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hippolyte-hodeau-trench-art

A Family Tree: Hippolyte Hodeau’s Trench Art (ca. 1917) Text by Sasha Archibald and Hunter Dukes Mar 26, 2024 Thierry Dornberger’s family keepsakes include a memento exceptionally delicate. His great-grandfather, Hippolyte Hodeau, was a World War I private who served in Argonne. As Dornberger relates, Hodeau “made the trenches and was gassed. Following the dull sound of a shell falling . . . he was wounded in the ear.” Like many soldiers, Hodeau spent hours huddled in these muddy channels. In order to kill time, perhaps, or lift his spirits, he gathered leaves from an oak tree — elongated, striated, forest green — and used a form of relief carving to inscribe the names of his daughters, Andrée and Eléonore, as well as the word “souvenir” and what looks like “Argonne”. “Trench art”, as it’s called, wasn’t necessarily fashioned in dugouts and wasn’t usually so fragile. Collectors seek out letter openers made of shrapnel; crucifixes made of bullets; and artillery shells fashioned into everything from bracelets to clocks to candelabras. Wooden walking sticks were festooned with intricate carved heads, and tiny valentine pillows sewn and beaded for sweethearts back home. Hodeau’s engraved leaves are part of this resourceful genre, but there is another artistic tradition to which they also belong — that of arborglyphs, or tree carving. Humans have long regarded trees as witnesses. Basque sheepherders in the American West wrote poetry on birch, Confederate Civil War soldiers graffitied their names in trunks, and various Aboriginal Australian tribes honored the dead on bark. Whereas these gestures leave a bit of the human in the landscape, Hodeau’s engravings take a bit of the landscape with the human. “I was here” says one; “I was there” says the other. As unique as his objects may seem, Hodeau was not alone in carving leaves. The art form flourished during World War I as a way to enhance letters home with a unique lightweight enclosure. Soldiers used a needle or knife to whittle between the oak and chestnut veins, leaving only words or, sometimes, an image. Due to the partial opacity of perforated leaves, the carvings are especially enchanting when lit from behind; sometimes they’re called “feuilles de poilus”, or “tree leaf lace”. Little has been written about this kind of memorialization, but French military history forums brim with amateur investigators and collectors. The user “GillesR”, for instance, reports tracing a leaf that reads “Souvenir Alsace” to an infantryman named Bringuier, who was left for dead on the battlefield in 1914, captured by the Germans, and subsequently released as unfit for combat after the amputation of his left arm. Andre Dupuis of the 52nd Territorial Infantry Regiment emblazoned “CapNap” in 1915, whereas Alfred Laperrière was fond of writing longer, more complicated phrases — “Souvenir de Serbie” (Serbian souvenir); “Je pense à toi” (Thinking of you); “Ton mari aimant” (Your loving husband). Words predominate, though there are startling exceptions. The Jardin Botanique de Nancy claims to have unearthed a silhouette of a soldier in profile, perhaps a self-portrait. Bernard Dauphin’s website gathers an assortment of leaves reading “Souvenir”, “Helene”, and “Yvonna” (the last enclosed in a heart), and tells of meeting a Frenchman who was deported to Germany during World War II under the service du travail obligatoire and who survived by traded carved leaves for sausage. Other specimens have no author, and no story. It seems that these type of leaves have only recently been gathered for exhibition. A 2022 show at the Halle Saint-Piere in Paris apparently included a “mémoire végétale de la Grande Guerre” (botanical memorial of World War I), while the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium, exhibited a remarkable collection of leaf portraiture in that same year. This eco-trench art might have quietly composted were it not for Europeana’s 1914–1918 project, which drew attention to the phenom by soliciting information from the public and digitizing thousands of fragile artifacts.

public-domain-review

Mar 26, 2024

Sasha Archibald and Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:18.287720

maria-catharina-prestel

Maria Catharina Prestel’s Printed Cabinet of Drawings (ca. 1780s) Text by Miya Tokumitsu Apr 24, 2024 From the Renaissance onward, drawings have fascinated collectors and connoisseurs, who often perceive them as intimate affordances of an artist’s creative process — prized as mediums of an artist’s physical gestures. As unique works, drawings can exist in only one collection at a time, where they are typically secreted away from the vast majority of eager spectators. Reproductions offer art lovers a satisfying degree of access to these works, but to create convincing facsimiles in the early modern era required a challenging technical feat: translating drawings into print. In the 1770s and 1780s, the enterprising artist Maria Catharina Prestel (1747–1794) was hard at work in Frankfurt, refining her printmaking technique to meet the demand of this secondary drawings market, reproducing sheets by Albrecht Dürer, Raphael, Giulio Romano, and others. She capitalized upon a new printing technique, aquatint, that allowed printmakers to render areas of tone in etchings. In her engaging history of aquatint, Rena M. Hoisington notes that Prestel and her colleagues manipulated aquatint in combination with a host of other intaglio printing processes, including line etching, soft-ground etching, and chalk-manner etching in order to best replicate particular drawings. In some instances, she used several printing plates to create multicolor prints when reproducing drawings with various inks and washes on colored paper. In one particular tour de force, Prestel applied gold dust onto freshly printed ink lines to recreate the metallic tonal heightening of Jacopo Ligozzi’s Triumph of Truth Over Envy. Together with her husband, Johann Gottlieb Prestel (1739–1808), and an apprentice, Regina Catharina Schönecker (ca. 1762–ca. 1818), Maria Catharina created three portfolios of prints after drawings in private collections, which they took care to reproduce at scale. Although Johann’s name appears on the portfolio covers, it is now acknowledged that Maria Catharina was the creator of a significant portion of the prints, among them some of the most technically complex. She and Johann eventually separated, and Maria Catharina moved to London, where she resumed her printmaking career. She remained there until her death in 1794. Opening one of the Prestel portfolios was a sensuous and intellectually rewarding experience. The prints were mounted onto sturdy sheets for easy handling, and viewers could bring each one close to their eyes to inspect its numerous details and guess its artist before turning the image over to read the informative inscriptions on the reverse. Hoisington points out that this format allows connoisseurs to admire both the drawings reproduced and the craft of printed facsimiles. The Prestels’ portfolio titles were in French and are named after cabinets where the drawings they reproduced were kept. Within the world of art collecting, Kabinett (German), kabinet (Dutch), or cabinet (French) refers to a room for viewing collections of small-scale artworks, including drawings. The term encompasses both the physical and metaphorical aspects of enclosure — these were walled spaces designed for the intimate appreciation of treasures. A cabinet is an interior within an interior, a place of privacy and curiosity and mystery, a capsule that contains things to discover. Beyond disseminating drawings of some of the canonical figures in European art, the Prestels offered their collectors just such a room of their own.

public-domain-review

Apr 24, 2024

Miya Tokumitsu

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:18.614041

passio-verbigenae

Grotesqueries at Gethsemane: Marcus Gheeraerts’ Passio Verbigenae (ca. 1580) Text by Hunter Dukes Mar 27, 2024 In his final days, Christ is haunted by grotesqueries. Cherubs and putti ogle the last supper’s lamb. Hybrid creatures sprout up in the Garden of Gethsemane. And during his descent into Limbo, demonic bodies roar and hiss at the Son of God. A series of thirteen prints by Jan Sadeler (I) after Marcus Gheeraerts (I), the Passio Verbigenae Quae Nostra Redeptio Christi (ca. 1580) employs a monstrous mélange of genres, sitting somewhere between a passion print series and a design book, a sacred narrative and a grotesque statuary. Subtly advertising ornamental patterns suitable for painters, silversmiths, and textile workers, these oval, cartouche-like images dissolve the distinction between framing and content. Strap- and scrollwork penetrate the scenes; biblical characters navigate jungles of exotic arabesques. On the cusp of modernity, these sixteenth-century engravings arrive at a postmodern tenet: any supposed distinction between a narrative and its frame is an illusion, a feint. The designs for these prints were created when Gheeraerts resided in Antwerp, after a decade’s exile in London. A stalwart reformist, he had fled after the Low Countries’ iconoclastic Beeldenstorm in 1566. Tried in absentia for heresy, Gheeraerts may have designed the Passio Verbigenae with economic, imperial, religious forces in mind. There was a bullish European market for ornamental prints in the mid-sixteenth century; early modern travelogues were increasingly detailing monstrous encounters with hybrid creatures abroad; and in the wake of iconoclasm, the mimetic claims of religious imagery was increasingly called into question. “Gheeraerts’s grotesques . . . work against verisimilitude and thus the Catholic image doctrine”, writes Tianna Helena Uchacz. “They cast the religious representation not as a truthful reportage guaranteed by mimesis but as an image — this is, an artifice of the human hand.”. And yet, by confounding the devotional gaze with a labyrinth of ornamental excess, which appears to swell as Christ approaches death, the images also seem to plot a path toward a new form of worship. Centuries later, artists now substitute for prophets in a secular age, and artworks offer a glimpse of the mysteries that icons once contained.

public-domain-review

Mar 27, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:19.113033

wierix-flemish-proverbs

Flemish Proverbs by Jan Wierix (ca. 1568) Text by Miya Tokumitsu Mar 14, 2024 “I wear mourning, seeing the world in which so much deceit abounds.” So laments The Misanthrope as he skulks along, withdrawn emotionally and sartorially, in a deep-hooded cloak. But world-weariness does not amount to wisdom in Jan Wierix’s engraving; rather than serving as a hermetic sanctum, the misanthrope’s heavy garment only blinds him to the fact that the world — personified as a waddling orb — has caught up to him to steal his purse. The Misanthrope belongs to a series of twelve engraved roundels depicting literal enactments of Flemish proverbs, each concerned with some aspect of human folly or treachery. Seven of the scenes, collected below, were engraved by Wierix; the precise authorship of the remaining five remains mysterious. Rather like many actual proverbs, the Proverbs’ motifs look backward to origins that are uncertain in some respects while maintaining vitality through repetition, reuse, and appropriation. In addition to The Misanthrope, the other six scenes engraved by Wierix include: a man shooting arrows into the ground; a hawker praising his own wares; a man playing a jawbone like a fiddle; a crowd crawling into a rich man’s asshole; a husband berated by his wife; and mendicant monks begging at unresponsive homes. The five more obscure scenes depict: the blind leading the blind; a man warming himself by his neighbor’s house fire; a fool perched on an egg; a horse frightened by an ambulant bale of hay; and an agitated peddler seated by a bride. To a contemporary anglophone audience, some of the scenes are comprehensible; for instance, the archer seems to symbolize the expenditure of energy on futile endeavors, similar to “spinning one’s wheels”. Others refer to specific Flemish proverbs of varying obscurity. It is not known who provided the initial designs for these engravings. Pieter Bruegel the Elder had long been considered the originator of the compositions, and in fact Bruegel had supplied designs for mass-market prints early in his career. He also maintained an interest — popular in the sixteenth-century Low Countries — in literal renderings of proverbs, most famously in his painting, Dutch Proverbs, a busy scene in which around 126 proverbs are enacted before the spectator. Wierix’s Misanthrope unmistakably references Bruegel’s independent painting of the subject, and the roundel format and the count of the prints echo the circular vignettes of Bruegel’s Twelve Proverbs panel, although none of the scenes in that painting are repeated in the prints. The prints only demonstrate that the engravers, Wierix and a possible collaborator, were familiar with some of Bruegel’s imagery, not that Bruegel himself was an active participant in their production. Indeed, Walter Gibson has noted that a set of drawings initially thought to be designs for the roundels, are now considered to have been made after them, and that eleven of the twelve engravings (The Misanthrope being the one exception) may well have been designed by Wierix himself or someone else working with him. Nevertheless, all of the engravings in the series could be described as Brugelian in their attitude and style. In addition to directly referencing an artist’s known works, imitating or attempting to elicit another artist’s manner — even in the creation of original compositions not sourced from that artist’s oeuvre — was a deliberate artistic practice in the sixteenth century. Artists and publishers kept close track of the print-buying public’s responses to their collective offerings. If a particular artist’s work became popular, it was common for others to create images in a similar vein. Indeed, none other than Bruegel himself began his career designing prints in the “mode” of a popular, elder artist: Hieronymus Bosch. Bruegel haunts the entire Proverbs series even though he neither conceived of it nor intentionally supplied its designs. His spectral presence affected their reception and future iterations. Several of the Proverbs were reformulated in later prints, and two painted versions of the crawling brownnosers were created by none other than Bruegel’s son, Pieter Bruegel the Younger.

public-domain-review

Mar 14, 2024

Miya Tokumitsu

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:19.568427

dr-berkeleys-discovery

The Afterimage of Death: Dr. Berkeley's Discovery (1889) Text by Hunter Dukes Jan 16, 2024 In 1888, the year before Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery was published, Jack the Ripper mutilated his second victim, Annie Chapman. Lacking a witness to the murder, the press wondered if an image of the killer might be preserved on his victim’s retinas — recoverable using the budding science of optography. This was an era when new media seeped into conceptions of the world and self, as sight, hearing, and other senses were extended beyond the body’s traditional reach. Telegraphy offered spiritualists a “medium” through which to conceive of instantaneous communication between the realms; phonography freed the voice from the biological limits of its body, allowing the dead to speak across their graves; and photography became a model for how images are imprinted on the eye and mind. That last analogy begged some questions: If photographs can outlive their subjects, and memory works like photography, do images somehow endure in the brain after death? Could these undead memories be recovered with the right technologies? Tinkering in his laboratory with microscopic slides, the protagonist of Richard Slee and Cornelia Atwood Pratt’s sci-fi novel, Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery, suddenly yells eureka. He calls his labmate Farrington over to look through the scope. “Carefully focusing the object glass up and down, he studied the field for a while. The thing he saw was merely a view of a crowded city street, and, though wonderful as a micro-photograph, which he immediately assumed it to be, there was nothing about it, on that supposition, to create keen excitement as Berkeley evidently felt.” Things are stranger than they appear. An urban metropolis up close, the specimen on the slide looks, without magnification, like a smattering of “brain-tissue”. Berkeley lets out an unsteady laugh. “What have I to do with micro-photographs? Man! I’ve done what I set out to do. I’ve proved that there are pictures in the brain and that I can develop them—for that is a section of brain-tissue and it came—it came from the Centre of Memory!” Like so many tragedies, the book begins with marriage. Ashford Berkeley is an absorbed scientist — absorbed in his work, absorbed in himself — living a life abroad after an undisclosed accident of youth. Tellingly, he does not “meet” his future wife, Aline Lefevre; “she came into his field of vision one evening in Paris”. He fails at making conversation; she doesn’t mind at all. “She had read that in America it was only the women that talked.” And so, Aline carries forth on her schooling in England, contemporary art, how she admires “the things that are new”. Ashford stares at his feet, tells her that she should visit America, “which is very new.” They marry and move to New York, but they put off “getting acquainted”: he is too busy with science. Aline grows wistful; Ashford neglects her for months on end. He takes her to France, leaves her with an aunt for the summer, flees back to New York to work alongside Farrington on his one true love, science. She writes long, impassioned letters, which are reproduced at length. We never see him respond. There is talk of Aline returning home early. Time passes and the letters grow sedate, “as if they were carefully made to conform to some pattern the girl kept in her mind of what such letters ought to be”. Meantime, Farrington is sore that Berkeley beat him to the scientific discovery of the century, and jealous of his labmate’s new wife, whom he has yet to meet. Waking late after a long evening in the laboratory, he buys the morning paper and reads about a bloody crime just a few blocks away in New York. A hotel reported that a “M. et Mme. Massoneau, France” had checked in to a private parlor the previous evening, before the husband, in an agitated state, asked for directions to Jersey City and Chicago. A housekeeper later heard groans behind the door and entered to find Mme. Massoneau soaked in blood and clutching an oriental dagger. Suicide is suspected until the plot grows more sinister. “M. Massoneau” seems to be a lover with whom the woman eloped to escape married life in France. Farrington visits her in the hospital and hears her final words. “Tell—my—husband—”, but she doesn’t finish the sentence. The coroner hires Farrington to do the autopsy, and his examinations reveal very little — it seems like “a case for Sherlock Holmes”. Nevertheless, he brings her brain back to the laboratory; after dragging his feet, Berkeley prepares the slides. His beloved technique, his sole devotion and pursuit for so many years, is working once again. He starts to see dim memories of childhood. Autumn at an English boarding school. The streets of Paris. A joyful wedding. His own two eyes. . . We know almost nothing about Richard Slee, whom is unfortunately sometimes credited as the sole author of Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery. On the other hand, Cornelia Atwood Pratt (1865–1929) is a forgotten nineteenth-century force. Born in Ohio, she graduated from Vassar before working as a journalist in Seattle. She wrote for popular periodicals like the Critic, the Century, and Harper’s Weekly, and served as a tastemaker for new literary forms on the cusp of modernism: “the map of the world and the atmosphere of civilization are changing radically”, she wrote in 1901. “A corresponding change in art should not be surprising.” Her short story collections, A Book of Martyrs (1896) and The Preliminaries (1912), were widely reviewed, as was her novel, The Daughter of a Stoic (1896). Reading her polemic — “Letter to the Rising Generation” (1911), published in the Atlantic Monthly — we see that Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery is barely science fiction. Cornelia Atwood Pratt believed that she was living on the cusp of a new historical era: The brain-specialists and the psycho­logists between them have given in the last ten years what seems conclusive proof of the servitude of the body to the Self. . . . Coming as this psychological discov­ery does, in the middle of an age of unparalleled mechanical invention and discovery, it is almost—is it not?—as if the Creator of men had said, “It is time that these children of mine came to maturity. I will give them at last their full mastery over the earth and over the air and over the spirits of themselves. Let us see how they bear themselves under these gifts.”

public-domain-review

Jan 16, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:20.059361

capital-and-labor

Mayday, Mayday: Capital and Labor (1907) Text by Hunter Dukes May 1, 2024 Labor is of divine origin, and no man should be ashamed that he is a workman. . . . We are a country of millionaires and beggars, and between these two extremes of society, there is a chasm so wide that no power under our present system of selfishness and private greed can bridge it. The reverend William Schuler Harris’ Capital and Labor (1907) frames its titular subjects as locked in a perennial struggle, “dating back to the time when the Egyptians laid the lash upon their slaves”. Writing in the early twentieth century, Harris is skeptical of the “orator [who] frequently soars into ecstasies over the privileges of the American workers”, for he sees how the labor force is suffering under the “galling yoke” of trusts and monopolies. Substitute those scourges of the Gilded Age with unfettered multinational conglomerates and something similar holds true today. The author’s list of obstacles facing workers are as relevant now as they were more than a century ago: the needs of “civilized life” increase more rapidly than wages; the skilled worker remains at the mercy of a boss; and her “sacrifices and sufferings” serve to further “the unlimited and unearned wealth of the rich”. Jobs bleed into the weekend, robbing workers of “the Sabbath rest”; economic inequality affects our “prospects of old age”; the wealthy are “indifferent” to the sufferings of the lower classes; “political corruption is on the increase”; “the Capitalists and the great corporations have generally been able to secure legislation in their favor”; and automation provides no new jobs when we are “superseded by the machine that takes [our] place”. How are we to fight the tentacles of capitalist exploitation, which regrow, hydra-like, with greater fortitude at every setback? Harris is bullish on labor unions, which he believes are “the most natural and effective method of reaching the desired end”, supportive of “temperate anarchists”, who will one day be praised for “arousing the masses against the oppressions under which they suffered”, and disdainful of “nihilists” for their “lawlessness and Godlessness”. While pickets, strikes, and legislative reform all earn measured praise in these pages, as does a plan to “Christianize the Capitalist”, his most sustained discussion is reserved for socialism. Harris believes that “thoughtful men are rapidly clearing their minds of the prejudice that they have held against Socialism” — a sentiment that feels, with hindsight, more than a little optimistic. He preaches the merits of nationalizing utilities, railroads, communication networks, and food manufacturers, and believes that a Christian socialist form of political economy will soon triumph worldwide, supplying “every human being with ample food, clothing, shelter and education”. There will be universal healthcare, a comfortable retirement at sixty years old, and an elimination of capitalism’s wasteful practices. His treatise ends with a vision of the future, one we are perhaps still waiting for: When the war is over, and the din of battle no longer disturbs a peace-loving people, what will be the opinion of that fortunate generation as it reviews the past? It will most naturally regard our present Capitalistic system as the second of the Dark Ages in which day and night mingled in strange confusion. . . . The question arises from the murmuring masses of today, “Will humanity ever be free?” Below you will find illustrations by Paul Krafft for Capital and Labor. A worker prunes the rosebuds of a monopolist, the personifications of vice and graft steer the nation’s motorcar off a cliff, and, in the most chilling image, skulls are stacked high to form an obelisk in memory of “the victims who were crushed under capitalism”.

public-domain-review

May 1, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:20.245628

blackwork

Paper Gems: Early Modern Blackwork Prints Text by Miya Tokumitsu Jan 30, 2024 Early modern prints are recycled waste products of everyday life. Paper was fashioned from soiled and tattered linen, which was boiled and beaten into pulp, then strained and dried in sheets. Ink was an admixture of lampblack or soot blended with oil. Rags and grime thus became the material basis for print media, once wrought through the printmaker’s resurrective craft. As printmakers of this period continued to discover, this act of applying ink to paper with a printing matrix and a press could be accomplished via an astonishing multitude of techniques, some quite esoteric. One unusual technique, called blackwork, resulted from the adaptation of an enameling process known as champlevé. In traditional metalwork, champlevé entails filling shaped voids in a metal object, such as a brooch or box lid, with a powder of colored glass and sometimes, metal. The object is then heated to melt and bind these fillings, and, once cooled, polished until smooth and an image or pattern becomes crisply legible. To create blackwork prints, shaped voids are gouged into a copper printing plate (rather than a piece of jewelry or decorative object) and filled with a concoction of thick ink (rather than colored glass). When pressed onto paper, the inked voids print areas of pure black that contrast with the unprinted paper; the resulting image was often an intricate pattern or lacy ornamental motif. Artists who made these prints frequently combined blackwork with the linear compositional elements of traditional burin engraving. Blackwork prints often signaled explicitly the technique’s origins in jewelry design. The earliest known print of this kind is a design for a ring and bezel. Insect and flower motifs are common in blackwork prints, as they are in jewelry. Many of these prints present designs for hypothetical objects like pendants, brooches, or earrings. As they imagined these objects that could be, but as yet did not exist, blackwork engravers were determined to make their own works — paper prints — precious and full of visual interest. The prints of Jean Toutin (1578–1644) and Elias Holl II (1611–1657) depict pendants and gemlike motifs suspended in the air above figural compositions that seem to bear little logical relation to them. Their jewelry designs and arabesques float over scenes of minimal narrative: harvesters pushing wheelbarrows; strolling couples. These curious juxtapositions anticipate department store window displays that appeared centuries later, where scenes of light narrative suggestion, in miniature, become backdrops for salable items. One printmaker, Giovanni Battista Constantini (active 1615–1628), understood that sex sells: in Octagonal Case and Two Other Motifs Held by Ignudi (1622), the contours of two blackwork patterns brush suggestively across the genitals of the nude male figures presenting them. ※※Indexed under…Jewellerydesign's influence on blackwork In addition to functioning as design proposals, these printed motifs could also manifest more purely as compositional experiments that toyed with the pictorial elements of scale, perspectival space, and contour. As Madeleine Viljoen suggests, the blackwork process itself provided specific content to many of these prints, invoking the air and gusts that produced the soot of printing ink and the creative spiritus of engraving. In one print by Toutin, for instance, a blackwork pendant hovers above a furnace tended to by a goldsmith and an assistant who clutches bellows. The production of blackwork prints spanned only a few decades, from the mid-1580s through the 1620s. Shifting tastes in fashion and ornament are the commonly understood causes of blackwork’s decline, but that does not explain why these engravers were either unsuccessful or uninterested in adapting blackwork to other types of imagery. Perhaps blackwork was too bound up in increasingly out-of-vogue designs for audiences — and makers — to conceive of the labor-intensive technique as fit for anything else. Nevertheless, for a time, these prints’ creators appropriated both the design principles and craft techniques of jewelry-making for graphic art, and in so doing, created objects of virtuosity and whimsy.

public-domain-review

Jan 30, 2024

Miya Tokumitsu

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:20.464109

photographs-of-palestinian-life

Photographs of Palestinian Life (ca. 1896–1919) Text by Hunter Dukes and Adam Green Apr 30, 2024 Girls pose in ornately embroidered tatreez. Women hold cauliflowers stacked four heads high; men carefully consider the heaps at a watermelon market. Commerce thrives: olive oil soap factories pile their bars by the thousands; merchants grade glossy bushels of Jaffa oranges; and in the bazaars, cutlers sharpen sickles and farriers fit shoes. Domari speakers raise their hands toward the camera in a grove on Mt. Hermon; women hoist water pots in the Druze community of Daliyat al-Karmel; men wear the tarboosh and prepare a Passover feast of roasted meat. Recreation takes many forms, from gramophone cafes to concerts, nargilah sessions to calisthenics. Families dressed in white walk through a cemetery after Ramadan; mourners mass for the funeral of a rabbi in Jerusalem; mothers attend a bible class shoulder to shoulder in Bethlehem. A family pitch their tent high above the Dead Sea, and, with his feet firmly planted, a man stares out over the fertile olive groves of Gaza. These images of Palestine before the British Mandate — all from stereograph collections held by the Library of Congress and Brown University — fall into two broad categories: stereoscope cards (made by overseas companies such as Keystone View and Stereo-Travel) and photographs produced by the American Colony based in Jerusalem (who would often provide stereoscope manufacturers with scenes). The vast majority of images produced by such organizations were intended to feed a “Holy Land” mania that increasingly obsessed the United States throughout the nineteenth century, a period in which only the Bible and Uncle Tom’s Cabin outsold books about Palestine. In addition to the rise of international tourism, this fixation was fueled by a wave of Christian thought in which Palestine was seen as a neglected Ottoman “backwater” in need of restoration, revitalization, and resettlement to facilitate the second coming of Christ. For those unable to make the transatlantic steamer, the “Holy Land” was brought home in the form of travelogues, photo books, theme parks, exhibitions, and, of course, through stereoscope cards, which — with their 3D technology — offered a unique form of sacred pilgrimage for the armchair traveler. While most of the photographs focus on historical and biblical sites — with locals demoted to mere ornamental function — the frame occasionally falls on Palestine’s inhabitants, capturing daily routines and peak experiences alike. Many of these images, often assembled to hide all traces of modernity, still carry the air of scriptural reconstruction (if not actually staged as such, then created in retrospect through captioning and biblical citation). But in others, we witness a less filtered vision of the everyday. Though, of course, a partial view and still the product of an orientalist gaze, we are offered in such photographs a valuable glimpse of Palestine at the turn of the century. Beneath the surface of biblical fantasy, we can glean a land alive with history and potential, a populace immersed in the comings and goings of village, city, and family life — a vision of Palestine that is anything but, as the early Zionist slogan would have it, a “land without a people”. Agrarian scenes predominate — when these photographs were taken, Palestinians were cultivating olives, cotton, tobacco, dura, sesame, and exporting barley to the United Kingdom, wheat to Italy and France, and Jaffa oranges around the world. In many of the photographs, women are shown at work: coffee gets ground with pestles; olives are gathered and pressed; wheat is measured, sifted, and eventually baked into bread. Of the roughly half a million residents in the Ottoman sanjaks that composed Palestine in this period, some seventy-five percent were farmers, living in more than seven hundred villages. The other twenty-five percent dwelled in towns and cities, making a living from education, commerce, government, religion, and artisanry. Joyful school scenes, coffeeshop conversations, shopkeepers and craftspeople hard at work, and ecstatic festivals all feature here. At the turn of the century, before the establishment of Mandatory Palestine and the large-scale increase of Zionist immigration, the Ottoman census recorded the population as roughly 85% Muslim, 11% Christian, and 4% Jewish. The stereoscope enthusiast would have contemplated scenes of religious and family life from all of these populations, and there’s a hint here at the kind of harmony and intermixing described in the memoirs and diaries of Jerusalem residents such as Wasif Jawhariyyeh and Yaakov Yehoshua, which detail Christians dressing up for Purim festivities, Sephardic Jewish musicians performing at Islamic weddings, and Muslim women learning the Ladino language of their neighbors. How one views these photographs today will likely be colored by their knowledge of what was to come for the communities and land depicted. The end of World War I would see the Ottoman Empire dissolve, the Balfour Declaration signed, and the British Mandate begin. Waves of Zionist settlement — encouraged by favorable Mandate policies and spurred by the terror of antisemitism in Europe — led to huge shifts in demography and power. These were changes that would ultimately prove devastating to the Palestinian Arab population in particular, from the Nakba of 1948, through the Naksa of 1967, to the horrors of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza. In Camera Palæstina (2022), Issam Nassar, Stephen Sheehi, and Salim Tamari argue, however, against reading photographs like these as nostalgic, “a reading that suggests the loss and erasure of Palestine as a historical and present fact”. Rather, they believe such images “illuminate Palestine as a lived and living social fact”. In Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba (2024), Johnny Mansour speaks about what photographs like these mean to him: “I firmly believe that while the people of Palestine lost their land, they refuse to lose their history. As one of the children, the survivors, of this people, I know how sincere our relationship is with the land, its past, its history, its images, its documents. Taken together, they return to us what we need the most: our homeland.”

public-domain-review

Apr 30, 2024

Hunter Dukes and Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:20.688247

celestial-phenomena-16th-century-germany

Signs and Wonders: Celestial Phenomena in 16th-Century Germany Text by Hunter Dukes Apr 11, 2024 The villagers of Strasbourg may have heard about a war in heaven while reading the Book of Revelation; in 1554, they witnessed one with their own eyes. As a broadsheet published in June of that year records, a bloody, fiery ray bisected the sun, followed by a clash between cavalry — each side bearing guidons. War raged for hours, and then, as suddenly as they appeared, the combatants trotted off into the clouds. Seven years later, this time in Nuremberg, the Bavarian horizon was blotted out by an extraterrestrial skirmish between unidentified orbs. “The globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour”, wrote the broadsheet’s author. Some of these vehicles crashed down beyond the city limits, while a terrifying, arrow-like object appeared in the air. “Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows.” These were not isolated incidents. German broadsheets in the Holy Roman Empire conveyed all kinds of wondrous phenomena through woodcuts: “anomalies in the sun, moon, stars . . . stones and fire falling from the sky, rainbows, miraculous births, rains of blood”, tracks Daniela Wagner. Unexplainable events happened so frequently that they were christened Wunderzeichen, wonder-signs. Between 1550 and 1559 alone, there were more than four hundred broadsheets and tracts published that recorded these prognostic events. The phenomena were also preserved in news pamphlets, astrological literature, sermons, scientific treatises, correspondence, personal diaries, and “wonder books”, broadsheets bound into a single volume. For many readers in this period, encounters with these reports and images were signs that the end was nigh. Although apocalypticism was not a novel concept, it gained newfound intensity during the Reformation. “By 1560”, writes Robin Bruce Barnes, “[clerical] attention to the unusual had become nothing less than an obsession”. New Protestant translations of the Bible rendered the Book of Revelation in particularly dramatic terms, while Luther and his acolytes encouraged followers to look upward and augur the future. “We see the Sun to be darkened and the Moon, the stars to fall, men to be distressed, all the winds and waters to make a noise”, he preached during a sermon about the Second Coming. “How many other Signs also, and unusual impressions, have we seen in the Heavens, in the Sun, Moon, Stars, Rain-bows and strange Apparitions, in these last four years?” Far from folk superstition, the belief in Wunderzeichen as portents of the Last Judgment was shot through with eschatology. Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560), who systematized Luther’s theology, saw these scenes painted across the sky as communications from God: For if these signs are not meant to be considered, why are they written and painted on the sky by divine providence? Since God has engraved these marks in the sky in order to announce great upheavals for the states, it is impiety to turn one’s mind away from their observation. What are eclipses, conjunctions, portents, meteors or comets if not oracles of God which threaten great calamities and changes for the life of men? Some speculate that the prophetic attention to celestial bodies was sometimes fueled by ergotism — the fungal infection that swept across cereal grains in much of northern Europe. Ingesting these crops produced delirium, hallucinations of fire and religious fervor. Drugs aside, the skies were alive with astronomical wonder, which was ripe for interpretation in even the soberest eyes. Northern lights streaked across the horizon like blood. Solar halos, sun dogs, and light pillars were frequent and mysterious. A 1556 comet was widely reported across Europe and Asia, spotted by awe-eyed observers from Britain to China. And each shooting star further unfolded a narrative of religious reformation. One broadsheet published in Nuremberg during May of that same year, for example, depicts Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia as damaged by an earthquake. It did not surprise readers that this destruction occurred alongside the appearance of a comet: eliding Islam with Catholicism, the text suggests that “the papacy—polemically identified as the Roman Antichrist—will also get its desserts”, writes Jennifer Spinks. Just as Victorian encounters with ghosts surged after the invention of photography, media technologies also played a part in propagating these sixteenth-century visions. Most of the images below come from Einblattdruck, a form of broadsheet that consisted of a title, woodcut, and an account of wonder. These sheets could be created rapidly, disseminated widely, and purchased cheaply. News and current events were thus being printed with greater speed and reach than ever before. As such, genres evolved and hybridized with haste. In the early 1520s, so-called “siege prints” — graphic tableaux of battles — became particularly popular. And astronomical almanacs were some of the most widely consumed vernacular texts in the Holy Roman Empire. Is it any surprise, then, that battles between stars started appearing in the skies, wedding these two genres, evidenced by woodcuts of astrological siege? The art historian Aby Warburg — puzzled why, in the midst of the Reformation, a seemingly new form of paganism flourished — concluded that “astral deities . . . enjoyed a peripatetic Renaissance, in words and pictures, thanks to the new printing houses of Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Leipzig”. The observance of celestial phenomena tapered off in the seventeenth century — as the doom foretold by the heavens finally came to Earth in the form of the Thirty Years’ War. Strangely enough, in the eighteenth century, very similar signs appeared in the skies over Riga, which deeply influenced a certain printer in Philadelphia’s views of revolution. For more on that story, see our post on A True and Wonderful Narrative (1763). Below you can browse a selection of broadsheets containing accounts of wonders, courtesy of Zurich’s Zentralbibliothek.

public-domain-review

Apr 11, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:21.023237

weird-islands

Distortions and Grimaces: Jean de Bosschère’s Weird Islands (1921) Text by Kevin Dann Apr 9, 2024 One wonders how many children might have tugged at a parent’s coattails to cajole a present of Jean de Bosschère’s Weird Islands when it was first released in 1921. A glance at any one of its 120 illustrations, all done by the author himself, would surely have scared off all but the most intrepid young readers. The Carpenter — an unnaturally tall, blue top-hatted, androgynous character in yellow bell-bottoms with a folding, insect-shaped airplane strapped to his back — joins a motley troupe of nine musicians (including Bing, taller still than the Carpenter, his face covered by a hawkish black harlequin mask; Peter, a fly-voiced fiddle player with spidery fingers; and Melinda, a selfish girl oblivious to everything and everyone but her own whims) for an outing upon the Thames in their Blue Boat. Uniformly incompetent and absent-minded, all have crooked postures, slightly misshapen limbs, faces like porcelain dolls, absurd arabesque costumes, and an air of vaporous unreality. Towing the Shark — a submarine piloted by a fellow dressed as a monstrous cod — and a dirigible christened the Lemon of Gold, the ten adventurers set off from Greenwich Pier while making a din with their incongruous instruments, and by the time they have reached the river’s mouth, a gale has set both the dirigible and the submarine adrift. The Carpenter must lend his instrument — a musical saw — to cut down the mast. Everyone escapes a watery grave when he then unfolds his airplane and leads the Travelers on a willy-nilly, topsy-turvy trip to a series of islands inhabited by beings even more uncanny and alien than them. On the Round Island, along with peacocks and pelicans, they meet a fiendish parrot who warns them to beware of the Balligoors and Coomasis who are known to strangle, hang, and behead any hapless shipwrecked mariners. A ferocious lion and a crown of spherical and cuboid birds accost them on another isle. They go on to encounter a pigwing, a kind of guinea pig with diaphanous useless wings; a crowd of cyclopes who wish to cage them; the Galipodes — storks with little hats made of pastry dough; and atavistic silhouetted creatures with masks of dried leaves. Both de Bosschère’s ten travelers and the archipelago dwellers are relentlessly chimerical and asymmetrical as rendered by his hand. One feels a slight frisson of gooseflesh with every encounter. Growing up together in the small village of Lier in the desolate Campine moorland of the Low Countries — isolated by having arrived to this Flemish-speaking, intensely pious area as a French-speaking family headed by a free-thinking atheist physician and naturalist — Jean and his beloved sister Marie, who suffered from a cleft lip, were bullied and ostracized. Long before Marie starved herself to death at the age of eighteen, Jean (who recalls making his first drawings at age three) shrank back from the world’s avarice, cruelty, and insensitivity. Even in his most tender and innocent literary and artistic productions — he wrote and illustrated half a dozen other children’s books, and, in the last decades of his life, four exquisite works of natural history — he is “the enraged one”, his inner rebellion perennially erupting to diagnose society’s malaise of soul. In January 1915, six months after the German invasion of Belgium, de Bosschère fled Brussels for London, carrying with him a notebook filled with sketches in which both the invaders and the invaded were marked by such unsettling dark distortions and grimaces that British censors confiscated them. Like his first books of poetic prose, his early works in English — Twelve Occupations (1916); The Closed Door (1917); The City Curious (1920) — contain their own unsettling sketches, engravings, and woodblock prints. While London appears less grotesquely sinister and threatening than Paris, he still manages to find its most anguished, tormented places; even his fairy tales cannot escape an unrelenting probing of ugliness and despair. For all his misanthropic severity, de Bosschère was the fiercest of friends. In Paris, he was an intimate of Antonin Artaud, Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel, and André Suarès; in London, he counted Ezra Pound, T. H. Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Conrad Aiken, and T. S. Eliot among his circle. Recognized by all who knew him as a genius, the reader of any of his works must summon a certain courage to meet his strikingly sensitive gaze at the spectacle of life. Despite its grotesqueries, Weird Islands actually makes for a gentle and humane place to begin. You can browse a selection of Jean de Bosschère’s illustrations for Weird Islands below.

public-domain-review

Apr 9, 2024

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:21.328809

merian-metamorphosis

Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705) Text by Paloma Ruiz Mar 6, 2024 Pomelos, pomegranates, plantains, and the sociopolitical importance of a seedpod. When Maria Sibylla Merian first set foot in Suriname, her senses were overcome with surprising tastes, sights, and smells. A dissected soursop and a hovering Owlet Moth; shining pepper plants and pineapple fibers which stung her German-born tongue. In her two years of exploration before contracting a malaria-like illness, Merian expounded upon the sweetness of watermelon, just as she dutifully detailed the long-misunderstood process of butterfly metamorphosis. The result was a compilation of sixty elaborate engravings, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705) — a fascinating catalog of New World plants, animals, and insects. Nestled within these pages, we find a fragmentary understanding of indigenous knowledge, the morsels of information which were shared with Merian by members of the enslaved population. Yet of the many species and processes which Metamorphosis revealed, most potent of all is an account of a singular, seemingly innocuous species of seedpod. As a young girl growing up in Frankfurt, Merian would often travel to the countryside to search for caterpillar larvae. She raised silkworms at thirteen years old, and gave thorough attention to every subtle shift in the physiology of her specimens. When she moved to Nuremberg with her husband in 1670, she was hired to teach illustration to wealthy, unmarried women, thereby securing herself access to some of the finest gardens in Germany, elaborate oases for the insects she studied. In 1690, now the mother of two young daughters, Merian divorced. And by 1699, after a decade of supporting herself through art, she was given permission from the city of Amsterdam to undertake research in Suriname with her youngest daughter, Dorothea. Lacking the financial backing from commercial enterprise that was typical for other Dutch naturalists, the pair stayed fiscally afloat through the sale of roughly 255 of their own paintings. Rumors abound that this voyage was partially paid for by the director of the Dutch West India Company, but there is no acknowledgement of sponsorship in Merian’s writing, and she was quite open with her criticism of colonial merchants. To her, their myopic obsession with sugar was self-destructive, disappointing. There were so many other potentially world-altering plants available for export, and it was her job to illuminate their existence. Merian’s work would not have been possible without the knowledge of enslaved peoples, both of African and Amerindian descent. Through her interactions, Merian documented indigenous plant names, as well as their traditional medicinal uses. Perhaps it was because she was a woman that she was made privy to the use of peacock flower (or red bird of paradise) seeds as a natural abortifacient. It was rare for a female to travel without a man, even rarer for her to do so for the purpose of work. Perhaps the duo of her and Dorothea appeared trustworthy enough, or perhaps they were so meddlesome that the information was begrudgingly surrendered. Regardless, Merian understood the painful depth and breadth of the abortifacient’s importance while writing Metamorphosis: The Indians, who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds to abort their children, so that they will not become slaves like themselves. The black slaves from Guinea and Angola have demanded to be well treated, threatening to refuse to have children. In fact, they sometimes take their own lives because they are treated so badly, and because they believe they will be born again, free and living in their own land. They told me this themselves. Merian returned to Amsterdam in 1701, opening a shop to sell her specimens and engravings. In 1705, Metamorphosis was published. Her engravings served as one of the first natural histories of Suriname, while her depictions of butterflies helped dispel the myth that insects were spontaneously generated out of mud and standing water. As Metamorphosis was shepherded through several editions and translations following Merian’s death in 1717, her work gained a larger audience. In spite of this, the medicinal use of the peacock flower was seemingly ignored. Instead, the plant became increasingly popular as an eye-catching, uncomplicated, ornamental shrub. First exported to Europe in the late seventeenth century, Caesalpinia pulcherrima took up residence in leading botanical gardens such as the Jardin du Roi in Paris and the Chelsea Physic Garden in London, yet was excluded entirely from the official pharmacopeias of London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Other New World medicines were tested and embraced — cinchona for malaria, guaiacum for syphilis. Although there was no specific law forbidding the study of abortifacients at this time, physicians and scholars proved ignorant or chose strategic omission. In this way, the plant that was originally leveraged as a life-altering act of self-ownership by the enslaved peoples of Suriname — a physical refusal to feed the cycle of slavery — was shipped across the Atlantic, and shorn of its history. ※※Indexed under…Lossof botanical knowledge

public-domain-review

Mar 6, 2024

Paloma Ruiz

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:21.669068

millions-of-cats

Unwashed Furry Masses: Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats (1928) Text by Hunter Dukes Feb 15, 2024 For the feline minded, there is rarely too much of a good thing when it comes to cats; Wanda Hazel Gág’s Millions of Cats (1928) tells a tale that proves the rare exception. Considered the oldest American children’s book still in print, it continues to delight the contemporary eye. A superbly talented lithographer, Gág helped popularize the double-page spread in illustrated children’s literature, collaborating on this volume with her brother, who lettered the text by hand. In 1928, The Nation placed Millions of Cats on its list of distinguished titles, and it won a Newbery the following year, a rare award for picture books. The story opens on an elderly couple: they are so very lonely. The woman lands on an idea — “If we only had a cat!” — and her husband sets off to find one. He trudges across sunlit landscapes and cool valleys until he comes across a hill completely covered with cats. Trillions of cats. Which one to choose? They are all so pretty. He picks a white one and then a black and white one and then a fuzzy gray one and then brown and yellow one . . . eventually he picks them all. Once he brings his new friends home, the old woman is more practical — trillions of cats is just a few too many — and decides they will ask the cats to choose. This is a mistake. “’No, I am the prettiest! . . . No, I am! I am! I am!’ cried hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of voices, for each cat thought itself the prettiest.” They begin to quarrel and hiss and claw and scratch. After a while, all falls silent. The couple look outside and cannot find a single cat. “‘I think they must have eaten each other all up,’ said the very old woman, ‘It’s too bad!’” But there is, of course, one runty kitten hidden out in the high grass, whom they welcome in and feed and raise. “‘It is the most beautiful cat in the whole world,’ said the very old man. ‘I ought to know, for I’ve seen — Hundreds of cats, Thousands of cats, Millions and billions and trillions of cats — and not one is as pretty as this one.’” Born into the German-speaking community of New Ulm, Minnesota, Wanda Gág (1893–1946) was raised by immigrants from Bohemia. Her father was a photographer, the son of a woodcutter, and entrusted her with the family’s artistic legacy on his deathbed: “Was der Papa nicht thun konnt’, muss die Wanda halt fertig machen” (What father couldn’t do, Wanda will have to finish). And she did. Gág won a scholarship to the Minneapolis Art Institute, where she became interested in socialist and anarchist writing, before relocating to New York in 1917 for the Arts Student League and to make a living as a commercial artist and illustrator. She hung out with the other kind of Bohemians — leftist artists in Greenwich Village — contributed to socialist magazines like The Liberator and New Masses, and eventually married the labor organizer Earle Marshall Humphreys, who would become her artistic collaborator. But before she accepted his hand, she made her intentions firm: “I would marry no man unless he would promise to run the house during my drawing moods and would excuse me from scrubbing floors.” (A few years after their marriage, she published Gone is Gone: or, The Story of a Man Who Wanted to Do Housework.) The couple had no children; Gág’s inspiration arose from something within: “I don’t write books for children. . . . I write for the child I am myself”, assembling material from “all the helpless fringes and frayed edges of our groping lives”. Her focus on the lives and plights of others caught the attention of Ernestine Evans, an editor impacted by the politically engaged children’s books produced in the Soviet Union, who agreed to publish Millions of Cats. It’s easy to read Millions of Cats as a simple story about the pleasures of pets — a Good Dog, Carl for the fairer species, a tale about the subjective beauty of a chosen cat. But Gág’s politics create tempting flights of interpretation. Julia L. Mickenberg, in Learning from the Left (2005), goes so far as to write that “Millions of Cats tells a very disturbing story about the barrenness of bourgeois living, greed, competition, environmental degradation, and senseless violence.” Viewed through this lens, the couple live in isolation, walled off from meaningful community; the trillion cats consume entire ponds and ecosystems and remain unsated; they devour their brethren and are devoured in turn — all to earn a spot in the couple’s family structure, their bourgeois home. Curiously, the trope of cats eating themselves up entirely can be found in The German Ideology: “the two Kilkenny cats in Ireland, which so completely devoured each other that finally only their tails remained.” Marx and Engels evoke this tale while pitting Max Stirner against Ludwig Feuerbach, but Gág seems to draw upon a similar image to portray a form of blindness. The beauty of a new family member trumps the deaths of a trillion starving orphans. It’s like they never existed: they simply melt into air.

public-domain-review

Feb 15, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:22.129291

my-lady-nicotine

Never-again Land: J. M. Barrie's My Lady Nicotine (1896) Text by Hunter Dukes Feb 6, 2024 Before he conceived of Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie decided it was time to grow up and quit smoking. He justifies this decision in My Lady Nicotine: A Study in Smoke (originally published in 1890), which begins with a common trio of arguments against substance addiction. The bodily and spiritual ruin; the economic impact; the pain caused to loved ones. In the case of our narrator (who seems to be a lightly fictionalized Barrie): he felt frequently like he was dying; realized several oriental rugs could be purchased yearly with the money saved; and delayed his marriage six months when his fiancée demanded cessation. Slowly, however, this “study” diffuses into a different mode. At the introduction’s close, fidgeting in the drawing room with postprandial cravings, he listens to his wife sing a sweet and mournful song, which takes his thoughts far away, to a parlor on the top floor of an inn, where time seems to slow as his body's hunger warmly fades, like coals in the hearth that throw light around this room — onto newspapers, through smoke rings, across the faces of gentleman friends, and against the contours of a tobacco jar. It’s a lost world, once known so well, and he pulls up a chair and begins to pack a pipe. “After a time the music ceases, and my wife puts her hand on my shoulder. Perhaps I start a little, and then she says I have been asleep. This is the book of my dreams.” It is also a book of Barrie’s dreams past. The volume was stitched together from pieces he had written anonymously for the St James’s Gazette, Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, and elsewhere, published to “establish his title to the contents in the face of pirates and rival claimants”, writes Denis Mackail. And yet it works surprisingly well as a single unit, whatever kind of unit that may be. There are: chapters on the pleasures of apparatus — pouches, smoking tables, the choice of stem and bowl; short stories masquerading as essays about friends, the men with whom our narrator smokes; speculations about literary history (surely Spenser puffed in bed); epistolary correspondence; a ghost story; three dream visions; and unfiltered wit. The only throughline to it all is how the chapters mirror the instincts of a smoker’s mind: although it may stray to other subjects, the prose always returns at steady intervals to the preoccupations of nicotine. We catch sight of the author’s slight social awkwardness, his odd sense of humor, the famed idiosyncrasies. Embittered in his youth for failings of wit, the narrator would “lay in a stock of repartee on likely subjects” the night before entering “the society of ladies”. All of this changed once he acquired his pipe. Known to scoffers as “the Mermaid”, its mouthpiece was a cigarette holder, which required “months of unwearied practice . . . before you found the angle at which the bowl did not drop off.” He turned this to his advantage at parties. She observed the strange-looking pipe. . . . It is possible that she may pass it by without remark, in which case all is lost; but experience has shown me that four times out of six she touches it in assumed horror, to pass some humorous remark. Off tumbles the bowl. “Oh,” she exclaims, “see what I have done! I am so sorry!” I pull myself together. “Madam,” I reply calmly and bowing low, “what else was to be expected? You came near my pipe — and it lost its head!” She blushes, but cannot help being pleased; and I set my pipe for the next visitor. Perhaps it’s best that this man quit smoking. While it might seem quite at odds with Neverland, My Lady Nicotine, like Peter Pan and Wendy (1904), is concerned with fleeting youth, a stage of bachelor life that has the trappings of childhood in a way: simple pleasures, imaginative adventures with companions, idleness, tranquility, and a sense that these days might go on forever, until they don’t. The book ends on a maudlin image. The narrator sits each night alone in the drawing room, while his wife sleeps upstairs. At a certain hour, a neighbor through the wall, whom he has never met, sparks a meerschaum pipe, and our man puffs his empty piece in solidarity until he hears the neighbor clearing out his bowl’s final ash. “Therefore when his last tap says good-night to me I take my cold briar out of my mouth, tap it on the mantel-piece, smile sadly, and so to bed.” For a slightly different take on nicotine, see Juliette Bretan’s essay “Documenting Drugs: The Artful Intoxications of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz”. And for a film about a smoker pitted against Tinkerbell’s cousin, see our post on Princess Nicotine (1909).

public-domain-review

Feb 6, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:22.634604

sutherland-macdonald-tattoos

The Art of Sutherland Macdonald, Victorian England’s “Michelangelo of Tattooing” (ca. 1905) Text by Hunter Dukes Mar 12, 2024 It’s an era when tattoos are no longer taboo: men and women flock to a London studio to enjoy cooling drinks, a snug stove, and the steady hum of a modern electromagnetic machine, fitted with interchangeable needles for fine lines and shading. Inked on their skin are designs “gathered from all corners of the globe” — Japanese dragons, The Last Supper, a fox hunt in full cry — and words from Arabic, Burmese, and other tongues. Snakes, lizards, and frogs are a current vogue. Coloration has come a long way since the early days: ultramarine blue and emerald green, once thought impossible, are now shot freely into the dermis. Officers get their regimental badges emblazoned; “some of our best-known society men” proudly sport a patch or crest. “Tired of constantly rouging her cheeks”, a woman stops by for the application of permanent makeup. It’s truly a tattoo enthusiast’s paradise . . . Sutherland Macdonald’s studio in Victorian England. “It is no exaggeration to say that tens of thousands of men and even women are more or less decorated in this manner at the present moment”, writes Gambier Bolton in “Pictures on the Human Skin”, an 1897 article for London’s Strand Magazine from which the above descriptions are drawn. (A year later, R. J. Stephens would put the number of tattooed at 100,000 in London alone.) Bolton goes on to describe the current loci of artistic tattooing: “England, America, Burmah, and Japan”, and posits that Britain’s fascination with inked skin stretches back to before the Norman Conquest, when tattooing was “universally” practiced on the Isles. To illustrate his article, he begins with a coat of arms design by Sutherland Macdonald, the first British tattoo artist to open a public studio, “The Hammam” on Jermyn Street in London. “No one in the past, and no man living to-day, can compare with Macdonald in placing really artistic pictures on the human skin.” The photographs of Macdonald’s artworks, collected below, are records from the Copyright Office at Stationers' Hall, and perhaps relate to a service detailed by Bolton: “in more than one instance the copyright of some particularly striking image has actually been purchased outright, so no one but the wealthier patrons of the Jermyn Street studio shall have the use of them.” (This seems to have been the case with a tattoo of Psyche and Amour on the back of one Captain Studdy, whose copyright is registered to Macdonald.) During the late 1800s, tattoos became a fixation for the upper classes; as Macdonald himself remarked in an 1889 interview in the Pall Mall Gazette: “I have tattooed many noblemen, and also several ladies.” Scholars occasionally attribute the shifting class connotations of tattoos to Albert Edward, Prince of Wales — his decision to get marked while visiting the Jordan River and, later, to have his sons supposedly tattooed in Japan by Hori Chiyo, Macdonald’s competitor on the international stage. Describing tattooing as “the popular pastime of the leisured world” in an 1898 article titled “Tattooed Royalty”, R. J. Stephens named just a few of the majestically inked — Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, Prince and Princess Waldemar of Denmark, Queen Olga of Greece, King Oscar of Sweden, the Duke of York, the Grand Duke Constantine, Lady Randolph Churchill — many tattooed by Macdonald himself. Part of Macdonald’s genius was his ability to court wealth by elevating the status of his artform. Earlier in the nineteenth century, tattoos were shadow signs — encountered on the bodies of sailors, soldiers, and recidivists, occasionally described in medical literature or criminology handbooks, but largely obscured from public discourse. Macdonald changed these perceptions by wearing a white coat (emulating a medical professional), using the latest technologies (he is credited with inventing the first electromagnetic tattoo machine), operating in proximity to a popular Turkish bath (playing up fashionable orientalism with a studio full of luxurious cushions), and registering a legitimate practice in the Post Office Directory (necessitating the creation of a new category of business). He cunningly referred to himself as a tattooist, distinguished from the workaday tattooer: “He lays great stress on the ‘IST’”, writes Bolton, “as he classes the ‘ER,” with the plumber and bricklayer, whilst the work of the tattooist, he claims, should rank with the professions”. By 1900, L’Illustration had named Macdonald “the Michelangelo of tattooing”. The photographs below can only hint at the depth of color and nuanced texture that admirers attributed to his works.

