John Grisham Is Letting You Download His New Novel as a Free eBook

in Books, e-books | February 24th, 2016

grisham novel free

FYI: Best­selling author John Grisham is giv­ing away his new nov­el called The Tumor: A Non-Legal Thriller. Avail­able as a free ebook on Ama­zon, Grisham has called The Tumor “the most impor­tant book I’ve ever writ­ten.” And, as the sub­ti­tle sug­gests, this new book isn’t anoth­er one of those legal thrillers Grisham is known for. No, this nov­el focus­es on med­i­cine and how a “new med­ical tech­nol­o­gy could rev­o­lu­tion­ize the future of med­i­cine by cur­ing with sound.”

Here’s how the book is briefly sum­ma­rized on Ama­zon:

The Tumor fol­lows the present day expe­ri­ence of the fic­tion­al patient Paul, an oth­er­wise healthy 35-year-old father who is diag­nosed with a malig­nant brain tumor. Grisham takes read­ers through a detailed account of Paul’s treat­ment and his family’s expe­ri­ence that doesn’t end as we would hope. Grisham then explores an alter­nate future, where Paul is diag­nosed with the same brain tumor at the same age, but in the year 2025, when a treat­ment called focused ultra­sound is able to extend his life expectan­cy.

Focused ultra­sound has the poten­tial to treat not just brain tumors, but many oth­er dis­or­ders, includ­ing Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, hyper­ten­sion, and prostate, breast and pan­cre­at­ic can­cer…

Read­ers will get a taste of the nar­ra­tive they expect from Grisham, but this short book will also edu­cate and inspire peo­ple to be hope­ful about the future of med­ical inno­va­tion.

You can down­load Grisham’s book here, and find many oth­er free reads in our col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

You can also see Grisham talk­ing about the mate­r­i­al in his nov­el at this TEDx talk.

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!

h/t Robin

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Download 2,000 Magnificent Turn-of-the-Century Art Posters, Courtesy of the New York Public Library

in Art, Books, Magazines | February 23rd, 2016

nypl art poster

A scroll through any col­lec­tion of con­tem­po­rary graph­ic design port­fo­lios makes for a dizzy­ing tour of the seem­ing­ly unlim­it­ed range of col­ors, tex­tures, fonts, etc. avail­able to the mod­ern com­mer­cial artist. From the most col­or­ful pop art to the sub­tlest fine art, it seems that any and every vision can be real­ized on the page or screen thanks to dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy. Turn the dial back over a hun­dred years, and the posters, mag­a­zine cov­ers, and adver­tise­ments can seem prim­i­tive by ini­tial com­par­i­son, some­what washed out and ane­mic, and cer­tain­ly noth­ing like the can­dy-col­ored visu­al feast that meets our eyes on lap­top and smart­phone screens these days.

Plansman

But look clos­er at the design of a cen­tu­ry past, and you’ll find, I think, just as much vari­ety, skill, and imagination—if not near­ly so much col­or and slickness—as is on dis­play today. And though soft­ware enables design­ers to cre­ate images and sur­faces of which their pre­de­ces­sors could only dream, those hand-illus­trat­ed graph­ics of the past hold a strik­ing­ly sim­ple allure that still com­mands our attention—drawing from art nou­veau, impres­sion­ism, pre-Raphaelite, and oth­er fine art forms and incor­po­rat­ing mod­ernist lines and con­trasts.

nypl art posters

Any graph­ic design­er work­ing today can learn from the adver­tis­ing posters you see here, and—thanks to the New York Pub­lic Library’s Turn of the Cen­tu­ry Posters col­lec­tion—can view and down­load hun­dreds more in high res­o­lu­tion, over 2000 more.

The Female Rebellion

“The advent of the art poster in Amer­i­ca,” writes NYPL, “is trace­able to the pub­li­ca­tion of Edward Pen­field­’s poster adver­tis­ing the March 1893 issue of Harper’s. [See a col­lec­tion of his Harper’s posters here.] Unlike ear­li­er adver­tis­ing posters, Pen­field­’s work pre­sent­ed an implied graph­ic nar­ra­tive to which text was sec­ondary. In this way, and sub­se­quent­ly, in the hands of major artists such as Pen­field, Will Bradley and Ethel Reed, the poster moved from the realm of com­mer­cial art to an ele­vat­ed, artis­tic posi­tion.” These posters quick­ly became col­lec­tor’s items, and “became more desir­able than the pub­li­ca­tion they were adver­tis­ing.”

