Ptak Science Books

The Scarcity of Divine Interactions in the History of Human Epidemics: Valley of Mexico

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Images of sacred interventions stopping the spread of disease is puzzling, as in this powerful and disturbing vision of Our Lady of Guadalupe appearing above the city of Mexico in 1737¹.  Mexico City was in the second year of a devastating cholera epidemic where 40,000 had perished in that city alone.

I wonder why Heavenly intercession didn’t come earlier?  Of course the people of the Valley of Central Mexico could’ve used some heaven-sent strong-armed virtuosity many times over the centuries.  In Mexico City during the Cockuliztli epidemic of 1576 the population of the non-Spanish (Native) population fell 50% in just a few years.  Over the period of 1545-1548 70% of the population of the city nearly died of hemorrhagic fever.  This epidemic was followed by many other (major) epidemics (1576-78, 1629-1631, 1736-1741, 1761, and so on) involving whooping cough, measles, typhus, smallpox , influenza, cholera, and of course famine. Cholera—like this epidemic in Mexico City—according to Rodolfo Acuna-Soto’s study² seems to have been the least of the epidemic worries in the Valley of Mexico over the last 500 years.  According to Robert McCaa’s study of population studies³, 11 authoritative studies on the decline in population in Mexico from 1519-1598 show an average and disasterous decrease of about 50%⁴.

So with the dozens of epidemics, the invasion of Europeans, and natural and unnatural famines, I would have expected to see more demonstrations of charity from above rather than this one skimpy display in the second year of a lower-echelon epidemic. 

1. From Caberra y Quintero Escudo de Armas de Mexico..., printed in Mexico in 1746.  There is much else of interest in this book--which is probably the best and most famous of the local histories of the city--besides the image that I fixated on. 

2. [Rodolfo Âcuna-Soto.]  Forum on Microbial Threats//Global Climate Change and Extreme Weather Events December 5, 2007 “The use of Historical data sets in Understanding Ecosystems Responses to Climate Change and the Importance of Long-term Monitoring Programs…” 

3. McCaa's study HERE

4. Table of colonial disaster 

Another Major Wrinkle in God’s Perfect Plan: Lots of Dots

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This installment of the continuing thread on the  history of dots questions the sublime machinery of the primum mobile in the work of Galileo, particularly in his The Siderreal Messenger (Sidereus nuncius) of 1610.   The reception of this extraordinary work was deep and profound, and the images of the “dots” were of extraordinary importance.

The perfection of the Creator’s plan was being shown to be not-so-perfect in the late Renassiance, a major chink showing up in the work of the dead Copernicus in 1543, which showed that the Earth was not the center of the great cosmological eye.  In the same year the body was also shown to be not so much built in god’s image with its bitter working revealed in one of the greatest anatomy books ever written, Vesalius’ revolutionary  De Humani Corporis Fabrica .  Problematic bits started showing up regularly wrapped in scientific proof:  the existence of a vacuum, thought to be impossible given the perfection of creation, was shown to exist in  Otto von Guericke's  Experiemnta nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de vacuo spatio (Amsterdam, 1672).

 The stupendous idea of additions to the night sky, which had been thought to be immutable and unchanging, came into being with Tycho Brahe’s 1572 discovery of a new star (Nova) in Cassiopeia and added to in 1602 by Kepler’s announcement of another new star—both events showing that the night sky was not complete and that it was actually changing.

When you consider Galileo and his use of the newly-invented telescope it is usually a little far down on the list of accomplishments that his explosion of the night sky is considered.  In addition to everything he did (applying mathematics to the study of physics, understanding the physics of motion, developing the telescope and the microscope and other precision physical instruments and so on) Galileo pointed the not-yet-astronomically-used telescope to the sky and expanded the size of the universe by a factor of ten.  It was so utterly astonishing an idea I can hardly think how the not-prepared mind of 1610 would’ve reacted to the idea.  Certainly it was not a happy acknowledgment coming from the Holy Father, though a simple defense could’ve been that this miracle was divinely revealed ,and that it was there all of the time but just unknown to humans, and so not threatening the orthodoxy of Christian belief.  But that wasn’t the case, and Galileo would soon enough be in trouble with the church and its inquisition in short order.

The dots in this image are the dots of never-before-seen stars, part of an unobserved sky that was revealed only under magnification.  The size and scope of the new bigness of the universe was staggering, and of course opened the question immediately to the possibilities of yet a larger universe revealed under yet more magnification.  I don’t know the answer to this, and I wonder where Galileo might have publicly mused about how big the universe might actually be, and if he ever dreamed about the possibilities of telescopes that were 15 feet across rather than just two inches, and what those beasts might reveal.

