Imagine you’re at a flea market or in a library. You target some juicy old book, open it and…find out it’s filled with personal notes and doodles on the pages’ margins. Ever happened in real life? If you’re one of those people who value books as a sacred objects and

Besides writing on a couple of underground magazines, I am a high school teacher. More precisely, I teach Philosophy and History. And if making teenagers fall in love with the first is child’s play, the latter is always a really tough pill to sugar. Therefore, I borrowed from my middle

The Bigelow-Wallis and Warren-Kaula watercolor collection is a set of 189 watercolor paintings commissioned by Harvard professor of surgery Henry Jacob Bigelow from lithographer Oscar Wallis between 1849 and 1854. There are a lot of weird and gross images in this collection worth checking out, but my favorites are the skulls

Back when I had TV, one of the channels I would find myself lingering on was the surgery channel. I can’t describe the feeling I experienced as I watched the innards of someone I didn’t know pulsating under bright lights and flashing steel instruments – kind of a combination of

via: Res Obscura The image above is a detail from a remarkable 1620 engraving I first came across this past summer. It shows a man sliding another figure into what looks like an old-fashioned oven – but instead of smoke, images of the man’s thoughts billow out of the oven’s top.

My favorite books as a kid for were always Pop Up Books. So when I saw the 1661 pop-up book of medical illustrations entitled Kleiner welt Spiegel, das ist, Abbildung Göttlicher Schöpffung an dess Menschen Leib: mit beygesetzer Schrifftlicher Erklärung (Ulm, 1661), a German translation of Johann Remmelin’s Catoptrum Microcosmicum originally published