Mike Rosenthal (@vectorbelly) has created Twitter: The Comic, a Tumblr blog of comics made from tweets, some his own, some by others.
There’s some random, twisted stuff on Twitter, as you may have noticed. But it makes for some interesting art.
This one, of course, is our favorite.
Based on this tweet by @DankHerbMullet.
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.
In two volumes, now available through the BNF site: The Notebooks of Edgar Degas : a catalogue of the thirty-eight notebooks in the Bibliothèque nationale and other collections
Article about the notebooks (in French): Les carnets de Degas, pour entrer dans les arcanes de sa création artistique | Gallica.
An 18th-century portrait sold in New York to a British gallery as a “woman in a feathered hat” turns out to actually portray a man dressed as a woman, becoming the earliest known painting of a transvestite. (Read how they figured it out…)
Seems the makers of the 24-episode Japanese animé series, Le Chevalier d’Eon, took a lot of liberties with the Chevalier’s history! And his appearance… Watch the trailer.
Striking vintage illustrations from a 1959 book by (evidently not French — see the comments) illustrator Maurice Laban. See more at My Vintage Avenue.
A fascinating documentary on the story of the iconic Paris bookstore Shakespeare & Co.
From Google videos: Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man.
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.
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!
Old French Fairy Tales by la Comtesse de Ségur reminded us of the books we used to get at the library as kids… Look to the left and you’ll notice you can download a PDF of the whole book.
Seen @brainpicker.
…once upon a time, the ability to speak French properly was considered an absolute essential. In 26 chapters, each focusing on a different colourful Francophile, Fumaroli makes his way across 18th-century Europe. The book is a gallery of Russians, Prussians, Swedes, Poles, Italians and Englishmen; politicians, soldiers, kings and collectors, who all aspired to speak and write the French language beautifully…
Read the rest at The Independent and buy the book at our Amazon store!
French artist Blexbolex has charmed the world with his playful cartoons and illustrations, to which he brings his wonderfully eclectic creative background — classically trained as a screen-printer in 1980s France, inspired by the whodunits of the 1950s and 60s, and having directed a German art studio in the 1990s, he blends elements of cartoons, graphic novels and soft watercolor painting into simple yet endlessly whimsical artwork.
Read the rest at Brain Pickings.
We love his style and have four of his books at our Amazon store: Seasons, Abecederia, People, and Dogcrime.
A compelling, intimate portrait of the Bonapartes, delving into the conflicted relationship between Napoleon and his beloved brother Lucien, the most talented of the Bonaparte brothers, who not only can be credited for helping Napoleon seize power, but who had a promising political career of his own. He was a romantic, an idealist, and an anti-monarchist whose love for Alexandrine, the woman he married in spite of Napoleon’s objections, caused him to fall out of favor with his powerful brother.
We have three hardback copies of this novel to give away this month. Go to the Community home page to see how to win! Offer ends July 31, 2011.
Didn’t win? Buy the book at the Francophilia Amazon store.
Graham Robb wrote a superb book about France two years ago, The Discovery of France, and now follows it up with an ingenious study of Paris since 1750. Perhaps surprisingly, Paris turns out to be the more tumultuous and unbounded subject.
Read the rest of the review at the Telegraph. Buy Parisians at the Francophilia Amazon store!
Mesh gloves, a rosary, a pencil-holder made from shells of German guns—these are some of the real-life objects that inspired this World War I-era novel, with photos of the objects scattered through the pages. [Author Elena Mauli] Shapiro inherited the cache of treasures that belonged to a scarcely known neighbor; all she really knew was the woman’s Paris address and name, Louise Brunet. The novel constructs a frame in which an American academic imagines Louise’s story through her possessions: the fiancé killed in the war, her bourgeois marriage, her sexual fantasies. Source: thedailybeast.
Visit the 13, rue Thérèse interactive website and buy the book at the Francophilia Amazon Store.
…[T]he epic mess of Piaf’s love life, as well as the scale of her talent, make this story something special, while her brutal Dickensian childhood virtually ensured that she would spend her adult life in a doomed quest for perfect love and security.
Complete review at The Barnes & Noble Review. Buy the book at the Francophilia Amazon store.