Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books

A Monumental and Potentially Fantastically Bad Idea: Draining the Mediterranean

Item:  Herman Soergel.  Lowering the Mediterranean Irrigating the Sahara.  Panropa Project.  Leipzig, 1929. 11x8 inches.  48 pp.  Illustrated with maps, diagramand drawings.  WITH a long presentation inscription signed by the author  Rare.  $650.  Formerly in the collection of the U.S. Department of State. 

WorldCat locates 17 copies, none in the U.S., and 16 in Germany. 

"Simply the thing I am shall make me live."--from Jorge Luis Borges, "Shakespeare’s Memory"

 
It would be a Purgatory, or worse, to suddenly wake up one morning with another person's memory--worse yet than to have wished it, only to find that you didn't want it at all.  This evidently works out with memories high and low, though it is tempting to want to wish to see what the inspiration looked like for one idea located in a particular memory.  Or maybe not.  But I am curious about when and here the author of the pamphlet above got his idea, and what it looked like to him--did he hear or see or smell something that prompted the inspiration for this reverse-monumental jolt?

 It is interesting to pursue a loose thought like this to its not-necessarily logical end.  Such is the case with the self-styled Paneuropic ideas of Hermann Soergel (1885-1952), the author of the above. Soergel was a Bauhaus architect and author of a number of works on design and far more ethereal, floating-castle ideas. His most spectacular contribution—incubated in the mid-1920’s and still clinging by its fingertips as an idea among some current thinkers—was to put a dam across the straights of Gibraltar.  The dam would generate electricity of course, but most importantly to Soergel, it would also empty an enormous amount of water from the Mediterranean leaving vast new expanses of land to be developed and colonized over generations into the future.  The water of course would have to go somewhere, and that somewhere was the Sahara Desert, somehow in its wake creating farmable and productive lands. Soergel was creating a certain, very wide, fantastical future of uncertain monumental prospects.

A "brief outline" of the idea was published in this four-language pamphlet, Lowering the Mediterranean Irrigating the Sahara (Panropa Project), which was published by J.M. Gebhardt in Leipzig in the very bumpy year of 1929. (The Weimar years in Germany were already into deep bumpiness; the rest of the world would follow suit in October of that year.)  To be fair, Soergel didn't plan on emptying the entire Mediterranean, just a bunch of it--at least enough to be able to rename it.

[Here's a map of the new Mediterranean, or the Mediterranean that would be made to go away.  As you can see at this point Sicily and Italy become enormous, and the Greek Islands are combined to form one large land mass--this last bit alone is enough to form total and complete reisstance to this idea. Also at this stage perhaps 150 or so miles of new lands have been reclaimed from the sea all along its former borders--more so in Turkey.  There is no mention as yet of any new islands that are formed in the sea water's wake.]

The master plan at work was that the world would be divided into three economic spheres in the future, all beginning with the letter “A”:  American, Asia, and the new land to be created by Soergel, “Atlantropa”, which was the former Europe expanded into the new dry beds of the Mediterranean and North Africa.  And also of course Egypt, which would be covered with "thousands" of canals and become semi-submerged by the new borders of the meandering sea.  This would be the way for Europa to compete with the rest of the world in the future. 

[I should point out that the image above comes from the Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig) for August 1931, and is a drawing by an artist named "AS. Christ" depicting a cross section of one of the bridge/dams of Soergel's Panropa's ideas.]

Perhaps it is actually three steps to get from the idea of damming up the straits of Gibraltar to the osmosis of Shakespeare’s memories into someone else’s brain—a squinting acquiescence of the middle touch being the brilliant Jorge Luis Borges.  You see it was in the Argentine master’s last published story, "Shakespeare’s Memory", that we meet Herr Soergel (as Hermann Sorgel) again.  But so far as I can remember Soergel exists only as a fictional character, with no reference to his real-life self.  In this wonderful story, Soergel inherits the memories of William Shakespeare—these bits come to him slowly but surely, until they start to conflict with his own memory, and things get difficult.  The man with Shakespeare’s memories winds up phoning strangers on the telephone, giving them away at random, until Soergel is left with his own mind again.  Superior as Bill’s memories were, they still weren’t Hermann’s, who wanted his own life back in the end. 

And so from the titanic, pan-europic technodream of Bauhausian Hermann Soergel to the dead brains and living memories of William Shakespeare, all through the fingers of the beautiful Jorge Luis Borges.  

I'm sorry to report that at the end of it all, near the end of the pamphlet, Soergel releases his opinion on the political importance of his project.  And yes, his aim was to form an alliance between the new PanAmerica (of the "three Americas" with the new Pan-European African Union to thwart "the yellow peril" which "arises from the racial antipathy of India, China and Japan.  Soergel writes that "the fate of occidental civilization...will be settled on the Mediterranean". 

After it is all said and done, perhaps the best reiew of the work by Soergel is provided by the graphic designer who put the Big Red X on the cover of his work.  It fits. 

The Old is New Department: Refuting Darwin with Commas, Adjectives, and the Creator

ITEM: (Anon.)  Darwinism Reproved and Refuted.  Washington, D.C., 1873.  7x5 inches, 25pp.  Bound in original wrappers.  Very good copy.  $75   Ref: JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1423

I wasn't going to write anything at all about this pamphlet, but the vocabulary was so strong and vehement, and reminded me so much of what we can read in today's daily press, that I thought to at least pick out some of the choice morsels. 

Darwinism Reproved and Refuted, published in Washington D.C. in 1873, is left without any attribution to the author, the writer not caring to sign his/her name, not even to use as the wood into which some shingle with a weak social sciences/psych/religious Ph.D could be nailed.  It is just left to the imagination or indignation that the writer didn't or couldn't feel confident enough to actually sign their work. 

The author has little room for Mr. Darwin's work¹, clearly on a super-rant over The Descent... and on the theory of evolution, using such colorful words in runny purple prose like "\repugnant, revolting, unsophisticated, outrage, deadening influence, peculiar, fallacious, cunning"--and this coming from the first two paragraphs.  Needless to say, even though  the writer was too weak to sign their name, they did have some strong opinions. 

"Utterly false, radically and fundamentally wrong, futile in the extreme, unreliable, ungrounded, false, short-sighted (in relation to god), ridiculous..." continues the author. The endowments of the Creator stuff doesn't work its way in until the third page, when the adjectival and adverbial assault was already on it way, all without the assistance of any scientific counterexamples--but then the rest of the work is dedicated to proving the godless nature of Darwin's work and its escape from scientific reality.

We find this:  "Evolution is founded on materialism, which is another term for atheism"...."let this doctrine be compared with the Mosaic account of creation, and then the student of nature determine if he will choose for his progenitors Darwin's pair of ring-tailled [sic] monkeys, or 'Adam...' "

And so that's what we get to in the refutation:  the Creator.  Old version of a contemporary complaint to get Darwin tossed out of classrooms to protect the youth of America, replacing it with divination.  The author writes:  "In the investigation of nature which is the proper province of the scientist, the most effectual method of studying it, in order to render this subject clearly intelligible to the human mind, is to regard the economy of nature as a form of government, having God for its founder, its Supreme Ruler, and Law-giver."

There's not too much one can do with that, and even though it sounds antique, isn't necessarily so, because the philosophy exists today, only with fewer commas. 

Notes:

1.  By 1873 Darwin already had produced an epochal body of work, including but not limited to On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859),  On the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilised by insects (1862), On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants  (1865), The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and  The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1873)

Bad Ideas Department: Restructuring the City and the "Terminal Box", Neopolis, 1938

ITEM: The New City, an American Plan of Social and Economic Reorganization (1938).  7x5 inches, 29pp.  Very good condition.  No copies located in the OCLC/WorldCat.  $100

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1421

The unnamed author of The New City, an American Plan of Social and Economic Reorganization (1938), makes a hard-edged plea for the formation of a new American society—and by “new” the author really means it, advocating a different economics, social structure and even the physical development of new cities and abandonment of the old physical and philosophical structures. 

Sprinkled among the Swiftian notions of rightness, quixotic lancings of social ills and a general bombardment of the structure of society are some interesting and isolated points: 
“America is the supreme user of the machine…ravishing the irreplaceable wealth of one of the earth’s richest continents, tearing down forests, looting the treasures of coal and draining the reservoirs of oil and natural gas, by methods scandalously wasteful.” 

This leads the author to the Depression, “a decade of demonstration of the profit system’s inability to deliver to the people the needs of life, a painful heartbreaking demonstration”. 

It is the profit-deliverers, not the machines or people, who are to blame.  One way of addressing the distribution system, was, unfortunately, Russia—“a form if society set up to overcome this impasse of the capitalistic system of production and distribution”.  Of course the Russians--the Soviets--were just in the middle of their enforced starvation/gulag/brutalization period under Josef Stalin, the gigantic negative parts of which were still in general not known to the great unwashed. 

The unnamed author dips lightly into Socialism, and then into Fascism and Nazism, though the only thing he/she really has to say about the later two is that “their answer [to economic woe] was in the seizure or control of the means of production by the state”, their own brutal means skipping off unnoticed into a pinkish glow, though the loss of personal freedom is “disdained”. 

The New City is actually a new world order, a new governmental form to take advantage of technological advancements leading to “nationalized urbanization” The first city in this new order is Neopolis, and this pamphlet was a call to those who would stand as its citizens.  (There’s actually a sort of application form, though all it really is a bill-of-sale for ordering more copies of the New City pamphlet.)

Even though the pamphlet is easily obtained, membership, the possibility of being a Neopolitan, is something entirely different.  The difference is actually exceptional, perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this whole misguided idea.  “Membership is to be carefully controlled at all times” we read. . “It is not desired to build up a huge and unwieldy membership of poorly-assimilated elements….interesting educational instruction…with tests to determine the fitness of the member for loyal, cooperative activity, leading, necessarily, to the elimination of those who may be found undesirable”. 
That’s some pretty muscular, steroidal stuff, particularly after such a glancing blow against the Soviets and Nazis. 

Since this is just an “abridgment” of a soon-to-be-written 250-page explanation of the concept, the complex and concentric organization of society is left mainly to the drawing of its plan, the physical layout of the city based upon this ideal. 

The Seattle-based author never did quite make it past page 29, never did name themselves, and never provided a concrete place where all of this heady stuff was being think out.  It is a sort of pretty design in a creepy/queasy way, there on the front cover, but that’s about as far as it goes.  If anyone actually did send any money to this quack thinker, it wound up in a nicely metaphorical place:  at “Terminal Box 3463”. 

This may be the very best idea to come out of touching this pamphlet—a place where people can send correspondence regarding Bad and/or Dead or Dying Ideas: “Terminal Box ______”.  I guess that box number would be pretty high by now. 

(Uncle Joe, before he killed the children, and dozens of millions of others.)

Obfuscation as a Weapon--Teaching Indians how to Read, 1875

ITEM:  Easy Reading Lessons for Indian Schools, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1875.  9x5 inches, 80pp.  Numerous small illustration throughout the book.  Nice condition.  $125

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1417 

This small pamphlet, Easy Reading Lessons for Indian Schools, was published for the Department of Indian Affairs (as a section of the Interior Department, classifying the Indian along the lines of cattle and agriculture) by the federal government, printed by the indomitable Government Printing Office in Washington DC in 1875.

It is an unintentionally quiet indicator of the general American policy towards the Native American in the 19^th century.  The work is indifferent to any particular need of the student.  It is intended for the person who could not read, and nowhere in this work is there a listing of the alphabet.  It is ignominiously but softly complex, and looks to me to be a total disaster as a text.  (This is true when comparing the work to nothing at all; but when you stand it next to, say, McGuffey’s reader or the Eclectic or any of the other classic how-to-read books of the 19^th century, the weaknesses of the Indian book become instantly clear.

How in the name of great bog could anyone have thought it just and fair and equitable to teach English-illiterate “Indians” to read with such an instructional?  It isn’t even close to being a book, and it comes no where near to being able to transcend its own terminal obliqueness.  It introduces simple words and phrases in a tongue-twisting ways, and then complicates the situation by quickly adding more structured words in a more confusing environment.  The thing is terrifying.  I actually had a hard time reading it out loud. 

Here on page 17 (already!) is a tremulous example:

“See the lad.  Is it Mat?  It is Mat; and Fan is by him on the sod.  He has his hat. But it is not on. Has Fan a hat?  Mat has a bat. Dan cut it by the bog. Mat had his bat, and ran at my dog Boz., and sat on a log, and hit him.  He did it in fun. And Boz had his fun.  He got the bat and ran it way and hid it in a box. Dan got it but bid Mat not hit the dog.”

For crying out loud! (The bat by the way is, yes, a baseball bat.  Pretty early stuff in 1875.)  Why would someone use this series of images to teach someone how to read?  The pamphlet continues to exhaustion, taking only 80 pages to do so. For me it is a perfect symbol of the way in which the government—in general—dealt with the “Indian Problem”.  Confusing children and making life more needlessly complex, making it harder for them to succeed, making it more difficult for them to rise above the difficult situation that they have unexpectedly been born into,  is a superior sign of inferiority of the dominant power. 

Wait a minute.  Am I writing about the Indian in 1875 or the poor kids in  SE DC in 2009?  I can’t tell.  The corruption of the social model for caring for people who need federal attention more than anyone else—the underprivileged child—is antiquarian and entrenched and as strong as ever.  At least there’s a moral foundation for the care of kids whose parents cannot afford health insurance.  Um, oh, wait another minute….

An Alphabet of Unintentionally Semi-Absurd Motivational Images, Business Publications, 1930's

ITEM:  collection of pamphlets, each 4.5 x 3 inches, 4pp., printed 1935-1940.   Prinbted in color.  Rare.  Set of 24, $200.

ref: JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1367

This alphabet fell into place almost by itself as I wandered through this maze of business motivational pamphlets published by Men of America Inc (of Chicago), all printed in the late 1930's to about 1941.  The design of the covers of this series is sensational (and I gulp wind as I say this) in very short and limited ways, just like it is sensational to watch a motionless penguin for a long time and then to see it suddenly turn its head to the left.  But these images served a very dedicated purpose when they were printed, and were even perhaps useful,or successful, as this publication saw at least 500 different numbers in this series.

Perhaps more interesting--where did these models come from? 

I think many of these covers are fantastic: charmingly naive, naively bizarre, cluttered with fantastically abandoned sentiments, and dripping with design elements all but forgotten and/or abandoned.  They are beautiful in their own special way.  And I'm not so sure that I wouldn't want to go back in time, read them and take their lesson to heart. 

A is for AIM to keep workers happy and profit happier

B is for BURN and hoping for a better-built candle

Elements for a Whiskey Alphabet Drawn from the Bible of Booze Names

ITEM: Registered Beverage Trade Marks Covering the Period from 1881 to 1939 Compiled from the records in the United States Patent Office (Distilled Alcoholic Liquors) may be the keys to the kingdom of names of booze(s) trademarked in this country.  15" tall, and inch thick, and 296 sheets big, this work (copyrighted y the Trade Mark records Bureau (in the National Press Club Building in DC, the one with the problematic parking garage) lists some 7,500 names of whiskey, cordials, gin, rye, bourbon and who knows what else. RARE.  I cannot find another copy.  $450.00

