Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books

Antique Circles--Astronomical Prints, Part 1

Yes, the heavens are made of circles, somewhat, especially if you were observing a three-dimensional figure in two-space, where all spheres are circles.  But here we're making those observations the other way 'round.  In any event, these are lovely images taken from a part of the history of astronomy images here in the bookstore.  But in the meantime, click away--you'll find that almost all are expandable and mine-able for design elements.

 

Armillary Sphere, 1784. $75

Distribution of the Nebulae, ca. 1860. $45

The Moon, ca. 1850. $45

The Solar System, 1804. $95

1855.  $75

Jupiter, 1864. $45

 

Mars, 1864.  $45

 

Full Moon, 1836. $45

Solar System, ca. 1820. $125

Solar System, 1823.  $75

Solar System, 1808.  $75

Dimension of the planets in comarison to the Sun, 1850.  $45

 

the Moon, ca. 1810. $35

the Solar System, ca. 1825.  $95

Partial eclipse of the Moon, ca. 1860. $35

Total eclipse of the Sun, ca. 1860. $50

 

Saturn, ca. 1870.  $75

 

 
1757.

 

Comparative cosmologies, ca. 1760.  $150

Cosmography Epitomized in Six Copper Plate Delineations by S. Dunn, 1774 Athanasius Kircher, on the tides, from his Mundus Subteraneus, 1647.  $350 Ca. 1865.  $125 Rotating roof for observatory, featuring the roof (of course) and a ball bearing-like rolling device. 1812. $65 Spheres 1825 $100  Tides, 1851. $35 Chinese armillary sphere. $75

Structure for Wide Thinking--Walter Gropius' 1942 Design/Exercise Book

ITEM:  Gropius, Walter & Martin Wagner. Housing as a townbuilding problem; a post-war housing problem for the students of the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, February-March, 1942. Harvard, 1942.  10x8 inches, 59 sheets.  Offset printed. Gathered by one brass paper punch.  Very good condition.  Rare.  $450

ref: see JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1247

Walter Gropius (1883-1969, founder of tthe Bauhaus School and one of the principle builders of modern architecture) and Martin Wagner (1888-1957) were thinking of a new type of “town”, of a different sort of settlement for people, when they wrote this exercise instructional for their Harvard course. Housing as a townbuilding¹ problem, written during the war in 1942, was intended to be an exercise (or  “problem”), a case to be studied by the students in the departments of landscape architecture and the graduate school of design at Harvard. The class opened with this rare² pamphlet as a basis for course work, given to the students on 2 Feb 1942, with the problem’s answers expected to be on Gropius desk five weeks later.  Gropius and Martin put a tough, wide-ranging, landscape-changing question and expected answers in a very short period of time, though they definitely had a very structured plan and approach to dealing with massive implications of their exercise.  The theory was outlined there in the paper, of course, and was expanded much more fully in class.  And then there was this: a full page of datelines and expectations, a way of dealing with a large problem in logical chunks, adding up the answered bits, and then delivering a larger answer at the end and on time. 

I’m not an architecture or design historian, so much of this paper was a little lost on me–but I could definitely appreciate the way in which the great Gropius outlined the process of problem-thinking and solution for his students.  This may be the part of this paper that I liked the most. 

In  "The Walter Gropius House Landscape: A Collaboration of Modernism and the Vernacular"³ (published in the  Journal of Architectural Education, 1984, 57 (3), p. 39) Eric F. Kramer wrote:

“Sounding similar themes in a 1942 joint studio problem for landscape and architecture, Walter [Gropius] wrote of the inspiration of the vernacular landscape and of integrating with existing systems: ‘Such a landscape invites the artist planner to observe and preserve its variety of aspects, and to invent a settlement pattern that .ts into its natural beauty. Fortunately our forefathers have already traced out a settlement pattern that fits very well into the landscape.’ Gropius–the grand master builder and master teacher–set out the problem and the solution”.