public-domain-review

Mar 12, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:23.167613

edith-wharton-italian-villas

Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904) Text by Hunter Dukes Apr 2, 2024 “The traveller returning from Italy, with his eyes and imagination full of the ineffable Italian garden-magic, knows vaguely that the enchantment exists; that he has been under its spell, and that it is more potent, more enduring, more intoxicating to every sense than the most elaborate and glowing effects of modern horticulture; but he may not have found the key to the mystery. Is it because the sky is bluer, because the vegetation is more luxuriant?” So begins Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904), which followed her debut novel, The Valley of Decision (1902). The novel’s success and Italian setting — as well as her work on an earlier volume, 1897’s The Decoration of Houses — caught the eye of an editor at Century magazine, who commissioned Wharton for a series of six articles on Italian architecture and an accompanying book-length collection. She shipped out of Boston in January 1903, disembarked near Genoa, and proceeded to tour widely, as she had done since childhood on an almost annual basis — Viterbo up to Orvieto; Siena, Florence, Rome, and Venice — following recommendations from Vernon Lee, the book’s dedicatee, who “better than anyone else, has understood and interpreted the garden-magic of Italy”. When not villa-hopping, Wharton rubbed shoulders with the countesses Papafava of Padua and Maria Pasolini of Rome, and rode in her first motor car. “In a thin spring dress, a sailor hat balanced on my chignon, and a two-inch tulle veil over my nose, I climbed proudly to my perch, and off we tore across the Campagna”. By March 18, she could report to her editor that she had already taken “innumerable photographs” and made notes on no less than twenty-six villas, “many unknown or almost inaccessible, & I hope to do nearly as many more in the next month.” She ends her letter tactfully, economically, asking for a 33 percent raise. “All this has increased our expenses considerably—especially, of course, I mean, the trips to out of the way towns & the long drives—& though you may think such investigations are unnecessary for the magazine articles, you will appreciate, I am sure, how much they will add to the value & importance of the book.” She wasn’t wrong: Italian Villas and their Gardens analyzes more than eighty wonders, intercut with fifty-two illustrations: wide-angle photographs and evocative color compositions by the American painter Maxfield Parrish (featured in our gallery below), which Wharton’s text was designed, in part, to accompany. The volume itself is enchanting — its cover inlaid with gold tablature, the images veiled by protective layers of engraved velum. Across these pages, we encounter familiar landscapes — Villa d’Este and the Boboli Gardens, the Mannerist Medici villa and the abutting Borghese park — but Wharton layers architectural history with fine-grain description, and fresh impressions germinate from this well-turned loam. The grounds at Villa Albani in Rome are “laid out in formal quincunxes of clipped ilex”, its gardens “seem to have been decorated by an archaeologist rather than an artist”. She is particularly sensitive to weightiness: the famous water theater at the Villa Aldobrandini is “a heavy and uninspired production”; a portico built under the direction of Winckelmann exhibits “the heavy touch of that neo-Grecianism which was to crush the life out of eighteen-century art”. While Parrish’s images were widely praised, some critics were dispirited by Wharton’s tone, claiming she was “almost too impartial in her appreciation”. A few Century editors agreed, calling the sister articles “too dry and technical”. They asked Wharton to liven things up; her reply was curt. If they wanted “sentimental and anecdotal commentaries”, she would gladly annul her contract. All of her articles subsequently appeared. The book remained one of Wharton’s favorite projects. In A Backward Glance, her 1934 autobiography, she writes: “I never enjoyed any work more than the preparing of that book, but neither do I remember any task so associated with physical fatigue.”

public-domain-review

Apr 2, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:23.480435

earthquakes-in-japanese-woodblock-prints

Tales of the Catfish God: Earthquakes in Japanese Woodblock Prints (1855) Text by Erica X Eisen Feb 21, 2024 Legend has it that when the tremors of the 1855 Ansei Edo earthquake had finally subsided, there were so many dead that survivors were forced to carry their loved ones’ bodies away in sacks of coal and sake barrels. With much of the city having been built on reclaimed marshland — often using heavy, rigid materials — Japan’s capital was a sitting duck for what was then the worst natural disaster in living memory. As aftershocks continued to roil the city for weeks on end, even those whose houses had miraculously escaped collapse took to living in the streets rather than chance having the ceiling fall down around them as they slept. All the same, these dramatic conditions did not prevent a new genre of artwork from flourishing amid the rubble: a type of woodblock print known as namazu-e. Rooted in a myth that earthquakes were caused by the movements of a great catfish (or namazu in Japanese), these prints typically feature one or more of the titular creatures being set upon by angry humans or subdued by the gods. Associations between catfish and natural disasters predate the 1855 earthquake, with popular tales relating how the Shintō deity Kashima kept seismic shifts in check by pinning down the fish’s head with a stone. (Other versions show the creature being trapped by a gourd, visually referencing an idiomatic expression related to accomplishing a seemingly impossible task.) But it was only in the aftermath of the Ansei Edo earthquake that the idea surged to prominence in Japanese visual culture. Hundreds of these prints were issued between when the earthquake struck Edo on November 11 and when the government issued an official ban in December of the same year. Within that narrow sliver of time, anonymous printmakers across Edo — themselves still reeling from the calamity — managed to produce a truly remarkable range of images within the confines of the genre. The namazu sprout human limbs; they are led around by the “reins” of their whiskers or served up as a meal. They visit Edo’s red-light district; they dress as swordsmen and sumō wrestlers. Purchasers would typically have displayed these prints in their homes (or what was left of them), where the images acted as protective charms casting their apotropaic power over the building and those who inhabited it. What is perhaps most striking about these post-earthquake prints is the incongruity between the devastation wrought by the disaster and the emotional tenor of the images that symbolically depict it. Walleyed, their mouths stretched into toothy grins, the catfish seem unbothered by the chaos they leave in their wake — and oblivious to the mob that sets about bashing and slicing them along the way. As a genre, namazu-e prints refuse the mournfulness one might expect, instead embracing an anarchic sense of humor that transforms the unpredictable ferocity of the natural world into an almost loveable — and ultimately placable — rascal. While many histories of the Ansei Edo earthquake have emphasized its disproportionate impact on the city’s poor, the scholar Gregory Smits writes that the actual data is not so clearcut. Jōtō Sanjin, who published a written account of a walk he took in the aftermath of the earthquake, describes the wealthy area of Daimyō kōjō (Lords’ Lane) as being not only flattened but burnt over — many of the aristocratic manors having contained stores of imported saltpeter. If certain upper-class districts were particularly hard hit, by contrast, commoners across various professions stood to benefit both from the widespread rebuilding projects and aid monies splashed out by a central government anxious to head off potential discontent (natural disasters being commonly read as signs of cosmic discontent with the powers that be). This itself would become a favored theme of namazu-e artists, who satirically depicted firefighters, builders, and the like praying for earthquakes out of selfish greed. Here is another attempt to take what might be moments of profound rupture and reconcile them with familiar schemas: the avarice of our fellow mortals, not the apathy of the gods, is ultimately to blame for the calamities that befall us all. It is the socially leveling aspect of the earthquake’s impact that is to account, at least in part, for the celebratory spirit that characterizes so many of the prints created in the weeks following the disaster. In one memorable example, a catfish commits seppuku, only to have money spill out of the slash in his belly instead of blood. In another, the artist has endowed the catfish with a whale-like blowhole out of which it expels a shower of coins, to the delight of onlookers on the shore. In this subgenre of namazu-e, writes Smits, the fish are imagined as forces of yo-naoshi, or world-rectification, restoring balance to society by redistributing wealth hoarded by the rich. Beneath the rubble of the old world, a new and fairer one perhaps lay waiting — for those willing and able to bring it into being. The following examples of namazu-e come from a collection titled “Ansei ōjishin-e” (Ansei Great Earthquake Pictures), courtesy of Japan’s National Diet Library. The artist names are unknown as most of these catfish prints were published illegally and without artist signatures to evade censorship from the shogunate. Note: The English versions of the titles are by machine translation and so likely far from perfect.

public-domain-review

Feb 21, 2024

Erica X Eisen

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:24.023102

animated-putty

I Also Am Formed Out of the Clay: Animated Putty (1911) Text by Hunter Dukes Mar 5, 2024 Decades before Gumby rode Pokey and Wallace petted Gromit, tendrils of clay writhed with agency on a dim screen. Ernst Haeckel once fantasized about Urschleim, a kind of primeval sludge from which all biological beings arose; Animated Putty (1911), considered Britain’s first stop-motion clay animation film, imagines a pliable material giving rise to manifold forms. While the substance used is likely synthetic — as is the case in almost all “clay” animation — the putty seems to gather associations from its medium’s tellurian precursor. An inverted plant pot, devolving back into raw materiality, expels nuggets of clay from its drainage hole, which roll themselves into a primitive snake, and then an eagle’s face. After a rose unfurls from the stuff of earthenware, a windmill raises itself into existence. Next comes a beautiful woman with flowers in her hair. When we blink, her visage dissolves into a demon, which spawns lesser imps from its mouth. It begins to resemble a primordial story, like clay is a primordial substance: an unformed orb evolves into a child’s face and the cycle begins again, with each new viewing. The pure expressiveness of Animated Putty, absent of any artist’s visible hand — plasticity giving rise to spontaneous orders of ideas — feels indebted to older traditions of imagining the animate: Galatea and Pygmalion; Pinocchio and Geppetto; golems brought to life from inanimate clay, who subsequently escape their animator’s yoke. In this trick film’s seemingly spontaneous generation, however, we catch sight of animation’s depersonalized artistry, recalling James Joyce’s description of the artist who, “like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” (Or here, cleaning the clay embedded under his nails.) Directed by Walter R. Booth, a magician whose pivot to cinema we’ve featured before, Animated Putty (as well as 1909’s Animated Cotton) were collaborations with the naturalist, nature documentarian, microphotograph enthusiast, and animator F. Percy Smith. It is perhaps Smith’s belief in the transformative power of attention that vitalizes Animated Putty. When asked by a colleague about techniques for pest control in her infested barn, he once (rather unhelpfully) replied: “If I think anything is a pest, I make a film about it; then it becomes beautiful.”

public-domain-review

Mar 5, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:24.650973

junghuhn-java-album

Lithographs from Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn’s Java-Album (1854) Text by Sasha Archibald Feb 13, 2024 Java-Album was printed from drawings by Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn to accompany a four-volume travelogue about his expeditions in the Dutch East Indies, published in 1854. The images were printed at great trouble — eleven color lithograph plates, with a twelfth tipped in as frontispiece to Volume 1— but they were not, by all accounts, appreciated by Junghuhn’s readers. Whereas the writing was judged literary, exuberant, and melodic, the renderings, as one critic wrote, “ha[ve] a hardness that makes the landscape look unnatural”. The sensuousness of Junghuhn’s prose apparently made his pictures feel sterile. Born in Prussia in 1809, Junghuhn was one of those nineteenth-century polymaths whose name is trailed by a blitz of professions: geographer, linguist, botanist, volcanologist, physician, quinine farmer, mountaineer, cartographer, and “Java’s Humboldt”. He did not admire very many people (in fact, he did not like very many people), but the naturalist Alexander Humboldt was an exception, and this moniker would have pleased him. Junghuhn arrived in Batavia (now Jakarta) around 1835 as a young man. He’d been forced by his father to study medicine, but then life stalled when he was jailed for fighting a duel. He escaped prison after a year and half, fled to France and joined the French Legion, but was discharged shortly after as unfit. Employment with the Dutch colonial government apparently had a low bar for entry. Junghuhn was hired as a doctor, though he proved a misanthrope without much aptitude for doctoring. After a few years, his superiors asked if perhaps he’d like to explore the mountainous interior of Java, which had never been mapped. Any other European transplant would have thought this task too dangerous to merit consideration. The area was known as a roiling terrain of great heights and active volcanoes. Even the urban areas of the Dutch East Indies were considered life-threatening to Europeans, who were slow to acclimatize to the relative heat and humidity, especially when they clung to their Western dress. Junghuhn himself published an article claiming that within eight years of arrival, 90% of Europeans were either dead or sick. (Racist fears of miscegenation were not deeply buried; stay in your climate also meant stay with your race.) Add to the volcanoes and heat various storybook animals: crocodiles, wild pigs, monkeys, rhinoceroses, and scorpions — all which obsessed and terrified the Europeans. Tigers were so plentiful they prowled public plazas. Batavia may have been called “Jewel of Asia” and “Queen of the East”, but it was also called “Europeans’ Graveyard”. Junghuhn, however, defiant and bristly by nature, decided that the expedition was a perfect assignment. He traveled for about twenty months, and despite many near-death experiences, rapturously enjoyed his time. In fact, he felt more contentment than he’d ever experienced before — his people weren’t people, it turned out, they were trees. Junghuhn wrote his travelogue after returning to Europe, though the drawings he claimed to have produced and colored in situ. The vantage point of each is insistently high. Junghuhn’s affection for the aerial view, which he called the “instructive vista”, was born of many factors, including philosophical prerogative. Like Humboldt and Thoreau, he privileged the eye as the best teacher of all — better than books, better than tutors, better than hands. But also, he judged the elevated mountain climate more pleasant, the major flora more dignified, and the cultural traditions more refined than at lower elevations. (Tengger, Sumatran, and Sundanese villages were higher than those of the Javanese, who lived near sea level, and for whom Junghuhn had total contempt.) The Hindu Sundanese, for instance, surrounded their villages with tall hedges of bamboo, which Junghuhn found charming; the volcano they worshiped, the nearby Bromo, struck him as deserving of worship. Junghuhn came to the conclusion that height truly does equal greatness, and mapped his preferences accordingly. One could predict his fondness for specific plants, animals, and humans based on their level of elevation. ※※Indexed under…ElevationFondness for plants and people based on As the drawings show, the Dutch had already introduced the cultivation system in 1830, according to which Java’s lands were planted with cash crops that made a fortune for the colonial state by exploiting and starving the locals. Junghuhn’s mapping project was very much an arm of colonialist power, though he criticized the cultivation system loudly enough that he was reprimanded by the Governor-General. He also advocated socialism, and thought Christians shouldn’t be allowed to proselytize. One scholar describes him as “this most uncolonial of colonials”. The critic who thought Junghuhn’s drawings “unnatural” and “hard” is not incorrect, but perhaps Junghuhn wasn’t aiming for naturalness. It’s possible that Java-Album’s stylized sterility was a deliberate effort to counter his audience’s assumptions that tropical landscapes are fetid, chaotic, uncontrollably profuse. Nonetheless, Junghuhn takes many liberties. The volcanoes are tamed, the farming terraces spaced like lines on a ruler, the moss tendrils delineated. There is no indication that this place has a smell, or a temperature. Junghuhn presents the mountain Gamping as pristine, even though its limestone was being rapaciously mined, and he sets humans at the edges as if to indicate scale, not because this is their home. Most conspicuous of all is the absence of fog: apparently ubiquitous in the areas where Junghuhn was traveling, it never appears in his pictures. He includes a few disciplined puffs of steam and a few billowy clouds, but absent entirely is the misty vapor that, on any given day, would have prevented Junghuhn from seeing clearly. Find ten of Java-Album’s lithographs, courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, below. The eleventh image (of Mount Merapi) seems to be missing from their collection, so we have used an image held by Leiden University Library, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, instead.

public-domain-review

Feb 13, 2024

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:24.991921

occult-chemistry

Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater’s Occult Chemistry (1908) Text by Hugh Aldersey-Williams Apr 16, 2024 “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.” So wrote Virginia Woolf in her essay “Modern Fiction”, collected in The Common Reader (1925). It is meant as advice to novelists, but this quotation may also be a squib directed at the prominent theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater who were doing exactly this. Their findings were presented in an illustrated book, Occult Chemistry, first published in 1908, although their investigative project continued for many more years, with subsequent editions appearing into the 1930s. “The atom can scarcely be said to be a ‘thing’, though it is the material out of which all things physical are composed”, they concluded. “It is formed by the flow of the life-force and vanishes with its ebb.” This is, to say the least, an unorthodox view of chemistry, which is in some ways the least mysterious of sciences. Besant was born in 1847. Around 1871, she rejected her previously devout Christianity, separated from her clergyman husband, became a freethinker, matriculated for a science degree at London University, but did not take it, advocated for birth control, and then joined the Fabians. In 1888, she turned to theosophy, moved to India, translated the Bhagavad Gita, and joined the Indian National Congress and the campaign for Indian self-government. Theosophy began as a late Victorian spiritualist movement which held that the nature of things is deeper than can be discovered by empirical science. In Besant’s own definition, “It is the fact that man, being himself divine, can know the Divinity whose life he shares.” Leadbeater, born in 1854, turned to theosophy having served as an Anglican priest and became a prolific author of the movement’s books and pamphlets. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes him as “an observant traveller on the astral plane”. He met Besant in 1894, and the two began their chemical observations almost immediately. Leadbeater used his clairvoyant talents, while Besant, with her scientific inclination, made sure that they followed a respectable methodology. Their first book together, though, was a psychological exploration called Thought-Forms (1901), which depicted experiences and feelings, such as varieties of love and anger, in coloured diagrams resembling abstract art. Their chemical method was — conveniently perhaps — “unique and difficult to explain”. Its clairvoyant aspect was based on a Yoga principle that one can reduce one’s self-conception to minute proportions so that very small objects appear large. The observer then simply draws what he sees on paper and his commentary may be taken down by a stenographer. It is much like somebody using a microscope and, in the view of its adherents, no less objective. Transcripts of the dialogue between Leadbeater and their illustrator, Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa, which were included in Occult Chemistry, display admirable frankness during these observation sessions, but do not really explain much more. Besant and Leadbeater’s investigations in Occult Chemistry begin with “four gases in the air” — hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and “a fourth gas (atomic weight=3) so far not discovered by chemists.” These were the simplest elements. As the atomic number increased, so did their geometric complexity of the atoms. Sodium, for example, was “composed of an upper part, divisible into a globe and 12 funnels, a lower part, similarly divided; and a connecting rod.” The atoms were duly grouped, not as in the periodic table (which is organized according to atomic number and reveals different elements’ related chemical properties), but according to overall shapes: spikes, dumbbell, tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, crossed bases, and star. Thus, boron, nitrogen, and vanadium, for example — elements with little in common chemically — all “have six funnels opening on the six faces of a cube”. Even the simplest element, hydrogen, was found to comprise eighteen units, which they called anu, in reference to the indivisible in Jain metaphysics. As the work progressed, Besant and Leadbeater “found” new elements, such as “meta-neon” and “platinum A” with positions intermediate between the established elements, and began to include simple compounds such as copper sulphate and benzene. In water, “The Oxygen double snake retains its individuality, as indeed it usually does, while the two Hydrogen atoms arrange themselves around it.” Although Besant’s and Leadbeater’s science is clearly misguided, their interest was obviously sincere, and their labour fairly exhaustive. At a time when there was no other means of “seeing” atoms, what is truly remarkable is that their visualizations so closely resemble those developed later by chemists relying on Niels Bohr’s theory of atomic structure from 1913 and laws of quantum mechanics not worked out until the 1920s. The cloudlike volumes known as atomic orbitals within which the electrons of an atom may circulate around its nucleus are today visualized as fuzzy-edged spheres, dumbbells and doughnut rings.

public-domain-review

Apr 16, 2024

Hugh Aldersey-Williams

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:25.201358

galateo

The Age of Impoliteness: Galateo: or, A Treatise on Politeness and Delicacy of Manners (1774 edition) Text by Hunter Dukes Feb 27, 2024 In the 1770s, a contagion was sweeping England and women were in danger: the danger of “contracting habits entirely opposite to their natural delicacy”. Take Belinda, for example, who after dinner, equipped with a linen napkin, “rummages the most remote cavities of her mouth and gums”, all the while thinking this behavior reflects “an infallible mark of her familiarity with the bon ton of fashionable life.” The contagious disease of bad manners did not discriminate by sex, however. It also infected fathers, with their eighteenth-century dad jokes: the man who “render[s] his whole family miserable, by making them dependent on his humour or caprice”. It corrupted the man-spreading public schoolboy, who, when in coffeehouses amid the public, “spreads himself before the chimney, and ‘gropes his breeches with a monarch’s air’”. Inoculation was possible, and the vaccine came in book form: a 1558 treatise by Giovanni della Casa, newly translated and prefaced by Richard Graves (who wrote the words above) in 1774: Galateo: or, A Treatise on Politeness and Delicacy of Manners. Il Galateo, as it is known in Italian, had been making waves in England for centuries by the time this edition was released. The work — first translated into English in 1576 by Henry Peterson — was immediately taken up by young Oxbridge scholars, who wanted to ditch their reading lists for practical knowledge that would serve them at the Elizabethan court. Gabriel Harvey, for example, in a 1580 letter to Edmund Spenser, reports what Cantabs were clandestinely consuming in their sets: “Machiavell a great man: Castilio of no small reputation, Galateo and Guazzo never so happy.” It makes sense that a new translation would be needed in the late-eighteenth century, an era marked by unprecedented mobility. The nascent Industrial Revolution created a burgeoning middle class of merchants and employees who found themselves attempting to ascend the greased rungs of an increasingly nuanced social hierarchy. The Earl of Chesterfield described the situation four years after Graves’ translation of Galateo hit bookshelves: “An aukward country fellow, when he comes into company better than himself, is exceedingly disconcerted. He knows not what to do with his hands, or his hat”. Unlike bloodlines, however, good behavior can be aped, and the popularity of etiquette books in this period — not to mention the rise of the novel — speaks not only to a desire for pecuniary emulation but also social mimicry. The takeaway from Galateo is simple — politeness is the art of pleasing others. Some examples of virtuous behavior are easy to enact. Well-bred men neither take “monstrous strides” nor let their hands “hang dangling down”. Indecent and improper men make a habit of “thrusting their hands into their bosoms, or handling any part of their persons which is usually covered”. Loud and messy sneezers were as detested in Della Casa’s time as our own, those people who deign to “sputter in the very faces of those that sit near them”. Spittle, the public paring of fingernails, and flatulence are held in eternally low esteem. Pages are devoted to table manners. Toothpicks make one look “like a bird going to build his nest”; only “inn-keepers and parasites” express great pleasure when consuming food and wine. Other examples are less accessible, such as the prohibition on smelling anything you intend to eat or drink. One emergent theme is a kind of social prophylaxis for the sensorium. The politest personages in Galateo are those that keep the mouth, ears, and eyes free of offensive stimulus — protecting their own bodies and those of their peers. The motif is taken to ends that seem initially odd, at least to the modern-day reader, who is told that it is rude to peruse personal correspondence in front of guests. The logic makes sense, however, for one should never portray themselves as bored, idle, or distracted in the company of others: the affront of an acquaintance checking text messages over drinks predates smartphones by several centuries, it seems. ※※Indexed under…HandsEtiquette involving In addition to prohibitions of the body, there are dicta regarding the spirit. Men must not be too “thoughtful” — “wrapt up in your own reflections” — or exceedingly sensitive, for to socialize with the latter kind of person is like being “surrounded with the finest glass ware; to which the slightest stroke may be fatal”. Discussing dreams is boorish, for most people are not “wise men amongst the ancients” but see only “trifling and frivolous” images thrown against the screen of sleep. Lying is bad. Arrogance is bad. Gossip should be reined in by a government of the tongue. No one ever wants unsolicited advice. People who subject others to “jingling puns” mistake wit for the shopworn speech of the low and vulgar. A prostitute should never be described as such — “an immodest woman” will do just fine. Galateo ends with a bit of rhetoric that evinces its author’s grace and manners: “because each of the particulars hitherto mentioned is marked but with a slight degree of error, therefore there can be no great harm in neglecting the whole”. What could be more gauche than instructing a stranger how to act? Giovanni Della Casa (1503–1556) was a Florentine humanist and cleric, born into mercantile wealth with aristocratic origins. After a libertine youth in which he penned obscene poems, he leveraged family connections, which trumped his shaky religious convictions, and found himself appointed Archbishop of Benevento. Initially angling after a cardinalate, the change of papal regime led Della Casa to take retirement, living “in tranquility, rest, and idleness amongst my books”. Here he set about composing, among other texts, what we now would call an etiquette manual, addressed to a young nobleman. Written between 1552 and 1555, Il Galateo was completed just a year before his death. In the months of his final decline, Della Casa asked a nephew to incinerate his compositions, but — thanks again to a network of family and friends — Il Galateo was published posthumously, seeing French, Spanish, German, and Latin editions circulating before the century’s turn, and dozens of others since. The work’s subsequent influence was so great that it inspired envy and impolite admonishments from other writers: Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy wonders how Della Casa managed to compose such a work — spending, as he did, “the greatest part of his time in combing his whiskers”. For another Italian book of manners from the sixteenth century, see our post on Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528).

public-domain-review

Feb 27, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:25.644927

gotham-attucks

Sheet Music Covers for the Gotham-Attucks Company, ca. 1905–1911 Text by Dorothy Berry Feb 1, 2024 We are all unfortunately immersed in the visual legacy of Blackface minstrelsy. Caricatures that mutated Black men into creatures, women into mockeries — offensive ornamentation designed to highlight a lascivious, criminalized otherness. One of the key ways these racist imaginaries seeped into the Western subconscious was through the proliferation of print material, and particularly through the covers of sheet music brought home to play around the parlor piano. These images appeared on music written by both Black and white artists, as the standard of presentation. And yet, beginning in 1905, one star-studded song-publishing company would push the aesthetic limits of how Black popular music was shown to the public. Throughout the mid-to-late-nineteenth century, popular music traveled from stage to page via publications featuring songs written and performed by white performers who blackened their faces with burnt cork to transform into living racial stereotypes. The covers of these publications often featured cartoonish drawings of these racist figures, and as the century moved onward, photographs of the performers in and out of Blackface, illustrating the depth of their transformation. By the early twentieth century, the genre had reached a bizarre space. African Americans were allowed to perform on the popular stage, but often only if they too painted themselves a shiny Black. The path to self-determination on the musical stage came in fits and starts, with some broad-brush overviews attributing the major breakthrough to the 1921 music Shuffle Along. The first two decades of the twentieth century, however, were marked by conflicted attempts to balance a public demand for established ethnic characterization with the desire for authentic self-expression. A lesser-known attempt that encapsulates this incongruity is the 1905–1911 run of the Gotham-Attucks Co., a song-publishing company managed by some of the most famous Black writers and performers of the day. In the August 12, 1905 issue of the controversial Black newspaper The Broad Ax, under the headline “News and Comment from our Yankee Metropolis”, the New York beat reporter covered the merger of two smaller music concerns and the opening of Gotham-Attucks in “elaborate and cleverly appointed headquarters” on 42 W 28th St. The article lists a who’s who of Black entertainment as taking leadership in the new company, with performing duo George Walker and Bert Williams as president and vice president, and with collaborators Earle Jones, R.C. McPherson (Cecil Mack), Alex Rogers, and Jesse Shippe as part of the team. Most, if not all, of these men would be household names to anyone interested in popular entertainment at the time. All of them had written lyrics, music, or starred on the covers of sheet music published by other firms, and many were visually represented in racist manners, often out of their control. The Broad Ax was unequivocally in favor of the enterprise upon its founding, writing: The Gotham-Attucks are extremely fortunate in having published about 9 songs this summer that are really “hits” with the public. It is the first colored American music publishing house properly established and managed that is deserving of the name. Most all the compositions handled by the firm are the fruit and product of Negro Brain and creation. Sylvester Russel, one of the more acerbic Black critics of the day, had a harsher view on the firm, publishing a satirical poem referencing a Black business convention in an issue of the Indianapolis Freeman published on the same August Saturday: The Gotham-Attucks music houseWill probably be seen there,As business men exhibitorsOf coon songs and hot air. Russel’s critique was directly commenting on the incongruity described at the outset. While Gotham-Attucks was run by Black creatives, much of the lyrical content was still clearly in the legacy of blackface minstrelsy. The writers may have only been able to subtly push the status quo, but the artistic design was a radical shift. Sheet music for popular songs by and about African Americans, up to that point, had trafficked in stereotypical images and racial grotesques. Gotham-Attucks publications featured modern colorways, art deco detailing, and flattering, naturalistic illustrations of Black people. In some of the boldest covers, there are illustrations of an (apparently) white woman representing the song’s subject, accompanied by a photo of the famed Black performers. This inverted a long-standing practice of featuring photographs of white performers in formal dress paired with Blackface, racial caricatures to both assure the purchasing audience that white performers were behind the minstrel mask, and to impress them with the transformation. Though Gotham-Attucks was short-lived, their decisive visual designs were part of a larger push towards Black creative life defined on its own terms. Marked by a striking logo — featuring the Pyramids of Giza, bookended by four-leaf clovers — the company’s published sheet music has a distinctive look. Though information on the specific designers and illustrators has not yet been discovered, the creative direction is clear. “Nobody” and “(That’s Why They Call Me) Shine” became classics of the American Songbook and their covers feature enduring designs. Inspired by Arts and Crafts styles, they exhibit rich colors and modernist floral elements with nothing verging on the cartoonish. Pieces like “Bon Bon Buddy” and “Malinda (Come Down to Me)” reveal the particular tightrope that Gotham-Attucks walked with popular taste. Though the use of stereotypical dialect is lessened in the music itself, both songs are closely tied to traditional minstrel themes, and both have illustrative elements — like a banjo-playing man serenading his beau, or cherubic Black babies — that had commonly been exaggerated for “humorous” racist intent in many other publications. There is a beauty in these Gotham-Attucks publications that can feel designed directly for a new, Black audience wanting to see versions of themselves in popular music — or, at least, wanting to own the latest popular songs and not feel ashamed to have them out on the piano stand.

public-domain-review

Feb 1, 2024

Dorothy Berr

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:26.159038

steamboat-willie

As Loud as a Mouse: Mickey’s Sonic Debut in Steamboat Willie (1928) Text by Hunter Dukes Jan 24, 2024 When Steamboat Willie premiered in the autumn of 1928, marking Mickey Mouse’s public debut, rivers were on the American mind. Show Boat had hit Broadway the previous Christmas, its racially integrated cast creating wake as they cruised the Mississippi on Cotton Blossom. That same year, the river’s waters surged to a high-water mark during one of the most destructive floods in US history. From the trauma came comedic release. In the summer of 1928, Buster Keaton commandeered a paddle steamer for Steamboat Bill, Jr., leading to his most infamous stunt. During a cyclone, a house makes to flatten Keaton, but he passes through a window and remains improbably upright — an image of resilience for all those devastated by recent disasters. And then, who next comes lazing down the river? A cartoon mouse in the employ of a villainous cat, ready to unleash a deluge of animated films upon the world. Although it was not the first cartoon to use synchronized audio, Steamboat Willie was the first to exhibit this new technology to a widespread audience. Walt Disney and his chief animator Ub Iwerks needed something to distinguish their cartoons from competitors, after two previous Mickey Mouse shorts failed to find a distributor earlier that year. And they bet it all on sound. While Iwerks drew almost every frame himself using cel animation, Disney accomplished the sound design with the help of a dime store, scooping buckets, bells, and cans into his shopping cart. Spittoons littered their screening room floor, repurposed as gongs. When Steamboat Willie finally debuted at New York’s Colony Theatre, it was the soundscape — of the film, of the crowd — that caught critical attention. Variety called it “a peach of a synchronization job all the way”; Weekly Film Review noted that the movie kept “the audience laughing and chuckling from the moment the lead titles came on the screen, and it left them applauded”. From the earliest frames, the film is alive with Cinephonic sound. The steamboat’s funnels blow scratchy o’s of smoke; its whistles honk and bark; and Mickey whistles too, the popular vaudeville song “Steamboat Bill”, while he spins a helm that clicks like a winch. It is sound that seems to grant animals their human qualities. The chaw of Peg-Leg Pete’s Star Plug tobacco and the subsequent slap of the spit smacking across his gob, Minnie’s nervous squeals at Podunk Landing before she is hauled aboard by her bloomers, a parrot teasing the mouse, both voiced by Walt himself, “Hope you don’t feel hurt, big boy!” — these spellbinding moments of synchronicity between eye and ear reveal the animism in animation. The extraction of voice from bodily forms serves as Steamboat Willie’s persistent theme. After a goat gobbles down Minnie’s ukulele, the animal becomes a music box, bleating out the tinny minstrel standard “Turkey in the Straw”. Mickey not only slaps a drum kit of saucepans, he also bullroarers a yowling cat, bagpipes a living duck, and approximates the legendary cat piano by plucking the tails of suckling piglets. It’s all very funny, yet also seems to repurpose a darker history for humor: the centuries of violence inflicted upon beings thought to be voiceless, speechless, dumb. Despite the outlandish premise, it starts to make sense why a forthcoming film adapts Steamboat Willie into a horror flick. “Steamboat Willie has brought joy to generations”, claims the director’s press release,“but beneath that cheerful exterior lies a potential for pure, unhinged terror”. How can it be that Mickey Mouse will find his way into not one but two terrifying (and possibly terrible) movies in 2024? Well, the mouse finally escaped its owners’ trap: Steamboat Willie entered the public domain at last on January 1, 2024. To appreciate the monumental nature of this one needs to understand a little about The Walt Disney Company’s relationship to, and perverse effect on, copyright law in the United States — and how symbolic Mickey has become in the fight to preserve the public domain. The story takes a significant turn in 1998 with the passing of the Copyright Term Extension Act, which basically did what it says on the tin: extended copyrights for many thousands of works that otherwise would have entered the US public domain, including Steamboat Willie (and also Plane Crazy). While Disney wasn’t the only lobbyist for this bill, it was certainly one of the most prominent, and its involvement earned the legislation a derisory moniker: “The Mickey Mouse Protection Act”. The effect of this Act (and previous extending Acts, also involving Disney) has been devastating to the enlargement of the US public domain, locking up an enormous number of works for many decades, but . . . all things must pass, and so too the copyright on Steamboat Willie. What does this mean? In a simple sense, one can now use the film as one wishes (in the US, at least). And this copyright expiry also applies to the characters of Mickey and Minnie who star in the film, but with two important caveats: first, it’s only these particular versions of Minnie and Mickey (e.g. long arms, gloveless), later iterations are still under copyright; and second, Disney still has the trademark, so you cannot reuse this material in a way which implies an affiliation with the company. For a more in-depth look at the issues involved here (including why aspects of the later Mickey iterations might also be fine to reuse), we highly recommend this great post by Jennifer Jenkins from the Center for the Study of the Public Domain and also this Twitter thread by Cory Doctorow.

public-domain-review

Jan 24, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:26.636591

kumanaki-kage

Clear Shadows (1867) Text by Koto Sadamura Jan 23, 2024 Silhouette portraits came into fashion in late-nineteenth-century Japan following their popularity in Europe and the United States. They were a form of party entertainment. Partygoers would take turns sitting behind a paper sliding door (shōji) while an entertainer captured their backlit silhouettes. A simple leisure activity soon gave way to more complex publications and commemorations. Clear Shadows (Kumanaki kage, 1867), for instance, is a compilation of silhouette portraits depicting members of the kyōga-awase club by the artist Ochiai Yoshiiku (1833–1904), which includes short biographies, picture riddles, and poems. Kyōga-awase (picture-matching for amusement) was played somewhat like Pictionary, where each person was given a subject to illustrate — and could draw anything but the subject itself. Points were awarded on the basis of cleverness. As scholar Satō Satoru details, Clear Shadows was created to honor Hagetsutei Kasetsu, a young patron of the kyōga-awase club, who died three years earlier. The book features sixty-seven individuals, of which fifty-seven are men and ten are women, including seven young members who are aged ten to sixteen. The silhouettes are far from static: these figures prune flora, draw with a brush, wave fans, finger the beads of a Buddhist rosary, read, smoke, and drink. A cat steals the limelight in one image and shadow puppets enliven others. This picture-matching club was formed in Edo (present-day Tokyo) and its members included ukiyo-e artists, popular authors, book publishers, and playwrights. Clear Shadows demonstrates that women and children were part of this social network of cultural activities in nineteenth-century Japan. The page spread below, for example, shows a female figure with the pseudonym “Satoyuki”’ on the right and a young man with the nom de plume “Doryū” on the left. According to their short biographies, Satoyuki is a daughter of a Jōruri chanter, a type of sung narrative with shamisen (the banjo-like, three-stringed instrument) accompaniment. As a young girl, she performed with her father and her precocious talent moved the audience to tears. Now she is reputed to have outstripped her teacher. Doryū is presented as a multi-talented person who is good at drawing and composing prose and verse — in particular, haikai (haiku) — as well as impersonating popular kabuki actors. The images at the top right of each portrait are the club members’ respective riddle submissions. For this commemorative occasion, each participant was given a theme related to the meaning of one of the kanji characters in Kasetsu’s name (“wave”, “moon”, “flower”, or “snow”), which was then combined with one of the five elements (“wood”, “fire”, “earth”, “metal”, or “water”). It is not easy to interpret the images, but Satoyuki’s theme was “flower and metal” and Doryū’s “moon and wave [water]”. Others are even more cryptic: a woman soaking pieces of paper with writings on them in a washbasin is “wave and water”, a man nodding to sleep is “flower and metal”, as is a woman brandishing a sword with her foot raised. Silhouette likenesses were particularly favored for memorial uses in nineteenth-century Japan. In the frontispiece of Clear Shadows, by the artist Shibata Zeshin (1807–1891), the deceased Kasetsu’s silhouette portrait is shown in a display alcove (tokonoma) with an incense burner and lotus flowers, suggesting a space to honor the departed. We also know that the image of a girl pseudonymized as Sekka (Tatsu) was later used for commemorative purposes, after she died two years on from the book’s publication. Her silhouette portrait is included in the memorial surimono album Mirror of Many Years (Ikuyo kagami, 1869), for example, and also painted inside the lid of the storage box for Journey around Hell and Paradise (Jigoku gokuraku meguri zu, 1869–1870, 1872), an important and moving album of paintings by Kawanabe Kyōsai. A further example of memorial silhouettes can be found in the poetry compilation entitled Moonlight (Katsura kage, 1872), which has twenty-eight silhouette portraits of people who attended a service for the memorial of a deceased child of Tsutagashi Bunkyō, a wealthy merchant in Osaka. Clear Shadows was compiled by Kasetsu’s brother Kōkōsha Baigai, who was also a member of the kyōga-awase group — possibly with the support of their father, Tsuji Den’emon, an official at the shogunal silver mint (ginza). The volume was first issued as a private publication, but subsequently printed commercially by Hirookaya Kōsuke, a publisher who also appears in the book as “Usen” and who must have seen its wider appeal and economic potential. The same year that Clear Shadows was published, Ochiai Yoshiiku produced another series of thirty-eight woodblock colour prints that preceded this memorial book, each featuring a silhouette profile image of a kabuki actor. The text included on one of the prints in the group offers a hint as to why silhouettes became a technology for memorializing the dead: “they indeed give the impression as though one is in the presence of these people.” The faddishness of silhouettes in Japan at this time reflected an increasing interest in verisimilitude, as was also found in contemporary Western media of visual representation such as oil painting, lithography, and photography. In the postscript of Clear Shadows, the popular writer Kanagaki Robun (1829–1894) observed: “Appearance is a deceptive skin. Silhouette shows the real bones [core structure of the person].” Silhouette images of this kind were entrusted to family members as truthful portraits and vivid reminders of their departed loved ones. For a contemporaneous book of silhouette shadows made in England, and the truths that they can hold, see our post on C. H. Bennett’s Shadows (1856).

public-domain-review

Jan 23, 2024

Koto Sadamura

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:26.991630

tom-seidmann-freud-hare-tales

Tom Seidmann-Freud’s Book of Hare Stories (1924) Text by Hunter Dukes Mar 20, 2024 “Quite often in dreams it is the hare that shoots the sportsman.”—Sigmund Freud, “The Dream-Work” Hares and rabbits have been known to serve as messengers between the conscious world and those deeper warrens of the mind. In Tom Seidmann-Freud’s 1924 Buch Der Hasengeschichten (Book of Hare Stories), folk and fairy tales are collected from across the globe, chosen for their leporine heroes. The stories are often comic and bleak; their anthropomorphic animals live in worlds darkened by adulthood. In a version of a Norwegian tale collected by Asbjørnsen and Moe, a recently married hare somersaults across a vale, recounting the reasons for his happiness. Soon after his wedding — to a woman with hairy teeth, who turned out to be a dragon — a fire broke out, reducing his home to ash . . . and his wife burned up too. In addition to fables from Inuit, Zulu, and Pomeranian oral traditions, there is a variant of the Br’er Rabbit “tar baby” story; a spin-off of Aesop’s “Hares and Frogs”, which opens with a bevy of bunnies who would rather kill themselves than live in fear; and an opaque Estonian aphorism about a hare who laughs so hard that its lips burst. At the turn of the century, German children’s literature was stuck in a mire of repetition and pedantry. “We have the most glorious things, gleaming gold treasures and gems”, wrote the education reformer Heinrich Wolgast in The Misery of Our Children’s Literature (1896), “and we choose to adorn the spring of our people with dull junk.” Combining the stylistic traits of Art Nouveau, New Objectivity, and Expressionism, Tom Seidmann-Freud belonged to a crop of artists who began to make children’s literature into a primary artform, when it had so often been treated as a supplement to more “serious” endeavors. While the stories she collects in the Buch Der Hasengeschichten might be familiar, her illustrations are strikingly new and bizarre. Against a rich pastel pallet, humans and animals have wide-eyed expressions, as if warning the viewer against looking too closely. A standing man and hare hold each other suggestively; giraffes appear to embalm a corpse in yellow; and a scene that initially registers as cute — featuring two little girls and hares in a rainbow-lit landscape — starts to feel utterly unheimlich as the eyes linger on. One of the girls, in a salmon skirt, rides her hare toward a funhouse whose door is a sinister void. The other looks on from a house that should be, well, homey, but its proportions seem to shrink around her gesturing arm: is she pointing somewhere over the rainbow or begging for release? Born in Vienna, Tom (née Martha) Seidmann-Freud (1892–1930) was the daughter of Maria Freud, Sigmund’s sister. Around the age of fifteen, she assumed the name Tom — preferring its masculine tone — and moved abroad to study art in London and Berlin, finally settling in Munich. Here, she befriended the scholar Gershom Scholem, who would remember her as: “an authentic bohemian”, who “lived on cigarettes, so to speak”. Expelled from Bavaria in 1920 due to her father’s Romanian citizenship, she returned to Berlin, where she created children’s books and founded the Peregrin publishing house — named after the Latin peregrinus, a Roman term for foreigner — with Jankew Seidmann, her soon-to-be husband. In one of only a handful of private letters that have survived, we can hear the excitement of this period in Tom’s own words: “Jakele is good and clever and I love him very much. In spring, all our sins will be forgiven. Which I really need!” It was through Peregrin that the Buch Der Hasengeschichten was released, along with 1923’s Die Fischreise (The Fish’s Journey), the story of a young boy who finds a golden realm beneath the waves, published shortly after her teenage brother drowned in the Mäckersee. She worked for a time with the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik to illustrate fairy tales in Hebrew — intended to stock Zionist schools in Palestine — and later turned to pedagogical texts. The quality of these primers and copybooks made Walter Benjamin poignantly suggest, during a glowing review in the Frankfurter Zeitung, that “where children play, a secret lies buried”. As Seidmann-Freud entered her mid-thirties, her cousin Anna Freud reported that the artist’s natural “warmth and kindness” had waned, confiding in the psychoanalyst Max Eitingon that “[Tom] has had a certain tendency to suicide for a long time, and was once very close to it when she was young”. In 1930, Seidmann-Freud’s Magic Boat and Game Primer No. 1 were voted to be among the fifty most beautiful books published in Germany, but it was already too late. Bialik had agreed to invest in Ophir, a publishing house set up by Jankew, but left for Tel Aviv without honoring his contract. Crumbling under the pressures of bankruptcy as the Great Depression set in, Jankew hanged himself, and fearing that his wife would follow him into death, the Freuds committed Tom to a sanitorium, taking in her seven-year-old daughter, Angela. Sigmund was among the last to witness Tom alive, writing that “the sight of her is terrible”. She died by suicide in February, 1930, at the age of thirty-eight.

public-domain-review

Mar 20, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:27.441030

body-as-house-diagram

My Body is a Temple Four-Story House: Analogical Diagram from Tobias Cohen’s Ma’aseh Tuviyah (1708) Text by Hunter Dukes Jun 14, 2023 This woodcut diagram, from Tobias Cohen’s Ma’aseh Tuviyah (1708), places the human body and house into analogy. Every organ in the man’s open torso is lettered; each letter matches with a room or architectural feature. The heart of the home can be found where “the master” resides: behind latticed windows, which are the lungs, on the top floor. The kitchen is the stomach, the site of early modern chemical processes that sound gastronomical, such as effervescence and fermentation. Toward the home’s egress, the digestive tract ends with plumbing — storage tanks and waterworks. Born in Metz, Tobias Cohen (1652–1729) was the son of a rabbi-physician who fled from Narol, Poland, during the mass atrocities of the Khmelnytsky Uprising. He studied medicine in Frankfurt an der Oder, as one of the first Jewish students admitted to the university, before transferring to a more welcoming preparatory school in Padua. Here Cohen fell under the influence and protection of Solomon Conegliano, whom he would later call “prince among philosophers and mighty among physicians”. After completing his degree in 1683, Cohen served as a physician to several sultans of the Ottoman Empire, in both Adrianople and Constantinople, retiring to Jerusalem in 1715. Scholars believe that Cohen completed Ma’aseh Tuviyah in 1700, but it was not published until 1708 in Venice, where it underwent additional print runs throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In David B. Ruderman’s estimation, Tobias Cohen’s encyclopedic work of medicine, theology, and other fields of knowledge is “the most influential early modern Hebrew textbook of the sciences”. Explaining the diagram’s analogy does not quite reveal its function, which continues to generate debate. Some think that it served a mnemonic purpose, allowing students of medicine to place the organs in “memory rooms” — the kind famously detailed by Frances A. Yates. Others, such as Conrad H. Roth, find a common trope present here and in works stretching from John Donne and William Harvey back to Ecclesiastes and Vitruvius — of the body, not as a temple, but a structure of domestic life. Yet the good doctor Tobias Cohen seems to have had more cosmological intentions with his chart, which appears in a chapter titled “A New House”. Unlike medieval physicians, who often viewed the body as a microcosm of the universe, or classical scholars such as Plato, who structured the soul like a polis, Cohen proposes an alternative: man is a house in a walled city. It is enough that he [man] be as one of the towers or houses among the dwellings of a walled city, as bars and gates, as I have shown you the pattern of the house and the pattern of its instruments, as the House of the Soul, for he has lower, second and a third stories, and an attic and roof above, and walls round about, and corners of the house. Despite Cohen’s fluent knowledge of Latin and several other languages that would have helped his treatise reach a larger audience in Europe, he wrote in Hebrew, which, in David Ruderman’s words, encouraged “his coreligionists to believe that they still remained full-fledged participants in the exciting scientific culture emerging through the Continent.” Even in Hebrew, the author’s rich style made the work inaccessible to anyone who did not seriously engage in the academic study of medicine, shielding it from quacks and “the masses”. During his preface, Cohen describes anti-semitism in bodily terms, responding to the gentiles “who vex us, raising their voices without restraint, speaking haughtily with arrogance and scorn, telling us that we have no mouth to respond, nor a forehead to raise our heads in matters of faith, and that our knowledge and ancient intelligence have been lost.” In this context, Etienne Lepicard draws our attention to how Cohen’s vision of the body offers a place of fortified refuge — as “one of the towers or houses among the dwellings of a walled city” — perhaps inspired by the supportive Jewish community he found in Padua after the discrimination of Frankfurt an der Oder. For more on the Hebrew in Cohen’s diagram, you can browse Conrad H. Roth’s blog post, featuring a translation by Simon Holloway.

public-domain-review

Jun 14, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:28.874195

comic-natural-history

The Comic Natural History of the Human Race (1851) Text by Hunter Dukes Jun 20, 2023 “Transmigration is held to be very marvelous”, reports H. L. Stephens in The Comic Natural History of the Human Race. And while these “kaleideiscopical” experiences are often attributed to “Hindoos, and other far-off outsiders”, he sets out to prove that metempsychosis can occur closer to home in Philadelphia. Lampooning well-known local and national personalities of the mid-nineteenth century, Stephens and the lithographer Max Rosenthal transformed them into exotic hybrid caricatures: forty human heads mounted on bugs, fish, and bats. Thomas Birch Florence, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, becomes The Florence Humming Bird (Trochilus politicus). Thanks to its popular vocalizations, the bird favors “the stump” as a habitat. Francis Martin Drexel — artist, banker, and father of the founder of Drexel University — reincarnates as a Gold Fish. You can find this species about the “shallow waters” of Wall Street: “we have caught him for you; now stare at him as you please—done in gold, gone, changed, transmuted perfectly, he did it himself—gold, gold—now he has turned into gold: stare at him.” The circus tycoon P. T. Barnum, self-proclaimed “Prince of Humbugs”, metamorphoses into a kind of Kafkaesque freakshow: his head growing out of a carapace with six candlewick legs. Here the Comic Natural History’s technique itself becomes a spoof of Barnum, whose fame was partially owed to his “Fee-jee Mermaid” — a hoax and monstrous cut-up of baboon, orangutan, and piscine parts. While many creatures in this comic bestiary represent specific people, others appear to satirize broader nineteenth-century types. The authors claim that Audubon, for instance, overlooked the Jail Bird, a trickster that is “often taken by hand to be confined in a cage, under the vain hope that it may learn to change its tune”. In the wild, the bird can be found near a fence with shiny things in its beak. Jail Birds are often caught by the Stool Pigeon, who is “a spy of the police”, eavesdropping at “ins and outs, ups and downs, churchs, court houses, play houses, poor houses, jail houses, hot houses, beer houses, hose houses, &c. &c.” The bird must be able to get on each particular “lay,” know all the “stalls”—be up to any “dodge,” ready for every “double,” apt at a “spot,” and “leary” at a “pull,” “shady” at a “blow,” and unerring at a “pipe,” “down upon a “plant,” certain as to the “swag,” know a “Thimble” from a “Peter” or “dummy,” and the “kickes clye” from the “pit,” and take a “tip” when “all’s right,” not always “lagg,” the crossman or put him in “quay.” Now a man to do all this must be “a bird.” One of the most popular American comic illustrators in this period, when the genre was still emerging, Stephens published this volume in parts before assembling the lithographs as the book featured above. Additional humorists may have been involved with the text, as the index credits W. A. Stephens, Cornelius Matthews, Richard Vaux, and Thomas McKeon. Other supposed contributors were more likely H. L. Stephens himself, writing under pseudonyms such as “Ali Baba the Woodcutter”. The entries signed “C.” were the work of an actual ornithologist, John Cassin, who served as Vice President of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and died from arsenic poisoning after mishandling corpses. He wrote to Spencer F. Baird, the Smithsonian Institute’s first curator, in 1851 to advertise his comic endeavor: “Stephens and I are very busy getting up a lot of the greatest nonsense you ever saw.” And there is, indeed, a great deal of nonsense. But the images themselves make use of a familiar set of sensical conventions. Imagining human heads on the bodies of animals has a long history: manticores and Zakariya al-Qazwini’s thirteenth-century hybrids are just a few of many precedents. Stephens’ illustrations rely upon a kind of correspondence between the qualities of individuals and their mirrors in the animal world — thus utilizing a logic closer to what’s at play in medieval bestiaries and antiquarian works of natural history than the pure imagination exhibited in, say, Edward Lear’s nonsense botany. In contrast to these images, the Comic Natural History’s prose is, at times, wonderfully innovative and seemingly outside of an obvious tradition. During a section on “The Little Dear”, an elkish satyr wearing tear-drop earrings and a crucifix, for example, our narrator gets lost in echolalia: My dear is apt to become an abstraction; or like many titles, duke, baron, and others, signifying nothing, or only something that has been. So changeable is language. . . . The children are mamma’s dears, the young ladies are pretty dears,—and the ladies that are married are very distinctly their husbands dears, and those that are not married are quite as distinctly their own dears; and all of us have found out,—or if we have not, we will find out that many a thing in this world is by far too dear, and so —— Oh dear!—we are quite exhausted—that’s all. North American natural history was, from some of its earliest incarnations, as much concerned with questions of national identity as it was attentive to the characteristics of flora and fauna on this newly colonized continent. Stephens’ comic natural history is no exception in the former regard. And perhaps that helps explain what is going on with all these “dears” and the cant of the Stool Pigeon above. Referencing great works of European and classical natural history throughout the book, Stephens and his contributors seek to assemble something homegrown and uniquely Philadelphian: “We have made the first effort in a species of Comic Literature, hitherto unknown in our city.” This new kind of comic literature requires a new idiom, the kind employed and referenced throughout the Comic Natural History. Americans have “a peculiarity of diction, as well in language, as in poetry and idiom and phrase, unlike the rest of mankind”, for the English language has been “outrageously corrupted” in the United States, creating “a new, or unknown tongue”. Embracing this unknown tongue, The Comic Natural History helped establish a habitat in which later species of American political cartoons could flourish. Below you can find a selection of the lithographs that appear in The Comic Natural History of the Human Race, courtesy of the Met.