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books  Post  1363

It may or may no be the case, but this large, flaking book that is balanced on top of a petulant pile of paper, Registered Beverage Trade Marks Covering the Period from 1881 to 1939 Compiled from the records in the United States Patent Office (Distilled Alcoholic Liquors) may be the keys to the kingdom of names of booze(s) trademarked in this country.  15" tall, and inch thick, and 296 sheets big, this work (copyrighted y the Trade Mark records Bureau (in the National Press Club Building in DC, the one with the problematic parking garage) lists some 7,500 names of whiskey, cordials, gin, rye, bourbon and who knows what else.  I cannot find the book in any online database, big or small, and I'm not sure where this info might be housed and housed in one spot.  I have no doubt that people somewhere need this data, unwieldy and unusable as it might be--you see, it is organized only according to a six/seven digit number which I guess is the trademark filing number, or something; there is nothing else useful about the thing, the data floating around without regard to year or place or liquor type.

So I sat down with the book for an hour pulling out interesting, odd, out-of-place, from-another time and bizarre names, inlcuding all manner of expected animal names like bull and elk, and then unicorn; and lots of sunny this-and-that, sloping/sunny/grassy hills, mountains, clubs; and of course the Old _____  category seem fairly filled up. 

If I spent a little more time on this entire alphabets could be produced relating to nothing but names from the animal kingdom, flora, the sciences, professions, religion, states of mind, altered states,  literature, and the labels that suggest a possible medical benefit.  One of my favorite categories is the "conversational liquor label", the label that speaks to you, invites you, tells you what to do with the bottle of booze:  Hava Cocktail and Uneeda Whiskey are good examples of that, as are You're Lookin Good, Uvanta and Yugeta whiskeys. Another is the liquor name ending in "o", like the beautiful Famo, from St. Jo, MO, which unfortunately wasn't trademarked in '00.  The label of suggested promise and outcome is another good one:  Kentucky Courage, Pleasant Dreams, Invincible Rye, Solace Whiskey and Ready Money are all good examples of the implied end-of-bottle pillow-fluffer...maybe, espcially, The Old Solution whiskey.

And then of course, there are those where the (creative) spirit has just flown away, like the lumpily-named Standard Spirits Whiskey, its hometown of New Orleans embarrassed by the lack of effort--especially in the light of some many hundreds of imaginative creations, like the fabulous Bone Factor Whiskey (1903), which like som many other great names  (Yellow Hammer Whiskey) comes from Louisville, Kentucky.

Antediluvium Whiskey, NYC, 1898; Anti-Grippine Whiskey, Philadelphia, 1906; Ash Cake Whiskey, Lynchburg, VA. 1899, Auto Crat Whiskey (St. Louis, MO), 1905

Bank Check Whiskey, Boston, 1900; Bone Factor, 1903;

Caloric Whiskey, 1904; Cremo Whiskey, 1902; and the confusing Chickencock "potable spirits", 1929

Devil's Island Benefactor Gin, 1905; Daily Mash Whiskey, 1935; Dandilyon Whiskey, Columbus, OH, 1906;

Electric Whiskey, Cincinnati, 1890;

Flow Whiskey, Pittsburgh, 1908; Famo Whiskey, St. Jo, Mo 1894; Faust's Own Whiskey,  Phila, 1900.

Gopher Gin, St. Paul, 1902; Gas Away, Columbus OH, 1902; Galoxy Whiskey, NYC, 1905; Gong "ethyl alcohol, etc," 1932' Georgia Watermelon, 1911

Hen Bolt Whiskey, 1889;  Hava Cocktail, NYC, 1933; Hospitality Gin, Louisville, KY, 1900

Index Whiskey, Cincinnati, 1906; Invincible Rye, 1900

Jupiter Gin, Boston, 1905; Judge's Preference, Boston, 1905;

Kentucky Courage Whiskey, Lexington, 1900

Marconi Whiskey, Birmingham, 1903

Old Tom Gin, 1887 (There are any number of Old ____ labels: Old Crow, Old Man River, Old Count, Old Court, Old Coon, Old King Cole, Old Rock, Old Moss, Old Soldier, and so on--there's a specialized sub-alphabet in this category, alone.)  Perhaps my favorite "old" is The Old Solution, Baltimore, 1900.