Ancestors

As such, the turn-of-the-cen­tu­ry art poster pushed the pub­lish­ing indus­try toward graph­i­cal­ly illus­trat­ed-mag­a­zine cov­ers and book jack­ets. The increas­ing­ly styl­ish, beau­ti­ful­ly-exe­cut­ed posters on dis­play in the NYPL archive show us not only the devel­op­ment of mod­ern com­mer­cial design as adver­tis­ing, but also its devel­op­ment as an art form. Though we may have need­ed Andy Warhol and his con­tem­po­raries to remind us that com­mer­cial art can just as well be fine art, a look through this stun­ning gallery of posters shows us that pop­u­lar graph­ics and fine art often trad­ed places long before the pop art rev­o­lu­tion.

The Century

Relat­ed Con­tent:

100,000+ Won­der­ful Pieces of The­ater Ephemera Dig­i­tized by The New York Pub­lic Library

Food­ie Alert: New York Pub­lic Library Presents an Archive of 17,000 Restau­rant Menus (1851–2008)

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets You Down­load 180,000 Images in High Res­o­lu­tion: His­toric Pho­tographs, Maps, Let­ters & More

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

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Neil Gaiman Presents “How Stories Last,” an Insightful Lecture on How Stories Change, Evolve & Endure Through the Centuries

in Books, Literature | February 11th, 2016

gaiman how stories last

Image by Thier­ry Ehrmann, via Flickr Com­mons

Every­body knows Neil Gaiman, but they all know him best for dif­fer­ent work: writ­ing com­ic books like Sand­man, nov­els like Amer­i­can Gods, tele­vi­sion series like Nev­er­where, movies like Mir­ror­Mask, an ear­ly biog­ra­phy of Duran Duran. What does all that — and every­thing else in the man’s pro­lif­ic career — have in com­mon? Sto­ries. Every piece of work Gaiman does involves him telling a sto­ry of one kind or anoth­er, and so his pro­file in the cul­ture has risen to great heights as, sim­ply, a sto­ry­teller. That made him just the right man for the job when the Long Now Foun­da­tion, with its mis­sion of think­ing far back into the past and far for­ward into the future, need­ed some­one to talk about how cer­tain sto­ries sur­vive through both those time frames and beyond.

“Do sto­ries grow?” Gaiman asks his years-in-the-mak­ing Long Now lec­ture, lis­ten­able on Sound­cloud right below or view­able as a video here. “Pret­ty obvi­ous­ly — any­body who has ever heard a joke being passed on from one per­son to anoth­er knows that they can grow, they can change. Can sto­ries repro­duce? Well, yes. Not spon­ta­neous­ly, obvi­ous­ly — they tend to need peo­ple as vec­tors. We are the media in which they repro­duce; we are their petri dish­es.” He goes on to bring out exam­ples from cave paint­ings, to secret retellings of Gone with the Wind in a Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camp, to a warn­ing to future gen­er­a­tions not to dig into nuclear waste sites — designed for pas­sage into the minds of pos­ter­i­ty as a robust­ly craft­ed sto­ry.

Sto­ries, writes the Long Now Foun­da­tion founder Stew­art Brand, “out­com­pete oth­er sto­ries by hang­ing over time. They make it from medi­um to medi­um — from oral to writ­ten to film and beyond. They lose unin­ter­est­ing ele­ments but hold on to the most com­pelling bits or even add some.” He knows that, Gaiman knows that, and I think that all of us who have told sto­ries sense its truth on an instinc­tive lev­el: “The most pop­u­lar ver­sion of the Cin­derel­la sto­ry (which may have orig­i­nat­ed long ago in Chi­na) has kept the glo­ri­ous­ly unlike­ly glass slip­per intro­duced by a care­less French telling.”

Anoth­er beloved British teller of tales, Dou­glas Adams, also had thoughts on the almost bio­log­i­cal nature of lit­er­a­ture. “We were talk­ing about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Gaiman recalled else­where, “which was some­thing which resem­bled an iPad, long before it appeared. And I said when some­thing like that hap­pens, it’s going to be the death of the book. Dou­glas said no. Books are sharks.” And what did he mean by that? “Sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the rea­son sharks are still in the ocean is that noth­ing is bet­ter at being a shark than a shark.” So not only do the best sto­ries evolve to last the longest, so do the forms they take.