*I’ve looked at the use of the telescope in the hands of Galileo before HERE (The Telescope in Galileo’s Hands: the Expansion of the Universe, 1610).

Gathering Information, 17th Century

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This image from Michael Lesy’s  wonderful Real Life, Louisville in the Twenties--a collection of interesting and naïve found photographs—has taken a life of its own.  It is probably a photo of a hosiery department (?) for a large clothing store taken during the great halcyon days of advanced hosiery as this is a very serious collection and display with what looks like waaay too many clerks to service god knows how many clients all buying hosiery at the same time.  Hosiery or not, whatever skinny thing it was in those flat boxes looks  as though whatever variety or size was needed by whatever verity or sized customer could be accessed in a minute or less, sending the customer on their way so that the next one buying unit could be serviced and dispensed, and so on into the night. 

But I prefer to think of the stuff in the boxes as letters, or words, or just plain old data:  sat for instance instead of this place being a clothing store it was a department store for writing, and this was the Poetry Section, selling words by the order, one word at a time.  Or perhaps the boxes held images.  Or entire ideas—just not entire, finished works. 

And why wouldn’t data and ideas have been stored and sold like this rather than hosiery or handkerchiefs?

This got me thinking a little about the storage and dispensing of information in antiquarian times, about how some of the writers of great and high-erudite works were actually able to accomplish their efforts. Deep into the early and future-vision-primitive history of online digital exploration, it is difficult to imagine producing works of sustained viability using combinations of only (private) libraries,  memory palaces¹, correspondence and notes.  Today the internet accounts for less than 1% of the time of advanced scholarship in all of  human history, but it has probably accounted for significant contributions to half of all the academic stuff that has ever been written--and we’re all probably terribly spoiled by the instant access to info in our datacentric existence.  

My own digital addiction in mind, I marvel at the accomplishments of people like Vincent Placcius (1642-1699), a vastly learned guy who sorted out 2,777 anonymous publications in 1500 pages, somehow, three hundred years ago.  He wrote a monumental bibliographical work 

 

 (Theatrum Anonymorum et Pseudonynorum²) with superb references, and did so with what we would today deem relatively nothing.  Placcius did have some sort chest-like devices with rods and pins and god knows what that functioned in a way I don’t understand as a note-keeping/comparing device.  I’ve included images of the device (below) in the hope that someone out there might recognize and explain it.  In any event, this superb piece of scholarship—the first of its kind—had to have taken a lifetime of reading and understanding and investigation to reveal.  The frontispiece to the book shows the author in  a library unmasking two anonymous authors, the masks of other conquests linked above him on a chord. 

Another example in the how-did-they-do-it category is Stanislaus Lubienitzky’s (1623-1675) Theatrum Cometicum…(1667), a powerhouse of data on all things cometary.  Lubienitzky recorded all manners of observations and reports of all comets ever recorded in extant chronicle or published work. Ever.  It is a vast and learned work of incredible determination.

NOTES:

1. See Frances Yates for the great standard on memory devices, The Art of Memory (1966).  And as long as we’re at it, her Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1971) are also terrific works on a very high order. 

2.  Theatrum Anonymorum et Pseudonynorum2, Ex Symbolis & Collatione Virorum Per Europam Doctissimorum Ad Celeberrrimorum, Post Syntagma Dudum Editum, Summa Beati Auctoris Cura Reclusum...1708

People Out of Place: Mailrooms and Traffic Islands, Military, 1918

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This is the U.S. Army mail depot at Regents Park, London, braced for and under siege by  Christmastime mail in 1917. It strikes me that there are not a million items in this photo--at this time in the war there were something like 35 million people in the services for all countries dedicated to the war effort, which is approximately half the number that served in total.  If these letters in this picture were bodies, I reckon that there would be five more rooms like this necessary to tell the visual picture of the war dead and wounded.  This aside, I initially focused on the guy in the rear with the white shirt and tie, standing there pretty much overwhelmed by the task of moving all of that stuff...and perhaps with the idea that much of the mound would wind up being undeliverable because the recipient was killed.  I wonder if that mail was returned, or not?

 

                            

On the other end of the spectrum is this bizarrely-titled photo of a British soldier "guiding" a traffic signal device...the description says that this is the busiest intersection in all of British-occupied France.  Maybe so, but not at this particular time.  Perhaps the photographer should've waited a bit to get a different sort of picture to make his point, rather than settle for this lonely (if not beautifully arranged) situation.

