Moroccan calligraphy, 19th century (courtesy of BibliOdyssey)
I know many of you are regular readers of 3 Quarks Daily and the fascinating posts by Elatia Harris. But for anyone who may be a newcomer here, run, don’t walk your way to her latest foray into the extraordinary blog, BibliOdyssey.
In her words: “One of my guilty pleasures is visiting BibliOdyssey — there’s a gorgeous new post almost every other night — a site devoted to visual Materia Obscura. Be it 12th century sky maps, illuminated manuscripts, or the drawings of a ship’s artist on a voyage to the South Pacific in the early 1800’s, you can trust BibliOdyssey to yield up something fantastic that you haven’t already seen.”
When Elatia first told me about this site I was enchanted. How fitting to now find out that the very cool English design group Fuel has published a book based on these breathlessly beautiful images assembled by the mysterious blogmaster, Paul K. The introduction is by Dinos Chapman, one half of the Chapmans, art brothers extraordinaire. For those of you in Europe, you can buy the book right now through Fuel. According to Amazon, it will be a few more weeks before it is available in the US. You heard it here: It will be everybody’s favorite holiday gift, to get or to give.
Georg von Welling, 1719 (courtesy of BibliOdyssey)
BibliOdyssey is so mindblowingly beautiful I can’t believe it. Funny that I just posted some beautiful mandalas today. I feel like I’m moving in a more visual direction. You have really been writing some amazing posts lately.
Thank you so much for this encouragement. As you know, it means a lot to get feedback like this.