Sam Anderson’s brilliant Year in Marginalia inspires MobyLives to announce the “Melville House Marginalia Contest.”
More Marginalia
An Archive of Artist Deaths at the Met
Arturo B. de St. M. D’Hervilly's macabre archive reports the deaths of painters, sculptors, and photographers of the early 20th century.
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Type Setting
In a clip The Atlantic calls “technology porn for book lovers,” you can see how manuscripts became books in the 1940s.
Carpet Reading
Poet and antiwar activist David Shook is raising money on Kickstarter. What for, you ask? He wants to rain poetry on a city with the help of a drone. (h/t Poetry Foundation)
Burroughs’ Selected Letters
Recommended Reading: The selected letters of William S. Burroughs at The Paris Review Daily. Read his correspondences with family and writers Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer. Pair with Jonathan Clarke’s article on why an author’s biography will never be more important than their writing.
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A National Mission
The new poet laureate of Canada wants to clue his readers in to the prevalence of poetry in their everyday lives. “People often don’t realize they’re surrounded by poetry,” he said in an interview with The Globe and Mail. “At the very least, it’s in the songs they listen to.”
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Does this mean Will Ferrell will play Steve Eisman?
The man who directed such Will Ferrell vehicles as Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and Step Brothers is turning toward the world of finance for his next movie project. That’s right. Adam McKay is adapting Michael Lewis’s The Big Short for the big screen.
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Nabokov on Butterflies
Vladimir Nabokov, who lived a parallel existence as a self-taught expert on butterflies and a Harvard museum curator, has had his theory on butterfly evolution finally proved sixty-five years later. (Thanks, Kevin)
He’ll Ask You For a Napkin
Mallory Ortberg of The Toast, whose Ayn Rand-inspired versions of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and You’ve Got Mail we told you about a few months ago, is back it at again. Now Rand (er, I mean, Ortberg) has her sights set on the dubiously libertarian children’s classic If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. If we give you the article, you’ll probably ask us for an essay by Gary Percesepe about meeting Ayn Rand’s editor to go along with it.