I love how the young girl riding a tourist bus on the current “Summer Fiction Issue” of The New Yorker is very clearly reading J. D. Salinger. Here’s the cover:
It’s a little small, and it’s better if you see a copy of the magazine, but it’s clear the designer used one of the white Bantam Salinger’s as a model. Here’s the Salinger in question (although to be technical, from the looks of it, the book is probably Nine Stories):
Awesome.
If you have thirteen-thousand dollars to spend, you can snag this lovely special edition of The Canterbury Tales:
More on Marginalia.
A fun article in today’s Times considers the necessity of annotated editions, focusing on a new edition of Pride and Prejudice:
Any reader who sticks with the program and absorbs the wealth of material that Mr. Shapard offers will, insofar as such a thing as possible, read “Pride and Prejudice” as it was read and understood at the time of its publication, with all the period details in place and correctly interpreted. But the novel, in most respects, remains the same. The reader who does not know a farthing from a guinea, it’s safe to say, will nonetheless grasp the great drama of attraction and repulsion that plays out between Darcy and Elizabeth. The cut and thrust of their conversation is timeless. Generations of young women who do not know the first thing about an entailed estate or a quadrille will recognize in Austen’s heroine a kindred spirit, a contemporary, a valued ally in the eternal war between the sexes.
How can this be? Austen was a stickler for accuracy. Like most of the great 19th-century novelists, she reported on her surroundings with loving attention to detail, creating her world fact by closely observed fact. Yet with time, details lose their meaning. Who, a century from now, will understand what a yuppie was, or text-messaging, or the meaning of an Armani suit?
In an 1816 foreword to “Northanger Abbey,” begun in 1798 and finished in 1803, Austen warned readers that the world she described might seem unfamiliar. “The public are entreated to bear in mind,” she wrote, “that 13 years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes.” Thirteen years! If English readers at the time were puzzled, how on earth are American, Japanese or Russian readers in the 21st century supposed to make head or tails of what they read? Yet they do.
Also included is this superb image reprinted from Deirdre Le Faye’s Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels.
I find these French dictionary illustrations to be simply astounding:
Via BibliOdyssey, from this database.
Actually, we are told that the images above are not really lettrines (illuminated letters); rather they are called iconophors – something of a neologism to describe an iconic letter together with surrounding pictures that start with that letter (apple = ‘A’ etc). There is a fair bit of english available and it’s interesting to browse around – mouseover the website images to discover the name of each related picture. It’s all easy. For instance, in one of the letter ‘G’ images above, you can see Gulliver and Galileo if you look hard enough. Some are more esoteric/french/difficult than others.
After a quick browse through the interweb for artists’s renditions of Don Quixote and the events therein, here are a few of my favorites.
This must be Cide Hamete Benengeli, the book’s “author” (Cervantes claims to be acting as translator only):
This is very close to how I picture the Don:
The style of this depiction of the book’s classic scene is very lively:
Lastly, Dore’s commentary on Don Quixote’s madness:
(Obviously, Picasso’s is magnificent, but it’s wildly popular so there’s no use in pointing this out one more time.)
And finally, this complete set is lovely and whimsical.
myrtias 
