Anyone interested in the history of the Guggenheim will want to spend time with a collection called “The Syllabus.” It contains five books by Hilla Rebay, the museum’s first director and curator. Together, they let you take a close look at the art originally housed in the Guggenheim when the museum first opened its doors in 1939.
To read any of these 109 free art books, you will just need to follow these simple instructions. 1.) Select a text from the collection. 2.) Click the “Read Catalogue Online” button. 3.) Start reading the book in the pop-up browser, and use the controls at the very bottom of the pop-up browser to move through the book. 4.) If you have any problems accessing these texts, you can find alternate versions on Archive.org.
You can find many more free art books from the Getty and the Met below.
With 1984’s Neuromancer, William Gibson may not have invented cyberpunk, but he certainly crystallized it. The novel exemplifies the tradition’s mandate to bring together “high tech and low life,” or, in the words of Gibson himself, to explore what “any given science-fiction favorite would look like if we could crank up the resolution.”
It may have its direct predecessors, but Gibson’s tale of hackers, street samurai, conspiracists, and shadowy artificial intelligences against virtual reality, dystopian urban Japan, and a variety of other international and technological backdrops remains not just archetypal but, unusually for older technology-oriented fiction, exciting.
Now you can not only read Gibson’s cyberpunk-defining words, but hear them in Gibson’s voice: a 1994 abridged edition, released only on cassette tapes and now long out of print, resides in MP3 form online here .
You can get a taste of this particular Neuromancer audiobook and its production in the clip above. I always appreciate hearing authors read their own work, but people will surely disagree about whether the laid-back tones of a man who often describes himself as thoroughly un-cutting-edge ideally suit the material. If you think it doesn’t, or if you don’t like the abridged-ness of this edition, you suffer no lack of alternatives: Arthur Addison read an unabridged one for Books on Tape in 1997, in 2011 Robertson Dean read another one for Penguin Audiobooks, and in 2012 Jeff Harding did yet another. (Note: You can download the Dean edition for free via Audible if you enroll in their 30 Day Free Trial. We have more details on that here.) Those who have found themselves hooked on the internet, in any of its modern forms, will certainly hear a lot of prescience in Gibson’s conception of technology as addictive drug. But in my experience, cyberpunk stories, too, can prove fiercely habit forming. Rather than the first cyberpunk novel, or the most important one, or the genre’s blueprint, let’s just call Neuromancer the gateway.
Leiden University book historian Erik Kwakkel describes his tumblr site as follows: “I post images from medieval books.” In the words of Samuel L. Jackson on the immortal Snakes on a Plane, you either want to see that, or you don’t. Presuming you do (and given your presumable status as an Open Culture reader, it strikes me as a safe bet) know that Kwakkel doesn’t maintain just any old images of medieval books; his posts tend to highlight the askew, the obscure, and the innovative, further demonstrating that we need not find the “dark ages” dull. At the top of the post, you can see one photo of the several he posted of the biggest books in the world, in this case the “famous Klencke Atlas” from the 16th century. “While they are rare, such large specimens,” writes Kwakkel, “they do represent a tradition. Choir books, for example, needed to be big because they were used by a half circle of singers gathered around it in a church setting. If you are impressed with the size of these objects, just imagine turning their pages!”
Above, we have an example of what Kwakkel calls “Siamese twins,” two books bound as one using an odd binding “called ‘dos-à-dos’ (back to back), a type almost exclusively produced in the 16th and 17th centuries.” You could read one text one way, then turn the thing over and read a whole other text the other way. “You will often find two complementary devotional works in them, such as a prayerbook and a Psalter, or the Bible’s Old and New Testament. Reading the one text you can flip the ‘book’ to consult the other” — no doubt a handy item, given the religious priorities of the average reader in the Europe of that era. The animated image below highlights a related and equally unusual binding effort, a dos-à-dos from the late 16th century containing “not two but six books, all neatly hidden inside a single binding (see this motionless pic to admire it). They are all devotional texts printed in Germany during the 1550s and 1570s (including Martin Luther, Der kleine Catechismus) and each one is closed with its own tiny clasp.”
If this kind of highly vintage, labor-intensive bookmaking gets your blood flowing, make sure to see see also Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau, the 700-page 17th-century guide to colors we featured in July, and which Kwakkel covered on his blog back in April: “Because the manual is written by hand and therefore literally one of a kind, it did not get the ‘reach’ among painters — or attention among modern art historians — it deserves.” Just one more reason to appreciate the internet, even if, as a medium, you far prefer the medieval book.
