This Week’s Reading, 22.4.12

After a week’s hiatus to deal with the headcrushing chaos of London Book Fair, TWR returns. This week: Kool Keith, post traumatic stress disorder, book spine poetry and Les Fleurs du mal illustrations.

• Leader image: L’Homme en gloire dans la Paix by Jean Lurçat (1958). Bigger versions of Lurçat’s work here.

• “One is the most innovative writer of the 20th century, the other is James Joyce.” James Joyce vs. Kool Keith.

• Tauriq Moosa on the tyranny of the majority.

• Screenprinted vintage Cuban book covers.

• Gratuitous Issue 2 out now. Typography porn.

• Ken Russell’s The Devils, now on DVD for the first time.

• Günter Grass poem ‘What Must Be Said’ still getting hackles up in Israel. As we missed it last week, here’s the poem in full.

• The Story of Scott Ostrom: post traumatic stress disorder in pictures.

• Bruno Jasieński’s I Burn Paris has finally been translated to English, 83 years after its release. John Self’s Asylum review is here.

• “Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee-drinker, apparently pees hard and often, and neither he nor the production can afford the time it’d take him to run down the Base Camp’s long line of trailers to the trailer where the bathrooms are every time he needs to pee.”

• Prescription for James Joyce’s spectacles and How to Enjoy Ulysses, a self-explanatory brochure released by Random House alongside the famously challenging book in 1934.

• Really old but really great piece on Honest Publishing author Willie Smith at Exquisite Corpse.

• Rajan Khanna on the finest non-traditional fantasy settings. Apt, considering one of our future releases.

• Book spine poetry.

• Lit tattoos aren’t completely our thing, but this is an exceptional case.

• All of Carlo Farneti’s illustrations for Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. Fullscreening this is advisable: