Ex Libris: A Short History of the Bookplate
A small printed label that says whose book this is, and often much more. Where bookplates came from, what they show, and why collectors started collecting the labels themselves.
A Short History of Reading Aloud
For most of history, reading meant reading out loud. From monastery refectories to Dickens’s public readings and Victorian family evenings, how the habit worked and why it faded.
Jane Eyre: The Novel vs the Film Adaptations
Every film of Jane Eyre has to decide what to do with a first-person narrator who argues with the reader. What the major adaptations keep, cut and change, scene by scene.
Classic Novels Under 200 Pages
Great books that take an evening or a weekend, not a month. Short classics from Melville to Woolf, with why each one earns its reputation in so few pages.
Novels Set in Bookshops and Libraries
Stories that happen among the shelves: secondhand shops, closed libraries and the people who run them. A reading list with what each book does with its setting.
Operas Based on Novels
Carmen, La Traviata, Eugene Onegin and more began as novels or novellas. What each composer took from the book, and what had to go to fit a story into an evening of singing.
How Vermeer Painted Light
Light from a window on the left, a wall that is never quite white, and small dots of paint that read as gleam. How Vermeer’s handful of paintings get their light, looked at one by one.
The Starry Night: What Van Gogh Painted and Why
Painted from memory at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, with a village that was not in his view. What is actually on the canvas, what Van Gogh’s letters say about it, and what they do not.
Gogol’s Strangest Sentences: The Nose, The Overcoat and Dead Souls
A nose that leaves its owner’s face and gets promoted above him. Gogol’s most absurd lines, in public-domain translations, with the story or chapter each comes from.
The Strangest Lines in Moby-Dick
A whaling novel that stops for sermons, cetology lectures and a chapter on the whiteness of a whale. The oddest sentences in Moby-Dick, with the chapter and what Melville is doing.