<body><div>Nonfiction:<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=1wfL42_0u3KyTj200" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=1wfL42_0u3KyTj200" width="967" height="1500" ></figure>The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives, by Adam Smyth (Basic Books): “It isn’t the case,” the book historian Adam Smyth writes, “that books, as objects, get better as the years tick by: a Whiggish version of history as improvement or a process of refining doesn’t work.” In our time of textual ephemera, then, Smyth’s new The Book-Makers stands as a monument to presses past: a delightful survey of bookish achievements from the fifteenth century to the present, attentive to the printerly peculiarities of each age. Keyed to the lives of such extraordinary individuals as Wynkyn de Worde and Benjamin Franklin, John Baskerville and Nancy Cunard, here is a welcome reminder of what the printed word can be. —REArt:<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=2pDA8T_0u3KyTj200" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=2pDA8T_0u3KyTj200" width="1024" height="683" ><figcaption>Installation view of “Milton Resnick: 811 Broadway, 1959–1961.” Photo courtesy of the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation.</figcaption></figure>“Milton Resnick: 811 Broadway, 1959–1961,” at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York (through December 21): It was in a repurposed synagogue that the painter Milton Resnick lived and worked from 1976 until his death in 2004—and it is in that same building, repurposed once again as the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, that three of his titanic canvases are now on display. Marking the artist’s brief stint at another studio on Broadway, the canvases recall Monet’s Water Lilies as much as they do Resnick’s Abstract Expressionist milieu. Their lush surfaces appear to undulate; two feature the colors of a verdant day, and the rich blacks of the other—displayed between the botanical canvases—suggest the same scene at night. Painted at the height of Abstract Expressionism’s popularity, these works nonetheless tiptoe back toward representation. —SMMusic:<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=1NPBT0_0u3KyTj200" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=1NPBT0_0u3KyTj200" width="1000" height="690" ><figcaption>The Goethe Bicentennial in Aspen, Colorado, 1949. Photo: Aspen Historical Society.</figcaption></figure>The Aspen Music Festival, Aspen, Colorado (June 26–August 18): As the New York classical world enters the summer doldrums, some listeners might consider decamping to Aspen, Colorado, for a breath of fresh air. Many did so in 1949, when the Aspen Music Festival was first held under the banner of a bicentennial celebration of Goethe. The then-dilapidated mining town of Aspen played host to a remarkable roll call of participants: Thornton Wilder, José Ortega y Gasset, Albert Schweitzer (brought in from his African hospital), and the entire Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra under Dmitri Mitropoulos, with Eero Saarinen designing a large tent for the proceedings. This year’s festival, which begins on Wednesday, promises another flurry of activity and star power for its seventy-fifth anniversary: productions of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, and performances by Gil Shaham, Joshua Bell, Renée Fleming, Alisa Weilerstein, and Jeremy Denk, among many others. —ISArchitecture:<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=0KvjML_0u3KyTj200" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=0KvjML_0u3KyTj200" width="1145" height="1147" ></figure>The Queen’s Dolls’ House, by Lucinda Lambton &amp; The Miniature Library of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, by Elizabeth Clark Ashby (Royal Collection Trust): We are in something of a Queen Mary renaissance. Born Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, she married Prince George, the Duke of York, in July 1893, but only after her engagement to George’s older brother the Duke of Clarence ended with his early death the year prior. An uncompromisingly royal queen after George’s accession to the throne in 1910, she seems to have been somewhat forgotten by the public after her death in 1953. That is, until Hugo Vickers did the public service of editing and bringing out The Quest for Queen Mary in 2018, which presented the notes James Pope-Hennessy made while compiling his 1959 biography of Mary. The riotous Quest for Queen Mary, which recorded conversations with many of Mary’s frightfully grand relatives scattered throughout Britain and on the Continent, brought her back into public consciousness. Now, two new titles from the Royal Collection Trust shine a light on another aspect of the Queen’s personality, namely her interest in fine craft, which led her cousin Princess Marie Louise to commission a spectacular dollhouse from Edwin Lutyens, the leading (full-size) architect of the day. Completed in 1924, the house is a triumph of imagination; as Lucinda Lambton, the author of a new book on the dollhouse, writes, “Within seconds of staring into its tiny chambers, all sense of scale is swept away.” Each will have his own favorite detail (the meticulous wine-cellar ledger is particularly winning), but all will be impressed by the miniature library, which is the subject of its own new book, by Elizabeth Clark Ashby. That room features hundreds of miniature handwritten books containing the works of Britain’s leading authors, including one by Ronald Knox that satirizes Lutyen’s drive for exact scale in the dollhouse project. Published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the dollhouse’s completion, these volumes are testament to a magical combination of eccentricity and competence. —BRDispatch:“Fashionable politics,” by Leann Davis Alspaugh. On Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez: A Tailor at the Court of Philip IV by Amanda Wunder.“Some Unsolicited Advice”Roger Kimball, American GreatnessFrom the Archives:“Chekhov’s lost souls,” by Joseph Epstein (May 1986). On Chekhov’s life &amp; oeuvre.<h2>New to The New Criterion?</h2>Become a subscriber to receive ten print issues and gain immediate access to our online archive spanning more than four decades of art and cultural criticism.Each week the editors of The New Criterion offer recommendations on what to read, see, and hear in the world of culture in the weekly Critic’s Notebook. To get it first, subscribe to the free Critic’s Notebook email by clicking here. </div></body>

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The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives, by Adam Smyth (Basic Books): “It isn’t the case,” the book historian Adam Smyth writes, “that books, as objects, get better as the years tick by: a Whiggish version of history as improvement or a process of refining doesn’t work.” In our time of textual ephemera, then, Smyth’s new The Book-Makers stands as a monument to presses past: a delightful survey of bookish achievements from the fifteenth century to the present, attentive to the printerly peculiarities of each age. Keyed to the lives of such extraordinary individuals as Wynkyn de Worde and Benjamin Franklin, John Baskerville and Nancy Cunard, here is a welcome reminder of what the printed word can be. —RE.

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The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives, by Adam Smyth (Basic Books): “It isn’t the case,” the book historian Adam Smyth writes, “that boo

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