Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books

Cold, Cramped, in a Ditch and Under Fire: France, 1918

ITEM .  Original news photo service photograph, Doughboy at flare gun. 1918. 8x6 inches.  $150

ITEM 2: Soldier in trench, walking, damp and cold.  1918. 7x5 inches.  Original image from a new photo service agency.  Very good condition.  $250

Ref: JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1308

If I was in a time machine, stepping back through a wormhole and into another segment of another reality, one of the places I'd least want to step into would be a cramped, cold, wet, dirty and dangerous place.  Like this American soldier, waiting for a German attack to begin so that he could launch a warning flare to the rest of the soldiers, hunkered down in a cold wet place in the front line along the Lorraine section in France, mid-way through 1918 and almost all-the-way-through WWI. 

There are of course much worse places to be, but I think if I limited my time travel to include what I would be on the other end--a U.S. soldier--one of the places at te top of te list would be a generic trench in the front line of a battle late in the fighting in WWI.  Sitting there, watchful, waiting for the advance of thousands of German troops, charging over a ruined and sulfurous landscape, waiting for the ruination to begin as it churned its way through  No Man's Land.  Of course it could be worse--one could be going "over the top", charging across the Desolate Place towards a line of thousands of entrenched soldiers all of whom were trying to kill. you. 

Or of course you could be in a blue coat marching in a straight line towards a series of long lines of men in red coats, everyone getting ready to get close enough to discharge an 69-calibre (or thereabouts) ball across an open plane of hundreds of feet into the ranks of the opponent.  Or being in a Marine uniform in Tarawa, in the Gilberts, in November 1943. Or being in Butternut, crossing the Emmitsburg Road on the way up Cemetery Ridge on 3 July, or being in any uniform whatsoever at Antietam.

The places and times get worse I think once you allow yourself to be any other solider in any other uniform.  A French soldier, for example, sitting in a similar spot in the same battle along a front line as our American Doughboy, above, would've been worse.  A Belgian soldier virtually anywhere also would have fared worse, statistically, than just about anyone else in WWI.  Being a newly-minted soldier wearing the uniform of the Soviet Socialist Republics in the Summer of 1941 would probably have been half-a-death-sentence.  Of course the list goes on, and on. 

Perhaps one of the worst inventions in the history of warfare was The Trench. Millions of men were wounded or met their ends while defending one, or attacking one, or being in-between two of them.  Hundreds of thousands of troops spent months charging back and forth between opposing lines, the ground over which they fought made uninhabitable for almost any form of life. Cold, wet, bad.

Here's another original photograph made by the Western Newspaper Union Photo Service, as a "British Official Photograph"  (with the "British" part penciled out and replaced by an unknown hand, "Italian"),  The photo agency supplied a caption for the image (that was supposed to have been used by the newspaper or magazine that published the picture) as follows:

And the detail:

 

Indoor Air Show: Empire Air Day, 1938

ITEM:  front page of the 4 June 1938 issue of The Illustrated London News.  $35

Ref:  JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1307

I wonder who invented walking? 

It was certainly one of the first inventions made by our deepest, oldest human cousins, walking,.  And it was probably invented in Africa. 

This thought comes to mind looking at this great photo of the Empire Air Day, being celebrated in England in May 1938.  All of these folks walking around this enormous dirigible hangar (a form of flight that had left the RAF field of interest just a few years before, mostly forever) looking at the best of what was in the air.  The crowd actually looks a little thin to me--were people already getting a little used to having such magnificent things flying overhead, even just 30 years or so into the history of heavier-than-air flight?  It makes me wonder what will be remembered of the earliest days of flying 10,000 years from now.  The answer to that question may be as meaningless as the question I just asked above. 

 

It is interesting to note the barrage balloons (three of which are shown here). The Nazis had only recently admitted that they had an air force, and of course by the middle of 1938 it was a considerable thing.  Hitler had shown his fangs of course and there was war in the air.  Wr doesn't smell like a desert bloom.  But the Balloons were there, as were the rest of the aircraft, to show the hearts and minds at home that the RAF was a strong arm of the military establishment, and that the balloons were ready to be sent aloft to help protect London (at least) from the possibility of German/Nazi attack. 

Here are some of the aircraft that were supposed to have been displayed: Armstrong Whitworth Whitley; Armsrong Whitworth Ensign -transport; Bristol Blenheim -  medium bomber; De Havilland Albatross; Fairey Battle - medium bombe; Gloster Gladiator - torpedo bomber; Handley Page Harrow -  bomber; Hawker Hurricane -; Shorts Empire Flying Boat; Vickers Wellesley - bomber; Vickers Wellesley - bomber; Vickers Supermarine Spitfire -  fighter Westland Lysander.

