An offshoot of the Reading the Past blog, Reusable Cover Art is a collection of book covers that incorporate the same image into their cover art. Some of the juxtapositions are funny; an image that inspired Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale is used for both an edition of the Canterbury Tales and a smutty historical romance (of which, now that I think about it, Chaucer would probably heartily approve). Others are a little more thought-provoking, as when the same image of a veiled woman is used for novels called Kleopatra and Scheherazade. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the images are of females looking feminine,  which makes Reusable Cover Art not just a curiosity, but a handy opportunity to reflect on how these images are used as a kind of shorthand, particularly when it comes to gender and race.

I dare anyone to resist the charms of Abebooks‘ Weird Book Room, a collection of, well, really weird books. Some, like We are the people our parents warned us against,  just have outrageous titles, but some are genuinely perplexing, like The Manga Guide to Calculus or this week’s Weird Book of the Week, Liberace: Your Personal Fashion Consultant:

Never underestimate a man in hot pants. Liberace, the globally-renowned pianist, swings his closet door open in order to coach you on the fine art of extraordinary dressing for ordinary occasions! Need something to wear to your sister’s wedding? Packing for your next Mediterranean cruise? Shopping for a new car? Rest assured, Liberace has the perfect gold lamé number or full-length cape to suit all of your needs.

Not only can you enjoy dazzling photographs of Liberace in the most outrageous of outfits, but you can also punch these photos out to play with twelve paper dolls in hilarious poses!

Ah, the cultures and subcultures that produced these artifacts! And if you happen to know of a weird book that hasn’t made it into the Weird Book Room yet, you can submit it for consideration, as people across the English-speaking world have done.

Finally, three cheers for the blog Curious Pages: recommended inappropriate books for kids, which features offbeat, out of print, abstract, and sometimes not-for-children children’s books. I was thrilled to see a new edition of The Wizard of Oz illustrated by collage artist Graham Rawle, whom I love (anyone who can create a novel exclusively out of clippings from 1960’s women’s magazines is okay by me). Curious Pages doesn’t neglect the classics; there is a post on Der Struwwelpeter (or Shock-Headed Peter), Heinrich Hoffmann’s 1845 collection of German children’s stories chock full of not-so-subtle messages about the dangers of playing with matches, sucking thumbs, going out in bad weather, etc. A nice reminder that children’s stories and fairy tales have rarely been as safe as we’ve tried to make them over the last several decades.

1. Critique them. Failing that, criticize.

The Cynical-C Blog regularly posts selections of one-star Amazon reviews of classic literature, film, and music. I’m all for questioning the canon. But most of these reviews are dedicated to the fine art of missing the point. I couldn’t help pulling out a few of my favorite assertions about books I’ve read and taught. Here they are, verbatim:

I dont care if Homer was blind or not this book is like 900 pages too long.

…every one says the aurthor george orwell is so trippy and wierd but i think he’s just trying to cover up for the fact that HE CAN’T WRITE. please george do us all a faver and stop writing books.

This book is a must if you wanna lull yourself to sleep. The opening was great, but then all these horrendous allusions kept popping up… I guess Melville should have decided if he wanted to write a book about hunting for whales or scientific stuff about them. Then the book would have been better.

I should mention, though, that the negative reviews of Anne Frank’s diary are less amusing than they are frightening…

2. Read them at work, stealthily

A couple years ago, the New Zealand Book Council created a sneaky little site called Read at Work, in which poems and short stories masquerade as Microsoft Office programs in folders on a faux desktop. So you can read Tolstoy, Dickinson, Twain, Wilde, Poe — all while seeming to be hard at work on a “PowerPont” presentation!

The way the texts are shoehorned into graphs and bullet points is amusingly inventive. I found the selection of New Zealand authors to be most informative, given that my grasp of Kiwi lit is pretty  shaky. Make that nonexistent…

3. Make sculptures out of them

One of my favorite moments in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night, a traveler is when the Reader meets an artist who sees books only as raw material for sculpture and, instead of reading them, destroys them in the process of creating his art. It’s scathing. Surely even Calvino, though, would find something to love in Thomas Allen’s book art photography, in which he carefully cuts out and bends away the figures on pulp novel covers and combines them to create three-dimensional scenes, which he then photographs.

First off, if you haven’t seen Garfield Minus Garfield, you are missing out! The site claims it is

dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.

Garfield deconstructed and redeemed. I love it. There’s even a book, which displays some of the top posts next to the original strips, if you’re wondering how they came about.

Then there’s Japes for Owre Tymes, written by a self-described “bad-tempered English prof” who procrastinates writing articles on Chaucer by translating comic strips into Middle English. Hard to go wrong, really, especially since her commentary is so darn funny (I’m thinking here of her David Foster Wallace-esque use of the footnote and her evolving argument that Marmaduke is, in fact, the “Antecryst”).

