
Ray Bradbury. NASA public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.
"The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade-journals." — — from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (born August 22, 1920)
Ray Bradbury. NASA public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1969 book publisher Random House commissioned surrealist artist Salvador Dalí to illustrate Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. For the 150th anniversary of the original publication of Lewis Carrol’s novel, Princeton University Press released a reprint of the book with Dalí’s illustrations. The video above is from Princeton University Press’s official Youtube channel.
For more information, see the following Dictionary of Literary Biography volumes, produced by our sister company Bruccoli Clark Layman and published by Gale Cengage:
"No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square." — Louise Bogan, former US Poet Laureate and poetry editor to The New Yorker. Happy birthday!