Needles and Threads; Sewing in Battle, 1918.

ITEM: 7x5 inches, Western Newspaper Union.  Original photograph, Nopvember 1918.  $150

Ref: JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1307

This fantastic photograph calls to mind the importance of the little things of battle--dry socks, headgear, water, food, scissors.  And of course a good coat in the winter--a good coat that can be kept closed to allow the body to stay warm, or dry.  I mentioned in a post here just yesterday that it was a small thing that may have led to the demise of Napoleon's army in Russia in 1812--the buttons on the overcoats of the soldiers were made of tin, and as tin becomes brittle in severe cold, it is conceivable that the buttons failed and therefore allowed the jackets to blow open much more easily than normal.  Little change that has an enormous impact.  

This photograph--an official French photo published by the Western Newspaper Union in November 1918--shows a group of French telegraphic soldiers, taking a break, and mending their clothes.  The original text for the photograph (below) points out that their uniforms were torn and made shabby by continuously running themselves up and down telegraph poles.  It is important to keep yourself fit and fed and your uniform in good order, so they calmly awaited the repair of their uniforms y the one man with a needle and thread. 

 

Art & Artists as Wartime Magi--Making Things Disappear, 1918.

Item:  7x5 inch orginal photogoraph, 1918. Camouflage on the Belgian Front.  WIth original text.  Very good condition.  $125

Ref: JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1306

Its a little difficult to think of Ellsworth Kelly, Jacques Villon, Grant Wood, Laslo Moholy-Nagy and Thomas Hart Benton as painters-for-war.  But its true, and true for many of hundreds of other artists in the 1915-1918 era. Its not as though they were in the trenches gunning down the enemy or lobbing hand grenades into the swirling gunsmoke. They were camofleurs, camouflage¹ experts, artists employed as magicians, Wartime Magi, employed/drafted to make ships and such disappear. 

Ever since it was (sort of) first noticed in 1915 that designs odd to the environment, stark geometric patterns and such, were capable of fooling the eye, people with  design capacity were pressed into service, rendering offensive and defensive instruments of war optically semi-impervious with variations of the then-five-year-old modern nonrepresentational art. That must've been a very odd position to wake up to every morning. 

Of course the idea of camouflage in the animal world is probably 250 million years old--animals and insects have been blending into their environment for eons, and I'm sure too that early hominids did their fair share of walking behind brush.  But the idea of hiding great amalgamations of very heavy metal with paint is really quite modern.

In this photograph, the camouflage is more a more futuristic conception of art than the abstract and cubist approaches that were taken during the war, this looking more like assemblages of found material more than anything else.  And, according to the text that accompanied the photograph (which comes from 1918, from the Underwood & Underwood news photo service agency), the camouflage--empty sandbags thrown on a barbed wire fence) successfully concealed a gunnery emplacement for months on end. 

Notes

1. A fine bibliography on camouflage appears here, at Leonardo Online.

The definition of "camouflage" from the Oxford English Dictionary shows that it is a young word, in English:

(n) The disguising of any objects used in war, such as camps, guns, ships, by means of paint, smoke-screens, shrubbery, etc., in such a way as to conceal it from the enemy; also, the disguise used in this way; freq. attrib.

1917    Daily Mail 25 May 4/4   The act of hiding anything from your enemy is termed ‘camouflage’.

1917    Daily Mail 16 July 5/3   The King paid a visit to what is called a camouflage factory.

1922    C. E. Montague Disenchantment viii. 108   A French aerodrome across which the French camouflage painters had simply painted a great white high-road.

Axe Men of the Trenches, 1918

ITEM: Original news photo service photograph, November, 1918. 7x5 inches.  With original typed description.  Very good condition.  $125

Ref: JF Ptak Science Books Post 1305

One thing that I haven't thought about--among many--is how the lumber for lining WWI trenches was provided.  This issue came about while looking at this World War I news photo service image (by Underwood & Underwood), an image showing a group of journalists accompanying a troop of Canadian soldier lumbermen, all riding on top of felled trees loaded onto railroad cars, the lumber headed towards the Front.  When you think about battles along the many fronts during the war, you don't think about all of the missing trees, some large percentage of which wound up being utterly splintered during the first stages of battle.  So the lumber needed to keep the sides of the trenches intact must've come from somewhere, somewhere else. 

[The original photo is available from our blog bookstore, here.]

