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The stunning art and inspiring story of the forgotten scientific illustrator Else Bostelmann, official expedition artist on William Beebe’s pioneering Bathysphere dives of the 1930s. Her paintings of previously unseen and unimagined creatures of the deep – some of which she painted in an astonishing makeshift studio on the ocean floor – invited the human eye and imagination into the wonder-world of the deep sea for the very first time, a world then more mysterious than the Moon. Dive in.

Otherworldly transcendence straight out of the real world: northern lights photographs of the year. 

The northern lights were named Aurora Borealis (after the Roman goddess of dawn and the Greek name for the norther wind) by the French priest, philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician Pierre Gassendi. 

Couple with a wondrous picture-book about the Aurora Borealis, one of the year’s loveliest children’s books. 

(HTKottke) 

Alison Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength is superb beyond words – an uncommon meditation on the life of the body, the transcendence of the self, and our search for meaning, folded into which is an uncommon history of the past 50 years, of America, and of the creative spirit dating back to the Romantics and the Transcendentalists. 

On this day in 1888, Vincent van Gogh cut off his own ear. (A century-some later, Joni Mitchell referenced his self-portrait in a self-portrait that became the cover of her album “Turbulent Indigo.”) Here is the stirring first-hand account of what actually happened that night from his best friend, Paul Gauguin. 

Looking for uncommon gifts for the science-lover and nature-ecstatic in your life (or in your soul)? Here are some wearable, washable, wallable, giftable wonders featuring artwork restored from centuries-old natural history, botany, and astronomy books, with proceeds benefitting The Nature Conservancy. 

Theadorable doodles Darwin’s kids left all over his manuscript of On the Origin of Species, published on this day in 1859 .

The forgotten poet Joseph Pintauro, born on this day in 1930, made some uncommonly wonderful children’s books for grownups, long and lamentably out of print. Here is what survives of them. 

In honor of the November 2021 partial lunar eclipse – the longest in 500 years – French artist Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s stunning 19th-century astronomical drawings of eclipses, planets, comets, meteor showers, and other wonders of the universe. 

A bittersweet celebration of the beauty and fragility of Earth’s most delicate ecosystem in artist Rogan Brown’s paper sculptures of bleached coral – organisms that thrived for 500 million years, until we came along and proceeded to decimate them in the mere century since we first gasped at their beauty in our first vibrantly illustrated encyclopedia of their world. 

“These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based ‘flying ointment’ that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the 'broomstick’ by which these women were said to travel.”

Michael Pollanonthe radical history of gardening and the scandalous, subversive botanical origin of the witch’s broomstick.

Chlorophyll evolved more than a billion years, was discovered 200 years ago, yet remains a mystery. Its fascinating science explains why, when autumn leaves change, nature’s true colors are actually revealed – colors that include true-blue bananas.

“These objects are, it is true, among the humblest of creatures that are endowed with organic life… Here we catch the first kindling of that spark, which glows into so noble a flame in the Aristotles, the Newtons, and the Miltons of our heaven-gazing race.”

Philip Henry Gosse’s stunning 19th-century illustrations of and meditations on coastal creatures and the interleaving of life. 

Cutting boards with centuries-old astronomical, botanical, and natural history art. Because why not. Proceeds benefitting The Nature Conservancy.

Elizabeth Blackwell is 29. The year is 1736. Her husband is in debtor’s prison, she has a small child to feed, and so she turns desperation into inspiration, she learns botany, and she paints a pioneering encyclopedia of medicinal plants – including (for International Coffee Day today) coffee, as well as the tomato, then known as “love apple.” See them all here. 

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