public-domain-review

Jun 20, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:29.342732

raman-sea

A Distinct Phenomenon in Itself: C. V. Raman’s Discovery of Why the Sea is Blue (1921) Text by Hugh Aldersey-Williams Jul 20, 2023 In September 1921, a largely unknown Indian scientist was returning from his first trip overseas where he had attended an international universities congress in Oxford. He had ample time as his ship, SS Narkunda, made its way to Bombay via the Suez Canal to consider more deeply a question that had begun to concern him ever since his first voyages shuttling between Calcutta and Rangoon as a young civil servant in British-ruled India: why is the sea blue? In 1899, the English physicist Lord Rayleigh had breezily dismissed the matter. “The much admired dark blue of the deep sea has nothing to do with the colour of water”, he wrote, “but is simply the blue of the sky seen by reflection.” However, the Indian scientist begged to differ. Staring over the steamer’s rail at “the deeper waters of the Mediterranean and Red Seas”, C. V. Raman saw, with the aid of a special prism to eliminate reflected sky light, that the blue was more intrinsic. In a short paper, which would later appear in Nature, penned even before stepping off the Narkunda in Bombay harbour, he wrote: “It was abundantly clear from the observations that the blue colour of the deep sea is a distinct phenomenon in itself, and not merely an effect due to reflected skylight. . . . the hue of the water is of such fullness and saturation that the bluest sky in comparison with it seems a dull grey.” Rayleigh had explained the blue of the sky using a formula to describe the scattering of sunlight by molecules in the air. In this process, the light preserves its wavelength or colour, with short-wavelength blue light scattered more effectively than other colours of longer wavelength. When he had completed further experiments in Calcutta, Raman confirmed that a similar effect pertained for light encountering water molecules, with the blue light scattered most effectively and other colours quickly absorbed, leading the sea to appear saturated by blue. Raman’s almost painterly obsession with the nature of light and colour would lead to other discoveries, and in 1930 won him the early accolade of the Nobel Prize for Physics, the first time the prize had been awarded to a non-Western scientist. Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born in 1888 into a middle-class Brahmin family in Tamil Nadu. Upon obtaining his master’s degree in physics from the University of Madras, but with limited opportunity for a career in research, he joined the financial branch of the Indian Civil Service, and was posted to Calcutta. He pursued his own investigations as far as he could using basic equipment, exploring the acoustics of sound waves and musical instruments, including the Indian ektara, sitar, and tanbur, ignored by Western scientists, as well as analogous wave phenomena in light, and especially the way light is scattered as it passes through different translucent media. This work led to his appointment as professor of physics at the University of Calcutta by the age of twenty-five. In 1927, continued studies revealed that while most light retained its original wavelength when scattered, a small fraction of it produced a feeble glow at different wavelengths. The effect was very weak, and correspondingly hard to study. However, it would turn out to have huge implications. As the Associated Press of India reported: The principal feature observed is that when matter is excited by light of one colour, the atoms contained in it emit light of two colours, one of which is different from the exciting colour and is lower down the spectrum. The astonishing thing is that the altered colour is quite independent of the nature of the substance used. . . . There is in addition a diffuse radiation spread over a considerable range of the spectrum. Raman conservatively attempted to describe his discovery in terms of the wave theory of light, in analogy with some of his early work on acoustics and musical instruments. In fact, a proper explanation required quantum theory, with the changes in the scattered light’s wavelength being associated with changes in the quantum energy levels of the scattering molecules. Although Raman was no fan of quantum theory, what soon came to be known as the “Raman effect” turned out to provide important evidence for the quantum nature of light. Raman’s curiosity was always stimulated by looking. His descriptions from his voyage aboard the Narkunda make that clear. His analysis of the colours of the sea takes into account the brightness of the day, the weather, the exact shape of the sea waves, and his own angles of observation. He observed light and colour with an artist’s unsparing eye, and often found a scientific question to be answered, whether it was to do with the twinkling of stars or the colours that arise when a sheet of steel is strongly heated. It was only with the invention of the laser in 1960 that the Raman effect at last made the transition from laboratory curiosity to useful tool. Using this intense source of single-wavelength light, it was now possible to record spectra of the weak scattered light. Raman spectroscopy is today used in all forms of chemical analysis. It has proved especially valuable for analysing pigments and other materials in order to determine the authenticity or otherwise of works of art because it does not require the taking of a sample from the work, and some notable forgeries have been revealed in this way. In 1930, Raman had been so confident he would win the Nobel Prize that he booked tickets for Sweden several months before the announcement was made. He was lucky: the award might have gone to two Soviet scientists who had made the same discovery. Raman later recalled the ceremony in Stockholm: I, the only Indian, in my turban and closed coat, it dawned on me that I was really representing my people and my country. . . . Then I turned round and saw the British Union Jack under which I had been sitting and it was then that I realized that my poor country, India, did not even have a flag of her own. Speaking on Indian radio shortly after receiving the prize, he offered his personal definition of science as “a fusion of man’s aesthetic and intellectual functions devoted to the representation of nature. It is therefore the highest form of creative art.”

public-domain-review

Jul 20, 2023

Hugh Aldersey-Williams

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:29.791379

an-adventure

In the Mind of Marie: A Haunting Encounter in the Gardens of Versailles (1913) Text by Sasha Archibald Jun 6, 2023 In 1901, two British women just getting to know each other took a trip to Paris. The day they visited Versailles, things turned strange. They were wandering in the gardens, hoping to find Petit Trianon, a smaller palace that had been the home of Marie Antoinette, when they began to see unusual things: people in antiquated clothing, a man with dark, pitted skin, a breathless servant delivering an urgent message to a woman sketching on the ground. The atmosphere was strange too, heavy and unsettling. Things seemed flat and otherworldly; Moberly wrote later of feeling “an extraordinary depression” and a “dreamy, unnatural oppression”. In time, the women joined a tour group, and the feeling went away. Everything felt normal again. The whole incident couldn’t have lasted more than thirty minutes. A week later, the women agreed that the Petit Trianon was probably haunted, and decided to separately write down what they remembered of their walk. When comparing notes, they found some conspicuous differences. Charlotte Moberly had seen a woman in plain sight right near the path, for instance, whereas her companion, Eleanor Jourdain, had no recollection of this person. Both found these discrepancies intriguing, and decided they were part of the queer uncanniness of the whole incident. Jourdain and Moberly worked at the Oxford women’s college St. Hugh’s. At the time of the Paris visit, Moberly was fifty-five and headmistress; Jourdain, eighteen years younger, was her incoming assistant. It was a few months later, when Jourdain was researching her lesson on the French Revolution, that she discovered their visit to the gardens happened on the 109th anniversary of the Storming of the Tuileries Palace — the day that Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI had watched the slaughtering of their guards, and were imprisoned. Some Parisians, Jourdain learned, believed Versailles was haunted on this particular day. This set their wheels turning, but it didn’t quite make sense. Jourdain and Moberly had not witnessed a violent takeover, but a prosaic afternoon. Then the two women, who had by now become quite close, had a creative epiphany: perhaps they hadn’t visited the actual events of August 10th, 1792, but the mindscape of Marie Antoinette on that day. According to Jourdain and Moberly’s theory, as the Queen was on tenterhooks, awaiting execution, she naturally reflected back — as anyone in her position might do — to the first time she’d been told of a threat to the crown. That had happened three years previously, in 1789. Jourdain and Moberly found a description of this scene in a book written by a gardener’s wife, who was present. Antoinette had been sitting in her favorite grotto when a servant ran up to tell her there was a mob approaching the castle. This was precisely what Moberly and Jourdain had witnessed! “We had inadvertently entered within an act of the Queen’s memory”, the two concluded. No wonder they’d felt entrapped — they had been trapped: in the despondent mind of Marie Antoinette. It was time travel with a hairpin twist; they’d landed in the psyche of a woman in 1792 who was thinking about 1789. Jourdain and Moberly were astonished when the Society for Psychical Research dismissed their story as lacking credibility. They resolved to marshal evidence, and spent the next nine years on elaborate, painstaking research. Through interviews, archival sleuthing, and repeated visits to France, they coaxed facts from the woodwork. The women “proved”, for instance, that the plow they’d noticed was from an earlier era; that a door they’d heard slam hadn’t been unlocked for at least a century; that Marie Antoinette’s personal bodyguards wore coats of the grayish green color they remembered; that her seamstress had made her a green silk bodice and semi-transparent white fichu exactly like they’d seen. Some far-off violin music was decisively identified as eighteenth-century light opera, and the incidental children were matched to the age and gender of the gardeners’ children. The women’s archival zeal brokered no limits. They tracked down records of payment for the clearing of dead leaves, the material composition of 1780s shoe buckles, and the gardeners’ method of eradicating invasive caterpillars. In Moberly and Jourdain’s eyes, this crazy-quilt accretion of labyrinthian detail cemented their case. Thus armored, they decided to publish An Adventure (1911), an account of their experiences. The book was furnished with a timeline, appendices, copious footnotes, and even several archival maps, intended to prove that Moberly and Jourdain’s walking path was solely consistent with Versailles’ 1789 landscaping. An Adventure was very popular; 11,000 copies sold in the first two years, and it went through at least six subsequent editions. The story doesn’t end there, however, because Jourdain and Moberly’ obsessive fixation had the curious effect of soliciting their readers’ own obsessive fixation. Terry Castle’s essay about the affair describes An Adventure as transmitting an “infection” — an infection that caused normal people to pore over minutiae for years on end, so as to take impassioned sides in what would seem to be a very low-stakes argument. Article after article, and even, unbelievably, book after book, debated whether Moberly and Jourdain were telling the truth. To subsequent editions of An Adventure the co-authors added yet more “proof”, which fanned the controversy instead of settling it. The most salacious of the takedowns, according to Castle, was published by a former student of the pair: Lucille Iremonger’s 1957 The Ghosts of Versailles. (By this point, Moberly and Jourdain had been dead for two decades, but the debate raged on; the saga was the occasion of a London symposium a year later.) Iremonger dropped two bombshells. First, that the two women, contrary to what they publicly claimed, had had various other paranormal experiences. Iremonger alleged that Moberly had privately described many apparitions, including visions of medieval monks, the Roman Emperor Constantine wandering the Louvre, the spirit of her dead father as a dazzling white bird. Jourdain also had visions, though they were more paranoiac; in fact, she died of a heart attack after she convinced herself that her staff was plotting mutiny. The other revelation was that the two women were lesbians. Iremonger alleged that their relationship was exactly like that of “husband and wife”, and detailed who was dominant in what respect, going so far as to speculate the dynamics of their affinity. Naturally, Iremonger brought up homosexuality to impugn the women’s credibility, but nowadays, the allegation reads differently. In a saga awash in detail, this detail bobs above the others. What really happened? Here’s one version: two women of uncommon intelligence spent decades asserting the validity of their particular shared experience. They fought tooth and nail to prove that they saw what they saw, that it mattered, that it was real, and that they were credible. It was an argument about ghosts, but it might not have been about ghosts at all.

public-domain-review

Jun 6, 2023

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:30.274410

fraktur-folk-art

Fraktur Folk Art (ca. 1750–1820) Text by Sasha Archibald Mar 30, 2023 The southeastern corner of what is now Pennsylvania was once home to entire towns of religious dissidents. All had been persecuted in Europe, and sought freedom in the colonies. There were clusters of Mennonites, Moravians, Lutherans, and various other German-Protestant sects, some obscure and eccentric. Residents of the Ephrata Cloister, for instance, practiced extreme calorie restriction, sleep deprivation, and celibacy. Another group followed the sixteenth-century teachings of Caspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig, a bearded, deaf ornithologist who split ways with Martin Luther over the meaning of the sacrament. These motley religious communities had significant theological differences, but shared a great deal as well — they were farmers who spoke German, prized religious tolerance, and practiced the same distinctive artform: fraktur. Fraktur is named after the font — heavy, angular, old-timey — which is usually called “blackletter” in the United States. Fraktur was ubiquitous in eighteenth-century Germany, and it remained so long after other European countries switched to the more readable Roman. (Fraktur is now associated with the Nazis, who used it extensively in propaganda, going so far as to outfit government offices with Fraktur typewriters.) How did the name of a font become the name of an art form? Fraktur art existed at the edges of text, as a decorative accessory of writing. It embellished fraktur script. In Pennsylvania and beyond, baptismal records, land deeds, certificates of accomplishment, bookplates, birth registries, and sometimes valentines were lettered in German-language fraktur, and decorated with the hearts, vines, and tulips that came to be characteristic of fraktur art. Fraktur has its origins in folk art traditions from Alsace, Switzerland, and the Rhineland, but in America it became more colorful, elaborate, and freehand, and far more apt to dominate the script it sought to embellish. The genre’s golden age was the period between 1790 and 1830 — a time when the American religious context was still strong, but the European influence less stultifying. The forms are highly stylized. Hearts, flowers, angels, and various birds are repeated over and over, to soothing effect. The palette favors bold primary colors, traditionally made of inks concocted from berries, iron oxide, and apple juice. The composition is orderly. The tidy leaves of the tidy vines are perfectly equidistant, and the flowers pared down to floral symbols. The goldfinch that appears in many fraktur images is drawn in such a specific way it’s still known by its German name: distelfink. Symmetry reigns, and when it doesn’t, the composition is otherwise balanced. One of the most common fraktur motifs is the “three-heart design” wherein a large heart is complemented by two smaller hearts on either side of its apex — in fraktur, even the most curvaceous of shapes assumes the rootedness of a square. Fraktur scholars and aficionados can distinguish Ephrata Cloister fraktur from Schwenkfeld fraktur from Mennonite fraktur. They can also identify the work of certain artists by sight —whether by name, or, for those who left their work unsigned, by epithet: the Nine Hearts artist or the Stoney Creek artist. But to simply appreciate the form, no expertise is necessary. Fraktur is straightforward and earnest. There is no irony and no secret code. Its pleasures are the homey kind. To contemporary eyes, the imagery signals feminine domesticity, but it wasn’t always so. Nearly all fraktur artists were men, and the papers they embellished were civic and religious documents. It is true, however, that fraktur was designed for private, domestic pleasures. It was not an artform of display or exhibition, but of personal devotion. Some of the most beautiful examples of fraktur are bookplates, hidden most of the time. Collectors and art historians have tried various ways of elevating Fraktur’s aesthetic status. One line of argument contends that the hearts and birds are all symbolic, such that each composition contains a decodable message. Others have tried to prove a direct lineage from medieval illumination. The evidence for either of these claims is so thin that the motivation behind them becomes suspect. Not all art need grasp toward grand significance to be enjoyed. A private pleasure, a small delight, a flourish both unnecessary and perfectly lovely is reason enough to look, and look again.

public-domain-review

Mar 30, 2023

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:30.724807

hokusai-warriors

Hokusai’s Illustrated Warrior Vanguard of Japan and China (1836) Text by Koto Sadamura Jul 19, 2023 Until the age of seventy, nothing I drew was worthy of notice. At seventy-three years, I was somewhat able to fathom the growth of plants and trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects and fish. —Katsushika Hokusai, One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, 1834 One year after this statement, seventy-six-year-old Hokusai drew a series of warrior images that included the figures above: Hirai Yasumasa (958–1036) subduing a monster spider, Tsuchigumo. Lines in the background trace the motion of the gigantic arachnid as it tumbles and its sickle-like legs flail in the air, emphasizing the movement and force in a way that resonates with the visual effects of modern manga. This image is dynamic; and yet it gives the impression of a perfectly paused still-frame — the monster’s eyes meeting our own — as the moment is immortalized. This scene is part of a woodblock-printed book by Hokusai, titled Wakan ehon sakigake, which assembles images of famous Japanese and Chinese warriors, both historical and legendary. The Japanese term sakigake in the title signifies outstanding figures or leaders (Wakan means Japanese and Chinese, and ehon is a picture book). In the preface, Hokusai explains that the publisher Sūzanbō asked him to “fill three volumes with ‘wisdom’ [chi], ‘humanity’ [jin] and ‘bravery’ [yū], using examples of widely celebrated mighty heroes as reminders of military arts even in times of peace”. The second volume was published as Illustrated Stirrups of Musashi (Ehon Musashi abumi, 1836) and the third was advertised at the end of this sequel as Picture Book in the Katsushika-style (Ehon Katsushika-buri), but appears never to have been published. The block-ready drawings for the third, uncompleted volume were subsequently bound in a luxury album format that is now at the Met. Following the passage quoted above from One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, Hokusai goes on to express his ultimate desire fully to master the art of the brush: “At one hundred and ten, every dot and every stroke will be as though alive”. Already in these images we witness that he was not too far from this achievement. No two dots or lines are the same. Each tiny leaf growing on the rocks and each textural mark on the ragged surface is animated, filling the picture with vibrating energy. Every single strand of hair is charged with life. Such pictorial magic was the result of Hokusai’s masterful draughtsmanship and the skill of the highly accomplished woodblock cutters, Egawa Tomekichi and Sugita Kinsuke. We also witness the expertise of the printer who realized these sharp, well-articulated lines and the delicately-gradated texture of the monster spider. Egawa Tomekichi was designated personally by Hokusai as someone who could accurately transfer his brush lines onto woodblocks for printing. The Hokusai scholar Nagata Seiji has pointed out that the time of this book’s production coincided with the most challenging period in the artist’s life. Made in the middle of the Tenpō era’s (1830–44) great famine, the images were produced while Hokusai was in the midst of financial difficulties due to family troubles. He left the capital city of Edo for a period and even used an assumed name. In one of his letters during this time, Hokusai wrote that improving his drawing and painting skills was the only pleasure that remained to him. These vigorous images of military tales do not hint at any physical decline due to his advanced age, nor emotional exhaustion from the personal hardships and poverty he experienced. When he was seventy-five years old, Hokusai started to use another art name “Gakyō rōjin”, which can be translated as “old man crazy to paint”, combined with “Manji” (卍; the reverse swastika), an auspicious symbol used in Buddhism. These names help convey his never-ending ambition to master the arts of drawing and painting. It is with this burning ardor that Hokusai tackled his project of the late great warrior books.

public-domain-review

Jul 19, 2023

Koto Sadamura

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:31.231583

denishawn-dance-film

Denishawn Dance Film (ca. 1916) Text by Hunter Dukes May 30, 2023 “In a word, we dreamed about a school of life”, wrote Ruth St. Denis about founding, with her husband Ted Shawn, the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts. Filmed across two or three summers between 1915 and 1917, according to the New York Public Library, the three-minute silent picture above offers a glimpse into the early activities of their school, when it was housed at the Parkinson Estate on the corner of Sixth Street and St. Paul Avenue in Los Angeles, and, from 1917, at the Westlake School for Girls. After a brief clip of guests arriving in formal dress to the Denishawn estate — perhaps attendees of a “supper dance” — we are met with a sustained scene of undress, as woman after woman emerges from a changing room, dispensing robes to a turbaned attendant and revealing their one-piece swimsuits with understated flourish. The bathing costumes were the school’s uniform. As Ruth St. Denis (1879–1968) describes in her autobiography, “We put bathing suits on them for working clothes, and turn them out into the sun. The release they felt from the circumscription of their ordinary lives filled the days with an artless charm and freedom.” Many of these students in the early days of Denishawn were local women, who paid $1 a day for classes, meals, and lectures. In a proto-Hollywood publicity stunt, Ted Shawn (1891–1972) was known to invite photographers to the grounds with the promise of bathing ladies, and seeded a rumor, reports Paul Scolieri, that “there was a heavy uptick in rental fees for the apartments in the building that faced the Denishawn property.” Subsequent scenes show a typical day of training. St. Denis leads a seated arm movement, which cuts to students wearing pashminas and head-carrying pots. Shawn auditions a young girl on pointe, before retreating for the garden to thumb through a French costume book. St. Denis wields a peacock feather and pets its living source in a windy colonnade. (The bird was an anniversary gift from her husband; it later escaped, as Shawn did not yet believe that peacocks could fly.) Perhaps St. Denis is practicing The Legend of the Peacock, her long-running solo that had begun as an improvisation on what Jane Sherman describes as “the frustration of being imprisoned in bejeweled vanity”. The film concludes abruptly after the students take a well-earned swim, and two people, likely Shawn and St. Denis, sit down for tea. ※※Indexed under…DancePeacock Describing his adolescent desires as “completely bisexual”, Shawn had met St. Denis two years earlier, when she invited him blindly for a cup of tea in her Upper West Side apartment. By this point, more than a decade older than Shawn, St. Denis was already a dancer of international renown. Trained in the Delsarte method, which aimed to systematize the expression of emotion through gesture, she became known for her orientalist performances — inspired by an image of the Egyptian goddess Isis that she had once seen on an advert for cigarettes in a Buffalo pharmacy. Shawn had been working at the Los Angeles City Water Department, studying and teaching physical expression in the evenings. Moving to California from Denver in 1912, he had arrived at the same moment that modern ragtime and silent films two-stepped onto the LA scene. His own Edison Company movie, Dances of the Ages (1913), allowed him to save $3000 and attend Bliss Carmen and Mary Perry King’s Uni-Trinian School of Personal Harmonizing and Self-Development, familiarizing the dancer with the Delsartian mode out of which St. Denis had crafted her style. When the future partners met in her New York sitting room in 1914, it was not quite love at first sight. Shawn recorded his initial impression: “Barefoot, she walks like Helen of Troy; in high heels, Helen of Troy, New York”. St. Denis, in turn, saw before her a man burdened by sexual insecurity, wrestling with “all of the great problems and desires and perplexities of his own nature that were yet to come.” Tea became dinner, they chatted past midnight, and Shawn returned the next day to perform his Dagger Dance, about an Aztec warrior trying to avoid ritual sacrifice. They agreed to tour together, falling in love in Paducah, Kentucky. Shawn proposed; St. Denis declined. Weeks later, she wrote him a twenty-six-page letter, describing “an all around living, progressing, experimenting partnership — in which sex in its particular sphere is a part but not the whole — this is my sense of love + loyalty + fidelity — first of all a friend, then a lover.” Nine months after marrying, the Denishawn school was born. In its early days, Denishawn was a complex mix of freedom, orientalism, and scientific racism. Ted Shawn viewed dance and eugenics as two methods for incubating idealism in the body. Ruth St. Denis agreed and they co-published articles with titles such as “Dancing Real Factor in Developing Strong and Virile Race of Men”. As Paul Scolieri writes in his recent biography of Shawn, the teacher “reasoned that his idealized white male body had the capacity to perfect the non-European, non-Christian dances he performed”. The school’s fetishism for North African, Indian, and East Asian imagery was, in part, an attempt to inhabit a kind of universal consciousness. In Dance We Must (1950), a volume of Shawn’s collected lectures, he reflects on the “universal language” of dance — how, during the famed Denishawn “Tour of the Orient” in 1925 and 1926, “the Orientals understood us, for we were human beings moving rhythmically and expressively in a manner which the Chinese, Japanese and Malays all understood and enjoyed.” Shawn also had a more-personal motive for his ethnic cosplay — his masculine representations of Eastern warriors and whirling dervishes helped separate his performances from the charge of homosexuality that hung over male dancers in this period. Though some of its methods appear flawed to modern eyes, Denishawn’s later influence cannot be understated. Pioneers of modern dance such as Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman trained at the school. Countless film stars, including the Gish sisters, Louise Brooks, and Mabel Normand, studied movement with St. Denis and Shawn. The couple’s partnership in life and art crumbled after both spouses became involved with the same lover, but they never divorced. Describing his final duet with St. Denis before their separation in 1931, Shawn commented: “The two of us were going up and up and up, remembering all the love of the earth but still lovers of infinite distance and infinite space, and still always up, going up.”

public-domain-review

May 30, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:31.768618

punctuation-personified

Punctuation Personified (1824) Text by Hunter Dukes Apr 27, 2023 Ev’ry lady in this landHas twenty nails upon each handFive & twenty on hands & feetAnd this is true without deceit.But when the stops were plac’d aright,The real sense was brought to light. The child protagonist of Punctuation Personified: or, Pointing Made Easy (1824) reads aloud without pause. Robert “gabbled so fast” and “ran on with such speed” that “all meaning he lost”. That is, until Mr. Stops comes to his aid. With commas for feet and a colon torso, Mr. Stops walks with a curly-brace cane and sports a typographical dagger in his section-symbol belt. Even his hand is a manicule, his hat a caret. Taking the child on a tour through punctuation, Mr. Stops introduces him to a cast of literal “characters”: there is Counsellor Comma, who knows “neither guile nor repentance” in his pursuit of “dividing short parts of a sentence”; Ensign Semicolon struts with militaristic pride, for “into two or more parts he’ll a sentence divide”; and The Exclamation Point is “struck with admiration”, his face “so long, and thin and pale”. Less common typographical marks get clustered into Arcimboldo-esque assemblages: a dash, circumflex, accent acute and grave, diereses, hyphen, and breve compose a rosy leafleteer, handing out fliers on punctuation to tentative children. And other personifications trade on iconic resemblances: ? is a “little crooked man” with a bent back and hat beneath his feet; ¶ carries a bindle and boards a boat toward distant shores, for the pilcrow announces something “distinct from what was read before”. In addition to providing children with images for remembering the unnatural conventions of writing, Punctuation Personified offers guidelines for translating these marks back into spoken language. When reading aloud, count one for a comma, two after a semicolon, and four following a full stop. This hierarchy parrots the instructions given in Lindley Murray’s English Grammar (1795), a book that sold more than twenty million copies and remained influential throughout the nineteenth century. In this period, however, it was not uncommon for “pointing” to be supplemental — the work of printers, compositors, and correctors, who received manuscripts wholly lacking in spaces for breath. During Making a Point, David Crystal quotes John Smith’s Printer’s Grammar (1755), which illustrates the practice: “[some authors] point their Matter either very loosely or not at all: of which two evils, however, the last is the least; for in that case a Compositor has room left to point the Copy his own way.” This had a further unifying effect on punctuation and led to “a growing rapprochement between grammarians and printers”. And yet, the problem of individual usage remained. Realizing that the rules of punctuation were mystifying to children, authors of books like Punctuation Personified attempted to systematize the deployment of these signs from a young age. Published by John Harris as part of the Novelties for the Nursery series, Punctuation Personified was one of several books in this era that visualized language for pedagogical ends. The Infant’s Grammar (1822) held a picnic party for the parts of speech; Osbourne’s Pictorial Alphabet (1835) vitalized the ABCs in classical scenes. And the tradition lives on: Barbara Cooper’s 2000s series of picture books introduces Alan Apostrophe, Christopher Comma, and Emma Exclamation Point. Charming as can be, the illustrations for Punctuation Personified seem to wink at a deeper wisdom: far from dead things, these silent symbols enliven writing, opening space for the entrance of breath and understanding. Below you can browse the hand-colored engravings from Punctuation Personified. Mr. Stops would return in Madame Leinstein’s The Good Child’s Book of Stops, or, Punctuation in Verse (ca. 1825), which can be read at archive.org.

public-domain-review

Apr 27, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:32.289230

san-francisco-calamity

Eyewitness Accounts of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake Text by Sasha Archibald May 23, 2023 The San Francisco Calamity by Earthquake and Fire (1906) was known in the publishing industry as an “instant disaster book”. This genre coalesced partly because there were so many disasters at the turn of the last century: the 1889 Johnstown Flood; the 1900 Galveston Hurricane; the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée; the 1903 Iroquois Theatre Fire; the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904; the 1904 burning of the steamboat General Slocum; and finally, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, which killed over 3,000 people and destroyed 80% of the city. All of these became topics of books that followed a certain pattern. A journalist was hastily dispatched to the scene, he furiously filed copy, the page count was fattened up with previously published odds and ends, and images were cut in, the more the better. Get the book to market before interest flits away. The author of The San Francisco Calamity was Charles Morris, though he’s actually credited as editor, an elision that allowed publishers a freer rein on the book’s final components. Morris was a professional writer who published a great number of popular histories, as well as pseudonymous dime store novels. It’s not clear when he arrived in San Francisco from Philadelphia, nor when he finished his manuscript, but his publisher claimed it was a matter of weeks. If the book wasn’t the first account of the earthquake, it was certainly among the first. The San Francisco Calamity justifies its length with a comparative survey of many other earthquakes, as well as a history of San Francisco, but the heart of the book is a small section that begins about fifty pages in, when Morris directly quotes his stunned interviewees. Their eyewitness accounts are sharp and disjointed, their experience not yet shorn of its surprise. Nothing has been smoothed or strategically forgotten. They describe a pageant of wretchedness, still unfolding. The billboard advertising beer that was converted into a public message board, and crowded with death notices. Thieves cutting off fingers and biting off earlobes to seize the jewelry of the dead. Shelters made of fine lace curtains and table cloths. Injuries seeping blood, and thousands of people with nothing to wear aside from their pajamas. Some survivors never stopped shrieking and others went comatose. Some refused to be parted with their piano, or their sewing machine, or their canary, or their lover’s body. Garbage wagons toted corpses. The air was thick with the smell of gas and smoke, and dangling electrical wires shot off blue sparks. Rich and poor, Chinese and white, were suddenly sleeping and eating side by side, to mutual bewilderment. (Between half and three-quarters of the population were made homeless.) There were shoot-to-kill orders for anyone caught looting, sometimes staged as public executions, and when a herd of cattle stampeded down a central street, passersby were gored and crushed. Water was so scarce that people lay on the ground to lap muddy puddles. As one man told Morris, “We are so drunken and dulled by horror that we take such stories calmly now. We are saturated.” The backdrop to all of this were interminable percussive blasts of dynamite. As is well known, spontaneous fires began almost immediately following the earthquake. As is less known, authorities used dynamite as a fire-fighting technique. There was no water, and they thought fire would spread less readily across rubble. It wasn’t very effective, and the collateral consequences were tremendous, but no other solution was at hand, so authorities kept at it, blowing up larger and larger patches of the city: first, select buildings, then half a block, then an entire block, and eventually, twenty-two blocks of Van Ness Avenue — a mile and a half of “handsome and costly” Victorian homes that were mostly untouched by the quake. For the better part of ten days, explosions happened every few minutes, day and night, each one ratcheting the panic and exacerbating the unease. Morris justifies his ambulance-chasing journalism in the preface. Time, he argues, will render everything into “one undecipherable mass of misery”. Getting the details while they’re fresh is important. Details make the historical record accurate, and they also solicit an appropriate measure of public sympathy. Morris’ intentions were probably not as lofty as he claims, but he’s right in the main: there is a colossal difference between knowing that there was a terrible earthquake in San Francisco in 1906, and knowing, say, that a woman gave birth in some scratchy shrubs, with no clothes or food or money or water, her house destroyed, blasts of dynamite sounding in the background. ※※Indexed under…Timeand the loss of detail

public-domain-review

May 23, 2023

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:32.784196

los-angeles-alligator-farm

Photographs of the Los Angeles Alligator Farm (ca. 1907) Text by Erica X Eisen May 11, 2023 From 1907 until its relocation in 1953, the area of Lincoln Heights was home to what the Los Angeles Times dubbed “the city’s most exotic residents”: a thousand-strong collection of alligators that welcomed visitors every day of the year to see, pose with, and even ride them. The brainchild of Francis Earnest and “Alligator” Joe Campbell, the Los Angeles Alligator Farm housed its namesake creatures — some five hundred years old, if the rather fanciful ad copy is to be believed — in a series of age-segregated pools to prevent them from devouring each other. Along with nearby attractions like the Cawston Ostrich Farm and the Selig Zoo, the Alligator Farm was a mainstay of another major LA claim to fame: Hollywood. Billy, a denizen of the park that reportedly weighed over two hundred pounds, proved particularly popular on studio lots because, as one journalist put it, “his jaws automatically opened when a chunk of meat dangled above his head just above the camera’s field of vision”. The farm became such a local staple that LA fraternities reportedly demanded that new pledges kidnap alligators as part of their hazing rituals. Visitors — and their pets — could get alligator carriage rides or watch them rocket down slides; toddlers could have their picture taken with a crowd of hatchlings and even bring one home at the end of the day. Souvenirs sold by the park included postcards trafficking in “gator bait” imagery, a racist trope depicting Black children threatened by alligators that was common in American popular culture of the period. The lack of regulations for the safety of captive animals, staff, or visitors allowed for a level of casual proximity with adult alligators that would be unthinkable today. One photo shows a group of young women enjoying a half-submerged picnic in a park enclosure complete with what the caption claims to be a birthday cake for one of the reptiles. A keeper stands to one side, club in hand, to make sure nothing goes awry. Perhaps another picture offers a clue to what kept the creatures in line: a clutch of babies emerge from their incubator, only to be greeted in life by the sight of an enormous alligator-skin purse. Below you can browse photographs of the Los Angeles Alligator Farm courtesy of USC Libraries.

public-domain-review

May 11, 2023

Erica X Eisen

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:33.110256

sundial-mottoes

“Though Silent, I Speak”: A Book of Sundial Mottoes (1903) Text by Sasha Archibald Apr 25, 2023 When thought needs a muse, it claims an evocative object. Long ago, love found hearts; secrets found keys; discovery found light; change found rivers. For many centuries this list would have had to include time finding sundials. Even the earliest sundials were inscribed with text, suggesting that a sundial was always both a way of telling time and a focal point for reflecting on its nature. Time has no voice, but sundial inscriptions pretend otherwise. In 1737, Charles Leadbetter published an instructional book called Mechanick Dialling: or, the New Art of Shadows about how to build a sundial. He included a selection of three hundred mottos, of which, he suggested, builders should choose one as the finishing touch on their project. The mottos were a small part of Leadbetter’s book, but as sundials entered their twilight of obsolescence, the mottos took on a life of their own. Other sundial enthusiasts began assembling and publishing collections of inscriptions, and reprinting Leadbetter’s. The task had a poetic hook: What can we learn about time from a timekeeping device made obsolete by its passage? Several books were ultimately published, among them Alfred H. Hyatt’s 1903 A Book of Sundial Mottoes. Hyatt selected sixty inscriptions, all drawn from Leadbetter, to which he added various quotes about sundials from famous writers, and his own ode-like introduction. It’s a small gift-type book, geared toward gardeners — sundials had by then become part of English country garden design. The book is awash in nostalgia, but the mottos less so. Most are bracing and hawkish. “This Dial Says Die”, for instance, makes the reader sit up straight, as does “Either Learn or Go”. Others deliver solid, if terse, advice, for example: “Do Today’s Work Today” and “Learn to Value Your Time”. A few are inscrutable, at least to this reader. “The Time Thou Killest Will in Time Kill Thee” might be a reference to harmful leisure habits, or it could darkly refer to all time, wherein time passed while living equals time killed. I was perplexed by “Opportunity has Locks in Front and is Bald Behind”, until my editors pointed out that the aphorism condenses a longer proverb, about Opportunity’s distinctive hairstyle. (“Opportunity has hair in front, behind she is bald; if you seize her by the forelock, you may hold her, but, if suffered to escape, not Jupiter himself can catch her again.”) Sundial advice is usually dispensed as generic wisdom, but occasionally the speaker reveals himself. One patriarch used his sundial to wag a finger at his progeny: “Remove Not the Ancient Landmark which Thy Father Hath Set Up.” The eeriest sundial inscriptions are written in the first person, as if the sundial is ventriloquizing time itself. What sorts of things does time say? Mostly ominous, haunting things, what one might expect from a hooded ghost with a scythe, not a sundial in an English country garden: “Look Upon Me. Though Silent, I Speak. For the Happy and the Sad, I Mark the House Alike. I Warn as I Move. I Steal Upon You. I Wait for None.” And also, stop looking at this sundial and get on with your life: “Begone About Your Business.”

public-domain-review

Apr 25, 2023

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:33.629457

smillie-smithsonian

The Department of Preparation: Thomas Smillie’s Photographic Survey of the Smithsonian (1890–1913) Text by Erica X Eisen Jul 12, 2023 When Thomas William Smillie (1843–1917) was designated “custodian” of the Smithsonian Institution’s photographic “specimens” in 1896 — a position we might now call curator of photography — it was the first such appointment at any museum in the United States, and perhaps in the world. Until his death, the Scottish-born chemist would dedicate his life to building and presenting the Smithsonian’s collections, whose far-flung gamut, as Merry Foresta described it, included such categories as “ethnological and archaeological, lithological, mineralogical, ornithological, metallurgical, and perhaps the most enticing category of all, miscellaneous.” Though a scientist by training, Smillie did not confine his curatorial remit to technical illustrations. He worked with Alfred Stieglitz, for instance, to arrange the purchase of a group of important Pictorialist and Photo-Secessionist photos. In an annual report to the Smithsonian, Smillie stated his strong interest in amateur work, arguing that professional photography, being more bound by convention, often “affords less opportunity for originality and progress.” Smillie’s CV is a constellation of firsts. As the first official photographer at the Smithsonian (appointed in 1870), he traveled to Wadesboro, North Carolina, to observe a total solar eclipse, using telescope-mounted cameras to capture a set of truly awe-inspiring shots: the delicate corona of the sun against the twin voids of space and the light-annihilating moon. Smillie also started the Smithsonian’s collection of photographic devices — paying $23 for daguerreotype equipment used by Samuel Morse — and his purchase of a selection from the 1896 Washington Salon is considered the earliest known acquisition of art photography by a museum. He was notable, too, for mentoring a number of prominent women photographers, such as Frances Benjamin Johnston, who would later become much in demand for her portrait work, and Louisa Bernie Gallaher, who became an expert in photomicrography at the Smithsonian but whose work has often been incorrectly contributed to Smillie until recent attempts to correct the record. As well as accompanying scientific expeditions and curating the work of other photographers, Smillie also set out to document the extent of the Smithsonian’s holdings, from taxidermied animals to Marshallese navigation charts. The cyanotype format he chose for printing — which had the advantages of low cost and relative simplicity — gives his work a sea-soaked serenity and lends even the most prosaic objects a certain luxurious allure. One of the most curious aspects of Smillie’s photographic survey of the Smithsonian is that it encompasses what would normally be the almost invisible accoutrements of museological storage and display: showcases, racks, shelves, chests with parts pulled out and piled up before paper backdrops into oddly modish assemblages. In one such image, a single drawer is positioned delicately on a clock-draped stool, looking for all the world like a pensive sitter. Smillie was also known for taking photographs of letters, documents, and books, whether to make a personal copy of useful information or to preserve an important object in case of damage or disaster. Indeed, in a curious sort of mise-en-abîme, Smillie even had a penchant for taking photographs of photographs (is that one of Smillie’s own eclipse pictures that catches the viewer’s attention at the bottom of a display case?). In these and other images, we see his broad view of the medium’s potential: an indispensable tool and a mode of creative expression whose historical antecedents and chemical underpinnings deserved careful study and preservation lest they be forgotten.

public-domain-review

Jul 12, 2023

Erica X Eisen

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:33.977832

treatise-of-buggs

“Those Disturbers of my Rest”: The First Treatise on Bedbugs (1730) Text by Hunter Dukes Jun 28, 2023 Written by John Southall — the godfather of exterminators, known in his day as a “bug destroyer” — A Treatise of Buggs (1730) is the first scientific study of bedbugs. According to its author, this lousy presence was still novel in London, only “known to be in England above sixty years”. Its supposed source? The importation of foreign lumber (namely “Firr-Timber”) in the wake of the city’s Great Fire, which raged in 1666. Across this book, bug bites serve as proto–heat maps, pocking the skin of victims in proximity to imperial supply chains. “Not one Sea-Port in England is free; whereas in Inland-Towns, Buggs are hardly known.” In order to defend against the invasion of bedbugs that “abound in all foreign Parts”, Southall seeks out a wiseman where the parasites spawn to learn his ways of combat. Our exterminator finds himself in a kind of colonial fever dream: sick in Kingston, Jamaica, he has “lost the Use of my Limbs” through “a Complication of the Country Distempers”. He meets an “uncommon Negro”, “one of the first Slaves brought into that Island” during Oliver Cromwell’s time. Observing Southall “often rub and scratch”, the nameless man “wonder’d [why] white Men should let them bite; they should do something to kill them, as he did.” The itchy Englishman is titillated: “this unexpected Expression excited in me a Curiosity to have farther Discourse with him”. When Southwall asks “how to destroy those Disturbers of my Rest”, the former slave trades him a “Calibash full of Liquor” in exchange for some tobacco and Spanish coin. Applying the liquor to his bedding, the author observes “vast Numbers . . . come out of their Holes, and die before my face.” Southall, it seems, has found his calling. He further trades the Jamaican some “English Beef, Pork, Biscuit, and Beer” for knowledge of the “Secret”. Curiously, the supposed cause of the British infestation — the importation of foreign resources — also becomes its potential cure. “Believing some of the Materials not to be had in Europe, I procured of him a quantity, and soon after returned to England.” We never learn the ingredients of this pesticidal liquor, for A Treatise of Buggs is really an advertisement for Southall’s services. It ends with a price list: ten shillings for de-pestering a bedstead and adjacent furniture; six for a four-poster; and surcharges if the wainscotting needs clearing. And yet, before this, the treatise wanders into a different mode entirely, one inflected not by disgust, but rather coy wonder and begrudging awe. He starts to breed bedbugs, admiring them under microscopes. “A Bugg’s Body is shaped and shelled, and the Shell as transparent and finely striped as the most beautiful amphibious Turtle”. For eighteen months, Southall mates a new pair of bugs every fortnight, recording their reactions to various foods. “Their beloved Foods are Blood, dry’d Paste, Size, Deal, Beach, Osier, and some other Woods, the Sap of which they suck”. They don’t care for oak, walnut, cedar, or mahogany. In temperament, bedbugs are “watchful and cunning”, “timorous of us”, but when fighting each other, they war “as eagerly as Dogs or Cocks”, waging internecine battles where both parties “have died on the Spot”. He becomes intimate with their sexual habits. “They are hot in Nature, generate often, and shoot their Spawn all at once, and then leave it”. And he uses their bites as a heuristic of his personal health: “I daily am bit when practicing and at work in my Business, destroying them; and as they never swell me but when out of order, from thence I infer, that not only myself, but all such who are among Buggs, and do not swell with their Bites, are certainly in good Habit of Body.” One section of Southall’s bugbook approaches something like nature writing as he attends to the shifting colors of his developing subjects. ※※Indexed under…Sexlives of bedbugs Southall was writing in a period before the connotations of verminous insects had been fully entrenched within regimes of class, race, cleanliness, and abjection. As the eighteenth century progressed, argues Lisa T. Sarasohn, the bedbug became a “canary in the coal mine, indicating the changing attitudes towards body and environment that characterize modern society.” Prior to this shift, however, there was a markedly different sense of what a bedbug meant, a sense that shines through during sections of Southall’s treatise. In Samuel Pepys’ diaries, for instance, we find the cryptically joyous account of waking up and “finding our beds good, but lousy; which made us merry”. The bedbug made no distinction between hosts, and, like John Donne’s flea, swelled with “one blood made of two”, transgressing freely across the social striations that separated various kinds of bodies. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century, writes Sarasohn, Londoners “smelled an enemy that could threaten their social aspirations”.

public-domain-review

Jun 28, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:34.494834

cranch-new-philosophy

C. P. Cranch’s Very Literal Illustrations of Emerson’s Nature (ca. 1837–39) Text by Sasha Archibald Apr 13, 2023 Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813–1892) is remembered for bringing levity to Transcendentalism. At the various gatherings that soldered the movement, the good-looking Cranch played the flute and guitar, loved to sing loudly, and pretended to talk to animals. “We have transcendental and aesthetic gatherings at a great rate”, he reported to his sister, “and they make me sing at them all. I have worn my Tyrolese yodlers almost to the bones . . . I am quite a singing lion.” Cranch was also quick with the pen, making witty sketches on the spot. His best party trick was to sketch satirical illustrations of sentences plucked from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature (1836) — a book that Cranch and his friends admiringly devoured. Emerson’s earthy, concrete analogies invited image-making. It started one evening, when Cranch and a friend, the minister and publisher James Freeman Clarke, began illustrating various Emerson quotes by literalizing the author’s figurative language. The two men doodled and giggled, so much so that when the visit ended, they continued to exchange drawings in the mail. Cranch was the more skilled artist, and Clarke egged him on. Clarke collected some of the drawings into a scrapbook, titled Illustrations of the New Philosophy, and sent others round to friends — all people who revered Emerson and received the satire with its intended geniality. The sketches were passed among Transcendentalist-leaning social circles in New York and Boston to the point that Cranch bragged, “My drawings . . . permeate all houses, as water doth a sponge. Wherever I go I hear of them.” Clarke also sent a selection directly to Emerson, who received the caricatures not as an insult, but an overture of friendship. Emerson and Cranch soon became lifelong friends. The sketches were cheeky, teasing, and toothless. They deflated Emersonian pretention, but were clearly the product of genuine delight — Cranch found Emerson’s language lively and fresh, and the drawings were his simpatico reply. One of the most popular depicted Emerson’s head perched atop a giant ridged melon, captioned with the Nature quotation, “I expand and live in the warm day, like corn and melons.” Others were similarly straightforward. When Emerson said in an address at Harvard, “Men in the world today are bugs”, Cranch drew a horde of upright insects, and when Emerson exclaimed “How they lash us with those tongues of theirs!” Cranch drew eight rope-like tongues and a cowering victim. Cranch’s illustration of “Few grown-up persons see the sun” is precisely what it says: a cluster of learned adults clueless to the radiance above. Even when the satire was more acerbic, it was a joke among friends. One such doodle, now lost, depicted Margaret Fuller driving the Transcendentalist carriage, reins in hand, with Emerson lounging in the back seat. The best known of Cranch’s sketches is the “transparent eyeball” drawing. The version featured below shows an eyeball in a dinner jacket and top hat, his optic nerves forming a low ponytail. It was shrewd of Cranch to home in on this baffling phrase. Eyeballs perceive transparency, but aren’t themselves transparent, so what did Emerson mean? Context helps, a bit. “Transparent eyeball” appears near the end of Nature’s first chapter, when Emerson is trying to describe precisely why walking in the woods has a curative effect. ※※Indexed under…EyeTransparent, dinner-jacket wearing Standing on the bare ground,— my head bathed by the blithe air,— and uplifted into infinite space — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. Bodily dissolution is key to these enchanted moments, except the body can’t entirely dissolve, because one part of the body — the eyes — induces the dissolution. “I am nothing; I see all” is the operational tangle that leads Emerson to the paradoxical “transparent eyeball”. Cranch’s illustrative figure is appropriately at odds with itself. Its posture is debonair, and its hands seem to have melted away, but its large eyeball-head, with barely the suggestion of a lid, stares upward, rapt and transfixed, as if communing directly with the sun. Some scholars have described these jottings as the pinnacle of Cranch’s life achievement. That’s a little harsh, but it’s true that Cranch’s cleverness never begat an illustrious career. He came from a prestigious, accomplished family that was deeply intertwined over three generations with that of President John Adams and his son, President John Quincy Adams. (John Adams and Cranch’s grandfather married two remarkable sisters, Mary and Abigail Adams; Christopher Pearse Cranch married John Quincy Adam’s sister.) Cranch was less conventional than his father, grandfather, and brother, and less impelled to do things he didn’t like doing. The poet and abolitionist James Russell Lowell described his friend thus: blessed with “gifts enough for three—only his foolish fairy left the brass out when she brought her gifts to his cradle.” As a young man, Cranch entered the ministry, but spoke with too much diffidence to be a charismatic preacher. He was never ordained, and instead traveled, taking the pulpit for short stints in different cities. His burgeoning interest in Transcendentalism threatened what thin career prospects he had, and after his dear friend and fellow Transcendentalist John Sullivan Dwight was forced to resign the ministry, Cranch quit in solidarity, and burned his sermons. With no training of any sort, he announced at age thirty that he would become a landscape painter. Unfortunately, his talent was middling. A “major mediocrity” is how he’s described by his biographer. Cranch’s unorthodox career left his wife and family of three children perpetually short on funds. They couldn’t afford to live in New York — where “greenbacks melt like snowflakes on hot griddles”, Cranch complained in 1863 — and so they settled for a decade in Paris. Cranch painted a great deal, but he also translated Virgil, published poems and reviews in The Dial and other magazines, and wrote two novels for children. He corresponded with many distinguished friends, and penned opera star Jenny Lind’s adieu to her American audiences. But nothing stuck. Few of his paintings sold, and his four books of poetry landed too quietly. One of them, ill-advisedly titled Satan, reportedly sold not a single copy. Like many humorists, Cranch was privately melancholic, and his depressive stints deepened as he aged. A posthumous tribute in Harper’s Magazine bluntly noted that Cranch was often silent and withdrawn. Certainly he had cause: the strain of his financial struggles, his artistic mediocrity, the fact that his father was mortified by his association with the Transcendentalists; the premature death of two sons. Cranch himself, however, said the “blues” were simply part of his character, and always had been. For relief, he looked to music, and also to Emerson. Cranch could recite pages of Nature aloud; the book reliably lifted his spirits for four decades. Thirty-five years after the satirist and his subject went huckleberry picking together on Walden Pond, Cranch sent Emerson a new landscape painting to thank him for a lifetime of solace. “I owe you for all that your works have been to me.” Below you can browse a selection of Emersonian sketches from Illustrations of the New Philosophy (ca. 1837–39), the scrapbook assembled by James Freeman Clarke in Cranch’s name.

public-domain-review

Apr 13, 2023

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:35.050155

dentologia

Dentologia: A Poem on the Diseases of the Teeth (1833) Text by Hunter Dukes Apr 12, 2023 Dentologia begins seemingly far away from the world of teeth. Invoking Juno and Apollo, the first canto ruminates on how “angelic natures” are revealed “when purified from the stains of mortality”. We gradually realize that the “stains” in question have little to do with divinity or sin. The poet is talking about plaque. The next five sections of this remarkable (and remarkably long) poem prove to be a crash course in dental hygiene and disease prevention — loosely tracking the stages of health from birth unto death. Canto Second is pediatric, concerned with the lifecycle of milk teeth: “Some struggling tooth, just bursting into day / Obtuse and vigorous, urges on its way”. Canto Third is a critique of luxury, laziness, and neglect: “If sloth or negligence the task forbear / Of making cleanliness a daily care”, then “insidious tartar comes / Incrusts the teeth and irritates the gums”. Canto Fourth is all about cavities and implants: the latter being fashioned from the “lordly elephant”, who, “in hoary pride”, toils “through successive ages to provide / The ivory tusk”. Finally, Canto Fifth begins with an apostrophe to health (“Gay, blushing Health!”), and develops into a discussion of how diseases of the mouth affect a body’s general condition. Brown’s poem closes on the image of a woman named Seraphina, a singer whose voice, once “so sweet, the labouring bees might stop to sip”, now only sounds “discordant notes”. Her “premature decay” is caused by a disease of her “dental pearls”. Seraphina’s prescription (and Dentologia’s general argument) can be distilled into four lines — a variation of the message delivered by today’s dentists and hygienists at every appointment’s end: Let each successive day unfailing bringThe brush, the dentifrice, and, from the spring,The cleansing flood : — the labor will be small,And blooming health will soon reward it all. Published in 1833, Dentologia was written by Solyman Brown, who helped found the first dental journal, society, and school in the United States. Known in his lifetime as “the poet laureate of dentistry”, Brown had sent a draft of Dentologia to Eleazar Parmly, another titan of American toothcare, who showed it to two gentlemen “distinguished for their fine taste in literature”. Overwhelmed by nameless critics’ positive response to the poem, Parmly wrote its preface and furnished the eighty pages of cantos with fifty more pages of erudite footnotes, crammed with citations to contemporary dentistry manuals. Far from justifying or explaining Brown’s verse — which Nicholas Parsons calls “the most eccentric, and certain the most engaging, didactic poem in English” — these labyrinthine notes only multiply its bizarre charms. Footnoting a mouthy metaphor (“A shining panoply of orient pearls”), Parmly presents the reader with a wall of text: The chief object of attention in artificial teeth is, that the substance be durable, and not liable to change color. Human teeth and those of small animals have been heretofore supposed to answer the best purpose, while teeth cut from those of the sea horse have ranked next in importance; but lately, they have been formed with great success from certain materials known to the manufacturers, and have been variously denominated, according to the taste of the artist — silicious pearl teeth — mineral teeth — porcelain teeth — incorruptible, and terro-metallic. Parmly continues on like this for another half-page, informing his audience that the most successful method for installing an artificial tooth is by means of “a pivot to a sound fang”. Ironically, Dentologia is often at its most poetic — revitalizing worn language with associations anew — when Parmly loses himself in scholarly learning. “Tartar is an accumulation of acrimonious earth matter, round the necks of the teeth”, he states. It is easy to laugh at Dentologia. The mouthfeel is all wrong. The poem’s forced iambic pentameter has the effect of a sadistic orthodontic device: every line is bent into uniformity for bending’s sake. And the unrelenting rhyming couplets fester humor in moments where gravity is requested. Frequently included in laughing-stock anthologies with titles such as Really Bad Ideas Throughout History, Brown and Parmly’s creation is usually praised only for elevating dentistry to a talking point — perhaps via ridicule — in an era when standards and accreditation were lax. And yet, as Ben Lerner intimates when discussing another nineteenth-century poet’s “radical failure”, there is something about Brown’s shortcomings that let us glimpse both the promise and impossibility of perfection. It’s an apt form for a poem about teeth. And it wasn’t Brown’s final attempt. Turning to blank verse, he went on to publish Dental Hygeia: A Poem on the Health and Preservation of the Teeth in 1838.

public-domain-review

Apr 12, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:35.372854

peking-opera

Peking Opera Characters (ca. 1900) Text by Hunter Dukes May 16, 2023 Of the approximately 360 kinds of theater in China, Peking opera remains the most infamous. Originating in Shanghai rather than Beijing, the style is thought to have become formalized sometime between 1790 and 1860. And yet, the neatness of the English term “Peking opera” masks the historical difficulty of delineating its canon. As Joshua Goldstein observes, the artform has three Chinese names (jingju, jingxi, and pingju) and points to a patchwork genre that includes “several dozen melodic themes otherwise known collectively as pihuang”. Patronized by the Qing court in its infancy, Peking opera was performed by troupes that could include more than a hundred people, from stagehands and musicians to costumers and actors, in order to put on six to ten hours of scenes per day. Training schools sprang up across the nineteenth century, concentrated in Beijing, creating well-known stars and tabloid forums to discuss their lives in intimate detail. Merging song, dance, dialog, martial arts, and acrobatics, Peking opera, in David Rolston’s words, was “one of the most important ways that people in China for most of the last two centuries imagined the world.” The colorful images below, courtesy of the MET, were painted by an unidentified artist sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. These portraits on silk each represent a particular character from one of nine plays. Like most operas of this style, the characters hail from diverse sources — literature, military history, and myth — but play stock parts. There are four basic roles in traditional Peking opera: sheng, dan, jing, and chou, each of which have numerous subtypes. Sheng and dan are male and female leads (historically both played by men), jing is a villain, and chou, the clown. As Mei Chun details, complex personas were to be avoided. “The flatness is deliberate. Flatness in characterization contributes to the effect of moral contrast while rounder characterization could lead to ambiguity and disorder.” The characters’ painted makeup, known as lianpu, tracks back to masks worn by dancers during the Tang dynasty, and is mainly used for jing and chou roles. The colors and expressions convey moral qualities that were easily legible to audiences of the opera. Personifications of virtue and vice, these characters evolved alongside changes in Chinese society across time, representing, in various periods, the ideals of Confucian, Buddhist, nationalist, and even revolutionary beliefs. (Yangbanxi, or “revolutionary Peking operas”, were formed under the supervision of Jiang Qing during the Cultural Revolution.) Like various theatrical forms the world over, Peking operas allowed audiences to experience and imagine forms of being that were not always possible in daily life. At the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, dan actors specialized in either qingyi or huadan roles — the former obedient, virtuous, and pedigreed; the latter young, flirtatious, and bawdy. When Mei Lanfang rose to fame for his dan parts during the Republican era, he merged the two subtypes, writes Goldstein, presenting “curvaceous figures of elite women and goddesses, often in sexually charged scenarios”. In doing so, he displayed a kind of complex femininity that was rarely performed during the Qing dynasty. This was partially possible due to the safeguard of sex. “On the stage, the ideally virtuous and beautiful woman was, necessarily, a man.”

