Ptak Science Books

Blank and Missing Things: Land (California as an Island)

JF Ptak Sciene Books    Part of the series on The History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things.

The influence of economic strategy seems to be the Old Red Sandstone of the geology of life on this planet, and sometimes it reaches right into cartography, expressing itself in unusual ways.  Such may be the case with the creation of the idea of California beign an island.

[A detail of a sample map showing California as an island, by Nicolas de Fer, 1720, and depicting the famous missing land at the north end of the Gulf of California.]

In general, much of the vast expanse of blankness of the continent in the 16th and 17th century was hidden under ornate Baroque cartouches and their encumbrances, which was a tried-and-true method of taking up space on  a map where you didn't (a) really know what was their and (b) didn't want to make stuff up to fill in the white space. By necessity most of North America was unknown to cartographers at this time because, well, there was no reliable information to work with.  The far reaches of the middle North American western coastline enjoyed a history of connectivity with the large land mass that exists east of the Gulf of California, the region known today as "california" being connected to the rest of the continent from the early 16th century.

About 116 years later, though, cartographic thinking on part of the coast changed.  Antonio de la Ascensíon is credited with first giving flight to the idea that the California Peninsula was in fact an island--and so, beginning in 1620, California would frequently make guest appearances on maps as an island. (Fray Antonio was born in Salamanca in 1573/4 and studied there and at the College of Pilots in Seville; he was ordained in the Order of Discalced Carmelites, and sent off to Mexico. As a cosmographer he accompanied Sebastian Vizcaino (1548-1624) on his expedition to California to find a good port for Spanish galleons coming from Manila, which is when Antonio produced his diaries with the famous island maps¹.)  This map was created during a period where there was heavy competition for trade routes and geographical knowledge was actual currency, so there was some amount of cartographic information that was proprietary. When the abbot's map was lost to/and recovered by the Dutch, the changes that were made to California were codified and published--the Spanish thought it not necessary to correct the misinformation. Perhaps.  In any event, it seems plausible that the Spanish crown had no interest in involving itself with what may or may not have been the loss of proprietary information, and so let the island business slide.  Until1751, when the King of Spain issued a proclamation saying that California was indeed not an island.

This practice continued to about 1747, when there was more than ample evidence to suggest that the island status of California was erroneous--still, it took several decades for the last of the island-maps to make its appearance. 

 

Paintings Looking for their Subjects

JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post

I think that this blog needs a (Jorge Luis) Borgesian category for the easily-to-multi-interpret things that move across the Blog Desk. Such is the case for this pamphlet printed in 1710, An Auction of State Pictures, Containing a Most Curious Collection of Original Low-Church Faces: Drawn Exactly to the Life by a High-Church Limner, which carries this beautiful woodcut as the only illustration for its slim twenty pages.

The pamphlet is a wonderful satirical farce, a political diatribe against the enemies of a Dr. Henry Sacheverell who set against the cleric for the sermons he preached against the Whig ministry of the Earl of Sunderland.  Its not necessary to be drawn into the intricacies of early 18th century English religico-polisci--just that the enemies of Sacheverell were dispatched by describing them as portraits being sold at this imaginary sale--unflattering portraits with unflattering descriptions. All anonymous they were, but to anyone having any knowledge of the scene their identities were clear enough. 

I think that the creation of an imaginary auction to tread on the disguised portraits of enemies was a brilliant idea.

Evidently, there is a description of what happens on the sales floor of this "auction", which appears to one of the earliest descriptions of an art auction scene--and the action of the auctioneer is pretty much that which you can find today.

Anatomy of Maps--Dissections in Geography

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This is an odd entry for the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things category as it relates both to making things missing and finding them again.  In this instance the topic is maps and puzzles, where both actions of making things blank and restoring them are intentional. The first item on display--a sample from a "dissected" map patent from 1873, shows both an unusual "blank map" (a template simply waiting for a face) and the ability to remove part of the whole or the entire thing itself--and then of course replace/return the pieces.  But I must admit the original image (below) had that appeal of being mostly an unintentionally absurd item, a blank jigsaw in a frame. 