Peeper Whiskey, Lexington, KY, 1880; Pen and Pencil Club Rye, Phila, 1894; Pleasant Dreams Whiskey

Radium Whiskey, Terre Haute, 1905; Rolling Fork Whiskey, Lexington, KY, 1876; Ready Money Whiskey

Sun Shot Cordial, Birmingham, AL, 1901; [SWASTIKA emblem, no name] Whiskey, Frankfort, KY,  1902; Suburban Whiskey, Boston, 1909; Solace Whiskey, Balto, 1900

Tidal Wave Whiskey, Houston, 1905

Uncle Tom Whiskey, Cincinnati, 1905; Uneedda Whiskey, Davenport IA, 1899;  Uvanta Whiskey, Louisville, KY, 1905

Vitoline Brandy,  St. Paul, 1897

Yugeta Whiskey, Plymouth, PA, 1906; You're Lookin Good Whiskey, D.C., 1902; Yellow Hammer Whiskey, Louisville, 1905

Zeno, Ace of  Clubs Whiskey

And to sew up the specialty market in school-named liquors, Lawrence McCormick of Baltimore trademarked whiskey names for Brown, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, Cornell, Swarthmore, Chicago, Oxford and of course Lehigh University, not to mention various label designs that featured books and "philosophical instruments" emblazoned on shields and rocks and such, all perhaps for those in search of higher education.

 

 

 

Antique pre-Dada Ingredients of the Anatomy of the Senses

ITEMS as follows.

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1362

Some of the strangest, occasionally least-of-their-time scientific illustration seems to come in the area of anatomical illustration--for me, anyway.  When taken out of context, some medical illustration looks positively modern, or post modern, as we can see with the following examples. 

The first image is a detail from a series of images by the Irish-born Quain brothers:  Jones Quain (1796-1865),  an anatomist and professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the University of London; and Richard Quain (1800-1887), professor of anatomy in 1832 at the University of London, then surgeon at North London Hospital, and president of the Royal College of Surgeons. The illustrations are from a later and smaller printing of their beautiful 1844 work The Anatomy of the Arteries of the Human Body, with its Applications to Pathology and Operative Surgery, in Lithographic Drawings with Practical Commentaries.  Taken out of context, removed 80 years or so, taken to Germany, and they might be bits and pieces (or entire works for that matter) of a Dadaist exhibition in Berlin in 1925. 

The full image of the image above is from:

TASTE

[Quain Brothers anatomy, London, ca. 1850, 12x9 inches.  $65.00]

SIGHT

[Quain Brothers anatomy, London, ca. 1850, 12x9 inches.  $65.00]

[Quain Brothers anatomy, London, ca. 1850, 12x9 inches.  $65.00]

And this beautiful detail:

[Source unknown, printed ca. 1870, $75.00]

SOUND

[Quain Brothers anatomy, London, ca. 1850, 12x9 inches.  $65.00]

 

TOUCH

This remarkable cross-section of the fingertip.

Which is a detail from:

[Source unknown, printed ca. 1870, $45.00]

SMELL

[Quain Brothers anatomy, London, ca. 1850, 12x9 inches.  $65.00]

HEARING

[Quain Brothers anatomy, London, ca. 1850, 12x9 inches.  $65.00]

Unintentional Dadaist Anatomy: William Rimmer, 1877

ITEMS (as follows): William Rimmer, Artistic Anatomy, Boston, 1877.  Each lithograph 12x16 inches.  Fine condition.  $125/each (Note: owing to size some of the later images scanned not so well; there are no dark spots in the originals.)

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1360

 
Looking at old prints sometimes reveals more than just their own history, simple or not:  there are, from time to time, subtle bits of otherness that creeps into the image, if you allow yourself the time to see it.  And sometimes looking at images of the past reveal a little of the future, or the possibility of the future. A great example of this is William Rimmer’s (1816-1879) Art Anatomy, this edition published in 1877 (and about which I wrote earlier in this blog¹).

