Book gallery¶
Sixteen trees from the forest, chosen for what they show about how a book becomes a tree, and for the weight the books carry. Each picture is the tree alone, at midday in summer, with every passage drawn as a leaf.
All sixteen are photographed from the same distance, 57.7 m, at the same height, so their sizes compare directly: a tree that looks small here is small in the forest. The lantern cart parked beside each trunk is the same cart you drive, 1.9 m long, for scale. Every entry links into the forest beside its tree; see Link to a tree.
The size of a tree follows its chunks, the passages the corpus indexed the book into, one leaf each. Its shape follows its species, which the genre decides; see The forest.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys¶
Samuel Pepys · Diaries · silver birch · 18,517 chunks
The largest book in the corpus by far, with nearly twice the chunks of the next. It grows as a diary does: one limb per calendar year, spiraling up a single trunk, with each day's entries hung along its year. That makes a tall column with coils of leaves, not a wide crown.
War and Peace¶
Leo Tolstoy · Russian literature · silver birch · 7,846 chunks
The largest novel in the corpus. Compare it with Pepys, which has the same species: a novel's chapters branch into a full crown where a diary's years climb a trunk. Les Misérables (7,636 chunks) is nearly the same size.
Moby Dick¶
Herman Melville · American literature · horse chestnut · 2,922 chunks
The largest tree in the American literature grove. The horse chestnut grows a full, rounded crown on a medium trunk.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn¶
Mark Twain · American literature · horse chestnut · 1,362 chunks
The steamboat on the American literature grove's mark is for Twain. At about half of Moby Dick's chunks, the same species grows a visibly smaller crown.
Hamlet¶
William Shakespeare · Shakespeare · weeping willow · 420 chunks
Shakespeare's plays grow as weeping willows, their limbs hanging toward the ground. Hamlet has 420 leaves, and pressing it is one of the forest's quests.
On the Origin of Species¶
Charles Darwin · Natural history · silver fir · 2,329 chunks
A book about the tree of life, grown as a tree. The silver fir keeps one central leader and sets its branches in level tiers around it. Darwin's Descent of Man and Voyage of the Beagle stand in the same grove.
Frankenstein¶
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley · Science fiction · silver fir · 1,022 chunks
Science fiction grows as silver fir, like natural history, so Frankenstein and Origin of Species are the same species at different sizes. Mary Shelley's mother wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, further down this page.
The Divine Comedy, two translations¶
Dante Alighieri · World literature · London plane · 1,476 chunks (Cary) and 1,440 chunks (Longfellow)
The same poem, translated twice, grows as two trees. The top picture is Henry Cary's translation and the bottom is Longfellow's. They are nearly the same size and shape: the poem's structure of cantos decides the tree, and the translators' wording only moves it by a few dozen leaves.
Open Cary's in the forest · Open Longfellow's in the forest
Don Quixote¶
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · Spanish literature · London plane · 4,032 chunks
The only book in the Spanish literature grove, so a whole grove, signpost and mark belong to one tree. The mark on its plaza is a windmill.
A Modest Proposal¶
Jonathan Swift · English literature · horse chestnut · 52 chunks
The smallest book in the corpus, a sapling beside the others. Photographed at the same distance as Pepys and War and Peace, it shows what 52 leaves look like against thousands.
The Republic¶
Plato · Philosophy · English oak · 2,900 chunks
Philosophy grows as English oak: a short trunk and long limbs reaching out wide and low. Philosophy is the forest's largest grove, with 39 books.
The Bible¶
Various · Sacred texts · stone pine · 6,696 chunks
The stone pine spreads a wide, flat crown on a tall bare trunk, and The Bible is the widest tree on this page. The sacred texts grove also holds The Quran (2,649 chunks) and the Tao Te Ching (142), one of the smallest trees in the forest.
One Thousand and One Nights¶
World literature · London plane · 1,457 chunks
Stories told within stories, grown as a tree of limbs within limbs. It stands in the world literature grove with the two Divine Comedy translations.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass¶
Frederick Douglass · Biography · horse chestnut · 524 chunks
A short book, and a small tree, that changed the argument over slavery in the United States. It stands in the biography grove.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman¶
Mary Wollstonecraft · Philosophy · English oak · 1,281 chunks
Wollstonecraft's 1792 argument for the education of women grows in the philosophy grove. Her daughter, Mary Shelley, wrote Frankenstein; the two trees are in different groves and different species.
Making the pictures¶
The pictures are rendered by the forest itself, in its ?shot= mode, which
shows one tree, with the cart beside it and nothing else of the forest. To render them
again after the trees change, with the dev server running:
cd web
npm i --no-save puppeteer-core
node scripts/gallery.mjs
make docs-gallery runs the same script. It drives the installed Google
Chrome with software WebGL and writes one JPEG per book into
docs/assets/trees/.