A Note on the Most Famous Missing Doorknob in the History of Art

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 1921  [Part of the series on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things]

 

[See also the recent post on Mona Lisa's Missing Jewelry.]

In the category of upper-levels things gone missing (though not nearly in the same category as entire libraries that have been destroyed over time) is the theft of the Mona Lisa. This is an odd story full of detail and holes  that could have been the work of one man, Vincent Peruggia  (born in 1881 and pictured above in his mugshot) and who with extreme naviete thought he could steal the painting and sell it to the Uffizi and regain the prestige of Italy over its own missing masterpiece by a native son. It also could have been the work of a thief/forger team of Marque Eduardo de Valfierno and Yes Chaudron  who set Peruggia to the task of stealing the painting, with Valfierno contracting the sale of as many as six Mona Lisa forgeries to interested parties. 

Valfierno's idea was pretty cunning and diabolical--his only need was to have the real Mona Lisa disappear; then he could have his accomplice forger produce x-number of copies and sell them to x-number of collectors as the real thing.  After all, its not as though Mona Lisa owners would have a convention, so the ownership of the world's most famous and stolen painting would be a very private affair. Also any claim of the real Mona Lisa appearing anywhere else--even restored to its place in the Louvre--would simply be met by the assertion by Valfierno that those "other" Mona Lisas were forgery. So it was forgeries all the way around.

And so Peruggia--an itinerant laborer who made hi sway to Paris for a better life and who had been working as a carpenter there at the Louvre--stole the painting on 22 August 1911. A Monday, it was, when the Louvre was closed to the public for staff to make repairs and such.  Evidently he simply worked his way over to the painting, took it off the wall, got a quiet place and removed it from the big frame (and glass!, which was a new security innovation to protect treasures from crank marauders), and loaded the Mona Lisa under his work smock. (He got the painting out of the building by getting a guard to unlock a door for him--one from which he had previously removed the doorknob, blaming its absence on scofflaws, distracting the man with the key enough to just open the door for Peruggia.)  

The blank/missing hanging space of the Mona Lisa  at the Louvre in the Gallerie Carre was a vivid testament to the power of the painting, with thousands of people trudging by the depressing art-hole to stare at its absence. There were just four iron hooks on the wall, waiting for it, pounded into the plaster between Correggio's Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine and Titian's Allegory of Alfonso d'Avalos.

Once Peruggia had completed the theft he was no longer needed. If Valfierno had actually been involved he would simply have used Peruggia as a fall guy, the many who made the sale of the forgeries possible. Peruggia wound up living in a series of shabby places, working his way back to Italy, perhaps waiting for further instructions, perhaps just a solo agent making his way back home.

If he was an accomplice in  a more involved scheme, one could only imagine his frustration in being abandoned--there he was, sleeping on a cot in top of a box filled with his clothing and the Mona Lisa, waiting for something to happen that wouldn't. 

Peruggia found his way back to Florence, staying in Room 20 of the third floor of the Hotel Tripoli Italia on Via Panzoni, which was only hundreds of feet away from where Leonardo had once painted the Mona Lisa.   In 1913 he  finally contacted officials at the Uffizi in a very weird and awkward attempt to sell it to the museum. He was of course apprehended almost immediately, the museum guardians retrieving the painting from beneath Peruggia's socks and underwear in the box under his bed.After being exhibited in Italy to tens of thousands of viewers, the Mona Lisa was returned to Paris on 4 January 1914. 

Peruggia was evidently quite open about his theft but didn't have anything to say about accomplices.  He was sentenced to a little more than a year for his crime--a sentence very soon after reduced to seven months. Following honorable service in WWI, Peruggia wound up in a suburb of Paris with a family and a hardware store, where he died of a heart attack in 1925. When returned to his hometown following incarceration, he was welcomed as a hero--he may have been more so if he hadn't demanded a payment for the painting, which I think makes him a simple thief.

