When did murder in a bookshop or library become a middlebrow meme? Example:

After all, although some bookshops and libraries may be middlebrow, there’s nothing inherently middlebrow about these institutions. It’s their sentimentalization by “booklovers” that’s the problem.

The question, then, is when did booklovers (and “film buffs,” for that matter) first emerge? Was it during [...]

Here PROSPERO discovers FERDINAND and MIRANDA playing at chess
MIRANDA: Sweet lord, you play me false.
FERDINAND: No, my dearest love,
I would not for the world.
MIRANDA: Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle,
And I would call it fair play.
ALONZO: If this prove
A vision of the island, one dear son
Shall I twice lose.
SEBASTIAN: A most high [...]

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An occasional series, which follows up on themes explored in the ten-part Hilobrow Cover Art series.

My little love, do you remember,
Ere we were grown so sadly wise,
Those evenings in the bleak December,
Curtain’d warm from the snowy weather,
When you and I play’d chess together,
Checkmated by each other’s eyes?
— From “The Chess-Board,” by Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton
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Eighth in an occasional series.

In the latest issue of Print Magazine, the graphic designer and design critic Steven Heller introduces perhaps the most ineradicable of all design viruses: the cutoff-torso-spread-leg framing device known as the “A-Frame.” Digging into the archives of his frequent collaborator Miro Ilic, Heller makes a case that the A-Frame “is the most frequently copied trope [...]

Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) studies Famous First Editions at the Hollywood Public Library, in The Big Sleep (1946, d. Howard Hawks).

BOTTLE-BLONDE LIBRARIAN (Carole Douglas): “You know, you don’t look like a man who’d be interested in first editions.”
MARLOWE: “Well, I collect blondes in bottles, too.”

Marlowe cracks himself up outside A.G. Geiger’s Rare Books and Deluxe [...]

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An occasional series, which follows up on themes explored in the ten-part Hilobrow Cover Art series.

“Chess is so inspiring that I do not believe a good player is capable of having an evil thought during the game.”
— William Steinitz, Austrian-American chess player and the first undisputed world chess champion, in 1896.
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Seventh in an occasional series.

Ellen (Gene Tierney) reads to Richard (Cornel Wilde) from his own (middlebrow) novel, Time Without End, shortly after meeting him on a train, in John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven (1945). Her homicidal jealousy will make it impossible for him to write another one. Which is probably a good thing.
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Thirteenth in an occasional series.

“The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem… I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.”
— Marcel Duchamp (shown here sitting in [...]

“The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.”
— Thomas Henry Huxley
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Fifth in an occasional series.

Meta-commentary: Researching pulp cover illustrations in which books are featured is exceedingly difficult. Try googling the phrases “book on book” or “book cover featuring book cover” some time, and see for yourself.
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Twelfth in an occasional series.

“At present my life can almost be likened to what a chess-piece in a game must feel when the opponent says: This piece is not to be touched — like an idle onlooker; for my hour has not yet struck.”
— Soren Kierkegaard, Diary (May 21, 1839)
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Fourth in an occasional series.

Scene from The 39 Steps (d. Hitchcock: 1935), in which Sheriff Watson (Frank Cellier) inspects a Church Hymnary that has stopped a bullet intended for Richard Hannay (Robert Donat).
SHERIFF: [laughing]
HANNAY: Cigarette cases, yes. But I’ve never seen it happen to a hymn book before, except on [sic] the movies.
SHERIFF: And this bullet stuck among the [...]

DINNER.
Not a little fit, not a little fit sun sat in shed more mentally.
Let us why, let us why weight, let us why winter chess, let us why way.
Only a moon to soup her, only that in the sell never never be the cocups nice be, shatter it they lay.
— Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons [...]

This book-shaped object is a Tabloid-brand medicine box, manufactured by the British pharmaceuticals company Burroughs Wellcome & Co. During the early 20th century, the catch-phrase “Weapons of Precision” helped sell BWC’s medicine chests to British colonists; during WWI, when BWC produced quantities of tetanus antitoxins, anti-gas gangrene sera, and typhoid vaccines for the Western Front, [...]

But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
‘What shall [...]

ORANGE: Egmont, our interests have for years weighed upon my heart; I ever stand as over a chess-board, and regard no move of my adversary as insignificant; and as men of science carefully investigate the secrets of nature, so I hold it to be the duty, ay, the very vocation of a prince, to acquaint [...]

House of Mystery #201 (April, 1972). Cover illustration by Michael Kaluta.
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Ninth in an occasional series.

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Eighth in an occasional series.

Gregory Green’s Book Bomb #8 (1994).
From the artist’s gallery’s website:

Since the mid-1980’s Gregory Green has created performances and artworks exploring the evolution of empowerment, which consider the use of violence, alternatives to violence and the accessibility to information and technology as vehicles for social or political change.
Many of Green’s artistic investigations have focused on terrorism [...]

Title: “This is the enemy.”
Publisher: [Washington, D.C.] : U.S. G.P.O. : Distributed by Division of Public Inquiry, Office of War Information
Date: 1943.
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Sixth in an occasional series.

A Kindle just wouldn’t work as well in this propaganda poster, would it?
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Fifth in an occasional series.

Sculpture by unknown artist — image found on Flickr and sent into us. If you have info, please drop us a line.
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Fourth in an occasional series.