~openculture | Bookmarks (4)

The Book of Colour Concepts will soon be published by Taschen in a multilingual edition, containing text in English, French, German, and Spanish. This choice makes its abundance of explanatory scholarship widely accessible at a stroke, but even those who read none of those four languages can enjoy the book. For it takes a deep […]

It’s difficult to imagine Iman and David Bowie inviting Vogue readers to join them on the above virtual tour of their mountaintop home near Woodstock, New York when the rock legend was alive. Granted, shortly after their 1992 wedding, he gave Architectural Digest a peek at their ultra-luxurious, Indonesian-style holiday digs on the Caribbean island […]

Westerners tend to think of Japan as a land of high-speed trains, expertly prepared sushi and ramen, auteur films, brilliant animation, elegant woodblock prints, glorious old hotels, sought-after jazz-records, cat islands, and ghost towns. The last of those has, of course, not been shown to harbor literal wraiths and spirits. But if that sort of […]

The Codex Seraphinianus is not a medieval book; nor does it date from the Renaissance along with the codices of Leonardo. In fact, it was published only in 1981, but in the intervening decades it has gained recognition as “the strangest book ever published,” as we described it when we previously featured it here on […]