                                                                                                            

Here's the image without the accompanying text, which was supplied for the end-user of the photo by the news service photography supplier. 

 

“Lesser Light Rules the Night…”—an Early Picture of Multiple Universes?

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Blank and Empty Things #56

This sort-of famous image, found in a French Bible Mortalisee made in Reims in the 13^th century,

displays The Creator measuring its creation, a sphere of the universe containing all of the stuff of creation, and including the Earth (pictured at upper right).  At least that is what I think this is—Creator stepping into the frame (its right foot outside the drawn border of the image), holding everything that it has made, and holding it all in the midst of another environment of some sort.  What that place might actually be, I don’t know.  Is that the space in-between the light created on the fourth day (pictured below from Schedel’s so-called Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493), the space that wasn’t the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night?  In this spirit it was the stars that were supposed to separate these two lights, but the stars themselves in many of the concentric circle cosmologies weren’t part of the Heavenly sphere itself, which is what the Reim’s illustrations seems to say.  I suppose that it is all simply displayed somewhere in the OT, but from where I sit right now, this looks like a painfully early Western image of multiple universes. 

The other thing is:  what is the Creator looking at?  It is definitely very focused and wide-eyed, and is lasered on something about half of the diameter of the universe to the right, just on the other side of the dividers. Is this the biggest of the Blank and Empty Things that can be imagined? 

Curious(?), Secretive, Sacred (?) Irish Independence Political Icons

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"Malone. … My father died of starvation in Ireland in the black ’47. Maybe you heard of it?
Violet. The Famine!
Malone (with smouldering passion) No, the Starvation. When a country is full of food, and exporting it, there can be no famine. Me father was starved dead; and I was starved out to America in me mother’s arms. English rule drove me and mine out of Ireland . …" --George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)

"The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight but the English created the famine...a million and half men, women and children were carefully, prudently and peacefully slain by the English government. They died of hunger in the midst of abundance which their own hands created."--John Mitchel (1815-1875), Irish Nationalist (and listed as a "martyr" in one of these badges/stamps)

I'm sorry to say that I do not know the origin of these diminutive, powerful emblems. They are only about a half-inch square or so, but they hold very powerful meanings in their messages.  I imagine that they were political messages to be worn, or posted in the mail, or used in subversive ways--because their messages were enormously subversive, taking on the occupying power of Great Britain at a time of supreme and enforced deprivation, an occupied people fighting against a spectacularly-better equipped foe.  The messages related to the Great Famine of 1847-1849, when the potato crops failed for three consecutive seasons , initiating a chain of events that caused the deaths of perhaps two million people, or 20% of the entire population of Ireland.  People didn't starve so much as they did die of associative diseases related to the process of starving to death, al of which it seems could have been addressed by some sort of effort by the British government.  It does seem to me as though the people of Ireland were left to flounder and drown.  The stories of the extreme deprivation are horrible:  starving dogs digging up the bodies of the recently unguarded dead, rats attacking the dying for food, and so on.  Terrible, miserable stories coming from what is probably the worst of period of starvation in European history.  the scene has been duplicated numerous times in this century killing hundreds of millions of people:: in Soviet Stalin's filthy anti-human pogroms, under the equally filthy Maoist adventures in production and nationalist strength in China, in Biafra, in Darfur, and on and on in our frailly stupid political existence here on Earth.

The small badges have always seemed somewhat sacred to me; there's just such a feeling of hope and inspiration and overwhelming empathy in them. 

Visual Display of Quantitative Data: Solomon Islands Battle Results

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I'm always ready to see different and interesting methods of displaying quantitative data, and this work--published in LIFE magazine in 1942--certainly fits that category.  That the ship losses are printed in reverse--white on black--is unusual in itself, but the design is just particularly good, fitting a lot of data on a single sheet of paper.  The image dramatically displays some very good (and very welcomed) news for the American public as the campaign for the Pacific dug in.  This was a major Allied victory in November 1942, and one of the pieces of the end for a campaign that stretched itself out over three years. 

--Solomon Island WWII battle chronology found HERE.

--General history of the Solomons campaigns HERE.                                                                                                           

Detail of the above:

Beautiful Title Pages 7: Gorgeous Design for Childen by Christoph Weigel, 1726

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"O Babees yonge, my Book only is made for youre lernynge” says what well may be the first book made in the West for children, written in the 14th century.  It was made for the eyes of noble blood, of course, and was basically a contribution towards how the children should act and behave, rather than teaching them anything outside of their immediate interactions with each other or their parents.  Books of manner and behavior was the dominant—if perhaps the only(?)—category of books for children until the late 16th century.

