The Evolution of Hokusai’s Great Wave: A Study of 113 Known Copies of the Iconic Woodblock Print

in Art, History | June 18th, 2024

The most widely known work by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese artist Hokusai, 神奈川沖浪裏, is usually translated into English as The Great Wave off Kanagawa. That version of the title reflects the iconic scene depicted in the image well enough, though I can’t help but feel that we should be talking about waves, plural. Granted, the Japanese language hardly makes a fuss about plurality and singularity in the first place, but even by the standards of ukiyo‑e woodblock prints, this is a work of art that takes many forms. It’s not just that there are a lot of parodies floating around, but that no single “original” even exists.

“There’s not just one impression of the Great Wave, as many people think. There were originally thousands of them,” says scientist Capucine Korenberg in the British Museum video above. Back in the mid-nineteenth century, “Japanese prints were very cheap, and you could buy them for the same amount of money you could buy a double helping of soup and noodles.” Demand for the Great Wave in particular was such that experts reckon that at least 8,000 prints were sold, having been made “until the woodblocks just started to be so worn out that they couldn’t be used anymore.” Again, note the plural: if the blocks used to make the image were replaced, we’d expect to see differences in the actual image over time.

We’ve discussed before how the Great Wave went through several iterations over four decades before Hokusai found the form recognized around the world still today. But if you look at a print of the final version closely enough — and know enough about Hokusai’s art — you can tell whether it came from an earlier edition or a later one. It was no less an expert than longtime Tokyo-based printmaker and Hokusai enthusiast David Bull (previously featured here on Open Culture) who noticed that “he could see small differences between the strokes” of the three Great Wave prints owned by the British Museum. Hearing this sent Korenberg on a quest to determine their exact chronological order.

Many factors complicated this task, including the amount of ink and pressure applied to the woodblock during its creation, as well as the chances of modification or partial replacement of particular blocks along the way. In the end, she found it “more certain than ever” that the British Museum’s three Great Waves came from the same key block, which would have been modeled after Hokusai’s drawing. But along the way, she did make a discovery: it was previously thought that 111 identified prints existed, but she confirmed two more, bringing the total up to 113. Determining the fate of the other 7,887 is a task best left to the even more obsessive ukiyo-e-hunters out there.

The Evolution of The Great Wave off Kanagawa: See Four Versions That Hokusai Painted Over Nearly 40 Years

Watch the Making of Japanese Woodblock Prints, from Start to Finish, by a Longtime Tokyo Printmaker

Watch a Master Japanese Printmaker at Work: Two Unintentionally Relaxing ASMR Videos

A Collection of Hokusai’s Drawings Are Being Carved Onto Woodblocks & Printed for the First Time Ever

Watch Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa Get Entirely Recreated with 50,000 LEGO Bricks

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Einstein’s Theory of Relativity Explained in One of the Earliest Science Films Ever Made (1923)

in Film, Science | June 17th, 2024

Albert Einstein developed his theory of special relativity in 1905, and then mentally mapped out his theory of general relativity between 1907 and 1915. For years to come, the rest of the world would try to catch up with Einstein, trying to understand the gist, let alone the full implications, of his groundbreaking ideas.

Above, you can watch one such attempt. Produced by Max and David Fleischer, best known for their Betty Boop and Superman cartoons, The Einstein Theory of Relativity used the power of animation to explain relativity to a broad, non-scientific audience in 1923. One of the first educational science films ever made, the silent animated film was created with the assistance of science journalist Garrett P. Serviss and other experts who had a handle on Einstein’s theories. According to a biography of Max Fleischer, the film was “an out-and-out success.” “The critics and the public applauded it. And Einstein did too, apparently deeming it an “excellent attempt to illustrate an abstract subject.”

Watch the short film above. And find it added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More

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Bertrand Russell’s ABC of Relativity: The Classic Introduction to Einstein (Free Audio)

Albert Einstein Appears in Remarkably Colorized Video & Contemplates the Fate of Humanity After the Atomic Bomb (1946)

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16th-Century Japanese Historians Describe the Oddness of Meeting the First Europeans They Ever Saw

in History, Religion | June 17th, 2024

Go to Japan today, and the country will present you with plenty of opportunities to buy pan, tabako, and tempura. These products themselves — bread, cigarettes, and deep-fried seafood or vegetables — will be familiar enough. Even the words that refer to them may have a recognizable ring, especially if you happen to be a Portuguese-speaker. Japanese has more than its fair share of naturalized terms, used to refer to everything from the konbini on the corner to the riizanaburu prices found therein, but none of them are as deeply rooted as its terms imported from Portugal.