public-domain-review

May 16, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:35.877824

verany-cephalopods

Jean Baptiste Vérany’s Chromolithographs of Cephalopods (1851) Text by Kevin Dann Apr 27, 2023 The subtitle of Jean Baptiste Vérany’s Mollusques méditeranéens: observès, decrits, figurès et chromolithographies d'après le vivant promised something quite extraordinary for 1851: chromolithographs of living sea creatures. Since Aristotle’s pioneering accounts of the octopus, cuttlefish, and paper nautilus, great advances had been made in the knowledge of cephalopod anatomy and taxonomy, without parallel progress in understanding these enchanting animals’ ecology and life history. In this first volume of a projected two-volume work on the mollusk fauna of the Mediterranean, both Vérany’s lyrical descriptions and forty-one color plates attest to the veracity of his “d’après le vivant” claim. Born in Nice, Vérany (1800–1865) was on a path to take over his father’s pharmacy when, after acting as local guide for University of Torino zoologist Franco Bonelli’s collecting expedition, he abandoned the drug trade in 1822. By 1834, Vérany was specializing in the study of cephalopods; though only five of the 144 plates in a natural history from this time were by Vérany, their fidelity to the living animals foreshadowed his later achievement. All five plates depicted the subtle, shifting shades of the chromatophores in cephalopod skin. One plate shows Eledon moschatus in six different dynamic expressions; another (Loligo vulgaris) includes two juveniles whose colors are much more muted than those of adults. It is no surprise that Vérany would eventually serve as assayer of gold and silver for Nice and Genoa. He had a connoisseur’s eye for color and patina. In Mollusques méditeranéens, Vérany’s realizes his ambition — to accurately render “the suppleness of the flesh, the grace of the contours, the flexibility of the membranes, the transparency and the coloring”. During a moment of characteristically vivid description, he tells of his first encounter with the bright red umbrella squid, Histioteuthis Bonelliana, on the pebble beach at the mouth of Nice’s River Var. Having come upon a child who held a strange mutilated squid in his hands, he presented the animal to fishermen, promising “a good premium” to anyone who might bring him a similar one in better condition; shortly after, he was shown one hanging in their nets, and plunged it into a tub: It was at this moment that I enjoyed the astonishing spectacle of the brilliant points whose forms so extraordinarily decorate the skin of this cephalopod; sometimes it was the brightness of the sapphire which dazzled me; sometimes it was the opaline of the topazes which made it more remarkable; other times these two rich colors confused their splendid rays. During the night, the opaline points projected a phosphorescent glare, making this mollusc one of the most brilliant productions of Nature. After his death in 1865, Vérany was largely forgotten outside of Nice, even though Napoleon III decorated him with the Legion of Honor in 1864, to recognize both his scientific work and his founding of Nice's Muséum d'histoire naturelle. A few of Vérany’s cephalopods achieved great fame anonymously. Victor Hugo’s 1866 novel Les Travailleurs de la mer featured an ink drawing by Hugo that was copied from Vérany’s Octopus macropus. (While Vérany debunked the myths of the octopus’ monstrous nature, calling it “incapable of harm”, Hugo’s ferocious beast fuelled the modern terror of tentacles.) In 1878, the Wards Natural Science Company featured Léopold and Rudolf Blaschka’s glass models of cephalopods; many of their sketches for these sculptures were Vérany knockoffs. When Ernst Haeckel published a classically symmetrical plate of cephalopods in his Kunstformen der Natur (1902), three of the five species were copied without attribution from Vérany’s plates (8, 21, and 38). Indeed, it had been Vérany himself who introduced Haeckel to the cephalopods in 1856, when the German naturalist visited Nice as a young zoology student.

public-domain-review

Apr 27, 2023

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:36.310422

shy-guy

Shy Guy (1947) Text by Hunter Dukes Apr 18, 2023 Before loners, stoners, slackers, geeks, and nerds became recognized misfits of American high-school cinema, there was Phil (played by a young Dick York), the shrinking violet of Shy Guy (1947). The first of many “personal guidance” or “mental hygiene” shorts produced by Coronet Instructional Media between the 1940s and 80s, Shy Guy was designed to be screened in the classroom — the environment where our protagonist falters. Recently enrolled in a new school after moving from Morristown, Phil is having trouble fitting in. “In class it’s not so bad”, says our narrator, “but when school’s out and the others go off to enjoy themselves, well, if you’re what they call a shy guy, that’s when you really feel it.” We meet the shy guy from behind, looking through the window of a local drugstore, as soda jerks serve malts and cokes to booths of smiling, well-adjusted teens. “You’re on the outside looking in”, we are told, “there’s a barrier and you don’t know how to begin breaking it down.” It’s an affecting opening: all the loneliness and distance of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, painted five years earlier, driven home by the camera angle and our narrator’s second-person address. If Phil is a shy guy, we are even more so — placed at a double remove from the object of his voyeuristic longing. Dad will help. We cut to home, where Phil is soldering a transmitter and microphone in the basement. He can’t figure out how to wire in the oscillator. “I know I have to connect it to the amplifier, but where? It just doesn’t fit in!” Well son, begins his father, “maybe school is like your radio. This oscillator will do its work well, but you still have to fit it in, so it can work with all the other parts”. There’s nothing subtle about the social message. Yet it’s a surprisingly explicit cybernetic conception of American society in the early days of economic acceleration. Phil doesn’t need to actualize or individuate, he just needs to wire himself into the right circuitry. As Zoë Druick writes, in a paper on postwar education, “cybernetics was championed after the war as an apolitical universal model for technological civilization . . . educational and documentary media in particular are genres in strategic positions to operationalize social visions.” For real-life shy guys, films like these could supposedly decrease social latency. Watching a cinematic version of a self-help text, we glimpse the aspirational role of educational media at this time, how, using literature’s age-old tricks of empathy and identification, it sought to correct behavior and achieve a specific societal vision. Shyness, then, is not merely a personal inconvenience. It was a detrimental bug in the civilization-building machine. During her study of shyness, power, and intimacy in the United States after World War II, Patricia A. McDaniel reminds us that “emotions are social experiences, or processes, rather than visceral sensations that happen to our unwitting bodies”. In mid-century America, shyness became a familiar topic in self-help manuals pitched at white middle-class men. Not only was overcoming timidity essential for establishing a productive heterosexual relationship, it also translated directly into the booming white collar labor market. Instead of doing business with “timid, lukewarm Caspar Milquetoast”, as one text labeled the shy guy type, customers preferred to shake hands with people like Chick Gallagher, the popular boy at Phil’s high school. “Echoing the advice given to young girls to be discreet in advertising their interest in a particular boy”, writes McDaniel, “self-help authors argued that the key to appealing to others in the business world was to show just the right amount of self-restrained interest in them.” And this is exactly how Phil comes to win friends and a romantic interest: he learns to “listen” and “think about the other guy”. Taking the advice of his pocket-square-suited father, who himself “had quite a time making friends in a new office where everybody else knew each other”, the shy guy begins to reverse engineer popularity: “pick out the most popular boys and girls in school and keep an eye on them”. But Mean Girls this is not. He soon learns that women like Jane Davenport are beloved because they attune to others. Unlike his hobbyist audio equipment, she successfully completes the feedback loop of communication and amplifies social signals. “She’s listening! Hearing about Helen’s collection of menus. And liking it! That makes her kingpin with Helen.” Returning to the drugstore, we cheer as Phil gets hailed over to a booth by Chick, enfolded into a masculine acoustic order because the women will not stop conversing noisily about shopping: “We men need some support to run down this girly chatter”. Phil gets invited to tomorrow night’s mixer, locking eyes across the drugstore with Mary Lou whose face dissolves in a blur transition. At the mixer, students finish a sing-along to the minstrel song “Oh! Susana” — a detail that perhaps reveals who is allowed to fit so seamlessly into this vision of middle-class America — and Phil hears the boys asking Beezy Barnes about radios. Beezy hesitates: the communicative circuit is momentarily broken. And Phil bravely fits himself into the gap. “They know he’s alive now”, the narrator says, “and strangely enough, he’s just discovered that they’re alive.”

public-domain-review

Apr 18, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:36.803786

blights-of-the-bookish

Blights of the Bookish: An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons (1768) Text by Hunter Dukes Mar 28, 2023 It was dangerous to be a man of letters in the eighteenth century. All that rumination; such single-minded concentration; countless hours hunched over the escritoire. “Some men are by nature insatiable in drinking wine, others are born cormorants of books”, wrote the Swiss physician Samuel-Auguste Tissot in An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons (1768). As with the reckless consumer of claret, an overindulgence in books could have devastating consequences for the mind and body. Across his essay, Tissot offers hundreds of examples of men who read too much, studied too hard, and consumed knowledge to the point of madness. There is the young man who developed an allergy to reading: “if he read even a few pages, he was torn with convulsions of the muscles of the head and face, which assumed the appearance of ropes stretched very tight.” And the man whose laser focus effected hair removal: “his beard fell first, then his eye-lashes, then his eye-brows, then the hair on his head, and finally all the hairs of his body”. There is Nicolas Malebranche, who was gripped with “dreadful palpitations” upon looking into Descartes’ Treatise on Man, and an unnamed Parisian rhetorician, who “fainted away whilst he was perusing some of the sublime passages of Homer.” There is the blind Constantius Huygens, whose “immoderate studies so broke the force of his sensorium, that he thought his body was made of butter”. Huygens found himself very cold, shunning the fire “lest it should melt him”, and tragically ended his life by leaping into a well. And there “have been many instances of persons, who thought themselves metamorphosed into lanterns, and who complained of having lost their thighs.” ※※Indexed under…ButterStudious man transformed into What is the cause of these afflictions? The reason men “grow pale with poring over books”? Some of Tissot’s prescriptions are those that physicians still endorse to combat the ills of deskwork: frequent exercise, enough sleep, good ventilation, proper posture and hygiene, avoiding the “excesses of gluttony”. And others, while based on long outdated models of the mind, feel relevant in our era of “dopamine fasting” and “digital detoxes”. Much of Tissot’s essay treats the nerves like electrical wires carrying too much current, which become gradually calcified by literary amperage — a kind of downregulation of neurotransmitters avant la lettre. As such, it is not the physical act of reading, but the quality of reading material that poses a danger. It is universally known that there are books composed without any strength of genius, which appear quite insipid and unaffecting to the reader, and only tire the eyes; but those that are composed with an exquisite force of ideas, and with an exact connexion of thought, elevate the soul, and fatigue it with the very pleasure, which, the more complete, lasting, and frequent it is, breaks the man the more. Unlike later moral panics about the corrupting effects of fiction on female readers, here it is paradoxically the most praiseworthy material that produces the most lamentable results. Elsewhere, Tissot turns to humoral models of the nerves, where the “body is exhausted by too great an evacuation”. Suppose “the blood were to run copiously from a wound”, or “the gastric fluids were to be poured forth by the anus”, or “the breasts sucked too long”, or “a greater discharge of saliva made by spitting”, he writes. In all cases, “strength would decline, and the health be lost”. For studious men, an equivalent expenditure takes place in the brain: “a perpetual dissipation of the nervous fluid springs from the incessant action of the nerves”. Tissot was not the only person concerned with longevity and the life of the mind in this period. Robert Priestly issued a 1798 treatise examining the conditions of “the sedentary” alongside “persons of fashion”. During the “Amusements of the Learned” section of his Curiosities of Literature (1791–1823), Isaac D’Israeli describes how a “continuity of labour deadens the soul”, and tells of various scholars’ methods for kicking back. Descartes kept a garden, Petavius twirled his chair for five minutes at the end of every second hour, and “Spinosa would mix with the family-party where he lodged, and join in the most trivial conversations, or unbend his mind by setting spiders to fight each other”. In the Georgian era, Chandler Robbins’ Remarks on the Disorders of Literary Men (1825) and George Hayward’s A Lecture on Some of the Diseases of a Literary Life (1833) picked up where Tissot left off, elaborating preventive measures and rehabilitating programs for those “who injure themselves by study”. And yet, there are moments in Tissot’s essay that suggest a quieter agenda. Above all else, he seems concerned with solitude — not only as a precipitating condition of melancholy, but also as a threatening attitude of self-absorbed autonomy. He enjoins his reader to “be vigilant” toward the studious and “knock at their doors; rouse them from their lethargy; make them, whether they will or no, lay aside their studies”. As Christine Crockett Sharp writes, Tissot’s depiction of “the mental ravages one would experience by indulging in such solitary pursuits” was linked to a conception that it degraded a kind of biopolitical function: the ability “to make reasonable and moral decisions” and fulfill “gendered expectations regarding propagation and the success of eventual offspring”. Very little attention is paid to writing in An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons — it is the bookworm, absorbing all the world’s learning and fathering nothing productive, who most concerns Tissot. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that the figure of “the man of letters” appeared in the Swiss physician’s earlier work on Onanism (1766). “The masturbator, entirely devoted to his filthy meditations, is subject to the same disorders as the man of letters, who fixes his attention upon a single question”.

public-domain-review

Mar 28, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:37.292911

bonnacons

Medieval Illustrations of Bonnacons Text by Hunter Dukes May 25, 2023 When it comes to self-defense, skunks and spitting cobras have nothing on the bonnacon. If threatened, it fled. While fleeing, it defecated. Violently. According to Pliny the Elder, the excrement voided the animal’s body with such explosive force that it could hit targets more than a football pitch away. Contact with its dung was said to burn like a kind of fire, scorching hunting dogs and anyone not equipped with protective gear. (There is some uncertainty whether the weapon was liquid or gaseous, super-heated or acidic.) As with many mythical medieval creatures, the bonnacon was a composite: the head of a bull, the mane of a horse, and its horns were “bent inwards upon each other, as to be of no use for the purposes of combat”, writes Pliny. First described by Aristotle (as a possibly distinct animal called the bonasus), the bonnacon was resurrected in medieval bestiaries due to the influence of Pliny’s encyclopedic study of the ancient world. The Natural History locates the dungy bull in Paeonia — roughly today’s North Macedonia — but later writers elaborated its ethology, rehoming it in Asia. The twelfth-century Aberdeen Bestiary, for instance, expanded the projectile’s devastation to an area of three acres and blamed the bonnacon’s “convoluted” horns for its upset stomach: “the protection which its forehead denies this monster is furnished by its bowels.” Other naturalists seemed to borrow the bonnacon’s properties when observing novel fauna: Polish onagers, as studied in the thirteenth-century by Gervase of Tilbury, guzzled water when threatened, expelling a blinding “deluge from their nostrils”; Bartholomaeus Anglicus described a nameless Bohemian beast in the eleventh century that “shoots at hunters or dogs coming too close to it . . . this water horribly removes hair from and scalds whatever it touches.” While many creatures in medieval bestiaries are laden with Christian symbolism, the bonnacon’s appearance seems to be more like a gag — for both its victims and audience. Browsing the image’s gathered below, we might not know whether to laugh or duck. Hunters with ineffective shields gaze at the viewer, as if pleading for our assistance, while choking on stench. The bonnacon rarely seems in pain, more so disgusted at what he has been made to do, or taking visible pleasure in his pollution.

public-domain-review

May 25, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:37.775902

fancy-turning

Specimens of Fancy Turning (1869) Text by Hunter Dukes Jun 21, 2023 This early photography book features thirty tipped-in albumen silver prints of geometric designs created on “the hand or foot lathe”. Resembling something between spirograph drawings and textbook diagrams of orbiting electrons, the figures were created using geometric, oval, and eccentric chucks and an elliptical cutting frame. Attributed to “an amateur” on its title page, the book is the work of Edward J. Woolsey (1803–1872), an heir of the mercantile Woolsey family and partner in the New York Patent Sugar Refinery. Along with his wife and first cousin Emily Aspinwall’s businessmen brothers, who built an improbable railway line in the early 1850s linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans across Panama, he invested in a well-known estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, and furnished it with eight miles of crisscrossed carriage roads. The preface to Specimens of Fancy Turning explains how Woolsey made these images. Inspired by “an amateur friend”, whose “exquisite productions” were too delicate to be successfully photographed, these “coarser” designs were produced by first applying India ink to an enamelled card with a “flat camel's hair brush”. The card was then fastened to the face of a chuck with tacks or mucilage, whereby a spring tool “cut through the blackened surface of the card, exposing to view the white paper”. The cards were subsequently photographed. “They lack, however, the depth of black background, which cannot be equalled by the solutions of silver employed by the photographer.” “Fancy” turning is an old artform, thought to originate in fifteenth-century Bavaria, with sustained discussions of the practice first appearing in Charles Plumier’s L’Art de Tourneur (1701). While we may be more familiar with lathes being used to shape staircase balusters and table legs, here an eccentric cutter can create both convex and concave objects from a variety of mediums. These patterns ornament the lids of wood and ivory boxes, bannister newels, and Fabergé eggs. The photographs in Woolsey’s book, on the other hand, focus on fancy turning when it is employed as a two-dimensional technique, as in the metalworks created by Rose engine lathes. There is little sense of depth — were it not for Woolsey's explanation, these designs would appear to be etched directly onto photographic paper. They simply celebrate the texture of light as it spirals out across a surface. There was precedent in Woolsey’s time for seeking new uses and representational modes of ornamental turning. Due to the difficulty of producing (yet alone reproducing) such filigreed shapes — Holtazapffel’s Turning and Mechanical Manipulation (1884) offers dozens of pages describing precise configurations for the slide rest, mandrel, and chuck — patterns from geometric lathes were included on bank notes and postage stamps as a defense against counterfeiting. The particular lathe used in this process was invented by Asa Spencer, who introduced the machine into general use circa 1818. A British commenter the following year noted how the lathe’s “powers for producing variety are equalled only by the kaleidoscope; but for beautiful patterns it surpasses everything of the kind.” And these Specimens of Fancy Turning are indeed kaleidoscopic. Perhaps we are drawn to them because they feel at once fundamental and accidental. Like the vortices dripped into existence by a leaky paint can swinging on a string, or the staggering shapes vibrated out of chaos onto Chladni plates, these geometrical figures seem to allow us to peer into certain formal properties of the world that recur at every scale of physical existence. For Woolsey, he hoped his book might “lead to an interminable prairie in the world of mechanical pursuit, where fresh beautiful figures can be brought to light by every one who indulges in the exploration.”

public-domain-review

Jun 21, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:38.255316

indian-sign-talk

Indian Sign Talk (1893) Text by Kevin Dann May 10, 2023 Upon reading Lieutenant Colonel Garrick Mallery’s 1880 appeal for descriptions of “Indian Sign Talk”, Lewis Francis Hadley abandoned his philological research on Quapaw and Ponca languages (he was reputed to know twenty Native tongues) and applied himself to the mastery of the single silent language that he estimated was known by over 100,000 Native people. By 1890, he had moved to a cave near Anadarko, Oklahoma. His tent was crowded with a printing press and stacks of woodblocks, which he carved with a kitchen knife to illustrate the hand language of Plains Indians. From woodblocks, he moved on to electrotype prints of his gestural sketches, which he made into flash cards that could be used to teach the signs. By the time he published Indian Sign Talk (1893), Hadley had printed more than 100,000 cards, and missionary friends had produced another 27,000 cards expressly for teaching Christian scripture. Indian Sign Talk begins with a vocabulary of over five hundred words which pair Hadley’s sketches of signs with telegraphic “equivalents” that spell out the thoughts behind the gestures. Noting that “the real genius of gesture language is grace, and ease”, Hadley shows how the language's syntax follows an economical set of grammatical rules: articles, conjunctions, and prepositions are omitted; adjectives follow nouns; verbs are always present tense. By surveying or practicing these sketches of things, events, and qualities, one feels an intuitive pantomimic impulse lying behind nearly every sign. For “bread”, pat imaginary dough between the hands; for “cat”, push the end of the nose upward with the ball of the right hand; for “cloud”, cast the eyes toward the sky, laying a flat hand above the head. Hadley occasionally gives lovely metaphorical extensions of these signs. The “cloud” gesture is used also for despondency: “One is sometimes . . . under a cloud, as it were.” The multivocality of hand gestures emerges in Hadley’s brief commentaries: to sign “accost”, one holds the right hand aloft and rocks the wrist: This may mean: Who are you?What tribe do you belong to?What are you doing?Where are you going?Or other inquiries, depending much upon circumstances at the time. One is often obliged to think well before answering this sign. Crooking both index fingers and resting them on the sides of the head above the ears gives “cattle” and “horns”; turning the fingers outward means “buffalo”, by which he means bison — the sacred beast whose centrality to Plains culture actually birthed the gestural language. Hadley was among the first to recognize that the geographic extent of sign language coincided with the range of the American bison, whose nomadic habit brought hunters from all the Native nations of the Great Plains into perennial contact with each other. At its peak, Plains Sign Language stretched from what is now central Canada across the United States to northern Mexico, moving across hands between the Fraser River and the Rio Grande. Born in 1829 into a Quaker family in Salem, Massachusetts, Hadley’s western travels initially brought him to live on boats – including one of his own design and construction – up and down the Arkansas River, whose course he spent two years charting. An early stenographer, his aptitude for rapid communication and mapping seemed to feed his passion for signs. Initially finding Indigenous customs “repugnant”, reported an Arkansas resident, Hadley later preferred to be called by his adopted name Ingonompashi (Long-Haired Sign Talker), and advocated practically “going native”, albeit for missionary ends: “If we try to reach the Indians’ tepee, and never go out of the white man’s road, we will never get there.” In an account of meeting Hadley during this period, a writer remembered him accidentally stirring cheese into a cup of tea, mistaking it for a sweetener he had not encountered in some time. “You see on the reservations we have only brown sugar”, he explained. The second section of Indian Sign Talk gets to the heart of Hadley’s mission to teach the Christian gospel. Beginning first with a gestural rendering of “The Indians’ Little Star” (“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”) and “Wolf and White Man” — a satirical story he witnessed being signed in plain sight of those mocked — Hadley moves on to a suite of Biblical texts including the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, and Psalm 19. Some sense of how keenly Hadley desired that his book be put to use as a tool to convert Native Americans to Christianity comes from a section entitled “Receive Jesus Now”. Hadley’s subtitle claimed Indian signs to be an “Almost Universal Gesture Language”, which was exactly why it held so much appeal for him as a communicative bridge to his own deeply held universal language of Christian scripture. Hadley's later biography is unknown. A 1949 article in Chronicles of Oklahoma records that, after publishing Indian Sign Talk, the rest of his life and death “remains a mystery”. Below you can browse a selection of the 268 octavo plates from Hadley’s Indian Sign Talk. And you can watch a 1930 documentary clip of the language being used on Wikipedia.

public-domain-review

May 10, 2023

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:38.588782

manhattans-last-arcadia

Manhattan’s Last Arcadia: Estate Plans from the Index of American Design (1936) Text by Kevin Dann Apr 5, 2023 Scattered amongst the 18,257 watercolor, crayon, chalk, charcoal, and color pencil drawings of folk, decorative, and industrial art executed between 1936 and 1942 for the Index of American Design (IAD) are a handful of aerial views of handsome country estates, whose curvilinear drives meander through sweeping lawns, clumps of evergreen trees, and arabesque flowerbeds bordered by neatly cropped topiary and hedgerows. Some of the picturesque landscapes are punctuated with craggy bedrock knolls and steep escarpments. A few of the drawings include close-up views of fountains, gazebos, benches, and lawn ornaments. Mostly labeled “Blackwell’s Survey”, and occasionally bearing the date “1860”, these watercolors depict the semi-rural terrain of northern Manhattan just before it began to urbanize in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Assembled under the direction of muralist George Stonehill, the images of more than two-dozen country estates in upper Manhattan’s Audubon Park, Fort Washington, Carmansville, Tubby Hook, and Kings Bridge (now coalesced into the Washington Heights, Fort George, and Inwood neighborhoods) were exhibited in the summer of 1936 at the Arden Gallery on Park Avenue. The Index of American Design had been born but a few blocks away the previous summer when Ramona Javitz, artist and curator of the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection, and Ruth Reeves, a textile designer who frequently used the NYPL collection for design inspiration, conceived a project that would create a chronicle of American design to rival the Library’s massive Eurocentric archive. Though historical American gardens had originally been one of the Index’s intended documentary subjects, this suite of drawings was one of the only projects in the vast IAD oeuvre to capture America’s most transient treasure, the landscape. The impetus came from art historian William Schack. As Head Research Worker of the IAD’s Historic Gardens Unit, he had stumbled upon a manuscript survey executed between 1860 and 1864 by engineer E. R. Blackwell, who had been tasked by New York City to lay out streets above 155th Street, the terminus of the city’s 1811 grid plan. Perhaps stunned to find such a well-preserved Arcadia so close to the heart of America’s premier metropolis, Blackwell had not only shown the estate buildings and grounds on the survey map, but drafted enlarged renderings on the back of the manuscript. After reproducing the views in Blackwell’s renderings, seven IAD artists — influenced by the pioneering landscape architecture pattern books of Andrew Jackson Downing, Jacob Weidenmann, and their own prodigious imaginations — supplied color, shade, and texture far beyond the elements recorded by Blackwell. IAD artists were typically instructed to hew closely to documentary representation, and to resist the very creative interpretation that their renderings were meant to inspire in peers who might use the Index images for their own design endeavors. In these watercolors, however, the Victorian era estate landscape was given a distinctly modernist aesthetic; the artists’ renderings might have come straight from a contemporary issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine. The 1860s — when the Blackwell survey concluded and the breaking up of the upper Manhattan estates started in earnest — is considered the beginning of American landscape architecture as a formal profession and practice. A revised history of both landscape architecture and conservation in New York might reach back farther to the older estates depicted in the images gathered here, which Wall Street brokers and bankers, publishers, department store magnates, and real estate speculators fashioned in concert with their wives, children, and hired hands. The Audubon Homestead was built in 1842 by artist-naturalist John James Audubon and his wife Lucy, whose family nickname “Minnie” was given to the fourteen-acre farm they called “Minnie’s Land”. Growing up on the estate of his merchant and stockbroker father George Blake Grinnell, naturalist and Forest & Stream editor George Bird Grinnell took his earliest tutelage in natural history from their neighbor Lucy Audubon. The legendary Eliza Jumel, ex-wife of Aaron Burr, began gardening on the Jumel Estate in 1815, when laborers — very possibly enslaved — planted the “Bonaparte Cypresses” brought back from the Tuileries Garden by her wine merchant husband Stephen. Like most of his well-heeled Fort Washington neighbors, New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett resisted the city’s encroaching urbanization initiative, certain that this landscape had a different destiny: There is nothing in the suburbs of London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna or any city in Europe to compare with it. If it is kept out of the hands of jobbers and speculators, and allowed to grow up, as it is doing, under the direction of the proprietors, it will become in ten or fifteen years one of the most beautiful faubourgs of any city in the world, and infinitely a superior location for the fine residences of merchants and others to Fifth Avenue or the Central Park. Less than a year after Bennett’s death in 1918, the executors of his estate auctioned off five hundred building lots; his graciously curving cinder-covered drives, ornate parterre, and other plantings soon vanished beneath macadam and modern “garden” apartment buildings. The gallery below includes all of the Index of American Design renderings based on the Blackwell Survey. They are arranged roughly in geographical order — progressing northward from 155th Street to the island’s end at Spuyten Duyvil Creek.

public-domain-review

Apr 5, 2023

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:39.109016

utsuro-bune

Unidentified Floating Object: Edo Images of Utsuro-bune Text by Hunter Dukes Jun 8, 2023 Sometime in the early months of 1803, an alien ship came ashore on the coast of Japan. Fishermen thought it was one of their own and rowed out to tow this object bobbing in the waves. It was not. The vessel looked like a cauldron, rice pot, or pod — its bottom was forged from some kind of heavy metal; the top seemed to be rosewood, lacquered and inset with latticed glass. On the beach, villagers marveled at the advanced engineering, and peering through the opaque windows, they noticed something writhing. Just then, a panel flung open on the hull and out stepped a being that looked almost human. . . Or so the various sources tell us, with varying levels of contradiction. This utsuro-bune (hollow or vacant ship) appears in at least twelve literary sources from the late Edo period. The most notable, perhaps, is Toen shōsetsu (1825) by Bakin Takizawa (Kyokutei) — a fourteen-volume collection of gossip and gathered tales. We find a series of perplexing details in the eleventh volume of this work, during an account titled Utsuro-bune no Banjyo (A Foreign Woman in a Hollow Vessel). The alien ship, measuring about five meters in diameter, was discovered on a beach in the Hitachi Province. Its adolescent inhabitant was incomparably beautiful. Her red hair had white highlights; some speculated it was made of fur. She wore a dress crafted from a strange material, which the local women rather liked, for it could be kept tight on the top and loose near her ankles. She grasped a wooden box firmly and refused to let it go. From evidence gathered in the vessel, her species seemed to drink water and subsist on mince and cake. She spoke no Japanese. On the beach, they fantasized that she was a foreign princess fleeing an unhappy marriage. This would explain the box — for some believed it contained a dead lover’s severed head — and the alien writing system inscribed on the vessel, which made them assume she was “a British, Bengali, or American princess”. (The reproductions of these symbols, such as in the rightward column of the image above, make us wonder otherwise.) In a cruel and slightly comic resolution, the villagers decide to send the alien back to where it came from. Not out of fear or hatred, but frugality. In Shoichi Kamon’s translation: ※※Indexed under…Writingon alien vessel If information about this incident is relayed to the lord of the territory, we may be ordered to inspect this woman and the boat, which would be a costly endeavor. Since there is a precedent that this kind of boat should be cast back out to sea, we had better put her inside the boat and send it away. From a humanitarian viewpoint, this treatment is too cruel for her. However, this treatment would be her destiny. The account in Toen shōsetsu ends with a curious bit of editorializing. The tale is signed by Kinrei, thought to be a pseudonym of Okitsugu Takizawa, but concludes with a postscript by his father, Bakin. He recalls reading an account of Japanese travelers in Russia, who witnessed women using white hair powder for formal dress. He thus relays that “she may have been a woman who lived in a Russian dependency. More detailed study on this is required.” Was a Russian, American, or Bengali woman really cast back into the sea two hundred years ago? Or is this simply a tall tale? Were it not for a resemblance between utsuro-bune and the UFOs nicknamed “flying saucers” in the mid-twentieth century, these images might have taken their place firmly alongside the other Edo ghosts and monsters. Yet ufologists are hesitant to let the supposed facts decay into fiction or castaway narratives. In The Mystery of Utsuro-Bune (2019), for instance, Shoichi Kamon believes it is “not unreasonable” to think that this event actually happened, and hopes that the story “may possibly be a key to solving the mystery of modern UFOs”. For those seeking an earthy explanation, we might look to the period in which the stories appeared. In his down-to-business analysis of the incident, “Did a Close Encounter of the Third Kind Occur on a Japanese Beach in 1803” (2000), Kazuo Tanaka discusses utsuro-fune: a genre of folktale that feigns to remember the Ur-scene of Japanese immigration — when people arrived to the archipelago in dugouts and small seafaring vessels — in order to boost the political legitimacy of a family’s rule. “The typical story of the folklore is that an ancestor of a family was a foreign noblewoman who crossed the sea by boat”. Folklorist Kunio Yanagita, who extensively studied utsuro-fune myths, believed they are governed by a law — legend becomes history. These stories were embellished over time, and the sea-crossing vessels morphed into the ornate watercrafts through cultural amnesia. Couple this genre with the Edo period’s isolationism from international exchange — remembering that foreign ships entered Japanese waters with increasing frequency at the turn of the nineteenth century — and perhaps we end up with something like the utsuro-bune tales, in which the anxiety and excitement of an ethnic other appropriate the literary form historically used to shore up national identity. In a variant of the story, illustrated below, an empty ship washes up on the beach, its surface and interior almost entirely black. Shoichi Kamon points out that Western ships coming into contact with the Japanese coast at this time were called Kuro-fune (black ships), due to their waterproofing by tar.

public-domain-review

Jun 8, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:39.784323

nuuttipukki

Season’s Bleatings: Finnish Photographs of the Nuuttipukki (1928) Text by Hunter Dukes Nov 28, 2023 A goat thing lurks behind the barn. There are horns and an empty skull, but its fleece looks thieved from a sheep. Where you might expect a tail, there’s only a truss of twigs — a sauna vihta, made for whipping flesh. It appears to be wearing boots. This is nuuttipukki, and he has come to slurp your booze and feast on scraps. You must let him in. “Good Tuomas brought Christmas”, a Finnish saying tells us, “and bad Nuutti took it away”. Appearing in written sources from the mid-nineteenth century, and suspected to originate much earlier, nuuttipukki (aka nuutipukki, knuutipukki, knuuttipukki, or knuutinpukki) appears on Saint Knut’s Day, January 13, the end of the Christmas season in Finland. Once possibly part of a fertility rite associated with the harvest festival Kekri — in which shamans donned bovid horns — this seasonal goat became Christianized in the Santa Clause–like figure of joulupukki, literally “Christmas goat”, part of a wider Yule tradition in northern Europe. Nuuttipukit, on the other hand, have shades of Krampus: they do not bring presents to children, but roam together in flocks, knocking on doors and grazing on beer and leftover casseroles. In earlier times, these goats were eligible, single men, but remained anonymous, so as not to attract the attention of the dead. Although their costumes and behavior could be frightening, it was considered bad luck to turn away a knocking nuutti. They wore birchbark or leather masks, and draped themselves in skins, coats, or straw, sometimes brandishing swords. Since kegs ran low after Christmas, nuuttipukit often drank the thick, cloudy dregs at a barrel’s bottom, and became associated with yeast. Havoc ensued if a goat’s thirst went unslaked. According to legend, after exiting a house, they occasionally wrote receipts on its walls, notes to future goat boys that a debt had been paid. A version of the tradition lives on in southwestern Finland, especially the region of Satakunta, and the Åland Islands, although the drunk and randy goat bachelors have been replaced by children, and the pantry-raiding by song and pantomime. Finland’s Nordic neighbors have their own goaty tendencies: Norwegians have been known to don disguises and go julebukking; and Swedish citizens of Gävle erect an annual goat effigy that makes The Wicker Man seem almost run of the mill. The photographs of nuuttipukit collected below were taken in 1928 near the town of Lunkaa in the municipality of Tammela by Toivo Kakoranta, a Finnish folklorist, intelligence officer, and magazine editor, who helped preserve regional stories and dialects in the tradition of Elias Lönnrot. Along with these images, you can enjoy a cheery holiday song collected near Heinola in 1914: I fed the Nuutti, I gave the Nuutti drinkI put the Nuutti in the corner to sleep.The Nuutti slept in its filth, sinking into its rags.That over there . . .if something is lying over there then I am probably naughty,if I come round to yours. Special thanks to Emma Vehviläinen.

public-domain-review

Nov 28, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:40.768892

unionization-of-central-europe

Divide and Concur: A Radical Plan for Peace in Europe (1920) Text by Hunter Dukes Nov 2, 2023 Published in Vienna a year after Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles, Die Unionisierung Mitteleuropas! (The Unionization of Central Europe!) anticipated not only the Second World War but also the coming European Union. “Does anyone really seriously believe that the current peace agreements have put an end to the idea of revenge [Revancheidee] of individual tribes?” asked the anonymous author, who wrote this twenty-four-page pamphlet under the initials P. A. M. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empire had suffered the “death blow” (Todesstoß). The Habsburg dynasty, upon which the sun once never set, “disappeared from the throne overnight”. The Allies had won, but animosity and divisiveness were haunting Europe, festering away in fields scarred with trenches, bullet-pocked homes. If “world peace” was a possible horizon, it would have to be worked toward gradually, starting with economic and cultural unification. According to P.A.M., war arose from nationalism, and nationalism could be overcome with a “Union”, consisting of a common flag, monetary system, time zone, postal service, and language. Upon forming the Union, Europe should immediately revise its school systems, allocating half of all teaching hours to Esperanto and the other half to a student’s mother tongue. After twenty-five years, there would be enough widespread command of Esperanto for it to serve as the language of the Union’s defense forces. After another twenty years, Esperanto was to become the language of politics. Eventually citizens will vote on whether their mother tongues are even needed anymore. The most bizarre aspect of The Unionization of Central Europe! is P.A.M.’s proposed canton system, which almost makes the Berlin Conference and Sykes-Picot Agreement look like ethnically sensitive approaches to territory distribution in comparison. To visualize this system, P.A.M.’s pamphlet came with foldout maps: “The New Europe with Lasting Peace”, and a slightly smaller map proposing a unification of European colonies in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, “The Colonies of the Union.” The center of the Union was to be Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral. From here, on the map, twenty-four cantons radiate out in all directions, named for their capital cities and overlaid with color that designates their residents’ ethnolinguistic identity: Roman, German, Slav, or Magyar. Kanton München runs from Vienna to the Bay of Biscay; Kanton Budapest fans out eastward to the Black Sea; Spain, Italy, the Nordics, and other nations outside of Central Europe were exempt from the plan. There are alternative arrangements, but P.A.M. assures his reader that he has chosen “the most advantageous and fair” division, which will instantly resolve the Balkan question and all other tensions. In a kind of wonderful inversion of concerns, P.A.M. spends more time on the details — outlining, for instance, the design, denominations, and iconography of the Union’s currency — than he does explaining how, exactly, this might all work. Since most of Europe’s problems can be solved by cutting it up like an overshared pie, he turns instead toward future threats to the Union: the East. To prevent “cultural upheaval” and incursions by “Asian peoples”, soldiers would occupy a fifty-kilometer no man’s land, where, when not fending off invasion, they could freely farm and marry. The pamphlet’s politics run the gamut. “Gypsy” children will be placed under state protection, and if parents complain, they are to be “expelled from the Union forever”. Schools are to be placed in forests due to the aromatic air (würzigen Waldesluft); factories that emit heavy smoke or pollutive noise must be relocated away from the capital; and imperial colonies should be consolidated, for this is the only way the Union can obtain, at a good price, “the raw materials that it absolutely needs for processing and producing cultural products”. The government of the Union is to be built on the tenets of consociationalist power sharing. At first, a Frenchman will be president, a Pole will serve as Minister of Agriculture, and a Hungarian will oversee transport and nutrition. Every three years, these departments are to be reallocated to a different canton. Swiss law is to rule the land, and citizens will be discouraged from marrying within their ethnic group. Every male must complete compulsory military service: two years of active duty — split into a year of state infrastructural labor and a year of military service — followed by eighteen years as a reservist. Land ownership will be capped at a thousand yokes (about 1400 acres, or 6000 square meters), and larger plots will be seized by the state. Wealthy individuals can opt out of the mandate for intermixed marriage, which was meant to encourage the dissolution of sociopolitical difference, but they must forfeit a significant percentage of their assets. While optional retirement begins at fifty-five, no one can work past sixty-five, as this creates youth unemployment, and those unfit for work will be provided for by the state. As everyone will have the ability to lead a life of “moderate prosperity” — due, in large part, to a massive network of colonies whose citizens reap none of the rewards offered to Central Europeans — “class struggle” and “the hatred of Capitalism” will naturally subside by itself. After a century, it is presumed that all divisions of nation and people will dissolve into a unified whole. As if shielding himself from potential critics until the genius of his vision began to manifest in Europe, P.A.M. filed details about his true name and profession with a notary, which were only to be released to the public once four nations had considered his proposal. This presumably never happened as historians remain uncertain of the writer’s true identity. Given that the publication of this pamphlet and its cartographic enclosures involved one Otto Maas, some think the author is likely his son, P. A. Mass. Abstract, geometric solutions to land distribution rarely result in lasting peace, especially when imposed from afar. However flawed and idealistic his vision, the core tenet — peace — of P.A.M.’s desired future remains one worth aspiring toward: To many a reader this work may appear as the result of over-excited imagination; someday, though late, the knowledge of truth will gain the upper hand, and perhaps many things which have been stimulated by me here will be realized. This would be the most beautiful reward of my quite selfless, long, and elaborate intellectual work.

public-domain-review

Nov 2, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:41.225710

ikkyu-in-hell

Ikkyū in Hell: Skeletons (1692) Text by Erica X Eisen Oct 31, 2023 “Ikkyū is my true heir, but his ways are wild”: these words, uttered by the fourteenth-century Zen master Kasō, may seem like something of an understatement to those acquainted with his chosen successor. Legends about Ikkyū abound to this day, making it difficult to separate truth from Tokugawa Period invention. The bastard son of Emperor Go-Komatsu, Ikkyū was sent to live at Ankoku-ji Temple when still a child and would soon gravitate toward the austerer strains of Buddhist thought. At twenty-one, grieving the death of his first great teacher, he paddled out to the center of Lake Biwa intending to drown himself but was stopped by the ghost of his mother. Years later, adrift in a boat on a different lake, he would hear the sound of a crow’s call and achieve enlightenment. A man of iconoclastic extremes, Ikkyū adopted the pen name Mad Cloud (Kyōun), authored verses that smash scriptural references together with scatalogical content, and spurned the comforts of his home monastery’s main buildings for a hut he dubbed Blind Donkey Hermitage. He is perhaps most famous, however, for his unabashed love of wine and women. In artworks, Ikkyū is often depicted flanking the Hell Courtesan, Jigoku Dayū, whose name punningly references both the highest (dayū) and lowest (jigoku) rank of Edo Period sex workers, the latter of which is also the Japanese word for the demon realm. A legend recorded in Santo Kyōden’s All Records of Drunken Enlightenment of Our Country (Honchō Suibodai Zenden, 1809) relates how Jigoku Dayū began her path toward spiritual advancement after meeting Ikkyū in the brothel where she worked. Many prints of the two feature the monk with an incongruously serene smile pasted across his face as he lofts a skull above the lady’s head. It is this fame for sinner-sainthood that, at least in the popular imagination, has eclipsed Ikkyū’s significant achievements as an artistic jack-of-all-trades: as a shakuhachi (bamboo flute) player, as a calligrapher, as a practitioner of ink painting, and as a writer. Many of these skills are brought to bear in his book Skeletons (Gaikotsu, ca. 1457), a mixture of poetry and prose that comes down to us in printed editions supposedly replicating a manuscript, now lost, by the monk’s own hand. The text describes a series of visions of animated skeletons that Ikkyū had when he visited an abandoned temple. The lively illustrations testify to their maker’s sardonic sense of humor: he images skeletons dancing, drumming, drinking sake, having sex. In the verse, too, we see glimpses of the monk’s trademark irreverence: If a stoneCan be the mementoOf the dead,Then the tombstoneWould be better as a lavatory. Ikkyū lived during the Muromachi Period, when close ties between the Ashikaga Shogunate and Kyōto’s temples resulted in a flush monastic class quite far from the ascetic ideal of the sangha to which Ikkyū cleaved. As many have pointed out, the monk’s life also coincided with a time of virtually constant conflict — including the devastating Ōnin War — that laid Kyoto to waste amid horrific scenes of violence and upheaval. For all that Skeletons’ titular apparitions frolic and cavort across the page, the dominant tone of the text is one of melancholy and somber contemplation. A number of its poems reference Mount Toribe, whose well-known cremation grounds outside the Kyoto city limits served as a memento mori for the capital’s residents each time they saw its ascending column of smoke. “When the breathing stops and the skin of the body is broken there is no more form, no higher and lower”, Ikkyū writes, cautioning readers about both the fleetingness of existence and the ultimately illusory nature of all things. A similar idea is expressed in certain versions of the Jigoku Dayū tale in which she witnesses Ikkyū dancing with a group of her fellow courtesans: when the group goes behind a screen, the lady is startled to see their solid bodies project ghastly skeletal shadows, as though their flesh had melted away in an instant to reveal a premonition of the death that awaits us all. As time went on, Ikkyū would become increasingly disillusioned by the corruption and worldliness of monastic authorities. In this context, his famous eccentricities begin to take on a different feeling: better to spurn the pieties professed by hypocrites than to submit to the fossilized non-thought of convention. The nickname Mad Cloud was less a sincere self-appraisal, as the Japanese literature scholar Sonja Arntzen explains, than “a way of pointing out his supramundane sanity” amid an ailing establishment increasingly removed from the values it pretended to espouse. In 1447, despairing of the intrigue and backbiting at his home monastery, Ikkyū hiked up to a remote mountain retreat with the intention of starving himself to death. He was saved this time not by his dead mother but by a living cousin, a distant half-relation who had come to occupy the imperial Chrysanthemum Throne in the meantime. Legend has it that this cousin dispatched an emissary begging Ikkyū to desist for the sake of the soul of the nation — by which one might suppose, substituting body natural for body politic, that the emperor meant also for the sake of his own soul as well.

public-domain-review

Oct 31, 2023

Erica X Eisen

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:41.753073

fixed-stars

Behold the Nebulous Smear: ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Sūfī’s Illustrated Book of Fixed Stars (ca. 1430) Text by Brad Fox Sep 21, 2023 In 349 AH (960–61 AD) the Persian astronomer ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Sūfī was visiting the court of Būyid caliph ‘Adud al-Dawlah in Isfahan. Shortly after his arrival, another learned gentleman known to be well-read in astronomical matters stopped by. When night fell, the caliph asked his two visitors to identify a star that should be visible above the eastern horizon. When the other astronomer struggled to answer, al-Sūfī saw that his colleague may have memorized a few astral charts, but he had spent little time using them to read the night sky. He explained to the caliph that a calculation error in Ptolemy’s Almagest — a cosmological almanac that had been translated into Arabic the previous century — meant the stars had shifted from the positions plotted by the Alexandrian eight hundred years before. In order to read the stars now, you had to add twelve longitudinal degrees. There are leading scientists, al-Sūfī bemoaned, who have never confirmed the books they read with direct observation. The caliph hired Al-Sūfī as his personal tutor and put him in charge of a new imperial observatory in Shiraz. Three years later al-Sūfī presented the caliph with the Kitāb al-Kawākib al-Thābitah Musawwar (Illustrated Book of Fixed Stars), an expansion on the Almagest that became the greatest astronomical work of its age. Portable and illustrated, it was not meant simply as a display of learning but as an aid in direct observation. Each constellation is represented twice: once reflecting how the starry forms would look to an observer looking down at a celestial globe, a second time reflecting how they appear while gazing up at the night sky. Ptolemy’s Almagest contained tables identifying names and positions of over a thousand stars that could be seen with the naked eye. The Kitāb al-Kawākib al-Thābitah Musawwar lists several bodies not mentioned by Ptolemy and includes traditional Arabic names for certain constellations and stars. To Arab stargazers, for example, the six stars that form the head of Cetus (the Whale) are known as al-kaff al-jadhmā — “the mutilated hand”. The five in the central body are called al-na’āmāt — “the ostriches” — and the star on the tip of the tail is called al-difdi’ al-thānī: “the second frog”. Meanwhile, in the area where Greeks found the constellation Andromeda, Arabs saw two fish. Al-Sūfī combined the images, so that the fish bisected Andromeda’s body. A star in one creature’s mouth, overlapping with Andromeda’s belt, is particularly large. In his accompanying notes al-Sūfī calls it, descriptively, al-latkhā al-sahābiya — “the nebulous smear”. This turns out to be the Andromeda galaxy, and al-Sūfī’s reference to it is the first ever written mention of a galaxy other than the Milky Way. During the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 656 AH (1258 AD), a copy of the Illustrated Book of Fixed Stars was saved by astronomer Nasīr al-Dīn al Tūsī, who offered it to Hulagu Khan and convinced him to build an observatory. By the fifteenth century, this distressed volume found its way to the Timurid sultan Ulugh Bey in Samarkand, who commissioned a new version and, like al-Sūfī, became the greatest astronomer of his age. The pages shown here are from Ulugh Bey’s manuscript, now held at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. Other versions can be found in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

public-domain-review

Sep 21, 2023

Brad Fo

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:42.256407

frankenstein-monster-reading-list

Humanity 101: The Syllabus of Frankenstein's Monster Text by Hunter Dukes Nov 8, 2023 Hiding in an unused structure connected to a cottage, Frankenstein’s monster becomes transfixed by the written word. Through a chink in the wall, he watches Felix read to his foreign lover and teach her how to speak his language, and piggybacks off of these lessons in language and letters. “I discovered that he uttered many of the same sounds when he read as when he talked. I conjectured, therefore, that he found on the paper signs for speech which he understood, and I ardently longed to comprehend these also”. Soon after, while searching for his humanity or its lack, the monster stumbles across a “leathern portmanteau” containing three books: Milton’s Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Noble Lives of the Greeks and Romans, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. What happens next speaks to the “human” in humanistic education: these texts do not merely reflect the “human” condition, they mold their readers into subjects that can be accurately named as such. “I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books”, he says to Frankenstein. “They produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings, that sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection.” The devilish creature sees himself in Milton’s Satan, and the power struggle that arises between creator and creation, finds a vocabulary for his dejection in Goethe’s “despondency and gloom”, and transcends personal concerns through Plutarch’s focus on “the heroes of past ages”. All the while he asks himself the most profoundly human of questions: “Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?” And yet, an autodidactic monster is no match for the dehumanizing judgements of society. His soul may look human — even more than human, thanks to his education — but his world will never let him be so. The creature’s reading spree ends with a reflexive moment of textuality: he finds Frankenstein’s journal in the pockets of a borrowed garment, essentially reading himself back into the early chapters of the novel in which he lives. Brought to life deep inside of multiple nested frame narratives, the monster becomes an allegory of writing itself — including the works by Goethe, Milton, and Plutarch enfolded into Shelley’s pages. Once words are birthed into the world, they live on in ways their creators can neither control nor fully imagine, and might indeed meet monstrous ends. Below you will find Frankenstein’s creature’s reading list, complete with his thoughts and feelings about these texts. In the Sorrows of Werter, besides the interest of its simple and affecting story, so many opinions are canvassed and so many lights thrown upon what had hitherto been to me obscure subjects that I found in it a never-ending source of speculation and astonishment. The gentle and domestic manners it described, combined with lofty sentiments and feelings, which had for their object something out of self, accorded well with my experience among my protectors and with the wants which were for ever alive in my own bosom. But I thought Werter himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined; his character contained no pretension, but it sank deep. The disquisitions upon death and suicide were calculated to fill me with wonder. I did not pretend to enter into the merits of the case, yet I inclined towards the opinions of the hero, whose extinction I wept, without precisely understanding it. The volume of Plutarch’s Lives which I possessed contained the histories of the first founders of the ancient republics. This book had a far different effect upon me from the Sorrows of Werter. I learned from Werter’s imaginations despondency and gloom, but Plutarch taught me high thoughts; he elevated me above the wretched sphere of my own reflections, to admire and love the heroes of past ages. Many things I read surpassed my understanding and experience. I had a very confused knowledge of kingdoms, wide extents of country, mighty rivers, and boundless seas. But I was perfectly unacquainted with towns and large assemblages of men. The cottage of my protectors had been the only school in which I had studied human nature, but this book developed new and mightier scenes of action. I read of men concerned in public affairs, governing or massacring their species. I felt the greatest ardour for virtue rise within me, and abhorrence for vice, as far as I understood the signification of those terms, relative as they were, as I applied them, to pleasure and pain alone. Induced by these feelings, I was of course led to admire peaceable lawgivers, Numa, Solon, and Lycurgus, in preference to Romulus and Theseus. The patriarchal lives of my protectors caused these impressions to take a firm hold on my mind; perhaps, if my first introduction to humanity had been made by a young soldier, burning for glory and slaughter, I should have been imbued with different sensations. But Paradise Lost excited different and far deeper emotions. I read it, as I had read the other volumes which had fallen into my hands, as a true history. It moved every feeling of wonder and awe that the picture of an omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting. I often referred the several situations, as their similarity struck me, to my own. Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature, but I was wretched, helpless, and alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.

