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All the Colors in One Convenient Location, and Other News

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On the Shelf

colors-4

From A. Boogert’s Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau, 1692. Image via Colossal

  • In the late seventeenth century, long before the age of Sherwin Williams and Pantone, a Dutch artist known as A. Boogert (!) compiled Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau, an eight-hundred-page compendium of paint and color.
  • The literary critic Randall Jarrell also wrote five children’s books—several of them illustrated by Maurice Sendak. “The Bat-Poet is the sweetish story of a bat who longs to stay up during the day and sing the song of the mockingbird; to his delight, he discovers that he himself can be a songster … ‘on the willow’s highest branch, monopolizing / Day and night, cheeping, squeaking, soaring / The mockingbird is imitating life.’”
  • Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has acquired Harlequin, whose romances offer “empathetic insight into contemporary cultures.”
  • EBay is launching a “digital magazine” at “the intersection of retail and publishing.” The president of eBay marketplaces, Devin Wenig, says, “We’re now in the content business … for the first time, eBay has a voice. We’re telling stories. We have an editor. We have curators. And we have writers on-staff.  You’ll see that evolve to some longer-form stories, some really beautiful pictures… It’s media-like.” He adds: “We’re entering a post-mobile age now,” he said. “Mobile is so important that it’s almost silly to talk about mobile.” (By the way, did you know The Paris Review has recently unveiled our new mobile site?)
  • In Paris, to “lock in their love,” tourist couples put locks on the Pont des Arts and other bridges—which would be an innocuous tradition, as far as these things go, except it makes the bridges ugly and dangerous. Two unlikely Americans are trying to end the practice.