 

Notes:

This is evidently a partial print from Leonardo, found amidst others in his manuscripts, which confidently compare to other identical fingerprints found in his paintings in places where only Leonardo and not his assistants would have been touching (and found via the Discovery Channel)

And the fingerprint of the thief (detail of an image via the Art Inquirer):

Blank, Empty & Missing Things Series: Sound and Silence

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1918   Part of a long series, Blank, Empty & Missing Things

In the American motion picture industry, the sound technician position did not exist in 1927; in about 1000 days it would be almost as important as the director.  1927 marked the first year of the synchronous, simultaneous sound-on-film motion picture, with the first commercial production appearing in 1929. (The history of motion pictures with sound is pretty complex for the 1920's; suffice to say that there were different attempts on synching separately filmed and audio recordings which was a difficult beast to master, and virtually no one did; the winning attempt at introducing sound into the movies had to be sound-on-film so that there would be simultaneous play of sound/film.) Prior to this, all dialog, all sound effects, were confined to the mind of the viewer, though there was sometimes live musical accompaniment.  Two years later, sound was in, and silence (as an absolute given) was out. 

The impact of sound had an overwhelming effect on the medium—not only because the actors could speak, but because they could also act within the subtleties of now being heard.  Whereas just the other day actors had to pantomime hearing different sorts of sound, or act in such a way that the audience knew that they were weeping—much had to be visually over-acted to support the lack of actually being able to hear things.  Once sound was incorporated, the dramatic range of actors advanced exponentially.  Of course there was also everything else outside of voice that could be incorporated by the director:  ticking clocks, advancing footsteps, thunder,  sirens, heartbeat, a soft wail, a chortle, an echo.  And silence could now be used to its true effect, its importance rediscovered.

The last, true silent film came in 1931, with Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights.  Chaplin acted/directed/produced the film, which, interestingly, was not really, altogether, absolutely, a “silent” film.  The movie—which directors Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tartofsky both selected as their fifth film in their top-ten all-time movie lists—actually used idiosyncratic and unintelligible sounds as speech in a spectacular salute to non-speech speech.  Chaplin was one smart man.

The advent of sound curiously silenced the careers of some of the great silent-era actors whose voices were really just beyond reach and the range of the enjoyable.  Clara Bow bowed out as a result of her deep Brooklyn accent, as did John Gilbert for his very high-pitched voice, and many others.  Such are the few ironies that came along with this rich technical advancement, small price to pay for a piece of the future.

(Chaplin and Einstein at the premier of City Lights.)

Blank, Empty and Missing Things Series: Identify the Shadow.

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post   Part of the Series on Blank, Empty and Missing Things.

Do you know who's missing? Can you identify the shadow?

Answer here.

The Invention of Satirical Photography (1840)

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1911

“Nothing is falser than people's preconceptions and ready-made opinions; nothing is sillier than their sham morality...” (atribued to) Petronius, The Satyricon

(Image source, Gerry Badger blog, who also has some interesting things to say about the work as momento mori.)

The road in determining who was the first person to what discovery is sometime a bit rocky--so with the invention of the computer (ask Mr. Atanatsoff), and the telephone (ditto Mr. Gray) and the television (and so to with Dr. Korn).  This is also the case with photography, the rights for the discovery of the process contested in the first year following the announcement of the process. 

The response to rejected claims for priority in discovery are almost (?) never recorded visually, but in he case of photography the rejected party did make a visual response, which I think was a prosimentrum of sorts, a photographic novella, and the appearance of the first use of satire in photography.

Louis Daguerre's epochal publication in the Comptes Rendus in 1839 would bring about the general recognition of the birth of photography--his process was described in that article and was immediately set to use by hundreds of adventurers people even in the first few weeks after publication. IT may well be that there are legitimate claimants working on the "photogenic" science before this time but it is Mr. Daguerre who published his findings first.

Among the many "firsts" in the first year of photography (reckoned as PD or post Daguerre

[Source here.]

Generally though the first photographic portrait has been recognized as being the work of Robert Cornelius, who was among the earliest practioners of the new science of the Daguerreotype.  This is his work, dated 1839, made in his father's gas light importing business on Chestnut Street, Philadelphia:

(Both subjects have interesting hair issues.)

is is fine and remarkable, though the images simply record the bodies of the humans that are pictured.  The first human portrait with an edge, with a political or social axe too grind and point to make, an  image bent on a decisive end, belongs to a man who mildly and then hotly contested Daguerere's claim to the birth  of photography--Hippolyte Bayard. 

