(Roughly) Daily

British designer Christophe Gowans put himself to the task of imagining “if best-selling albums had been books instead”…

Many more pulpy pleasures at “The Record Books.”

[TotH to Paris Review]

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As we head for the library, we might recall that it was on this date in 1956, at a party in Cambridge, England, that Fulbright Scholar Sylvia Plath met poet Ted Hughes.

…the one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge… I screamed in myself, thinking, Oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you.

Her wish was granted; they were married later that same year.  They didn’t make beautiful music together, but did each create a stream of powerfully-important books:  Plath killed herself, in London, in 1963, several weeks after The Bell Jar came out; in 1981 her Collected Poems (edited by Hughes, who oversaw her posthumous publications) won the Pulitzer Prize.  Hughes was himself a great success as a poet (and children’s writer). Critics regularly rank him as one of the best poets of his generation; he served as Britain’s Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998.

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