Once upon a time Blotto Design, a design firm based in Berlin, wondered: what would happen if you printed an entire book on a single poster? Could you still read it? How would it look when framed and hung on a wall?
And so they developed a prototype, liked what they saw, and have since turned 20 large books into posters — books like Homer’s Iliad, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Melville’s Moby Dick, and Joyce’s Ulysses, all 265,222 words of it. Posters cost 20 euros a piece. Browse through the shop here. And get more backstory from Wired here.
Here’s a challenge: for every book recommended to you by Amazon, pick one from the site Neglected Books. No fancy algorithms here, just old-fashioned serendipity, and you’re unlikely to see much overlap. You will be rewarded with book after fascinating book that has slipped through the usual marketing channels and fallen into obscurity. Most of the authors come recommended by well-known names, making them writers’ writers—people whose writerly difficulty or peculiar subject matter can narrow their readership.
This is not entirely a fair assessment, and in many cases, the work that achieves literary notoriety does so by chance, not mass appeal, but it is undoubtedly the case that certain kinds of writers write for certain kinds of readers. The literary editor Malcolm Cowley, helming The New Republic in 1934, thought so, and lamented a system that prevented books from reaching their intended readers. In a call to “America’s leading novelists and critics,” Cowley asked for lists of such books—and in perhaps a retroactive vindication of the listicle—published them in two articles, “Good Books That Almost Nobody Has Read” and “More About Neglected Books.” Neglected Books, the website, quotes Cowley’s announcement:
Each year… a few good books get lost in the shuffle. It may not be the fault of the publisher, the critic, the bookseller, it may not be anybody’s fault except that of the general system by which too many books are distributed with an enormous lot of ballyhoo to not enough readers. Most of the good books are favorably reviewed, yet the fact remains that many of them never reach the people who would like and profit by them, the people for whom they are written.
Cowley asked his targets to suggest “two or three or four” names and “a few sentences identifying them.” He got lists from about a dozen writers, including lions like F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder and critic Edmund Wilson, who gets a mention in both Fitzgerald’s and Dos Passos’ lists. (Fitzgerald also offered three other titles Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West; Sing Before Breakfast by Vincent McHugh and Through the Wheat by Thomas Boyd.) Dos Passos, unlike most of the men, names a few women writers, including Agnes Smedley, now revealed to have been a triple agent for the Soviets, the Chinese, and Indian nationalists, “one of the most prolific female spies of the 20th century.” Dos Passos’ commentary on her autobiography Daughter of Earth—which he misremembers as Woman of Earth—is mostly understated: “An uneven but impressive I suppose autobiographical narrative of a young woman’s life in a Western mining camp and in New York.”
Libertarian journalist Susan La Follette, one of the few women writers surveyed, offers only one suggestion, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s 1931 comedic Russian novel The Golden Calf. The description alone in this L.A. Times review of a 2010 translation has me thinking this may indeed be an overlooked masterwork of totalitarian satire. La Follette said as much three years after its publication, writing of her disappointment, “I take this quite personally, because so few people even know about it that I rarely find anyone who can laugh over it with me.”
While The New Republic is well-known as a left-of-center publication, the meaning of the American Left in the thirties was much more inclusive, even of avowed Marxists like The New Masses editor Isidor Schneider, who names Imperialism, and The State and Revolution by Lenin and Leninism by Joseph Stalin. Next to the irony of naming two books that thousands have been coerced to read, Schneider contrarily names the The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, from the aesthetically radical, but earnestly religiously conservative Irish Jesuit poet. (The latter two suggestions did not make publication since Schneider’s list was already quite long.)
As interesting as the lists themselves is the selection of responses to the second article. William Saroyan writes in to recommend Grace Stone Coates’ Black Cherry as the “finest prose you ever saw.” And legendary publisher Alfred A. Knopf writes with a lengthy and detailed explanation of the books listed that he published. Of one book named, Franz Kafka’s The Castle, Knopf writes, “The Castle is one of my really inglorious failures. It is, as Conrad Aiken says, a masterpiece. But in the original edition it sold only 715 copies, and since January 3, 1933, we have been offering it at the reasonable price of $1 and only 120 copies have been purchased.”
In the mid-1930s, some beautiful, high-quality books were published by a company called Limited Editions Club, which, according to Antiques Roadshow appraiser Ken Sanders, was “famous for re-issuing classics of literature and commissioning contemporary living artists to illustrate 1500-copy signed limited editions.” One of those books—the 1934 Pablo Picasso-illustrated edition of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata—is, next to Henri Matisse’s 1935 edition of Joyce’s Ulysses, one of “the most sought after and desirable limited editions on the market today.”
The book’s rarity, of course, renders it more valuable on the market than a mass-produced object, but whether it was worth $5,000 or $50, I think I’d hold onto my copy if I had one (here’s one for $12,000 if you’re buying). While Aubrey Beardsley’s 1896 illustrations do full and stylish justice to the satirical Greek comedy’s bawdy nature, Picasso’s drawings render several scenes as tender, softly sensual tableaux. The almost childlike simplicity of these illustrations of a play about female power and the limits of patriarchy do not seem like the work of a rumored misogynist, but then again, neither do any of Picasso’s other domestic scenes in this spare, rounded style of his.