Relations between Japan and Portugal go back to 1543, when the first Portuguese sailors arrived in the southern Japanese archipelago. Impressions of this encounter are included in the video above, a Voices of the Past compilation of how actual sixteenth-century Japanese historians described their unexpected visitors. “A southern barbarian vessel came to our shores,” writes one of them, anonymously. From it “emerged an unnameable creature, somewhat similar in shape to a human being, but looking rather more like a long-nosed goblin, or the giant demon mikoshi-nyūdō.”

This grotesque, unintelligible creature turned to be a bateren; that is, a padre, a missionary priest come to spread the kirishitan religion in this distant land. In this primary task they faced severe, ultimately insurmountable challenges, but as the first Europeans to make contact with Japan, they also happened much more successfully to disseminate Western concepts and techniques in agriculture, science, and art (not to mention dessert culture). Their introduction of the gun, described in detail by another contemporary historian, also changed the course of Japanese history, doing its part to make possible the unification of Japan in the following century.

Kurusu in hand, these bateren argued that one should devote oneself to Deusu in order to avoid eternal condemnation to inheruno and gain admission to paraiso. There were converts, though perhaps not in numbers as large as expected. Then as now, the Japanese had their own way of going about things, but in the sixteenth century, they had rulers inclined to crack down hard on suspicious foreign influence. The last section of the video contains testimony of a showdown staged between Christianity and Buddhism, a debate in which the bateren seemed to have put on a poor show. Defeated, they were either expelled or executed, and not long thereafter, Japan closed the doa — as they now call it — for a couple more centuries.

The History of Ancient Japan: The Story of How Japan Began, Told by Those Who Witnessed It (297‑1274)

What Happens When a Japanese Woodblock Artist Depicts Life in London in 1866, Despite Never Having Set Foot There

A Japanese Illustrated History of America (1861): Features George Washington Punching Tigers, John Adams Slaying Snakes & Other Fantastic Scenes

The 17th-Century Japanese Samurai Who Sailed to Europe, Met the Pope & Became a Roman Citizen

Hear an Ancient Chinese Historian Describe The Roman Empire (and Other Voices of the Past)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch the Earliest-Known Charles Dickens Film: The Death of Poor Joe

in Film, Literature | June 17th, 2024

A little over a decade ago, a curator at the British Film Institute (BFI) discovered the oldest surviving film featuring a Charles Dickens character, “The Death of Poor Joe.” The silent film, directed by George Albert Smith in 1900, brings to life Dickens’ character Jo, the crossing sweeper from Bleak House. Prior to this find, the title of the oldest known Dickens film belonged to Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost, which premiered in November 1901.

Providing more context for the film, the BFI writes:

This tragic short film is based on the stage production of Poor Jo the Crossing Sweeper, which itself adapted one of the most affecting stories in Dickens’ epic novel Bleak House. This short film is very much an adaptation of the stage version, in which a follow-spot recreated the night watchman’s lamp. As Joe dies, never having been taught to pray, the light also represents the redemptive light of heaven.

The character of Joe was popularised in the 19th century by actress Jennie Lee, who toured her performance around Europe and the USA. Here Joe is played by Laura Bayley and the Night-watchman by Tom Green. Both actors were regular collaborators with the Brighton-based filmmaker GA Smith (Bayley was his wife).

You can watch the film, courtesy of BFI, above.

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Watch L’Inferno (1911), Italy’s First Feature Film and Perhaps the Finest Adaptation of Dante’s Classic

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Frankenstein Hits the Silver Screen (1910)

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What’s Under London? Discover London’s Forbidden Underworld

in Architecture, History, Technology | June 14th, 2024

When the words London and underground come together, the first thing that comes to most of our minds, naturally, is the London Underground. But though it may enjoy the honorable distinction of the world’s first railway to run below the streets, the stalwart Tube is hardly the only thing buried below the city — and far indeed from the oldest. The video above makes a journey through various subterranean strata, starting with the paving stone and continuing through the soil, electric cables, and gas pipelines beneath. From there, things get Roman.