Keep tabs on Kwakkel’s tumblr site for more unusual finds, and don’t miss his other blog, Medieval Fragments, where he and other scholars delve more deeply into the wonderful world of medieval books.
Thanks to Kalev Leetaru, a Yahoo! Fellow in Residence at Georgetown University, you can now head over to a new collection at Flickr and search through an archive of 2.6 million public domain images, all extracted from books, magazines and newspapers published over a 500 year period. Eventually this archive will grow to 14.6 million images.
This new Flickr archive accomplishes something quite important. While other projects (e.g., Google Books) have digitized books and focused on text — on printed words — this project concentrates on images. Leetaru told the BBC, “For all these years all the libraries have been digitizing their books, but they have been putting them up as PDFs or text searchable works.” “They have been focusing on the books as a collection of words. This inverts that.”
The Flickr project draws on 600 million pages that were originally scanned by the Internet Archive. And it uses special software to extract images from those pages, plus the text that surrounds the images. I arrived at the image above when I searched for “automobile.” The page associated with the image tells me that the image comes from an old edition of the iconic American newspaper, The Saturday Evening Post. A related link puts the image in context, allowing me to see that we’re dealing with a 1920 ad for an REO Speedwagon. Now you know the origin of the band’s name!
I should probably add a note about how to search through the archive, because it’s not entirely obvious. From the home page of the archive, you can do a keyword search. As you’re filling in the keyword, Flickr will autopopulate the box with the words “Internet Archive Book Images’ Photostream.” Make sure you click on those autopopulated words, or else your search results will include images from other parts of Flickr.
Or here’s an easier approach: simply go to this interior page and conduct a search. It should yield results from the book image archive, and nothing more.
In case you’re wondering, all images can be downloaded for free. They’re all public domain.
Last month we featured the particulars of novelist Haruki Murakami’s passion for jazz, including a big Youtube playlist of songs selected from Portrait in Jazz, his book of essays on the music. But we also alluded to Murakami’s admission of running to a soundtrack provided by The Lovin’ Spoonful, which suggests listening habits not enslaved to purism. His books — one of the very best known of which takes its name straight from a Beatles song (“Norwegian Wood”) —tend to come pre-loaded with references to several varieties of music, almost always Western and usually American. “The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami,” Sam Anderson’s profile of the writer on the occasion of the release of his previous novel 1Q84, name-checks not just Stan Getz but Janáček’s Sinfonietta, The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil, Eric Clapton’s Reptile, Bruce Springsteen’s version of “Old Dan Tucker,” and The Many Sides of Gene Pitney. The title of Murakami’s newColorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage,writes The Week’s Scott Meslow, references Franz Liszt’s ‘Years of Pilgrimage’ suite, “which plays a central role in the novel’s narrative. The pointed reference isn’t exactly a major detour from Murakami.”
Given the writer’s increasing reliance on music and the notion of “songs that literally have the power to change the world,” to say nothing of his “ability to single-handedly drive musical trends,” it can prove an illuminating exercise to assemble Murakami playlists. Selecting 96 tracks, Meslow has created his own playlist (above) that emphasizes the breadth of genre in the music incorporated into Murakami’s fiction: from Ray Charles to Brenda Lee, Duke Ellington to Bobby Darin, Glenn Gould to the Beach Boys. Each song appears in one of Murakami’s novels, and Meslow even includes citations for each track: “I had some coffee while listening to Maynard Ferguson’s ‘Star Wars.’ ” “Her milk was on the house if she would play the Beatles’ ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ said the girl.” “Imagine The Greatest Hits of Bobby Darin minus ‘Mack the Knife.’ That’s what my life would be like without you.” “The room begins to darken. In the deepening darkness, ‘I Can’t Go For That’ continues to play.” It all coheres in something to listen to while exploring Murakami’s world: in your imagination, in real life, or in his trademark realms between.
To listen to the playlist above, you will first need to download Spotify. Please note that once you mouse over the playlist, you can scroll through all 96 songs. Look for the vertical scrollbar along the right side of the playlist.