Bayard (1807-1887) experimented in the photographic science before the publication of Daguerre's paper and had shared some of his successes at this early date with members of the French Academy of Sciences (the publishers of  the esteemed Comptes Rendus, the vehicle for Daguerre's paper). He was even in communication with Francois Arago, who as it turns out was the champion of Daguerre, and who introduced the paper to the world.  After the appearance of Daguerre's paper Bayard--no doubt somewhat envious of the attention and money/funding that Daguerre was receiving) petitioned for help from Arago to establish his own claim and a chance for the experimenter's lament (funding). He was told in no uncertain terms by Arago to cease the attention, as it would hurt the chances of Daguerre to establish his priority and have the honor of the invention of photography to stay in France.  It is a longer story than this, obviously, but suffice to say, Bayard's interests were mostly ignored, his priority claims relinquished.  (He was later able to collect a few thousand francs for his scientific work, but the larger prizes eluded him.

And so in 1840, full of his own defeat and thoroughly impressed by Daguerre's success, Bayard composed the (above) portrait of himself as a drowned and dead man.  On the reverse he wote:

"The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that has just been shown to you. As far as I know this indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with his discovery. The Government which has been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life....! ... He has been at the morgue for several days, and no-one has recognized or claimed him. Ladies and gentlemen, you'd better pass along for fear of offending your sense of smell, for as you can observe, the face and hands of the gentleman are beginning to decay."   (From Helmut Gernsheim, A Concise History of Photography, with Alison Gernsheim, London: Thames & Hudson, 1965)

It seems that the use of satire in photography was not common in the first few decades following 1839, which makes Bayard's first use of he genre in 1840 even more remarkable.  Satire in general has been aroudn for thousands of years, mostly in the form of drama and literature, and then in (Western, at least) painting in the Renaissance), right up through the Brueghels and Hogarth and Chaplin's Great Dictator and Dr. Strangelove. But it seems to me that the first photographic use of the genre came with the overtaken Bayard, who at least deserves this honor of "firstness". 

Note:

I just wanted to remark on the hands and head of Bayard in his self-portrait--I believe that the man is just sunburned.  It si common to see in 19th century photographs of working people that--when their hat is removed and so on--we see a big sun/tan line ont heir forehead.  This is particularly the case in the work of Solomon Butcher, who recorded the lives of families on the SOdbuster Fronter in the 1880's and 1890's in Nebraska. 

(Source, Nebraska State Historical Society.)

Daily Dose from Dr. Odd: Hermits, Putridity & Long Life Spans in "The Bible", 1826.

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

[Les Ages de l'homme (The Ages of Man)  by D de Vosthem, late 16th century, source here.]

Increasing nothingness and putridness can possible lead to longer life spans, at least this is an hypothesis posed by John Blake in his Geographical Atlas..., published in New York in 1826:

" Rare examples however of extreme longevity of a life of more than 150 years seem to he common to all countries without distinction. If England the salubrity of which is so highly extolled has furnished thrice or four examples of men arriving at the age of from 150 to 169 years. Hungary which generally speaking is not a very healthy country has scen the celebrated Pierre Czartou prolong his life to the 185th year and John Uovin at the age of 172 had a wife of 164 and a younger son of 117. It is in the Bannat of Temeswar a very marshy district and subject to the putrid fever that these examples of longevity and many others have been observed A mode of life which is soher and unruffled by tumultuous passions singularly contributes to longevity..."

"According to the author of a very curious little work called the Apology for Youth* 152 hermits taken in all ages and under every climate produce a sum total of 11,589 years of life and consequently an average of 70 years and a little mare than thrice months for each whereas the same number of Academicians the one half belonging to the Academy of Sciences and the other to that of Belles Lettres gives only 10,511 years of life consequently 69 years and a little more than two months for the mortal career of each. It is therefore not improbable that in the ages of patriarchal innocence the period of 150 or even 200 years was much more commonly attained than it is in our times..."

