The legendary writer, Oscar Wilde, has a tomb like no other. Thousands of kisses have been planted on his beautifully designed tomb, decorated with a monument of a flying Assyrian-style angel.
Since 1999, when someone decided to plant a big, red, lipsticked kiss on it, Wilde admirers from around the world have traveled to his tomb in Paris to do the same.
It’s so popular that the accumulation of grease from people’s lipsticks have slowly eroded the surface of the monument. Paris’s Irish Cultural Centre said in a statement,
The grease base of the lipstick penetrates the stone and long after the coloring pigments have faded, a grease ‘shadow’ is still visible.
The tomb is close to being irreparably damaged; each cleaning has degraded some of the stone surface and rendered it more porous and has subsequently necessitated a more drastic cleaning.
This became a problem for Merlin Holland, Wilde’s only surviving grandson. Thanks to his efforts a new glass barrier has been recently erected to prevent fans from showing further affection to the tomb.
Interestingly enough, this has not stopped fans from kissing a nearby tree. Oscar Wilde fans sure are affectionate!
Erin Smith, an Australian artist, developed a fascination for typography during her university years some years ago. She says, “I was looking at the intricacy of the engracing of a smith and wesson pistol (on the computer, not my own) [and] I thought about this image in relation to typography then started using the computer to create the image. I did a series of these for a project.”
Her work reminds us of our own posters. The major difference between our art pieces and Erin’s is that we don’t deconstruct text so fans of the book can read their favourite passages in the original structure and form that the author had intended. In other words, Erin puts more emphasis on typography in her art, whereas we put more on passages.
What I really like about her work though is the originality in her subject matter. She doesn’t simply use typography as a gimmick to illustrate uninteresting things.
Sagaki Keita is a fantastically creative Japanese artist who recreates masterpieces with thousands of small doodles.
Much like our book posters – the art piece looks like a normal illustration from afar, but shows more of its intricacy and uniqueness as you draw nearer.
I think it’s brilliant of Keita to contrast the maturity of classic works with the immaturity of doodles while comprising both in a singular form.
At first I thought it was too good to be true…is it possible that one of my favorite novels of all time is going to be turned into a new film adaptation in 2012? It’s true! Great Expectations by Charles Dickens will be gracing our movie theatres in film form sometime next year. Unfortunately, it is still too early for the movie trailer, but apparently actor Helena Bonham Carter will be playing the role of Miss Havisham. This should be interesting to see as Miss Havisham is a rather quirky and interesting character in the novel. Check out this photo of Carter dressed for the part. What do you think? Did you imagine Miss Havisham to look anything like this?
SyFy has just released a trailer for their upcoming Peter Pan prequel mini-series. You can watch the enthralling video below:
While watching the video, I grew more and more excited about the story. And, as I didn’t realize the video was related to Peter Pan until mid-way through (since my eyes were glued on the video and not the title), I immediately jumped to attention when I heard the ever-familiar word - Neverland - being uttered.
According to the official SyFy website, the mini-series is slated to begin on December 4, 2011.
I don’t know about you but I’ll be scheduling things that day around the showing time!
The tale of author Haruki Murakami is that of legends. The story goes that he was suddenly prompted to be a novelist while he was at a baseball game. In the split second it took a batter to hit a pitch, Murakami supposedly became inspired and returned home that same night to launch the beginning of what would turn out to be a successful writing career. The result of this inspiration appeared to the world in the form of his first novel Hear the Wind Sing and has been followed by countless works since. Recently, the New York Times published this charming article about delving into the Murakami’s imagination and the danger of taking his literature too literally. It is a fun read and gives us a chance to learn more about this fascinating author! Enjoy!
We’re crazy about typography as you probably can tell from our book posters. So this project from Kickstarter really caught my eye.
What you see here is a calendar that’s “made of two-thousand and twelve used keyboard keys. The keys are arranged manually to write out all days of the year 2012.”
The layout is a bit difficult to follow though, “The keys are arranged in a grid. If you read them from left to right, they read each day of the year in sequence: January Sun 01 Mon 02 Tue 03 etc. You can think of it like a long array, sequence or string of all dates in the year. To make things easier, every month is differentiated by an “arrow key.”"
You can learn more about the project by watching this video:
Hmm. This makes me wonder what font is on our keyboards, and whether or not all keyboards use the same font. If so, why that one and who made the decision?
We live in exciting times when technology is consistently changing and evolving the way we view and interact with the world. Not too long ago most of us would buy actual books – bound reams of paper with the writing of our most beloved authors on its pages. Today some of us have given up paper and started using products like the Kindle for our reading. Most recently, Chris Swain – professor at USC as well as game designer – was quoted as saying something even more surprising. Check out this article to see what Swain believes to be the literature of the 21st century. You may be surprised! Enjoy!
