factoidfactory:

Random Fact #6,697

BookCrossing is a project where you release a book “into the wild” with info about the project you can print out and stick onto the inside cover, and you can track where the book has travelled when people who find the book log in their location, complete with an option for a journal entry about their discovery, what they thought about the book, etc.

You can use a standard bookplate or even make your own with a program they have on the website!

(via intothestacks)

vampira-carmilla:

𝕸𝖆𝖓𝖚𝖘𝖈𝖗𝖎𝖕𝖙 𝖔𝖋 𝕭𝖗𝖆𝖒 𝕾𝖙𝖔𝖐𝖊𝖗’𝖘 𝕯𝖗𝖆𝖈𝖚𝖑𝖆 𝖕𝖑𝖆𝖞𝖘𝖈𝖗𝖎𝖕𝖙, 𝖋𝖗𝖔𝖒 1897.

(via whoreofabaddon)

brujahinaskirt:

vladimir-nabokov-official:

“Lolita isn’t a perverse young girl. She’s a poor child who has been debauched and whose senses never stir under the caresses of the foul Humbert Humbert, whom she asks once, ‘how long did [he] think we were going to live in stuffy cabins, doing filthy things together…?’ But to reply to your question: no, its success doesn’t annoy me, I am not like Conan Doyle, who out of snobbery or simple stupidity preferred to be known as the author of “The Great Boer War,” which he thought superior to his Sherlock Holmes. It is equally interesting to dwell, as journalists say, on the problem of the inept degradation that the character of the nymphet Lolita, whom I invented in 1955, has undergone in the mind of the broad public. Not only has the perversity of this poor child been grotesquely exaggerated, but her physical appearance, her age, everything has been transformed by the illustrations in foreign publications. Girls of eighteen or more, sidewalk kittens, cheap models, or simple long-legged criminals, are baptized “nymphets” or “Lolitas” in news stories in magazines in Italy, France, Germany, etc; and the covers of translations, Turkish or Arab, reach the height of ineptitude when they feature a young woman with opulent contours and a blonde mane imagined by boobies who have never read my book. In reality Lolita is a little girl of twelve, whereas Humbert Humbert is a mature man, and it’s the abyss between his age and that of the little girl that produces the vacuum, the vertigo, the seduction of mortal danger. Secondly, it’s the imagination of the sad satyr that makes a magic creature of this little American schoolgirl, as banal and normal in her way as the poet manqué Humbert is in his. Outside the maniacal gaze of Humbert there is no nymphet. Lolita the nymphet exists only through the obsession that destroys Humbert. Herein an essential aspect of a unique book that has been betrayed by a factitious popularity.”

— Vladimir Nabokov (tr. Brian Boyd), Apostrophes (1975)

Véra Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov’s editor and wife (among so many other things), mentioned in interviews with her biographer that he threw the Lolita manuscript into a fire several times (she pulled it out). Vladimir Nabokov spoke openly about his fear that the industry and an idiot public would pervert his book into a saucy sex fantasy instead of a study on predatory patriarchal horror. I hate how right he was.

(via lesmandposting)

gingerbarts:

Ursula K. Le Guin - A Wizard of Earthsea
The Court of the Terrenon

(via nitewrighter)

intothestacks:

Tsundoku - The Japanese term for amassing books you’ve bought but haven’t read

I feel both called out and seen all at once.

lunamond:

Saw this trend on tiktok and couldn’t help thinking of them 💔

(via gwenllian-in-the-abbey)

roach-works:

little-miss-rasputin-pageant:

in almost every other children’s book where the main heroine is swept away to a land of whimsy she’s shown having a lovely time; braving dangers occasionally, trying to find her way home, sure, but ultimately delighting in the magic around her. meanwhile alice spends her entire time in wonderland like

look, here’s the thing: alice in wonderland’s enduring fucking charm is that it perfectly captures the vibe of being a very tired and annoyed child who is nonetheless required to play along with adult nonsense.

alice is dragged from place to place without warning, forced to play stupid games with no good prizes, grilled over her schooling and manners and recitation and dress, scolded, judged, insulted to her face, sent away, given gifts she didn’t ask for and doesn’t like, corrected incorrectly, been subject to shifting and arbitrary rules, and then when she gets snappish with all this bullshit everyone acts like a little girl’s temper is the end of the fucking world.

alice in wonderland isn’t a drug trip or a nightmare or a metaphor, that’s just what being ten years old is LIKE. that’s why kids love it so much. even if they can’t quite articulate how, they recognize themselves in it.

