I have a thing for old books.
Love them.
Whenever I find a secondhand or antique book shop, I'll check out the medical section first, then the history section, and then, if I still have any money left, it's on to literature and poetry. I love old history and literature and poetry books because they're so beautiful. I love old medical books for the same reason, with the aded bonus that they're hopelessly outdated, hideously inaccurate, and potentially incredibly dangerous. They just delight me, for some weird reason. Come to think of it, "for some weird reason" sums up a lot of the decision-making in my life.
When the writer Petronius Arbiter turned out to be a supporting character in Juvenalia, I figured it was time to update my copy of The Satyricon, which, until then, was just a PDF file from Project Gutenberg that was saved to my desktop. So, to reward myself for finishing Juvenalia, I got a 1944 copy of The Complete Works of Gaius Petronius, translated by Jack Lindsay, with illustrations by Norman Lindsay.
For those who don't know Norman Lindsay, he was an Australian writer and artist probably most famous these days for writing the children's classic The Magic Pudding. His other works really worked up the wowsers though. They were considered anything from salacious to pornographic (the American authorities burned sixteen crates of his painting, drawings and etchings as pornography.) Art critic Alan McCulloch said of his work:
To gain an instant local response (and perhaps an audience overseas?) he exaggerated grossly the erotic and sensational elements. The people he drew were always in shocking taste whether nude or clothed and his humor was the 'sick' humor of the Roman forum.
So Lindsay was surely the perfect artist to illustrate the Satyricon. I'll bet Petronius would have approved.
Here are some pictures from my edition:
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