Most people know Alexandre Dumas for his classics (usually assigned as required reading for class) The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, but fewer people are aware of what he considered his masterwork: Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine. This giant tome was part memoir, part encyclopedia, part cookbook. Rohini Chaki at Atlas Obscura describes the project as “more than a cookbook. Dumas meant it to be a formidable inquiry into both gustation and gastronomy, utilized by enthusiasts and culinary professionals alike.”
Alexandre Dumas in the Kitchen
Competence without comprehension
If you read one piece on early computer scientist Alan Turing that’s come out in celebration of his 100th birthday last Saturday (if you were wondering about Friday’s Google Doodle) you might do very well to make it this one in the Atlantic on how his reading of Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution influenced his work and continues to shape the way we work with computers. It’s also about the limits of artificial intelligence.
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A Feast for Your Eyes
As an appetizer, consider Rick Poyner’s take on the work of Pierre Faucheux, a book designer Richard Hollis called “the single most important figure in French graphic design after Cassandre.” For the main course, check out this incredible Book Cover Archive edited and maintained by Ben Pieratt and Eric Jacobsen. Finally, as dessert, nominate your favorite book designs from 2011 for Design Observer’s “50 Books/50 Covers” contest.
True Coffeeshop Story
“Literary interviews became popular in the eighteen-eighties, but Richard Altick, the late professor of Victorian literature at Ohio State University, traces the public fascination with writers’ homes at least as far back as the eighteen-forties, when there was a vogue for books describing the houses and landscapes of famous authors, complete with engravings and, later, photographs.” On the strangeness of literary celebrity.
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Introducing Flannery O’Connor
Adrian Van Young at Electric Literature has compiled a reading primer for the works of Flannery O’Connor. Pair with Nick Rapatrazone’s Millions essay on teaching and learning from “the greatest American writer ever to load up a typewriter.”
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A Different Time
Last week, I wrote about the disparity between Norman Rockwell’s inner life and the cheerful art that made the painter famous. In the new issue of The Atlantic, James Parker writes about the “unconscious energy” of Rockwell’s work, while on the magazine’s website, Jennie Rothenberg Gritz republishes an old article that examines how Rockwell’s style could seem outdated even in the fifties.
Brave New Serial
Margaret Atwood’s got a new book called Positron out, and she’s going digital: the novel is being published serially via Byliner.