public-domain-review

Nov 8, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:42.456609

arbeid-van-mars

The Works of Mars (1671) Text by Hugh Aldersey-Williams Sep 7, 2023 It is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity. The construction of fortifications, for instance . . .—W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (2001) What is the peculiar appeal of military architecture? Whether Norman castle or Cold War concrete, there is a kind of sublimity that belongs to defensive design. It stems obviously from the massive scale of construction, and from the luxury of uncompromised execution that generous defence budgets afford. But there is also pleasure to be taken in the unornamented purity of style of structures that have been built solely for practical ends. These qualities are abundant in the work of the seventeenth-century French military engineer Allain Manesson Mallet. Born in Paris in 1630, Manesson studied mathematics before becoming a soldier (he added the name Mallet in tribute to his teacher). In 1663, he was posted to Alentejo as an army engineer in the service of the Portuguese king Alfonso VI, where he fortified chateaux, until the Treaty of Lisbon in 1668. He returned to France with an appointment as mathematics instructor at the court of Louis XIV. He recorded his military ideas in a highly successful manual, The Works of Mars (i.e. “the art of war”) in 1671. A year later came German and Dutch editions (the source of the images above), even though France was by then at war with the Netherlands. Manesson’s book encompassed theories of fortifications from their origins in designs developed in the sixteenth century by Michelangelo and the architect Vincenzo Scamozzi, including more recent innovations of French and Dutch engineers. He included numerous “star forts” with four, five, six, seven, and nine points or bastions, as well as less regular structures designed to protect whole cities such as Lisbon. The perimeters were designed to eliminate blind spots and allow for firing outward at all angles from positions protected against attacking fire. Manesson even included diagrams showing how to generate the optimum angles of the bastions from a pure circle using geometry alone. The strongly geometric structures had emerged as a response to the introduction of gunpowder-operated firepower, and drifted slowly north from Italian city states to the trading cities of northern Europe. The symmetry was formative in the planning of “ideal cities”, where the need for defence might have dissipated, but the geometric style was retained for aesthetic reasons. The success of The Works of Mars depended greatly on the many fine engravings it contained. These were the work of the Dutch artist Romeyn de Hooghe, who lived for a time in Paris before settling in Amsterdam. A caricaturist, satirist, propagandist, pornographer, and spy as well as an illustrator and engraver, de Hooghe was one of the most remarkable characters in the artistic ferment of the Dutch “Golden Age”. Clues to the full range of de Hooghe’s technique are present in the graphic sketches that fill the margins of the technical designs — here an action-packed exchange of pistol fire, there a rolling perspective of a field of battle. De Hooghe was a political cartoonist first of all, “the virtuoso of patriotic imagery”, according to historian Simon Schama. In 1667, for example, he produced a comic strip–like record of the signing of the Treaty of Breda ending the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Later, he revived the 1600s tradition of so-called “atrocity prints”, the propagandist cartoons that had once been used to vilify the Spanish, to rouse hatred against the new French enemy. His drawings showed the French playing football with Dutch heads and children being burned alive. In one of his most dramatic engravings, a dyke is breaking, with enemy soldiers, peasants, and horses and carts all suddenly washed away (six hundred were drowned in the incident) while the star fort of Coevorden, which he had painstakingly drawn in geometrical accuracy for Manesson’s book, squats in the background, powerless against the force of natural events. In Amsterdam, de Hooghe ran a large studio producing posters, portraits, and pamphlets as well as illustrations for books of stories by everyone from Boccaccio to la Fontaine. He set up one of the first satirical magazines in Europe. Never shy of controversy, he made everything from diagrams for a self-defence manual to prints celebrating the art of necromancy. His pornographic drawings, including a volume titled “The Wandering Whore” illustrating sexual positions, earned him a conviction for blasphemy and indecency. The crowning of the Dutch Prince of Orange as William III of England in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 yielded a graphic commemoration by de Hooghe of the Catholic king James II being deposed. Later, working as a spy, he exposed an Italian plan to destroy the dykes that protected Dutch cities from flooding. In 1706, he proclaimed the Dutch Republic the “freest and safest state” in the world . When he died two years later, his widow burned his erotic art to avoid any further trouble with the authorities. De Hooghe’s fine draughtsmanship disguised one thing, however. Impregnable though they might look, the star forts made for obvious targets, and were vulnerable to sustained onslaught or siege, with no means of regroup or escape for those pinned behind their walls. Long after the concept had been metaphorically breached, military engineers continued nevertheless to design ever more ambitious forts, entranced perhaps by the symbolic ideality of the structures so apparent in the plan view of drawings such as de Hooghe’s. They were rendered obsolete for good with the advent of more powerful artillery in the nineteenth century. Their legacy today is a series of highly visitable historic sites scattered throughout European countries and their former colonial outposts: Palmanova and Lucca in Italy, Berwick-upon-Tweed and Tilbury in Britain, Almeida in Portugal, Copenhagen, Fort George in Nova Scotia, Fort William in Kolkata, Zamość in Poland, Naarden in the Netherlands, Ticonderoga in New York State to name a few. These, and of course works of art, such as de Hooghe’s, and the numerous treatises on defensive architecture by Manesson, Jean Errard, and others. As W. G. Sebald writes: “No one today, said Austerlitz, has the faintest idea of the boundless amount of theoretical writings on the building of fortifications . . .”

public-domain-review

Sep 7, 2023

Hugh Aldersey-Williams

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:42.939065

fire-tests-with-textiles

Your Flannelette Cure: Fire Tests with Textiles (1910) Text by Sasha Archibald Oct 19, 2023 Ballerinas on fire fascinated Victorians. It was an erotic, potent image, the subject of numerous prints: dewy, ethereal virgins licked by flames. But it was also a real thing, in that actual ballerinas caught fire on stage and died of horrific burns. In one such fire, for instance, in Philadelphia in 1861, a dancer’s tutu blazed, others rushed to help, and eight ballerinas burned to death, some in view of the audience. The charred remains of French ballerina Emma Livry’s costume are held in the collection of the Musée-bibliothèque de l'Opéra in Paris; the famous dancer lifted her tutu so that the tulle wouldn’t be smushed when she sat down to rest, and the tiny whoosh of air swelled a fatal gas lamp. These deaths by fire grabbed headlines, but most others did not; it was shockingly commonplace for a woman to die because her clothing ignited. The problem was threefold. First, light was provided by flame. Second, fashions were so voluminous they couldn’t be closely controlled. And third, fabric. Some fabrics — lace, netting, gauze, tulle, muslin — were far more flammable than others. They ignited almost instantly, and burned fast and hot. Others, such as wool, were naturally fire-retardant. Women’s clothes were more often made of the former than the latter. The number of fatalities increased in the last decade of the nineteenth century when a new fabric entered the market, flannelette. Flannelette was a poor woman’s flannel — a cotton calico that had been treated on one side with bladed rollers and brushes that abraded the surface, raising a kind of fiber fluff. Like its namesake, flannelette promised warmth, which was desirable on its own, but also thought to prevent illness. It was used extensively for undergarments, pajamas, and children’s clothes. The fabric turned out to be extraordinarily flammable, “almost as dangerous, if touched with fire, as gunpowder”, wrote a contemporary observer. Like dry brush in a forest, the buttery nap accelerated fire, such that a spark at a nightgown’s hem could spread to the collar in fifteen seconds. As the deaths increased, Britain’s coroners began raising alarms. Some coroners went so far as to suggest that flannelette should be banned, which is when one of the largest manufacturers, Manchester’s Messrs Whipp Bros & Tod, finally took action. The company hired chemists and fire scientists to determine if flannelette could possibly be made less flammable. It was a difficult ask. Existing fire retardants were unsuitable for clothing — they turned fabric dusty, flaky, or clammy. Messrs Whipp Bros & Tod needed something that wouldn’t affect the tactility, color, or smell of the flannelette, and was organic enough for skin contact. Most challenging of all, the retardant had to stay put through repeated washings. It wasn’t practical for the average flannelette consumer to dip the garment over and over, in a separate tub, at extra expense, with time for drying before and after. The images above document just a tiny fraction of the ten thousand burning tests ultimately performed. The process was rigorous. Messrs Whipp Bros & Tod’s experiments controlled for weather, clothing size, number of washes, and the specific type of washing, whether by machine or hand, with elaborate specs for each. (The handwashing process, for instance, entailed fabric being: “rinsed in cold water, then washed and boiled in Field’s pure oil soap and Brunner Mond’s alkali, then rinsed once with warm water, rinsed twice with cold water, centrifuged, dried in moderate heat, ironed.”) Ignition by candle was compared to ignition by gas lamp. The basic experiment, run over and over again, was to set fabric on fire, watch it burn for sixty seconds, and then document the percentage of total destruction. Messrs Whipp Bros & Tod ultimately concocted a product that did very well in these tests, well enough to earn approval from the British Fire Prevention Committee. A size large nightgown made of ordinary flannelette and washed and ironed 10 times was more than half in cinders after 60 seconds, whereas a size large nightgown made of the new treated flannelette, also washed and ironed 10 times, remained entirely intact even at 120 seconds. (The photos show a tiny swatch burned out of the hemline, and no other damage.) “Non-Flam Flannelette” hit the market in 1910, with hopes that it would replace flannelette entirely. Even more lifesaving was the switch from gas to electric light. There is always another way to skin a cat.

public-domain-review

Oct 19, 2023

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:43.409286

madame-b-album

The “Madame B Album” (ca. 1870s) Text by Sasha Archibald Sep 6, 2023 The “Madame B Album” was not made for public viewing, though the artist spared no care on its design. The book is a leatherbound volume of some hundred photocollages. Victorians enjoyed their photos in myriad ways — trading, posing, and arranging, inscribing winking captions, customizing rings and lockets. Photocollage is part of this domestic feminine milieu, and yet separate from it; collagists treated the photo irreligiously, as raw material for artmaking, something to be used, and used up. There is no substantive distinction between nineteenth-century photocollage and collage as it is understood today. Madame B’s primary practice was to paint elaborate, fantastical watercolor settings for photographic portraits of friends, family, and pets. She pastes photos in all sorts of whimsical places: on the tail feathers of a turkey, within the divots of a blue infinity chain, nestled in bouquets and lily pads. Men in suits form the eyespots of a butterfly’s wings, and women with muffs balance in a snow-speckled tree. Photos dangle from a bird’s beak and a horse’s yoke; seven are ensnared in a spider’s web. Madame B’s meticulousness is almost maniacal, her touch as fine as one might expect from a miniaturist. On one exceedingly delicate collage, thousands of minute pale lines suggest crazing, the hairline webbing that appears when ceramic and glaze imperfectly bond. On another, jagged blush-colored striations indicate marble. Photos are encircled by ribbons and sticks, pine boughs and wrought iron, mica terrazzo, cattails. A picture of a grand building is draped by a curtain of chainmail, each link distinct. As is true of so much art and craft produced by Victorian women, the album is unsigned; the Art Institute of Chicago acquired it without any idea of the maker. They assigned it its enigmatic title because the first page features an elaborate doorway monogrammed “B”. Close inspection and curatorial sleuthing revealed that the artist knew French, and had also spent a great deal of time in Sweden and later, Italy. She was a skilled watercolorist and draftswoman, suggesting an aristocratic education. The various circles of acquaintance represented in the book’s cartes de visite were carefully layered: who might have possessed a photo of Sweden’s king, Italy’s queen, a Russian family surnamed Polovstov, a diplomat from Württemberg? By educated guess, the name eventually attached to the “Madame B Album” was Marie-Blanche Hennelle Fournier, known as “Blanche” and married to a career diplomat, Hughes-Marie Henri Fournier. Blanche had a daughter, Pauline. She loved her husband, or at least suggested as much through the symbology of the flowers that adorn his photo. She lost interest in her album, and left many collages unfinished. Surely, she never imagined it acquired by a museum, and paged by strangers all over the world.

public-domain-review

Sep 6, 2023

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:43.871728

rabot-photographs-of-the-arctic

Masters of the Ice: Charles Rabot’s Arctic Photographs (ca. 1881) Text by Erica X Eisen Jan 9, 2024 “They are so beautiful, so magnificent, those deathly solitudes, so strange in their fleeting finery of brilliant colors, that they always leave one with a burning desire to see them again”, Charles Rabot wrote in 1894 of the particular allure of boreal landscapes. Hardly had he returned from a trip to Greenland, as he put it in the preface to his travelogue of the Russian taiga, when “nostalgia for the countries of the north took me” and sent him off on another of the peregrinations that would mark his life. The opening of that book includes a portrait of the author that, while showing nothing of his physical appearance, captures the image of the intrepid explorer that he wished to convey to the world: knee-high leather boots, matching gloves, and face entirely obscured by a thick swaddling of mosquito netting to prevent him from being eaten alive by gnats. A self-styled glaciologist, Rabot undertook four expeditions to the Arctic in his lifetime; when he wasn’t voyaging to polar climes, he was writing about them in his capacity as editor of the journal La géographie or advising the likes of the prince of Monaco on their own itineraries. His written accounts theatrically capture the difficulty of life in these harsh climates, as in a description of the struggles of providing medical care in rural Scandinavia: Each doctor has under their purview a vast area, some as large as one of France’s departments. . . . The shortest trip is a tedious trek in the summer and a voyage of a few days in winter, beneath bursts of snow, in the icy darkness of the northern night. The life of a Norwegian doctor is a veritable study in devotion and sacrifice. Too often, alas! their aid is in vain; before the arrival of the doctor, the sick person has long since passed away. “We’re here for moral support,” one of these excellent men told me sadly. In contrast to the melodramatic style of his writings, Rabot’s photographs of the North are characterized by an abiding sense of stillness. This comes through both in the staginess of his ethnographic photos of Sami communities and his landscapes, where wide-angle shots in soft semi-shades of black and white give the impression of an infinite and unchanging expanse. With their fuzzy light, with their areas of grayish blur, many of the latter photos appear almost to be frozen at the heart of a block of ice — or perhaps glimpsed through a glass darkly. If there are any people to be seen in these snow-pied expanses, they are tiny afterthoughts so overwhelmed by the whiteness around them that any individuating features are obliterated completely — to the extent that these figures seem less like the protagonists of the shots and more like another accidental void bitten into the negative by the frost. This is the push-pull logic presented by Rabot and other so-called explorers of the era: the landscape is unconquerable; I myself have conquered it. Proficient in multiple Nordic languages, the French Rabot seemed to have a particular affinity for Norwegian culture and exerted considerable effort campaigning on behalf of that country’s territorial claim to what was then called Spitsbergen (modern-day Svalbard). As part of the so-called “Literature Lobby”, he edited, authored, and translated numerous articles advancing Norway’s cause, even going so far as to testify at the Paris Peace Conference regarding the matter. “No other nation compares with them in their geographical discoveries, the number and accuracy of their surveys, and the extent of their scientific results in this archipelago”, he argued in a piece that veers between geography and jingoism, later stating that “nearly all the expeditions that have visited this Arctic land have engaged Norwegians as ice masters.” Rabot also wrote in favor of Denmark’s colonization of Greenland, calling it a “philanthropic” project in which the sole aim of Danish authorities was “to better the situation of the natives and lift them bit by bit out of their condition as savages.” While he could stirringly describe the destructive might of nature at such extreme latitudes, Rabot was also aware, over a century before our time, of the heavy toll that human interference was taking on the regions he studied. As Alexandre Simon-Ekeland points out, “Only one travel account [of Norway’s North Cape], written by Charles Rabot, overtly recommended in 1898 that all tourists participate in a whale hunt . . . urg[ing] them to do so fast before the whales disappeared from the region.” That Rabot’s response was not to call for a halt to the commercial activity laying waste to the environments he claimed to so love but to give advice on how best to watch them get sucked dry is a grim intimation of our current moment.

public-domain-review

Jan 9, 2024

Erica X Eisen

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:44.377736

the-landlords-game

The Landlord's Game: Lizzie Magie and Monopoly's Anti-Capitalist Origins (1903) Text by Sasha Archibald Dec 21, 2023 There are few cases of creative and intellectual theft more egregious than the origins of the billion-dollar grossing Monopoly. The short version: a brilliant woman economist invented an anti-capitalist board game that was stolen by a lying, opportunistic man and repackaged as capitalist family fun. In early 1933, Richard Brace Darrow went to a dinner party where he was taught a new game. He had such a good time, and waxed so enthusiastic, his hosts typed up the game’s rules and sent Darrow a copy. Then Darrow proceeded to draw his own version, on a circular piece of oilcloth. (The version he’d played at the dinner party had also been homemade — mass-produced board games were not yet an ordinary commodity.) Darrow was a heater salesman who’d lost his job and times were lean. He decided to take his prototype and pitch the game to Parker Brothers. The rules were exactly the same as those his friends had shared, down to the misspelling of Marven Gardens as Marvin Gardens. Parker Brothers didn’t bite right away, but then they did, and Darrow became a millionaire. Included in every new Monopoly box for decades was a story about how Darrow invented the game while tinkering around in his basement — a self-made man who saved himself from poverty through ingenuity and hard work. Darrow and Parker Brothers stuck to this story, even to the point of suppressing contradictory evidence. Parker Brothers bought up early homemade versions of Monopoly, presumably to have them destroyed, and somehow maneuvered their patent despite existing patents. Everyone in Darrow’s social circle knew the truth and some tried to say so. They were ignored. Perhaps Darrow quelled his conscience by imagining the game had no inventor. In fact, with a bit of effort, he could have tracked her down. She was still alive, and still making games. As was later detailed, Darrow learned the game at the Todds’ house, and the Todds learned it from a friend, Eugene Raiford. Eugene learned it from his brother, Jesse. Jesse learned it from Ruth Hoskins, who taught at a Quaker School in Atlantic City. Ruth learned it in Indianapolis, from someone named Dan Laymen, who had played it in his frat house in college. The frat brothers who taught everyone else to play were Louis and Ferdinand Thun. They learned it from their sister, Wilma, who learned it from her husband Charles Muhlenberg. Charles learned the game from Thomas Wilson, who learned it in his college economics class, with the radical Wharton/UPenn economics professor Scott Nearing. (Nearing played the game with his students until he was fired, in 1915, for criticizing industrial capitalism.) The trail ends here, for Nearing learned the game directly from its remarkable inventor, Elizabeth Magie, or Lizzie, who filed a patent for it in 1903. Lizzie Magie was a provocative, whip-smart nonconformist. Piqued about her dismal salary as a young working woman in the late nineteenth century, she caused a national furor by taking out an ad in a major magazine, describing herself as a “young woman American slave” for sale to the highest-bidding suitor. She filed many patents, not just on Monopoly (which she called The Landlord’s Game), but other games too, and also for a mechanical device that improved the ease of typing — all this at a time when the number of patents filed by women was miniscule, less than 1%. Born in 1866, Magie didn’t marry until she was forty-four, and had no children. She wrote poems, performed in dramatic theater, taught college-level courses in her home, corresponded with Upton Sinclair, and studied economic theory. Her father was close friends with Abraham Lincoln. Both father and daughter were devout followers of the teachings of economist Henry George, whose 1879 treatise Progress and Poverty made the case for a single tax, on land. Like her fellow Georgists, Magie believed that ownership of nature was not possible — the earth was not something that could be owned. Land could, however, be “rented”, thus comprising the single tax. Magie designed The Landlord’s Game to teach and proselytize the principles of Georgism. At first Magie self-published her game, producing a small number of copies she sold to friends. A few years later, she found a publisher in the Economic Game Company, who helped The Landlord’s Game find an audience in “pockets of intellectuals along the eastern seaboard”, writes Mary Pilon, and in Scotland, where Magie debuted a version she called Brer Fox and Rabbit. As the game’s popularity spread, bootlegs sprang up, including the version at the Todd’s dinner party. Monopoly changed in its telephone-like peregrinations. Most of the property names were altered, often in ways specific to the town in which the game was being played. Someone thought to group properties with colors, and the Quaker players, to make the game less raucous, eliminated both dice and the bidding that preceded a property purchase. Darrow hired a graphic artist to draw the now-iconic “Go” and various pictograms, and Magie herself kept fiddling, updating her patent with new properties and rules. Most of these changes were superficial, but one was not. Magie’s original concept included two sets of rules representing the difference between a Georgist and capitalist economy. By one set, players tried to produce equity through a single land tax, such that wealth was evenly distributed and winning the game a collective achievement. By the other, players tried to build monopolies and fleece their opponents. As is obvious, Darrow favored set two. What Magie intended as a forecast of disaster became Monopoly’s sole objective. In November 1935, George Parker visited Magie and finally offered to buy her patent. The offer wasn’t about restitution, but rather part of a corporate strategy to absorb games that threatened Monopoly’s monopoly: Easy Money, Finance, Inflation, and, of course, Magie’s Landlord’s Game. To sweeten the deal, Parker promised that his company would not only market The Landlord’s Game, but also develop two new games of Magie’s design. Magie agreed, and Parker Brothers did as promised, though without much oomph. The Landlord’s Game received little press, and Magie’s subsequent games, King’s Men and Bargain Day, fared poorly. Monopoly, on the other hand, went global. Parker Brothers president Robert Barton later admitted, “Whether [Darrow] got it all from Magie Phillips, whether he got it from somewhere else, we didn’t know. And we cared very little.” Darrow glibly lied, Parker Brothers pretended ignorance, and the collusion worked perfectly for decades. After the umpteenth interview in which Darrow repeated Monopoly’s fake origin story, in 1964, one of his former dinner party friends wrote a letter to the show’s producer, WRCV-TV in Philadelphia. He described precisely where Darrow got the game, and noted the irritation of everyone involved. The letter writer concludes, “There is nothing to be gained by writing you this letter except, perhaps, to vent my feelings and point out . . . that everything in this world is not what it seems to be.” This entire story would have been lost had Parker Brothers not decided to pursue legal action against a Berkeley economist, Ralph Anspach, who began marketing a game he called Anti-Monopoly in 1973. Parker Brothers (by then owned by General Mills) sent Anspach a frightening cease and desist letter. Anspach thought the grounds ridiculous: no one would ever confuse his scrappy Anti-Monopoly (originally christened “Bust the Trust”) with the global sensation Monopoly — so rather than ceasing and desisting, he began digging up the history of the game, to see if there were grounds to contest Parker Brothers’ copyright claim. Indeed, there were. When Anspach realized Parker Brothers was defending a patent built on a house of cards, he took the company to court. The role of Lizzie Magie was a happy research surprise. As for the flip flop at the center of the story — a homemade, anti-capitalist game created by a woman becomes a mass-produced uber-capitalist game that profits a man — that part wasn’t much of a surprise at all.

public-domain-review

Dec 21, 2023

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:44.693869

paper-lantern-catalogue

Chromolithographs of Paper Lanterns (ca. 1880) Text by Hunter Dukes Nov 9, 2023 The chromolithographs collected below, from a late-nineteenth-century catalog published in Baden-Württemberg, advertise paper lanterns in the style of those still carried during St. Martin’s Day celebrations. They speak perhaps to the changing seasons, a last grasping after the green hills and grinning sun lost to summer memories. These lanterns were manufactured by the C. Riethmüller company, founded in 1855 by the eponymous bookseller, which continues to sell balloons, bunting, and other party goods. Originally the lanterns were shaped with scissors and colored by hand. An unexpected demand for the beautiful objects pushed Riethmüller toward industrial methods, and he soon launched a line of Japanese designs, with salesmen representing his goods in Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Austria. An 1886 trade magazine for papermakers recommended visiting the Kirchheim-unter-Teck factory to relax below its charming samples, and describes how the company once offered more than 150 varieties of lantern to a global network of clients. With expertise in pulp and printing, Riethmüller constructed the catalogs as elaborately colored demonstrations of industrial precision. The modern-day St. Martin’s festival on November 11 — celebrated across Europe, but particularly present in German-speaking countries — once had “a pronounced secular character” and was, according to Martin W. Walsh, “a kind of ‘shadow’ Carnival ushering in, instead of ushering out the winter revelling season.” The parallel secular and sacred traditions are maintained to this day, as “Old Halloween” (before the Gregorian calendar, Saint Martin’s Day fell at the beginning of November) is both an important liturgical event and a nondenominational festival of light. Best known for feasts anchored by fatty geese and oxen, “Martelmas” in Britain was historically associated with heavy drinking and hearty revelry: “drinking deepe in tankards large, and bowles of / compasse wide”, as a 1555 text described the festival. Nowadays, especially in the Netherlands, Austria, and Germany, we associate St. Martin’s Day more with innocence and flame rather than the dim fug of a tavern. Lantern parades (Laternelaufen) are held in city streets, as children carry paper lanterns and sing songs to combat autumn’s gloam, strolling toward a bonfire where Glühwein is served to their chaperones. It is not known exactly how lanterns came to be associated with the saint. A figure of charity — famous for cutting his own cloak in two to warm the less fortunate — Martin of Tour’s gift-giving qualities perhaps extend to light itself, coruscating out of lanterns into insatiable darkness.

public-domain-review

Nov 9, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:45.037396

history-of-the-negro-race-in-america

George Washington Williams’ History of the Negro Race in America (1882–83) Text by Dorothy Berry Sep 12, 2023 George Washington Williams (1849–1891) lived the sort of picaresque life not often imagined possible for nineteenth-century African Americans. At the age of fourteen he falsified an identity and joined the Union army for the last battles of the Civil War. He continued his military career, serving in Mexico under General Espinosa and in the Indian Wars, until he was honorably discharged due to an injury. His life then moved to a series of firsts, accomplishments, blunders, setbacks, social networks, and burnt bridges. He briefly enrolled at Howard University, then left to eventually become the first Black graduate of the Newton Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, an ordained Baptist pastor, the founder of a Black newspaper in Washington D.C., a lawyer and then elected legislator in Ohio — all before beginning to work on his first major publication, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. One thing Williams was not, however, was a trained historian. A pure autodidact in the field, he forged a historiographical process through dedicated study of primary sources, exhausting the resources of the Ohio State Library, and traveling east to the Library of Congress and New York Historical Society. Perhaps Williams was dedicated to comprehensive documentation because he lacked formal credentials. He not only reviewed official government records, but also pamphlets and newspapers, going so far as to conduct interviews with members of Black military regiments in the Southwest when his requests for information through official channels were denied. His evidentiary enthusiasm is clear from the preface of the first volume where he recounts the genesis of his work: I was surprised and delighted to find that the historical memorials of the Negro were so abundant, and so creditable to him . . . I became convinced that a history of the colored people in America was required, because of the amply historically trustworthy material at hand. That passionate study led to the 1882–83 publication of the two-volume History. Divided into three major parts, “Preliminary Considerations”, “Slavery in the Colonies”, and “The Negro During the Revolution”, the first volume actually begins far before 1619, with the Book of Genesis (a historical bound that speaks to Williams’ encyclopedic vision). The initial chapter of the book is thus more biblical history than scientific, calling on theological studies to counter popular dehumanizing theories about Black people based on scriptural arguments. Next comes “The Negro in the Light of Philology, Ethnology, and Egyptology”, which moves forward some centuries, tracing ethnographic and linguistic understandings of whom is referred to with the term “Negro”. Williams continues onward with geographic and historical overviews of various West African tribes and societies. Unfortunately, this first part is Williams’ most creatively non-factual, full of imaginative language that reads more like an adventure tale than historical study, as seen in this excerpt about battles between the English colonial army and the Ashanti: All the native and British forces were compelled to retire to the forth; while the Ashantee troops, inspired by the dashing bearing of their new king, closed in around them like tongues of steel. . . . The screams of fainting women and terrified children, the groans of the dying, and the bitter imprecations of desperate combatant,- a mingling medley - swelled the great diapason of noisy battle. History of the Negro Race in America evens out once we reach the 1619 arrival of enslaved Africans in the Virginia colony, and the first volume’s latter parts are bolstered by the author’s ability to more directly access primary sources and references. He delves into legal and legislative rulings around slavery and freedom in each of the twelve colonies, comparing and contrasting the situations for enslaved people before the American Revolutionary War. His second volume, published a few months after the first, kicks off with “Negroes in the Army and Navy” at the start of the nineteenth century and continues through the Civil War into Reconstruction, concluding with a “Retrospection and Prospection” on the “Negro Power of Endurance”. Perhaps due to his own extensive military history, Williams thrives when writing about the Revolutionary War, devoting one of his longest chapters to “Military Employment of Negroes 1775-1780”, which details all aspects of the conflict — from the shooting of Black and Indigenous sailor Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre, widely regarded as the first American to die in the war, through the cessation of hostilities. The chapter contains transcriptions of military rulings and correspondence, charts, tables, and some glimpses of Williams’ innovative use of newspapers as primary sources. The mixture of directly quoted and fully reprinted documents and Williams’ opinionated authorial voice make his history a unique contribution, a view into African American history as well as into one African American’s idiosyncrasies. After years of research and relationship building, Williams’ debut was subject to reviews and critique across the major periodicals of the day. Some reviewers gave shallow praise, simply impressed that a Black man could accomplish a task of this magnitude, while others had severe critiques of Williams’ style and methodology, especially regarding the early speculative chapters. Perhaps the larger issue that brought out reviewers’ red pens was his tone. With a background in both clergy and the law, Williams indulged in the sort of affected prose that was common in the 1880s but that reviewers seemed to find issue with when coming from a new Black historian. There were also complaints that he did not have enough professional respect for colleagues. Throughout History of the Negro Race, Williams harshly critiqued historians that he thought were citationally lax or faltering in their professional objectivity. He felt comfortable correcting the historical record definitively, as in this footnote relating to Benjamin Banneker, an eighteenth-century polymath and, most famously, publisher of almanacs: William Wells Brown, William C. Nell, and all the Colored men whose efforts I have seen, have made a number of very serious mistakes respecting Banneker’s parentage, age, accomplishments, etc. He was of mixed blood. His mother’s name was not Molly Morton, but one of his sisters bore that name.I have used the Memoirs of Banneker, prepared by J. H. B. Latrobe and J. Saurin Borris, and other valuable material from the Maryland Historical Society. The chiding tone of this footnote is among his more gentle reproofs, and certainly was not something as obvious as Williams claims. In the Houghton Library copy of the History, there is a handwritten annotation from Alonzo Rothschild, jeweler and previous owner, showing that Latrobe himself disagreed with Williams. In spite of the somewhat-excusable errors in methodology and irreverence for his peers, even Williams’ most critical reviewers noted that they were being exacting out of respect for the work itself. An Atlantic Monthly review begins with the following note: If we frankly point out its defects as well as its merits, it is because its author has honestly aimed to place it on that high plane where it can be judged by the standard of its absolute worth, without any sort of reference to “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” To criticise it thus impartially is a recognition of its value. Condescending as that reads today, and it was certainly condescending at the time, the fact that major intellectual venues treated this self-taught historian’s first book as a serious text worthy of detailed review is almost as impressive as Williams’ endeavor itself. The publication and subsequent press attention made Williams a national figure. To the surprise of no one, Williams’ life did not slow down. He went on to publish a major volume of Black military history, lecture around the United States, travel to Europe where he met with King Leopold of Belgium, and then to Egypt and the Congo, where his earlier illusions about the benefits of African colonization were resoundingly shattered. He reported his concerns back to Leopold, causing him to promptly disassociate from Williams, who died in Blackpool, England, in 1891 on his way back from that eye-opening journey. Despite his national prominence, it would take more than fifty years for John Hope Franklin to begin excavating Williams’ legacy after his death, and he is still far from a household name. His vision for the serious undertaking of Black history has enduring relevance, however, and illustrates the longevity of Black history as a scholarly topic, one that remains under debate across the United States. Though he was often harshly critical of other Black historians, Williams dreamed of a rich community stewarding the material and intellectual history of their people. In 1883, the same year his first book was published, Williams wrote a letter to the editor of the Boston Herald, titled “An American Colored Historical Society Proposed”. His historical society was never realized, but his description reveals how his imagination shirked every contemporary bound of racial possibility: I am now earnestly endeavoring to organize an American negro historical society. The negroes of this country are making very credible history now, and it should be preserved. My object is to have 25 of the most intelligent colored men of the country organize with a charter; hire a room in a fireproof building in Boston; secure all works written by negroes; preserve all pamphlets, orations and speeches of negroes; correspond with Hayti, Liberia and Jamaica; hold semi-annual meetings, when a historical paper would be read; have the proceedings of the society published every year, and, in time, preserve every thing of historic interest relating to the negro. . . . I have learned by experience the necessity of such an organization.

public-domain-review

Sep 12, 2023

Dorothy Berr

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:45.532317

pantographia

Pantographia: A Specimen Book of All the Alphabets Known on Earth (1799) Text by Hunter Dukes Oct 10, 2023 There's a radical tradition in Jewish mysticism that thinks we are missing a letter of the alphabet. In our current cosmic cycle, the letter is either invisible, or present to our eyes in a faulty, corrupted form. This is why the Torah contains negative logic structures — when every letter appears as it should, there will be no need for apophatic theology. In Genesis, God fragments the single language shared by all humans, scattering their humpty-dumpty tongues abroad, but in Kabbalistic thought, the Lord looks more like Raymond Queneau and his fellow Oulipo, writing a lipogram that uses every letter but one. Both cases place a profound power in putting the pieces back together again, reassembling the total in its original form. A related Jewish tradition claims the psalms are out of order to keep humans from assuming divine power: "if [the psalms] were arranged in their proper order, and any man so read them, he would be able to resurrect the dead", says the Midrash. When the Talmudic scholar Joshua ben Levi began to number these hymns differently, a booming voice from heaven intervened: “Do not rouse that which slumbers!” In 1799, the same year that the Rosetta Stone was unearthed in Egypt, the type-founder Edmund Fry published Pantographia, his attempt to gather back together every known alphabet on earth. Containing 405 alphabet specimens from 164 languages, the book is a treasure chest for the epigraphical imagination. There are the expected alphabets that influenced the shape of Latin — Greek, Semitic, Phoenician, Etruscan — and mysterious and magical alphabets, such as the twenty variations of Chaldean, an occult writing system that has no extant original sources. (Fry reports that it may have been transmitted directly to Adam; others believe it stems from a medieval cipher, whose creators couched the shapes in antique lore.) Indigenous languages without alphabets such as “Virginian” and “Esquimaux” are given phonetic approximations in Roman characters. And Domesday, Ethiopic, Poconchi, Sclavonian, Tartaric, Walloon, and dozens of other alphabets have been arranged to spell out the Lord's Prayer. As your eyes trace the thousands of distinct kinds of line that have made meaning for humans across the world, script can indeed feel like a kind of scripture — the rudiments of spelling become an incantation, a spell. Yet there is also something mournful about Pantographia, especially for a modern reader. We might learn to intone and live in a few of the linguistic landscapes encrypted in these writing systems, but the rest will always remain empty runes before our eyes, from which a vital force has fled. And as languages continue to be lost each year to mute extinction, Fry's book begins to look more like a mausoleum than agora. Genesis framed our fallen state as a problem of space: people can no longer unite to build towers unto heaven because they have to shout incomprehensibly across continents. Yet Fry hints in his introduction that imperial alphabets might offset this punishment. "By this happy mode of communication, distance is, as it were, annihilated, and the merchant, scholar, and statesman, become present to every purpose of utility, in the most remote regions." And like James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, who sets up a phone call to Eden by dialing the alphabet — “Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one” — Fry believes the study of alphabets might also solve the problem of time. Namely, questions concerning the origins of language. In a bizarre argument, he claims that alphabets must have divine origins because certain civilizations have failed to develop these phonemic systems. Written Chinese grows "more intricate and voluminous every day", but will never “terminate in so clear, so comparatively simple, an expedient, as that of alphabetical characters". But Fry also declines Pliny's "conjectures and fables” about letters being eternal, the notions of "cabalistic doctors", who believed alphabetic writing was created during the sabbath, and anyone who dare suggest that letters were breathed down to the Egyptians by their god Teuth. Instead, it all goes back to Babel, when one tongue — and presumably one alphabet, although here Fry seems unsure — shattered into uncountable quantities. Aside from theological claims made by Fry in his introduction, there is also a kind of secular miracle present in this work. The sublimity of craftsmanship. To get these letters into print, Fry carved each one onto a steel punch, which could be pressed into a copper matrix for printing. It took him sixteen years, four thousand punches, and an estimated ten thousand hours of labor. According to alphabet historian Johanna Drucker, Fry's Pantographia "provides an overview of the state of linguistic knowledge in the British Empire" and is the key transitional work between two modes of knowledge production: eclectic, antiquarian compendia and specialized, professional research. In Fry's own estimation of the project, Pantographia is a meeting ground, an incomplete but working commons for all those in need of a “centre of communication”.

public-domain-review

Oct 10, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:46.012461

aftershock-of-the-new

Aftershock of the New: Woodblock Prints of Post-Disaster Tokyo (1928–32) Text by Erica X Eisen Oct 17, 2023 The shockwave struck at lunchtime. Witnesses would later state that tremors rocked Tokyo for ten full minutes, igniting fires across the city as lit stoves and cooking oil were thrown together in the chaos of the magnitude-7.9 earthquake. With water mains severed, the resultant blazes spread unchecked across the largely timber cityscape, consuming everything in their wake as the winds whipped them onwards. By the time the aftershocks petered out and the last flames were extinguished, the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, as it would come to be known, had claimed over 100,000 lives — including thousands of ethnic Koreans and others murdered amidst xenophobic rumors of sabotage — and the face of Japan’s capital had been altered forever. Yet in the aftermath of this tragedy, the tone of many bureaucrats and public planners in Tokyo was one of optimism, almost cheer, at the vast expanses of burnt-over nothingness that now provided them with space in which to lay out broad new roads and grand civic buildings in imported styles. This is the vision put forward in One Hundred Views of New Tokyo (Shin Tokyo Hyakkei), a collection of prints by eight artists published between 1928 and 1932. The artists who contributed to the series were part of the sōsaku hanga (creative print) movement, which brought new techniques and aesthetic vocabularies to the Japanese woodblock. “Sofar as the classical ukiyo-e artists are concerned, I feel positively no relation to them and no debt to them whatever”, said Onchi Kōshirō, one of the movement’s most famous exponents and a leading contributor to the New Tokyo series. “Today our attitudes toward art are completely different.” One can detect in Onchi’s declaration something of the functionary’s heady glee at the leveled quakescape’s infinite potential — that “forceful reiteration of modernity’s logic of creative destruction,” in Gennifer Weisenfeld’s words, “aimed at legitimating urban development and renewal.” Yet despite the artist’s strenuous disavowals, parallels to prints of centuries past are not hard to spot. The series participates in a long lineage of ukiyo-e celebrating (and skewering) vistas of the so-called Eastern Capital — taking as its most direct point of reference Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo Hyakkei, 1856-9). Pagodas are traded for church domes, the pine-needle fires of tile kilns for a smokestack’s laminar effluent, and a fisherman’s net is replaced by the protective mesh screening fans at a baseball field. Like Hiroshige, who set many of his series’ prints during ombré hours, the artists of Shin Tokyo were also interested in exploring the play of light, though in their case it is not the firelit congress of foxes that interests them but the splayed image of a film projector in a darkened theater. One of the cardinal visual effects of Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo is its recurring, often winking inclusion of foreground elements that loom over and even eclipse whatever well-known site the print in question is supposed to be elegizing: a suspended turtle, a boatman's hairy arm, the groin of a straw-shod horse. Against the calligraphic swish-swish of a black koi banner, does anyone even notice the diminutive arc of Suidō Bridge, whose celebration is the image’s pretext for existing in the first place? This is the crux of Hiroshige’s message: an Audenesque affirmation that these great and exalted places exist amidst — and indeed owe the great force of their vitality to — the quotidian moments that they stage and that here upstage them. But the views of New Tokyo exhibit neither Hiroshige’s stylistic preference nor the sentiment that undergirded it. No person, no animal, and not a single thing can rival the city itself, which is the protagonist above all else. It’s notable how many of the series’ people look away from the viewer, into the distance or out at the great capital that has already opened its mouth to consume them. It’s noteworthy, too, that the later series drops Hiroshige’s word meisho (famous places) from the title. Many of its views — the Shell station, the thronged dance hall — could be from nearly anywhere at all, speaking little to Tokyo but a great deal to the shin, the new, the now. If the earthquake shook the city loose from the particularities of space, it also disjointed it from time: Shin Tokyo’s artists did not, as Hiroshige did, divide their series according to the march of the seasons, and in the enclosed worlds of the subway station and the gleaming department store, who can tell if it is day or night? Time is no longer cyclical, per Hiroshige’s vision — instead we have only the great forward tilt toward modernity, which like sugar on the tongue entices only to dissolve once you have finally gotten a taste. Indeed, less than two decades later, when a number of the prints were reissued in the wake of Japan’s surrender to the United States, it was under the self-consciously wistful title Tokyo Kaiko Zue, often translated as Scenes of Lost Tokyo. Yet in another sense the prints had lost their shin even before they were first published. “Yesterday’s Tokyo has already changed, and there are many prints in the early part of the series showing places that have changed. So they are really ‘Old’ Tokyo and not ‘New’ Tokyo”, wrote the artist Maekawa Senpan, who contributed twelve prints, in an article on the occasion of the series’ completion. “Indeed, we could [already] start on another series of Shin Tokyo Hyakkei!” This is Audenesque too, in a sense, though perhaps transposed into a different key: how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster.

public-domain-review

Oct 17, 2023

Erica X Eisen

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:46.507585

books-fatal-to-their-authors

Books Fatal to Their Authors (1895) Text by Sasha Archibald Jan 4, 2024 At the very end of P.H. Ditchfield’s 1895 compendium Books Fatal to Their Authors, the priest, historian, and prolific author argues that a just society would create a refuge specifically for aging writers — a place where they can live in peace, enjoying the same repose as a retired racehorse deserves. The existence of such a sanctuary would signal gratitude for a lifetime of cerebral labor, and protect those “maimed and wounded warriors” who have suffered “in the service of Literature”. If you’re not convinced, skim your way through Books Fatal to Their Authors and see if your mind is changed. Writers have been punished with more variety, more frequency, and more severity than you might expect. Ditchfield catalogues hundreds of authors who were banished from their homeland, languished in prisons and castles and monasteries, and spent decades on the run. Their right hands were cut off and their children executed; fines were levied and reputations destroyed. In one case, a gang of hit men found a fugitive satirist, Trajan Boccalini, resting on a couch in Venice and beat him to death with sandbags. In another, the writer was presented with a choice: either be beheaded or eat his book. Theodore Reinking wisely chose the latter, which he accomplished by somehow “converting [the book] into a sauce.” The most common writerly punishment was to be burned at the stake. This practice extended at least four centuries, and Books Fatal to Their Authors provides dozens of examples. There was Lucilio Vanini, a sixteenth-century Italian philosopher who advocated atheism and changed his name to Julius Caesar — burned alive; Giordano Bruno, a Renaissance scholar who, among other heresies, suggested that the Bible was perhaps a work of dream interpretation — burned alive; Francois de Stabili, an Italian poet who used poor judgement in reading the horoscope of the Duke of Calabria’s wife — burned alive; and Savonarola, a beloved fifteenth-century Florentine preacher and revolutionary — strangled, then burned. The religious iconoclast Simon Morin was burned alive at the entrance to Notre Dame Cathedral while his followers were branded and enslaved. Jacopo Bonfadio was comparably lucky — his friends negotiated down the punishment, such that the philosopher was kindly beheaded, and then burned. The chemist Joseph Francis Borri fled Rome just in time, so that he was only burned in effigy, an experience that psychically transmitted a great chill: “Borri declared that he never felt so cold, [as] when he knew that he was being burned by proxy.” While the fires were stoked, the writer was often strangled or whipped, and sometimes dressed in special clothes. Usually, the offending books were burned at the same time. When it was over, the ashes were thrown into a river, so that they didn’t become treasured relics, though at least once, an author’s ashes were shot from a cannon, as was the fate of poor Cazimir Liszinski. What heinous things did these writers write? Occasionally the crime is as clear as day. Authors who criticized the spending of the Church, mocked the manners of the French Court, or suggested assassinating a tyrant king must have expected blowback. Same goes for the printers who messed with the Bible. The printer who surreptitiously removed the Seventh Commandment — “Thou shalt not commit adultery” — was heavily fined; another printer, a woman, tweaked Genesis’ “He shall be thy lord” to “He shall be thy fool” and was sentenced to death. But in most of Ditchfield’s anecdotes, the insult is not particularly intelligible, and his glosses barely help. Taking offense is culturally specific, and needs to be explained with some weedy detail. Ditchfield offers only tiny vignettes, shorn of context. What is clear, however, is that punishment does not correlate to a book’s popularity, or its truthfulness, or the quality of its scholarship. An author’s madness is rarely taken into account when offense is perceived, and neither is haplessness. It’s upsetting how many writers seem to have become fatalities entirely by accident. The unluckiest of Ditchfield’s unlucky subjects is the poet Pierre Petit. A gust of wind blew a few unpublished poems from Petit’s table to the street below, where they were immediately snatched up by a passing priest. The priest scanned the drafts and demanded the poet dead. It was done. The story puts the lie to Ditchfield’s title: tyrants, not books, kill authors.

public-domain-review

Jan 4, 2024

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:46.929292

coney-island-at-night

Coney Island at Night (1905) Text by Adam Green Nov 21, 2023 Before the cotton-candy and mechanical thrills, Coney Island was known for its thriving rabbit population — hence the name, the Dutch for rabbit being konijn: or so goes one of numerous etymologies for the area. Earlier the Lenape had named it Narrioch, meaning “land without shadows” or “always in light”. While thought to be a reference to its sunlit beaches, the name also speaks somehow (more than rabbits at least) to the dazzling electrical displays which would light up the peninsula after dusk at the turn of the twentieth century. It’s these illuminations which are the subject of Coney Island at Night, an Edison Studios short from 1905 directed by Edwin S. Porter. Bringing together two of Thomas Edison’s “inventions” — the light bulb and the motion picture — the film offers a dreamy four-minute glimpse of the amusement district at its peak. Two years prior, Luna Park had opened, full of lavish electric landscaping and a futuristic “dark ride”, A Trip to the Moon, in which passengers left Earth to cavort with moonlit maidens and Selenites. And a year after that, the ribbon was cut at Dreamland, home to lagoons, towers, and one million electric lights. These venues, along with Steeplechase Park, built in 1897, formed the trio of iconic parks that competed during Coney Island’s heyday. For the darker side of early film at Coney Island, see Ross Bullen’s essay on Jumbo’s ghost, featuring a filmed electrocution of Topsy the elephant on the site of Luna Park’s construction. For Coney Island’s acoustic heritage, see our post on Cummings’ Indian Congress too.

public-domain-review

Nov 21, 2023

Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:47.379675

shadows

Charles H. Bennett’s Shadows (ca. 1856) Text by Kevin Dann Oct 3, 2023 “Coming events cast their shadows before”, reads the caption for Charles H. Bennett’s frontispiece; it shows a young child dipping into a pot of preserves as a raised hand foreshadows punishment. The twenty-two other portraits in Shadows (1856) paint human nature in strokes nearly as dark, the cleverly manipulated silhouettes revealing drunks, killjoys, gluttons, fools, and minor monsters. Christened “Cheerful Charley” by his Savage Club compatriots — and recalled (after his early death at thirty-nine in 1867) by his fellow Punch men as “the kindlest and gentlest of our associates” — Bennett’s satirical sensibility in Shadows is relentless, even if intended as light-hearted moralism. Originally published as individual graphics for Fleet Street bookseller David Bogue’s Illustrated Times, Bennett’s caricatures were reprinted in a number of expanded editions, popular due to a simple and ingenious magic-lantern conceit: that the shadow thrown by a spotlit individual can reveal her inner character. Born and raised on the Covent Garden piazza, where Samuel Pepys observed the first recorded performance of a Punch & Judy show in 1662, Charles Bennett instilled his finest drawings with the antics of puppetry, bursting with frantic noise and movement in a tightly controlled space. In the title-page illustrations for his books, and in most of the more than two hundred drawings he did for periodicals, the characters spill out beyond the margins. Many of Bennett’s shadow satires rely on the visual vocabulary of animals to cast shade on his subjects. A vain old woman is rendered into a self-admiring parrot; a young woman is belittled by the shadow of a “Little Duck”; a leering man projects the menacing shadow of a greedy crocodile. A gifted storyteller as well as artist, Bennett wrote a number of children’s books — The Faithless Parrot (1863), The Frog Who Would a Wooing Go (1864), The Nine Lives of a Cat (1860) — whose animal protagonists were far more sympathetic than the humans lampooned in Shadows. More often, however, as in Fables of Aesop (1857), which pairs up animals in Victorian garb to make thinly-veiled digs at London’s fashionable class, Bennett’s animals are mere beasts of rhetorical burden to castigate their two-legged cousins. Below you can browse Bennett’s shadows. For their equally monstrous but inkier cousins, see our post on blottograms.

public-domain-review

Oct 3, 2023

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:47.865258

selection-of-whisk-ferns

A Careful Selection of Whisk Ferns (1837) Text by Erica X Eisen Sep 19, 2023 Of the aesthetic imperfections to be avoided by any serious practitioner, the 1989 guide Classic Bonsai of Japan lists kuruma-eda (“branches that originate from a single point”) and karami-eda (“branches . . . whose lines cross each other”), as well as vessels that are too-showy, attempts to make species like the gingko curve as they grow, and improper balance in the “twin-trunk style”. Such modern handbooks find their ultimate antecedents in the Tokugawa Period, when fans of these miniature trees included even the era’s namesake warlords — indeed, a five-needle pine said to have been nursed by the shōgun Tokugawa Iemitsu himself is still living to this day (despite its near-totally hollow trunk) and has been declared a national treasure by the Japanese state. Robert J. Baran, researcher and historian for the Phoenix Bonsai Society, writes that the earliest catalog of bonsai was likely Chōseisha Aruji’s Manual on Arboriculture (Kinsei jufu), published in 1833. The appearance of these books on the market accompanied both a terminological and a categorical shift: from hachi-no-ki (literally, tree in a pot) to the name we now know today, and from a merely decorative role to something that took on the physical and philosophical rigors of artistic practice. Contemporary books on the subject were accompanied by delicately rendered illustrations of thick foliage, curved branches, and rugged trunks, with particular care lavished on the exquisite ceramic pots from which bonsai itself (the first character of which means tray) takes its name. In contrast, this curious two-volume illustrated book on bonsai from 1837 dispensed not only with the vessels but with the trees themselves. That set, A Careful Selection of Whisk Ferns (Seisen Matsuranfu), is devoted instead to the cultivation of the titular rootless, branchless, leafless genus, whose smooth stems are stippled here and there with globular yellow outgrowths called enations. The images dedicated to these minimalist beings, in lime and emerald green, seem to reduce bonsai to its sparest visual elements. The result is something alien, algal — hardly recognizable as a plant at all. Whisk ferns — Psilotum to botanists, matsubaran in Japanese — belonged to a category of plants called kihin, curious and rare specimens for which there was a fad among collectors during the latter part of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Printed illustrations could forever freeze these unique cultivars in the moment of their highest flowering or fullest leaf. But publishers of books who fed into the kihin craze sometimes ran afoul of the period’s harsh sumptuary laws, which strictly regulated the consumption and display of luxury items according to one’s social status. Such is the case for Catalogue of Extraordinary Plants (Sōmoku Kihin Kagami), whose unfortunate editor, Kinta the Gardener, had his property seized and his woodblocks burned before being banished from the capital forever — fitting punishment, so it was apparently thought, for promoting such dangerous indulgences.

public-domain-review

Sep 19, 2023

Erica X Eisen

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:48.331575

recueil-de-la-diversite-des-habits

The World's First Costume Book: François Desprez's Collection of Various Clothing Styles (1562) Text by Hunter Dukes Dec 6, 2023 These woodcuts by François Desprez come from 1562’s Recueil de la diversité des habits (whose full title translates as “a collection of the various styles of clothing presently worn in the countries of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the savage isles”), published in Paris and sometimes cited as the world’s first costume book. As Europeans encountered and conquered new worlds during the Age of Exploration, they not only took an interest in novel geography, biological specimens, and exportable resources but also in the customs and dress of unfamiliar peoples. Desprez’s 121 engravings illustrate garbs found the world over, accompanied by anonymous quatrains describing the sartorial behavior of Desprez’s subjects. The typeface is civilité, an imitation of the style of handwritten letters found in children’s book and etiquette manuals of the period, making the woodcuts look almost as if they are annotated with a traveler’s observations. Indeed this book was not meant to inspire innovation in the boudoir but served instead as a kind of anthropological atlas, marketing itself as a proto–National Geographic: “If you’re not eager a voyager to be, / To reach the places where other people dwell, / Escaping travelers’ woes, here you can see / A Hungarian man’s dress just as well.” Just as early travelogues blended observation and folklore in their accounts of natural history — birthing mythical creatures and all sorts of hybrids — the dress on display here is a bizarre mélange of documentation and fantasy. Viewed in rapid succession, the woodcuts feel like trading cards for exoticized humans and extinct humanoids. Turks, Tartars, and Spaniards rub shoulders with a droopy eared cyclops, a monkey using a walking stick, and the so-called sea bishop: a bipedal, piscine creature, first spotted in the early 1500s, who cosplayed a Catholic priest and could communicate with clergy. It is not surprising that scholars believe Desprez was also the artist behind The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel (1565), a series of grotesque hallucinations after Rabelais that were published, like this book, by Richard Breton. The images in Recueil de la diversité des habits portray fashion in the oldest sense of the word: a fabrication or act of creation as well as a habit and way of life. If clothes make the man, however, different clothes, seen through imperial eyes, can also make the man a monster. For his part, Desprez insisted on the truthfulness of the images, many borrowed faithfully from “the late Roberual, Captain for the King, and a certain Portuguese [sailor] who visited several different countries.” At least twelve costume books were produced in Europe between 1550 and 1600, exemplifying “the period’s confidence in dress as a signal of kinship and identity”, how costumes were thought to be imbued with the “typologies of national character”, writes Katherine Bond. If the nude “savages” and muscular barbarians are somewhat expected in a book published in the 1560s, the decade that saw the establishment of West Indies Fleets, it is perhaps more disorienting to view the funhouse refractions of people who lived, not across the Atlantic, but on the other side of the Channel (Desprez finds savages aplenty in Scotland) or a few days trek across the Alps. The quatrain for “The Englishwoman”, for example, portrays clothing not as fashion but as obligatory costume, by which one can successfully identify a foreign species: “Thus dressed is an English woman, / On top her bonnet is fur-lined. / We can recognize her easily . . . By her square bonnet.” Other national costumes prompt the Frenchman to reflect on his own people’s vanity. The “German” does not change outfits “as often as we do / because the French ask for new clothes / changing them like the wind”. This was a bugbear for Desprez, who lambasted “curieux” clothing, the fast fashion of his time, casting a new light on his assertion that foreign peoples’ dress stays fixed. Where we might expect to find only crude stereotypes — and there certainly are some of those — we also happen upon a critique of the homeland, grounded in praise (albeit misinformed) for the cultural stability of foreign lands. We will leave you with the address to the reader from Recueil de la diversité des habits, which — in a moment of seeming cultural relativity — acknowledges that sartorial difference can make other people look strange, no matter where they hail from: If you want to see portraits of girls, men, and women,Without leaving their gestures or clothing behind,Depicted from life at the time that we live in,For the sake of delightfully enlivening your mind,Read through this book with attention and care.Over these images let your gaze range.You’ll come to know well the clothes humans wear,Which make them all, one to the other, seem strange.