There are of course major statements in city-building and human resettlement in this work, but for now, I’m still concentrated on the Bauhaus-founder’s outline for problem solving.   

Notes

1.  The full title: Housing as a townbuilding problem; a post-war housing problem for the students of the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, February-March, 1942.

And in that publication Gropius writes: “When we speak of ‘new townships’ we think of a new type of human settlement “, with a redefined vision of what a “town” means, using an idea of “reception basins” for spheres of cities as centers of culture, art and commerce “and our open country as furtherer if an industrialized agriculture and of forestry and recreation”. (page 21).  And all of that to be manufactured along the lines of “planned super-highway systems, one branch of which is to go through New England region and will supposedly cut through the towns of Weston and Weyland”.–Gropius and Martin.

2. This copy was in the Office for Emergency Management; only  six other copies have been found and these in excellent collections: MIT, Harvard Special Collections, Harvard College of Design, Cornell, Columbia and the NYPL (Special Collections).  So the publication is pretty scarce, and given its method of printing and distribution, it looks like not many survived, though it is difficult to say how many were actually printed.  In any event, few survived.

3. The abstract of this paper is helpful: “The Walter Gropius House Landscape A Collaboration of Modernism and the Vernacular”. “The Gropius house landscape is a potent physical manifestation of the design debates of its era. The landscape is an element of both mediation and integration forging a reciprocal and evenhanded relationship between architecture and site. Shaped by modern architectural sensibilities translated to the landscape and developed at a moment when landscape architecture was struggling to .nd a modernist inspiration and voice, it is an object lesson in the development of a modernist landscape architecture in America...”   
“In these studio problems, Gropius consistently encouraged students to find new form in the functional requirements of modern times and yet to integrate with existing systems through an understanding of their own functionally driven evolution.”

Manipulated Art 2--Panoramic Brooklyn Bridge, Boxing Scene and such on Accounting Paper, 1880

Each copyright-free item is laser printed on 11x3 inch ledger paper from 1880-1885.  Each item is $15.

Continuing a series of small experiments I've printed some classic panoramic images on some rather beautiful tabulating paper, taken from an 1880's ledger. All are available from our blog bookstore.

And the detail:

Boxing scene with mamoth crowd, ca. 1910.

And the detail:

Police officers, ca. 1900:

And the detail:

Spartanburg, South Carolina, 1920:

And the detail:

Andthe New York City skyline, ca. 1905:

And the detail:

The negative Brooklyn Bridge:

And the detail:

 

Manipulated Art--FSA Photography on 1830 Tissue Paper

ITEM:  Arthur Rothstein, "Father and Son", original printed in 1936; this image laser-printed on 1830 tissue paper.  Image: 2.5x2.5 inches on 7x5 inch (irregular) sheet.  $45

I've experimented a little in presenting photographic images on a slightly different medium, and the results are interesting,  Take for example Arthur Rothstein's classic 1936 "Father and Son" (actually, the "son" should be a plural, as there are two little kids rushing in the photo): I've used a 25 meg file and printed (lasered) rather small on a piece of antique tissue-guard paper--the paper, from 1830, is fantastically light, yet very strong for its remarkable thinness. The result of the modern, small Rothstein printed on the 170-year-old paper looks "believable" in its own odd way.

My manipulated-printed effort:

[This image is available on my blog bookstore.]

And the original:

And details in the original, small canvases in their own right:

 

 

 

 

 

Establishing the U.S. Position on Poison Gas, 1917.

ITEM:  carbon copy of letter sent by Willis R. Whitney to Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels on establishing the U.S. position on poison gas and warfare. 10x8 inches, on onion skin paper. RARE.  $1000.

