[Editor's note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we'll spend the next two weekends revisiting some of our most popular features of the year. This post was originally published July 26, 2011.] All it takes is a single image to evoke our favorite Grimm’s fairy tales and other childhood stories: Rapunzel’s golden braid, the Cheshire Cat’s toothy grin in Alice in Wonderland, Snow White’s poison apple. These are the stars of Christian Jackson’s minimalist kids-book posters, which provide a refreshing alternative to the loud, busy Disney-style design of most entertainment-inspired children’s decor. Although most of these affordable prints would look great in a tot’s bedroom (despite Jackson’s disclaimer that “not all images are appropriate for children”), we wouldn’t be embarrassed to hang them in our apartment, either. Take a look at the series after the jump, and click here to buy a poster.
Let’s face it: sometimes it’s hard to buy a book for your favorite book nerd. After all, you know you’re supposed to give them a Serious Literary Novel, but they’ve probably read every book you’ve ever heard of, and then some — or at least that’s how it feels sometimes. So for those of you with a book lover who’s read everything under the sun on your holiday list, we’ve put together a gift guide full of art, tools, and trinkets sure to please any literary nerd. Click through to see our list of gifts and help your favorite reader proclaim their love for the written word this year. Read More »
Penguin has long been the gold standard for book cover design. But they really outdid themselves with Penguin Bond, a 2008 series of reprints decorated with sexy, mildly psychedelic, ’60s- and ’70s-retro portraits of each novel’s iconic Bond girl. Designed by Michael Gillette, the alluring images are now on offer as limited-edition prints, available in a variety of sizes and prices from San Francisco’s Electric Works – the perfect gift for the Bond aficionado (or stylish horndog) in your life. Click through for a gallery of our favorite covers, and visit the project’s website to see the rest.
Now that Christmas shopping season is in full effect, it’s time for your Flavorwire editors to swing into public service mode. Yes, yes, all the lists and links and commentary are fun, we know you’re saying, but where are the shopping tips? What do I get my movie-obsessed cousin Donovan? Do I have to actually communicate with him to find out what he wants? Those phone calls always last twice as long as I want them to, and his breathing patterns are disturbing! Fear no more, gentle reader, for after the jump, you’ll find a collection of films and books guaranteed to warm the hearts of your film fan relatives on Christmas morning, which they’ll enjoy to the fullest before fleeing the premises to catch the 1:20 matinee of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Check them out and add your own after the jump! Read More »
It always feels like we’re pining for more free time during the holiday hustle, but often, when we’re faced with a few days at home to ourselves, we’re too spent to figure out how to enjoy them. Inspired by the release of the all-new Madden NFL 12 from our friends at EA Sports, we decided to spotlight some rewarding holiday activities you can enjoy in your newly discovered down time. Whether you’ve been celebrating Thanksgiving at home this year by choice or by consequence, we’ve come up with ten ways (Madden included) to keep you entertained — and none of them involve stepping foot out the front door. Read More »
Ever wonder what your favorite book looked like when it was first published? While many classics — The Great Gatsby, Catch-22 — have retained their iconic, original covers over the years, others have changed with the times. As a follow up to last week’s roundup of famous magazines’ first covers, we’ve compiled 20 beautiful, surprising, or otherwise notable first covers of classic novels that we’d never seen before. See a surprisingly minimalist The Age of Innocence, a painful-looking The Sound and the Fury, the design that preceded A Clockwork Orange‘s famous ’70s cover, and many more, in chronological order after the jump. Read More »
Imagine a grain of rice — picture its width and height. Now, imagine an art installation that consists of penning book chapters word by word on the über-tiny grains. New York City-based artist Trong G. Nguyen took on this incredibly ambitious endeavor to honor literary greats in a series entitled Library, for which he hand-writes an inconceivable amount of words on rice using a fine-point technical pen — sans magnifying glass. Although the project took off back in 2007, Nguyen has continued to expand on it, recreating the words of writers such as Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Roland Barthes.
“Several years ago, I decided to write the entirety of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time word for word on grains of rice – about 1.5 million words, ” Nguyen explained in an interview with AHAlife. “The intent is to house all the grains of my ‘translation’ in a single, giant hourglass, where the rice kernels replace grains of sand. This project will take at least a few more years to complete. In the meantime, I decided to do smaller versions of this project by writing singular chapters or complete texts from shorter works, usually of books in my own library. A collector friend subsequently commissioned me to do the first chapters of his seven favorite books, and that’s how the project’s evolved.”
Check out Nguyen’s artistic ode to literature below and learn more about his work over at his website. Read More »
There comes a time in a TV show’s life when the plot line takes a turn for the literary; a fictional character hunkers down and authors a book. Some are guidebooks, others are self-help books, but they all share one crucial quality: they’re not real. These authors don’t exist in real life, so how could their books? Well — sometimes, just sometimes, our real world is graced with a fake book’s tangible, published, purchasable presence. But, not always — so we’ve gathered some awesomely fake books from TV that you can actually buy, and a few others that we hope will be available one day. Because, well, who wouldn’t want to read Liz Lemon’s Dealbreakers: A Girl’s Guide to Shutting it Down from cover to cover? Or proudly display Cosmo Kramer’s The Coffee Table Book of Coffee Tables on their own coffee table? Read on for some fake TV fiction, and let us know your other favorites.
As popular, contemporary authors go, few offer story lines as imaginative or images as vivid as Haruki Murakami’s. So it was exciting to learn, via Super Punch, that the LVMH-affiliated design site Nowness is running a competition for the best original art inspired by Murakami’s work in advance of the English-language publication of his newest novel, 1Q84. Now that the entries are in, readers have been invited to vote, and six winners will be crowned on October 25th. We’ve posted a selection of our favorite pieces — which range from photos to paintings to book-cover designs — after the jump.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are known for their all-encompassing installations — like the awesomely spooky one they did for Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, Pandemonium. This 2008 piece, The House of Books Has No Windows, is an installation of a house, made entirely out of antique books. Commissioned by Modern Art Oxford and the Fruitmarket Gallery, the house was created to offer ” … a space of infinite possibility where nothing may be read yet everything imagined. The work has no windows and in the absence of external stimulation, we must imagine the worlds of the books, and hear the voice in our head that talks to us when we read.” The piece was constructed over three week’s time and is composed of four different library collections gathered from across Scotland. As the video after the jump details, these books were going to be pulped, but Cardiff and Miller have rescued them to use as bricks for their house. Click on to find out how it was constructed.