You can find 18 sto­ries by Neil Gaiman (all free) in this col­lec­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Saun­ders Demys­ti­fies the Art of Sto­ry­telling in a Short Ani­mat­ed Doc­u­men­tary

48 Hours of Joseph Camp­bell Lec­tures Free Online: The Pow­er of Myth & Sto­ry­telling

Neil Gaiman Reads “The Man Who For­got Ray Brad­bury”

Where Do Great Ideas Come From? Neil Gaiman Explains

Aman­da Palmer Ani­mates & Nar­rates Hus­band Neil Gaiman’s Uncon­scious Mus­ings

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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The 20 Most Influential Academic Books of All Time: No Spoilers

in Books | January 21st, 2016

kant critique

Image by Let Ideas Com­pete, via Flickr Com­mons

Some­times I’ll meet some­one who men­tions hav­ing writ­ten a book, and who then adds, “… well, an aca­d­e­m­ic book, any­way,” as if that did­n’t real­ly count. True, aca­d­e­m­ic books don’t tend to debut at the heights of the best­seller lists amid all the eat­ing, pray­ing, and lov­ing, but some­times light­ning strikes; some­times the sub­ject of the author’s research hap­pens to align with what the pub­lic believes they need to know. Oth­er times, aca­d­e­m­ic books suc­ceed at a slow­er burn, and it takes read­ers gen­er­a­tions to come around to the insights con­tained in them — a less favor­able roy­al­ty sit­u­a­tion for the long-dead writer, but at least they can take some sat­is­fac­tion in the pos­si­bil­i­ty.

His­to­ry has shown, in any case, that aca­d­e­m­ic books can become influ­en­tial. “After a list of the top 20 aca­d­e­m­ic books was pulled togeth­er by expert aca­d­e­m­ic book­sellers, librar­i­ans and pub­lish­ers to mark the inau­gur­al Aca­d­e­m­ic Book Week,” writes The Guardian’s Ali­son Flood, “the pub­lic was asked to vote on what they believed to be the most influ­en­tial.” The short­list of these most impor­tant aca­d­e­m­ic books of all time runs as fol­lows (and you can read many of them free by fol­low­ing the links from our meta list of Free eBooks):

The top spot went to Dar­win’s On the Ori­gin of Species, which Flood quotes the Uni­ver­si­ty of Glas­gow’s Andrew Prescott as call­ing “the supreme demon­stra­tion of why aca­d­e­m­ic books mat­ter,” one that “changed the way we think about every­thing – not only the nat­ur­al world, but reli­gion, his­to­ry and soci­ety. Every researcher, no mat­ter whether they are writ­ing books, cre­at­ing dig­i­tal prod­ucts or pro­duc­ing art­works, aspires to pro­duce some­thing as sig­nif­i­cant in the his­to­ry of thought as Ori­gin of Species.”

Kan­t’s Cri­tique of Pure Rea­son placed a still impres­sive fifth, giv­en its sta­tus, in the words of philoso­pher Roger Scru­ton, as “one of the most dif­fi­cult works of phi­los­o­phy ever writ­ten,” — but one which aims to “show the lim­its of human rea­son­ing, and at the same time to jus­ti­fy the use of our intel­lec­tu­al pow­ers with­in those lim­its. The result­ing vision, of self-con­scious beings enfold­ed with­in a one-sided bound­ary, but always press­ing against it, hun­gry for the inac­ces­si­ble beyond, has haunt­ed me, as it has haunt­ed many oth­ers since Kant first expressed it.”

So you want to write an aca­d­e­m­ic book this influ­en­tial? You may have a tough time doing it delib­er­ate­ly, but it could­n’t hurt to steep your­self in the mate­ri­als we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured relat­ed to the cre­ation of this top twen­ty, includ­ing 16,000 pages of Dar­win’s writ­ing on evo­lu­tion (as well as the man’s per­son­al library), Orwell’s let­ter reveal­ing why he would write 1984, as well as Marx and Kan­t’s rig­or­ous work habits — and Kan­t’s even more rig­or­ous cof­fee habit, though if there exists any 21st-cen­tu­ry aca­d­e­m­ic in need of encour­age­ment to drink more cof­fee, I have yet to meet them.

via The Guardian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

Read 700 Free eBooks Made Avail­able by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia Press

The 10 Great­est Books Ever, Accord­ing to 125 Top Authors (Down­load Them for Free)

28 Impor­tant Philoso­phers List the Books That Influ­enced Them Most Dur­ing Their Col­lege Days

Life-Chang­ing Books: Your Picks

Dar­win: A 1993 Film by Peter Green­away

Darwin’s Per­son­al Library Goes Dig­i­tal: 330 Books Online

16,000 Pages of Charles Darwin’s Writ­ing on Evo­lu­tion Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­able Online