(Reference JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 981)

On 21 December 1917, thee years into the beginning of World War I and eight months after America entered the war, Willis R. Whitney composed this one-page letter composing the American response to the use of poison gas in warfare.  Whitney was head of one the great research laboratories in America—run by General Electric, the GE Lab—and was one of the leaders of the U.S. Navy‘s Naval Review Board (along with Thomas Edison and Hudson Maxim, among others), and wrote to Josephus Daniels, who was at the time the U.S. Secretary of the Navy.  [Image below clickable.]

Whitney was a chemist, a former instructor at MIT, and a Ph.D. under Ostwald, a brilliant, “bearish” intellect in many fields, an innovator, and a leader, a tactician.  He summarized the state of affairs, and communicated quickly and with clarity and without hesitation what he thought must be done, and how America should respond to the German chemical threat. 

The Germans had first used chemical weapons (shells containing xylyl bromide) against Russian troops in Bolimow, Poland.  It was the first foray into a section of the war that caused more than one million casualties and 85,000 deaths.  It would be another three months for the first full-scale use of a chemical weapon—in the form of chlorine gas—in the Second Battle of Ypres.  But the time Whitney sent his letter, chemical warfare had been a deeply-established weapon.

Whitney recommends that the U.S. begin production; that several plants be established to produce the chemicals, and to get on the matter immediately, suggesting a man to head the work.  As it turns out the work didn’t begin in earnest for a number of months later, the first large quantities becoming available just after the signing of the Armistice.

{I should note that I purchased this letter--rather, Whitney's carbon copy of the letter--many years ago from the estate of  a Navy historian.  I am pretty sure that it has never been published before.]

Notes:

From Physics Today, March 1958:

Willis R. Whitney, founder of the General Electric Research Laboratory, died on January 9 in Schenectady,
N. Y., after suffering a heart attack a week earlier. He was 89 years old. Born in Jamestown, N. Y., Dr.
Whitney was graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1890 and received his PhD from
the University of Leipzig, Germany, in 1896. In 1908, after having served as assistant and associate professor
of theoretical chemistry at MIT for 8 years, he was named nonresident professor of chemical research, a
title which he still held at the time of his death. In 1900, Dr. Whitney joined GE to work with Charles Steinmetz and from that year until 1932 he became the founder and active director of the GE Research Laboratory. During the last four years of this period he also served as vice president in charge of research for the company. In 1932 he retired from the directorship of the laboratory and, in 1941, from the vice presidency. Since that time he had continued research in the capacity of honorary vice president and consultant to the laboratory. Dr. Whitney held many awards and honorary degrees of international origin. He was a member of the American Physical Society.

And another, far more literary and scientific appraisal here, in the journal Nature.  A delightful review of Whitney's career is presented in J.E. Brittain's long article "Electrical Engineering Hall of Fame: Willis R. Whitney", in the Proceedings of the IEEE, volume 95, issue 12, 2007--unfortunately I don't have te rights to reproduce it here.

See also: Willis R. Whitney, General Electric, and the origins of U.S. industrial research by George Wise, COlumbia University Press, 1985.

On the Possible Delusion of the Inhumanity of Poison Gas, 1921

ITEM:  Quick, Herbert.  What About Chemical Warfare? The Newspaper Enterprise Association (1921) 15pp. 7x5 inches.  Fine condition.  WorldCat locates 6 copies.  RARE. $75

Herbert Quick did a fair amount of thinking about the military use of poison gas, and it winds up, in the final analysis, thinking that it was tolerable.  What About Chemical Warfare? (published by the Newspaper Enterprises Association in 1921) is certainly a possible title for a Duck-and-Cover A-Bomb or You and Your Hormones kind of film.   But Mr. Quick took the slow boat around his issue, thinking about it a little long and out loud, before coming to his final conclusion in the chapter titled "Gas Warfare Cheapest and Most Effective Arm of Defense".

He points out the enormous impact in the war effort that relatively small chemical corps played in WWI--something on the order of hundreths of one percent of all serving soldiers were employed in the combined chemical corps, saying "how small a body to produce such great results!" Which is true, assuming that by "great" he meant 'widespread', though it is unclear exactly what he was talking about.

Nr. Quick does make a case for poison gas being not so inhuman as presented by most civilized people, pointing out both its high quick-death rate and survivability/recovery rates, which seems to be giving/taking at the same time. No matter:  "But woe to the army or nation that does not keep up with the times.  The Angel of Death will breathe in their faces" he writes. 

The author also warns that though Germany was "stripped" of her war-making capacities, he thought it was not so of the industries necessary to produce poison gas. He points out that Germany can produce these munitions in secret, and that if any "militaristic nation conquers the world in the future", it will be through the use of the poison gas it developed in secret. 

Defense was also important:  "in the absence of efficient defense worked out beforehand, our great cities might be wiped out with gas bombs dropped from aircraft".  Mr. Quick believes that protecting cities is possible, writing simply "preparation will prevent such a crisis".  Indeed.  Unfortunately no ideas about this defensive posture were forthcoming, though he did bring himself around to writing about gas as a defensive tool.  Against looters. And rioters. And snipers.  "Gas puts the sniper in the power of his enemy" Quick writes, using the Marine action in Vera Cruz, Mexico, as a good example of where gas ("gas grenades") would have come in handy.

The bottom line is of course the bottom line, practically stating that poison gas as a weapon was indisputably more cost-conscious than anything else, by far, each dollar spent on chemical warfare being worth "from three to five hundred for the army".  Poison gas services Quick says should be pursued, because "gas warfare cannot be stopped until all war is stopped".

Gas warfare "gives the educated, intelligent nations the advantages over the people of lower civilizations".

"When both sides are prepared it is much less inhumane than war with bullets and high explosives; but it means horrible annihilation to the army which is unprepared."

It is an interesting exercise to replace "poison gas" with other types of weapons, just to see how it reads.

Mr. Quick was up and down in his treatment of poison gas and war, though almost entirely down.  One thing he didn't see, that no one saw, really, was the use of a particular gas that was used to destroy millions of people, and which was developed quite in the open in Germany for many years, used for killing rats.  The Nazis simply used it instead on people.  No one saw Zyklon-B coming, and no one could have, even when they did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An ABC of Bombing, 1940

ITEM:  After the Air Raid, an A,B,C, of Information,by the Bute County Council,  was published around 1940.  Fine condition.  $45

I’ve written on this blog on some odd alphabets, and I’m certainly aware of some unusual alphabet books (like the alphabet of acronyms for some of FDR’s social creations and an alphabet book for socially conscience city planning ca. 1940), and there are endless alphabet books for young people learning how to read, but I don’t remember ever seeing an ABC book for bombing.  Actually, its ABCs for after the bombing:

After the Air Raid, an A,B,C, of Information,by the Bute County Council,  was published around 1940.  This was printed in the town of Rothesay (by the “Rothesay Express”), which of course places publication in Scotland (though the Bute that I know is a county in North Carolina, 275 miles from where I sit–an old, 1760's-founded county, up near the border of Virginia, closing in on the coat...its not-for-nothing that they call my part of the state “the Southern Highlands”, what with the huge influx of Scots/Irish coming into this area in the 18th 19th centuries).  It’s a curious publication, not the least of which is the unlikely place of its origin. 

Another curious thing is that no other copy of this slight publication shows up in WorldCat/First Search–not only that, but there are precious few publications that are found in the 1940-1950 era with “after” and “air raid” in their titles. (The few I found are below.)

The six-page pamphlet manages to cover 15 letters of the alphabet, plus a question mark at the end, for questions.

The entries are very economical, tidy, and well written:

“Money.
If you are in need as a result of enemy action, you should explain your circumstances to the Assistance Board Officer who, if satisfied with your case, will help you.”

“Orphans
Notification should be sent to the Information Centre of any children who have become orphans as a result of air raids.”

