Free iOS app for your next visit to Jacques Chirac’s legacy museum!
Gallica, the best of French culture at your fingertips
Now I know what I’ll be doing for the rest of my life… As soon as I get an iPad, that is. Which may now be sooner than I had thought because the Bibliothèque nationale de France has just released Gallica for iPad. And it’s free. The app contains 240,000 books, 880,000 magazines and 470,000 images. Also original musical scores, manuscripts and other goodies. Watch the video, and download the app (French store link).
No iPad? Enjoy the riches on the web.
Maps of France, as seen by…
Alert, cultural stereotypes ahead! France as seen by Americans, Germans, José Bové, and more. Author(s) unknown. See the rest at: Cartes de France, vues par ….
Hot young French farmers
“C’est beau d’être agriculteur” was the slogan for the 2012 Calendrier des jeunes agriculteurs, created by the French agricultural union “Jeunes Agriculteurs” to promote the métier of farming. We tipped you off to the young farmers’ calendar back in 2009, but didn’t have a picture. Looks like the 2012 version is sold out, but you can still make yourself a note to get one next year, and you can see more pics from the Calendrier Jeunes Agriculteurs 2012 here, though the slideshow doesn’t include all months.
Other calendars we’ve brought you in the past: The From’Girls, promoting French cheese with sexy pinups, the Aubade calendar, featuring those lingerie ads you see in the bus stops in Paris, and the Stade Paris rugby team beefcake calendar. You can get the current versions of them all at these links!
Nénette, une dame d’un certain âge…
Meet Nénette who, at 40, is the oldest resident of the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes in Paris. The Parisians love her. See the trailer of the award-winning documentary about her made by French filmmaker Nicolas Philibert.
Poaching and palm oil plantations are killing off the orangutans. If you care about them, there are several ways you can help through Orangutan Outreach.
Congrès mondial acadien 2014
Save the date for the Acadian World Congress 2014! Details: Congrès mondial acadien 2014.
A selection of Francophile designs for inspiration
It’s always fun to see the icons and concepts people choose to represent France (the usual clichés, but we love them anyway). But we’re sharing this mostly because the Quasimodo cracked us up…
See more francophile design inspirations at CreativeRoots.
Around the world with Maurice Laban
Striking vintage illustrations from a 1959 book by (evidently not French — see the comments) illustrator Maurice Laban. See more at My Vintage Avenue.
Notre Dame getting new bells
The bells that have been ringing every 15 minutes since 1856 in the towers of Notre Dame are being melted down and reforged. The Diocese of Paris says they’re ”mediocre in quality and of discordant tonality.”
Not sure I want bells that are in tune. It’s like having perfect teeth; no character…
Read the rest at the Sydney Morning Herald.
“Metropolisson” by photographer Janol Apin
Photographer Janol Apin does a series of photos in the Paris métro consisting of visual puns based on the names of the stations. Above: one meaning of boulet is “ball and chain.”
Interactive French geography games
Some entertaining interactive games on this site. We failed miserably at the cheese game, (shot above), but had fun nonetheless!
“Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man”
A fascinating documentary on the story of the iconic Paris bookstore Shakespeare & Co.
From Google videos: Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man.
Gallica, France’s digital library
We could wander these virtual stacks for days! So far, the Bibliothèque nationale de France has digitized more than one million works, including books, maps, manuscripts, images, periodicals, scores and sound recordings, and made them available for free to the public at the Gallica digital library. This is France’s answer to Google Books, and the result of the big fight from a couple of years ago.
Mullin Automotive Museum in LA preserves French Art Deco cars
The Mullin Automotive Museum, a Southern California institution dedicated to the preservation of French Art Deco era art and automobiles, announced today that its latest book, French Curves: Delahaye ∙ Delage ∙ Talbot-Lago, will be unveiled to the public this August at the 2011 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.
We covered the first volume in this series, The Art of Bugatti, here. French Curves is the second volume, and you can buy them both directly from the publisher. If you ask, you can get them signed by author Michael Furman too!
France Telecom bids adieu to the Minitel
France Telecom said today that it was shutting down its ground-breaking Minitel service, the proto-Internet that brought online shopping and chat rooms into millions of French homes in the 1980s.
Read the rest at PCMag.com.
Thanks for this. Looking forward to trying it out.
RSS feed for comments on this post. / TrackBack URI