John Locke, in his Thoughts on Education (1691), suggests that "when a child begins to read, some easy, pleasant book, like Aesop's Fables or Reynard the Fox, with pictures if possible, should be put into his hands". He adds, "What other books there are in English of the kind above-mentioned, fit to engage the liking of children, and tempt them to read, I do not know, but am apt to think, that children, being generally delivered over to the method of schools, where the fear of the rod is to enforce, and not any pleasure of the employment to invite them to learn, this sort of useful books, amongst the number of silly ones that are of all sorts, yet have had the fate to be neglected; and nothing that I know has been considered of this kind out of the ordinary road of the hornbook, primer, Psalter, Testament, and Bible." (This quote from C.M. Watkins article in The Atlantic Monthly, 1880.)

Perhaps the most beautiful of early books for children is found behind this deeply designed title page, brought to us by Christoph Weigel (German, 1654-1726), the author, illustrator and engraver of Die Welt in einer Nuss oder die Historien vom Aufgang der Welt…¹ published in Nurnberg in 1726.  The book was a tall, thin production, with 16 pages of text and 43 engraved plates, much like this one, emblazoned with emblematic studies and dedicated to a particular point in the historical continuum.  And it was intended, believe it or not, for children—the title can be basically translated as “The World in a Nutshell” and was absolutely intended for kids, compressing all of the human story into 16 terse pages and a whole bunch of gorgeous illustration. This image shows the second millennium after the birth of Christ, illustrated with seven engravings (secula septem).

Notes:

1. Weigel, Christoph: Die Welt in einer Nuß oder Die Historien vom Anfang Der Welt samt deren Zeit-Rechnung bis auff unsere Zeit auf eine besondere und ganz leichte Art kurz zusammen zufassen oder ausgebreitet in einem Augenblick auf einer einigen Tafel zu wiederhohlen, fürgeschrieben und fürgebildet. [Nürnberg]: 1726

A short timeline of Early Children’s Literature:

Orbis Pictus (1658) by John Amos Comenius: perhaps the first book of stories written for children to be illustrated. 

Charles Perrault, the inventor, perhaps of the new genre of the fairy tale,  wrote (in the 1660’s-1690’s) tales that include Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (Little Red Riding Hood), La Belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty), Le Maître chat ou le Chat botté (Puss in Boots), Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de vair (Cinderella), La Barbe bleue (Bluebeard), Le Petit Poucet (Hop o' My Thumb), Les Fées (Diamonds and Toads), La Marquise de Salusses ou la Patience de Griselidis (Patient Griselda), Les Souhaits ridicules (The Ridiculous Wishes), Peau d'Âne (Donkeyskin) and Riquet à la houppe (Ricky of the Tuft).  Some of the stories were simple, some not; some were hard, some not.  Reading the originals (or close to them) and reading them fully leaves them outside my taste, especially for kids.

A Token for Children. Being An Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of several Young Children (1672) by James Janeway. One of the first books specifically written for children and which shaped much eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writing for kids--as you can tell, not a happy go.  Its a wonder we're all not dead.

The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come by John Bunyan (1678):  Christian allegory serving as a model for many more such works to come.

A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744) by John Newbery: avery early book of really nothing but fun and a few promos.

The Governess; Or, Little Female Academy (1749) by Sarah Fielding: Often described as the first novel for children

Lessons for Children (1778-9) by Anna Laetitia Barbauld.  A best-selling book series made for little and grubby hands, easy to hold, wide margins and easy to read and adaptable to different age groups. 

The Brothers Grimm (German: Die Brüder Grimm also Gebrüder Grimm), Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Karl (1786–1859). Myths and stories told without holding back on what might cause years' worth of nightmares. Very tough going by today's standards. Very.

Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) fairy tale-ist,  "The Snow Queen", "The Little Mermaid", "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "The Ugly Duckling"; storie smore suited for a kinder and more comfortable bedtime once th elights go out.

Cars Driving in the Sky: the Future of the City, 1930's

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

In an earlier post here I wrote about  living a big life in a big airplane--I saw this weird little print and was attracted to its unrepentent awfullness and the sleeky bulbous nature of this exotically unflyable aircraft.  I guess it bothered me becuase even though it was unsupportably  big it didn't bother to have any of the luxurious features that other, similarly bloated-enormous aircraft had at the time:  swimming pools, greenhouses, landing strips for other planes...  This one didn't have anything like that, and didn't really seem to make any sense, unless that big belly part was actually a zeppelin or something like that, filled with helium--but even that doesn't make sense.  Perhaps we need to assume that it is supported in the air by something yet named and unknowable, powered by engines that were far advanced.  But what is more interesting in the print are the multi-tiered auto-skyways and suspended nonsensical roads that hang between the skyscrapers like a gravity marble game.