“Tools
You may obtain a grant to replace tools which are essential to your work, apply to Employment Exchange for assistance.”   

Very matter-of-fact.  I should think that if you needed to consult a work like this after having been bombed, that you’d want your information compact and direct.

Bombing Britain, 1940--a Popular Look from "the Other Side"

ITEM:  issue of Illustriete Zeitung, for the week of  5 Septmeber 1940.  $145

It is essential to look at objects from alternative angles, especially in science, in order to determine the correctness, or fitness, of a finding, or opinion.  Even when consolidating data or evidence regarding the confirmation of an established bit,  you may very well find other strands of loose data that could help illuminate even a well established or iconic societal “given”.

That the war was not going well for the Allies in September 1940 is an understatement—and the chief allies at this point excluded the United States, happily now recovering from the Depression, and still a full 14 months away from entering the war. 

What is very weird to me is that after having looked at every issue of LIFE magazine at least three times  from the start to the end of World War II, that there are more advertisements using war images than there are images of the war itself.  This actually continues into the spring of 1942, when LIFE got really busy, the war got really messy, and people started really dying.  And frankly even the coverage of Pearl Harbor in no way lived up to what I thought the coverage of a photo-magazine like LIFE would be. This is not a scientific study.  It just strikes me as odd, or propagandizing, that there should be such relatively scant, or undervalued, coverage of the fighting when sanitized images of that same fighting were being used to sell socks and shaving cream and cigarettes and such.  I understand the power of hearts-and-minds campaigns, but this seemed so amateurish, boorish even, that it just didn’t approach the level of a psychological ploy to pacify an American public that had virtually no interest in attending the European Theatre. 

This was not the case with the British equivalent of LIFE—the Illustrated London News.  Actually, I should say that LIFE is a dumbed-down version of the ILN, which was the world’s first illustrated magazine, and which began almost 100 years before LIFE was born.  The ILN covered the war like it was a war being fought in their front yards—and it was. 

This was also not true of one of the principle German equivalents of these two weekly photo-imags, the Illustriete Zeitung (Leipzig).  There was a  lot of war coverage, though much more sanitized than even the very sanitary (pre-1943) versions of reality issued by LIFE and the ILN.  The Germans by and large did not use war or military images to sell common-sue, every-day consumables; it rather concentrated on the glories of battle, real and imagined, as well as using a very grandly flatulent palette to paint the image of Adolf Hitler.

What caught my eye was a map in the 5 September 1940 issue of the Zeitung.  (The cover woodcut illustration, by the way, is a sharpened point of the Roman standard bearer being used by the Fascist Mussolini government about to impale a running cat-thing that represented Somalia.  The Italians attrociously bombed innocent civilians in Somalia and Ethiopia with abandon and disdain.) On page 165 is a two part map, the upper part being a velum-like overlay, showing the German bombardment of England.  (“Bombenregen ueber England.  England muss jetzt allein um seine insel Kaempfen…” )  The template map is in stark black and white, showing locations of “war” industries, chemical plants, rubber works, textile plants, metal industries and gas works . The overlay shows the outline of the island with 150 or so bombs, imprinted with a color code to show what sort of industry it was intended for.  As you can see there was quite a cluster around London—I looked closely, and no one bomb was actually placed directly upon the outlined city of London. Suffice to say that no fool editor at the Zeitung was going to show their readers that German bombs were falling on a city. 

What this map shows me, outside of the propaganda aspect for its intended readers, is that the basic bits of the bombing campaign was actually true—that there was a whole crap-load of bombing going on, and going on quite well country-wide.  Certainly people in England knew this but knew it in chunks.  The Battle of England was being fought at this point, and the outcome was still undetermined—even though the Brits had the “ultra” and basically knew when the attacks were coming, and where.  But looking at this image of the bombing from a completely different, contemporary, and ENEMYsource hammered home the fact that England was being bombed, and bombed heavily, and that its future was in real doubt. 

