#moveable book

[upennmanuscripts]

It's not a manuscript, but this tunnel book depicting a promenade on the Champs-Élysées is still pretty cool (Rare Book Collection GV1525 .T86 1836). The place and publisher aren't known, and it was made no earlier than 1836. The video is by Chris Lippa, Digital Imaging Specialist at Penn Libraries.

This book is featured in the video loop for THE MOVEMENT OF BOOKS, an exhibit about all the ways that books move. You can watch the whole loop on YouTube, and if you're in Philadelphia before December 13 you can see the exhibit in person.

Link to Record 🔗:

The Movement of Books Video Loop 🔗:

The Movement of Books exhibit information 🔗:

[emeralddss]

studying at the library and new books <3

[cyclogenesis]

✨ per @some-stars request, the F. Scott Fitzgerald part of my review of Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast:

After chapter upon chapter of events ranging from "I went to the cafe to write and an annoying guy talked to me" to "I was hanging out with this famous writer and he was such a dweeb lol, believe me I'm a normal guy myself and very qualified to judge everyone I meet" to "I went to the cafe to write but then got drunk. Crazy that I'm so broke" we eventually got to my favorite part, where Hemingway meets F. Scott Fitzgerald and gets so mad at himself for having the gayest possible feelings a man can have that he just has to be a passive-aggressive bitch about it for several thousand words.

TO BE FAIR: F. Scott Fitzgerald is a manic pixie nightmare girl. He's Kylie Jenner writing the Great American Novel. He's my personal series of exciting-but-horrible Aries situationships/girlfriends that I chased throughout my teens and twenties. He and Zelda saw you from across the speakeasy and they like your vibe. Do you want to have the most bad idea threesome imaginable? It involves a magnum of champagne and screaming at each other until you pass out. That's how they fuck. Yes he just asked if you had sex with your wife before marriage. That was his pick-up line. He is a lunatic. He is Zelda's disagreeable wife. You wish that Scott was your OWN disagreeable wife. He has undiagnosed ADHD and a drinking problem (related?). You are never bored with him. God, you wish sometimes you could just be bored with him. He's asking you to rate his dick. You, Ernest Hemingway, take a look at his dick and give him a fair rating (7.5?). You take him to the Louvre to look at statues of naked Greek and Roman twinks and you're literally like, "maybe you're a grower, not a show-er." You tell him his wife sucks. Ernest you old queen. You butch little TEASE.

F! Scott! Fitzgerald! Sorry, this is all because I'm jealous that Hemingway got to hate himself while flirting with My Most Horrible Boy. And it's here that the book comes most ALIVE, that it becomes ABOUT something other than a broke guy in Paris trying to write a book. Finally, instead of just being about ol' Hem secretly disdaining every person that tries to have a conversation with him, we get Hemingway wanting somebody, wanting their attention and regard and time, and it's a delicious disaster. Scott's a wreck, a disappointment, a drunk; Scott's gorgeous, dazzling, and so full of talent Ernest is SEETHING ABOUT IT. They chase each other like carousel horses. It's a clown show. Scott lovebombs him when he's not too drunk to forget to, and whines about missing Zelda when Ernest won't take the hint and kiss him already.

Something very funny about all this is that at the time Ernest was about 25 years old, and Scott - who Ernest thought of, at the time, as "an older writer" - was all of 28. So it makes sense to me that much of this section reads like an @ Zola-esque Twitter thread combined with a Tana Mongeau YouTube storytime video: Romantic Road Trip with F. SCOTT FITZGERALD?! (The Beautiful and DRUNK! not clickbait!) "Hi guys, welcome to my memoir or welcome BACK to my memoir. Before we get into it, don't forget to like and subscribe, and comment down below to let me know if you'd like more storytimes about me being a deeply repressed bisexual, OR if you want me to vlog the next time I go on a bender with Scott and we DON'T hook up, at least not as far as I can remember. So anyway, I was heterosexually at work on my next adjective-less short story..."

Sorry, I'll stop. Five stars for that entire section of the book, minus one star for the rest of it. Now can someone make a deeply homoerotic film about their relationship, PLEASE.

[u-mspcoll]

Get Those Books Moving : Part 4

Summer 2023 Cathleen A. Baker Fellow Katarina Stiller worked on treatments for pop-up books from the William A. Gosling Pop-up and Movable Books Collection --- part of our Children's Literature Collection.

Here are Schneewittchen (1961) and Rotkäppchen (1960) --- both illustrated by Vojtěch Kubašta and published by Carlsen Verlag GMBH --- before and after treatment!

