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The assignment: redesign Vladimir Nabokov’s book covers, all 21 of them.

The result: 21 designers, and, in a nod to the author’s passion for butterfly collection, 21 specimen boxes.
 

See also: Michael Bierut’s eulogy for designer Fred Marcellino, previously at Design Observer, and Nabokov Under Glass.

R. Crumb’s faithful rendering of Genesis highlights the book’s inconsistencies, including the conflicting accounts of the creation of humanity.

Was Eve formed as a subservient “helper,” from Adam’s rib, or did the Lord make man and woman at the same time, with a let-there-be-light-type command? The simultaneous creation story is the older one, actually, but fundamentalists read them together, giving greater credence to the flesh-of-my-flesh, bone-of-my-bone version, and seeing (or at least acknowledging) no conflict.
 

Paul Morris rightly praises Crumb’s “portraits of the early forefathers and foremothers, as well as painstakingly detailed terrain, vegetation, and attire — an attentiveness that would border on overresearched if it weren’t so immersive.” Although I can’t judge as a historian or archaeologist would, Crumb’s Book of Genesis, like Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze series, feels textured and informed, and anchored in a particular time and place.

I’d love to see his straight-faced take on Exodus, not to mention Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
 

But despite Crumb’s vastly superior artistry (above, and first panel below), as I read I kept thinking of the frightening, ill-reasoned, and weirdly campy tracts of one Jack Chick (second panel below), the most influential cartoonist of my young life.

Probably it’s all the Sodom and Gomorrah. And the brimstone and hellfire.

In the spirit of The Awl’s Public Apology column: Sorry again, ’80s Miami, for pressing This Was Your Life! on you in Tropical Park when you were just trying to have a picnic.

Michael Bierut’s brief but fascinating currency design slideshow includes this ¥5000 note, which features 19th century Japanese novelist Ichiyo Higuchi on the front, and a field of irises on the reverse. (Via.)

For the duration of its The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia show, the Guggenheim has given over its rotunda to Ann Hamilton’s “human carriage.”

When set in motion, a simple and strangely beautiful little silk-canopied trolley circles the balustrade spirals, top to bottom, carrying Tibetan hand cymbals that ring at seemingly random intervals. Everyone not wearing headphones slowly becomes aware of the sound, and many rush to the railing to watch as the carriage makes its way down to the lobby.

There it comes to rest until a “reader” above loads “a stack of books — cut guillotine style and glued and tied together in bundles — onto a vertical pulley, which lifts the bells back to the top of the ramp.” Eventually this is deposited on top of the other cut-up volumes, and the process starts over again.

The artist has characterized the work as an audible and visual metaphor for the transmission of culture, especially through reading. Whom You Know’s photograph, above, is the only one I’ve seen that comes close to capturing the experience. (Click over to the site for a larger version.)

The rest of the show is, as Lee Lawrence says, interesting but unwieldy, “a dissertation illustrated with artworks.” It runs through April 19.

For the holidays, the design firm Pentagram sent out Decipher, a gorgeous book of cryptograms now reproduced online for your enjoyment. Solve them here, and enjoy.

Has there ever been a comprehensive exhibition of Marc Chagall’s literary etchings and lithographs? Dead Souls, The Odyssey, the Bible. . . ?

I wish someone would put such a thing together — in New York. Or at least that the universe would award me a plane ticket to Nice.

You can see that my cubicle is aflutter with productivity today, huh?
 

(That’s Isaiah at the top of the post. Other Biblical lithographs, after the jump: Moses with the Tablets of the Law, Angel, Job Praying, Abraham and Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert, and Angel at the Gates of Paradise.)

There was a wonderful piece in Saturday's Washington Post by writer Jim Sollisch called "A Day to Edit Our Lives", which compares the process of atonement and renewal on Yom Kippur to that of editing and revising a novel.

Some of my favorite bits:

"Writing is a process of making choices. Thousands of them. The act of writing an opening sentence is the result of more choices than I can count. Every word a character speaks or swallows is a choice. Every action or inaction, more choices. It's so easy to get them wrong. Or at least to see that another choice would have made more sense.

The best writers are usually the best revisers, and they learn to look forward to the process. Revision gives you a chance to get things right. You learn to ask other people for suggestions. Your narrator may be omniscient, but you realize you're not. Suddenly, the writing isn't yours alone anymore.

You see that it affects people differently from the way you intended.

On Yom Kippur, we are given the chance to understand that our lives are also not ours alone. Our actions and choices affect others, often in ways that we don't intend. If we cling to our vision of ourselves too fiercely, we blow the chance to gain insight."

and best of all, this:

"Revising yourself requires you to do something almost psychologically unnatural -- stop narrating the story of your life the way you always have.

The British novelist John Fowles said that people under 40 should not attempt to write novels because they lack the wisdom to do so. I think he may have meant that they lack the ability to revise. Living, like writing, requires no wisdom. Only revising does.

As someone who has spent many years in therapy precisely to learn how to stop narrating the story of my life in the unhealthy way I always had, that sentence really resonated with me. There are times when I've felt frustrated that I came to writing, the thing that I always wanted to do, so late in life; there's a certain amount of "what would have happened if I'd started earlier, what might I have achieved by now?"

But now I realize there's probably a good reason I didn't get my first book contract until two months after my 40th birthday. Maybe I had to do the work on revising myself before I could successfully revise a novel.

P.S. I'm STILL trying to get rid of the headache hangover from the crippling migraine I got from fasting on Yom Kippur. Next year, I REALLY have to wean off the caffeine a few weeks before the big day.

HB reviewer Lauren Adams and I went with our nice Jewish boys to Kol Nidre services last night, where none other than that nice Jewish girl, our own Jane Yolen, was referenced in the sermon. The theme was something about "remembering the person you always wanted to be," and Jane was brought into it via an essay she wrote about the power of stories to make sense of our lives. Mazel Tov, Jane!