Of course, there are plenty of comics that have long warranted reverence instead of mockery. If, like me, you’ve always meant to learn more about the early history of comics and just never gotten around to it, then Don Markstein’s Toonopedia is made for you. He’s written over a thousand short articles on different cartoon characters so far, and new ones are added all the time. So if you aren’t sure why Little Nemo in Slumberland or Happy Hooligan was such a big deal, Toonopedia’s articles provide a nice thumbnail sketch, with lots of links to articles about other comics, so you can see how they all fit together.

Once you’ve got your bearings, you’ll probably want to check out more of the strips themselves. With articles and info to support the strips themselves, Coconino County is the most comprehensive Krazy Kat site I’ve found, though The Comic Strip Library has a nice collection of Krazy Kat too, as well as almost 500 gorgeous and intricate Little Nemo strips.

Enter The Museum of Online Museums, a clearinghouse of collections big and small. Sure, they’ve got links to heavy hitters like the Rijksmuseum and The Art Institute of Chicago, but they also feature quirky online exhibits like Toothpaste World, the Gallery of Pulp Paperback Covers, and the Virtual Shoe Museum. Prefer audio collections? Try the Speech Accent Archive or the Locomotive Horn Sound File Collection. My personal favorites are Plan59 (of course), which bills itself as “The Museum of Mid-Century illustration,” and the Condiment Packet Gallery.

Since collage is one of my recent obsessions, I’ve also enjoyed nu-real: a timeline of fantastic photomontage and its possible influences, 1857-2007. I do wish the photomontages were bigger, but I’ve enjoyed scrolling through and reading random entries about the form’s various incarnations.

Finally, if satire is your thing, the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA), whose stated goal is “to bring the worst of art to the widest of audiences,” might just become your new favorite online hangout. The works featured on MOBA, many of which are listed as “acquired from trash,” are accompanied by mock serious interpretations. Here’s the one that accompanies Mama and Babe, right:

The flesh tones bring to mind the top shelf liqueurs of a border bistro. With an astonishing emphasis on facial bone structure, the artist flirts with caricature and captures features of Mamma’s face which remind us of a Presidential candidate. The upright marionettish pose of the babe hints that the early bond between mother and child is as formal as it is familiar. Good old fashioned parental respect is at the center of this celebration of color and contour.

If you think you can top that, you can enter MOBA’s “Guest Interpretator’s Challenge“!

They also sell t-shirts. What more could we ask for?

Last week’s post dealt with how new technology facilitates direct encounters with masterpieces of art. But the whole reason the discipline of Art History exists is that there’s always much more to a work of art than meets the eye.

Enter smARThistory, a “free multi-media web-book” created by two art historians: Dr. Beth Harris, Director of Digital Learning at The Museum of Modern Art, and Dr. Stephen Zucker, Dean of Graduate Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Here’s a nice explanation, in their own words, of what smARThistory is trying to accomplish:

In smARThistory, we have aimed for reliable content and a delivery model that is entertaining and occasionally even playful. Our podcasts and screen-casts are spontaneous conversations about works of art where we are not afraid to disagree with each other or art history orthodoxy. We have found that the unpredictable nature of discussion is far more compelling to our students (and the public) than a monologue. When students listen to shifts of meaning as we seek to understand each other, we model the experience we want our students to have—a willingness to encounter the unfamiliar and transform it in ways that make it meaningful to them. We believe that smARThistory is broadly applicable to our discipline and is a first step toward understanding how art history can fit into the new collaborative culture created by web 2.0 technologies.

So if, for instance, you took a look at Leonardo’s The Last Supper after last week’s post and want to know a bit more about it (this being Holy Week and all), you can check out Beth and Stephen’s nifty screencast on the work.

Another fabulous online resource is the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. It’s a little more staid than smARThistory, and not quite as user friendly, but there’s some fascinating content there. There are, as you may have guessed, art history timelines for all regions of the world, which include links to representative pieces from each era (and area). You can also search an image database of 6,000 works of art from the Met’s extensive collections and read succinct, informative essays on everything from Egyptian amulets to Japanese incense to my beloved Georgia O’Keeffe.

Oh, my, look at the time! Let’s continue our online art history discussion next week, shall we?

I’ve yet to find any substitute for confronting a work of visual art directly, but the free online resources available now are a big step up from the laminated prints of my third period art class.

The Prado Museum, for instance, recently became the first museum to allow Google to start mapping its holdings, with the happy result that we can now zoom in like crazy on fourteen gorgeous paintings. The paintings can be viewed in popups on their Google Maps site, or, if you download Google Earth, you can see them full-screen, along with a 3D image of the museum itself. So far, I’ve checked out Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (which is especially handy if you happen to be reading Terry Tempest Williams’s book Leap), Rembrandt’s Artemis, Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, Goya’s The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid, and Raphael’s The Cardinal. Titian and El Greco are next…

And at the online store Haltadefinizione, you can get closer than you ever could in person to the frescoes of Gaudenzio Ferrari and Andrea Pozzo, Alessandro Antonelli’s Basilica of St. Gaudenzio, and — wonder of wonders! — The Last Supper, by the one and only Leonardo da Vinci.

There are so many lovely online art history resources that I’ve decided to make this a two-part series. So tune in next week for more fabulous online art history info!