One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick Inspired by Zak Smith's (previously) Illustrations for Each Page of Gravity's Rainbow, self-taught artist Matt Kish is posting One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick. Some favourites: 8, 40, 48, 54, 66, 74, and 85. While he's only through about 100 of the Signet Edition's 552 pages, you can follow along on the artist's blog.
posted by synecdoche on Dec 22, 2009 - 29 comments

Henry Miller had always loved art. He first began painting after seeing some Turner prints in a Brooklyn department-store window. There was only one minor drawback: he couldn’t draw. But his best friend, Emil Schnellock, could, and Miller became his disciple. It wasn’t long before he realized that what he lacked in draftsmanship, he made up for in color and composition sense. (previously)
posted by Joe Beese on Dec 8, 2009 - 9 comments

Hey Oscar Wilde! It's Clobberin' Time!!! is a blog featuring gobs of drawings by comic book artists of their favorite literary authors or characters. [via] [more inside]
posted by marxchivist on Nov 6, 2009 - 26 comments

Alasdair Gray is best known as a novelist but his illustrations of his own books have long fascinated and delighted. Here you can see hundreds of artworks by Alasdair Gray, including some book illustrations, from 1950 through 2009. Here are a few of his works that I like: unfinished Scottish Society of Playwrights poster, Nina Watching the Simpsons, Erics Watching Television, Ice Age and Babylonian Science, theatre poster for A Clockwork Orange and the Scots Hippo series. Also on the website there are a lot of articles about and by Alasdair Gray reposted from various publications. And finally, here's a podcast of a talk Alasdair Gray gave called The First Pictures I Enjoyed.
posted by Kattullus on Oct 20, 2009 - 18 comments

"A few months ago, I got an email from Paul Buckley, the wonderful art director at Penguin Classics, who asked if I wanted to illustrate a book cover for him..." Illustrator Michael Cho on designing a cover for Don Delillo's White Noise as part of the Penguin Graphic Classics series, in which prominent comic artists and illustrators create covers for literary classics. All the covers can be found in this flickr set, including Daniel Clowes’s Frankenstein, Candide illustrated by Chris Ware, and Frank Miller's (kind of disappointing) cover for Gravity's Rainbow.
posted by dersins on Sep 21, 2009 - 23 comments

The pictures and sketches of JRR Tolkien
posted by nthdegx on Sep 16, 2009 - 24 comments

Suheir Hammad, a Palestinian-American poet and activist now based in New York, writes about being a Muslim immigrant and also a woman challenging conventions. Spotted by Russell Simmons for Def Poetry Jam, she has performed pieces about love in the time of war, exoticising beauty, and a touching ode to her father, among many others. Suheir has just produced and released her first feature film Salt of This Sea, up for the Cannes Films Festival and possibly an Oscar, and recently performed in Ramallah for the 2009 Palestinian Festival of Literature.
posted by divabat on Jul 7, 2009 - 5 comments

William Gass's personal library. The photos accompany this article by Gass about his love of books -- specifically about collecting them over his life and "living in a library." [more inside]
posted by mattbucher on Apr 8, 2009 - 21 comments

Should you find yourself wandering around the city of Leiden, the Netherlands sometime, you may notice some curious markings on the city's walls.

These Muurgedichten ("Wall Poems") adorn many of the town's streets (clickable map), and many English-language poets are represented: one John Keats, for instance, inside a bookshop; Dylan Thomas, E. E. Cummings, W.B. Yeats, some guy called William Shakespeare, or this ode to Charlie Parker by American William Waring Cuney. [more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Apr 5, 2009 - 15 comments

The Giving Tree (1973), animated short based on Shel Silverstein's 1964 children's story and narrated by the author. [more inside]
posted by the_bone on Mar 18, 2009 - 38 comments

Visual Poetry Today collects various forms of visual poetry, today. It includes Peter Ciccariello, who wraps text around computer-modeled landscapes. [more inside]
posted by mediareport on Jan 20, 2009 - 4 comments

Artists' Books Online is a collection by the University of Virginia of artists' books. Artists' books are works of art that take the form of books and are often both text and visual art. Either way, they're awful interesting to look at. Here are some artbooks to get you started: How to Humiliate Your Peeping Tom by Susan Baker, The Word Made Flesh by Johanna Drucker, Life in a Book by Francois Deschamps, A.A.A.R.P. by Clifton Kirkpatrick Meador, opuntia is just another name for a prickly pear by Todd Walker and Black Dog White Bark by Erica Van Horn
posted by Kattullus on Dec 28, 2008 - 7 comments

The Agrippa Files presents a fairly expansive overview of the original and very rare 1992 art book Agrippa (a book of the dead), a collaboration between artist Dennis Ashbaugh, author William Gibson, and award-winning journalist Kevin Begos, Jr. that presciently explored the ephemeral nature of and decay of memories and information. [more inside]
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Dec 13, 2008 - 11 comments