Given that there were something on the order of 12,000-25,000 miles of trenches for the war (a figure taken from the PBS site on the Great War)--that would mean that there were many miles of trees needed to shore up the ditches.  This is just another one of those infrequently considered indicators of how massive the supporting efforts to the supporting efforts ( and etc.) of the war effort was on each side--that there was a corps necessary as a provider for the construction of the walls of trenches is staggering, especially when you consider the amount of lumber that was necessary to do the job. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blank, Missing & Empty: German Soldiers, November 1918

ITEM: Underwood & Underwood original new photo service photograph.  8x6 inches.  With attached, typed/printed description of the contents of the photograph.  Copyright stamps on verso of photograph.  Very good condition.  Photo is in a half-curled position from having been stored in a tube for 90 years.  $150.00

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1305

This remarkable photograph is part of an archive of World War I Underwood & Underwood News Photo Service photographs I purchased many years ago.  It shows a pile of German soldiers' uniforms--thousands of them--taken from German prisoners, the clothing headed for "cleaning and repair". 

[This photo, along with mnay others, is available for purchase from our blog bookstore.]

I didn't know before this that the uniforms were repaired--I can imagine the cleaning part, since the prisoners must wear something, and deep into the fifth year of the war it seems hardly the case that they would be given anything at all to wear except for what they were captured in. the cleaning part sounds logical too, especially a the cleaning was being done by the prisoners themselves (pictured here).  Clean clothing makes for more sanitary conditions in mass compounds for thousands of prisoners, and lowers cost for the health maintenance for the prisoners in the short and long run.

And the detail:

And closer still:

And the text that was provided by the photo service company to be used along with the photo wen (or if) it was published. 

The cleaning and repairing went on, the prisoners kept coming in--even for those involved, the scent of the end of the war was in the air, though I doubt that the majority felt that it was only a week away. 

Reverse Autopsies of Stick Women--Blank and Empty Art Anatomy, 1941

ITEM: A Dynamic Home Study Course in Fashion, Drawing and Dress Design, Series One.  American Hme Studies, Washington D.C, 1941.  11x8 inches, 54pp.  Printed wrappers. FIne condition.  Scarce.  $45

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1304

Part of our Blank, Missing and Empty series.

Coming on the heels of my posts of autopsies of snowmen and donuts comes this semi-remarkable thing, published by  American Home Studies (of 1700 Eye Street, NW, Washington D.C.¹), displaying very restricted instructions on anatomy for art students.  The drawings really work better in reverse, I think, because you really can't get to the final product from the illustrated series in its how-to sequencing unless you already were finished.

What happens throughout this pamphlet is what we see below--draw a circle, then divide it by drawing lines over imaginary bones, pop in some eyes and lips, and then fill in the rest.  Not too very helpful.  This is especially so when we look at the image above, which the student was supposed to simply cover with clothing after having added the head.  If this was an animated figure, I think I  would find it disturbingly creepy.

Things become clear by the time you reach the end of the pamphlet, when you are told that you can detach any page from the work and send it to the D.C. address for correction and advice, for a dollar a page.  That's when the real education occurs. (Many others have done this--the two guys responsible for creating Superman started out selling their services in just this how-to way.)

 

 

But I guess as a sort-of artist one would need to have something else going on for themselves so far as business goes, because its painfully clear that the maker of this pamphlet had special but very limited talent. I think that the faces given to these women are drawn by someone who does not like them, given their emotional range and all:  peevish, dull, bored, haughty, disinterested and, well, dead. 

Notes

1.  The building at 1700 I is gone now, replaced by another building of the many nameless buildings that create the corridors of I and K streets.  1700 I is basically right across the street from Farragut Square, and only a few blocks from Lafayette, which is across the street from the White House. Nice location.

Stuff Blocking the Horizon--Ugly Roadside Horizon-detractors, 1922

ITEM: The Roadsides of California, a Survey¹ (1922)  8x5 inches.  48pp.  Very good condition.  Rare.  $75

Ref: JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1303

“There’s nothing so perfect as imperfection.”–Somebody.

“The great unconquerables in the geography of human thoughts and ideas are the bad ones.”–Nobody.

Bad ideas don’t so much go away as they get recycled. They can be replaced by good ideas or bad, but the ”original” bad ideas seem to linger on and on.  They are perhaps the indomitable inheritance of society, real and imagined.   

Bad human-produced landscapes are an outgrowth of bad ideas, calamities large and small that come and go, the old replaced by something new that is good or bad or indifferent. With the landscape, the original landscape itself--apart from the idea that brought it about--is generally lost forever once it has been replaced.  There is no Bad Idea Spirit that brings it back whole again, unlike the generic Bad Idea, which can live on and on, unencumbered by history, like a Greek play or some deeper mythology.