 

First Photograph of a Smell, Revisited

ITEM:  two leaves from The Illsutrated London News, 10 September 1938.  Each 13x10 inches. Fine conditon. $95/the pair.//

It leaves me with such a cozy feeling to not find what I think is an obvious-but-odd phrase in Google.

 And that's what happened with "the first photograph of a smell" (or "photograph of a smell" or odor, for that matter),  as shocking to the senses as it might be.

There are long and interesting lists of firsts in photography: the first color photograph (Maxwell, 1867, but impermanent), the first photograph of a human face, the first photograph of the moon, the first photo of a planet, and so on, tirelessly, until we see how many derivations of "firsts" there are. (We can go from first photo of human to first photo of a human face to first photo of a human in motion to the first photo showing human hands to the old human recorded by photography tot eh first photo of a couple to the first photo of a human with a tool and on and on.) There is a shorter list of "first photographic non-photograph of a photograph" (?!) that I wrote about in an earlier (illustrated) post, but we won't go there today.

Here is a "first" though that I think hasn't been dealt with too terribly much: the first photograph of an odor.

These beautiful images appeared in the 10 September 1938 issue of The Illustrated London News and were exhibited at the 83rd Annual International Exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society, and were made by H. Devaux (who evidently, according to the snippet of an obituary that I can see from Science magazine, was a plant physiologist and "pioneer of surface physics"
who died in 1956). The note accompanying the photographs read: "The emission of an odor involves volatillisation of material. If an odiferous material is enclosed in a cell a few millimeters above a clean mercury surface, it is possible to collect on the surface of the mercury a monomolecular layer of the volatillising or odoriferous substance. If the mercury surface initially is covered with talc powder, the gradual formation of the monomolecules layer may be observed as the talc is gradually pushed away from the point immediately below the specimen of material."

The photos are that of the odors of a lily and of camphor. I don't know which is which, and a good story could be made up for either photo belonging to either item. Needless to say, these images are as gorgeous as they are unexpected, especially considering that they were made in 1938.

{Both images are avaialble for purchase from our blog bookstore.]

FOOTNOTE:

I'd just like to add here the first photograph of a human being--well, actually, it is the first photograph that just happens to capture a human in the emulsion (discussed very nicely on the Doug's Darkworld  blogsite.  Since the  exposure time was so terribly long for this image to be made, the moving people and horses and carriages on the street, all of the city-life bits, were necessarily spectral, invisible, to the photograph.  Only the stationary items were captured, and the only people captured here were two figures in the foreground, doing something or other that made them still for at least five minutes--long enough for their anonymous but famous photonic impressions to be captured.   Mr. Doug and others seem to think this is a man getting his boots shined--I agree.

Logic Trees, Magic Squares, Magic Circles and Magic Square of Squares

ITEM 1:Magic Circle of Circles and Magic Square of Squares, engraving, from Abraham Rees' Cytclopedia, printed in London, 1812.  10x8 inches.  Fine condition.  $85

ITEM 2:  Magic squares and magic circles, engraving, from Abraham Rees' Cytclopedia, printed in London, 1812.  10x8 inches.  Very good condition.  $75

Both ITEMS 1+2 pictured in full, at bottom. 

[Associated posts: The Mother of all Renaissance Logical Graphs, The Knight's Tour, Porphyry and Boethius and Census Art and the Display of Quantitative Data, 1860.]

Well now:  I don’t know what the provocation or inducement is here to hurtle this axe-swinging monk to attack Porphyry’s Tree¹, though it would be interesting in a forensic sort of way to know what the tree’s section might reveal. The “tree” was a diagrammatic creation of a 3^rd century Syrian mathematician/logician/philosopher named Porphyry who-- much taken with Aristotle (and with the Categories in particular)-- developed a systematic approach to the organization of thought in diagrammatic form.