The Tale of the Heike (Heike Monogatari) is a medieval Japanese account of the rise and fall of the Taira clan and has inspired many other works of art. Click on the chapters and scroll down to see Heike illustrations (or start here), see more art or figures inspired by the Heike. Would you rather read? [more inside]
posted by ersatz on Nov 16, 2008 - 10 comments

Nabokov and the Moment of Truth. VN talks about metaphors of time, great books, and reads the first line of Lolita. [more inside]
posted by mattbucher on Nov 14, 2008 - 18 comments

The Guardian has compiled a list of their top fifty arts videos, the majority being from either rare or obscure sources and uploaded onto YouTube.
posted by djgh on Aug 30, 2008 - 13 comments

ArtMagick is a collection of art and poetry that roughly dates from after the Enlightenment but before Modernism. While the poetry section is extensive the main draw is the sites extensive art collection, which can be browsed by artist, art movement, title, theme or albums created by the site's users. So, forget the summer heat with some chilly pictures of winter, check out famous objects of devotion or search the archive.
posted by Kattullus on Jul 14, 2008 - 5 comments

How to Write With Style.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Jul 13, 2008 - 36 comments

Selections of Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Calligraphy from the collection of The Library of Congress. 373 individual pieces from ranging in time from the 9th to the 19th Century, all explained and some translated. A few personal favorites (note that very high quality scans can be viewed by clicking the appropriate link after clicking thumbnail): marriage decree, verses on tragic love, practice sheet, verses 10-11 of the 48th chapter of the Qur'an, poetic verses offering advice, frontispiece of Qur'anic exegesis and quatrain by Rumi. There are also four special presentations: Calligraphers of the Persian Tradition, Ottoman Calligraphers and Their Works, Qur’anic Fragments and Noteworthy Items. This last presentation also features representational art, for instance images of The battle of Mazandaran and the Persian king Bahram Gur hunting.
posted by Kattullus on May 12, 2008 - 11 comments

Martha Nussbaum reviews three recent books on Shakespeare and philosophy. The essay offers an excellent analysis of love in Antony and Cleopatra and Othello, and an excellent discussion of the interaction between philosophy and literature. [more inside]
posted by painquale on May 5, 2008 - 17 comments

Kumeyaay.info welcomes visitors and indigenous peoples of all tribal nations and provides a casual village environment to share and network their culturally relevant creative work, information and opinions. (previously)
posted by netbros on May 2, 2008 - 2 comments

The Modernist Journals Project collects literary arts journals from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including both issues of Wyndham Lewis' Vorticist manifesto Blast, the first ten years of Poetry magazine (with Amy Lowell, T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton and foreign correspondent Ezra Pound), topical essays, the Virginia Woolf-inspired December 1910 Project, the amazing proto-dada zine Le Petit Journal des Réfusées and a searchable biographical database of famous and not so famous artists and writers.
posted by mediareport on Apr 28, 2008 - 10 comments

Shepard Fairey's cover art for Penguin releases of 1984 & Animal Farm.
posted by jonson on Apr 13, 2008 - 29 comments

MOMA has around 400 images from its collection of illustrated books available online. It's heavy on the works of the early 20th Century European avant-garde, especially the Russian Futurists, though it extends into the present day. Here are a few of the images that I liked: Aleksei Krucenykh and Kirill Zdanevich, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Olga Rozanova, Ekaterina Turova, El Lissitzky, Max Ernst, Raymond Pettibon, Vasily Kandinsky and Natalia Goncharova. [more inside]
posted by Kattullus on Dec 13, 2007 - 11 comments

Curiosities of Literature by Isaac D'Israeli (1766-1848). [more inside]
posted by homunculus on Oct 26, 2007 - 9 comments

The Hans Christian Andersen Digital Collections of the Odense City Museums includes his drawings, papercuts, picture books and collage screens as well as portraits of him and people he knew, manuscripts, pictures of his study and more. If you wish to read his fairytales might I suggest the illustrated Oxford Complete Edition Fairy Tales And Other Stories from 1914.
posted by Kattullus on Sep 7, 2007 - 7 comments

A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust - an overview of the people and events of the Holocaust through photographs, documents, art, music, and literature. It is designed to prepare K-12 teachers to approach this sensitive topic. The content is presented from three perspectives: Timeline, People, and The Arts. Produced by the University of South Florida.
posted by netbros on Aug 29, 2007 - 7 comments

Max Dohle's Stapelgedichten is a simple concept. Stack up some books, take a picture: a poem is born. Most are in Dutch, but there are some English ones as well.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Jul 24, 2007 - 36 comments

Alasdair Gray 0-70 2004 BBC Artworks Scotland film made on the occasion of Glasgow artist and author's (best known for Lanark) seventieth birthday. Also a short clip and another film on his mural work as embedded Youtubery at his site. (Previously.)
posted by Abiezer on Jul 17, 2007 - 19 comments

The Book of Job, as illustrated by William Blake, in high resolution. He was 68 when he finished it in 1826, but died the following year before he could finish giving Dante's "Inferno" the same treatment. (Complete Blake Archive.)
posted by hermitosis on Jul 12, 2007 - 25 comments