(via intothestacks)

sonofshermy:

Haunted Books

(via in-flvx)

bondsmagii:

bondsmagii:

hanging around in a second-hand bookshop today. three massive floors and a basement. barely room to squeeze past another browser in the aisles. absolute labyrinth in every room. hidden stairs and doors. housed in an old bank that was then a school. crumbling decor, sloping floors, like an abandoned building filled with books. also very haunted. hell yes.

usual state of affairs

(via butchfeygela)

therepublicofletters:

Decorated pages from the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University

(via knightsickness)

medievalistsnet:

The Book of Marvels: Imagining the Medieval World at the Morgan Library - see these and more at their new exhibition. Details at:

Exploring the Medieval World Through Illuminated Manuscripts at the Morgan Library - Medievalists.net

The Morgan Library & Museum has unveiled an extraordinary exhibition, The Book of Marvels: Imagining the Medieval World, running from Januar

Medievalists.net

(via memories-of-ancients)

Anonymous asked:

I would LOVE to read your analysis of louis as byronic hero as apposed to his reading as gothic heroine. lots of the latter and zero of the former in the fandom.

pynkhues:

Sure! Mmm, okay, so –

What are we talking about when we talk about Gothic Heroes?  

When we talk about gothic heroes, we’re really talking about three pretty different character archetypes. All three are vital to the genre, but some are more popular in certain subgenres i.e. your Prometheus Hero may be more common in gothic horror, whereas your Byronic Hero might be more likely to be found in gothic romance. That’s not to say they’re exclusive to those subgenres at all, and there is an argument that these archetypes themselves are gendered (in many ways, I think people confuse Anne being an author of the female gothic with Louis being a gothic heroine, but I’ll get into that later), but this is also not necessarily something that’s exclusive.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself, haha, so the three gothic hero archetypes are:

1. Milton’s Satan who is the classic gothic hero-villain. You can probably guess from the name, but he was originated in John Milton’s 1667 poem, Paradise Lost. He is God’s favourite angel, but God is forced to cast him out of heaven when he rebels against him. As an archetype, he’s a man pretty much defined by his pride, vanity and self-love, usually fucks his way through whatever book or poem he’s in, has a perverted, incestuous family, and a desire to corrupt other people. He’s also defined as being “too weak to choose what is moral and right, and instead chooses what is pleasurable only to him” and his greatest character flaw, in spite of all The Horrors, is that he’s usually easily misguided or led astray. (I would argue that Lestat fits into this archetype pretty neatly, but that’s a whole other post.)
2. Prometheus who was established as a gothic archetype by Mary Shelley with Frankenstein in 1818. Your Prometheus Hero is basically represented by the quest for knowledge and the overreach of that quest to bring on unintended consequences. He’s tied, of course, to the Prometheus of Greek myth, so you can get elements of that in this character design too in that he can be devious or a trickster, but the most important part of him is that he is split between his extreme intelligence and his sense of rebellion, and that his sense of rebellion and boundary pushing overtakes his intelligence and basically leads to All The Gothic Horrors.
3. And the Byronic Hero, who as the name implies, was both created by and inspired by the romantic poet, Lord Byron in his semi-autobiographical poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage which was published between 1812-1818. The archetype is kind of an idealized version of himself, and as historian and critic Lord Macaulay wrote, the character is “a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection.” Adding to that, he’s often called ‘the gloomy egoist’ as a protagonist type, hates society, is often self-destructive and lives either exiled or in a self-exile, and is a stalwart of gothic literature, but especially gothic romance. Interestingly too, in his most iconic depictions he’s often a) darkly featured and/or not white (Heathcliff being the most obvious example of this given Emily Bronte clearly writes him as either Black or South Asian), and b) is often used to explore queer identity, with Byron himself having been bisexual.

Okay, but what about the Gothic Heroine?

Gothic heroines are less delineated and have had more of an evolution over time, which makes sense, given women have consistently been the main audience of gothic literature and have frequently been the most influential writers of the genre too. The gothic genre sort of ‘officially’ started with Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto and Isabella is largely regarded as the first gothic heroine and the foundation of the archetype, and the book opens even with one of the key defining traits – an innocent, chaste woman without the protection of a family being pursued and persecuted by a man on the rampage.