Notes:

Beautiful Book Cover Design and Defending Something Coming from Nothing

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1907   [Part of the series The History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things]

• Coming shortly:  The Other Great Work of The Principia Year of 1687  AND  "Where Light is Declared to be not Similar", Newton's First Published Work 1671
  

  I should feel pleased were this study to be looked upon as the entrance of the temple in which lie hidden the mys- terious splendors of Nature, and if it were the means of in- spiring some with a desire to penetrate into the sanctuary itself, and uplift the veil which conceals them, my labors will bear good fruit. -- Pouchet, from his Introduction

Felix-Archimede Pouchet (1800-1874) was a serious academic and professor of anatomy, a skilled medical man with a long history at university.  Late in his life, nearly very well at its end, he published a general popular history of science with a probably-unique title, The Universe, or the Wonders of Creation, the Infinitely Great and the Infinitely Little.  It was a wrist-bender, going through at least 12 editions before 1900 (a best-seller) and weighing in at just over 1000 pages.

The title is lovely, and the artists responsible for the design of the publisher's binding, the front cover, for the book did an absolutely excellent job. (The title page for the 1882 edition appears below, looking much like the covers of the book.)

As it turns out, it seems as though there have been a thousand or two books published over  the 400 years between 1500 and 1900 using the word "universe" in the title--at least according to a quick browse through the WorldCat catalogue.  It seems actually to be a little common, which was a surprising to me. (Some of the titles were remarkable, as the one below by Herman Moll¹, though the Pouchet title seems to be of high elegance compared to the lot I've seen.)

Pouchet does have some disappointments in the book, some classic beliefs that went afoul of experimentation and discovery.  He has a towering time with Louis Pasteur, whose theory of airborne organisms causing all manner of changes in the state of biological systems ran directly against Pouchet's belief system of spontaneous generation, and of things being borne of nothingness.  It was a bitter time Pouchet had with the great man, and a long and fruitless argument that would come to no good end for the man railing against what he called "pansperma".

His book in general was interesting, and ran the full gamnut of interest, establishing itself as a versatile and popular encyclopedia of sorts, in spite of his very obvious problem with being on the wrong side of the argument with Pasteur.  Still, the title is great, and having it worked into the cover design of the book was brilliant. 

Hidden Stories in Prints--Renaissance Ladders in the Brooklyn Bridge, 1876

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1904

I've long been interested in the hidden, or the obscure, or the secondary, or the non-essential backgrounds and foreground in prints--more so at times than the subject of the print itself.  This thinking certainly applies for me nowadays when looking at another engraving of Winchester or another view of Rome or another prosaic cityscape--the main focus of the images are of course beautiful, but since I've seen this stuff so much my eye started wandering around to the small and inconsequential bits in the scene, and found that this is where odd richness might be.

And so on to what is in my mind, at least, an iconic wood engraving of the half-completed* Brooklyn Bridge, showing master mechanic and chief engineer of the project E.F. (Frank) Farrington making his slidy way as the first person to cross between the two spans (on 26 August 1876). 

What we see in the background of this print, on the Brooklyn-side tower, is a group of people watching Farrington, and in their midst, two gigantic, ramshackle ladders, straight out of the Renaissance.  Farrington was supposed to be showing how safe everything thing was for the workers--27 men died in the construction of the bridge, which given the times and difficulties is tragic but actually not too  bad--but I think he simply couldn't resist the impulse of making the dangerous, wind-swept way across the river to the Manhattan side.  The ladders don't seem to speak much to security and safety, but I guess that they worked

 Another interesting peep into the times is seen in this wood engraving from 1877, showing a crew working on the cables.  As much as eyewitnesses claimed that Farrington performed his stunt to exhibit the safety of the cables, looking closely at this print shows the relative danger faced by the workers.  The railing around the support car here looks more like a hindrance than a help, seemingly making it easier for a worker to trip on it, and fall into the water 300+ feet below.  

