Advertisement

Sign In

Your Job Is Totally Meaningful, and Other News

By

On the Shelf

ZUunJ

Keep working!

  • “A rare first edition of Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds belonging to Frances Currer, the woman believed to have inspired Charlotte Brontë’s pseudonym of Currer Bell, has come to light.” That’s fine news. But it gets better: Currer’s edition includes “an engraving which depicts someone urinating out of a cowshed [which] was considered rather coarse by some contemporaries and was bowdlerized in some copies but is untouched in this.”
  • Since Hitler’s death in 1945, Germany has barred any and all reprinting of Mein Kampf. But that ban is soon to expire, and the first new German edition of the book in some seventy years is on its way. “The new edition is a heavily annotated volume in its original German that is stirring an impassioned debate over history, anti-Semitism and the latent power of the written word … Rather than a how-to guidebook for the aspiring fascist, the new reprint, the group said this month, will instead be a vital academic tool, a 2,000-page volume packed with more criticisms and analysis than the original text.”
  • Galleries are great for displaying and selling your art—but they’re getting better at losing it, too. We live in a Golden Age of misplaced artworks. “As art prices rise, gallerists are less likely to keep all the art consigned to them on their own premises, because of safety and insurance costs … There’s also been a boom in mega-big-box galleries that have multiple locations in one city, or around the world, occasioning traveling exhibitions. Add to this the fact that many pieces, on inventory lists at least, look nearly identical, and you see the problem.”
  • Today in insidious, nihilistic capitalist ploys: “Faced with a cadre of young workers who say they want to make a difference in addition to a paycheck, employers are trying to inject meaning into the daily grind, connecting profit-driven endeavors to grand consequences for mankind.” KPMG, an accounting firm, launched a new video encouraging employees to see themselves as “bricklayers or cathedral builders.” One employee said “it got him thinking about the lack of meaning in his day job.”
  • Alice Munro on Dickens’s A Child’s History of England: “This was the first book I ever read … in the sense that I had a private vision of what I was reading about—unexpected, incommunicable, painfully exciting.”