In Aristophanes’ play, the women of Greece refuse their husbands sex until the men agree to end the Peloponnesian War. The play makes much of the men’s mounting sexual frustration, with several humorous gestures toward its physical manifestations. Beardsley’s drawings offend Victorian eyes by making these scenes into exaggerated nudist farce. Picasso’s modernist sketches all but ignore the overt sexuality of the play, picturing two lovers (2nd from top) almost in the posture of mother and child, the pent up men (image above) as dejected and downcast gentle souls, and the reunion of the sexes (below) as a highly stylized, none too erotic, feast. These images are three of six signed proofs featured on the blog Book Graphics. See their site to view all six illustrations.
Dutch TV journalist Wim Brands looks a bit dour to be inhabiting the role of World’s Luckiest Man, but that’s surely how bazillions of David Sedaris fans will view him, wishing they too had been invited to cozy up to their favorite author’s kitchen table. Particularly since that table is situated in the rustic, sixteenth-century West Sussex house that provided the setting for “Company Man”, one of his more delightful New Yorker stories of late.
Sedaris has made a fortune passing himself off as a self-involved fuss-pot, but in this episode of Boeken op Reis (Dutch for “Books on Tour”) he’s the perfect host.
He supplies thoughtful responses to Brands’ unsmiling questions and affably points out the home’s notable features, including off-kilter doorways and a taxidermied lapdog (“We call him Casey because he’s in a case.”)
He brings a plastic bag on a stroll through the surrounding countryside in order to collect litter — an endearing routine, even if it’s a scoop Brands must share with the BBC’s Clare Balding.
Best of all, he obliges his guest with a couple of live readings, the first from the aforementioned New Yorker piece, the other having to do with his youngest sister’s suicide this summer.
“I always figure that whatever most embarrasses you is something that everyone can relate to,” he muses, effectively summing up the secret of his success. If you ever feel like Sedaris is overdoing the craven complainer bit, this visit will set the record straight.
Watch the entire interview here. Non-Dutch speakers, please be advised that the segment switches to English once Brands sets the scene for his intended audience.
-Tip of the hat to Michael Ahn for the idea.
Ayun Halliday’s teenage daughter wrote David Sedaris a fan letter and David Sedaris sent a handwritten reply on a postcard. Classy! Follow her @AyunHalliday
A new study published this week in Scienceconcludes that you may get something unexpected from reading great literary works: more finely-tuned social and emotional skills. Conducted by Emanuele Castano and David Comer Kidd (researchers in the psych department at the New School for Social Research), the study determined that readers of literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or non-fiction) find themselves scoring better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence. In some cases, it took reading literary fiction for only a few minutes for test scores to improve.
The New York Times has a nice overview of the study, where, among other things, it features a quote by Albert Wendland, an English professor at Seton Hall, who puts the relationship between literature and social intelligence into clear terms: “Reading sensitive and lengthy explorations of people’s lives, that kind of fiction is literally putting yourself into another person’s position — lives that could be more difficult, more complex, more than what you might be used to in popular fiction. It makes sense that they will find that, yeah, that can lead to more empathy and understanding of other lives.”
It was one of my favorite gifts of Christmas 2006. No, all apologies to everyone who bought me thoughtful gewgaws, but it was, without a doubt, the favorite. A humble, unassuming package contained a veritable encyclopedia of Americana: over one hundred portraits of jazz, blues, and country artists from the golden eras of American music, all drawn by a foremost antiquarian of pre-WWII music, R. Crumb. Beside each portrait—some made with Crumb’s exaggerated proportions and thick-lined shading, some softer and more realist—was a brief, one-paragraph bio, just enough to situate the singer, player, or band within the pantheon.
Though a fan of this sort of thing may think that it could get no better, glued to the back cover was a slipcase containing a CD with 21 tracks—seven from each genre. A quick scan showed a few familiar names: Skip James, Charlie Patton, Jelly Roll Morton. Then there were such unknown entities as Memphis Jug Band, Crockett’s Kentucky Mountaineers, and East Texas Serenaders, culled from Crumb’s enormous, library-size archive of rare 78s. Joy to the world.
Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country began in the 80s with a series of illustrated trading cards, as you can see in the video above (which only covers the blues and jazz corners of the triangle). The first cards, “Heroes of the Blues,” came attached to old-time reissues from the Yazoo record company. Eventually expanding the cards to include jazz and country, working in each category from old photos or newsreel footage, Crumb covered quite a lot of musico-historical ground. Archivists and authors Stephen Calt, David Jasen, and Richard Nevins wrote the short blurbs. Finally Yazoo, rather than issuing the cards individually with each record, combined them into boxed sets.