public-domain-review

Dec 6, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:48.851757

dictionary-of-modern-slang

A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words (1860) Text by Hunter Dukes Sep 26, 2023 Could you have learnt to patter flash the argot of costermongers, hawking sanguinary James and other belly-timber? You might recognize these types by their Newgate knockers, those aggerawators tucked behind a lug on the nuddikin. Hear them shout their prices: saltee, madza poona, exis-evif yeneps! Or you may prefer the rapping of beaker hunters, needy mizzlers, and such — all Dutch uncles now, but common when pudding snammers were wido in the push. This was an era of shivering jemmy on the high fly munging for a bit of cagmag, when pure finders collected danna amid fencers of cakey-pannum. At night, on London’s streets, stallsmen and the doxies cooled the esclop for their buz-bloaks. And those who missed their tip, like nibblers done for a ramp, climbed the vertical-care-grinder stunned on skilly. Yet it was all Yorkshire Estates compared to drummers caught with hocus: that wretched lot cried hookey walker as they lumped the lighter to dance on nothing. In other words, stiff’uns, cold meat, burked. This is a small sample of the lexicon offered by the expanded second edition of John Camden Hotten’s Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words (1860). A lexicographer of the “fast” and the “low” in London, he is most interested in the kind of language that can be heard at unsavory hours on steamboat piers, amid knots of “semi-decayed cabmen”, and plucked from “the refined word-droppings of magniloquent flunkies”. To compile this dictionary, he also scoured “popular” writing, “fashionable and unfashionable” newspapers, and sought a high-standard of orthographic correctness — each word and phrase was confirmed by multiple groups of chaunters and tramps. He was attuned to the politics of compilation. Dictionary makers like Charles Richardson, whose New Dictionary of the English Language (1836–37) first featured the kind of historical evidence that would later set the OED apart from its competitors, were “exceedingly crotchety in their choice of what they considered respectable words”, thought Hotten. If the English language in the mid-nineteenth century contained thirty-eight thousand words, as contemporary philologists calculated, Hotten conservatively claimed to have enlarged the language by almost ten percent, and that wasn’t even counting all the filthy and obscene entries that he deemed unfit for print. This censorship evidently required some restraint on Hotten’s part. He is perhaps better remembered as a publisher who not only popularized American writers such as Mark Twain and Walt Whitman in England, but also delivered a series of erotic and sometimes pornographic titles to market, including Exhibition of Female Flagellants (supposedly written in 1777), The Romance of Chastisement (1869), and a comic opera, Lady Bumtickler’s Revels (1872). Morally progressive, Hotten was nevertheless influenced by the typecasting racial sciences of his era. He often talks of rascals and vagabonds as distinct in physiognomy. On one hand, there is something almost profound about his formulation that every society gives rise to an underclass of thieves and crooks who speak their own cryptolect — a kind of linguistic subconscious maintained by the socially subaltern. On the other hand, the people he refers to as pickpockets and cat burglars are rarely thieving guilds, but simply racial or ethnic others. “In Finland, the fellows who steal seal skins, pick the pockets of bear-skin overcoats, and talk Cant, are termed Lappes.” He maintains a distinction between “cant” and “slang”, which a modern-day reader might have trouble reconstructing. For him, cant is an economic argot that arose among beggars, tramps, and other kinds of street walkers who invented a way of street talking. Meanwhile “slang” represents “that evanescent, vulgar language, ever changing with fashion and taste, which has principally come into vogue during the last seventy or eighty years, spoken by persons in every grade of life, rich and poor, honest and dishonest.” He also includes glossaries of “back slang” — words created from reversal — and “rhyming slang”, the Cockney dialect whereby “table” becomes “Cain and Abel”. Hotten is fascinated both by how countless foreign and antiquated words ended up in the adaptive mouths of English speakers on London’s streets and by how newly-invented language continues to trickle upward and downward in English society. Unlike some of his peers, who believed that the first dictionary of vagabond tongues was Richard Head’s Life of an English Rogue (ca. 1680) or dramatist Thomas Decker’s Bellman of London series (1608), Hotten traces the tradition back to Thomas Harman’s Caveat or Wareningfor Commen Cursetors (1567), which he reproduces at length. (For more on this tradition and its fictions, see Julie Coleman’s excellent article.) Preserving these words was not only a matter of novelty for Hotten — he thought vulgar language itself was an agent for “the retention and the revival of sterling old English words, long since laid up in ancient manuscripts.” In addition to word lists, he also includes an “account of the hieroglyphics used by vagabonds”, a variation of the “hobo signs” still occasionally employed near railways in the United States and other places by migrant worker subcultures. Here too he treats this linguistic system as a storehouse of cultural knowledge, wondering if one can glimpse “in these beggars’ marks fragments of ancient Egyptian or Hindoo hieroglyphical writing”. It’s a romantic enterprise to assemble a dictionary of slang and cant, and to bundle these two terms together. The former is faddish, everchanging: fixity makes a quick death for slang. The latter’s words are taken from purposely secretive languages. They are meant to enact verbal handshake protocols, establish trust and maintain safety within the earshot of hostile parties. Cant “goes one step further than jargon”, argues Daniel Heller-Roazen while quoting a historian of language in his study Dark Tongues, “its primary purpose is to deceive, to defraud, and to conceal.” Once exposed, it can no longer function. At the same time, there is a democratic tendency at play in mixing together, in a single volume, the specialized language of people who may have never exchanged words in the street. Alongside his thieves and vagabonds, Hotten includes religious slang, public schoolboy slang, pirate slang, equine stable slang, phrases coined by Dr. Johnson, the slang of softened oaths, workmen’s slang, stagehand slang, shopkeeper’s slang, and dozens of other argots. Find a brief selection of entries from the Dictionary, one for each featured letter of the alphabet, below. If your “mince pies” aren't tired, you can also enjoy our other posts on A Dictionary of Victorian Slang (1909) and A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1788). Autumn — an execution by hanging Breaky-leg — a strong drink Chive-fencer — a street hawker of cutlery Dublin packet — to turn a corner Earwig — a person who prompts another maliciously Flymy — knowing, cunning, the quality of a rogue Gadding the hoof — going without shoes Hoxter — an inside pocket on clothing Inside lining — dinner, etc. Jessie — a sound beating Kisky — drunk Lump the lighter — to be transported Multee kertever — very bad Nose em — tobacco Old gown — smuggled tea Pitch the fork — tell a pitiful tale Quean — a strumpet Rag splawger — a rich man Star the glaze — to break the window of a jeweler Unbetty — to unlock Vardo — to look Wido — wide awake, not a fool Yay-nay — someone without conversational power Ziph — a secret dialect spoken by students at Winchester College

public-domain-review

Sep 26, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:49.326018

man-and-his-desire

Modernity in the Rainforest: Man and his Desire (1917) Text by Hugh Aldersey-Williams Nov 16, 2023 Where do you go to find the modern? For the French composer Darius Milhaud, the answer would lie in the rainforest of Brazil. In January 1917, having agreed to act as secretary for the poet Paul Claudel, who had just been appointed as France’s minister plenipotentiary in the country, he embarked from Lisbon on a steamer bound for Rio de Janeiro. He docked in the Brazilian capital on February 1st and disembarked into a summer heat wave. As they worked together over the next two years, the two men began a long-term artistic collaboration that would set the seal on Milhaud’s unique brand of musical modernism. Brazilian melodies and rhythms explain the character of such relatively popular compositions as Le Boeuf sur le toit (the ox on the roof) and Scaramouche. But before these came a more radical and daring work, now hardly ever programmed in concerts, a ballet with the title L’Homme et son désir, with a scenario by Claudel, a beautiful edition of which is featured above. Milhaud’s unusual score calls for a small orchestral ensemble backed up by four vocal parts and nineteen percussion instruments. In later life, he considered L’Homme to be one of his most important works. They were unlikely artistic collaborators on the face of it. Claudel was nearly fifty, with more than two decades of diplomatic service already behind him, conservative, Catholic, Parisian, and conventionally anti-Semitic. Milhaud was twenty-five years old and, as he would characterize himself in his autobiography, “a Frenchman from Provence, and, by religion, a Jew.” But, brought together in this stimulating new environment, they shared a wish to create art. Europe and its war were far away. Here, there was time. There was quiet. And there was noise. New for Milhaud were the sounds of the forest that would suffuse his work. Claudel was one of his favourite authors, and he had sought the collaboration, feeling that “the extraordinary pounding of Claudel’s language” could lead him toward his own distinctive musical style. The rhythms of Claudel’s verse and the wild rhythms of the forest would clash and blend in L’Homme et son désir. There was also a third partner in Audrey Parr, the half-French wife of a British diplomat, whom Claudel had met on a previous posting, who would design the ballet’s sets and costumes. Parr’s set took the nighttime forest as its stage. Horizontal layers of green, blue, purple, and black depicted the sky with the moon and cloud, the verdant growth and creatures of the forest, and the waters of the primeval swamp reflecting the moonlight. Positioning the instrumentalists and singers in small groups on each tier made them seem like the staves of a musical score. The unconventional placement anticipated later modernist compositions in which the players are spatially separated for acoustic effect, and added to the dramatic impact of the music. The double bass was moved away from the other strings and put with the woodwinds, which some musicologists have suggested shows that Milhaud was already absorbing ideas from the jazz that would colour his later works. Before sets could be built and dancers hired, the artistic collaborators laid out their vision with ink. Claudel and Parr produced fifty-three handmade books, concertina-folded in Japanese fashion with gilded endpapers, comprising four pages of Claudel’s handwritten scenario for the ballet surrounded by cutouts of naked dancing figures by Parr, together with a few more drawings in blue ink based on scenes. The figures invite comparison with Matisse’s famous painting, The Dance, of 1910, and anticipate Picasso’s The Three Dancers of 1925. The verso sides of these pages fold out into a long collage created by Hélène Hoppenot, the wife of another French diplomat, who later achieved fame as a photographer. It shows the positions of the instrumentalists and dancers on the stage, pasted above a strip of manuscript paper with fragments of Milhaud’s score drawn on it in stylized notation. The resulting book, like the ballet itself, was a deeply collaborative affair, the creation of friends who, as Claudel wrote, “held a picnic of ideas, music, and drawings every Sunday on the Sierra overlooking Rio de Janeiro. This little plastic drama is a product of the atmosphere of the Brazilian forest in which we were somehow submerged.” Milhaud found few pieces so enjoyable to write. “We were in constant contact with the virgin forest and its mysteries”, he recalled later. “At sunset, the nocturnal sounds of the forest burst forth suddenly, the simple life-noises of little animals of all kinds: toads, birds, insects, vibrating together in a richness of undreamed-of tonalities.” Milhaud’s unpitched percussion — including two types of castanets, a whip, and a siren, as well as drums of all sorts — aims to evoke this natural chaos with complex overlapping rhythms. The score also calls for a hammer and plank, which are used to recreate the resonant banging call of the cooper-toads that infested the forest floor. Milhaud immerses us in nature, but nature as it has never before been heard in music. L’Homme et son désir begins with a quiet, insect-like clicking. A piping theme is heard, a small creature’s fanfare. Background strings slowly build an atmosphere, with calls across from one side of the stage to the other, gradually blending into a sustained aural world. Suddenly, voices break in, loud and frightening, with unintelligible words. They fade away, and a new kind of pulsing starts, a bird calls, is answered . . . and so it goes for some sixteen minutes of scratching, shrieking and strumming, interrupted by odd human invocations, terrifying and alluring all at once. The rhythmic complexity makes this the most modernistic piece in Milhaud’s prolific output and invites comparison with Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Claudel’s scenario explains the origin of these strange sounds. It depicts “Man taken over by primitive powers and from whom Night and Sleep have stripped all name and countenance.” He is first led by two figures representing Image and Desire, Memory and Illusion, who tease him before they disappear to leave him sleeping under the glare of the tropical moon as the forest animals all come to look at him. He awakens to see a vision before him, dancing “the eternal dance of Nostalgia, Desire and Exile, that of captives and abandoned lovers, that which for entire nights causes people to pace feverishly all night from end to end of their verandas tormented by insomnia, that of the animals in the menageries who throw themselves, and throw themselves again and again and again once more against the impassable bars.” L’Homme et son désir did not receive its premiere until June 1921 when it was put on by the Ballets Suédois in Paris. Milhaud — whose name was by now associated with the frivolities of the group of composers known as Les Six, which included Francis Poulenc and Arthur Honegger, and counted Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau as its guiding lights — had feared that critics would not take the work seriously. In the event, he need not have worried. The critics acknowledged its originality, although public audiences reacted with a “tempest of animal cries and rude laughter”, according to Milhaud’s biographer Paul Collaer, for whom the occasion recalled the famous near-riot provoked by The Rite of Spring eight years before. Milhaud himself noted varying reactions, “ranging from restlessness to solemn attention”. By the time that Milhaud’s more famous jazz-inflected work, La Création du monde, was premiered two years later, also by the Ballets Suédois, he no longer cared. “The press is vile”, he noted. “I rejoice”. Many Europeans dreamed of bringing modernity to the Brazilian rainforest — the telegraph, the railway, the opera house at Manaus. The folly of such projects is the subject of Werner Herzog’s famous film, Fitzcarraldo. But the modern was already there, waiting. And Milhaud and Claudel found it.

public-domain-review

Nov 16, 2023

Hugh Aldersey-Williams

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:49.798130

kollwitz-peasants-war

Käthe Kollwitz’s Peasants’ War Series (ca. 1901–1908) Text by Sasha Archibald Oct 5, 2023 The German Peasants’ War of the sixteenth century might seem an unlikely topic for a young artist. The War was fought three centuries before the artist in question, Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), was born, and it was not a triumph, but a series of skirmishes that ended badly: the landowners had horses and artillery, the peasants did not. Kollwitz, however, was no ordinary artist. It was the failure of the rebellion that attracted her, the underdog farmers, outmatched by every measure, who yet valiantly defended their rights. Across a vast and masterful oeuvre, this was Kollwitz’s constant interest: the innate dignity, courage, and strength of the poor. At the time Kollwitz made the seven etchings that comprise her Peasants’ War series, she had completed her studies in art, and was living in pre-Weimar Berlin, active in radical leftist circles. Born to a Socialist family, she had recently married a doctor who worked in a clinic for the poor. The newlyweds chose to live in the same neighborhood as the clinic; Kollwitz liked to sit in the waiting room, and observe. The first etching Kollwitz completed in the series, the etching from which the others stemmed, was “Charge” in 1902. “Charge” depicts a woman raising her arms as if at a starting line, while a morass of bodies plunge forward, their mouths stretched with screams. The image is smudgy and raw — Kollwitz pressed in various fabrics for texture. Seen from behind, the woman is balanced on the ball of her left foot, her knobby fingers rising high above the chargers’ knives and bayonets, like a conductor signaling the violins. Kollwitz called this commander-in-chief Black Anna, and said she was based on a real person, though the artist was known for taking imaginative license with her source material. Together, the etchings form a disjointed narrative, each depicting a different moment of the War. Black Anna appears just once more, in “Battlefield”. Now she’s looking for her son’s corpse, with a lantern in her hand, and seems to have finally found it. She stoops down with a leg on either side of his body, more bodies all around, and reaches to touch a finger to her son’s chin. Whereas in “Charge” Black Anna’s sleeves are pushed up above her elbow, workmanlike, in “Battlefield”, the sleeves have unraveled, and hang in finely-etched limp threads.

public-domain-review

Oct 5, 2023

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:50.318415

christmas-garland

Wreathed in Pastiche: Max Beerbohm’s Christmas Garland (1912) Text by Hunter Dukes Nov 30, 2023 In a 1903 letter to E. F. Spence, the critic, artist, and humorist Max Beerbohm set forth a theory of caricature: When I draw a man, I am concerned simply and solely with the physical aspect of him. I don’t bother for one moment about his soul. I just draw him as I see him. . . . It is because (and only because), or, let us rather say, when (and only when) my own caricatures hit exactly the exteriors of their subjects that they open the interiors too. Do I make myself plain? (I don’t mean, do I caricature myself? I never do: I am much too sensitive: the bully is always a coward.) Here we encounter the artistic philosophy that informed not only Beerbohm’s caricatures of fin-de-siècle characters, published in The Strand Magazine and other popular periodicals, but also his literary parodies, best exhibited in his 1912 collection, A Christmas Garland. The exterior of a person, or the style of his prose, becomes a portal into the wells of interiority, if carefully observed. (Critics thought that Beerbohm had been given “temporary loans of [his subjects’] very minds”.) There is perhaps a riff on dandyism here. Like the dandy (and by all accounts this man was one from the get-go, having celebrated his tenth birthday with a coupe of champagne), Beerbohm achieves what Baudelaire describes as “a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions”. Yet the external limits for this parodist are the visages of others, or the signature qualities of their voices on the printed page. Just as Elmyr de Hory, the art forger in Orson Welles’ F for Fake, did not duplicate preexisting images but painted “new” works by Renoir, Dufy, and Derain, Beerbohm aped so well that his imitations became individual, original. A Christmas Garland comes with the subtitle “woven by Max Beerbohm”. And there is indeed an Arachne-like quality to these masterful imitations that Beerbohm composed with few visible flaws. He styled himself as a kind of latter day Robert Louis Stevenson, who, by his own account, “played the sedulous ape” to writers of the past. Finding himself afflicted with a “disability” in his adolescence — the inability to read any author earlier than Thackery — Beerbohm became, instead, the voice imitator of his living peers. The table of contents itself is a parody of nineteenth-century fiction’s nominal censorship, pretending to anonymize the “contributors” to this collection: “H*nry J*m*es”, “H. G. W*lls”, “Th*m*s H*rdy”, “J*s*ph C*nr*d”, “G**rge B*rn*rd Sh*w”. Each short story and poem is set around Christmas, and in each, Beerbohm positively nails his subject matter. To take just one example, consider how he renders the syntactic and psychological opacity of “late James”: But his sense of the one thing it didn't block out from his purview enabled him to launch at Eva a speculation as to just how far Santa Claus had, for the particular occasion, gone. The gauge, for both of them, of this seasonable distance seemed almost blatantly suspended in the silhouettes of the two stockings. Over and above the basis of (presumably) sweetmeats in the toes and heels, certain extrusions stood for a very plenary fulfilment of desire. And, since Eva had set her heart on a doll of ample proportions and practicable eyelids—had asked that most admirable of her sex, their mother, for it with not less directness than he himself had put into his demand for a sword and helmet—her coyness now struck Keith as lying near to, at indeed a hardly measurable distance from, the border-line of his patience. It's all fun and games to play the ape, but how did Beerbohm’s contemporaries feel about seeing their efforts sent up in a simian mirror? Surprisingly flattered. After hosting James for Christmas dinner, Edmund Gosse reported back to Beerbohm that his guest thought A Christmas Garland was “the most intelligent [book] that has been produced in England for many a long day”. James caveated the praise with his own sense of humor: “you have destroyed the trade of writing”. But Beerbohm got the last laugh. He modified the title page of his personal copy of James’ Terminations with a caricature that makes it appear as if an acorn, the printer’s device, dangles from the author’s mouth, and the final piece Beerbohm wrote in his life, “An Incident” (ca. 1954), recalls how he declined an invitation to walk through London with James, for he found it preferable to spend the day reading him. The jabs were mostly good natured — and Beerbohm could always return to his claim that any bullying was a front for cowardice. “I cannot conceive how any artist can be hurt by remarks dropped from a garret into a gutter”, he once confessed in a letter.

public-domain-review

Nov 30, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:50.787087

the-book-of-halloween

A Melting Cauldron: The Book of Hallowe’en (1919) Text by Hunter Dukes Oct 24, 2023 “How many times the Church has decanted the new wine of Christianity into the old bottles of heathendom”, writes Ruth Edna Kelley at the outset of The Book of Hallowe’en (1919), considered the first book-length history of this celebration. She is quoting, almost verbatim, James George Frazer’s vast work of comparative religion, The Golden Bough, which, in turn, reworks Jesus’ parable from Mark 2:22: “And no man putteth new wine into old bottles: else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred”. But Christ could not anticipate the craftiness of his followers. The triduum of Halloween, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day were brewed within recycled pagan casks — the Celtic festival of Samhain, Egyptian solar superstitions, devotions to Pomona, the Roman goddess of plenty — and overlaid onto older spiritual calendars that marked when the dead were unusually close to the quick, when “the gods whom Christ dethroned joined the ill-omened throng”. The Book of Hallowe’en begins its history with Celtic druids, first referenced by the historian Herodotus in the fifth century BC, who “worshipped spirits of forest and stream, and feared the powers of evil”. The druids believed that on October 31st, the last night of the old year, “the lord of death gathered together all the souls of those who had died in the passing year and had been condemned to live in the bodies of animals, to decree what forms they should inhabit for the next twelve months.” According to Kelley, the familiar imagery that adorns the plastic shlock and costumes of Big Halloween today — a market estimated by statisticians to see $12.2 billion of consumer spending in the United States this year — is sourced from these older rites. The druids, we are told, held black cats sacred, sacrificed enemies in wicker frames set ablaze, and carried magical glass balls crafted from the spittle of snakes. As Christianity spread across Britain, the sacred oak groves of the druids were felled to build churches, and their festivals hollowed out to serve as vessels for monotheistic rites. Saint John’s Eve was mixed with the dregs of Midsummer; Lammas filled the sterilized bottle of Lughnasadh, a Gaelic harvest festival progressively shorn of pagan reference. Like her contemporaries across the Atlantic involved with the Irish Literary Revival or the Scottish Renaissance, Kelley believes that the old magic was buried but not lost: it simply went underground, finding safe passage into modernity in rustic landscapes inhabited by “Scotch, Irish, and Welsh peasantry”, who still believe that “brooks, hills, dales, and rocks abound in tiny supernatural beings”. Modern Halloween — the costume-clad, decoration-heavy, trick-or-treating variety — is younger than it might seem. In her 2012 history of the celebration, Lisa Morton argues that American Halloween was a product of the mass immigration from the British Isles following the Irish potato famines and Scottish economic depressions in the nineteenth century. Shortly after Queen Victoria participated in a widely publicized 1869 Halloween party at Balmoral Castle, reports of children’s Halloween festivities in the United States began to appear in newspapers and magazines, as newly arrived immigrants sought to keep up with their homeland. Sticking to her comparative mythological method, Ruth Edna Kelley notes the same phenomenon but casts it in the light of authentic reenactment. While the original customs of Hallowe’en are being forgotten more and more across the ocean, Americans have fostered them, and are making this an occasion something like what it must have been in its best days overseas. All Hallowe’en customs in the United States are borrowed directly or adapted from those of other countries. It’s a phenomenal vision — the American melting pot metaphor taken to such extremes that novelty and originality become unimaginable. America is literally haunted here: not by ghosts and demons, but by the inescapable traditions stowed away in cultural baggage smuggled over from the Old World. Accordingly, The Book of Hallowe’en is most alive when recounting the customs, rituals, celebrations, games, and other forms of merrymaking carried out in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, Brittany, and the Isle of Man. There are respects paid to the dead and acts of divination. Bretons, says Kelley, stay up late, until “mysterious noises begin to be heard about the house”, and then honor the deceased with tales and memories. The actions of cats can be read like tea leaves on Halloween — a jump in the lap is double good luck; if a kitten yawns your way, you are not alert to the opportunities offered by life. Salt before bed induces prophetic dreams, and other forgotten uses of food abound. We learn about “lambswool”, a drink made from milk and roasted apples, and the extant Irish tradition of hiding a ring in colcannon, a cabbage mash. Similar to the fève baked into French galletes des rois, finding the ring heralds luck for the married, or imminent marriage for the young and single. Other traditions repurpose food, namely root and cruciferous veg. In Ireland, cabbage stalks were named for everyone present at a party, “then pulled up, and the guests were asked to come out, and ‘see their sowls.’” In Scotland, children made terrifying jack-o’-lantern turnips and piled cabbage stalks around doors and windows, baiting fairies to bring them new siblings. There is a surprising amount of snack-fueled matchmaking. Boys walking with oats in their mouths would hear the name of their future wives on the wind. Girls with nine slices of apple, who look into moonlit mirrors, may see the image of a lover, asking for the final bite. And Welsh women who stick “a knife among leeks”, while walking backward out of the garden, will return to find the knife plunged into the earth by a future beau. Published when Kelley was just twenty-six years old, five years after she graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe College, The Book of Hallowe’en was composed between shifts at Lynn Public Library in Massachusetts, where she would work for much of her life. Kelley ends her book with a vision. “May there not be written and presented in America a truly Hallowe’en pageant, illustrating and befitting its noble origin, and making its place secure among the holidays of the year?” Halloween is certainly secure in the United States and many other countries today, but do our contemporary celebrations befit the day’s noble origins? Few would be able to answer this question better than Kelley. And on the evening of October 31st, when your floorboards begin to creak beneath the weight of unseen forces, perhaps she will share her thoughts.

public-domain-review

Oct 24, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:51.263104

john-h-white-documerica

John H. White’s Photographs of Black Chicago for DOCUMERICA (1973–74) Text by Erica X Eisen Feb 1, 2023 It’s hard not to read John H. White’s DOCUMERICA series as a love letter to Black Chicago. Whether capturing protesters or checkers players, concerts or chores, White’s work feels animated by a wonder and curiosity for the great breadth of stories and characters he encountered while exploring his adopted home city — “life”, as he put it in the captions to several of his images, “in all its seasons”. While still in his twenties, White (b. 1945) was contracted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as part of DOCUMERICA, a project that sought to produce a visual record of the nation and its people with a particular — but not an exclusive — focus on ecology. The program made use of local photographers around the country and generally provided little in the way of guidelines or restrictions on subject matter; collectively, White and the rest of the DOCUMERICA cohort produced over 20,000 images, often using the openness of their assignment to create a body of work that shines not just with environmental urgency but with artistic vision too. In its ambition to present as capacious an account of contemporary American life as possible, DOCUMERICA was a spiritual successor to the Farm Security Administration’s Great Depression-era photography, which project director Gifford Hampshire cited as a major source of inspiration. Indeed, White is often spoken of alongside Gordon Parks, whose photographs for the FSA and the Office of War Information constitute crucial documents of Black American life in the mid-twentieth century. Originally from Lexington, North Carolina, White was interested in photography from a young age. In an interview with NPR, he recounted buying his first camera at the age of thirteen with ten Bazooka bubble gum wrappers and fifty cents from his grandmother; his father later gave him his first “assignment”, that of documenting the ruins of their church in the wake of a fire. The numerous accolades White has received over the course of his career include the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 1982, making him one of only a few Black photographers to have been so recognized. Extraordinarily, the committee awarded him the prize not for a single photograph or series, as is typical, but for “consistently excellent work on a variety of subjects”. Clarence Williams, who studied photography under White before also winning the Pulitzer, characterized his former mentor’s photographs of Chicago as “an earnest visual stream of consciousness that is tightly edited and that explores a city and its people through various moods that span what it means to be alive.” It is notable that even White’s snapshots of joy and play are often paired with captions (composed by the photographer himself) that frame the scene within larger economic realities: elevated unemployment rates, wage discrimination, and the difficulties Black business owners faced opening and keeping afloat their stores amid racial prejudice from white clientele. In several of his photographs, children in the foreground are dwarfed by the looming husks of abandoned housing blocks behind them — largely salvageable buildings that White notes “have been systematically vacated as a result of fires, vandalism or failure by the owners to provide basic tenant services” before being “razed and replaced with highrise apartments which appeal to few members of the Black community”. By placing these subjects within the framing of an EPA-funded project, White and the directors of DOCUMERICA drew an implicit connection between suburbanization and divestment from cities, on the one hand, and environmental racism on the other — analysis that rings with enduring resonance today. But by far the dominant impression that White’s portraits of Black Chicago exude is of life and liveliness. Genuine care for his subjects comes through in the way his experimentation with angles monumentalizes the workers he photographed. White’s DOCUMERICA work exhibits a talent for picking out moments of individual emotion amid crowds — whether the tears of a woman listening to a speech by Elijah Muhammad or the rapt concentration of a little boy executing drill team moves at a talent show. Yet in interviews White generally frames himself as a humble conduit, someone who captures more than he composes. “I don't really take pictures”, he said at one point. “Moments come when pictures take themselves.” Below you can browse a selection of John H. White’s photographs for DOCUMERICA with his original captions, presented in all caps as they appear in the National Archives Catalog.

public-domain-review

Feb 1, 2023

Erica X Eisen

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:52.280425

microscopic-delights

Martin Frobenius Ledermüller’s Microscopic Delights (1759–63) Text by Kevin Dann Mar 22, 2023 Novel and astonishing as they may have been for Enlightenment readers, it is difficult for us to comprehend how the magnifications of lice, fleas, houseflies, and other vermin might have been conceived as amusements for the mind and eyes. In full hand-colored clarity, stingers, pincers, biting mouthparts, and other irksome insect organs become menacing monsters thanks to the powers of the microscope in Martin Frobenius Ledermüller’s three-volume Mikroskopische Gemüths- und Augen-Ergötzung (Microscopic Delights of the Mind and Eyes). For all of their scientific verisimilitude, microscopes were first and foremost instruments of wonder, and Ledermüller (1718–1769) — a German polymath, physician, and keeper of the Margrave of Brandenburg’s natural history collection — extolls their virtues in illustrating the marvels of God’s Creation and also as pure entertainment. Along with the vermin, Ledermüller gave state-of-the-art descriptions of plant, animal, and human organs, fungi, plankton, and crystals that accompany more than 150 attractive colored plates, produced by Nuremberg publisher, artist, and engraver Adam Wolfgang Winterschmidt. Ledermüller’s own delight at the scenes beneath the lens shines through in many of his descriptions. While washing some sand collected from a beach on Rimini’s Adriatic shore, Ledermüller notices unidentified “globules” (he guesses that they are snail eggs), and places them beneath his “Oeconomical Glass”: “It is by this means that I discovered a real Firework on Water; that is to say that my Globules made on Water the same Effect as lit Grenades do, with the only Difference, that instead of Sparks of Fire, it was only Vapors & Particles of Water that they vomited.” Lederüller is similarly enchanted by all manner of Nature’s prodigies — a bee’s tongue, fish spawn, a drop of urine, the scales of insect wings. Examining the ocellus on a butterfly wing, he finds that “no painter, however skilful he may be, will ever succeed in rendering with his Brush, the Radiance & the Fire of the red, which this Mirror spreads”. Much of the microscope’s allure was communicated to the public through salon demonstrations coupling the new solar microscope — whose improved imaging capacity came from a rotating mirror that directed light into the eyepiece — with the camera obscura, transforming the (formerly) private affair of observation into a social event. Accordingly, the visual power of microscopy raised both scientific and social questions in the late-eighteenth century. Based on the evidence given by the microscope, Ledermüller dismisses the theory of spontaneous generation; he also argues that microscopy is a suitably edifying occupation for young women. Occasionally Ledermüller’s observations lead him to claim even the authority to name new species: Among the swampy water insects, there is a creature, which resembles in many respects the grotesque figure of a Harlequin. His black head, his body of various colors, his jumps, his bounces, his swings, his ridiculous tricks, have much in common with those of this jester of the Italian theater. For sometimes he stands on his Head, or rather on this red Tongue or Valve, which one sees appearing underneath; sometimes he stands perfectly on his Tail furnished with two large Fins; sometimes he stretches out quietly all the way, then gathering himself all of a sudden, he springs forward by a Snake’s Jump. Sometimes he puts himself in a Peloton, looking maliciously like Scapin from under his Coat, & then makes a Leap in the air; finally he bends like a banded Bow, & swims in this Posture on Water with the step of a Caterpillar; knowing as well how to keep his Balance as a Fish, so much so that he is as able on the surface of the water as in its depth. All this has led me to compare it to a Harlequin & to give it the Name. Across the three volumes, Ledermüller graciously concurs with the scientific opinions of a wide range of aristocratic correspondents, yet the final volume concludes with a testy reply to a German naturalist who had pointed out his error in mistaking the female housefly’s ovipositor for the male’s reproductive organ. Coming to Ledermüller’s defense, the artist Winterschmidt contributes a magnificent engraving of the housefly as the work’s final plate. Below you can browse images from a later French edition (1764–68) of Ledermüller’s work, courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries and Biodiversity Heritage Library.

public-domain-review

Mar 22, 2023

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:52.773845

mighty-mikko

Mighty Mikko: A Book of Finnish Fairy Tales and Folk Tales (1922) Text by Hunter Dukes Dec 6, 2022 With the assistance of his Finnish speaking friend Lydia Tulonen, Parker Hoysted Fillmore (1878–1944) wandered “through the byways of Finnish folklore”, glossing his volume Mighty Mikko as “the traveler’s pack I have brought back home with me filled with strange treasures”. Rather than translating the folklore in a manner faithful to their original language, which, he thought, could sound “stiff, bald, and monotonous” to English ears, Fillmore retells these stories in his own idiom. Like Russian formalist Vladimir Propp, who would author his “Morphology of the Folktale” six years after Mighty Mikko appeared, Fillmore recognized that these tales shared a deep structure with stories told the world over. They are nevertheless “dramatic and picturesque”, colored “with a wealth of charming detail which is essentially Finnish”. Yet unlike, for example, the European literary cycle of Reynard the Fox, where beasts are substitutes for political and legal figures, Fillmore believes that his creatures are “plain downright Finnish peasants, sometimes stupid, often dull, frequently amusing, and always very human”. Mighty Mikko contains twelve stories loosely based on Finnish tales, concluding with the hundred-page “Mikko the Fox: A Nursery Epic in Sixteen Adventures”. All, it seems, were gleaned by Fillmore from the work of Eero Salmelainen (1830–1867), namely his 1852 Suomen Kansan satuja ja tarinoita (Fairy tales and stories of the Finnish people), which collected tales told across Finland. Thanks to vibrant contributions from the abstract artist Jay Van Everen, Fillmore’s text is intercut with more than a dozen full-page block prints, numerous ornaments and miniature illustrations, and a magnificent color frontispiece. Among the stories, we find a perennial theme of youth shepherded across the threshold of adulthood by animal guardians. To leave the house and traditions of her forefathers, Ilona of “The True Bride”, based on “Merestä-nousija-neito”, must outsmart Syöjätar with the help of her dog Pilkka, and marry the King’s Son; in the eponymous “Mighty Mikko”, based on “Madon linna”, a huntsman mourning his deceased parents uses inherited traps to snare a crafty fox, who, in turn, helps him wed a princess and capture a castle. There are Bluebeard-like figures, such as the aged Vetehinen in “The Three Barrels” — a variation of the Grimm’s “Fitchers Vogel” — who beheads a farmer’s daughters for looking into a forbidden room in his aquatic kingdom. And there are stories of hygiene, like “The Little Sister”, that seem quintessentially Finnish: to banish Syöjätar, an ogress associated with disease in Finnish mythology, make sure the sauna stones are red hot. Despite Fillmore’s belief that faithful translations would sound bald and monotonous, some of his choices — made to sanitize the stories for children — are no less stiff. In a stumpily-titled “Log”, his truncation of “Leppäpölkky eli Sininen risti” (Leppäpölkky or the Blue cross), a many-headed monster emerges from the dark ocean to utter an evil incantation: “Fee, fi, fo, fum! / I smell a Finn! Yum! Yum!” The original has a more adult mood: “Huh-huu! ohan täällä ihmisen veri haisee; jopa tääll' on miehen luita syödäkseni” (Huh-huu! here the blood of man reeks; and here too are the bones of men to eat). Elsewhere, Fillmore adds a welcome bit of slapstick. In “The Partners”, when the Fox secretly eats the Wolf’s share of butter and then denies it, the animals decide to have a trial by fire: each will lie in the sun and see if fat runs from the other’s mouth. Assured of his innocence, the Wolf falls asleep in the warm light, which allows the Fox to smear his lips and frame him. In Salmelainen’s original, the Fox wakes the Wolf by crying: “Nouse katsomaan, kuoma, miten suustasi rasva valuu kalliolle!" (Rise friend, see how the fat drips from your mouth onto the rock!) Fillmore, seizing an opportunity, modifies the channel of delivery: “‘Wake up, Pekka! Wake up!’ the Fox cried. ‘There’s butter running out of your nose!’” ※※Indexed under…Butterrunning from the nose of a wolf Little remembered today, Parker Hoysted Fillmore was something of a children’s literature wunderkind in the first decades of the twentieth century. A 1909 profile in Hampton’s Magazine, for example, written when Fillmore was thirty years old, lauded his “wonderfully varied career” and “unusual success as a writer”. After graduating from the University of Cincinnati in 1901, the young man of letters was nominated by his college president to spend three years in Tigaon, Philippines working as a schoolteacher, part of a colonial mission to export American education to the country recently purchased by the United States from Spain. He supposedly taught himself Spanish during the voyage at sea and was installed as local postmaster not long after disembarking. It was here he became interested in the imagination of children, writing stories set in regional landscapes as pedagogical aids. After returning to Cincinnati, Fillmore went into investment banking with his brother, but soon suffered from exhaustion. (The diarist Winfield Townley Scott recalls hearing his contemporaries speculate that Fillmore “would never write another good book, because he had used himself up in the first”.) To recover, he slept outdoors in the Berkshires for a full year, and then set off for a series of long walks across England, France, Switzerland, Spain, and Italy. In the later period of his career, Fillmore turned to folklore, retelling stories he heard from his Czechoslovak friends in New York during Czechoslovak Fairy Tales (1919), The Shoemaker’s Apron (1920), and The Laughing Prince (1921), which a critic from the Evening Mail described as so brilliant that “Czecho-Slovakia is likely to be annexed by our nursery autocrats immediately”. His final works looked toward colder climates, with Mighty Mikko followed by a retelling of the Finnish Kalevala, titled The Wizard of the North: A Tale from the Land of Heroes (1923). Special thanks to Emma Vehviläinen.

public-domain-review

Dec 6, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:53.295874

munsell-atlas

Atlas of the Munsell Color System (1915) Text by Kevin Dann Mar 7, 2023 Before publishing his Atlas in 1915, painter and art teacher Albert Henry Munsell (1858–1918) had spent decades seeking to compress the totality of human color experience into a simple and elegant three-dimensional graphical model. In 1879, after reading physicist Ogden Rood’s Modern Chromatics, he devised a pair of twirling triangular color pyramids joined at the base. In 1898, he painted a child’s globe in subtly shifting shades, only to find that the globe’s perfect symmetry could not sufficiently map the differences in strength — which he called “chroma” — between colors or “hues”. By 1905, in his A Color Notation, Munsell had moved to a tree as model, since its unequal length branches could accommodate different hues, chroma, and “value”, the third axis of his system, which ran vertically from the pure white crown of the tree to its pure black roots. In the Atlas, the Color Tree and Color Sphere give way to cross-sectional charts by which the user is meant to imaginatively assemble a “realistic” system of alphanumeric notation. Each individual color square represents the intersection of hue, value, and chroma, denoted by a three-part code. Munsell’s system turned Vermilion into “5R4/10” — “5R” denoted the fifth step in the red scale (R as one of five color initials); “4” denoted the fourth step in the value scale, and “10” indicated that the color had the maximum chroma/strength. Vermilion’s complementary color, Viridian, was expressed as BG4/5. Besides “Red”, “Yellow”, Green”, “Blue”, and “Purple” — Munsell’s five principal hues, which overturned the prevailing dogma of three “primary” colors (red/yellow/blue) — “Vermilion” and “Viridian” are the only two specific color names that appear in the Atlas. Indeed, Munsell’s motivation for creating his system lay largely in his animus against the mushrooming chromatic vocabulary impelled by the fin-de-siècle commercial expansion of colors employed in advertising, manufacturing, fashion, and home décor. “Baby blue, peacock blue, Nile green, apple green, lemon yellow, straw yellow, rose pink, heliotrope, royal purple, Magenta, Solferino, plum, and automobile”, protested Munsell, “are popular terms, conveying different ideas to different persons and utterly failing to define colors.” Munsell envisioned a system akin to musical notation, which conveyed a sound’s pitch, intensity, and duration “without dragging in loose allusions to the endlessly varying sounds of nature”. Munsell was hardly alone in this initiative: Milton Bradley’s Color Wheel (1893) earned the toymaker a place on the Smithsonian Institution committee formed to devise a new system of color naming for scientific purposes; ornithologist Robert Ridgway sought a standardized system of color in his campaign to promote amateur natural history practice; drawing on Goethe’s color theories, Rudolf Steiner developed a spiritual scientific phenomenology of color; and painter Emily Noyes Vanderpoel created a color manual “to classify the study of color in individual eyes, in light, in history, and in nature”. None of these color crusaders were as evangelical as Munsell, who closely chronicled his two-decade-long quest for an “objective” color terminology and grammar across six journal volumes. Presenting his system to hundreds of artists, educators, scientists, and businesspeople, Munsell constantly encountered the objection, “Why should the old Red-Yellow-Blue system be given up?” Munsell was adamant that this commonplace three-pigment theory was harmful to children, who were led to believe that red was the complement of green, yellow the complement of purple, and blue the complement of orange — all of which, he thought, were untrue. The spectrometer or photometer showed that each pigment reflects nearly the entire spectrum, a part of it in enough excess that the eye recognizes only this dominant hue. Munsell found the explosion of commercial color photography and printing disturbing due to its reliance on R-Y-B, complaining that “like the crash of a brass band, there sprang up great billboards in red, yellow, and blue, with their chromatic shrieks for Harvard Beer, Hunter’s Rye, and Gorton’s Codfish.” Boston-bred Munsell’s chromatic snobbery exposes the main limitation of his and other attempts at color systematization, for perhaps more fundamentally than any other attribute of Nature, color will ever be a matter of “each to his own”, rather than the province of scientific certainty.

public-domain-review

Mar 7, 2023

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:53.824005

march-of-the-intellect

“March of Intellect” Cartoons (1828–29) Text by Hunter Dukes Mar 2, 2023 What did the future look like in 1820s Britain? Poking fun at liberal ambitions for education reform, the rapid pace of industrialization, and a fashionable interest in applied knowledge, William Heath’s March of Intellect series offered a satirical vision of the wonders and potential cost of progress. While extravagantly dressed ladies window-shop for pastel finery and forgo stairwells in favor of belt-driven slides, a child is moments away from being paved into the road by a carriage at full gallop. The automation of domestic labor — through a device called the “Grand Servant Superseding Apparatus for doing every kind of household work &c &c &c &c” — leaves women more time for recreation (or idle folly): smoking shisha in public, riding horsy hovercrafts, and traveling effortlessly to South America, Bengal, and Cape Town through the use of vacuum tubes, accelerator bridges, and pedestrian tunnels. Men gorge themselves on pineapples and guzzle bottles at the Champagne Depot. Postmen flit around with winged capes; a clocked-in shoeshiner has the time to read a newspaper in French, thanks to his boot-cleaning engine. Even convicts have it better: they embark for New South Wales on a gargoyle zeppelin, but still have panoramic views. In their imagination and satire, Heath’s prints reflected debates about the early-nineteenth century “March of the Intellect” or “March of the Mind”. For those who championed progress, this period roared with possibility. Encyclopædia Britannica first became available to the British public in 1771; by the early nineteenth-century, at least fourteen major encyclopedias, and reams of subject-specific dictionaries, were passing through all kinds of British hands. Magazines, reference books, and lending libraries rapidly circulated knowledge beyond the portered gates of elite institutions. Organizations like the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge promoted mass education as a mode of political reform. If knowledge was truth, then trustworthiness and moral action could be inculcated in the middle and working classes by providing autodidacts with affordable materials. That was part of the worry. Not only did the democratization of learning threaten an old cultural regime and potentially stoke the kind popular unrest seen in the Spa Fields riots and Peterloo Massacre, its liberal gloss was marred by suspicions about the machinations of political economy: “many believed that knowledge was foisted by the powerful and wealthy on the working classes in order to indoctrinate them into a culture where knowledge validated a simple work ethic”, writes Alan Rauch in Useful Knowledge. We find a more apocalyptic vision of the future in Robert Seymour’s 1820s The March of the Intellect, where a jolly automaton stomps across society. Its head is a literal stack of knowledge — tomes of history, philosophy, and mechanic manuals power two gas-lantern eyes. It wears secular London University as a crown. The machine smokes while crusading, blowing hot-air-balloon follies from a pipe bowl, carried on the breath of its menacing exhalation: “I Come I Come!!”. Wielding a straw broom, capped with the head of reformer Henry Brougham, it sweeps away all potential encumbrances. Gone are the pleas, pleadings, delayed parliamentary bills, and obsolete laws. Vicars, rectors, and quack doctors are turned on their heads. Like Frankenstein’s creature, birthed from a pick ‘n’ mix of exhumed organs and ossified science, the monster in this satirical cartoon is patchwork knowledge itself, practically applied and made widely available for the very first time. Fifty years after these prints appeared, Shanghai merchant guilds would attempt to prohibit silk filatures driven by steam to protect handicraft workers. A half-century later, John Maynard Keynes forecasted a future of “technological unemployment”. Fifty years after that, the General Motors Corporation announced a lights-out “factory of the future” to be run by robots in Saganaw, Michigan. And, in 2023, artificially intelligent chatbots have fueled ongoing anxieties about the mechanization of intellectual labor. In an era when “full automation” seems to mean anything but “less work”, the projections of these images — whether earnest or caustic — let us glimpse what the future might have looked like, and what it could still be. Below you can browse a selection of cartoons related to the March of the Intellect by William Heath, Robert Seymour, and other artists.

public-domain-review

Mar 2, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:54.452023

moseley-coffee

A Treatise Concerning the Properties and Effects of Coffee (1792) Text by Hunter Dukes Feb 2, 2023 How did coffee become so popular in the Middle East, turning the Yemeni port city of Mokha into a global marketplace of beans for nearly three centuries? Benjamin Moseley, eighteenth-century physician and early anti-vaxxer, offers an origin story for coffee culture in the expanded fifth edition of his Treatise Concerning the Properties and Effects of Coffee (1792). Noting that the account is a “ludicrous tale”, he nevertheless reproduces it in full. One night a Yemeni goat herder found his flock restless. They would not sleep, but “jumped and frisked about as if they had been infatuated”. The herder summons a religious official from the local mosque, who notices that the goats had foraged on “shrubs and berries [that] had always been considered among the wild and useless productions of the earth”. Intrigued, the holy man goes home and steeps himself a cup, which he “supped off hot”. Soon he too “began to dance and frisk about as the goats had done”. After the jitters wane, the man’s thoughts turn back to God, and he realizes that this concoction would “be an excellent thing to keep the Dervishes awake, when their duty obliged them to pray after dinner”. The experiment was an “utmost success” and soon the drink spread through every nearby nation and “among all the religious of the East”. Moseley was the eighteenth-century precursor to today’s third-wave connoisseur. He had strong opinions on roasting that might still hold water — “the closer it is confined at the time of roasting, and till used, the better will its volatile pungency, flavour, and virtues, be preserved” — and high standards of taste: following François Bernier, he relates that only two people in 1650s Cairo were capable of making a proper brew. As a practicing physician, Moseley's interest in coffee was mostly medical and, although these debates still continue, he had little time for the uncaffeinated. In a terribly-aged analogy, he compares coffee alarmists to those who raise “declamations against mercury” and “nonsense against tobacco” — equally bunk. Some of the proclaimed benefits of coffee are familiar. It combats “lethargy, catarrh, and all disorders of the head”. It “accelerates the process of digestion”, affects “the gastric powers”, and “diffuses a genial warmth that cherishes the animal spirits, and takes away the listlessness and languor”. It also helps hangovers: that “disorderly condition brought on by drinking bad fermented liquors, and new rum, to excess”. Other benefits are perhaps less well-known today. If bedridden with “bloody flux” or dysentery, drink four cups of hot coffee and cover yourself with heavy bed clothes — you will soon be cured through perspiration; for messengers commuting long distances, “the alternate effects of opium and coffee” can sooth “their tedious journies”. Aside from a caution to pregnant women and those with serious illnesses, the only negative account of coffee in this hundred-page treatise comes from a person Moseley met in Leyden: he “seldom drank much coffee, or continued the use of it for several days successively, without having a hæmorrhage from the nose.” When the first edition of Moseley’s treatise appeared in the 1780s, Europe’s urbanites had been hooked on coffee for more than a century. London’s original coffee house opened in 1652; the French, who “knew nothing of it until 1645”, could enjoy a public café in Marseilles come 1671. As Matthew Green details, these were intoxicating spaces where strangers mingled and discussed news, politics, scholarship, and everything in between. Part of Moseley’s polemic takes aim at those who charged coffee with inspiring treasonous activity in the veins of its stimulated sippers, such as the 1675 proclamation, under Charles II, that the “retailing of coffee might be an innocent trade; but as it was used to nourish sedition, spread lies, and scandalize great men, it might also be a common nuisance.” Moseley was writing against the backdrop of an unfolding neurochemical revolution in Europe. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch argued in his heady Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (1992), after centuries of imbibing alcoholic beverages as their main source of potable water, European’s new fondness for boiled drinks — coupled with the psychoactive properties of caffeine — swapped societal tipsiness with a mindstate primed for the Enlightenment’s intoxication with reason. (In a nonchalant aside, Moseley mentions how Voltaire once told him that he practically lived on coffee, for it “refreshed the brain, oppressed by study and contemplation”.) Unfortunately, the raison principale behind Moseley’s treatise was far from enlightened. Most of the defense of coffee serves his argument that the British Empire should fund plantations in the West Indies and lighten taxation to drive down market competition. In Jamaica, for instance, the would-be overseer will find “an easy employment; the labour light, and many parts of it performed by children.” When Moseley justifies this exploitation in his final paragraph as a way to ensure that “the [British] poor would be supplied with an wholesome ingredient for improving their diet”, we are left with only bitter grounds.

public-domain-review

Feb 2, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:54.890301

scare-fox

Art Brut: The Scare-Fox (1910) Text by Kevin Dann Jan 10, 2023 Uncannily resembling an early work of outsider art, Head Gamekeeper D. Green’s “scare-fox” was an altogether utilitarian contraption, devised to send foxes fleeing from his Herefordshire game preserve’s pheasant field. Shutters driven by a clockwork mechanism sent light flashing from three sides of the crude box, while its fourth side bore a badly painted caricature of a human face. Before the “scare-fox”, Green would burn fires at night to keep the foxes from the pheasants, “and even after that used to lose some”. He was certain that two scare-foxes set up in any field or wood would keep the predators away, and had plans to make one with glass sides and bells timed to ring with the shutters. Lawyer, editor, and indefatigable leader of the “More Game” movement in America, Dwight W. Huntington published this photograph of the scare-fox in Our Wild Fowl and Waders (1910) as part of his campaign to raise American awareness of the devastating depredations caused by “vermin”: a word that Americans used largely to refer to bed lice, but which in British gamekeeping circles had long been applied to any animal — from foxes, weasels, snakes, and stoats to rats, moles, and even shrews — that competed with hunters. Enthusiastically introducing the term in his March 1908 Independent “Game Bird Enemies”, Huntington would routinely employ it for the next three decades while cheerleading for “MORE GAME AND FEWER GAME LAWS”. Two journals he edited — Amateur Sportsman (1909–1912) and The Game Breeder (1912 –1938) — are a unique chronicle of the antagonistic reactions of hunters and “shooters” (waterfowl and other bird gunners) to the early twentieth century growth of the wildlife conservation movement. While Audubon Societies and kindred organizations lobbied legislatures to protect mammals and birds from destruction by both hunters and habitat loss, the Game Conservation Society (founded by Huntington in 1912) marshaled a nationwide campaign to stymie the “naturalists”: his generic and largely derogatory label for all of those who impinged on his dream of making America the world’s leading producer of game animals. Having long held pride of place as the chief nemesis of game keepers and bird hunters, “Reynard” — the red fox, Vulpes vulpes, a circumpolar predator universally known as the most catlike of the canids — exercised Huntington’s ire more than any other vermin. Conceding that “I enjoy seeing an occasional sly fox about”, Huntington happily reported his own and others’ fox shooting exploits, including the Middle Island Club of Long Island’s outing to celebrate a worthy member’s eighty-second birthday, during which they killed a number of foxes: From the time the first hound gave tongue Mr. Reynard was on his way. Oh, such music on a sharp, still and pretty morning can only be appreciated by those who know! Well, after chasing this cunning cuss for more than an hour, he was finally headed off by our young member, Mr. Howard Voorhies, who registered his first kill, and arrangements were made to have the pelt tanned and incidentally to decorate the cozy home in Brooklyn. Like that macabre scare-fox, such accounts sit uneasily for us fox-admiring moderns, who are more likely to find sympathy with Oscar Wilde’s delicious declaration that fox-hunting was “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”.

public-domain-review

Jan 10, 2023

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:55.087127

dool-hoff

Dool-Hoff: A Dutch Maze with New Jerusalem at its Centre (1705) Text by Hunter Dukes Feb 21, 2023 In his fifth-century commentary on Ezekiel’s vision of New Jerusalem, Jerome quotes the Aeneid, likening the path of salvation to a minotaur’s maze: “‘As once in lofty Crete the labyrinth is said to have had a route woven of blind walls’ . . . . So I, ente[r] the ocean of those scriptures and, so to speak, the labyrinth of God’s mysteries, of whom it is said ‘He made darkness his covert’ and ‘there are clouds in his circuit’”. This 1705 maze (Dool-hoff), signed by the Dutch Catholic printer Claes Braau, also comes with clouded pathways, but here the way to New Jerusalem is cobbled by didactic verse. The broadsheet’s four dead-ends are burnished with spiritual gravity by its epigraphs: “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Proverbs 14.12) and “See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise” (Ephesian 5:15). Each pathway is paved with texts that narrate vocational and moral choices at various lengths. The road dedicated to economic wealth is full of twists and turns, but ultimately leads to the same fate as the short meander through a trench describing vanity: your journey’s abrupt termination. Choosing the “wrong path” forces the puzzler to backtrack, should they want to meet the Lamb of God at the maze’s center. Luckily, there are many ways to reach salvation, such as by studying the seven liberal arts. The Dool-hoff was published in Haarlem during a period when neighboring Amsterdam was awash with secular mazes. “Doolhof inns”, a type of surreal public house, became increasingly popular in the seventeenth-century, treating tipsy patrons to mechanical statues, uncanny waxworks, and disorienting hedge mazes. Claes Braau’s Dool-hoff strayed from the path of these “astonishing and unprecedented novelties”, in Angela Vanhaelen’s words, and their “Bacchic conviviality”. Instead, it drew upon an older Christian tradition, represented by cathedral labyrinths like the one at Chartres, which W. H. Matthews hypothesized might reference “the various degrees of beatitude by which the soul approaches heaven, as figured by Dante”. That is, a byzantine journey through the labyrinth of the world toward a paradise of the heart. In its marriage of text and spatial warren, the Dool-hoff formally recalls the script labyrinth of Johann Neudörffer (1539), the Geistlich Labyrinth of Eberhard Kieser (1611), and several other precursors. Curiously, as the millennium progressed, the actual serpentine streets of Old Jerusalem would come to represent something much less beatific for Western Europeans: what George Prochnik calls an “entropic deliquescence of the Oriental” — the city’s perceived downward spiral under Ottoman rule. Scholars are not sure who designed this Dool-hoff. While the text is credited to H. A. Hoejewilt, the name seems to be a bibliographic dead-end (Hoe je wilt means “However you want” in Dutch). Only a few copies survive. While the version above comes courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Jeff Saward offers a detailed description of an earlier specimen, discovered in the recycled backmatter papering a book of Quaker minutes, which can be read and viewed here. And for more religious spiralling, check out our post on Claude Mellan’s 1649 engraving The Sudarium of Saint Veronica.