Theoretically society is supposed to learn from recognized bad ideas, so as to not repeat them etc., which is one reason why we keep track of them, in the vain hope that someday someone somewhere in the history of our future will kill particular bad ideas off one by one. 

In the meantime we can dwell on what we have, though with the removed bad idea landscape, it is more difficult.  That’s why it is important every now and then to familiarize ourselves with them when the opportunity arises, which is just what happened with this innocuous-sounding pamphlet, The Roadsides of California, a Survey¹ (1922)  Its not like it’s Pandora’s box–we can open this one and just a few, limited baddies come out, and fall limply to the floor.  But what we see is interesting, a slice of our memory of the horizon–a part of our “progress” that we’ve tried to excise–and what we can see now are the removed and forgotten things. 



Notes

1. This is actually an interesting pamphlet, an early attempt at removing the quickly generated ugliness that was cluttering new roads for the explosion of automobile travelers.  As quickly as cars were made in the new decade of the automobile, billboards and roadside attractions followed.  This pamphlet identified this phenomenon as a problem.

Colossally Bad Ideas: Sterilization, Eugenics and Soviet Racial Domination

ITEMS, as follows:

Russia, Colossal Racial Experimentation.  2 part, 72pp.  Wrappers. Fine copy.  $75

Sterilization Made Easy...etc.  3 parts, $75

Human Sterilization Today, 2 parts.  $125   {see below for details for all]

Ref: JF Ptak Science Books Post 1301

Sometimes I need to make a post about a book simply to get it out of my system--once I've said something about a numbingly bad book, it usually just goes away, falling off the edge of the flat Earth rather than having its mast sink peacefully below the horizon. Such is the case with these pamphlets, one of which is so bad that its badness could not be contained in just one "volume" that it needed another. I almost wrote " 'little' pamphlets" because they are, well, little--but little in size only, their badness easily transcending their size, and the idea of "size" in general. 

I never really liked the word "colossal" in the title of any book other than say a joke or magic book for children--outside that, I think the author is asking for trouble.  And trouble is the seat of reason in this work, which was published in 1939.  It is too painful to quote much from the text, but, right from the outset the reader gets a taste for what is ahead, being told that the New Russia (the Russians being "the most elemental of all white peoples") is one way of saving the Nordic race, quoting The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception as a part-source, saying that "this race will collectively make up the sixth of the seven sub-races tat will constitute the present Aryan or Fifth Root Race" and it will "be expected to develop certain attributes that will contribute toward humanity's ultimate perfection".

 The author is enamored of the free voting system in the Soviet Union.  "No one visiting the Soviet's pictorial Exhibit at the World's Fair om New York could fail to be impressed by the dignity and attractiveness of the pictured polling places and the freshness and eagerness animating the faces of those figures who entered t perform their civic duty..." An incredible statement, validating the democratic freedom of the Soviet Union at a particular time in it history when millions of people had recently been starved to death, among other things.  The photographs of the coming genetic masters was proof enough of freedom than anything else. 

The pamphlets grow heavier and more dense with each paragraph, the edges of the pages bending under their own filthy weight of vast stupidity and understated racial hatreds.  God and the superiority of whiteness and the gross disabilities of Catholics and Black people come along after a bit.  Jewish people aren't even mentioned.   But the author states that it is a genetic "tick", some sort of "genetic conscience" that comes into play that has prevented the "inferior races" (like Catholics or Blacks) to have come anywhere near attaining the presidency.  It is a spiteful, hateful pamphlet that is completely myopic about the rich, savory goodness that is the highest attainment of spiritualism/intellectualism/modernism and civilization that was the Soviet Union.  There would be little left to say about this work ten years hence, when the real stuff of the Soviet Union became more publicly common knowledge, and it became more difficult--I would think--for the author to reconcile his witches' brew of Biblical nonsense, genetic debauchery and Cool-Whip history.

The next assortment--all written just after WWII--asks some questions that one probably has never heard before.  "Should married lovers fight?" and "Is sexual castration easy?" are probably a pair of interrogatories that would never be heard in conversation in a hundred years of boring parties.  The contents of the pamphlets are a genuine struggle to get through--I picked my way through each for about 20 minutes before declaring defeat, except that I know enough to not have to think about these works again.

The pamphlet Sterilization for Human Betterment, published by the Human Betterment Foundation (Pasadena, California),  states that 13,000 people in this category had been "asexualized" between 1909 and 1939 in California. (I should point out that California was the sterilization capital of the United States, with a third of all the national eugenics procedure performed in this state for this period of time) It defends this practice, saying emphatically that "eugenic sterilization is not an experiment", and that "sterilization in this form represents one of the greatest advances in modern civilization". 