First comes the Billingsgate Roman House and Baths and the Roman amphitheater, two preserved places from what was once called Londinium. Below that level run several now-underground rivers, just above the depth of Winston Churchill’s private bunker, which is now maintained as a museum.

Farther down, at a depth of 66 feet, we find the remains of London’s tube system — not the Tube, but the pneumatic tube, a nineteenth-century technology that could fire encapsulated letters from one part of the city to another. More effective and longer lived was the later, more deeply installed London Post Office Railway, which was used to make deliveries until 2003.

At 79 feet underground, we finally meet with the Underground — or at least the first and shallowest of its eleven lines. The Tube has long become an essential part of the lives of most Londoners, but around the same depth exists another facility known to relatively few: the Camden catacombs, a system of underground passages once used to stable the horses who worked on the railways. Further down are the network of World War II-era “deep shelters,” one of which hosted the planning of D‑Day; below them is a still-functional facility instrumental to the defeat of different enemies, typhus and cholera. That would be London’s sewer system, for which we should spare a thought if we’ve ever walked along the Thames and appreciated the fact that it no longer stinks.

The Lost Neighborhood Buried Under New York City’s Central Park

“The Wonderground Map of London Town,” the Iconic 1914 Map That Saved the World’s First Subway System

Undercity: Exploring the Underbelly of New York City

The Genius of Harry Beck’s 1933 London Tube Map–and How It Revolutionized Subway Map Design Everywhere

Paris Underground

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Roger Federer’s Dartmouth Commencement Address: “Effortless Is a Myth” & Other Life Lessons from Tennis

in Graduation Speech, Sports | June 13th, 2024

In 2006, David Foster Wallace published a piece in the New York Times Magazine headlined “Roger Federer as Religious Experience.” Even then, he could declare Federer, “at 25, the best tennis player currently alive. Maybe the best ever.” Much had already been written about “his old-school stoicism and mental toughness and good sportsmanship and evident overall decency and thoughtfulness and charitable largess.” Less easily commented upon — because much less easily described — was the aesthetic transcendence of his performance on the court, which Wallace thought best witnessed in person.

“If you’ve watched tennis only on television, you simply have no idea how hard these pros are hitting the ball, how fast the ball is moving, how little time the players have to get to it, and how quickly they’re able to move and rotate and strike and recover,” Wallace writes. “And none are faster, or more deceptively effortless about it, than Roger Federer.” Was that one of the observations the champion had in mind this past weekend, eighteen years later — and two years after his own retirement from the game — when he took the tree-stump lectern before Dartmouth’s class of 2024 and declared that “Effortless is a myth”?

That was one of three “tennis lessons” — that is, lessons for life derived from his long and hugely successful experience in tennis — that Federer lays out in the commencement address above. The second, “It’s only a point,” is a notion of which it’s all too easy to lose sight of amid the balletic intensity of a match. The third, “Life is bigger than the court,” is one Federer himself now must learn in the daily life after his own “graduation” that stretches out before him. For a man still considered one of the greatest players ever to pick up a racket, is there life after professional tennis?

Federer acknowledges the irony of his not having gone to college, but choosing instead to leave school at sixteen in order to devote himself to his sport. “In many ways, professional athletes are our culture’s holy men,” Wallace writes in another essay. “They give themselves over to a pursuit, endure great privation and pain to actualize themselves at it, and enjoy a relationship to perfection that we admire and reward.” But when their athletic careers inevitably end, they find themselves in a greatly heightened version of the situation we all do when we come to the end of our institutionalized education, wondering what could or should come next.

Clearly, Federer doesn’t suffer from the kind of inarticulacy and unreflectiveness that Wallace diagnosed over and over in other professional athletes about whom he wrote. In profiling player Michael Joyce, for instance, Wallace saw that Joyce and his colleagues lived in “a world that, like a child’s world, is very serious and very small” — but which Federer has long displayed an uncommon ability to see beyond. Still, as he must know, that guarantees him a satisfying second act no more than even world-beating success in any given field guarantees any of us general well-being in life. Wallace, too, knew that full well — and of course, he was no mean commencement speaker himself.