The work reminds me of at least two touchpoints, one from art, the other literary.  First and foremost, the added elements, the humanist touches and flairs (and I mean Humanist as in the 16th century variety) , the mytholigizing elements, the little designs that are added to the anatomical details

that run throughout the course of the work,  remind me of the work of the Dadaists that would come forty years later.  As will be seen below, there really isn't much necessity for all of the added extras, the fabulous add-ons, that Rimmer incorporates in this work.  This part of the work definitely has an antiquarian flavor to it, the major anatomies of the 16th and even into te 17th century having a pronounced artistic flavor to them.

In a more removed sense, I get a heavy dose of memory of Marcel Proust from the Rimmer images.  In a sense, Rimmer is trying to affect change, an instability, into the most common and stable presentations in art, human anatomy.  There is a strong his history of presenting anatomy in an artistic format--Vesalius is one famous example--where skeletons are posed reading books, or holding their skin or contemplating  a(nother) skull--but not so much past the late 17th century.  Though very few of the "decorated" anatomies have ever taken their artistic license quote so fabulously as Rimmer.  And Proust I think is a Great Destabilizer--he works very hard to push the center of gravity away from where it should be on just about everything.  He drags himself to the proposition at hand, to the memory, to the situation, and though all of his great personal destabilizers--his allegeries, his allegeries to the things that he loves, his allergies to his allergies, his vast catalog of physical complaints, his pale melancholia, his fits, his spectacular memory, his ability to see differently, and on and on, all seemed to coalescence into a colossal ability to see even the smallest detail outside of its small details.  Perhaps this is a stretch, but that is the literary sense-impression I have from Rimmer.

For some reason I never included any of the images available for sale in my blog bookstore--though now I have.

Birds with Stone Wings: Athanasius Kircher, 1664

ITEM:  Original engraving from Athanaseus Kircher Mundus Subterreaneus....1664.  14x10".  Very good condition.  $150.

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1347

The great semi-mystifying polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) lived for a long time and filled his life with ideas and words,  producing dozens of books during his time on Earth, some of which were never published even though written, some manuscripts lost forever. His was a massive output of extraordinary breadth.  He wasted little time what I can see, writing on a spectacular range of subjects, enlightening people, confusing people, generating great theories and some bad ideas. 

The image below comes from his Mundus Subterraenus ("Athanasii Kircheri Mundus subterraneus in XII libros digestus... "), published in 1664, and which was concerned mainly with geology and the theory of the Earth.  Kircher a product of the great Jesuit institution, the Collegio Romano, postulated the structure of the interior of the Earth, the origin of heat, the source of the tides, the composition of light, mechanics, the structure of music, linguistics, astronomy, and of course the existence of the Virgin Mary in amber.  There was also a fair amount of work on one of his side interests that populated a number of his works, alchemy and the search for the organization of materials.

But what I am looking at today with Kircher is the Mary-in-Amber part, his investigations (and theorizing, and documentation) on naturally-appearing, organic objects found in inorganic material--rocks and minerals--like these birds:

Which is a detail from  

The engraving, entitled Figure Volucrum, quas Natura in lapidibus depinxit, ex variis Museia decerpt et aliunde transmissa (or "Figures of winged creatures, painted by nature on stones, taken from various museums, and otherwise transmitted.") shows Kircher's collection of anthropomorphically based inorganic items.  It is a remarkable exercise to try and place yourself within the context of the scientific world of Kircher's time, 350 years ago, and try to explain these naturally-occurring phenomena, without even the benefits of the conception of long geologic time, or of expanded time in general. 

The descriptive text (at the bottom of the engraving) from Kircher on these objects is translated, as follows:

1.  The first figure represents a head of a Stork, together with some, but I do not know what, quadruped. At the top is something like a human face. Extracted from Aldobrandinot (see PI. XXIII. Fig. 1).
2.  Shows various forms and parts of animals, winged creatures as well as quadrupeds, although very imperfect, the cause of which we give in the physical examinations (see PI. XXIII. Fig. 2).
3.  Represents the figures of two birds expressed by nature on marble in the church of St. George's, at Venice, referred to by Ambrosinua (see Vol. VII. PI. II. Figs. 3, 4).
4.  Shows the head of an Owl, surrounded by rudiments of other birds (see PI. XXIV. Fig. 2).
5.  Represents the figure of a Wagtail, or as others prefer, of a Peacock (PI. XXIV. Fig. 3).
6.  Shows the figure of a monstrous bird (Vol. VII. PI. II. Fig. 4).
7.  The figure of a Merle (Vol. VII. PI. II. Fig. 5).

