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: Literature
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.
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.
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.
Medieval cat poetry
Pangur Bán was an Irish monk’s cat in 9th century Germany; we know this cat’s name because the monk wrote a poem about him. Even though this poem was written more than a thousand years ago, Pangur Bán was not the first named cat in history.
Cryptographic magic
Steganographia is a late 15th / early 16th century German book of magic… but it’s not actually about magic.
Mythical Indian Ocean continent
Before we knew about plate tectonics, a zoologist proposed a lost continent connecting Madagascar and India across the Indian Ocean. That hypothesis, now debunked, was nevertheless picked up by Theosophists and Tamil revivalists.
The history of The History of King Lear
From 1681 to 1838, performances of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy King Lear had a happy ending.
Original cliffhanger
Cliffhangers have been a staple of serialised fiction for centuries, but the first literal cliffhanger appears in an 1873 novel by Thomas Hardy.
An Anglo-Saxon in Middle Earth
In an early version of J. R. R. Tolkien’s stories, the tales of Middle Earth are brought to our world by Ottor Wǽfre, who would go on to be the father of both the author of Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain.
Don’t forget to breathe
People with central hypoventilation syndrome, also known as Ondine’s curse, can forget to breathe.
Redacted art book
From 1966 until 2016, English artist Tom Phillips created a new story out of the Victorian novel A Human Document; he did not add any words, but selectively drew or painted over each of its pages to surface something entirely new.
Deciphering a secret society manual
Around 1730 a German secret society recorded their initiation rituals in an encrypted manuscript. In 2011, that cipher was finally decoded.
Indigenous appropriation
Iron Eyes Cody portrayed Native American characters in more than 200 films and the famous “Crying Indian” TV ad. Red Thunder Cloud and Jamake Highwater presented themselves as experts on Native American culture. None of them were actually indigenous.
The author of Aladdin
Neither Aladdin nor Ali Baba were in the original Thousand and One Nights (aka the Arabian Nights). The tales first appeared in the French translation, probably from a Syrian Christian storyteller named Hanna Diyab who lived in Paris from 1708 to 1710.
November 22, 1963
John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley, and C. S. Lewis all died the same day. The following day, Doctor Who premiered.
The Generalist Academy 