Joyce Images—postcards of Ulysses. [A little backstory.]
posted by cortex on Apr 2, 2007 - 26 comments

Sexual Fables. Western philosophy, literature, and thought from a distaff point of view. Full of multidisciplinary goodness, and the intertextuality is pretty neat. The art's pretty good, too.
posted by John of Michigan on Nov 27, 2006 - 3 comments

Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie [via]
posted by mediareport on Nov 6, 2006 - 16 comments

What Good Are the Arts? asks John Carey’s recent book of the same name. The New Criterion think Carey’s thesis is informed by cynical political motives rather than earnest convictions, and accuses Carey of dabbling in the risky art of aesthetic relativism: Obviously, art is ultimately about “the search for truth” (a lesson we’d do well to remember before society falls apart). But as Carey and others point out to the contrary, the Third Reich was all about art—and yet, art under the Third Reich had precious little to do with “searching for truth.” So just what good are the arts? Here’s what a few others have to say on the subject.
posted by saulgoodman on Oct 4, 2006 - 45 comments

William Blake's Grave. Museums and galleries only have a few weeks left to save William Blake’s long-lost watercolour illustrations accompanying Robert Blair’s poem “The Grave”, before they are dispersed at auction in New York on 2 May.
posted by matteo on Mar 17, 2006 - 25 comments

3quarksdaily. Just another blog, sure, but a good one. 3quarksdaily is a filter blog much like our very own, but with only 15 users (and an editor). As they say on their about page "On this website, my guest authors and editors and I hope to present interesting items from around the web on a daily basis, in the areas of science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else we deem inherently fascinating." The do an admirable job.
posted by panoptican on Dec 6, 2005 - 26 comments

The Language of Saxophones At 55, L.A. musician and poet Kamau Daáood is finally beginning to acknowledge the possibility of his own place in local letters with his debut book of poetry, The Language of Saxophones, a 30-plus-year retrospective published by City Lights. Though he’s recorded a solo CD and read nationally and internationally, Daáood had never seen fit to collect his material in a book. Until now. “I never liked the idea of poetry sitting on a shelf somewhere, lost in all those book spines”.
posted by matteo on Apr 17, 2005 - 2 comments

"For ordinary books are like meteors. Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes. With bitter resignation we sometimes wander late at night through the extinct pages that tell their stone dead messages like wooden rosary beads."
posted by felix betachat on Apr 8, 2005 - 6 comments

The Great Book of Gaelic. Illustrated poetry.
posted by plep on Mar 14, 2005 - 15 comments

Traditional Russian fairytales with beautiful illustrations depicting scenes from the stories.
posted by gregb1007 on Feb 23, 2005 - 9 comments

Pygmalion stories in literature and art. The myth of the scuptor who fell in love with a statue and prayed for it to be brought to life.
Related :- Galatea, a piece of interactive fiction which allows you to interact with a interpretation of the living statue (by Emily Short); Wikipedia entry on the myth.
posted by plep on Feb 21, 2005 - 10 comments

Tis the Season -- a new short story from China Mieville, just in time for the Holidays™ ... Don't get me wrong. I haven't got shares in YuleCo™, and I can't afford a one-day end-user licence, so I couldn't have a legal party. I'd briefly considered buying from one of the budget competitors like XmasTym, or a spinoff from a non-specialist like Coca-Crissmas, but the idea of doing it on the cheap was just depressing...
posted by amberglow on Dec 23, 2004 - 14 comments

The best web mag you've never heard of. This is a truly GREAT collection of essays, written by a bunch of famous and not-so-famous folks. Updated twice a month. You will not get any work done today. One of those "bookmark immediately" sites!
posted by braun_richard on Nov 30, 2004 - 9 comments

Thackeray's 'Chronicle of the Drum' , illustrated.
posted by plep on Nov 16, 2004 - 3 comments

Rare Books. Links to virtual exhibitions, 1991-present.
posted by plep on Oct 3, 2004 - 2 comments

William S. Burroughs demonstrates his cut-up method in this excellent film sequence.
(.swf, 10mb, related discussion)
posted by moonbird on Sep 27, 2004 - 19 comments

heartwarmingfilter: Alice's Adventures under Ground, Lewis Carroll's illustrated first edition. (via SomeRandomRomanian)
posted by Pretty_Generic on Jul 16, 2004 - 19 comments

Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls.
posted by hama7 on Dec 6, 2003 - 7 comments

These people make for some "Interesting Motherfuckers."
posted by the biscuit man on Nov 28, 2003 - 17 comments

The Dance of Death. Die Totentanz: A German-language site spotlighting, for example, the dance of death in literature, graphic art, music and film. For those, like me, whose German is not so good, this page offers an English-language history of the phenomenon, and the Catholic Encyclopedia has an article too. See also Holbein's Dance-of-Death; Lübeck's Dance-of-Death; and umm, this.
posted by misteraitch on Jul 3, 2003 - 14 comments