Shop Indie Bookstores

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition

Designer: Keenan.

Sometimes I stumble across a cover while looking for something else. Sometimes what I find is much more interesting than what I was looking for. In that spirit I give you this. Who's Giordano Bruno? "Italian philosopher, priest, cosmologist, and occultist...burned at the stake as a heretic." Let the interpretations of this cover begin :-)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The only thing I can come up with is "hermetically" sealed, which a box like that actually isn't.

Anonymous said...

Could be that it refers to the unpacking of meaning, which is the project of hermeneutics?
I also thought of the cliche "out of the box" (Bruno being a heretic and free-thinker).
The main question for me, though, is not about the image, but this: why is the author's name so front and center? I don't think Francine Yates is the main attraction here.

Anonymous said...

Bruno made some important philosophical contributions to cosmology, including the idea of space and time being infinite, and that the earth was not at the centre of a series of spheres, but that the universe was all "up there", pretty much independent of us. The 'up'-ness of the boxes sort of suggests this.