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

The Dai­ly Habits of High­ly Pro­duc­tive Philoso­phers: Niet­zsche, Marx & Immanuel Kant

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

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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How to Make a Book From Scratch

in Books | January 20th, 2016

In a new video series from “How To Make Every­thing” — a Youtube chan­nel ded­i­cat­ed to find­ing out how to break down com­plex pro­duc­tion process­es and make things from scratch — you can watch Andy George cre­ate a book using very tra­di­tion­al tech­niques. And when I say tra­di­tion­al, I mean tra­di­tion­al. He cre­ates papyrus, parch­ment, ink and leather book cov­ers by hand. And be warned, some parts may make you a bit squea­mish. “The How to Make a Book” series is divid­ed into eight sep­a­rate videos. If you click play above, you can watch them all from start to fin­ish.

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!

via Devour

Relat­ed Con­tent

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

Watch a Japan­ese Crafts­man Lov­ing­ly Bring a Tat­tered Old Book Back to Near Mint Con­di­tion

The Birth and Decline of a Book: Two Videos for Bib­lio­philes

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

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The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civil Rights Guide to Traveling Safely in the U.S. (1936–66)

in Books, History, Life, Travel | January 18th, 2016

Green Book Cover

Pop­u­lar enter­tain­ment has roman­ti­cized the idea of the road trip as a whol­ly spon­ta­neous adven­ture, but for mid-cen­tu­ry African Amer­i­can motorists, plan­ning was essen­tial. The lodg­ings, restau­rants, and tourist attrac­tions where they could be assured of a warm wel­come were often few and far between in the era of seg­re­ga­tion.

The Negro Trav­el­ers’ Green Book, first print­ed in 1936, was an invalu­able resource for trav­el­ers of col­or, par­tic­u­lar­ly when their route took them out­side of urban areas. In the pre-Inter­net age, pub­lish­er Vic­tor Green, a Harlem-dwelling mail­man, relied on read­ers to sup­ply feed­back and new loca­tions for sub­se­quent edi­tions:

There are thou­sands of first class busi­ness places that we don’t know about and can’t list, which would be glad to serve the trav­el­er, but it is hard to secure list­ings of these places since we can’t secure enough agents to send us the infor­ma­tion. Each year before we go to press the new infor­ma­tion is includ­ed in the new edi­tion. When you are trav­el­ing please men­tion the Green Book, in order that they might know how you found their place of busi­ness, as they can see that you are strangers. If they haven’t heard about this guide, ask them to get in touch with us so that we might list their place. If this guide has proved use­ful to you on your trips, let us know. If not, tell us also as we appre­ci­ate your crit­i­cisms and ideas in the improve­ment of this guide from which you ben­e­fit. There will be a day some­time in the near future when this guide will not have to be pub­lished. That is when we as a race will have equal oppor­tu­ni­ties and priv­i­leges in the Unit­ed States. It will be a great day for us to sus­pend this pub­li­ca­tion for then we can go wher­ev­er we please, and with­out embar­rass­ment. But until that time comes we shall con­tin­ue to pub­lish this infor­ma­tion for your con­ve­nience each year.

- from the intro­duc­tion to the 1949 edi­tion

The New York Pub­lic Library’s Schom­burg Cen­ter for Research in Black Cul­ture has dig­i­tized 21 vol­umes of its Green Book col­lec­tion for your brows­ing plea­sure. It’s a trip back in time.

Green Book Points of Interest NYC

1936’s pre­mier edi­tion is geared toward vis­i­tors spend­ing time in and around New York City. In appear­ance, it resem­bles a church bul­letin or com­mu­ni­ty the­ater pro­gram, with busi­ness card ads for beau­ty salons spe­cial­iz­ing in mar­cel wav­ing and restau­rants serv­ing South­ern home cook­ing. Pub­lish­er Green extols the won­ders of Coney Island, Chi­na­town, and the The­atri­cal Dis­trict, even as he notes that “the col­ored show hous­es are in Harlem.” He also seeks to give read­ers a laugh with “How to Keep From Grow­ing Old,” a dri­ver-spe­cif­ic list that could be read aloud from the pas­sen­ger seat for the mer­ri­ment of every­one in the car. (“In slop­py weath­er, dri­ve close to pedes­tri­ans. Dry clean­ers appre­ci­ate this.”)

