Back in 2007, J. Peder Zane asked 125 top writers–everyone from Stephen King and Jonathan Franzen, to Claire Messud, Annie Proulx, and Michael Chabon–to name their favorite 10 books of all time. Zane then published each author’s list in his edited collection, The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. And he capped it off with one meta list, “The Top Top Ten.” When you boil 125 lists down to one, it turns out [SPOILER ALERT] that Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Kareninaisthe very best of the best. If you’ve read the novel, you’ll likely understand the pick. If you haven’t, you’re missing out.
Above, you can hear actress Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Dark Knight, The Honourable Woman, etc.) read the opening lines of Anna Karenina, which famously begins “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Gyllenhaal spent 120 hours in the studio, making a recording that runs close to 36 hours in total. A lot more than she originally bargained for. Although available for purchase online, you can download the reading for free if you sign up for a 30-Day Free Trial with Audible. We have more information on that program here.
It’s fair to say that every period which has celebrated the literature of antiquity has held epic Roman poet Virgil in extremely high regard, and that was never more the case than during the early Christian and medieval eras. Born in 70 B.C.—writes Clyde Pharr in the introduction to his scholarly Latin text—“Vergil was ardently admired even in his own day, and his fame continued to increase with the passing centuries. Under the later Roman Empire the reverence for his works reached the point where the Sortes Virgilianae came into vogue; that is, the Aeneid was opened at random, and the first line on which the eyes fell was taken as an omen of good or evil.”
This cult of Virgil only grew until “a great circle of legends and stories of miracles gathered around his name, and the Vergil of history was transformed into the Vergil of magic.” The spelling of his name also transformed from Vergil to Virgil, “thus associating the great poet with the magic or prophetic wand, virgo.” Pharr quotes from J.S. Tunison’s Master Virgil, a study of the poet “as he seemed in the Middle Ages”:
The medieval world looked upon him as a poet of prophetic insight, who contained within himself all the potentialities of wisdom. He was called the Poet, as if no other existed; the Roman, as if the ideal of the commonwealth were embodied in him; the Perfect in Style, with whom no other writer could be compared; the Philosopher, who grasped the ideas of all things…
Virgil, after all, acted as the wise guide through the Inferno for late medieval poet Dante, who was accorded a similar degree of reverence in the early modern period.
We should keep the cult of Virgil, and of his epic poem The Aeneid, in mind as we survey the text you see represented here—an illuminated manuscript from Rome created sometime around the year 400 (view the full, digitized manuscript here). Beginning at the end of another great epic—The Iliad—Virgil’s long poem connects the world of Homer to his own through Aeneas and his companions, Trojan refugees and mythical founders of Rome. It is somewhat ironic that the Christian world came to venerate the poem for centuries—claiming that Virgil predicted the birth of Christ—since the Roman poet’s purpose, writes Pharr, was “to see effected… a revival of faith in the old-time religion”—the old-time pagan religion, that is.
But the careful preservation of this ancient manuscript, some 1,600 years old, testifies to the Catholic church’s profound respect for Virgil. “Known as the Vergilius Vaticanus,” writes Hyperallergic, it’s one of the world’s oldest versions of the Latin epic poem, and you can browse it for free online” at Digita Vatica, a nonprofit affiliated with the Vatican Library.
Written by a single master scribe in rustic capitals, an ancient Roman calligraphic script, and illustrated by three different painters, Vergilius Vaticanus is one of only three illuminated manuscripts of classic literature. Granulated gold, applied with a brush, highlights meticulously colored images of famous scenes from the poem: Creusa as she tries to keep her husband Aeneas from going into battle; the islands of the Cyclades and the city of Pergamea destroyed by pestilence and drought; Dido on her funeral pyre, speaking her final soliloquy.
Hyperallergic describes the painstaking care a Tokyo-based firm took in digitizing the fragile text. Digita Vaticana is currently in the midst of scanning its entire collection of 80,000 delicate, ancient manuscripts, a process expected to take 15 years and cost 50 million euros.
Should you wish to contribute to the effort, you can make a donation to the project. The first 200 donors willing and able to fork over at least 500 euros (currently about $533), will receive a printed reproduction of the Vergilius Vaticanus, sure to impress the classics lovers in your life. Should you wish to read the Aeneid in its original language, a true undertaking of love, you can’t go wrong with Pharr’s excellent scholarly text of the first six books (or see an online Latin text here). If you’d rather skip the genuinely difficult and laborious translation, you can always read John Dryden’s translation free online.
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.
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.
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.”
“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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
“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).
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