The Rise and Fall of Dandy

By Sadie Stein

On December 4, 1937, the first edition of children’s comic book The Dandy was published, also marking the first known use of the speech bubble. Today, the magazine’s seventy-fifth anniversary, marks the final print edition of The Dandy. The speech bubble lives on!

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December 4, 2012

Arts & Culture

Reading the Viaduct

By Jessica Vivian Chiu

Starting out for the southern end of the Reading Viaduct means walking alongside a live railroad track, vigilant for the sound of a CSX freight train approaching from behind. Your destination is the mouth of an abandoned tunnel, which will pull you into stretches of almost total darkness thirty feet below ground. You aren’t headed for the tunnel because you love tunnels, but to glimpse the diversity of landscapes that makes up Philadelphia’s Reading Viaduct before it becomes the city’s answer to New York City’s Highline. You are there for the tunnel as much as for what’s on the other side: the promise of meadowland and prairie hiding in plain sight.

The Reading Viaduct may one day become a linear park transecting downtown Philadelphia. Should that happen, the Viaduct would be like no other park in the world. The three-mile stretch runs thirty feet underground at one end and emerges as an elevated line thirty feet above street level on the other. Since the 1980s, it has been abandoned. Sections of the Viaduct may undergo development as early as next year. Read More

December 4, 2012

Look

WPA Wants You to Read

By Sadie Stein

Melville House has a terrific slide show of WPA posters about books and reading. (The Library of Congress has even more!) The art is inspiring enough; the sentiments behind it, even more so. A few of our favorites, below.

Correspondence

William Styron in Letters, Part 2

By William Styron

Rose Burgunder and William Styron.

To John P. Marquand, Jr.

April 17, 1953 Rome, Italy

Dear Jack:

I received your telegram, and I must say that Rose and I feel that there would be nothing more delightful than to play Byron with you for a while, and we were especially intrigued by the line which said a special tour was being arranged, or would be arranged, “in our honor,” which conjured up visions of open, bullet-proof sedans, police escorts, and jonquils being thrown into our faces by a frantic populace. It would indeed be nice. But we have talked this thing over and have decided that in view of the fact that we will probably be getting married within the next few weeks, and that Rose’s brother and wife are expected at any moment, it would put a strain on our nervous resources to come, at least my nervous resources, already depleted by a soggy, constant drunkenness brought on in part by the prospect of marriage, by insomnia, by clots, and by a general spiritual enervation resulting from the realization that already, going on 28, I am a wash-up as a writer and ﬁt only to do the “Recent & Readable” part of the book section in Time. In other words, I will be going through a crisis this spring and although I don’t doubt that Greece is an excellent place to weather such a storm, I hope you can understand my position. I hope also, by the way, that when you ﬁnish diddling your Greek lady-in-waiting you will come back to Rome in time to take part in the shoddy ceremony which is due to be enacted in the city hall. That will be some time toward the end of this month, no doubt, or the ﬁrst week or so in May.

On the Shelf

Selling Psalms, and Other News

By Sadie Stein

Boston’s Old South Church is considering selling the Bay Psalm Book, thought to be the oldest book published in North America. The money would be used to finance repairs to the 1874 building.

On touching Sylvia Plath’s hair, the Plath Symposium, and literary hagiography.

Dispatches from the first Twitter Fiction Festival.

Managing the challenges of preserving the Vatican’s treasures.

The emotional life of books.