Green Book Westchester

The Green Book soon swelled to include nation­al list­ings, as tourists and busi­ness trav­el­ers heed­ed Green’s call to beef up the info.

1961’s 25th anniver­sary edi­tion includes a his­to­ry of the enter­prise, a fair amount of typos, newsy updates on the staff, and a renewed promise to list the best places on the moon, should lunar trav­el become an option.

Green Book Pg 5

Green Book 25th Anniversary

Arm­chair trav­el­ers can take the NYPL’s dig­i­tized col­lec­tion out for a spin by enter­ing coor­di­nates into a map­ping fea­ture for 1947 or 1956.

Start­ing in my Indi­ana home­town with sights set on Man­hat­tan took me to the Cot­tage Restau­rant in Colum­bus, Ohio, the Jones Restau­rant in Grafton, West Vir­ginia, and the beau­ti­ful­ly named Trott Inn in Philadel­phia, before I final­ly lay my vir­tu­al head at the Amer­i­ca Hotel. (These days, it would be the Mil­len­ni­um Broad­way.)

Green Book 1956

Enjoy your trip. In the words of Vic­tor Green, “let’s all get togeth­er and make motor­ing bet­ter.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read Mar­tin Luther King and The Mont­gomery Sto­ry: The Influ­en­tial 1957 Civ­il Rights Com­ic Book

Robert Penn War­ren Archive Brings Ear­ly Civ­il Rights to Life

Vin­tage 1930s Japan­ese Posters Artis­ti­cal­ly Mar­ket the Won­ders of Trav­el

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She doc­u­ment­ed her mis­ad­ven­tures on the road in No Touch Mon­key! And Oth­er Trav­el Lessons Learned Too Late Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Download 650 Soviet Book Covers, Many Sporting Wonderful Avant-Garde Designs (1917–1942)

in Archives, Books, Design | January 14th, 2016

Circus 1931

Amer­i­cans like to pride our­selves on the numer­ous ways our pop cul­ture pen­e­trat­ed the Sovi­et Union and seduced its young­sters, send­ing them to bed with dreams of Mick­ey Mouse, Bil­lie Hol­i­day, Elvis, and Star Wars. Whether it’s jazz in the ear­ly decades after the rev­o­lu­tion, or rock and roll in the 50s and after, Sovi­et youth so craved the ways of the West, it seems, that they famous­ly boot­legged Amer­i­can music on used X‑rays, with results of wide­ly vary­ing degrees of qual­i­ty. That’s all well and good, but we rarely ask what Sovi­et cul­tur­al exports we were miss­ing while we trum­pet­ed our supe­ri­or­i­ty. (I mean, besides Ayn Rand or the com­e­dy of Yakov Smirnoff.)

Unknown Soviet Cover 1

A few of those exports have become high water­marks of cre­ative inno­va­tion and aes­thet­ic beau­ty, such as the film­mak­ing of Dzi­ga Ver­tov and Andrei Tarkovsky. At least one Sovi­et export, the Theremin, rad­i­cal­ized music with its haunt­ing elec­tron­ic whine. Much less well-known, how­ev­er, are the fas­ci­nat­ing devel­op­ments in ani­ma­tion and illus­tra­tion (such as these out­er space utopias). Now—thanks to the New York Pub­lic Library’s huge­ly expan­sive, free dig­i­tal image archive—we can view and down­load 650 exam­ples of Sovi­et book cov­er design between the years 1917 and 1942 (most date from the 30s). Many of these cov­ers are as unre­mark­ably vanil­la as some of their Amer­i­can coun­ter­parts, but no small num­ber offer unique looks into avant-garde Sovi­et design trends.

Two Years In Northern Lands 1935

Addi­tion­al­ly, the archive gives us a broad overview of the kinds of books that were pub­lished in the Sovi­et Union dur­ing these pre-Cold War years. It’s unlike­ly many of these titles saw trans­la­tion into Eng­lish and unlike­ly many of them ever will. In some cas­es, the author and title of the book rep­re­sent­ed have been lost to his­to­ry (as with the col­or­ful cov­er sec­ond from the top). Each of the images here links to a page on the NYPL’s online data­base, where you can see pub­li­ca­tion info and down­load high-res­o­lu­tion scans. Browse, and down­load, hun­dreds more pre-War Sovi­et book cov­er designs at the NYPL’s “Scrap­book of Russ­ian Book­jack­ets, 1917–1942,” or see a few more choice selec­tions at The Paris Review, who drew our atten­tion to this won­der­ful online col­lec­tion.

