These mysterious paper sculptures (left around famous literary sites in Edinburgh) are simply amazing. We love you, mysterious sculptor of awesomeness. Via Book Harbinger.
Books as a Canvas
Pxyleyes.com posted an interview with multimedia painter Mike Stilkey.
I am not one of those people that thinks that every book is sacred. This is one of those touchy subjects, though. I do sort of wonder to what degree the mind instinctively rebels against the phrase “book burning,” and whether or not that rebellion gets interpreted into the idea that every book is magic and untouchable.
It’s definitely a question for our current age.
We haven’t really decided, as a society, whether or not the reverence is for the book as an object or the content of the book.
Which is why you get those people, posting on their blogs about their commitment to the printed page. You get the people that revere the paper, maybe over the meaning. The smell of the object. The weight. But, when it comes right down to it, the vast majority of books are transient. Disposable.
Have you ever looked through the free bin at a library book sale?
99% of it is stuff that no one is ever going to read again. Mass market fiction, well past date—often sexist, and racist, and badly written to boot. Manuals for how to set up your hi-fi system. Cook books for making whole chickens in the microwave.
I post a lot of book art. There’s a lot of book art out there, all of a sudden.
From the interview:
As Kindles have become more popular and there are now downloadable forms of literature, books are going the way of the vinyl record. They are starting to become obsolete.
I enjoy memorializing them in my work and giving them a new life. Otherwise, they would just be thrown out or pulped.
And, invariably, re-purposed books generate comments. Someone on twitter recently said that seeing collages made from vintage children’s books makes her physically ill.
But, “thrown out and pulped” is really the fate of many books. Most books.
Photo
bmkk:
Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate.
It contains more than 3,500 words. (All of which will be turned into flashcards that I will then peruse assiduously and sedulously until the words have become so firmly entrenched in my mind that no cogitation or reflection will be necessary to verify what will by then be my entirely unaffected and unparalleled sapience.)
Re-learn your SAT words! Annoy your friends! Confuse mere mortals!
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott in her twenties.
Check out that hair.
I say that look is ripe for a comeback. You could use those weird flapping hair pockets to store your small electronics.
I started Little Women this week, because I could not remember if I had ever read it. I had. That and its sequel. Sometime in 8th or 9th grade, I suppose right around the time the Winona Ryder adaptation came out. I still love that movie—and it’s nearly Christmas, so now I am really in the mood to watch it.
I know everyone is supposed to love the Hepburn one, but man… Jo riding off into the sunset with Gabriel Byrne?
How can you not love that?
Also, it has Christian Bale before he was Batman.
Anyway.
I got through several chapters this morning, and wondered about illustrations of various versions.
The 1880 version was illustrated by Frank Merrill, who was quite prolific in the 19th century, and Alcott was quite pleased with them:
Compare that to the kind of laughably bad version by Tasha Tudor decades later:
They look like deranged china dolls, don’t they?
Here’s a freakish mid-century interpretation:
Apparently Amy escaped from Midgard long enough to mix in with the humans.
And, a recent Penguin Edition:
Very classy, no?
