my sci-fi habit.

How Not to be Wrong, by Jor­dan Ellen­berg. Ellen­berg, a math­e­mati­cian and writer, explains how math plays into our dai­ly lives with­out our even know­ing it. Each chap­ter starts with a sub­ject that seems fair­ly straightforward—electoral pol­i­tics, say, or the Mass­a­chu­setts lottery—and then uses it as a jump­ing-off point to talk about the math involved. In some places the math gets quite com­pli­cat­ed, but he always wraps things up by mak­ing sure you’re still with him. The book’s larg­er point is that, as Ellen­berg writes, “to do math­e­mat­ics is to be, at once, touched by fire and bound by reason”—and that there are ways in which we’re all doing math, all the time.

The Vital Ques­tion, by Nick Lane. Nick is one of those orig­i­nal thinkers who makes you say: More peo­ple should know about this guy’s work. He is try­ing to right a sci­en­tif­ic wrong by get­ting peo­ple to ful­ly appre­ci­ate the role that ener­gy plays in all liv­ing things. He argues that we can only under­stand how life began, and how liv­ing things got so com­plex, by under­stand­ing how ener­gy works. It’s not just the­o­ret­i­cal; mito­chon­dria (the pow­er plants in our cells) could play a role in fight­ing can­cer and mal­nu­tri­tion. Even if the details of Nick’s work turn out to be wrong, I sus­pect his focus on ener­gy will be seen as an impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion to our under­stand­ing of where we come from.

The Pow­er to Com­pete, by Ryoichi Mik­i­tani and Hiroshi Mik­i­tani. I have a soft spot for Japan that dates back three decades or so, when I first trav­eled there for Microsoft. Today, of course, Japan is intense­ly inter­est­ing to any­one who fol­lows glob­al eco­nom­ics. Why were its companies—the jug­ger­nauts of the 1980s—eclipsed by com­peti­tors in South Korea and Chi­na? And can they come back? Those ques­tions are at the heart of this series of dia­logues between Ryoichi, an econ­o­mist who died in 2013, and his son Hiroshi, founder of the Inter­net com­pa­ny Rakuten. Although I don’t agree with every­thing in Hiroshi’s pro­gram, I think he has a num­ber of good ideas. The Pow­er to Com­pete is a smart look at the future of a fas­ci­nat­ing coun­try.

Sapi­ens: A Brief His­to­ry of Humankind, by Noah Yuval Harari. Both Melin­da and I read this one, and it has sparked lots of great con­ver­sa­tions at our din­ner table. Harari takes on a daunt­ing chal­lenge: to tell the entire his­to­ry of the human race in just 400 pages. He also writes about our species today and how arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, genet­ic engi­neer­ing, and oth­er tech­nolo­gies will change us in the future. Although I found things to dis­agree with—especially Harari’s claim that humans were bet­ter off before we start­ed farming—I would rec­om­mend Sapi­ens to any­one who’s inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry and future of our species.

You can get more ideas from Bill Gates at Gates Notes.

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