Callaway Arts and Entertainment took hundreds of thousands of photos of the Sistine Chapel’s frescoes over two months, and it has now published them in life size in a three-volume book weighing 25 pounds and measuring 24×17 inches, which was five years in the making:

If you’re always on the hunt for limited edition photobooks and have ultra-deep pockets and bookshelves, here’s one for your collection: the The Sistine Chapel. It’s a giant $22,000 trilogy that contains views of the Sistine Chapel’s art captured in gigapixel glory through 270,000 individual photos.

‘The publication of The Sistine Chapel trilogy is a pioneering technological breakthrough,’ Callaway says, noting that it was the result of a five-year collaboration between it, the Vatican Museums, and the Italian art publisher Scripta Maneant.

To publish the masterpieces of the Sistine Chapel on the pages of the book in 1:1 true-to-life scale and with 99.4% color fidelity, a team of photographers visited the chapel over 67 consecutive nights while it was closed off to the public. They used a 33-foot-tall scaffold and rig to capture every inch of the chapel in 270,000 separate digital photos.

That’s right. It costs a cool $22,000. You can order it here, where you can also find a short video about the book and how it was made.

In other news: The Swiss writer Rolf Dobelli recommends we Stop Reading the News in his new book, which seems like pretty good advice right now. Gary Furnell reviews: “Stop Reading the News is a manifesto, as the subtitle specifies . . . The thirty-five chapters (each is short, commonly less than six pages) present a range of reasons to avoid the daily news media completely, including the steps necessary to remove oneself from the drip-feed news culture. A sample of these chapter titles indicates some of the reasons: ‘News is Irrelevant’; ‘News Obscures the Big Picture’; ‘News Gets Risk Assessment All Wrong’; ‘News is a Waste of Time’; ‘News Produces Fake Fame’; ‘News is Invented by Journalists’; ‘News is Manipulative’; ‘News Destroys our Peace of Mind’. These are perhaps obvious arguments, but Dobelli does well to remind us of the obvious which we errant humans keep overlooking. It’s the less obvious arguments that are especially intriguing. Other chapter headings include: ‘News Kills Creativity’; ‘News is Outside Your Circle of Competence’; ‘News Gives Us the Illusion of Empathy’; ‘News Encourages Terrorism’; ‘News Keeps the Opinion Volcano Bubbling’; ‘News Encourages Crap: Sturgeon’s Law’. Dobelli points out that no genuinely creative person is addicted to the news. The addiction would kill their creativity, enfeeble their imagination and cheapen their art. It would rob them of the time necessary to reflect, meditate, envision and practise.”

Let’s get to the news that stays news—or, more precisely, to Ezra Pound’s pronouncement of such: James Matthew Wilson explores the relationship between “news” and poetry in a new Theopolis Conversation. Scott Cairns and yours truly will be responding in due course. So will Christian Leithart and Remy Wilkins.

A chess expert recommends Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit and also explains what the show gets right and wrong about chess.

Joshua Hren revisits Chris Beha’s Sophie Wilder: “Midway through the novel’s dark forest, we come upon one of the most moving, ‘Dostoevskian’ dialogues on God found in contemporary fiction.”

The physicist Carlo Rovelli talks about books and stories. He couldn’t finish Lord of the Rings, he wishes he had written Dostoevsky’s “White Nights,” and he is ashamed to have never read Notes of a Native Son.

A new study of the Mount Pleasant “mega henge” argues that the site was built over decades, not centuries: “The finding has led researchers from Cardiff University to put forward the theory that a frantic building programme was under way in southern Britain in around 2,500BC, just before people arrived from what is now mainland Europe with other belief systems, ways of life and materials. The lead researcher, Susan Greaney of the university’s school of history, archaeology and religion, said: ‘The picture emerging is an explosion in building activity with large and labour-intensive monuments being constructed across southern England, and perhaps further afield. The building of Mount Pleasant would have involved a huge number of people – digging out the enormous ditches with simple tools like antler picks. This was right at the end of the stone age, just before people came from the continent with metal goods, new types of pottery, new styles of burial and so on. You could look at it as the last hurrah of the stone age.’”

Photo: Varanasi