These other cities of the future at least take a greater leap of faith in the belief of extraordinary inventions and abandon the generally stylized shape of known aircraft and propulsion systems.  At least for the next two images, even the architecture is mostly new.  What I'd really like to know is what people were doing in those buildings and where they were going in those hover cars.  For the most part in stories of the future like this people were simply going to work as they would in 1937, driving off with anti-gravity sumpin' to Spacely Sprockets to do office work as it was in the past. 

 

 

For the most part future vision seemed grounded in the past, techno-wizzardry  carved into the fabric of existing society.  I'm not so sure what was so "futuristic" about elevated railways stacked up on top of each other like flapjacks, but to someone there in the 1930's past it looked like a great thing about to happen....in 1965. 

The Devil in the Mirror, ca. 1560

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There’s plenty of interesting images in the Renaissance and Baroque featuring images caught as reflection in a mirror, none more famous I guess than Van Eyck's marriage scene (which I’ve written about several times in this blog, most recently in "Original Reflections: unique experiences with mirrors, Van Eyck and Brunellesci, here).  What is unusual here is that we see the Devil in the mirror (actually the devil’s hindquarters), which to my experience is very uncommon. Also I thought the phraselet “the Devil in the Mirror/Mirrour” was well used and worn, but, as it turns out, it is hardly so, though there’s a near-alphabet of things that the devil could be in. 

For example, when looking through FirstSearch/WorldCat (a massive catalogue of books in libraries world wide and a cataloguing librarian’s best friend) for the things that a devil might be in, as in the phrase “the devil in the ____” we find the devil in a belfry, book (a Dalton Trumbo novel!), bush, candle, cheese, classroom, cross, dark, details, drain, desert, deep blue sun, flesh, fog, gateway, hills, junior league, kitchen, Middle Ages, milk, modern world, mountain, New World, shape of a woman.  The devil in the mirror turns out only to be so in a song. 

None of this amounts to a hill of  ____  (beans, cocoa, molasses, moolah, fritos), but I found it unusual that the phrase and the whole devil-in-a-mirror idea to be so scarce.  Unless he can’t be seen in a mirror….No wait, that’s a vampire

I know I'm wasting this image with this trivial pursuit when a decent writer would be looking at Satan over the ages, or its virtual non-appearance in the Bible, or the different names of the devil or its infernal helpers, and its other unholy images, or the history of Hell itself., or of the history of guilt, or fear (see Jeff Donlan's lovely appraisal of Daniel Gardner's The Science of Fear, which doesn't really have anything to do with the devil but is a great idea) or temptation, or general unacknowledged dark worry.  I just stuck to the picture. 

This naturally leads to looking at some antiquarian book titles involving devils and the nonsense and hokum that they got into.  Here’s a few lovely examples of titles-as-long-as-opening-paragraphs; it seems that the less old they are the less detailed they become.  But I’m probably wrong about that, too. 

The displaying of supposed witchcraft : wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of deceivers and impostors, and divers persons under a passive delusion of melancholy and fancy but that there is a corporeal league made betwixt the devil and the witch, or that he sucks on the witches body, has carnal copulation, or that witches are turned into cats, dogs, raise tempests or the like, is utterly denied and disproved ; Wherein also is handled, the existence of angels and spirits, the truth of apparitions, the nature of astral and sydereal spirits, the force of charms, and philters; with other abstruse matters / 
Author: Webster, John, 1610-1682.

War with the devil, or, The young mans conflict with the powers of darkness in a dialogue : discovering the corruption and vanity of youth, the horrible nature of sin, and deplorable condition of fallen man : also a definition, power, and rule of conscience, and the nature of true conversion : to which is added an appendix containing a dialogue between an old apostate and a young professor, worthy the perusal of all, but chiefly intended for the instruction of the younger sort / 
Author: Keach, Benjamin, 1640-1704.

A Whip for the Devil, or, The Roman conjuror discovering the intolerable folly, prophaneness and superstition of the papists in endeavouring to cast the Devil out of the bodies of men and women by him possest ... / 1683

I find these title strangely satisfying, much like the dime library westerns of the late 19th century with their tow-parter extendo-titles:  Valerie of the Blazing Sands; or, Colonel Ingraham and the Satisfied Sod Buster, a Tale of Woe and Heroism and such.