#invisible cities

[thebeautifulbook]

INVISIBLE CITIES by Italo Calvino. [San Diego: Harvest, 1972]

Art Binding by Dmitri Koutsipetsidis, He’s known for his great bindings on FRANKENSTEIN, THE WASTELAND, THE HOBBIT, THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

source — about the design

source — read

[dandelionjack]

WHAT IS A DREAM CITY? what it says on the tin — an urban environment that you have involuntarily visited multiple, repeated times in dreams. to be a dream city, it must not be a real-life place, whether one you have physically travelled to/lived in or one that you have seen videos of.

doesn’t need to look “alien”. mine, though some of the architecture is quite distinctive, resembles a southern european city, with most of the structures seeming 19th century

the storylines that play out and characters which feature may vary, but the setting crucially must remain the same or at least very similar. certain recurring locations must be present (buildings, streets, landmarks, a river, a bar — for me at least, but once again these locations could be anything in your personal experience).

you will find that, despite logically never having “been” here in reality, you always know where to go, as if you’re a long-term resident or at least a well-prepared tourist.

the public transport is usually weird. for me it’s mostly a winding system of subway networks, complex and misleading like a labyrinth, naturally. what’s a dream city without a maze

so, that’s enough detail for you to know which button to vote for by now. no nuance. either you drop by the dream city on the regular or you don’t.

reblog for reach. and no i don’t have a clue on what i’m planning to do with the results, thanks for asking

[calliop-e]

Italo Calvino, from Invisible Cities

[watermotif]

CITIES & THE DEAD 2

Never in all my travels had I ventured as far as Adelma. It was dusk when I landed there. On the dock the sailor who caught the rope and tied it to the bollard resembled a man who had soldiered with me and was dead. It was the hour of the wholesale fish market. An old man was loading a basket of sea urchins on a cart; I thought I recognized him; when I turned, he had disappeared down an alley, but I realized that he looked like a fisherman who, already old when I was a child, could no longer be among the living. I was upset by the sight of a fever victim huddled on the ground, a blanket over his head: my father a few days before his death had yellow eyes and a growth of beard like this man. I turned my gaze aside; I no longer dared look anyone in the face.

I thought: 'If Adelma is a city I am seeing in a dream, where you encounter only the dead, the dream frightens me. If Adelma is a real city, inhabited by living people, I need only continue looking at them and the resemblances will dissolve, alien faces will appear, bearing anguish. In either case it is best for me not to insist on staring at them.

A vegetable vendor was weighing a cabbage on a scales and put it in a basket dangling on a string a girl lowered from a balcony. The girl was identical with one in my village who had gone mad for love and killed herself. The vegetable vendor raised her face: she was my grandmother.

I thought: 'You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.'

The stevedores climbed the steps in a line, bent beneath demijohns and barrels; their faces were hidden by sackcloth hoods; 'Now they will straighten up and I will recognize them,' I thought, with impatience and fear. But I could not take my eyes off them; if I turned my gaze just a little towards the crowd that crammed those narrow streets, I was assailed by unexpected faces, reappearing from far away, staring at me as if demanding recognition, as if to recognize me, as if they had already recognized me. Perhaps, for each of them, I also resembled someone who was dead. I had barely arrived at Adelma and I was already one of them, I had gone over to their side, absorbed in that kaleidoscope of eyes, wrinkles, grimaces.

I thought: 'Perhaps Adelma is the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known. This means I, too, am dead.' And I also thought: 'This means the beyond is not happy.'

italo calvino, invisible cities (tr. by william weaver)

[andmaybegayer]

The Rumor Come Out: Does Marco Polo and Kublai Khan is Gay?

[malojasnake]

— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

[regicidal-defenestration]

[vuenville]

Photo credit David Cousin Marsy

Invisibles cities

[etudiantfantome]

Invisible Cities

[momentojorie]

an old art assignment from undergrad where I had to draw some of the scenes from italo calvino's novel invisible cities

[teethburied]

…A Valparaíso (1963) dir. Joris Ivens

[eelartdump]

Fedora, from Invisible Cities

[neutron669]

Invisibile Cities of Italo Calvino by Dave McKean

[fishingforwords]

the world was made for us to see.

oxford english dictionary || italo calvino, invisible cities || team cherry, hollow knight || henry david thoreau, walden || one piece || eurythmics, sweet dreams (are made of this) || mary oliver, wild geese || bill watterson, calvin and hobbes

[thebeautifulbook]

INVISIBLE CITIES by Italo Calvino (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1974) Art Binding by Erin Fletcher of Herringbone Gallery.

‘French-style fine binding with laced-in boards. Top half bound in dark grey buffalo skin with bottom half bound in light grey buffalo skin. Various onlays in green leather and suede, ruby faux suede, stone veneer and mutli-layered palladium pieces adorn the top half. Bottom is embroidered in matching cotton floss. Lines tooled in palladium on top half and left blind on bottom half. Edges decorated with graphite. Top half of fore edge and head gilt with palladium. Hand-sewn double cored French endbands. Edge-to-center doublure in dark grey and light grey buffalo skin. Top half tooled in cosmos (front) and dome (back). Bottom half embroidered in matching cotton floss and blind tooled in Cancer (front) and Pisces (back) constellation. Gilded cork paper flyleave. Endpapers are granite Cave Paper and Hahnemuhle Ingres in light grey.

Book is housed in a clamshell box covered with green goatskin and stone veneer. Leather spine embroidered with star in matching cotton floss and onlays matching binding. Title and author's name stamped in silver foil. Trays covered in handmade Katie MacGregor paper in aqua green and lined in ruby suede.’ — from the bindery site

source [book]