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30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web

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Medieval Tennis: A Short History and Demonstration

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear Edgar Allan Poe Stories Read by Iggy Pop, Jeff Buckley, Christopher Walken, Marianne Faithful & More

in Film, Literature, Music | June 13th, 2024

In 1849, a little over 175 years ago, Edgar Allan Poe was found dead in a Baltimore gutter under mysterious circumstances very likely related to violent election fraud. It was an ignominious end to a life marked by hardship, alcoholism, and loss. After struggling for years as the first American writer to try and make a living from his art, and failing in several publishing ventures and positions, Poe achieved few of his aims, barely getting by financially and only managing to attract a little—often negative—notice for now-famous poems like “The Raven.” Contemporaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson disparaged the poem and a later generation of writers, including William Butler Yeats, pronounced him “vulgar.”

But of course, as we know, a countercurrent of Poe appreciation took hold among writers, artists, and filmmakers interested in mystery, horror, and the supernatural—to such a degree that in the previous century, nearly every artist even passingly associated with darker themes has interpreted Poe as a rite of passage. We’ve featured a reading of “The Raven” by the often-sinister Christopher Walken.

At the top of the post, you can hear another version of the Queens-born actor reading Poe’s best-known work, a poem designed to produce what the author called a “unity of effect” with its incantatory repetitions. This recording comes from a collection of celebrity Poe readings called Closed on Account of Rabies, which also features such unique takes on the classic horror writer’s work as that above, “The Tell-Tale Heart” as read by Iggy Pop.

Just above, hear a lesser-known poem by Poe called “Ulalume” read by Jeff Buckley, with an accompanying soundtrack of low, pulsing, vaguely Western-inspired music that well suits Buckley’s formal, rhythmic recitation. The use of music on this album has divided many Poe fans, and admittedly, some tracks work better than others. On Buckley’s “Ulalume,” the music heightens tension and provides a perfect atmosphere for imagining “the misty mid region of Weir,” its “ghoul-haunted woodland,” and the “scoriac rivers” of lava pouring from the poet’s heart. On Marianne Faithful’s reading of “Annabelle Lee,” below, a score of keening synths can seem overwrought and unnecessary.

The remainder of the 1997 album, which you can purchase here, treats us to readings from 80s goth-rock stars Diamanda Galas and Gavin Friday, Bad Lieutenant director Abel Ferrara, Blondie singer Debbie Harry, and gravel-voiced New Orleans bluesman Dr. John, among others.

Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe? An Animated Video Explains

7 Tips from Edgar Allan Poe on How to Write Vivid Stories and Poems

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Harvard Removes the Human Skin Binding from a Book in Its Collection Since 1934

in Books, Harvard, History, Libraries | June 12th, 2024

In June of 2014, Harvard University’s Houghton Library put up a blog post titled “Caveat Lecter,” announcing “good news for fans of anthropodermic bibliopegy, bibliomaniacs, and cannibals alike.” The occasion was the scientific determination that a book in the Houghton’s collection long rumored to have been bound in human skin — the task of whose retrieval once served, they say, as a hazing ritual for student employees — was, indeed, “without a doubt bound in human skin.” What a difference a decade makes: not only has the blog post been deleted, the book itself has been taken out of from circulation in order to have the now-offending binding removed.

“Harvard Library has removed human skin from the binding of a copy of Arsène Houssaye’s book Des destinées de l’âme (1880s),” declares a strenuously apologetic statement issued by the university. “The volume’s first owner, French physician and bibliophile Dr. Ludovic Bouland (1839–1933), bound the book with skin he took without consent from the body of a deceased female patient in a hospital where he worked.” Having been in the collection since 1934, the book was first placed there by John B. Stetson, Jr., “an American diplomat, businessman, and Harvard alumnus” (not to mention an heir to the fortune generated by the eponymous hat).

“Bouland knew that Houssaye had written the book while grieving his wife’s death,” writes Mike Jay in the New York Review of Books, “and felt that this was an appropriate binding for it — ‘a book on the human soul merits that it be given human clothing.’ ” He also “included a note stating that “this book is bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance.” This copy of Des destinées de l’âme isn’t the only book rumored — or, with the peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) technology developed over the past decade, confirmed — to have been bound in human skin. “The oldest reputed examples are three 13th-century Bibles held at the Bibliothèque Nationale in France, write the New York Times’ Jennifer Schuessler and Julia Jacobs.