public-domain-review

Feb 21, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:55.549079

fechtbucher

Battles of the Sexes: Duels between Women and Men in 1400s Fechtbücher Text by Hunter Dukes Jan 18, 2023 Around the year 1430, illustrated German-language manuscripts began to depict the art of Zweikampf: dueling, or, literally, a battle of two. Known as “fight books” (Fechtbücher), these manuals developed out of a tradition founded by the semi-mythic Johannes Liechtenauer, a fencing instructor whose biography remains almost completely obscured. Enriched by novel technical vocabulary and rubbing shoulders with Arthurian romance, these fifteenth-century manuals are most notable for their vast quantities of visualized combat, influencing parallel traditions in Italy, Spain, and France. Yet spend enough time browsing Fechtbücher and you may notice something strange. Between colorful scenes of intimate grappling, demonstrations of the longsword, lance, falchion, knife, and scythe, cheap tricks for outwitting your enemy, and the mournful aftermath of battle, we find men and women engaged in judicial duels. A form of legal trial, the duels often begin with the man in a pit or a tub, equipped with a wooden mace, while the woman circles above, slinging a stone wrapped in a veil or “loaded” into the sleeve of her chemise. The difference in height is meant to level any physical advantage of biological sex. Various painful scenarios play out. In one sequence from fencing master Hans Talhoffer’s 1467 Fechtbüch, the man somehow flips his opponent over, piledriving her into the ditch while flourishing his weapon as if emoting victory or assault. In another, the pinned woman executes a reversal on the pit man, putting her opponent into a headlock before proceeding to pull him backward out of the earth by his ears or groin. Submission, not death, seems to be the goal. Legal codes differed on what came next: the Stadtbuch von Augsburg (ca. 1272) called for the defeated to be buried alive, while the Freisinger Rechtsbuch (ca. 1328) suggested cutting off the woman’s hand and beheading the man. ※※Indexed under…HolesMen in If these images are baffling, so too are the hastily researched articles they have fostered. In a kind of digital telephone game, a three-paragraph-long note on Talhoffer — posted by University of Oklahoma Professor Kenneth L. Hodges on the Academy of European Medieval Martial Arts webpage — is linked out to with embellished claims. There are no fewer than a dozen articles online that describe Talhoffer as outlining a common late medieval practice of divorce-by-combat — the term does not appear in the manual or post — and credit Hodges with the 1467 Fechtbüch’s discovery, despite the professor’s use of an 1887 facsimile. As Allison Coudert writes, “nowhere except in the Holy Roman Empire were judicial duels ever considered fitting means to settle marital disputes, and no record of such a duel has been found after 1200”. A more sober reflection of historical consensus regarding these images comes from a BBC interview with Neil Grant, a trustee of the UK’s Royal Armouries: “It's very, very odd – please do not ask me to explain it!” Instead of offering a theory, others have resorted to practice. In 2016, participants in the European martial arts “Dreynevent” staged a simulated combat based on Thalhoffer’s manuscript. But some attempt at explanation is warranted given the quantity of misinformation. Was trial by combat an actual practice for resolving legal disputes between Germanic women and men in the 1400s? Or do the images reference a kind of premodern Punch and Judy show, introduced to liven swordplay pedagogy with exaggerated depictions of a perennial struggle between the sexes? To answer those questions requires knowing more about law in the era. As R. Howard Bloch describes, discussing the spread of trials by combat westward into France, this form of justice made legal process “indistinguishable from divine process, human will from godly will, positive law from divine law”. Finding its roots in Frankish society, trial by ordeal (whether fire, water, or combat) reached an apex between 800–1200, after the Carolingians sanctioned the now-Christenized practice. Distinct from matters of honor — the more familiar duels that involve throwing down the gauntlet at a perceived slight — these trials by combat were often prescribed only for the most serious crimes. Yet the law frequently codified the use of substitutions. Amputees, the elderly, chronically ill, and women were encouraged or mandated to seek a champion to fight on their behalf. This is not to say medieval women did not draw weapons: one of the earliest European fencing treatises features swordswomen fighting alongside male counterparts, and Vickie L. Ziegler notes that “while fighting was generally considered a man’s work, the redoubtable women of Bavaria were allowed to do battle”. Yet, for the majority, because these trials were not feats of strength — a belief that casts a perplexing light on the very logic of substitution — a proxy would do just fine. In Kathryn Gravdal’s words, “God makes the truth seen and tangible”. How, then, would a woman find herself wielding a makeshift flail, circling a man buried up to his waist in the 1400s? In short, she probably wouldn’t. By the time these scenes began appearing in Fechtbücher, trials by ordeal of all kinds were on a steep decline. Scholars offer various explanations for the images gathered below. Claiming that “the cultural mores of the time absolutely forbade such things”, Hugh T. Knight, Jr. draws our focus to how popular entertainments “enjoyed role-switching themes for metaphoric or humorous purposes”. Yet Hodges might disagree. Analyzing the language used by Talhoffer to describe this combat, he notes how the author “is taking this seriously, not exoticizing it”. Coudert offers what seems to be the most likely explanation: fencing masters like Talhoffer and Paulus Kal copied outmoded dueling practices from passed down stories or now-lost manuscripts “to make their treatises as historically comprehensive as possible”. This is not to say that these events were not theoretically possible: a cruel 1276 Augsburg law required women who accused men of sexual violence to fight without a champion, if there were no witnesses present to the crime. We just do not have much evidence that these duels between men and women actually took place with any regularity. And there is a chance that these images are more engaged with the history of literature than law. In Heinrich von Neustadt’s epic Apollonius von Tyrland (ca. 1300), Flordelîse calls for a duel against Silvia of Nazareth to avenge her married sister, who he attempted to violate and subsequently slandered. Because “Si ist ain weib, er ist ain man” (She is a woman, he is a man), the city bishop finds himself stumped. Fortunately, his bookishness gets rewarded when he remembers reading about an old duel that was made fair by putting the man in a pit. Some believe this story itself was inspired by a widely circulated case of a woman who defeated a man during a 1288 combat in Bern, which Ariella Elema has called “the sole example in European history of a trial by battle between a man and a woman that the litigants pursued all the way to combat and fought in person.” More than a century before judicial duels between women and men began appearing in Fechtbücher, these events were abnormal occurrences or the stuff of a distant past, accurate or invented, witnessed firsthand by few and remembered mostly in texts. Below you can browse a gallery of images depicting judicial duels between women and men. And here you can purchase a new translation of Talhoffer’s 1467 Fechtbüch.

public-domain-review

Jan 18, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:56.005079

frost-flowers

Frost Flowers on the Windows (1899) Text by Kevin Dann Jan 19, 2023 In Frost Flowers on the Windows, expatriate Swedish actor, theater producer, and writer Albert Alberg (1838–1924) leads us on a fin-de-siècle walkabout across Chicago. His goal is to document a “New, Truly Great Discovery”: the extraordinary power of windowpane frost to take “ice photographs”, images capable of expressing the “vital qualities” of life forms close to the glass. During the Great Arctic Outbreak of 1899, which plunged North America into record lows, Alberg was eating at his favorite German restaurant. Looking up, he saw the outlines of ferns, celery stalks, and a withered geranium etched in ice upon the window. Although most of the celery on his table had been consumed, leaving only undesirable leftovers — stalks that were “thin and small and without scarcely any leaves, mere tufts being suffered to remain” — their images appeared in frost as the “most vividly depicted stalks of celery with sprigs and leaves”, proof that “no other plant [is] endowed with such an extraordinary powerful vitality”. After his supper, Alberg proceeds to conduct an “espionage into this secret branch of nature”. He finds tropical plants reproduced on the frosted glass of a saloon serving punch made from coconut and sugarcane; pineapples in the windows of a Greek fruit dealer; cereals, vegetables, and even a shopgirl’s lace apron on the panes of a Swedish restaurant; and, at a small grocery, celery stalks are again cast across the glass. Writing during a decade in which celery tonics dominated the patent medicine trade, Alberg takes this last apparition as proof that “‘Jack Frost’ therefore seemingly most emphatically endorses celery as a conserver and restorer of vitality”. Though a modern reader might take this mercantile frost extravaganza to be Alberg’s deep-freeze-induced hallucination, he mentions a number of witnesses. Spying cabbage leaves delineated on the kitchen window at a friend’s home, he ventures (correctly) that they had recently dined on cabbage. Calling at the home of another friend, he finds a miniature landscape — complete with flat-roofed house, steepled church, and a moored boat — portrayed on the window of his son’s bedroom. When the son confesses that he often dreams of the family’s ancestral farm outside Cleveland, his father recognizes the ice tracing as a fair depiction. Having moved in Spiritualist circles during his fifteen-year residence in London, and Chicago’s large Theosophical community since his arrival in 1890, Alberg writes prose tinged with both the Spiritualist language of “materialization” and Theosophical language of the astral realm. Apart from his countryman Linnaeus’ 1761 report of producing ice figures from crushed seeds, the only authority Alberg cites is Theosophical writer Franz Hartmann on the subject of alchemical palingenesis — the resurrection of life forms. And despite a long Western tradition of anthropomorphizing the uncanny animations of ice crystals as the magical work of “Jack Frost”, and a full-blown Victorian rage for “frost flowers” (known as Eisblumen in Germany, where the Romantic imagination was gripped by the creative powers of these shapes), no one had previously conducted the sort of phenomenological survey that Alberg undertook during that bone-shatteringly cold winter of 1899. That nary a single illustration accompanies Alberg’s text is frustrating, but perhaps understandable, for only a handful of pioneer photographers had mastered the technical demands required to capture images of such subtle forms. Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley’s unprecedented microphotographs of snowflakes were first made in the 1880s; Englishman James Leadbeater published his first clear photographs of windowpane frost in the 1890s. Nearly all of the dozens of Victorian poetic paeans to “frost-work” emphasized its ephemerality. At first light or breath, the tracework would fade. Sadly, the fate of this monograph went the way of frost flowers. Aside from a plea to readers from The American Monthly Microscopical Journal to test his findings, and a single notice of the book in the Chicago journal of popular occultism The Star of the Magi, the work vanished from view. Yet the author’s own interest in the phenomenon continued unabated. In 1912, when Alberg sent a copy of Frost Flowers to British zoologist Alfred Russell Wallace, he still hoped to publish further observations. Living once again in Sweden, Alberg lamented how the use of double-pane windows largely prevented “fine ice-palingenesis”. When he died in 1924, Alberg was unaware that Ehrenfried Pfeiffer — struck by the difference between frost forms on the windows of florist and butcher shops in Basel, where he was studying chemistry — had been working to develop “sensitive crystallization” methods for demonstrating etheric forces, the elusive “vital energy” hinted at by Alberg’s discovery.

public-domain-review

Jan 19, 2023

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:56.547358

mayer-medusae

Floating Phantoms: A. G. Mayer’s Medusae of the World (1910) Text by Kevin Dann Nov 15, 2022 There is something inevitable about Alfred Goldsborough Mayer’s attraction to jellyfish. Like Ernst Haeckel before him, Mayer could never “remain insensible to the rare grace of form and delicate beauty of color of these creatures of the sea”. While Haeckel’s highly-stylized illustrations of Medusae are widely celebrated, the seventy-six color plates of Mayer’s Medusae of the World (1910) — in three quarto-size volumes comprising 735 pages of text and 428 line figures — are almost entirely unknown to all but specialists. Each figure is executed with an eye toward satisfying the exacting taxonomic task of classifying jellyfish’s bewildering diversity. Poorly known in Mayer’s day, Medusae of the World described 565 species of Hydromedusae — mostly small jellyfish commonly called the “veiled medusae” for the presence of propulsion-assisting veils on their bells — and 180 species of Scyphomedusae, or “true jellyfishes”, including familiar species such as the Moon Jelly (Aurelia aurita), the Sea Nettle (Chrysaora quinquecirrha), the Lion’s Mane Jelly (Cyanea capillata), the Cannonball Jelly (Stomolophus meleagris), and various Upside-down Jellies (Cassiopea spp.). These handsome volumes are more than a compendium of this difficult phylum, for Mayer’s gracefully written text also summarized the latest research on Medusae life history, embryology, cytology, ecology, physiology, regeneration, and behavior. Having in his first scientific publications included superb line drawings of box tortoises, garter snakes, and the variegated wing scales of butterflies, his gift for zoological illustration and close natural history observation drew him to the attention of Alexander Agassiz, son of the titan Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz, and founder of a private marine biological laboratory at Newport, Rhode Island. Contemplating the location information for many of Mayer’s gorgeous drawings, one gets a glimpse of the littoral nature of Gilded Age scientific patronage; from Casco Bay, Maine to Newport, RI, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, to Chesapeake Bay, and down through Cape Fear to Key West and Nassau Harbor, the richest places to collect these colorful flowers of the sea were also the favorite haunts of America’s yachting set. The aging and somewhat tyrannical Agassiz sent Mayer on collecting expeditions much farther afield — Fiji, Java, Tahiti, Japan, most of the major islands and coasts of Oceania and Australia — and by the time that Mayer’s opus magnum was published, “Alex the Great” (Mayer’s wife Harriet preferred “Ivan the Terrible”) had passed away. Though Medusae of the World is long on tedious taxonomy and short on descriptive natural history narrative, there is still a dramatic nemesis at the heart of these three volumes: Ernst Haeckel, whose limited field experience and zeal for new species made him a “splitter”, as contrasted with Mayer’s “lumper” taxonomic tendency. “I have seen Haeckel’s ‘species’ only in medusa which I have myself preserved”, Mayer confessed. “They appear not to exist except in alcohol.” While Haeckel’s paintings turn the floating phantoms into baroque spectacles of color and flowing form, Mayer’s medusae are more sober, their tentacles subdued, their umbellate bells transparent. Even his text descriptions tend to mute the hues, in favor of faithful phenomenology; speaking of the Mediterranean medusa Carybdea marsupialis, Mayer says: “Bell and pedalia dull milky-ocher, due to the color of the exumbrella nematocyst-warts. Flexible parts of tentacles dull pink. Ocelli very dark brown, nearly black; basal branches of gastric cilli dull horny-brown.” For all of his unromantic exactitude, Mayer’s jellyfish are nonetheless dreamily beckoning forms, tissues which find pulsing animation at the aqueous threshold of life. Below you can browse a selection of illustrations from Mayer’s three volumes. Captions can be found, after clicking the source link, on the page before each plate.

public-domain-review

Nov 15, 2022

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:57.025938

tanzmasken

The Tanzmasken of Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt (ca. 1924) Text by Sasha Archibald Nov 22, 2022 In January 1924, a German studio photographer of some status, Minya Diéz-Dührkoop, took portraits of a young avant-garde artist couple, Lavinia Schulz (1896–1924) and her husband Walter Holdt (1899–1924). The photos are unusual, partly because the couple’s faces are never visible, and partly because the costumes they’re wearing are so bizarre: Grandiose, but also earthy and oddball — a brigade of science fiction bogeymen, homespun. Schulz and Holdt made these costumes for dancing; they performed under the name Die Maskentänzer (The Mask Dancers). The outfits are more sculpture than clothing, and they entirely swallow up the wearer. Some suggest a mongrel collision of characters — a buggy-eyed insect meets a jester meets a bearded tomato — and others allude to zippy motion, with eyeballs cartoonishly pulling off the face. Wires poke out and wooden blocks dangle, a bridge seesaws from shoulder to shoulder. Many of the geometric silhouettes defy anatomy; hands, feet, and heads are all boxed in, with no apparent exit. The bright, discordant colors were apparently chosen based on esoteric rules. Remarkably, Schulz and Holdt’s craftsmanship, especially the sewing, keeps pace with their imaginative reach. Six months after the portrait sitting, Schulz shot Holdt in the head, and then turned the gun on herself. Both died. Their one-year-old infant son, who was there beside them, was unharmed. Following the murder-suicide, the couple’s apartment was cleaned out, and their things taken to the Hamburg Museum of Arts and Crafts, where they were stashed in the attic. The boxes were forgotten for six decades, and luckily so; had the collection been properly catalogued, it would have likely been seized by the Nazis. At the time of their death, Schulz and Holdt were somewhat notorious in the local art community. They’d performed recently at the Hamburg Museum, and also at a large arts festival. One historian describes their short-lived practice as “among the strangest produced by the whole Weimar dance culture”. Schulz was indisputably the duo’s leader. She directed the costume-making, and choreographed the dances. She was also the enforcer of the artists’ distinct philosophy, which correlated aesthetic value with suffering. The raison d'être of live performance, Schulz believed, was intensity, and the performer could channel intensity only if she was herself in an intense frame of mind. Privation made this state more accessible. “Art has to be exhausting”, Schulz wrote, “otherwise it is worthless”. Austerity, deprivation, and extreme self-discipline were essential — not so as to survive the travails of a creative life, but as a pre-condition for creating anything of value. Schulz practiced what she preached. The couple’s basement apartment had a dirt floor, outdoor toilet, and no electricity or running water. They slept in hammocks, or on straw. Gray tights and unitards were worn as everyday apparel, so that they could rehearse at any moment. Their materials were scavenged, and they avoided machines. Believing that art and commerce shouldn’t mix, they refused money for their work, which led to bouts of starvation, even after their child was born. To the interior of the costumes they added elements that were invisible to the audience but heightened their personal discomfort: weights, for instance, and nails pointing inward. Some of the outfits weigh more than forty kilograms. Schulz and Holdt also hurt each other. Their storied fights involved kicking and punching, terrible obscenities, and wrestling on the ground. During one rehearsal, with a large group watching, Holdt dragged Schulz around the room by her hair. Schulz apparently relished this; as a friend recalled, “catastrophe” was her métier. Schulz seems to have imbibed some of her notions about art directly from her mentor, the German Expressionist theater producer and theorist Lothar Schreyer. A former copyright lawyer and future Nazi, Schreyer cultivated a tiny, cliquish circle of artsy young people, which he helmed as creative priest and chief. He had an outsized effect on Schulz’s life. He recruited her when she was just sixteen and had left her family in Lusatia to study in Berlin. Schulz stayed at Schreyer’s side for the next eight years. His description of her in his memoirs has the whiff of erotic intimacy: “wild and passionate, restrained only by the strict discipline of art”. Schreyer flattered himself an art prophet, and Schulz proved an ideal disciple. She amplified his directives, and literalized his abstractions. For instance, when Schreyer cast Schulz in the lead role of his 1918 production of August Stramm’s Sancta Susanna, and explained the production concept as “a play of naked man”, Schulz decided to play her part naked, or nearly so. Her mentor was pleased, and much of the audience horrified. One critic called it “a murderous attack on the theatre”. Schreyer’s funding vanished after this production, so he moved the increasingly cultish company away from Berlin to the quiet town of Hamburg. (Subsequent performances were invitation-only, no critics allowed.) In Hamburg, Schreyer recruited some new acolytes from the local high school, among them Holdt. Holdt and Schulz fell into a relationship that was preternaturally intense. After one epic scene of violence, Schreyer kicked them both out. Without Schulz’s talent, however, the group folded. Schreyer moved on, taking a position at the Bauhaus teaching stagecraft, while his former students struck out on their own. Schulz was then twenty-four-years old and Holdt twenty. Their marriage and collaboration would last three years. Abstract, handmade costumes remained central to their practice, and Schulz used her teacher’s system of notation to choreograph dances that were low to the ground, with lots of lunging, squatting, and creeping. (Schreyer had said that one should not dance like a marionette, as in ballet, but like someone holding a marionette.) They scored their work with Schönberg’s cacophonous twelve-tone system, formulated just a few months previous. ※※Indexed under…Dancenotation Schulz’s choreographic notes reveal the way that she linked pain with ecstatic transformation. Describing one character’s motion, she writes, “Steaming, snorting, gathers, curves, throws itself, throws, pushes, tears and sinks, breathing heavily to the ground. Dead?! She rises again, suffering-lashed, pain-tormented, snort-blasted.” The specter of death, it seems, was Schulz’s personal font of life. Some say that Holdt was cheating on Schulz and she shot him in revenge. Others that Holdt had retreated to bed, from illness or depression, and Schulz was furious that he’d abdicated their collaborative practice. It was widely reported that the two were emaciated; indeed, many Germans were starving in 1924. What’s certain is that their costumes, rediscovered in 1988, remain singularly remarkable. It’s always a gamble when an artist bets on suffering, and who’s to say that Schulz and Holdt lost? Special thanks to Joachim Baur.

public-domain-review

Nov 22, 2022

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:57.559982

book-of-bread

The Book of Bread (1903) Text by Hunter Dukes Jan 5, 2023 “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”, writes Owen Simmons at the outset of The Book of Bread (1903), a work he hopes will definitively establish “the link between the bakery and the laboratory” and speak to “the needs of the baker and of the miller”. And the text, at times, does indeed read like a lab manual for commercial bakeries: Simmons was a breadmaker’s breadmaker, co-founder of the National School of Bakery in London and frequent contributor to The British Baker. The book contains equations for the conversion of starch into alcohol (by way of maltose, dextrin, and glucose), chemical explanations for why viscoelasticity is “injurious to the proper manufacture of several kinds of biscuits”, and intricate discussions of nitrogenic proteids, which, once transformed into peptones, “nourish the yeast by percolating its cellulose”. In addition to its scientific learning, the preface notes two unique aspects that set The Book of Bread apart from competitors: a tabulated appendix, featuring the results of more than 360 baking experiments, and its “most expensive illustrations”, which will force readers “to admit that never before have they seen such a complete collection of prize loaves illustrated in such an excellent manner”. An early entry in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s history of the photobook, the attention lent to loaves left the writers in awe: “Here, at the beginning of the twentieth century, one of the humblest, yet most essential of objects is catalogued as precisely, rigorously and objectively as any work by a 1980s Conceptual artist.” Kenneth Josephson’s later photographic experiment, The Bread Book (1973), seems to directly reference Simmons’ work. In many ways, The Book of Bread anticipates the rise of molecular gastronomy in the 1990s and 2000s. Simmons’ demonstrations of scientific learning are purely in service of the glutenous arts, and his passion for bread leavens, here and there, moments of flat discussion. The author elaborates on the “vigour of yeast”, the textural superiority of a “soft, pliable, and springy crumb”, the causes of “crumbliness”, “ropiness”, and “blisters and bladders”. Yet Simmons’ tireless displays of authoritative gravity — his chapter epigraphs include lines from Pope and Tennyson — occasionally come across as humorously overbaked. Consider, for instance, his taxonomy of holes: Concerning holes in bread there are many conflicting opinions. Men engaged daily in the handling of dough differ ; thinking men who commit their thoughts to paper are diametrically opposed ; but we think the differences of opinion would disappear if the different kinds of holes were kept in mind, and the subject more fully discussed. Holes in bread may be divided into two classes—those, on the one hand, which are more or less distributed in a loaf, being of medium size and numerous, and those, on the other hand, which are very large, being only one or at most two in the entire loaf. There are many subsidiary causes, which we shall proceed to discuss. . . After roughly three hundred pages of dense, carbo-scholastic prose, Simmons offers no conclusion or parting remarks. His last sentence, before turning to tabulation, is a minor caution to bakers: “In using compressed yeast see that it is fresh, and not too soft.” Simmons preceded the trade edition of his book with a stunning edition de luxe of roughly 350 copies, bound in red grained Moroccan leather with the original silver bromide prints pasted in. While the larger print run of the trade edition necessitated a switch to more cost-effective photomechanical illustrations, Simmons still made the unusual step of retaining two pasted-in silver bromide prints (the ones bordered by green below) in addition to the beautiful chromolithograph plates, where golden loaves glow against an ultramarine background. As @incunabula notes, this reference text is surrounded by mystery. The talented photographer remains nameless and, for unknown reasons, very few deluxe editions of The Book of Bread have survived, despite a fairly generous initial printing.

public-domain-review

Jan 5, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:58.031132

yaggy-geographical-maps

Levi Walter Yaggy’s Geographical Maps and Charts (1887/93) Text by Sasha Archibald Feb 15, 2023 Levi Walter Yaggy’s Geographical Study (1887) unpacks like a matryoshka doll. The experience begins with a heavy wood box, outfitted with leather straps and brass clasps, inside of which is a sheaf of complex maps and charts, and a learning guide on how they should be used in the classroom. The maps are each the size of a small rug (ranging between two and four feet) — large enough to lay on the floor and have pupils gather around — and all save one are printed expensively, on thick paper with chromolithography. The exception is a green relief map of the United States, made of plaster and papier-mâché and built directly in the carrying case. It’s the least charming of the suite, though it made Yaggy justifiably proud: most of the mountains he depicts had yet to be measured. The remaining maps, of Earth and its cosmos, are packed in such a way as to avoid being crinkled by the Rocky Mountains. Some of “Yaggy’s maps”, as they were usually called, are straightforward two-dimensional posters, but others feature elaborate cutaways and intricate layers. “Physical Geography”, for instance, presents as a bucolic orb of rivers and fields, with an erupting volcano in the corner. By adjusting riveted metal tabs, this scene falls away, and a new view is revealed underneath, showing all variety of subterranean human activity: Venetian grottoes; a cave in Kentucky; quartz, salt, and coal mines. Beneath this layer is another, with a diagram of the stratified ages of the earth in striped autumnal colors; and then, finally, the mass of land becomes a bustling aquarium, starring a one-eyed octopus and a fleet of pulsing jellyfish. The cutaways in Yaggy’s “Planetary System” map are even more complex. Seasons can be adjusted with a dial, and translucent linen inlays reveal the corresponding placement of constellations, which shine when backlit. There’s a cutaway showing the phases of a solar eclipse, and another with a view of the moon as seen by the world’s most powerful telescope. Every corner packs a surprise; the innermost layer, “Chart of the Heavens”, draws the nocturnal sky like a party, crowded with animals and gods. ※※Indexed under…Revelationthrough the lifting of flaps Mapmaker was not Levi Walter Yaggy’s (1842–1912) chief occupation; he was best known as a businessman, though he was also an inventor, author, conservation advocate, prohibitionist, and elder in the Presbyterian Church. Yaggy founded and helmed an enormously successful business in Chicago, Western Publishing. Western was a subscription book rather than trade book publisher; its volumes, sold door-to-door, had lower cultural status and made far more money. One of Western’s books, co-written by Yaggy when he was twenty-eight years old, became an astounding bestseller. The Royal Path of Life: Or, Aims and Aids to Success and Happiness (1876) was a nonfiction blockbuster for three decades, and sold upwards of 800,000 copies, a number roughly equivalent, during Yaggy’s time, to the populations of Chicago, Baltimore, and New Orleans combined. Yaggy enjoyed his success. He bought and sold various properties, and built a grand house down the street from the Mayor of Chicago. Delighted by a topiary maze in Switzerland, he re-created it on the acreage surrounding his house. He was a trustee at nearby Lake Forest College, and sent his three sons to Yale. He wrote more books, and filed many clever patents: not only charts, maps, and educational tools, but an early vending machine; a rototiller; an award-winning device for holding animal feed. There is a ghost town in Kansas bearing Yaggy’s name, where he once planted a million catalpa trees as a proposed alternative to cutting old growth forest. It took a certain amount of swagger for Yaggy to assume that a market existed for children’s educational materials as lush as those that he designed. The Geographical Study cost today’s equivalent of nearly two thousand dollars, and the presumed customers included one-room schoolhouses that adjourned when the harvest came in. Many American cities didn’t yet have a public library. No worries, Yaggy was first and foremost a salesman. His pitch went like this: Teachers trained in the most up-to-date pedagogy deserved the best tools to suit. His maps were new, modern, essential. Adverts featured the word “Revolution” in all caps, and rhetorically asked, “Why follow the old ruts?” At every opportunity, Yaggy associated his maps with “the spirits and methods of the New Education”, alluding to a way of teaching that prioritized direct examination. Like other nineteenth-century creators of inspired pedagogical materials, such as Emma Willard, Ellen Harding Baker, and Edward and Orra Hitchcock, Yaggy believed that wonder was the helpmate of learning. Once in hand, the maps sold themselves. One teacher rhapsodized that the set was “absolutely marvelous”, “perfectly unique”, “wonderfully ingenious”, and “as necessary . . . as is a telescope in an observatory”. Portfolios were purchased by far-flung schools in Utah, North Carolina, Nevada, Missouri, Maryland, North Carolina, and many other places. One district in Pennsylvania bought eight sets of Yaggy’s maps, and only a single chalkboard. Few of Yaggy’s maps survive, likely because they were fingered by dozens of small hands, year after year. It’s obvious now that the Geographical Study contains many errors: errors of fact, as revealed by the last century of scientific exploration, and errors of prejudice, too. (The accompanying Teacher’s Hand Book instructs students that Caucasians are “the most handsome, active, wise and powerful people in the world”.) The distortion for which Yaggy is most accountable is his inordinate fondness for pastiche. He compressed the world’s variety into digestible tableaus, brazenly mingling fauna and topography that never abut in real life. (In a later series of maps, Yaggy’s Geographical Portfolio from 1893, animals from three oceans swim in common waters, and a desert is bordered by a forest.) Is there a cost to making a map more charming than true? In The Poetics of Space, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard speaks disparagingly of maps like Yaggy’s. Bachelard scoffs at the “schoolboy’s desert”, and the “Sahara to be found in every school atlas”. Such representations, he argues, dangerously truncate the desert’s immensity. The child is never made to feel his smallness, which is perhaps the most important geography lesson of all. Yaggy’s world too easily fits inside its case. Below you can browse both the Geographical Study and the Geographical Portfolio, courtesy of the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, or read a copy of the 1888 Teacher’s Hand Book: Designed to Accompany Yaggy’s Geographical Study, held by the Library of Congress, here.

public-domain-review

Feb 15, 2023

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:58.561538

extinct-animals

A Bestiary of Loss Nov 30, 2022 According to many ecologists, we are in the midst of a new mass extinction event. And unlike any other in the Earth’s 4.54 billion year history, this one is caused by a single species of primate: humans. Of course, the death of species is a natural part of evolution, but fuzzy estimates put the current rate of loss at somewhere between 100 and 10,000 times higher than background rates. Our current extinction event is closer to the mass die offs caused by volcanic activity and asteroid impacts than any governing force of evolution. This is both old news and recent history. As early humans ventured from Africa to prosper across the globe, they seem to have left ecological devastation in their wake. Paleoindians, for example, are controversially hypothesized to have hunted various species of North American megafauna into extinction: saber tooth cats, giant beavers, and two tonne armadillos longer than a king-size bed. But to chalk up the natural world’s destruction to something innately human obscures the specific institutions and individuals that were (and are) outsized contributors to extinction. The stories of the vanished animals gathered below allow us to glimpse these forces and actors. They are stories that are unique to each species, but which exhibit haunting affinities and causal similarities, and all arrive at the same conclusion. Humans might be unparalleled predators, but recent extinctions demonstrate how our deadliest weapon is the forms of collective behavior that economic, political, and social life enshrine. The history of modern extinctions is inseparable from the history of colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization. Of the roughly 800 animal species estimated to have gone extinct since 1500 — and that is only counting those documented — many met tellingly analogous ends: they have been hunted to death for sustenance or sport, killed off by intentionally introduced species and those stowed away on imperial ships, or forced to leave their native habitats as forests were cleared for fields to feed distant metropoles. Despite an enduring fantasy that humans are somehow distinct from the animal kingdom, the loss of biodiversity heralds a grave threat to our species as well — a species that relies upon an intimate interconnection with biological systems for continued life on this planet. In the wake of lukewarm policy achievements at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which ended this month without a commitment to phase out fossil fuels — and at a historic moment when young people are looking toward their environmental future and fighting the hand-wringing apathy of older generations — we have assembled a partial mausoleum of animals lost. This post will continue to be updated, with newly extinct animals, although we hope they fail to materialize at currently projected rates. Our list is truncated, dramatically so — to feature every animal lost since the Age of Exploration would sacrifice specificity for a false sense of completeness. We’ve been drawn to those species that somehow speak to the beauty and variety of what is gone: through their behaviors, impact on biodiversity, and, of course, striking naturalist illustrations in the public domain. There is an unsettling irony here. It prompts the question if our pull toward these animals is not entirely dissimilar from earlier attempts to possess their feathers and hides as tokens of rarity. And many of the illustrations gathered below are based on specimens extracted through the same expeditions, networks, and regimes that ultimately contributed to the animal’s demise. Images and stories cannot bring back the dead. But we hope this post might help provide a resource for collective mourning, a means to visualize the scale of loss, and perhaps a spur to action. There are 3797 animals currently on IUCN's critically endangered list. We recommend this earth.org introduction on mitigating biodiversity loss; the ranging overview of threats and solutions to animal extinction published by The Solutions Journal, and The Royal Society’s biodiversity hub. AurochsBos primigenius1627 Once widespread in Asia, Europe, and North Africa, the aurochs is believed to be a wild ancestor of domestic cattle. One of the largest herbivores in the Holocene, their grazing of nuts, twigs, and grass shaped historical ecosystems, and their manure supported vast kingdoms of insects and fungi. A prominent participant in human history — and one of the richest food sources before the advent of agriculture — aurochs were among the earliest figures to appear in Paleo- and Neolithic cave paintings and petroglyphs, and feature across Egyptian reliefs, Bronze Age figurines, and classical literature. (The Latin “A” descends from a Phoenician character that some believe was originally meant to represent the creature’s horns, still visible when inverted: ∀). As forests were increasingly clearcut and pastures enclosed, their populations dwindled. The last surviving herd of aurochs lived in the marshy woodlands of Poland’s Jaktorów Forest. The final cow passed away in 1627. DodoRaphus cucullatus1662 Famously flightless and fearless of humans, the dodo was endemic to Mauritius, evolutionarily forgoing flight due to the richness of abundant food sources and lack of immediate predators. Little remains known about their behavior or appearance (accounting for the varied depiction in naturalist illustrations) due to the narrow research window between their first recorded description, by Dutch sailors in 1598, and last accepted sighting in 1662. Mistaken for an ostrich, albatross, and vulture by colonial explorers, one of the most detailed descriptions of the bird comes from Sir Thomas Herbert’s 1634 travelogue, where he characterizes the creature as having eyes like diamonds and being of a “shape and rareness [that] may antagonize the Phoenix of Arabia”. Despite being sent to Europe and Asia, the last recorded captive dodo died not long after arriving in Nagasaki. Scientists state with confidence that the animal was probably extinct in the wild by 1700 from habitat loss, the introduction of predators to Mauritius, and overharvesting by humans. First used as an example of human-induced extinction in an 1883 magazine, the bird’s memory lives on in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where, with perhaps tragic irony, the dodo declares that the best thing to help the animals would be “a Caucus-race”. Steller's sea cowHydrodamalis gigas1768 Once ranging across the North Pacific during the Pleistocene epoch, by the eighteenth century, this sirenian mammal was found only around the Commander Islands in the Bering Sea. Its first recorded encounter with humans occurred in 1741, when the German botanist and explorer George Wilhelm Steller shipwrecked on Bering Island and spent a year researching wildlife while awaiting rescue, which explains how he came to describe the animal’s taste as reminiscent of corned beef. An obligate herbivore, we know little about the sea cow’s behavior beyond what was observed by Steller, though — unique for its biological order — the animal’s buoyancy was so great that it was unable to submerge in water, instead harvesting kelp with its toothless, bristled mouth from across the ocean surface. Our knowledge is also limited regarding the cause of the sirenian’s extinction, but it is conjectured that populations may have initially dwindled due to hunting by the Siberian Yupik people, and then were further depleted by fur traders traveling the route to Alaska pioneered by Vitus Bering. Literature readers may know the animal as the rare white seal from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and the poetry of W. G. Sebald. While later sightings were reported in the 1800s and as late as 1962, the official extinction date remains 1768, twenty-seven years after Steller discovered the sea cow. BluebuckHippotragus leucophaeus1799 The bluebuck was a species of antelope found in South Africa until the early 1800s. With a lesser mane than roan and sable antelopes, its name derives from a distinct gray-blue coat. When European colonists encountered the animal during the seventeenth century, it was already in decline, due perhaps to a changing grassland habitat around the Cape Peninsula. Hunted to extinction by settlers within a century, biologists did not have long to observe the creature’s behavior before it vanished — many of the extant illustrations of bluebucks seem to have been based on taxidermized specimens. Originally thought to be a blue goat by Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant, scientists now know that the animal once occupied a larger territory. It appears in shamanic paintings attributed to the San peoples and in Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), where the antelope’s belly is said to be “as white as the driven snow”. Réunion giant tortoiseCylindraspis indica1840 Comparable in size to modern Galapagos giant tortoises, this animal was endemic to Réunion, where its vast creeps were important for maintaining the biodiversity of forests. Noted to be friendly, curious, and without fear, its populations were exploited by passing sailors in need of oil and food, further shrinking when settlers from France and Madagascar began to occupy the island in the seventeenth century. Like its fellow Mascarene giant tortoise species, the animal’s slow metabolism allowed it to survive without food or water for extended periods, making it perversely suited for being packed into ship holds. While attempts at preservation were legislated for tortoises on Mauritius in the seventeenth century, meaningful protection was not offered for more than a century. The introduction of invasive species further decimated hatchling numbers, with the final observed tortoises dying off in the 1840s. One of the only taxidermized Mascarene tortoise specimens is kept in the haunting Grande Galerie de l’Évolution’s Salle des Espèces Menacées et des Espèces Disparues (The Room of Endangered and Extinct Species) in Paris. As Matt Stanfield writes at the Remembrance Day for Lost Species project, “Disappearing when they did, at a time when modern science was still emerging, the Mascarene giant tortoises occupy a strange halfway house between poorly-understood human-induced casualties of the early modern era and better-known lost species of more recent times.” Southern black rhinocerosDiceros bicornis bicornis1850 Historically plentiful in South Africa, southern Namibia, and possibly also Lesotho and Botswana, this species of black rhinoceros went extinct around 1850 due to hunting and habitat destruction. Very little is known about the animal. Carl Linnaeus, who taxonomized the species in 1758, used a holotype of unknown provenance, with some suggesting for a time that the specimen’s skull was actually an Indian rhino with a fake horn attached. Black-fronted parakeetCyanoramphus zealandicus1850 Endemic to Tahiti, the black-fronted parakeet was discovered by Europeans during James Cook’s first voyage in 1769 — when the specimens held in Liverpool and at the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum in Tring may have been collected. A woodland species with striking violet-blue flight feathers and vibrant red lores, the parakeet survived deforestation, harvesting by Tahitians for handicrafts, and predation by pigs and kiore (Rattus exulans). With the introduction of cats and European rats to Tahiti, the black-fronted parakeet quickly became extinct as these creatures preyed on the birds and their nests, with the last reported sighting in 1850. Hoopoe starlingFregilupus varius1850 Once populating Réunion, this species of starling is thought to have been first recorded by Étienne de Flacourt of the French East India Company in 1658. It was noted to be delicious by Sieur Dubois in 1674, especially “when it is fat” — a reference to the bird’s summer feeding cycles. As a twentieth-century natural historian elaborated somewhat caustically: “It became very fat in June and July, and may have itself been used for food, for it had none of the usual starling alertness, being so stupid that it could easily be knocked down with a stick.” Despite this same scientist proclaiming the passerine’s extinction to be “an ornithological mystery”, Julian P. Hume argues that extreme deforestation was the cause, with contemporary observers recording mass culling to increase the productivity of farms. (In 1807, for example, Levaillant charged the starling with causing “big damage to coffee trees”.) Eulogizing the bird’s extinction in the mid-nineteenth century, Eugène Jacob de Cordemoy wrote: “I have known the bird you ask me about since childhood . . . . After ten years spent in Paris I did not find a single one in the forests where formerly they flew about in flocks. All ruthlessly destroyed. I shall never forgive myself for the part, slight though it was, which I took in the matter.” Great aukPinguinus impennis1852 Classed as a flightless alcid, and the only modern species of the genus Pinguinus, this creature gave its name to penguins, as Atlantic sailors believed the latter birds were related to the auk. Historically ranging between eastern North America, Scandinavia, and the Strait of Gibraltar, the great auk mated for life, weighed about five kilograms (eleven pounds), and gurgled when anxious. Human history is tightly entwined with the bird. Its bones have been found around Neanderthal campfires, Native American burial grounds, and it helped European sailors navigate toward the Grand Banks of Newfoundland when adrift at sea. Last officially sighted in 1852, after its swift decline in the hands of harvesters selling its soft down to European clothiers, the bird’s conspicuous absence resulted in novel — though ineffective — protective legislation to be passed in 1753. The long-running ornithology journal The Auk was named in its honor. Falkland Islands wolfDusicyon australis1876 “We barely knew the warrah”, begins a recent National Geographic feature on the Falklands Islands wolf. It was first sighted by Captain John Strong in 1690, studied by Charles Darwin in 1833, and then, forty years later, was nevermore. The animal had a reputation for foxlike slyness, hence its original French name, loup-renard (wolf-fox). Darwin remembered how one stole “some meat from beneath the head of a sleeping seaman”. While Thomas Huxley classed the Falklands wolf as a coyote, it is closer to the South American fox (itself not a true fox). The only endemic mammal to the Falkland Islands, the wolf was assumed to have crossed on an Ice Age land bridge to the unpeopled archipelago in some prehistoric time. Yet recent genetic research suggests that the animal left its mainland ancestors in the recent geological past (16,000 years ago), and may have been accompanied by human companions. It was hunted to extinction. QuaggaEquus quagga quagga1883 Named for an onomatopoeic Khoikhoi word for zebra — thought to mimic the creature’s equine call — the quagga was endemic to South Africa until it was hunted to extinction by European settlers in the late nineteenth century. Brown and white striped, it was known to roam in herds of fifty. William Cornwallis Harris, an English military engineer and big game hunter, described the collective movement during its summer migration, unwittingly capturing the quagga’s place in a landscape rich with biodiversity: “Bands of many hundreds are thus frequently seen doing their migration from the dreary and desolate plains of some portion of the interior, which has formed their secluded abode, seeking for those more luxuriant pastures where, during the summer months, various herbs thrust forth their leaves and flowers to form a green carpet, spangled with hues the most brilliant and diversified.” For centuries before extinction, the quagga played an important part in human culture and agriculture, appearing in cave paintings attributed to the San peoples and used to safeguard livestock by Afrikaner farmers. When a hybrid — the offspring of a quagga that was crossbred with a horse — gave birth to striped children, it led to breakthroughs in theories of telegony. Writing in 1889, naturalist Henry Bryden eulogized the loss of the quagga: “That an animal so beautiful, so capable of domestication and use, and to be found not long since in so great abundance, should have been allowed to be swept from the face of the earth, is surely a disgrace to our latter-day civilization.” Extinct by 1900, a stuffed quagga is held by Leiden’s Naturalis Biodiversity Center, where it is trotted out for special occasions. Portugese ibexCapra pyrenaica lusitanica1892 Half the length of its Pyrenean relative, there remains some debate whether or not the Portuguese ibex was a subspecies or a species of its own. Hunted by mountain-dwelling locals for meat, its ornamental horns, and the seemingly magical stone-like bezoars found in the animal's gastrointestinal tract, its decline tracks the spread and advancement of firearms. “There is little doubt that the Cabro’s only significant enemy was Man”, writes David Day in The Doomsday Book of Animals: A Natural History of Vanished Species (1981). The last known Portuguese ibex died in 1890, although a lone female was spotted near the Serra do Gerês in 1892. Harelip suckerMoxostoma lacerum1893 A species of ray-finned fish found only in the United States, the harelip sucker has not been seen since 1893. Once considered by fishermen in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee as “the commonest and most valued species of sucker”, it had an olive-colored back, a nonprotractile upper lip, and a notably short head. The reasons for its extinction are uncertain, but scientists suggest that the sucker died off by the siltation of its freshwater habitat through deforestation, which impacted the fish’s ability to see the snails, limpets, and crustaceans on which it fed. Sooty crayfishPacifastacus nigrescens1900 Once endemic to the San Francisco Bay Area — specifically Alameda Creek, Coyote Creek, and Steamboat Slough — the sooty crayfish was declared extinct in 2010. It probably disappeared earlier, as it was not sighted for the entirety of the twentieth century, vanishing from its native waters as the signal crayfish was introduced, a species that carry a water mold known as crayfish plague. Overharvesting and development of the Bay Area may have also contributed to its demise. It resembled the Shasta crayfish, but was smaller and blacker in color, rarely exceeding two inches (fifty-one millimeters) in size. Rocky Mountain locustMelanoplus spretus1902 This species of grasshopper was an infamous decimator of prairie farms in the 1870s. One swarm, recorded in 1875 and named after the observing physician Albert Child, was calculated to number between 3.5 and 12.5 trillion insects, encompassing some 198,000 square miles (510,000 square kilometers) of land. A western Missouri historical record remembers how they gave “an earnest and overwhelming visitation, and demonstrated with an amazing rapidity that their appetite was voracious, and that everything green belong to them for their sustenance.” Its taxonomic specific name (spretus) captures the human attitude toward the grasshopper, deriving from the Latin word for “despised”. (Entomologist Charles Valentine Riley invented a recipe for butter-fried locusts during blight, but was met with a public who “would just as soon starve as eat those horrible creatures”.) The swarms, described by one farmer as “like a great white cloud, like a snowstorm, blocking out the sun like vapor”, became a rare site in the twentieth century, due, it is thought, to the expansion and irrigation of farmland and trampling of breeding grounds by livestock. As extinction ripples up and down the animal kingdom, the Eskimo curlew’s critical endangerment (or possible extinction) is thought to stem from the loss of this vital food source. The locust was formally declared extinct in 2014. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937) captures the awesome force of these lost locust swarms. Bulldog ratRattus nativitatis1903 Once endemic to Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, the bulldog rat was russet colored, dwelling on hills and in thick forests. The creatures’ demeanor has been described as sluggish — avoiding daylight, for it dazed them, and never climbing into trees or shrubs. They were last seen in 1903, when sailors observed mass die offs, which were later attributed to diseases carried by black rats that had stowed away on colonial ships. Its murine neighbor on Christmas Island, Maclear’s rat (Rattus macleari), followed it into extinction soon after. In March 2022, researchers in Current Biology speculated about a possible pathway toward de-extinction through gene editing, prompting some Jurassic Park style fearmongering in the popular science news. Black mamoDrepanis funerea1907 Known as the hoa on its Hawaiian island of Molokai — with a fossil record also found on the neighboring Maui — the black mamo was known for its highly decurved bill, often dusted with pollen from lobelia flowers. Killed off by habitat destruction and the introduction of rats and mosquito-borne diseases, the last recorded specimens were captured in 1907, only fourteen years after its first recording by European naturalists. Its Latin name funereal, the same root from which we derive the word “funeral”, tragically hints toward its doomed future. Alfred Newton, who taxonomized the bird, wrote that “Its sombre plumage and the sad fate that too probably awaits the species induce me to propose for it the name Drepanis funerea”. Yet the bird’s behavior was anything but funereal, for it was remembered as a markedly curious creature, which would seek out human proximity and respond to manmade imitations of its call. William Alanson Bryan, who published a natural history of Hawaii in 1915, captured the beauty of the bird’s feeding, before loading his shotgun and killing the last specimens ever collected: “The tongue was inserted with great precision, up to the nostrils, in the flower, while the bird balanced itself on the branches, assuming almost every imaginable attitude in its operations. In all three of the birds secured, the crown was smeared with the sticky purplish white pollen of this lobelia.” Sloane's uraniaUrania sloanus1908 Named after Sir Hans Sloane, whose private collection helped found the British Museum, this species of moth was endemic in Jamaica until the last reported sighting around 1895. Its neon green, red, and blue coloration was achieved by refracting light off of ribbon-like scales, a warning to predators of its toxicity. The diurnal species lived a migratory existence, known for suddenly vanishing from areas it had previously called home. Scientists speculate that this behavior was a response to plants gradually releasing chemicals to ward off being eaten by caterpillars, accounting for an abnormal death rate observed in wild larvae broods. Sloane's urania may have succumbed to habitat loss after Jamaica’s lowland rainforests were cleared and converted to agricultural land, hindering its nomadic movements. TarpanEquus ferus ferus1909 A species of small, free-ranging horse from the Russian steppe, it is uncertain whether tarpans were wild or feral creatures, hence their ferus taxonomy. They were first described by the German botanist Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin in 1771 and the last tarpan is thought to have died in captivity in 1909. They varied in color, resembling ancient depictions found in cave paintings made in Europe during the Pleistocene epoch, and some may have carried the “dun gene”, sporting a blue grullo coat. They were hunted to extinction. Many domesticated horses bear phenotypic traits of the tarpan. Passenger pigeonEctopistes migratorius1914< ※※Indexed under…PigeonsExtinction of Passenger This wild North American pigeon was named not for its ability to transport passengers, but for its wanderlust tendency to pass by (passager, in the French), before gradually passing out of existence for good, due to hunting and widespread deforestation in the nineteenth century. Living in the deciduous groves of eastern North America and breeding around the Great Lakes, the passenger pigeon’s population at one point numbered between three and five billion. (A similar number range occurs in the dating of its oldest known fossil: from a specimen found in North Carolina estimated to be between 3.6 to 5.3 million years old.) It could reach airborne speeds of sixty-two miles (one hundred kilometers) per hour and caught light in its iridescent neck feathers. Wallace Craig attempted to record a different kind of tonal richness: the male pigeon’s vibrant vocalizations, in musical notation and phonetic imitation, as it moved gently toward its mate: “kee-kee-kee-kee”, “tete! tete! tete!” This chattering call sounded from one of the most social land birds, whose scale of loss is almost inconceivable: at their peak, passenger pigeon populations were about equal in number to all the birds that currently overwinter in North America. To give a sense of this figure, Christopher Cokinos believes that if all of the pigeons flew in a single line, they would have ringed Earth twenty-two times. For fifteen thousand years, before the arrival of European colonizers, Native American land-use practices, it is thought, worked in symbiotic relation with the birds — promoting tree species that produced nuts, acorns, and fruits upon which the pigeons fed. Maritime explorer Jacques Cartier was the first European to record the passenger pigeon in 1534. Soon after, René Laudonnière, the French Huguenot founder of Fort Caroline, reported killing almost ten thousand pigeons over the course of a few weeks. The advent of railroads and telegraphs facilitated the tracking of flocks as hunting continued to accelerate, due, in part, to the eighteenth and nineteenth century belief that the pigeon had medicinal properties. Its decline was noted by Bénedict Henry Révoil in 1856, who foresaw the pigeon’s fate. “Everything leads to the belief that the pigeons, which cannot endure isolation and are forced to flee or to change their way of living according to the rate at which North America is populated by the European inflow, will simply end by disappearing from this continent”, he wrote. “[I]f the world does not end this before a century, I will wager. . . that the amateur of ornithology will find no more pigeons, except those in the Museums of Natural History.” How right he was. The last recorded wild sighting was around 1900, and the final captive passenger pigeon, named Martha, died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. The pigeons were remembered by naturalist Aldo Leopold, who wrote these moving words at the close of World War II: “Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.” Martha’s likeness was painted by muralist John A. Ruthven in 2014. Carolina parakeetConuropsis carolinensis1918 The Carolina parakeet shares a bleak historical affinity with the passenger pigeon: the species were known to flock together, and four years after the death of Martha, the last passenger pigeon, Incas — the final captive Carolina parakeet — died in the same cage. This small green bird, with a lemon-yellow head and ruddy face, was the only indigenous parrot to the eastern Midwest and plains states, and one of only three parrots native to the United States. It was first recorded by the English merchant venturer George Peckham in his A True Report of the Late Discoveries of the Newfound Lands (1588). The birds are thought to have been poisonous, due to cats who succumbed shortly after preying upon the parrots. Their voices imbue numerous European colonial travelogues, for the sound of parrots’ cries were inseparable from the soundscape of arrival in the New World: the birdcall of a genus that did not live in Europe. Edward McIlhenny, son of the Tabasco pepper sauce tycoon, attempted to imitate their call: “While on the wing they chatter and cry continually; this cry sounds like ‘qui’ with the rising inflection on the i; this is repeated several times, the last one being drawn out like ‘qui-i-i-i’.” Yet by the nineteenth century, travelers were already noting the mournful silence that signaled their decline. The cause of their extinction is multifold: deforestation, hunting, capture by the pet trade, and competition for nesting sites by introduced species. Known to flock to the site of dead and dying birds, opportunists would exploit this behavior for wholesale slaughter. Florida black wolfCanis rufus floridanus1934 Once roaming throughout the lower southeast of the United States, the Florida black wolf hunted bison in prairies and pine forests. While initially thought to be a type of coyote, scientific consensus now believes that the animal was a subspecies of red wolf. Jet black, with the exception of white highlights on its chest and snout, this predator was declared extinct in 1908, forced out of its natural habitat by homesteaders pushing into the hinterland, who saw the wolf as a threat to livestock. Hawaiʻi ʻōʻōMoho nobilis1934 Reportedly common on the Big Island in 1891 and 1892, this yellow-tufted bee-eater had disappeared two years later, which contemporary observers believed resulted from prize hunting and from forest lands being cleared for coffee plantations and browsing livestock. The last specimen was collected in 1902, although a senior Hawaiian ornithologist swears to have heard one hidden amid the flanks of the active volcano Mauna Loa in 1934. Notably timid, the nectivorous ʻōʻō had an extended tongue for probing lobelias and made a hummingbird-like buzzing while hovering. Robert Perkins, who Julian Pender Hume describes as spending weeks on the mountains of Hawaii bare-foot and on horseback, recorded the bird as displaying an aggressiveness that “appears so wanton and unnecessary, and so frequently interrupts its own feeding, that one suspects it must be an ancient habit, which has survived from a time when either nectar-producing flowers were scarcer, or the birds which feed upon them were more numerous.” The islands of Molokai and Maui also were home to species of Moho, which — like the Hawai’ian ʻōʻō — are now extinct. Thylacine (or Tasmanian tiger)Thylacinus cynocephalus1936 The darkly-striped thylacine was a marsupial, not a tiger, and had many canine characteristics. Formerly it lived on New Guinea and the Australian mainland, but met its end on Tasmania, with the last captive specimen outside of Oceania dying in 1931. Its tigrine features are present in rock art dating back to at least 1000 BCE. Observing the animal’s footprints in 1642, Dutch colonist Abel Tasman described them as “wild beasts having claws like a Tyger”. Surprising settlers by sporting a kangaroo-like pouch, the thylacine’s combination of characteristics led it to be later described as a “dog-headed opossum” by naturalists, and a transformation of the striped archerfish by Kunwinjku Aboriginals. Thought to have been hunted to near extinction by early humans, the last thylacines succumbed to bounty schemes introduced by Van Diemen’s Land Company in the nineteenth century, after thylacines were blamed for the death of sheep, with what is thought to be the final thylacine shot by a farmer named Wilf Batty in 1930. Before extinction, its visual hybridity inspired a wealth of engravings, lithographs, and drawings, collected in Carol Freeman’s Paper Tiger: A Visual History of the Thylacine. Toolache wallabyMacropus greyi 1939 Slim, graceful, and elegant, this species of wallaby once roamed in Victoria and South Australia. Sociable, they lived in groups, finding homes in swampy areas and foraging sedgeland by twilight. Hunted for their ash-brown pelt, the toolache wallaby population was culled by the introduction of European animal predators to Australia, and further decimated when their habitats were cleared by selectors for agricultural purposes. A final 1920s attempt to save the wallaby ended in disaster when fourteen were accidentally killed by conservationists. The last recorded observation of the wallaby in the wild was in 1924, although there were hopeful — although unconfirmed — reports of sightings during the 1970s. Bibron's skinkChioninia coctei1940 One of two species of skink named for the French zoologist Gabriel Bibron, Chioninia coctei inhabited the islets of Branco and Raso in the Cape Verde archipelago. One of the largest skink species, it was unique for having tooth crowns that were labiolingually compressed and multicuspate (ridged by cusps and bumps), and notable for its transparent lower eyelid, a mechanism that possibly allowed it to better spot predators on the ground. Its extinction is thought to have been caused by hunting, the introduction of predatory animals, and its harvesting for skink oil by native residents of the nearby islands. Marooned convicts ate a significant portion of the extant population in 1833. It was last observed in 1940. Arabian ostrichStruthio camelus syriacus1941 Ranging across the Arabian Peninsula, this ostrich species served as a sacrificial offering in Mesopotamia, adorned prehistoric lithic graffiti, and was thought be a fit gift for kings in Tang China. It was disparaged in the Old Testament’s Book of Job — which instead praised the parental stork — for leaving its nest unattended. Romans stewed the ostrich, while its eggs became a peace offering in T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926). The introduction of firearms and motor vehicles profoundly tipped hunting expeditions in the favor of humans, leading first to overharvesting and then extinction. Due to its genetic similarity to a North African subspecies of ostrich, attempts are ongoing to reintroduce this animal to the Arabian Peninsula. Caribbean monk sealNeomonachus tropicalis 1952 Last seen surfacing near the Serranilla Bank in 1952, this monk seal is still sometimes reported by fisherman and divers in Haiti and Jamaica, yet scientific expeditions have failed to confirm the sightings. (It is suspected that the observed animals are hooded seals, not Caribbean monk seals.) While early colonial voyages encountered the species throughout the Caribbean — Christopher Columbus and his crew slaughtered eight of these “sea wolves” for sustenance in 1494 — its populations are thought to have been already diminished by the fifteenth century, relegated to atolls by indigenous hunting activities. Although first recorded by Europeans four hundred years before its extinction, little scientific research was ever conducted on the species. By the nineteenth century, Caribbean monk seals had all but disappeared, overharvested by fishermen, sailors, and sealers who preyed upon the animal’s genetic tameness and lack of natural defenses. Crescent nail-tail wallabyOnychogalea lunata1956 With a soft and silky pelage limned by rufous tones, this species lived in the scrub of southwestern and central Australia until at least the 1950s. Extremely timid, the crescent nail-tail wallaby was first observed at length by John Gould in 1840, who chose the specific name lunata (lunar) to describe the animal’s crescent markings. In his Mammals of Australia (1863), Gould seems to hint how naturalist specimens of the species, while useful for research, cannot preserve the vitality of the living animal. “It is to be regretted that this as well as other Kangaroos lose the delicate tints of their colouring on exposure to light; so much so in the present instance, that Museum and recent specimens could scarcely be considered as identical.” Known by settlers as a “kangaroo rabbit” and as yiwutta in Arrernte, the animal was frequently hunted and trapped by Aboriginal Australians, but declined rapidly after their habitat was impacted by pastoral expansion and through the introduction of European foxes and feral cats. A related species, the bridled nail-tail wallaby is currently under threat, with an estimated wild population of fewer than five hundred creatures. Blackfin ciscoCoregonus nigripinnis1969 Until the mid-twentieth century, this species of freshwater whitefish was common in the Great Lakes of North America. Spawning on stony substrate, it was distinct for its green and black coloration, which provided a form of camouflage for these denizens of the deep, who lived at depths of up to six hundred feet (180 meters). Along with the longjaw and deepwater cisco, the blackfin went extinct due to overharvesting by the commercial fishing industry, competition created by introduced species, and predation by introduced alewife, rainbow smelt, and the parasitic sea lamprey, a tubular creature with nightmarish rows of keratinized teeth. Last seen in Lake Huron in 1960 and Lake Michigan in 1969, there is some controversy regarding whether or not the blackfin succumbed to introgressive hybridization — a form of extinction that takes place when an endangered species interbreeds with an abundant population of an adjacent species. Japanese sea lionZalophus japonicus1970 Declared extinct in the 1970s, this sea lion once traveled the Sea of Japan, frequently seen around the Japanese Archipelago and near the Korean Peninsula. Considered a subspecies of the California sea lion until 2003, these dark gray mammals rested in caves and were harvested for oil, according to an eighteenth-century Japanese encyclopedia, and, later, were captured to serve as circus attractions. Systematic trawling in the early twentieth century killed upwards of fifteen thousand Japanese sea lions — helping to decimate a population that was once forty thousand strong in less than a century. By the 1930s, fishermen were only reporting a few dozen catches per year. While it is possible a few members of the species remain, the sea lion has not been reliably observed in more than fifty years. BaijiLipotes vexillifer2002 The “functionally extinct” baiji, whose Latin taxonomic designation translates to the “flag bearer left behind”, lived in China’s freshwater Yangtze river system, a catchment area that the cetaceans share with approximately twelve percent of the global population. Even if a few members of the species live on, this population is no longer viable for reproduction and continued survival (a 1991 expedition recorded just thirteen baijis; a 2006 expedition adjusted that number: one or two, maybe, but most likely none). Thought to be the first dolphin species extinguished by humans, the baiji has not been seen for more than twenty years, killed off by industrial pollution and the impact of development on its native waterways — although, as Samuel Turvey notes, “early Chinese records show that river dolphins were actively exploited throughout the country’s history”. Weighing up to 230 kilograms (500 pounds), the baiji could live for twenty-four years in the wild, accelerating away from danger at speeds reaching sixty kilometers (thirty-seven miles) per hour. Like other cetaceans, the species relied on sonar for navigation, socialization, and emotional expression. The baiji served as an important figure of human cultural expression too. “For thousands of years, people along the Yangtze have told stories about how the baiji came to be through poems, stories, and myths”, writes Lydia Pyne in Endlings: Fables for the Anthropocene. “The animals in these stories are mystical and mythical, entwining people and the river together; sometimes, in such tellings, the baiji is cast as a ‘river goddess.’” The baiji did not receive notable attention in the West before 1914, when Charles Hoy, a seventeen-year-old American, shot a specimen and sent its skull to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The animal’s last days are treated at length in Samuel Turvey’s Witness to Extinction: How We Failed to Save the Yangtze River Dolphin (2009), where, among other chilling anecdotes, we are treated to a third-hand account of how the Great Leap Forward impacted this cetacean species. “Yangtze fishermen have good hearts. . . . But back then — back then it was very difficult. Mao did some terrible things. We had to eat. We thought we had no choice. It was the dolphins, or it was our children. Which would you choose?” Caspian tigerPanthera tigris virgata2003 Living in the sparse forests and riverine corridors of eastern Turkey, northern Iran, the Caucasus, and western China until the 1970s — and, before the Middle Ages, in Ukraine and southern Russia — this tiger’s extinction is entwined with the Russian colonization of Turkestan in the late nineteenth century. It was hunted for sport; the animal’s preferred reed-bed habitats were converted to cropland for cotton; and the Russian military was used to clear predators from local forests. We know little about their behavior. Conservation attempts were introduced in Tajikistan in 1938 and Iran in 1957. In the early 1970s, naturalists from the Iranian Department of Environment spent years searching for the Caspian tiger, but did not uncover any evidence of their survival. Described by Virgil and Shakespeare, this species of tiger appears more recently in Alex Dehgan’s The Snow Leopard Project and Other Adventures in Warzone Conservation (2009). “The freshness of the Caspian tiger’s extinction was disturbing”, he writes, “we were so close to being its contemporary.” South Island kōkakoCallaeas cinereus2007 Possibly extinct, this forest bird is endemic to New Zealand’s South Island, notable for its black facial mask and orange wattles, the latter of which distinguish the kōkako from a North Island relative. Last sighted in 2007 — the first authenticated observation since 1967 — the bird’s fleeting song was memorably described by Victorian colonial surveyor Charlie Douglas: “Their notes are very few, but the sweetest and most mellow toned I have ever heard a bird produce.” Males were known to perform an “archangel” display and collectives of kōkako were described in the second edition of Walter Lawry Buller’s A History of the Birds of New Zealand (1888) as preferring to pass through forests on foot, in groups as large as twenty, like a flock of sheep: “if the first bird should have occasion to leap over a stone or fallen tree in the line of march, every bird in the procession follows suit accordingly!” The kōkako’s range was initially impacted by Polynesian forest management, further reduced by the clear-cutting practices of European settlers as well as the introduction of mammalian predators such as ship rats in the 1860s and stoats in the 1880s. Māori traditionally hunted the bird, and it was poached by settlers for sale to collectors and museums in the nineteenth century. Western black rhinocerosDiceros bicornis longipes2011 Declared extinct in 2011, this subspecies of the black rhinoceros was once widespread in the savannas of Africa, although they concentrated in Cameroon. It was distinctive for the shape of its larger horn, which had a square base, and a long distal limb. Like other rhinos, it had poor eyesight, forming symbiotic relationships with birds such as the red-billed oxpecker, who helped detect threats. The story of the western black rhinoceros’ decline is “a story of greed, indifference, hope and despair”, writes John R. Platt for Scientific American’s Extinction Countdown blog. First came trophy hunters in the early twentieth century, then industrial agriculture, which destroyed large swaths of the animal’s preferred home. And then, like the baiji, the western black rhinoceros (as well as its relatives, the southern and north-eastern black rhinoceros) were surprisingly impacted by the rise of Maoism. In a Cold War effort to promote traditional Chinese medicine over western cures, the powder of rhino horns was marketed as a panacea. Profiting off of this renewed demand, poachers arrived in Africa in record numbers, killing ninety-eight percent of black rhinoceros between 1960 and 1995. By 1997, there were estimated to be only ten endlings left, many living in isolation, making the species functionally extinct. The western black rhinoceros was last seen in 2001 and declared extinct a decade later, the same year that the Javan rhinoceros subspecies in Vietnam disappeared. Pinta Island tortoiseChelonoidis niger abingdonii2012 A subspecies of the Galápagos tortoise native to Ecuador’s Pinta Island, this animal was presumed to be extinct by the mid-twentieth century due to uncontrolled hunting. The tortoise was first described by herpetologist Albert Günther in 1877, and the differences between subspecies of Galápagos tortoises — adaptations suited to the distinctive environments of their different island homes — helped Darwin formulate his theory of evolution. Like its relatives, the Pinta Island tortoise was known to rest for sixteen hours each day, and could reportedly survive almost six months without food or water. They provided a critical service to the local ecosystem, dispersing seeds and cycling nutrients for other animals and plants — since their extinction, many other species on Pinta Island have suffered from the loss. In 1971, a single male Pinta Island tortoise was discovered and grimly nicknamed Lonesome George. Decades were unsuccessfully spent trying to mate him with other subspecies before his death in 2012. As Michael Blencowe writes, drawing attention to the sometimes oddly unnatural dynamics of conservation in last year’s Gone: A Search for What Remains of the World’s Extinct Creatures: “George lived the life of a celebrity. He had a luxury compound with a pool, he put on a lot of weight and the world became unhealthily obsessed with his sex life.” The same year as George’s death, researchers from Yale found seventeen first-generation hybrids on the neighboring Isabela Island, prompting speculation that perhaps their Pinta Island parents were still extant. Christmas Island forest skinkEmoia nativitatis2017 Once endemic to Christmas Island, the last known forest skink (nicknamed Gump) died in captivity in 2014. Living in leaf litter and covered by rich chocolate-colored scales, this species of skink was abundant in population as late as 1979. During the 80s and 90s, forest skink numbers plummeted by ninety-eight percent, alongside similar declines in other Christmas Island reptiles, such as the blue-tailed skink, Lister’s gecko, and the coastal skink. The cause is not certain, although researchers think that habitat loss caused by introduced species, such as yellow crazy ants, are to blame. A 2021 paper lists twelve additional possible contributions to the forest skink’s extinction, including predation by other species (giant centipedes, wolf snakes, black rats, and feral cats), use of the insecticide fipronil, disease, and climate change. Smooth handfishSympterichthys unipennis2020 Declared extinct and then later revised as “possibly extinct” due to insufficient data, the smooth handfish is thought to have been once commonly found off the coast of Tasmania — so much so that it was one of the first species noted by European colonists. Using pectoral fins to walk across the seabed, the fish were described by Zoe Kean on the Guardian’s Age of Extinction channel as resembling “grumpy ageing punks, each spotting a dorsal fin over its head like a mohawk, bulging eyes and a cantankerous expression.” Known primarily from a sole type specimen collected during François Péron’s 1802 colonial survey of Australia, this species of handfish is thought to be the first modern marine fish to have gone extinct, falling prey to environmental changes and unsustainable scallop harvesting and trawl fishing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ivory-billed woodpeckerCampephilus principalis2021 Native to the bottomland hardwood and temperate coniferous forests of Cuba and the Southern United States, the last universally accepted sighting of an American ivory-billed woodpecker was in 1944, while the last Cuban member of this species was spotted in 1987. Many subsequent sightings of this bird — known to be John James Audobon’s favorite species — have been reported, leading to ongoing claims of rediscovery. Thought to be extinct due to widespread habitat destruction by logging, they once lived on larvae and wild fruits such as hickory nuts and persimmons. They were historically important to Native American groups from the Great Lakes and Great Plains regions, who used their bills for trade and ceremonial crafts. One of the largest woodpeckers in the world, this species had a wingspan of up to thirty inches (seventy-six centimeters). Nancy Tanner, the wife of James Taylor Tanner — the ornithologist often credited as authoring the definitive study on the ivory-billed woodpecker — described the magic of encountering a roosting female: “She looked huge. Her shining black-and-white plumage, white bill, and bright yellow eyes made her very conspicuous.” In the wake of Tanner’s study, several other narratives about searching for this dying species came to press, including Tim Gallagher’s The Grail Bird (2005) and Stephen Lyn Bales’ Ghost Birds (2010). In September 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed that the species should be declared extinct — their decision on the matter is due in the coming months. ----- The stories collected above are informed by Wikipedia’s list of recently extinct animals, Julian P. Hume’s profoundly detailed Extinct Birds, and many other linked resources. We have also benefited from the Guardian’s Age of Extinction series, Scientific American’s Extinction Countdown, and the Remembrance Day for Lost Species project.

