The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just released almost 400,000 high-resolution digital images of its collections. Among them are thousands of illustrations from bygone days when “picture books” were not for children alone. Pair with Buzz Poole‘s reviews of contemporary works of visual literature in The Millions archives, from hand-drawn self-help quotes to politically-charged images of transit in Tehran.
Picture Books
The Congenital List-Maker
In true Seinfeldian fashion, Arthur Martine, the Victorian writer behind Martine’s Handbook of Etiquette, drew up a detailed taxonomy of the various species of bore. These include the Loud Talker, who “silences a whole party by his sole power of lungs;” the Malaprop, who masters the art of inappropriate conversation; and the Life-Sharer, who may be familiar to the Facebook addicts of today.
Oh, and congrats, btw.
“I Didn’t Tell Facebook I’m Engaged, So Why Is It Asking About My Fiancé?” or, FB continues to make people feel a little awkward.
Child of Franco
Warning: There’s another James Franco film coming your way. His latest literary adaptation is of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God. The first trailer features banjo, an ominous voiceover, an edgy Scott Haze, and surprisingly little Franco.
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Paying Hommage
There’s a new literary magazine on the digital shelves. The Neu Jorker is “an hommage d’triomphe” to a magazine with an eerily similar name.
Early Edition
Feel like something’s off with a person you follow on Twitter? They could be time travelers from the future. In The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer writes about a new study, conducted by two physicists, that sought to find social media users with an uncanny knowledge of future events. “It’s not crazy, and yet it feels crazy when you think about it,” says The Hidden Reality author and Columbia professor Brian Greene. You could also take a look at our own journey to the early days of literary Twitter.
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