This Spanish translation of Lucian Deslinières Comment se réalisera le socialisme (1919) is from 1937. The publisher, Editorial Marxista, was founded in 1936 by the P.O.U.M (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), one of the many factions in the Spanish Civil War. Editorial Marxista would last only 11 months but was prolific in its short life, producing dozens of Marxist classics and more than fifty different pamphlets, many of which were translations - like this one. In June of 1937, the Communist police seized the offices of the POUM and Editorial Marxista, destroying any EM material they found. Those items that remain have historical as well as intellectual value to historians of the Spanish Civil War and Marxist intellectual thought.
TheRubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is one of the most famous works of Persian literature. These two editions are from the Peter Pauper Press. The first (1940) is illustrated by Paul McPharlin with border designs by Carl Cobbledick, who was inspired by ancient Persian manuscripts. The other (1949) is illustrated by Vera Bock, a Russian illustrator. These translations were both done by Edward Fitzgerald, but the McPharlin/Cobbledick edition is from Fitzgerald’s first-edition text, while the Bock is from the fourth edition. These are just two of the many beautiful editions of the Rubaiyat!
“Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.”
Okay but actually this is what we do with ancient texts. There’s a concept called the “ur-text” in textual scholarship and it’s the idea that by collecting all the versions of a text (from any era!), scholars can reconstruct the original, ideal, and now lost version of the text (debate over whether such an ideal text ever even existed rages among the people for whom this is of concern).
But even simpler, we know much of what we know about ancient works not because the works themselves survive but because commentariesabout those works survive, and we can approximately reconstruct what the originals were. If every copy of Percy Jackson were to be firebombed off the planet tomorrow, we could probably reconstruct the books via its fanfiction, or at least approximate the predominant themes, plot points, and questions posed by the text. Literary historians do this all the time, even for more recent stuff than uber old shit (in the ~before times~ I attended a lecture on some very obscure French accounts regarding the exile of an official, which implied that the official had written a damning report of a king…and the scholar had pulled together what the report may have been like based on the bureaucratic accounts). All fanfiction is a commentary on its source text in a similar way.
Things survive when we take notice of them and talk about them. Fanfiction doesn’t just need to be preserved because it’s art in its own right, but because it actively preserves other art.
hello yes @sadviper thank you for these fabulous tags! I have a post about novelizations/media tie-ins of films and shows and dolls (America Girl, He-Man & She-Ra, etc.) in my drafts somewhere that I’ve never finished butif you’re interested in that, you might throw my guy plague librarian a follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/plaguelibrarian. he is working on a bibliography of novelizations (i.e. a big list of books that fall into this category) that will hopefully serve as the research basis for your question: why don’t we have these anymore? in a way, we do have remnants of that practice: we see them when we get film adaptations of novels and then the books are repackaged with a movie poster as the cover. original novelizations in the 1930s usedthe movie posters as the covers to make it very! clear! that the two were one & the same. as you might expect, it was mostly a marketing tool, and the little fragments we have of that practice today are still a marketing tool. but perhaps PL will reveal something new or another angle to approach this history!
to your second question: would they be hard to write? one article asks a similar question, looking at Addy Walker, the first Black American girl doll, whose background story was an escape from enslavement. in this case, American Girl complicated the creation and novels for this doll (and everything she represented) more than they needed to. it’s worth a read!
we really devolved as a society when we stopped using fully painted pictures on romance novels and started using cheap photoshop instead
case in point
this is a Hell of a downgrade
worst crime capitalism ever committed was eliminating Horny Oil Painter as a viable career option.
I went down a rabbit hole this summer researching romance novel covers and painting fanart in this style and
this is an EXTREMELY fun style to work in, and also
many of the most iconic romance novel covers you’re probably picturing when you think “classic painted romance novel cover” were produced by one prolific, masterful artist
Her name was Elaine Duillo, and she had a long and extremely productive career spanning from the mid 60’s to her retirement in 2003. She worked mainly in acrylics.
She did illustration work in other genres as well, but she really found her niche in romance novels. She pretty much redefined the aesthetic conventions of the genre, popularizing male models and male nudity and sexualizing men to cater to the female gaze in a way that simply wasn’t the norm before her work. You know Fabio? she’s the one who started using him as a model, and essentially launched his career. And honestly, just look at her work:
magnificent
Wait shit, she retired in 2003? I think that’s exactly when I started seeing shitty photoshops on all the new romance novel covers.
She was literally carrying the entire industry single-handed and then they just did not replace her.
100% agree that being able to see racoons in party hats any time of day or night is wonderful, but I do feel like people making these sorts of observations forget (or perhaps even don’t know) how ubiquitous print media used to be.
Mosthouseholds had at least one daily newspaper delivered–and many more regularly bought them on newsstands or had one passed along by someone else who was finished reading it. People who thought of themselves as “readers,” or as being particularly engaged with current events often subscribed to more than one.
There were also a number of weekly magazines with wide circulations–LIFE, NewsWeek, Time, Harper’s Weekly, etc., as well as monthly magazines for every conceivable topic. The most popular ones had millions of subscribers each, and magazines were even more likely than newspapers to be passed through multiple households before they were discarded. People also read magazines in many circumstances where you’d today boredom-scroll through your phone: standing in line at a store, in a waiting room, on public transit, etc*.
(*And there were moral panics about these practices! In the late 19th to early 20th century, when the combination of public education and advances in printing technology made magazines available to the masses, there were widespread ~*~concerns~!*~ about how people–especially people who were young, working-class, and/or female–were reading Trashy Magazines instead of Worthwhile Books. There was also a fair bit of head-shaking over how many people in public places had their face in a newspaper, instead of Engaging With Their Fellow Man.)
Dailies and weeklies usually focused on news, and monthlies on some topic or interest, but they had a huge variety of content in addition to big serious articles about the publication’s topic–celebrity gossip, recipes, puzzles, humor items, and especially funny or interesting pictures. (One magazine I remember (I think It was LIFE, but don’t quote me) always ran a funny picture as the last page in the issue.) A number of popular magazines also had features where readers could send in their own pictures, and they’d print the best ones–like going viral, except that they were chosen by an editor instead of an algorithm.
People 50 years ago saw similar amountsof content as we do today–it was just that it came in physical formats, and there was an editorial/gatekeeping process before it got to you. And because people have not fundamentally changed, the type of material hasn’t really changed much, either. The big difference is in how much individual choice you have over what you see and when you see it, rather than having a pre-selected bundle of content delivered to you on a set schedule.
tl:dr: It’s true that the average person, 50 years ago, who had a sudden urge to see a picture of an animal in a funny hat, would have to go out of their way to do so. However, they were about as likely as we are today to have one just turn up in the course of their normal activities.
Adding to what @alex51324 said, because I love them, in the funny picture department there were greeting cards. Without such things as email, IM, and text, people wrote a lot more, and the selection in the Hallmark part of the store hasn’t changed as much as you’d think. You’d probably see a raccoon in a birthday hat every time your great aunt three-hours-drive had a birthday.
Admittedly, I’m pretty sure a fair number of the funny pictures appeared in the magazines too, but not all of them.
Yes! I forgot all about greeting cards. Calendars, too.
There was also a thing where, if your magazine or newspaper had something in it that you wanted someone else to see, you could cut it out and mail it to them. If you thought everyone should see it, you might cut it out and tape it up somewhere that other people could see it–like a bulletin board at your workplace, or outside your door in a college dorm. (Hence why the earliest social media sites were called “bulletin boards” and why Facebook has a wall.)