The book—which validates my sense that this music belongs together cheek by jowl, even if some of its partisans can’t stand each other’s company—evolved through a painstaking process in which Crumb redrew and recolored the original illustrations from the printed trading cards (the original artwork having disappeared). You can follow one step of that process in a detailed description of Crumb’s conversion of the blues cards to a silkscreened poster. Crumb’s process is as thorough as his period knowledge. But Crumb fans know that the comic artist’s reverence for Americana goes beyond his collecting and extends to his own version of kitchen-sink bluegrass, blues, and jazz. Listen to Crumb on the banjo above with his Cheap Suit Serenaders. And if anyone feels like getting me a Christmas present this year, I’d like a copy of their record Chasin Rainbows. On vinyl of course.
“David Bowie Is,” the extensive retrospective exhibit of the artist and his fabulous costumes, hit Toronto last Friday (see our post from earlier today), and as many people have reported, in addition to those costumes—and photos, instruments, set designs, lyric sheets, etc.—the show includes a list of Bowie’s favorite books. Described as a “voracious reader” by curator Geoffrey Marsh, Bowie’s top 100 book list spans decades, from Richard Wright’s raw 1945 memoir Black Boy to Susan Jacoby’s 2008 analysis of U.S. anti-intellectualism in The Age of American Unreason.
Bowie’s always had a complicated relationship with the U.S., but his list shows a lot of love to American writers, from the aforementioned to Truman Capote, Hubert Selby, Jr., Saul Bellow, Junot Diaz, Jack Kerouac and many more. He’s also very fond of fellow Brits George Orwell, Ian McEwan, and Julian Barnes and loves Mishima and Bulgakov. You can read the full list below or over at Open Book Toronto, who urges you to “grab one of these titles and settle in to read — and just think, somewhere, at some point, David Bowie (or, to be more accurate, the man behind David Bowie, David Jones) was doing the exact same thing.” If that sort of thing inspires you to pick up a good book, go for it. You could also peruse the list, then puzzle over the literate Bowie’s lyrics to “I Can’t Read.” You can also explore a new related book–Bowie’s Bookshelf:The Hundred Books that Changed David Bowie’s Life.
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Goodreads, that social network for the bookish, recently posted on its blog the results of a survey taken among its 20 million members with the melancholy title “The Psychology of Abandonment.” Complete with infographic, the survey gives us, among other things, a list of the “Top Five Abandoned Classics.” James Joyce’s Ulysses is third on the list, and I’m not at all surprised to find it there. One must know Ulysses, it seems, to merit consideration as a culturally literate person. But Ulysses, perhaps more than any work of modern literature, can easily discourage. It presents us with a landscape so psychologically complex, so dense with literary and historical allusion and contemporary cultural reference, that I cannot say I would have known what to do with it had I not read it under the auspices of an august Irish Joyce scholar and with Don Gifford’s guidebook Ulysses Annotated ready at hand. I had nowhere near the breadth and depth of reading Joyce seems to assume of his ideal reader. Few people do.
Two of Joyce’s contemporaries, however, had such a grasp of literature and language: T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. And the two had quite a lot to say about the book, much of it to each other. Eliot recommended Joyce’s novel to Woolf, and very soon after its 1922 publication, she purchased her own copy. At the time, Woolf was hard at work on her story “Mrs. Dalloway on Bond Street,” which would eventually grow into her next novel, Mrs. Dalloway. She was also immersed in Proust’s epic Remembrance of Things Past, just beginning the second volume. According to Dartmouth’s James Heffernan, Woolf “chafes at the thought of Ulysses,” writing haughtily:
Oh what a bore about Joyce! Just as I was devoting myself to Proust—Now I must put aside Proust—and what I suspect is that Joyce is one of those undelivered geniuses, whom one can’t neglect, or silence their groans, but must help them out, at considerable pains to oneself.
Heffernan chronicles Woolf’s reading of Ulysses, which she documented in her diary in a “withering assessment” as the work of “a self-taught working man… egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating.” “When one can have cooked flesh,” she writes, “why have the raw?”
This private critical opinion Woolf recorded after reading only 200 pages of the novel. Heffernan makes the case that she read no more thereafter. Though she claimed to have “finished Ulysses,” he takes her to mean she had finished with the book, putting it aside like those bewildered, bored, or exasperated Goodreads members. Nevertheless, Woolf could not shake Joyce. She continued to write about him, to Eliot and herself. “Never did any book so bore me,” she would write, and many more very disparaging remarks about her brilliant contemporary.
Over and again she savaged Joyce in her diaries; so much so that it seems to Heffernan and Woolf scholar Suzette Henke that hers is a case of protesting too much against an author whom, Henke alleges, was her “artistic ‘double,’ a male ally in the modernist battle for psychological realism.” This may indeed be so. In the midst of her characterizations of Joyce as uncouth, boring, “underbred” and worse, she admits in her diary that what she attempted in her fiction was “probably being better done by Mr. Joyce.” While hardly any reader of Ulysses—among those who finish it and those who don’t—can say they are attempting something near what he accomplished, we might all find some solace in knowing that a reader as sharp as Virginia Woolf found his modernist masterpiece either so boring or so intimidating that even she may not have been able to finish it.
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