Jay also mentions the especially vivid example of “an 1892 French edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Gold Bug, adorned with a skull emblem, is genuine human skin: Poe en peau humaine.” In general, Schuessler and Jacobs note, the largest number of human skin-bound books “date from the Victorian era, the heyday of anatomical collecting, when doctors sometimes had medical treatises and other texts bound in skin from patients or cadavers.” Now that this practice has been retroactively judged to be not just deeply disturbing but officially problematic (to use the vogue term of recent years) it’s up to the anthropodermic-bibliopegy enthusiasts out there to determine whether to put the items in their own collections to the PMF test — or to leave a bit of macabre mystery in the world of antiquarian book-collecting.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

How the 13th-Century Sufi Poet Rumi Became One of the World’s Most Popular Writers

in History, Poetry, Religion | June 12th, 2024

The Middle East is hardly the world’s most harmonious region, and it only gets more fractious if you add in South Asia and the Mediterranean. But there’s one thing on which many residents of that wide geographical span can agree: Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī. One might at first imagine that a thirteenth-century poet and mystical philosopher who wrote in Persian, with occasional forays into Turkish, Arabic, and Greek, would be a niche figure today, if known at all. In fact, Rumi, as he’s commonly known, is now one of the most popular writers in not just the Middle East but the world; English reinterpretations of his verse have even made him the best-selling poet in the United States.

“The transformative moment in Rumi’s life came in 1244, when he met a wandering mystic known as Shams of Tabriz,” writes the BBC’s Jane Ciabattari. She quotes Brad Gooch, author of Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love, describing them as having an “electric friendship for three years,” after which Shams disappeared. “Rumi coped by writing poetry,” which includes 3,000 poems written for “Shams, the prophet Muhammad and God. He wrote 2,000 rubayat, four-line quatrains. He wrote in couplets a six-volume spiritual epic, The Masnavi.” He did all this work in service of what, in the animated TED-Ed lesson above, Stephanie Honchell Smith calls his ultimate goal: “the reunification of his soul with God through the experience of divine love.”

How is such a love to be accessed? “Love resides not in learning, not in knowledge, not in pages in books,” Rumi declared. “Wherever the debates of men may lead, that is not the lover’s path.” He pursued it through devotion to Shams’ Sufism, “participating in ritualized dancing and preaching the religion of love through lectures, poetry, and prose.” Later in life, he shifted “from ecstatic expressions of divine love to verses that guide others to discover it for themselves,” incorporating “ideas, stories, and quotes from Islamic religious texts, Arabic and Persian literature and earlier Sufi writings and poetry.” Perhaps there can be no full appreciation of Rumi’s work without a scholar’s understanding of the languages and cultures he knew. But if his sales figures are anything to go by, the longing into which his complex work taps is universal.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Download Issues of “Weird Tales” (1923–1954): The Pioneering Pulp Horror Magazine Features Original Stories by Lovecraft, Bradbury & Many More

in Literature, Magazines | June 11th, 2024

We live in an era of genre. Browse through TV shows of the last decade to see what I mean: Horror, sci-fi, fantasy, superheroes, futuristic dystopias…. Take a casual glance at the burgeoning global film franchises or merchandising empires. Where in earlier decades, horror and fantasy inhabited the teenage domain of B‑movies and comic books, they’ve now become dominant forms of popular narrative for adults. Telling the story of how this came about might involve the kind of lengthy sociological analysis on which people stake academic careers. And finding a convenient beginning for that story wouldn’t be easy.

Do we start with The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic novel, which opened the door for such books as Dracula and Frankenstein? Or do we open with Edgar Allan Poe, whose macabre short stories and poems captivated the public’s imagination and inspired a million imitators? Maybe. But if we really want to know when the most populist, mass-market horror and fantasy began—the kind that inspired television shows from the Twilight Zone to the X‑Files to Supernatural to The Walking Dead—we need to start with H.P. Lovecraft, and with the pulpy magazine that published his bizarre stories, Weird Tales.

Debuting in 1923, Weird Tales, writes The Pulp Magazines Project, provided “a venue for fiction, poetry and non-fiction on topics ranging from ghost stories to alien invasions to the occult.” The magazine introduced its readers to past masters like Poe, Bram Stoker, and H.G. Wells, and to the latest weirdness from Lovecraft and contemporaries like August Derleth, Ashton Smith, Catherine L. Moore, Robert Bloch, and Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian).