After treatment! Schneewittchen (1961)

After treatment! Rotkäppchen (1960)

[litandlifequotes]

We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

[littleemptyattik]

This week I finished reading “A Moveable Feast” by Hemingway.

My first introduction to Hemingway was when I lived in the town of Pensacola, Florida. On the boardwalk over the bridge, one of the popular restaurants that overlooked the bay was called Hemingway’s Island Grill. Before eating here, I had heard of Hemingway but never had ready anything by him. The atmosphere of the restaurant—and its menu “inspired by Hemingway's thirst for adventure and great food”—made me curious about the man in the photographs on the walls. Then around the same time, I watched the movie “Midnight in Paris,” and I have to say—Corey Stoll did a fantastic job with the characterization; I can see that now that I’ve read this book.

As I read this book, I could understand why the Hemingway’s restaurant chose its theme, and why Stoll portrayed him with the voice and mannerisms he did. This man was a tough one, no question. And as a woman in a different era, I can’t say I admired his treatment of his wife and son in every chapter. His tone is consistently brash and stern and I could sense some pride and self-centeredness in the mix of qualities he expressed. But at the same time, I admired him for other reasons. He was honest, direct, open, straightforward, and nothing he said or did was a mystery or purposeless. When he reminisced, he could acknowledge his failures and weaknesses in the past. And when he spoke about others, he represented them fairly and sincerely according to his own perspective—the good ones he called good, and the bad ones he called bad, and he always seemed to know which was which from the start. He was positive and as untroubled as he could be, speaking of his times of poverty and struggle with casual candor, not expressing fear of the future.

More than that, he wasn’t an unkind man. He was blunt and proud and a cheater, but he supported his friends and emphasized their best features and was patient with them always. (Looking at you, Scott.) My purpose in reading this was to learn about Paris in the 1920s from the perspective of a man who was there. Hemingway wasn’t just there, he was there. He understood the city and the people and the world in a way that was unique to his own mind. And reading this book was like reading his personal journal. It wasn’t a story; it was a decade in a life. And I really enjoyed getting to know this man’s life. Cheers, Ernest. 

[arnold-layne]

what i expected out of reading hemingway: boring

what i read: hemingway telling francis scott fitzgerald that his dick size is enough because fitzgerald's wife told him he couldn't satisfy a woman

[normavasquez]

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans. ― Ernest Hemingway A Moveable Feast

[delicatepoets]

starting the bell jar hehehhehehe

[byopiapress]

How to Make a Volvelle

Today’s post shows how to make a single disc volvelle in a square mount. Continue reading Untitled

[projecthipster]

A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway

"A Moveable Feast" by Valerie Suter, from her authors series. Left to right are Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” - Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

"Les rêves des amoureux sont comme le bon vin / Ils donnent de la joie ou bien du chagrin" - Camille, "Le Festin" (Ratatouille Original Soundtrack)

Technically this wasn’t the first Hemingway I ever read. There’s been a few short stories, decent ones, out of a collection that’s still sitting on my shelf that I haven’t finished. But this was the first Hemingway book I’ve read cover to cover, and maybe it was a strange one to to start with. A Movable Feast could be thought of as both the beginning and the end of Hemingway’s story. Written at the end of his life in the 1960s and published posthumously, this is a memoir that nonetheless throws back to the beginnings of his career, living in Paris in the 1920s and struggling to be recognized as a writer, even among a community of some of the greatest literary and artistic names of the 20th century. James Joyce was in Paris at the same time. Ezra Pound, who was only just starting to be a complete fascist, was among the circle that met at Gertrude Stein’s house salon. And perhaps most notably of all, F. Scott Fitzgerald was just then publishing a little book of no acclaim, written in Paris but set in and all about New York, called The Great Gatsby.

For all the weight of the literary figures that fill its pages though, and that fill the left bank cafés and weary old streets of Hemingway’s nostalgic recollections, A Movable Feast isn’t a weighty read. It’s light, romantic in the archaic sense of the word, airy, almost cozy. It hums with saudade like a trumpet in a Montmarte jazz club. Certainly Hemingway’s consciously minimalist style, the most well-known hallmark of his writing, plays a part. As if to remind the reader of this, the first story tells simply of Hemingway’s daily quest to write a few good pages in a good café, and here he delivers some really great writing motivation: “write one true sentence.” And then do it again, because there will always come another sentence that the discerning writer can know is simple and true. But the lightness comes too from the fact that these years of bohemian bonhomie seem filled, through the filter of pen and page, with goings-on of little consequence but great value. The reader wants more than anything to be living the life portrayed in this book, to drink well and eat well and live in small apartments and share brilliant writing among a group of friends who are all brilliant writers, to be poor but happy in a world that stands apart from hustle and stress. Because isn’t that the hipster ideal? Of course, one has to question how true all of this was, being recollected through la-vie-en-rose-coloured glasses decades later. Or one doesn’t, if one prefers to simply take the chocolate as it rolls.

