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| Hieronymus Bosch The Owl's Nest ca. 1505-15 drawing Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam |
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| Andrea del Sarto Standing youth with book 1514-15 drawing Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin |
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| Domenico Campagnola Calling of the first Apostles ca. 1520-30 drawing Teylers Museum, Haarlem |
from FIELD GUIDE TO THE NOVEL
The first book Tom remembers having read, when he was seven, was a reprint [school edition] of Jules Verne's Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and since 1977 he has amassed a collection of as many different editions of the book as he can find in used book stores, Salvation Armys, thrift stores, and the like: Pocket Books, Magnum Easy Eyes, Fawcett Premiers, Signet Classics, Washington Square Paperbacks, Mentors, Amazing Stories, Oxford World Classics, Everyman Editions, Serpent Books, Scholastics, a host of generic elementary school editions sold through school book clubs, Norton Criticals, Dover Thrifts, Fantastic Stories, Penguins, Livres de Poches, Evergreens, Puffins, Pelicans, and Bantams. Every time he finds a new cover, he promptly goes home and speed reads the book and he has now read Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea 137 times, carelessly, and in six different languages, including Spanish, Russian, Korean, French, Chinese, and Greek. He even tried learning Arabic once to half-get through a version he found in a pensione in Florence.
One evening after drinking, Tom confessed to me that he had never really bothered to think about the book at all in all his years of reading and that he had not really ever experienced anything while reading the book except the book's numerous covers: one-eyed octopi, riveted nautiluses connected to leathery breathing tubes, a lead balloon that looks like a manhole-cover, photo-synthetic seaweed, farm-like fields of layered oceans and raisin-shaped islands, barnacled or tentacle-entwined periscopes, and even what looks like a large manatee on a book from Brazil. For Tom, the 1930s with its images of red-eyed sea monsters becomes the 1950s with its Soviet-style submarines becomes the 1960s with its long-haired sea creatures becomes the 1990s with its sonar-guided Trident missiles. The book is impervious to history and to human reading habits . . .
– Tan Lin (b. 1957), as printed in The noulipian Analects, edited by Christine Wertheim and Matias Viegener (Los Angeles: Les Figues Press, 2007)
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| Parmigianino Head of a Woman ca. 1530-35 drawing Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Pordenone Conversion of St Paul 1530 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
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| Perino del Vaga Studies from an antique sarcophagus and other objects ca. 1540 drawing Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario |
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| Giorgio Vasari Three River Gods 1541 drawing Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin |
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| Francesco Salviati after Michelangelo Bust of warrior with fantastic helmet ca. 1545 drawing Royal Collection, Windsor |
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| Maarten van Heemskerck Christ crowned with thorns ca. 1548 drawing Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen |
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| Francesco Primaticcio Dance of the Hours surrounding three putti with cornucopiae 1548 drawing Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt |
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| after Giulio Campi Allegorical figure of Prudence with serpent ca. 1550 drawing Royal Collection, Windsor |
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| Battista Franco Drapery study for Angel of Annunciation ca. 1553 drawing Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Prospero Fontana Muliebris inconstantia (sketch for allegorical book illustration) before 1555 drawing British Museum |
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| Taddeo Zuccaro Jonah and the whale, seen from a landscape with trees ca. 1555-60 drawing Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide |