The book arcade
Around the end of the 19th century, Melbourne, Australia, hosted one of the biggest – and certainly the most carnivalesque – bookstores in the world: Cole’s Book Arcade.
Category: Arts
Wordless novels and motionless movies
Novels have words and films move. But some creators have resisted even these conventions, creating novels without writing and films without motion.
Art before art
Humans have been making figurative art for at least forty thousand years – but we may have been carrying “found” art around for much longer.
Star Wars disco
At the 1978 Grammy Awards, in the category Best Pop Instrumental Performance, John Williams’ famous Star Wars soundtrack faced off against… a disco funk cover of the Star Wars soundtrack that had outsold and out-charted the original.
Fantasy revised
In the original edition of The Hobbit, Gollum was willing to give up the ring; before 1994 the American and British editions of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader were different; Madame Mim was removed from The Sword and the Stone for its 1958 reissue.
Happiest meal
McDonald’s iconic Happy Meal came to us via a Chilean-Guatemalan restauranteur, a Missouri advertising agent, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Breeches of The Last Judgment
After Michelangelo’s death, his friend Daniele da Volterra was employed by the Vatican to paint over the genitalia of the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgment.
The band prophecy
In the mid-20th century, Austin Wiggin’s mother predicted that her son would have daughters, and those daughters would form a famous band. He did, and they did, in the most surprising way possible.
Indian flag monopoly
Every Indian flag in India is made in one small south Indian village.
Blanket heater table
The Japanese kotatsu combines a table, a heater, and a layer of comfortable blankets.
Horned Moses
Michelangelo’s statue of Moses has horns, thanks to a mistranslation in the Latin Vulgate Bible.
Scavenger cistern
The Basilica Cistern in Istanbul is an underground underwater forest of 336 huge marble columns. It was built in the 6th century CE, but parts are much older – because they were scavenged from other buildings, sometimes with original sculptures intact.
German troublemakers
In the 1865 German children’s book Max and Moritz, the titular troublemakers blow up a teacher, are baked in an oven, and finally get ground up in a flour mill and eaten by ducks.
First piano
The arpicembalo (harp-harpsichord) of Bartolomeo Cristofori could play notes both loud and quiet, which the harpsichord could not. It was the first piano.
The Phony King of England
Disney’s Robin Hood features a song about the “Phony King of England.” That song is based on an old (and very bawdy) English folk ballad about “The Bastard King of England.”
Buried film history
In 1978 a cache of five hundred film reels was discovered under an ice rink in Dawson City, Yukon. These buried reels included the only copy of films that had been lost for decades.