A closer look at the image:

 

 

What Free Things Cost--The Washington Times and the Eugenics Society

ITEM:  (Ephemera) 1934 circular from the Eugenics Society to library "subscribers".  See below.  One page, 8x6 inches.  $25

Years ago when I lived in DC a new, upstart newspaper, The Washington Times (a conservative, Sun Yung Moon Unification Church organization-owned entity that is painful to italicize) spent years trying to establish a toehold in the area readership.  For years they spent a dollar per daily reader trying to get their message out--the cult leader himself, Rev. Moon, has stated that the paper has cost over a billion dollars to keep "competitive". Since its founding in 1982 the paper has always lost money but has kept its focus on target--recently though there have been breaks in its rigid far-right exterior, changing some of its rhetoric to be more accommodating, like for example in 2009 deciding to use the word "gay" rather than "homosexual".  The paper was owned by New World Communications--a branch of the Unification Church--from 1982 to 2010, when the paper was sold directly back to Moon for $1.  The paper is still in publication a,most 30 years later.  And even though the Unification Church says that the paper is independent from editorial control, former editors of the thing have said otherwise.  [New World Communications owns UPI by the way. Happy Happy World World]

For several years running as a matter of fact the Washington Times threw their newspaper onto my lawn, a freebie, news gratis--they just kept coming, day after day, even after I called them requesting that they stop the free delivery.  They didn't.  I simply didn't want to be included as a statistic as a "reader", because grass-reading was evidently a statistic they could deal with. Had I been a lawyer I think I would've sued them for littering, as that was about the extent of the value of their newspaper, to me.  I guess if you give something away long enough, people get used to it, and then, after many years, they are guilt ridden to buy, or--like a phantom song from the radio that you've heard so many times that you know it by heart even though you don't like it--it becomes part of your routine.

That's what I thought of when I saw this circular slide out of one of the volumes in the warehouse of the Journal of the Eugenics Society.  It warned librarians that the free ride their library had been given by the society was about to end--maybe--and that if the institution wanted to receive any further issues, they would need to buy them.

Unlike  the Washington Times--still in business today--the Eugenics society didn't make it.  It died decades ago. Died a death long overdue, died in its seventh decade.  Pieces of it lived from ancient times, famously with Plato, developing in more modern times into a societal, philosophical, scrapingly biological branch of pseudoscience, aimed generally at improving the human population through a more-or-less longitudinally dreamed belief system.  It was squared away and rounded up with social stats of Karl Pearson and number crunching of Francis Galton (who misunderstood the writing of his cousin, the beautiful Charles Darwin). And in spite of coming into a sort of Renaissance in the early twentieth century, it was mostly put away by Nazi monsters, who broke whatever basis in reality that eugenics had, almost entirely dealing the belief system a mortal blow.  Some people still felt comfortable with it enough to use it to continue a practice of population control by sterilizing anti0social elements--including prostitutes and drug addicts, and people of low IQ, but mostly, almost entirely, poor people--up until the 1970's. 

It looks like a desperate thing to me, this flyer (available from our blog bookstore, here).  It may well have been real, it may have been the case that it wasn't this piece of propaganda that I see  it as to help sell a fatal science...but I don't think so.  It looks pathetic, paper collar and starched shirt and doctorates and cufflinks and privileges notwithstanding.  And it reminds me of the desperate attempts of propaganda machines like The Washington Times to get its message across--even when it is very clear that there are not nearly enough people to fund it, a message machine in desperate search of an audience.