It’s been a couple of years since I read A Moveable Feast, and to be honest, a lot of the actual plot and happenings, or rather, hippenings, of Hemingway’s vignettes and short stories have faded. I know it started in that café, and then there were trips to salons and restaurants. I recall that there was a trip to a racetrack over the course of which Hemingway and his wife realized that what either of them can say and what they mean to convey can never be fully reconciled, and they worried about that fact until they came home, drank some wine, and concluded that that’s simply the human condition, and it renders everyone a fascinating mystery, so why worry about it? This all took place during a false spring when goat milk peddlers drove their herds through the streets of Paris, which makes the reader think, is any understanding we can gain of each other merely a false spring that we cling to because in the moment it's as good as the real thing? And if it is ephemeral, does that matter, when in the end everything is? And I remember that the book ended in the Alps, on one of the very original ski holidays, which as a skier a hundred years later, I loved. In between scenes of wide-open slopes and warm chalets, there’s a mention of a man killed from his neck being worn right through by the friction of an avalanche, as if to say, don’t forget, the dream exists among death. Just years before this recollection, this halcyon city of light was a place of war and fire, of the same war and fire that unmoored us all from the steady paths of violent industrial civilization and led us to seek this quiet life of secret glamour instead. And the hipster reading today, or in the glory days of the 21st-century hipster that’ve just barely passed us by, might feel the same way, and want to seek the same path away from the age of Covid and Trump and the failings of late capitalism, or, if we’re talking retroactively, of falling towers and George Bush and war in the desert and the Great Recession that seems routine now but was such an unmooring in 2008. That’s why the 1920s were an age of one kind of hipster, the 2000s and early 10s another, and we may be due for another. But back to Hemingway.

For all that rambling last paragraph trying to recall what happened in this book, what happened was never really the point. What lingers in memory is the feel of it all and the characters that populate the stories. I remember images conjured in my head of a 1920s convertible driving with a lost top, soaking in the rain through the fields of Champagne, complete with the smell of mud and lavender. I remember Gertrude Stein as the paradox she seems in Hemingway’s recollection: an iron woman of great softness, matron of a house where everyone was welcome, but you’d be on the street in an instant if you called her a mother; an open, almost evangelical lesbian who nonetheless thought that male homosexuality, specifically, was abhorrent. The text doesn’t judge these figures with their odd views. That’s left to the reader. Hemingway’s just observing; a part of what Stein eternally dubs the “lost generation,” but at the same time, its chronicler in a future much changed. As Hemingway’s Lost Generation friend Scotty Fitzgerland would famously write of his own narrator, he was within and without.

I give this hipster book five wine-soaked living room literature conversations out of five

Project Hipster is a futile and disorganized attempt to dive into the world of things that the internet has at some point claimed "are hipster," mostly through ListChallenges search results.

This review comes from the first list, Hipster Lit: If You Haven't Read 'em, Pretend You Have.

Stay deck.

[upennmanuscripts]

ABC--3D, by book artist Marion Bataille, is a 3D alphabet with 26 letters that move and change before your eyes. ABC--3D is featured in the video loop for THE MOVEMENT OF BOOKS, an exhibit about all the ways that books move. The exhibit has closed, but you can still watch the whole loop on YouTube!

ABC--3D 🔗:

The Movement of Books Video Loop 🔗:

The Movement of Books exhibit information 🔗:

[dramatic-dolphin]

This is half true! They invented moveable type printing in China about four (maybe five?) centuries before Gutenberg. It just did not have that rapid rise to popularity and was not a culture-changing event the way Gutenberg's was in Europe, for multiple reasons.

One of the reasons is actually very obvious: the Latin alphabet has a few dozen characters. (The first printing presses often had more characters than they use now, since they made individual blocks for ligatures. Some numbered in the hundreds.) The Chinese alphabet, on the other hand, has tens of thousands of them. Unless you're printing hundreds or thousands of copies, it can be more cost-effective to just stick to the old method of page-by-page printing.

[youronthebarrygibbtalkshow]

[u-mspcoll]

Special Collections After Hours | Books in Motion

Join the Special Collections Research Center in Hatcher next Tuesday (11 April) at 4 pm for our final After Hours open house of the Winter term, exploring a selection of moveable books! Read more

[litandlifequotes]

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway