Check out what's coming up at the Morgan Library & Museum: HISTORY OF ENGLAND’S PRESTIGIOUS MAN BOOKER PRIZE IS THE SUBJECT OF NEW EXHIBITION AT THE MORGAN THIS FALL Bookermania: 45 Years of the Man Booker Prize September 13, 2013—January 5, 2014 New York, NY, August 22, 2013—England’s Man Booker Prize turnedPossession into an instant best seller, propelled The English Patientand Life of Pi onto the screen, and made a star out of an advertising copywriter named Salman Rushdie. Throughout its history, it has been a dynamic force in marketing literary fiction, while drawing attention to questions about the critical, popular, and economic influences that shape cultural value and...
Dieter Roth and the “Stinky” Artist’s Book
Dieter Roth. Literature Sausage (Literaturwurst). 1969, published 1961–70 "What's really incredible about Roth is the way he started to totally reinvent what a book could be. When he began making books in the early 1950s he decided that, for him, a book didn't need a binding or a sequence or a text or even an image." - Sarah Suzuki MoMA curator How about cheese, chocolate and bannanas Between 1961 and 1970 Roth created about fifty “literature sausages.” To make each sausage Roth followed a traditional recipe, but with one crucial twist: where the recipe called for ground pork, veal, or beef, he...
Collecting Opium
The drug of choice for most of the world in the 19th century was Opium. The Western powers cultivated it, created demand for it in the East and then went to war to suppress it leaving a trail of carnage and opium addicts in their wake. Maggs Bros. Ltd. of London is currently offering what it believes is "the finest collection on the subject" ever assembled. The Santo Domingo Opium Collection is comprised of over 3,000 items, gathered over decades of collecting. The collection contains extensive historical documentation as well as "a huge collection of objects, including material of the highest quality and the most...
Bolaño on view
It has been a decade since Roberto Bolaño's first work, Night in Chile, appeared in English. Translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions the book first introduced the Chilean novelist to America. It was also the year Bolaño died. The Bolaño express has been going full speed since. His work has been translated into 35 languages and at least 10 works have since been published in English including Savage Detectives and 2666, which one National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2008. The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) takes us inside the life of this literary rock star with an exhibit titled...
A Strange Jewel: The Morgan Library and a Sixteenth-Century Book of Hours
The Van Damme Hours They call this beautiful book The Van Damme Hours after its Flemish scribe, Antonius van Damme. It was illuminated by Simon Bering. Though no one knows for sure who commissioned the book there is ample documentation on the short lineage of who owned the book before it was acquired by J.P. Morgan in 1911. It all started with John Strange "a British dilettante whose eclectic interests included everything from sea sponges to Venetian paintings." Luckily his interests also included books. Lots of them. His library consisted of near 80,000 volumes and it took fifty-six days to auction...