Takers 1933

The Grim River 1933

M. Lermontov

Big Universe 1936

via The Paris Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets You Down­load 180,000 Images in High Res­o­lu­tion: His­toric Pho­tographs, Maps, Let­ters & More

Sovi­ets Boot­legged West­ern Pop Music on Dis­card­ed X‑Rays: Hear Orig­i­nal Audio Sam­ples

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

Watch Sovi­et Ani­ma­tions of Win­nie the Pooh, Cre­at­ed by the Inno­v­a­tive Ani­ma­tor Fyo­dor Khitruk

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

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

in Archives, Art, Books | January 13th, 2016

paulklee1879klee_0001

What­ev­er else Banksy’s 2010 doc­u­men­tary Exit Through the Gift Shop sug­gests about the strange rela­tion­ship between the worlds of gallery and street art, its title alone hints at a seri­ous prob­lem with the art estab­lish­ment: muse­ums are expen­sive! Unless you are in Wash­ing­ton, DC, where most of the muse­ums are free, you must not only pony up an entrance fee (or “sug­gest­ed dona­tion”), but you must also, well, exit through the gift shop, where you’ll inevitably be tempt­ed to pur­chase some tchotchkes, swag, knick-knacks, or—more like­ly for art lovers—some beau­ti­ful, over­priced book with glossy, full-page repro­duc­tions of the works you rushed past with impa­tient fam­i­ly or stood on tip­toes to glimpse over the heads of tourist crowds.

It’s true, you may some­time have the good for­tune of get­ting to the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, the Get­ty, the Guggen­heim, or the LACMA on an off day, with all the time in the world to mill around and take it in. But if you’re any­thing like me, you’ll still find your­self hov­er­ing around the shelves and book tables, try­ing to con­vince your­self not to shell out upwards of $100 or more for some gor­geous cof­fee table vol­ume. (And that’s assum­ing you even get to New York or L.A. to vis­it these muse­ums at all.) Muse­um gift shop art books—whether they high­light the col­lec­tions, oth­er muse­ums, his­toric schools and move­ments, or the tech­niques and devel­op­ment of indi­vid­ual artists—are tan­ta­liz­ing objects, as are the cat­a­logs that accom­pa­ny exhi­bi­tions.

cezanne free art book

Online libraries cre­at­ed by major muse­ums have mit­i­gat­ed many of these issues of cost and dis­tance. While they won’t sub­sti­tute for the feel and smell of new books, nor proud­ly adorn your cof­fee table, hun­dreds of the vol­umes you might cov­et at the gift shop have been dig­i­tized and can be read and down­loaded for free. For exam­ple, if you head over to the Guggen­heim’s web­site, you can browse online cat­a­logs from his­toric exhibits, like that for the Paul Klee 1879–1940 exhib­it from 1967 (top). Then rum­mage through 108 free art books delv­ing into all kinds of mod­ern art.

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The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art has 456 more books to read—and to download—in their online library. You can, for exam­ple, own a copy of The Age of Car­avag­gio as a PDF on your hard dri­ve, or you can read it online, along with titles cov­er­ing every imag­in­able school, peri­od, artist, and region—“five decades of Met pub­li­ca­tions on art his­to­ry, avail­able to read, down­load, and/or search for free.”

On the oth­er side of the coun­try, we have the impres­sive Get­ty muse­um, well over 200 of whose pub­li­ca­tions you can access imme­di­ate­ly with­out leav­ing your screen at the Get­ty Pub­li­ca­tions Vir­tu­al Library. There you’ll find “free dig­i­tal back­list titles from the Get­ty Pub­li­ca­tions archive,” like Cézanne in the Stu­dio, which you can read online or down­load as a PDF.

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And if you hap­pen to be in Los Ange­les with time on your hands, I know you won’t deny your­self a trip to the fan­tas­tic L.A. Coun­ty Muse­um of Mod­ern Art. But whether or not you’re able to see its dizzy­ing­ly diverse col­lec­tion for your­self, or vis­it its gift shops, there’s lit­tle stop­ping you from brows­ing its online Read­ing Room, where you’ll find sev­er­al online titles free to read and down­load, like this excel­lent pre­sen­ta­tion of Edvard Munch’s lith­o­graphs, etch­ings, and wood­cuts. Whether you’re a stu­dent, a schol­ar, or sim­ply a devot­ed lover of art, your life will be great­ly enhanced by the hun­dreds of books in these free online col­lec­tions.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

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

Free Course: An Intro­duc­tion to the Art of the Ital­ian Renais­sance

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

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