The gothic heroine was, for years, defined by her lack of agency. She was innocent, chaste, beautiful, curious, plagued by tragedy and often, ultimately, tragic. Isabella survives in The Castle of Otranto, but she’s one of the lucky ones – Cathy dies in Wuthering Heights, Sybil dies in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Justine and Elizabeth both die in Frankenstein, Mina survives in Dracula, but Lucy doesn’t. There’s an argument frequently posited that the gothic genre was, and is, about dead women and the men who mourn them, and Interview with the Vampire certainly lends itself to that pretty neatly.

Keep reading

Anonymous asked:

What do you mean when u say Lestat is a Milton’s Satan hero?

pynkhues:

Ah! Okay! Going to try and keep this shorter than my Byronic Hero post, haha, but we’ll see how we go.

Before we start…

When we talk about Milton’s Satan as a character archetype, we’re talking about something that was originated in John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, which was published in 1667. This was before gothic literature was quote-unquote ‘invented’ (as I mentioned in my first Byronic Hero post, gothic literature is widely accepted to have begun with Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto – worth the read, even just for the bonkers prophecy-speaking skeletons and a character dying from a helmet falling on his head, haha), but had, and continues to have, an enormous impact on gothic literature and horror in general.

The poem is set across twelve ‘books’ (chapters, basically), and is effectively a re-telling of the Book of Genesis but with two narrative throughlines. One throughline is Adam and Eve who represent more conventional biblical heroes in the poem, and the other is Satan (also called Lucifer in the poem). We’ll talk more about them in a sec, but before we begin it’s important to note that Paradise Lost was never intended as a criticism of the church.

Milton was a religious man, which is a really important thing to note when we start talking about Paradise Lost, but he was also heavily influenced as a writer by King Charles I’s autocratic rule and the English Civil War which lasted from 1642-1651. I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of all of that, but what’s important to note is that he wrote Paradise Lost in a really increased period of anti-authority sentiment in the UK and believed strongly in rebellion against authority, which feeds into how he invented his Satan.

Keep reading

Anonymous asked:

So, if Lestat is a Milton’s Satan hero, Louis is a Byronic hero, Claudia is a gothic heroine and Daniel is a Prometheus hero... who's Armand in this analysis? 👁️👁️

pynkhues:

I go back and forth on Armand a bit, but I generally lean towards him being The Monk.

The Monk archetype basically became a thing during the Spanish Inquisition as gothic authors were horrified by what the the clergy did in the name of devotion / God, and it’s really what created the huge anti-Catholicism throughline that’s fairly central in gothic literature to this day. They’re less of a defined archetype, I’d say, than Milton’s Satan, the Byronic Hero, or the Prometheus Hero (in fact, The Monk can actually be fed by any of those archetypes), but they’re really defined by the fact that they hide behind devotion and you never know how much power they actually have, nor if you’re dealing with a true religious man, a cad or even a tyrant.

When they’re a lead, they’re usually defined by their moral degradation. They start as a true and virtuous innocent and are corrupted by an incident, usually involving sex and sorcery (the trope being established in Matthew Lewis’ 1797 novel aptly titled The Monk, where a pious, but repressed monk is seduced by a woman who turns out to be a demon planted there by Lucifer), and through that incident become usually hyper-sexual and also often tied to dark, supernatural gifts that they use to try and control other characters (usually the gothic heroine, but not always).

The Monk uses his devotion and the trust placed in him as a religious authority to then control his congregation, and usually to exact overreach over other characters within the text. Interestingly too, The Monk can also be pretty passive in the face of other character types? Just never the Gothic Heroine, which we see I’d say in how Armand treats Claudia.

The fact that Armand goes from being groomed by Marius to being literally instated as the leader of the Children of Satan cult, then placed again as a sort of ‘agent of God / head of church’ figure by Lestat in the Paris Coven I think lends itself to that pretty neatly, but also his need to serve a hallowed figure plays into that sense of the perversion of church and the corruption of the clergy in the desire to control not just congregation, but often that that they purport to worship as well.

I do think Armand has little bits of all three of the main archetypes though too, which actually isn’t uncommon for The Monk!

layaart:

ALT

botanical books 🌷🌸

(via in-flvx)