Below-knee-level barricades surely does not make for a safety fence--it is very probably anti-safety.  That said, if you look closely at the man on the extreme right, he seems to be sitting on the safety cable, leg up, nonchalant, watching the application of the cable. Tempting fate.

 

 

And the detail:

I guess though that the most hidden aspect of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge was the identity of the chief and overriding builder:  Mrs. Emily Roebling.

It turns out that the original designer for the bridge, John Roebling, was killed early on in an explosion and was replaced by his son, Washington, who in turn (in 1871) was terrifically incapacitated; Washington was 'aided" by his wife Emily (1843-1903), who became the most recognizable spokesperson and sub rosa engineer of record.  She was supposed to be assisting Washington, but it was far more so than that.  Probably it was an inappropriate time for society in general to believe that a woman was capable of supervising the construction of the world's longest suspension bridge.

"The work which is most likely to become our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge." - Harper's Weekly (1883) 

*The bridge was about half-way done, following the construction beginning in 1870 and its opening in 1883.

Exercise in Irony: the Usually-Invisible Chinese Rail Worker and the Highly Visible Photographer, 1869

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1903   Part of the series on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things:  Chinese Rail Workers, 1869. 

One thing that you seldom see so juxtaposed in the photographic history of the American West are the people who were so important to it placed in proximity to those who were no well disposed to recording their existence. 

For example:  this image by J.B. Silvis, "China Section Gang Promontory", a photograph published as a stereocard between  1869 and 1870, shows a small group of Chinese workers setting two rails in Utah--they are the ubiquitously missing elements in historical images of transcontinental railroad construction. There were many thousands of these workers who were set to notoriously difficult tasks in bad situations and under time constraints with little liberty or pay (and not well-afforded much protection under the law), and in the history of documenting the expansion of the railroad across the West these workers are very seldom seen.

They are set incongruously in front of a photography car that so often saw through or around them.   The  car was labeled  "U.P.R.R. Photograph J.B. Silvis Stereoscopic & Landscape Views of Notable Points on line of Pacific R.R. Always on Hand", and I found it tempting to try to see in the photograph that it was made solely for the photographer's advertisement, but the central placement of the workers makes a good argument against this.  On the other hand, when you look at some of the other work of Silvis documenting his railway car (see here), there are a number of group images where he gathers cowboys or Indians  or makes a photo with his car in an unusual place, he is definitely using those people and locales to establish the idea of remoteness and wildness of the places in which he was working. It seems to me that in the end, he was using the Chinese laborers as a piece of his advertising ensemble more than documenting them. Again, this is very speculative.

It is a very unusual image which I think is knee-deep in irony. 

I should also like to point out that most of the workers have taken care to sew  large leather patches on their breeches--that to help their thighs when pulling that heavy metal lever across their bodies while setting and moving track. 

[All images via Denver Public Library, here.]

Children in the Workforce, 1880

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

(On discovering and photographically documenting children at work in the 1920's and '30's, see here.)

Here's an interesting bit I just slipped into while looking for something else.

Children at work.

10-15 years of age. 

In 1880, half of the population was 10+ years old. There were 17 million people at work, and of these 1.1 million were children, making about 6% of the entire workforce.  And that's about as truthful as we'll ever know about that statistic--given the relatively primitive way in which these numbers were corralled, my guess is that there were considerably more children at work than this.        

 

And it looks like of the total population of male children aged 10-15 (3.37 million) that 1.1 million of them--about 29%--were working, mostly it seems in the fields. 

 

Blankness and Design in the Title Pages of Great Scientific Works (Part 1)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1900

As I've written about on this blog before, Blank, Empty, Blank and Missing Things can be of great importance.  For example, if human conversation wasn't mostly filled with nothing, it would be difficult for us to process anything, everyone sounding like several mockingbirds calling away at once, all of the time.  Music would be difficult if there were no silent interludes. And of course since existence is made up vastly of nothingness, to have it be filled would present a, um, problem.  It also might be interesting to invent an 18th century board game based on the discovery of nothing through the ages...or maybe 16th century, when the idea of zero in mathematics was first coming into widespread use.