public-domain-review

Nov 30, 2022

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:58.966305

ensor-sins

James Ensor, The Deadly Sins (ca. 1904) Text by Hunter Dukes Jan 24, 2023 Perhaps no modern artist better exemplified the charge issued by Baudelaire in his 1862 essay “Painters and etchers” — “etching is a profound and dangerous art, filled with treachery, which reveals the faults of an artist’s mind as clearly as his virtues” — than James Ensor (1860–1949). Aside from an incomplete course of study at Brussels’ Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, the institution he called an “establishment for the near-blind”, the artist spent the near entirety of his life in the coastal Belgian city of Ostend. Here he lived in his parents’ home into his late fifties, largely financed by his mother and aunt Mimi’s souvenir shop, which sold papier-mâché carnival masks, skeleton costumes, and Asian curios. His early realist and romantic paintings impressed critics, with Russian Music (originally titled Chez Miss) earning him a coveted showing in the 1882 Paris Salon. By the mid 1880s, however, much of his new work was unrecognizable, and his future, once full of promised renown, seemed abruptly foreclosed. A lifelong atheist, Ensor pivoted toward grotesque Christian imagery, not for its theistic content, but because it offered the best symbolic vocabulary for visualizing his growing disgust with the world. Once claiming that he had “anticipated all modern tendencies . . . in every direction”, he now saw, through the mockery of Christ, his own plight to be misunderstood. It was at this time that Ensor fell in with Les XX — an avant-garde Belgian coterie — and began experimenting with printmaking, creating Christ Mocked, his first etching, in 1886. Asked why he had chosen the medium, Ensor replied that it offered protection against the infidelity of time, offering something like immortality through preservation: The fragility of paintings frightens me, vulnerable as they are to the mishaps of the restorer, to general hazards, to the distortions of reproductions — I want to live, to speak for a long time yet to the men of tomorrow. I think of solid copper plates, of inks which cannot be altered, of simple reproductions, of faithful impressions, and therefore I have taken etchings as my means of expression. By Louis Lebeer’s count, Ensor’s oeuvre contains 133 prints: 117 etchings, 14 drypoint intaglios, a single soft-ground etching, and a sole lithograph, illustrating a story by one of his favorite authors, Edgar Allan Poe. (This last figure does not take into account the many whimsical drawings on lithographic transfer paper for his ballet, La Gamme d’Amour.) And yet, Ensor’s output was cascadic instead of steady. Shortly after creating his 1904 album Les péchés capitaux (The deadly sins), Ensor more or less abandoned printmaking entirely, save for a series of works at a collector’s request in the 1930s. Drafted in colored chalk and created and retouched over decades, beginning with Lust in 1888, The Deadly Sins are less moralizing depictions of vice, more personal chaffings against petit bourgeois life. In La Paresse (“sloth” or “laziness”), for example, Aunt Mimi has a lie-in while devils prick her jaundiced face and manipulate the hands of a bedside clock. Outside, scything workers harvest crops under the watch of a countenancing sun. The title’s allusion “can only be ironic”, thinks Susan M. Canning, a “sarcastic projection of Ensor’s prickly view of his familial circumstance”, for Aunt Mimi’s work ethic was anything but loafing. Gluttony makes La Grande Bouffe look like a light snack. A pair of men spew vomit while a skeletal butler readies the next course: crab, a lobster that seems to cling in defiance of death onto the tablecloth, and someone’s severed head. A painting behind the diners depicts figures doing possibly shameful things to pigs. Humor livens (though rarely lightens) these torturous scenes. In Wrath, a man bleeds from his eye sockets while a red panda stands on its hindlegs in surprise; the well-dressed woman of Pride fails to notice a giddy reaper playfully tussling her hair. Drawing on his father’s ancestry, Ensor glossed his satirical etchings as English in inspiration, influenced by caricaturists such as William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, and James Gillray, and went so far as to write, in a letter to Pol de Mont of October, 1900, “I feel more English than most of the English artists now slavishly imitating the early Italians.” Unlike his paintings of the late 1800s, which revel in phantasmagoric hellscapes, such as Tribulations of Saint Anthony (1887), and communicate an enduring interest in crowds, as in Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889, The Deadly Sins all focus on small groups and seemingly domestic spaces. The largest and, at first glance, tamest ensemble appears in Envy, where a group of grotesque figures — faces inspired, perhaps, by his family’s stock of masks — stare fixedly upon a breastfeeding woman. Even Ensor’s supporters found some of these themes outlandish. Eugène Demolder, one of his Brussels compatriots and an early critical champion, wrote from Paris with brusque candor: “Your caricatures are not at all appreciated. People find them puerile and common.” The symbolist Emilie Verhaeren offered a different take: “[Ensor] acts as a dilettante of the impossible rather than as an avenger of vice or a master of virtue. He engenders horror elsewhere: He delineates it within himself.” Only in 1917, after the death of his mother and aunt, did Ensor leave his parents’ house, moving to a residence across the street that he inherited from an uncle, which also had a curio shop on the ground floor. Always a theme in his artwork, toward the end of his life Ensor turned his attention to music, composing only in minor scales as he refused to play the white keys of his harmonium. In August de Boeck’s words, “Ensor knows absolutely nothing about musical technique, but he is a musician.” In 1942, a Belgian radio program broadcast news of his death, even though Ensor would continue to live for a half-decade more, almost reaching the age of ninety. “I am mourning myself”, he would frequently joke in the intervening years. The images gathered below come from a set of etchings held by the Musea Brugge. The frontispiece above is part of a different set of hand-colored etchings held by the Mu.Zee in Ostend. Additional sets, colored and uncolored, are available on WikiCommons.

public-domain-review

Jan 24, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:59.440659

gay-trivia

A Pantomime and Masquerade: Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716) Text by Hunter Dukes Nov 17, 2022 “I have passed all my days in London”, boasted Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth in 1801, and “formed as many and intense local attachments, as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. . . . I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life.” Immersing himself in “all the bustle and wickedness”, “ the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles”, “the crowds, the very dirt and mud”, the poet and essayist proclaimed London to be “a pantomime and a masquerade — all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me without a power of satiating me”. Written almost a century before Lamb fashioned himself as a man in the crowd of modernity, John Gay’s (1685–1732) Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London also pits city against country. It begins with a question cribbed from Virgil’s Eclogues, the textual wellspring that would feed many of British Romanticism’s idyll currents: “non tu in triviis, indocte, solebas, stridenti, miserum, stipula, disperdere, carmen?” Delivered by Menalcas as a slight to his fellow shepherd Damœtas’ attempts at song, these lines are translated in the Loeb as: “Wasn’t it you, you dunce, that at the crossroads used to murder a sorry tune on a scrannel straw?” By opening Trivia with the image of a shepherd bungling melodies on a poorman’s panpipes at a “crossroads” — trivium, in the Latin, literally a place where three roads meet — Gay performs a rhetorical maneuver akin to Lamb refusing the peaks above Grasmere for London’s squalid Arcadia. If Virgil’s third eclogue, with its gloating interlocutors, intimates that something is rotten in bucolic paradise, Gay seemingly sets out to prove that there is something analogously pastoral about seedy London. Yet this passionate urban shepherd will neither make a fold of Spitalfields, nor plant his crook in fallen Covent Garden, but instead, with an eye toward satire, relish the ironies offered by his mock georgic form. Burlesquing the Augustan era’s fixation on classical tradition, as his fellow Scriblerian Alexander Pope did in The Rape of the Lock (1712), Gay renders practical advice for perambulating England’s capital into oftentimes absurd, hexametric verse. (Pope found a draft of Trivia “ludicrous [and] trifling”; Samuel Johnson thought it “spritely, various, and pleasant”, yet believed the poet wholly lacked “the dignity of genius”.) Trivia’s subject is a city whose grime and sinful denizens were wont to produce hyperbolic accounts of pollution, such as John Evelyn’s claim that he had visited “a spacious church where I could not discern the minister for the smoke, nor hear him for the people’s barking.” To capture the leeching sprawl of a fast growing metropolis, Gay riffed on the vade mecum (walk with me) genre: a kind of reference book that, according to David Alff, makes walking into artisanship, a technical craft. Beginning in daytime with instructions for choosing a proper winter coat — kersey cloth trumps Russian bearskin — the poem dilates on the dangers of nightwalking. “Who can the various City Frauds recite, / With all the petty Rapines of the Night? / Who now the Guinea-Dropper’s Bait regards, / Trick’d by the Sharper’s Dice, or Juggler’s Cards?” Little is safe, except staying at home. Even nocturnal carriage rides provide an illusory sense of security. In one scene, a coach plummets through a poorly paved road into a vast subterranean cesspool. For Margaret R. Hunt, Gay's description of potholes as “dark caves” opening into sewers — “arched Vaults their gaping Jaws extend" — is not unlike the mythic vagina dentata described by Freud. Indeed, much of Trivia dwells on maleficent feminine forces, represented both by actual women and vulvar city infrastructure. London’s streets, Hunt writes, become “a kind of skin over the top of a heaving, pestilential sewer, one that keeps erupting into daily life via actual open sewers, like the Fleet Ditch, fish-women, predatory prostitutes, women stallholders, and ill-concealed potholes and gaps in the road.” Even stranger, though consistent with the amalgamation of urban infrastructure and women’s reproductive systems, Gay classes decay not as deathbound entropy, but as a generative force of city planning. His scenes of uneven cobbles, clogged gutters, and dangerous inhabitants are “evidence of London’s health: the city’s incompletion occasions labor”, thinks Alff, creating the need for the work of maintenance, enforcement, and repair (the tasks divided between builders, constables, parishes, and such) and the labors of verse — the need for navigational guidance, which Gay’s poem purports to supply. Above you can browse a 1922 edition of Trivia, illustrated with engravings by William Hogarth, whose images of London were influenced by this text, and introduced by W. H. Williams, who thought that, unlike the “savage” Swift and the “spiteful” Pope, John Gay “came to scoff, but remained to pray”.

public-domain-review

Nov 17, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:59.898927

basohli-beetle-paintings

Beetle Carapaces in Basohli Miniature Paintings (ca. 1660–1700) Text by Erica X Eisen Mar 16, 2023 In his fourteenth-century treatise on gemology, the Rajasthani scientist Ṭhakkura Pherū tracks the origins of precious stones back to a trip taken by the demon Bala to the heavens: He was requested by the gods: “Become the beast in our sacrifice.” [Thus] propitiated, he replied: “[So] I shall become. You do your task.” . . . The parts of his body became precious gems; [they were truly] the abodes of the goddess of wealth, dear to the gods and beautiful. Pherū ascribes to precious stones not merely incredible beauty but magical powers. “If one endowed with truth and good moral conduct wears on his limbs these gems belonging to the nine planets”, he explains, “the planets do not harm him”. Flawed gems, by contrast, “destroy money, sons, and prosperity”. According to the tale, Bala’s bile is what gave the world emeralds, in whose trade Pherū’s fellow Jains would long specialize in their capacity as sought-after court jewelers across India. And it is in the service of depicting emeralds — believed by Pherū to guard against the effects of poison and attract riches to their wearers — that a school of painters in what is now Jammu and Kashmir hit upon a particularly ingenious method: cutting and applying the iridescent carapaces of beetles to the page. Rising to prominence in the seventeenth century, the Basohli School is particularly known for its vibrant use of color and inventive textural elements. The glimmer of iridescent beetle fragments as they catch the light captures something of the supernatural quality attributed to jewels, giving these paintings an unparalleled sense of vibrancy and presence. (In addition to their trick for simulating emeralds, Basohli artists often used raised dots of shell lime to lend a three-dimensional effect to pearls.) Tear-shaped beetle-emeralds accentuate the peaked crown of the fearsome goddess Bhadrakali as she sits on a corpse or stands surrounded by a sun-like orb whose luster pales in comparison to that of her jewels. In another image, cut shards of beetlewing adorn the foreheads and blankets of two warring elephants. Kalki, the final avatar of Vishnu, holds a beetle-studded shield as he prepares to mount his characteristic white horse. Within the context of religious paintings, this sense of life — the way in which adornments on the gods’ bodies seem to actively respond to the viewer and their setting by now flashing and now growing dim — evokes darśan, the idea that one simultaneously sees and is seen by images of the divine. The materiality of Indian miniatures has been relatively unstudied compared to that of painting traditions in the West, though new projects like Mapping Color in History have created publicly available pigment databases to allow for a deeper understanding of where, why, and to what effect South Asian artists used their materials. In contrast to the Mughals, the rajas of Basohli were Hindus, and the work of the artists they commissioned reflected this. An unknown Basohli School artist chose to depict Krishna as the wayward lover mentioned in one exceptional (and beetle-studded) scene from the Rasamanjari (or Bouquet of Delight), a collection of Sanskrit poetry on varieties of romance. Jewel imagery plays a key part in the emotional intensity of the lines that pair with the painting as well: “Seeing her beloved’s forehead red with the color of the paint from another woman’s feet, the radiance of the corner of the eyes of the sweet-eyed Nayika made the pearls in her ears red as rubies.” Whether in the form of emerald pendants, gold bracelets, flower garlands, or floating scarves, ornamentation (alankara in Sanskrit) is a ubiquitous element in Indian figural art, not just an extra frill but a requirement — so much so that a body unbeautified is interpreted as a sign of something amiss. When these images are looked at correctly, the art historian Vidya Dehejia argues, “the word ‘naked’ should have no place in the Indian artistic vocabulary”.

public-domain-review

Mar 16, 2023

Erica X Eisen

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:00.450835

concealing-coloration

Many-Colored Misdirection: Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909) Text by Kevin Dann Feb 7, 2023 When first looking upon the untitled frontispiece of Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909), one is not quite sure what the kaleidoscope of color represents. Turning the page to find the title “Peacock in the Woods”, the reader flips back to pick the bird out from its surround, but does so only with some difficulty — the very challenge that painter Abbott Handerson Thayer ascribed to predators of the spectacularly-adorned creature. In this one scene, Thayer extravagantly displays many of the techniques used by animals to achieve invisibility. The colored spots and streaks obliterate its silhouette. Green feathers on its back become foliage, while the copper feathers alternately mimic sunlit and shadowed tree bark and rock. The iridescent ocelli — smallest and dimmest near the body, progressively larger and brighter toward the periphery — draw the eye away from the bird, and our gaze gets lost in the blurred foliage beyond the tail’s “evanescent border”. Even the spectacular multi-plumed turquoise crest serves to deceive, mimicking a piece of shimmering blue sky. In his introduction to Concealing-Coloration — a work written primarily by Gerald Thayer to summarize his father’s theories — Abbott tells us that the peacock’s hues “‘melt’ him into the scene to a degree past all human analysis”. While directing the reader’s attention to all these details, Thayer’s introduction fails to mention that, rather than being painted from life somewhere in India — the peacock’s native habitat — the artist and his assistant had contrived the scene using a taxidermied peacock from the family menagerie, which they had propped up on a stone wall running through the deciduous woodland outside his Dublin, New Hampshire home. The indistinguishable colors of figure and ground all have their origin on the painter’s palette, not in the real world, making “Peacock in the Woods” a stunning artistic and scientific misdirection in service of Thayer’s wildly erroneous assertion that the coloration of all animals was meant to conceal them from predators. Perhaps Thayer had placed the peacock front and center since it had famously vexed Charles Darwin as controverting his theory of natural selection. Something so conspicuous as the peacock’s sequined tail surely could never have been produced by the deadly Malthusian game of predation that Darwin believed to drive biological evolution. Like Darwin’s co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace, Thayer was “more Darwinian than Darwin himself”, rejecting the theory of sexual selection proposed in Darwin’s Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) for a totalizing “law” of concealment compassing not just ground-dwelling birds and mammals, but bejeweled iridescent tropical tanagers, harlequin-hued coral reef fish, and dazzlingly patterned and painted butterflies. Untrained in the art of optical illusion, of which painters were masters, zoologists could never discover Nature’s methods of rendering animals absolutely indistinguishable from their surroundings. “Our book”, declared Thayer — and it was indeed a family affair, for Abbott Thayer’s wife Emma painted many of the plates’ backgrounds — “presents, not theories, but revelations, as palpable and indisputable as radium or X-rays”. While his ex-cathedra pronouncements drove some naturalists, such as big game hunter Theodore Roosevelt, crazy, Thayer had many well-respected scientific supporters, including Wallace and evolutionary biologist Edward Poulton, with whom he collaborated on an elaborate interactive display at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Thayer loved to take skeptics of his camouflage theory outside, where he would arrange elaborate demonstrations with disappearing duck decoys, cutout stencils of animal silhouettes, and a fantastic array of stuffed birds and mammals, some of which Thayer had painted in reverse countershading to make them stand out against the landscape. Many of the book’s 120 black-and-white photographs reproduce such demonstrations; while their relatively poor reproduction quality reduces their impact on a modern viewer (and leads to the question of how black-and-white images can effectively convey color), they seem to have struck Thayer’s contemporaries as convincing evidence of his obsession. The colored plates (gathered below) culminate in a clever pièce de résistance, in which a copperhead snake, invisible among dry oak leaves, leaps into view through a cutout overlay. While the copperhead is painted in an intensely naturalistic style (most likely because it was mainly executed by Rockwell Kent, listed as “assistant” for this painting), all of Thayer’s other subjects — wood ducks, blue jays, birds-of-paradise, roseate spoonbills, and flamingoes — are painted in the same impressionist style of the peacock, allowing him freer reign to metamorphose solid animals into diaphanous blotches of color that seem to mirror and match their environment. His son Gerald’s illustrations, on the other hand — depicting ruffed grouse, cottontail rabbit, and caterpillars — approach photographic realism, echoing the descriptive style of the text, which faithfully elaborates his father’s vision. For more on Abbott Thayer’s theories and illustrations, we recommend two articles, by Emily Gephart and Hanna Rose Shell, from our friends at Cabinet Magazine.

public-domain-review

Feb 7, 2023

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:00.929144

the-slant-book

Downhill from Here: The Slant Book (1910) Text by Hunter Dukes Feb 16, 2023 Jack broke his crown falling down the hill and Jill tumbled after. But Bobby, the child protagonist from Peter Newell’s The Slant Book (1910), careens on his baby carriage with so much momentum that he disrupts all aspects of society. Let go by his careless nurse on a steep slope, he first takes on the law. “You’re scorchin, kid”, bellows a police officer, but he is no match for Bobby’s runaway “Go-cart”, which “smashed that Cop completely”. Next, he destroys urban infrastructure, snapping off a fire hydrant, and plays havoc with the economy: house painters, immigrant hawkers on the curbside, a Germanic marching band, glaziers, a shepherd, farmers and their egg-hauling wives — no trade is safe from the speedster Bobby. Even the leisure class cannot insulate itself from this child’s accidental antics. The pushchair upends a “perambulating” lady, “Chappies” battling out a tennis match at deuce, “Picnickers'' lunching on sardines and pickles, and Cremnitz White Mulvaney, an “Artist. . . so absorbed”. A lovely piece of children’s literature in its own right, The Slant Book is made all the more curious by the book’s rhomboid form. It’s as if, along with the other mischievous disruptions caused by Bobby’s downhill journey, representation itself gets pulled into the mix, warping the book’s standard dimensions through gravitational force. (The format even estranges the expected left-to-right motion of a book’s pages: rather than moving downhill toward the direction of reading, the illustrations send Bobby’s stroller seemingly “backward” to its end, which is our reading journey’s origin.) A precursor to the multimodal storytelling of present-day popup works and metafictional classics such as Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955), The Slant Book also plays with the relationship between text and the physical world within its images. An advertiser’s sandwich board becomes a launch ramp; a paperboy is sent head-over-heels, an event that instantly makes the news: “A GO-CART BREAKS AWAY”. In this slanted world, however, Newton’s laws still hold — there is no perpetual motion, even in fiction: all plots, like all downhill races, must eventually halt. In The Slant Book, the child’s joyride and his narrative terminate together. The stroller crashes into a hemlock stump, Bobby is thrown safely into a haystack, and “scene”: “The longest night must have an end / As well as a beginning; / And so this Cart, you may depend, / Was bound to cease its spinning.” Born in Illinois, where he worked as self-taught gallery portraitist, Peter Newell (1862–1924) trained at New York’s Art Students’ League before settling in Leonia, New Jersey, an early-twentieth century colony for artists and academics. He made a career illustrating for periodicals like the Harper’s magazines (Bazar, Monthly, and Weekly), drawing comics, and released beautiful editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1901), Through the Looking-Glass (1902) — which features a frontispiece of the mustached Newell — and The Hunting of the Snark (1903). He also provided illustrations for books by Guy Wetmore Carryl, John Kendrick Bangs, Mark Twain, and numerous other authors. When not illustrating, Newell created whimsical toys, the charm of which can be gleaned from the patents he filed, for devices like a “sounding toy”, which, when spun, makes an agitated bird orbit its nest of eggs. But Newell is today best remembered for his experimental children’s books, an author whom Joseph W. Reed called “the saint of book-eccentricity”. Like The Slant Book, The Hole Book (1908) structures its story around a physicalized form of narratological metalepsis, “a paradoxical contamination between the world of the telling and the world of the told”: Tom Potts accidentally fires a gun at his wall and Newell’s hole-punched pages illustrate the damage the bullet does as it penetrates homes, apiaries, bagpipes, and more. The Rocket Book (1912) rotates the hole’s trajectory from the z-axis (into the book) to the y-axis (up through the book’s world). Fritz, “the Janitor’s bad kid”, ignites a rocket in the basement, which burns through various levels of an apartment building, and, by doing so, also traverses society. Up, up, up it flies — through the catsup-eating Steiner family’s dining table, the posh bubble-blowing Algernon Bracket’s toy room, Mrs. Maud’s new hat, and a taxidermist’s severed walrus head — before meeting the immovable object that is Billy Bunk’s can of cream.

public-domain-review

Feb 16, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:01.404458

scatalogic-rites

Law and Ordure: Scatalogic Rites of All Nations (1891) Text by Hunter Dukes Feb 28, 2023 No matter how “repellent” the subject matter of this book, John Gregory Bourke (1846–1896) believed it to be “none the less deserving of the profoundest consideration”. Marked as “not for general perusal”, its topic is the use of human and animal excrement in religious and medicinal rites (or, “Filth Pharmacy”), and the survival of sanitized rituals into the present day. To arrive at his conclusions, Captain Bourke consumed a bizarre mélange of anthropological learning, from “The Urine Dance of the Zuñis”, through the “Tolls of Flatulence Exacted of Prostitutes in France” (mostly collected at bridge crossings), to Christian Stercorianism, which held that the blessed sacrament is processed into ordure like ordinary food stuff. Little, it seems, does not lead back to excreta — a category that, for Bourke, includes the expected bodily waste, fingernails, and ear wax, but also the social expulsion of sacrificial objects. The colorful Easter eggs of children’s hunts, for example, are here a “survival” of the Wendish and Celtic “worship of the chicken-god”, who “remains to this day in his proud position, whence the first missionaries were unable to dislodge him, at the summit of the sacred tree or spired of the village church”. To expel disease and evil from their communities, these ancient believers scapegoated cocks, with hens’ eggs becoming the economical substitute at a later date. Leaning heavily on James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), much of Bourke’s discussion makes use of the sympathetic magic of similarity and contact. According to Peter Beveridge, another well-absorbed source in Bourke’s text, certain forms of Aboriginal spells used “excrement sausages”: an enemy’s waste wrapped in opossum skin and lubricated with kidney fat. When this “roll” was then consumed by fire, its human source would be devoured in turn. Shot-through with nineteenth-century prejudices against so-called “primitive man”, Scatalogic Rites of All Nations pairs disgust for its subjects with perverse attention and descriptive care. As Benjamin Breen observes, Captain John Gregory Bourke seemed to embody “a distinctly American paradox”: serving in the Indian Wars on the western frontier, he was “an unrepentant jingoist”, whose early diaries were “unabashedly genocidal”. And yet, just a few years later, Bourke would begin to observe and record the peoples and cultures he had “once worked to exterminate”, writing books on The Snake-Dance of the Moquis of Arizona (1884) and The Medicine-Men of the Apache (1892). Bourke’s pivot from eradication toward gestures of cultural preservation parallels a larger settler fascination with sanitized images of indigeneity, propagated through frontier mythologies, dime novels, pulp magazines, and Western films. One of Bourke’s favorite writing techniques is to alienate his audience (and himself) and then work to normalize the source of this discomfort. In Scatalogic Rites, he devotes a good deal of time to implying that “nations of high enlightenment” are not much less coprophilic than “primitive” societies. Soon after discussing the use of poisonous mushrooms in “Ur-Orgies”, wherein psychoactive urine is consumed and then expelled into the next participant’s cup — supposedly intensifying the effects with each “distillation” — Bourke turns his mind to Blighty. “Though we have not this custom among us, I foresee that if it were introduced, we might have many a toad-eater in England ready to drink from the wooden bowl on these occasions, and to praise the flavor of his lordship’s liquor”. What appears first as ritual, recurs in anecdotes of cloacal secular practices. We hear: stories of the Berlin cheesemonger who procured “the urine of young girls” to make his product “more piquant” (when he was exposed to the press, “people went, bought and ate his cheese with delight”); rumors of “love-sick maidens in France” who fill cakes for their paramours with philters of “human skull, coral, verbena flowers, secundines, or after-birth, and a copious flow of urine”; and the exploits of wives in England, seeking to “rekindle the expiring flames of affection in the hearts of husbands”, who kneaded dough with their “posterior”. That last tradition, thinks Bourke, has survived in a children's song, sung while wobbling to and fro on the floor: “Cockledy bread, mistley cake, / When you do that for our sake.” ※※Indexed under…UrinePiquant cheese made from In his Histoire de la merde (1978), Dominique Laporte describes how “human excrement, like the soul, carries the ‘noxious’ trace of the body it departs”. An analogous trace is carried by each of the cultural practices under consideration in Scatalogic Rites. More than noxious, these repellent stories total into something profoundly human. During his 1913 preface to a German translation of Bourke’s text, Sigmund Freud lamented how “Civilized men . . . . deny the very existence of this inconvenient trace of the earth, by concealing it from another, and by withholding it from the attention and care which it might claim as an integrating component of their essential being.” In the shame, power, and curiosity that Bourke attributes to his subject matter, we find the promise of comparative anthropology in a surprisingly unadulterated form: a truly universal aspect of human life.

public-domain-review

Feb 28, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:01.960355

crane-months

The Procession of the Months (ca. 1889) Text by Hunter Dukes Jan 3, 2023 While others celebrated New Year’s Eve, Walter Crane (1845–1915) mourned December’s passing. Honeymooning in Rome as 1872 drew to a close, the young artist found himself contemplating Shelley’s Dirge for the Year (1821): “January gray is here, / Like a sexton by her grave; / February bears the bier, / March with grief doth howl and rave”. This striking image of a personified calendar inspired Crane’s tempera and gouache The Death of the Year, in which a procession of Months entomb the bier of yesteryear in “a pillared porch of a temple — the house of time.” Shelley aside, Crane was fresh from a trip to the Uffizi, where he had feasted on Spring (ca. 1480) by Botticelli, whose paintings, remembered Crane, had not yet been “re-discovered by the critics” and were “more or less scattered, and sometimes ‘skyed’ in less important rooms”. Crane may have found inspiration for his funeral scene in the ensemble of Spring and perhaps also saw, in Botticelli’s highly hung masterpieces, an artist equally underlooked. Infatuated with the pre-Raphaelites, Crane and his circle had been panned by London critics as of a mode “mystico-medieval” and “loathly”, with Crane in particular being a “academician of the nursery”. As if taking that last criticism to heart, Crane’s Death of the Year is a sober, adult reworking of his 1870 King Luckieboy’s Picture Book. In this children’s story, the boy king Luckieboy sits on a throne and greets the months as they are ushered past by his footman Tempus. A monocled Mr. March arrives arm-in-arm with Mr. March Hare. May is predictably beautiful, “with a nose-and-a-gay, and a train which was borne by two little twins”. September, the recipient of summer’s harvest, balances bottles of wine on either side of his Dionysian wreath. And, approaching expiry, December rides in on a yule goat seeming “very old”, but there is not a hint of death. He comes laden with crisp holly and “all that was jolly”, mainly puddings and gifts. Treated as a diptych, King Luckieboy’s Picture Book and The Death of the Year offer a parallax view on aging. The passage of time can seem like a frolic or entombment, depending on how much remains. Created sometime around 1889 with his daughter Beatrice (1873–1935), The Procession of the Months synthesizes Walter’s two earlier treatments of the calendrical theme, reflecting age across the gutter between text and image. As with their contemporaneous collaboration Flora’s Feast: A Masque of Flowers (1889), Walter illustrated the verse that Beatrice wrote. In the case of The Procession of the Months, it seems the images came later, for the preface notes the poems’ creation when she was “quite a child”, demonstrating how “each Season, with its ever-changing beauties, was fully realized by the child’s quick, artistic imagination.” In the case of Beatrice Crane, her imagination was especially quick, with Oscar Wilde publishing her poem “Legend of the Blush Roses” (and her father’s accompanying illustration) when she was just fifteen. In all of their collaborations, Walter seems to follow his daughter’s lead: “he does not attract unnecessary attention by telling part of the story through his picture”, writes Andrea Korda, “but instead allows Beatrice’s words to make meaning on their own.” Originally serialized in Little Folks magazine, the processional months are personified as women, each of whom, in the published book, are followed by a calendar and a list of that season’s flowers (which, the backmatter reminds the reader, “may be had, freshly-cut each day, direct from The Floral Farms, Wisbeach”). December is much bleaker than the jolly Claus of King Luckieboy’s Picture Book: her “eyes grow sad / And fainter still her tread; / One hears a long, low sigh / Which tells the year is dead.” But January is full of hope and joy and new life. Notably, it is the only month where a child appears hand-in-hand with its elder. Beatrice was born to Mary Frances and Walter Crane in Rome, 1873, just months after her father conceived The Death of the Year.

public-domain-review

Jan 3, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:02.413645

solar-system-quilt

Ellen Harding Baker's “Solar System” Quilt (1876–ca. 1883) Dec 7, 2022 Two years after a naked-eye comet pierced the blanket of night in the spring of 1874, Ellen Harding Baker (1847–1886) began a near decade-long project to bring the stars farther down to Earth: an appliqué quilt depicting the solar system, complete with a green-tailed comet, its slingshot course plotted around the Sun. On this dreamy textile, measuring seven by eight feet, moons orbit their various planets in running stitch, asteroids clump in circular fields, and embroidered stars of wool and silk blaze out in concentric rings of yellow, blue, and red. As Maria Popova notes, Baker was born the same year that Maria Mitchell discovered her eponymous comet, and seems to embody the astronomer’s hope that sewing needles and crewelwork, rather than tack women to domestic tasks, could aid scientific perception. “The eye that directs a needle in the delicate meshes of embroidery” — wrote Mitchell in an 1878 diary entry, at about the time Baker’s quilt was halfway complete — “will equally well bisect a star with the spider web of the micrometer.” Working as an astronomy teacher in Lone Tree, Iowa, Ellen Harding Baker quilted this representation of the cosmos for her students. News of its completion reached the national press, with the New York Times lightly mocking her pedagogy as “somewhat comical”, but nevertheless praising the quilt’s accuracy and its maker’s diligence for undertaking a trip to a Chicago telescope to view Coggia’s 1874 comet. Using a color palette resembling that of Orra White Hitchcock’s scientific classroom illustrations, and exhibiting a scalar ambition that rivals Emma Willard’s maps of time, Baker joins a lineage of nineteenth-century American women educators who produced visual aids for teaching that are also magnificent works of art.

public-domain-review

Dec 7, 2022

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:02.905059

phallic-tree-worship

Cultus Arborum: A Descriptive Account of Phallic Tree Worship (1890) Text by Hunter Dukes Mar 14, 2023 There are few of the works of nature that combine so many and so varied charms and beauties as a forest; that whether considered generally or particularly, whether as a grand geographical feature of a country or as a collection of individual trees, it is alike invested with beauty and with interest, and opens up the mind a boundless field for inquiry into the mysterious laws of creation. So begins Cultus Arborum: A Descriptive Account of Phallic Tree Worship, published anonymously in 1890. The fourth entry in a ten-volume “Phallic Series” printed privately in limited number, Phallic Tree Worship was preceded by three 1889 studies: Phallicism: A Description of the Worship of Lingam-Yoni in Various Parts of the World; Ophiolatreia: An Account of the Rites and Mysteries Connected with the Origin, Rise, and Development of Serpent Worship; and Phallic Objects, Monuments and Remains. Less a self-contained book than a series of extended quotations from historical sources (ranging from Pliny to the Kangxi Emperor) and contemporary works on comparative religion, the text leans heavily on Henry Clark Barlow’s Sacred Trees (1862), James Fergusson’s Tree and Serpent Worship (1868), and James Forlong’s Rivers of Life (1883), which contains sections on “Tree Worship” and “Serpent Worship”. As such, this book intentionally seems to relish missing the forest for the trees, offering hundreds of examples from religious history connected only by the soft logic of association. A sense of this volume’s eclectic breadth can be seen in the table of contents: “Invocation of Tree Gods”; “Origin of Groves”; “Persian bushes”; “The ‘Ash Faggot Ball’ of Somersetshire”; and “Universal Sacredness of the Oak”, to take examples almost at random. At times, the montage pace of the author’s quest produces dizzying, if unconfirmable, results. Tracking the oracular trees of the Sun and Moon, as described in a fictional fourth-century letter from Alexander the Great to Aristotle, the author ferrets out their supposed location from the Pseudo-Callisthenes and John Mandeville’s Travels (ca. 1350). He speculates that one of these specimens might have been a cypress tree “said to be 1,450 years old, and to measure 33 ¾ cubits in girth” near Kashmar, Iran, grown from a paradisical shoot brought down to Earth by Zoroaster, which was felled by al-Mutawakkil in the ninth century and transported to Baghdad on rollers by thirteen-hundred camels. In his footnote-chasing foray, the author elevates hearsay to a literary style. Elsewhere, this associative method leaves only soughing prose where scholarship should be. The author dismisses the idea that Christmas trees, which have “become a prevailing fashion in England at this season”, find their roots in a Germanic Protestant tradition, and instead posits that they date to pre-Christian Egypt — a theory he substantiates with the observation that modern Germans, without tree-buying means, create “pyramids [formed by] slight erections of slips of wood, arranged like a pyramidal epergne, covered with green paper, and decorated with festoons of paper-chain work, which flutters in the wind and constitutes a make-believe foliage”. The sole unifying thesis seems to stem from the earlier Phallicism, where the practice under consideration is “the adoration of the generative organs as symbols of the creative powers of nature”. Speaking of organ adoration, and despite the book’s title, there is very little explicitly sexual here. Describing the lingam worship of Hindu Shivaism, which takes place under “an umbrageous Bael” or “fine Ficus” — and, if both are lacking, “the poor god is often reduced to the stump of a tree” — the author cautions a potentially salacious audience: “My readers must not fancy that this worship is indecent, or even productive of licentiousness. It is conducted by men, women and children of modest mien, and pure and spotless lives.” He proceeds to admit that, at certain seasons, “the passions are roused and the people proceed to excesses” — but these are, he thinks, significantly less common than in the rites of Eastern Christianity. Although published anonymously, the Phallic Series is undoubtedly the work of Hargrave Jennings (1817–1890), whom Paschal Beverly Randolph heralded as “the chief Rosicrucian of all England”. The author’s anonymity may have been as much about saving face as cultivating mystery: the Westminster Review deemed his 1870 The Rosicrucians as “the most absurd book”, with A. E. Waite flagging its associative methodology as “ill-digested erudition”. Mostly forgotten today, Jennings was nevertheless a key precursor of the occult revival in the 1880s. Joscelyn Godwin, one of the few scholars to have written on Jennings, believes him to be “an unrecognized pioneer in the exploration of oriental metaphysics and the reconciliation of East with West”. Acknowledging the “slapdash way that Jennings throws together his facts and fantasies”, he nevertheless encourages us to celebrate this “lonely intellectual adventure”, carried out “with minimal support, moral or financial, from anyone”.

public-domain-review

Mar 14, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:03.353462

gertie-the-dinosaur-1914

Gertie The Dinosaur (1914) Aug 1, 2011 Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 American animated short film by Winsor McCay. Although not the first animated film, as is sometimes thought, it was the first cartoon to feature a character with an appealing personality. The appearance of a true character distinguished it from earlier animated "trick films", such as those of Blackton and Cohl, and makes it the predecessor to later popular cartoons such as those by Walt Disney. The film was also the first to be created using keyframe animation. The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, and was named #6 of The 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time in a 1994 survey of animators and cartoon historians by Jerry Beck.

public-domain-review

Aug 1, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:04.112817

halloween-postcards

Halloween Postcards, ca. 1900–1920 Oct 29, 2011 Halloween and picture postcards have a shared history, and both captured the anglophone imagination at the turn of the twentieth century. As the October 31st festival began to emerge in its modern guise thanks, in part, to an influx of immigrants from the British Isles in the United States, picture postcards entered their so-called “golden era”, ca. 1905–1915. Rarely seen or used in the US before 1893, an estimated 900 million postcards had been mailed two decades later. And quite a few of these were Halloween themed. Historian Lisa Morton reckons that around 3,000 unique designs for spooky cards were created in the golden era alone, cards which helped popularize the celebration and standardize its imagery. Viewing them today, much of the iconography is familiar — black cats, jack-o’-lanterns, witches’ brooms — but many of the games and rituals have fallen out of favor: scrying, ducking or bobbing for apples, pranks involving cows. Viewing these archival postcards at length is a somewhat uncanny experience — missives intended for other eyes than our own arriving instantaneously to greet us through digital displays. It’s almost as if the postcards never actually reached their final destination, and might not have still. Hurling through time, carrying images of long-gone landscapes and the heartfelt messages of deceased speakers, the picture postcard is a well-matched medium for a day when the dead are said to be given one last chance to seek vengeance on their enemies. Below you will find a selection of Halloween picture postcards, most created in the “golden era”, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, the New York Public Library, the Toronto Public Library, and Digital Maryland. It’s a hodgepodge of hobgoblins, joyous skeletons, and truly terrifying gourds. Personified pumpkins drive automobiles, line up to salute the toes of young women, and saunter on high heels fashioned from turnips. Cats do their usual thing — creating charming chaos. They pop out of jack-o’-lanterns with sealed letters in their paws and dig their claws into the bewitched full moon. Several of the postcards contain scenes of scrying and amorous divination: girls using mirrors, candles, and backward steps to reveal their future husbands. Whether you are trick-or-treating, marathoning scary movies, or trying to avoid the gaze of ghouls this All Hallows’ Eve, The Public Domain Review wishes you safe passage and a successful arrival at your intended destination.

public-domain-review

Oct 29, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:05.103133

general-pershing-march-imperial-marimba-band-1918

General Pershing March - Imperial Marimba Band (1918) Oct 5, 2011 A rousing march composed by the Vandersloot Publishing Company in honour of General "Black Jack" Pershing who led American troops in World War One.

public-domain-review

Oct 5, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:05.529292

maps-from-geographicus

Maps from Geographicus Sep 22, 2011 In March 2011, Geographicus Rare Antique Maps, a specialist dealer in fine and rare antiquarian cartography and historic maps, donated their collection of over 2000 digital images to Wikimedia Commons. Here is just a small selection of a really great collection. Explore more, and help Wikimedia to categorise them, here. Each map shown below is linkable to the Wikimedia Commons page with more info about the map and higher resolution images. A huge thank you to Geographicus for sharing these amazing images!

public-domain-review

Sep 22, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:06.000819