January 10, 2014 Look Fear and Loathing in Wonderland By Dan Piepenbring From Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, illustrated by Ralph Steadman, 1973. Via Brain Pickings. Ralph Steadman’s febrile and slightly sinister take on Alice in Wonderland, published in 1973 and exhumed today by Brain Pickings, will make you think twice before using the phrase “Cheshire Cat grin.”
January 8, 2014 Look Ice—It’s More Than Just Frozen Water! By Dan Piepenbring Lower Glacière of the Pré de S. Livres, 1865, an illustration from Ice-caves of France and Switzerland. If ice has lost all its wonder and the world feels to you like little more than a refrigerated truck, spend a few minutes with Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland: A Narrative of Subterranean Exploration, George Forrest Browne’s 1865 account of his journeys into the glacières of Chappet-sur-Villaz, La Genollière, and other such exotic Continental locales. The book’s tone is, as its title might suggest, implacably British, and Browne makes for an almost risibly agreeable narrator. The man simply loves to describe ice. It did not separate under the axe into misshapen pieces, with faces of every possible variation from regularity, that is, with what is called vitreous fracture, but rather separated into a number of nuts of limpid ice, each being of a prismatic form, and of much regularity in shape and size. A contemporary reader might expect some harrowing brush with fate, but this is not Into Thin Air. Browne is largely content to stay out of harm’s way: It would be very imprudent to go straight into an ice-cave after a long walk on a hot summer’s day, so we prepared to dine under the shade of the trees at the edge of the pit, and I went down into the cave for a few moments to get a piece of ice for our wine. And lest you tire of his meticulous accounts of ice formations, you’ll find relief in the more mundane details of his travelogue: A counter-irritant appeared in the shape of a fellow-traveller, whose luggage consisted of a stick and an old pair of boots. The man was not pleasant to be near in any way, and he was evidently not at all satisfied with the amount of room I allowed him. He kept discontentedly and doggedly pushing his spare pair of boots farther and farther into my two-thirds of the seat, and once or twice was on the point of a protest, in which case I was prepared to tell him that as he filled the whole banquette with his smell, he ought in reason to be satisfied with less room for himself.
January 3, 2014 Look Truth in Advertising By Dan Piepenbring As the Northeast is battered by “Winter Storm Hercules”—a nor’easter all but destined to enter Wikipedia’s list of notable nor’easters—one public library has provided succor, sort of. In Hopkinton, Massachusetts, a redditor came across this sign; to its great credit, it suggests neither burning books, nor reading erotica aloud, nor any other heat-generating gimmickry. Rather, it stands as a stark, charmingly blunt reminder that though literature may warm the soul, it will never warm the body. Curl up with a good book today, but don’t try to be a hero: curl up with a blanket, too.
December 19, 2013 Look, Our Daily Correspondent This Author Hates His Book’s Cover By Sadie Stein “I was realistic about the book’s marketing … it was, after all, a memoir about some cats, and no state-of-the-nation literary epic. Nonetheless, Simon & Schuster’s birthday-cardish cover—an anonymous actor kitten sitting in a pair of jeans, against a sky-blue background—seemed a curious choice.” —Tom Cox
December 19, 2013 Look, Our Daily Correspondent If Looks Could Kill By Sadie Stein Melville House captions this “vintage bookmobile drama,” and we challenge you to imagine exactly what was going through the brunette’s head. Or, more to the point, why.
December 18, 2013 Look Tragic, Indeed By Sadie Stein If selfie was the word of the year, can the slightly more literary shelfie be far behind? Nothing if not forward-thinking, Neil Gaiman legitimizes it on WhoSay: “A tragic shelfie. We are preparing to move. The books are in boxes…”