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 also see Grisham talking about the material in his novel at this TEDx talk.
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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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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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.
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.”)
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.
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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