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This fascinating volume explores an important fifteenth-century illustrated manuscript tradition that provides a revealing glimpse of how western Europeans conceptualized the world.

From the classical encyclopedias of Pliny to famous tales such as The Travels of Marco Polo, historical travel writing has had a lasting impact, despite the fact that it was based on a curious mixture of truth, legend, and outright superstition. One foundational medieval source that expands on the ancient idea of the “wonders of the world” is the fifteenth-century French Book of the Marvels of the World, an illustrated guide to the globe filled with oddities, curiosities, and wonders—tales of fantasy and reality intended for the medieval armchair traveler. The fifty-six locales featured in the manuscript are presented in a manner that suggests authority and objectivity but are rife with stereotypes and mischaracterizations, meant to simultaneously instill a sense of wonder and fear in readers.

In The Book of Marvels, the authors explore the tradition of encyclopedias and travel writing, examining the various sources for geographic knowledge in the Middle Ages. They look closely at the manuscript copies of the French text and its complex images, delving into their origins, style, content, and meaning. Ultimately, this volume seeks to unpack how medieval white Christian Europeans saw their world and how the fear of difference—so pervasive in society today—is part of a long tradition stretching back millennia.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 11 to September 1, 2024, and at the Morgan Library & Museum from January 24 to May 25, 2025.

In his second collection, The Marvels, David Orr writes from the conviction that the available world is enough: its worn shirts, coffee cups, rainbows, buses, obsolete machines, failed plans, neighborly borders, and minor acts of courtesy. These poems are clear-eyed without being cold, comic without being merely light. They attend to ordinary things not as symbols waiting to be elevated, but as the actual substance of our shared existence.

Praised by The Washington Post for his “quirky, engaging poetry,” Orr brings formal control, wry wit, whimsy, and an exacting intelligence to the relentless dailiness of life. In “Coffee Cups,” two mugs have been scoured blank by the dishwasher: “Nothing makes them special now. / What they do is all they are.” Yet the household still reaches for them first, “hoping to save the others.” In “Decency,” a nearly useless blue shirt becomes kin to the small social gestures that certify “this shared space as shared”: a held door, a blessing after a sneeze, the habitual signs by which strangers acknowledge one another. And in the title poem, marvels are planted along a property line, where two neighbors meet to prune, argue, trade tools, and admire what grows between them.

Unillusioned but not disenchanted, The Marvels finds its force in persistence, use, courtesy, memory, and care. The poems do not look past the real for consolation. They look steadily at the world we have — its comedy, damage, repetition, and thin but durable fabrics of connection — until its sufficiency comes into view.