In the magazine’s first few decades, you wouldn’t have thought it very influential. Founder Jacob Clark Hennenberger struggled to turn a profit, and the magazine “never had a large circulation.” But no magazine is perhaps better representative of the explosion of pulp genre fiction that swept through the early twentieth century and eventually gave birth to the juggernauts of Marvel and DC.

Weird_Tales_1934-09_-_The_People_of_the_Black_Circle

Weird Tales is widely accepted by cultural historians as “the first pulp magazine to specialize in supernatural and occult fiction,” points out The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (though, as we noted before, an obscure German title, Der Orchideengarten, technically got there earlier). And while the magazine may not have been widely popular, as the Velvet Underground was to the rapid spread of various subgenera of rock in the seventies, so was Weird Tales to horror and fantasy fandom. Everyone who read it either started their own magazine or fanclub, or began writing their own “weird fiction”—Lovecraft’s term for the kind of supernatural horror he churned out for several decades.

Fans of Lovecraft can read and download scans of his stories and letters to the editor published in Weird Tales at the links below, brought to us by The Lovecraft eZine (via SFFaudio).

Letter to the editor of Weird Tales, September 1923 – September 1923

Letter to the editor of Weird Tales, October 1923 – October 1923

Letter to the editor of Weird Tales, January 1924 – January 1924

Letter to the editor of Weird Tales, March 1924 – March 1924

Imprisoned With The Pharaohs – May/June/July 1924

Hypnos – May/June/July 1924

The Tomb – January 1926

The Terrible Old Man – August 1926

Yule Horror – December 1926

The White Ship – March 1927

Letter to the editor of Weird Tales, February 1928 – February 1928

The Dunwich Horror – April 1929

The Tree – August 1938

Fungi From Yuggoth Part XIII: The Port – September 1946

Fungi From Yuggoth Part X: The Pigeon-Flyers – January 1947

Fungi From Yuggoth Part XXVI: The Familiars – January 1947

The City – July 1950

Hallowe’en In A Suburb – September 1952

Fans of early pulp horror and fantasy—–or grad students writing their thesis on the evolution of genre fiction—can view and download dozens of issues of Weird Tales, from the 20s to the 50s, at the links below:

The Internet Archive has digitized copies from the 1920s and 1930s.

The Pulp Magazine Project hosts HTML, FlipBook, and PDF versions of Weird Tales issues from 1936 to 1939

This site has PDF scans of individual Weird Tales stories from the 40s and 50s, including work by Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Dorothy Quick, Robert Bloch, and Theodor Sturgeon.

And to learn much more about the history of the magazine, you may wish to beg, borrow, or steal a copy of the pricy collection of essays, The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales: The Evolution of Modern Fantasy and Horror.

Enter a Huge Archive of Amazing Stories, the World’s First Science Fiction Magazine, Launched in 1926

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

How a Bach Canon Works. Brilliant.

in Music | June 11th, 2024

Brilliant. This moving manuscript depicts a single musical sequence played front to back and then back to front. Give the video a little time to unfold and enjoy.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Evolution of Hokusai’s Great Wave: A Study of 113 Known Copies of the Iconic Woodblock Print

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity Explained in One of the Earliest Science Films Ever Made (1923)

16th-Century Japanese Historians Describe the Oddness of Meeting the First Europeans They Ever Saw

Watch the Earliest-Known Charles Dickens Film: The Death of Poor Joe

What’s Under London? Discover London’s Forbidden Underworld

Roger Federer’s Dartmouth Commencement Address: “Effortless Is a Myth” & Other Life Lessons from Tennis

Hear Edgar Allan Poe Stories Read by Iggy Pop, Jeff Buckley, Christopher Walken, Marianne Faithful & More

Harvard Removes the Human Skin Binding from a Book in Its Collection Since 1934

How the 13th-Century Sufi Poet Rumi Became One of the World’s Most Popular Writers

Download Issues of “Weird Tales” (1923–1954): The Pioneering Pulp Horror Magazine Features Original Stories by Lovecraft, Bradbury & Many More

How a Bach Canon Works. Brilliant.

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