Photo above is attributed to “wakarimasita of Flickr”
Haruki Murakami’s 13th novel,Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage: A Novel, was first published last April in Japan, and, within the first month, it sold one million copies. This week, the novel (translated by Philip Gabriel) finally arrives in bookstores in the U.S. If you’re wondering where this novel will take readers, you can read an excerpt of Murakami’s novel recently published in Slate, and then Patti Smith’s book review in The New York Times. Smith, the “Godmother of Punk,” won the National Book Award for her 2010 memoir Just Kids. She knows something about writing, and she’s clearly no stranger to Murakami’s body of work. While planning to go on tour, Smith once wondered what books to take along, and wrote on her personal web site:
The worse part, besides saying goodbye to my daughter Jesse, is picking out what books to take. I decide this will be essentially a Haruki Murakami tour. So I will take several of his books including the three volume IQ84 to reread. He is a good writer to reread as he sets your mind to daydreaming while you are reading him. thus i always miss stuff.
Like so many poets, Thomas Stearns Eliot could write a fine letter. Unlike quite so many poets, he could also illustrate those fine letters with an amusing picture or two. The T.S. Eliot Society’s web site has several examples of what the author of “The Waste Land” could do when he got thinking visually as well as textually. At the top of the post, we have a cover he drew for a book of his own, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a well-known work of Eliot’s in its own right but also indirectly known and loved by millions as the basis of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats. Well before this satirical feline material attained such grand embellishment for and far-reaching fame on the stage, it took its first, humble public form in 1939. Had you bought Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats then, you would have bought the one above, with Eliot’s hand-drawn cover. (It runs $37,000 now.) The very next year, a new edition came out fully illustrated by Nicholas Bentley. The inimitable Edward Gorey took his turn with the 1982 edition, and the latest, published in 2009, features the art of German illustrator Axel Scheffler.
Above and below, you can see a couple more surviving examples of what Eliot could do with pen and ink, albeit not in a context necessarily intended for publication. While Eliot’s actual handwriting may not make for easy reading, even if you can read the German in which he sometimes wrote, his drawings vividly display his impressions of the people presumably mentioned in the text. I’d have taken such pains, too, if I had the expectation some 20th-century men of letters seemed to that their collected correspondence would eventually see print. Yet Eliot himself went back and forth about it, “torn over whether to allow public access to his private letters after his death,” writes Salon’s Kera Bolonik. “ ‘I don’t like reading other people’s private correspondence in print, and I do not want other people to read mine,’ he said in 1927. But six years later, he admitted he had an ‘ineradicable’ desire for his letters to reach a wider audience. ‘We want to confess ourselves in writing to a few friends, and we do not always want to feel that no one but those friends will ever read what we have written’ ” — or see what we have drawn.
The political intersection of Ayn Randian libertarians and Evangelical conservatives is a baffling phenomenon for most of us outside the American right. It’s hard to reconcile the atheist arch-capitalist and despiser of social welfare with, for example, the Sermon on the Mount. But hey, mixed marriages often work out, right? Well, as for Rand herself, one would hardly find her sympathetic to religion or its expositors at any point in her career. Take her sound lashing of writer, scholar, and lay theologian C.S. Lewis, intellectual hero of Protestant Christianity. (Wheaton College houses his personal library, and there exists not only a C.S. Lewis Institute, but also a C.S. Lewis Foundation.) Lewis’ The Abolition of Man(1943), while ostensibly a text on education, also purports, like Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, to expound the principles of natural law and objective moral value. Rand would have none of it.
Religion journal First Things brings us excerpts from the edited collection, Ayn Rand’s Marginalia: Her critical comments on the writings of over 20 authors. In it, Rand glosses Lewis’s Abolition of Man with savage ferocity, calling the author an “abysmal bastard,” “cheap, drivelling non-entity” [sic], and “abysmal scum!” The screenshot above (Lewis left, Rand’s annotations right) from the First Things’ blog post offers a typical representation of Rand’s tone throughout, and includes some particularly elaborate insults.
The C.S. Lewis Foundation comments that Lewis “probably would not have approved of the level of venom, but he probably would not have liked Rand’s philosophy much either.” Another Christian academic has successfully squared an appreciation for both Rand and Lewis, but writes critically of Rand, who “seems to have interpreted Lewis’s book as a Luddite screed against science and technology,” part of her “tendency to caricature her opponents.” Certainly no one ever accused her of subtlety. “It’s pretty clear,” our professor continues, “that when showing students how to engage in scholarly discourse, Ayn Rand should not be the model.” No, indeed, but how she would thrive on the Internet.
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