 

It continues:  "(sterilization) has been continuously used by American institutions since 1899, when the first sterilizations were performed in Indians".  What?

"Patients, relatives of patients, state officials, physicians,parole and probation officers, social workers, agree on the value of this practice" which was actually the "prevention of producing defective and handicapped children".  I'm relieved that the probation officers were consulted.

The Betterment people shed more light on the role of sterilization and sex offenses by women. (My bold.)  "Of 304 feebleminded girls sterilized and paroled, 9 out of every 12 had been sex offenders before commitment.  After sterilization, only one out of every 12 became a sex delinquent on parole". 

If this wasn't such an awful story, "sex delinquent on parole", a phrase I've never seen before, might make for a great 1950's trashlit title. (It could've been a series, too:  all you need to do is take the title "Sex Delinquents on Parole" and add something to it, like "...on Parole from Outer Space" or "...on Parole:  Queenie the Slip Crown Breaks Her Knuckles" and so on.)

The sorry story that I've interrupted with this bit of frivolity is that the "sex offenses" that are being discussed here is actually "prostitution".  These young women weren't committing violent acts of sexual savagery, they were just prostitutes, which meant that in most state they were "depraved".  The "feebleminded" girls I would guess were poor or working poor, without the best education, and didn't do well on whatever test was being administered to them to determine their test-taking intelligence. It seems to me that if  the goal was to liquidate prostitution that perhaps the men "seeing" these women should've been the ones faced with the operation. But that isn't how the dominant culture viewed the situation, and that the best way to approach the problem was to remove the reproductive capacities from the weakest members of society.

(Click on this table for a larger, clearer version of the number of forced sterilizations by state.)

 This pamphlet was the co-authored spawn of Paul Popenoe (1888-1979) and E.S. Gosney (1855-1942) while both were on the board of the Human Betterment group. In addition to a strict diet of superior morality and race,  Gosney seems to have been the money behind the organization. Popenoe had a background in agricultural genetics with an overdrive taste for eugenics and race, somehow intersecting them with social hygiene and marriage relations. The “dr.” that Popenoe loved to insist attaching to his name was an honorary, unearned degree, which he must have felt he needed in order to secure the proper amount of intellectual identification necessary to write on intellectual identification. The Nazis wasted little time in translating and publishing this work, adding it to their official publications list in 1939. It was one of a significant number of intellectual imports that came into poor, besotted Germany; the imports came nowhere close to the amount of information banished, exported to the necessarily beautiful non-Aryan non-Nazi inferno. It was just the sort of thinly distributed stain that interested people like the Nazis.

I wonder what "Dr." Popenoe thought of this Nazi honor?

The second pamphlet by the same people, Human Sterilization Today,. is in a swift eight pages in which the Betterment Foundation makes it case to use sterilization to check "the misery spread through the community by the unchecked reproduction of the human unit" (italics mine)..  They are closing in on the Big Picture in this work, aiming at the 5,000,000 "who will be at some point committed to state hospital as insane" and the other 5,000,000 "who are so deficient intellectually (with less than 70% of average intelligence) as to be, in many cases, liabilities rather than assets to the race".

This is exhausting reading, but it is a story that shouldn't be forgotten, and could remind us that what we're doing or practicing today might look  like the Human Betterment stuff 25 years down the road. 

What is also deeply unsettling about Popenoe is that from this vast miasmaic idea set of misguided and forced statistics, philosophical racial extremism, "social hygiene", eugenic sterilization of the enfeebled and socially undesirable, he managed to create the very first marriage counseling service/practice in the United States.  The American Institute of Family Relations opened its doors in 1930 (in L.A.!) with this dizzying philosophical semi-brew of sterilization and marriage talk-therapy, happily correlating the whole thing with exploding axis of divorce, love, social failure, racial impurity and castration.  And somehow it all seemed to make sense to allot of people, back there in the past.

 

Scarce von Neumann Publication, 1947

ITEM

von Neumann, John and R.D. Richtmyer.  On the Numerical Solution of Partial Differential Equations of Parabolic Type. LA-657.  11x8 inches, 17pp.  Original, mimeo-reproduced variety.   1947.  "LA-657" refers to Los Alamos Technical Publication #657  (see http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/lib-www/la-pubs/00424820.pdf for a pdf of this publication.)  This work was previously classified though this paper bears no stamps saying that this was the case; the microfilmed copy from LANL shows "Unclassifed" stamps.  Very uncommon.  SOLD

See also the bibliography of John von Neumann's work at http://www.netlib.org/bibnet/authors/v/von-neumann-john.bib