My interest in Nothing today comes along with design and epochal scientific publications--or at least highly significant appearances of great ideas.  Sometimes the typography and design of the title pages of Great Works turn out to be very surprising--and sometimes that surprise in blankness is an unintentional result.  

Also we'll just discuss relatively recent works of the past 150 years or so. Design changes quite a bit from the 18th to the 19th century so far as scientific and technical title pages go--the earlier design (and particularly the illustrated versions) are another matter.

First, the intentional bits, like this fine example of Niels Bohr's superb introduction to the rest of the world of modern atomic theory (based upon the Rutherford model and Planck's quantum theory),  "On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules" (in the Philosophical Magazine for July 1913).  In this case (which actually is a three-part paper), the offprint to the publication has an upper part that is blank because it excludes the closing paragraphs of the preceding article--offprints being the separately-published and bound author's article that were meant to be distributed privately and prior to publication of the appearance of the contribtution in the journal.  

Before I proceed though perhaps it would be interesting to see an attempt at anti-nothingness in design, which in many cases can be a work of high design art in themselves. For example, even though most of the white page is filled up, 

this is still somehow quite balanced and pleasing. (Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann delivered a series of eleven seminal papers from 1933 to 1939, this being one of the most important, signaling the discovery of nuclear fission, an event that started its own sort of chain reaction in physicists who awoke with the sudden realization of how very doable all of this was, and how close so many other scientists were to having discovered this themselves.)

Dosing out the Cures from "The Beast that no Existence Hath"--the Unicorn.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1898

Who could refuse to see a medical person advertising themselves as:

"the Doctor Liveth in Houndsditch, next Door to Gun-Yard, having a Back Door into the Yard, where any Patient may come..."

and especially one selling Unicorn horn curative extract?  The cure promises of  "the beast that no existence hath" (Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus) sounded attractive, having the ability to dispense "scurvy, old Ulcers, Dropsie, Running Gout, Consumptions, Coughs, palpitations of the heart, Fainting Fits, Convulsions, King's Evil, rickets in children, melancholy or sadness, the green sickness, and all distempers proceeding from a Cold Cause"  as well as "all crudities in the Body".  But promises like this are almost always loyal only to that pretended self.

[Source for both images:  Rudiger Robert Beer, Unicron, Myth and Reality, Mason Oress, 1977.]

In spite having a very long sales history over the milennia, pretty much the only place where unicorn horns have actually been seen were in apothecary shops selling narwal horns and in the constellation Monocaros (named so for the unicorn by Jacob Bartsch around 1624).  This great ground-up thing, one of the great mythic myths of all time, was a highly-inclined multi-purpose curative purgative suggestative ill-spoiler, capable of defeating nasty bodily nasties and enhancing things like our Noble Parts. For years it was worth more by weight than gold, though (depending on what it was that was being sold as unicron horn) ingested gold might have had about the same medicinal effect as a dose of unicron horn. 

This fabulous image of a unicorn, draped in Renaissance-y literary moudlings appears in The secrets of Albertus Magnus: of the vertues of herbs, stones, and certain beasts : whereunto is newly added, a short discourse of the seven planets, governing the nativities of children : also a book of the same author, of the marvellous things of the world and of certain things, caused of certain beasts   being a translation of  De virtutibus herbarum, lapidum, & animalium quorandam libellus, and his De mirabilibus mundi, ac de quibusdam effectibus causatis à quibusdam animalibus (1543). 

Hope faded in the greatest degree for the unicorn only in the 18th century, replaced immediately by any other number of empassioned impossibles, like magnetisma and curative electricity.

A few handy resources:

http://www.storehousesoflearning.com/links.htm  Useful links for Medieval images and manuscripts

http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beastalphashort.htm  Great Bestiary, with searchable index of creatures; once inside, there are references to the animal from some of the leading Medieval bestiaries (and their ancinet sources), including Herodotus, Strabo, Guilaaume le Clerc, Pliny, Isidore, John Mandeville, and others. 

Medieval book of birds http://archive.org/stream/medievalbookofbi00hughuoft#page/n7/mode/2up

The Invisible Man, 1785

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post   [Part of the Series on Blank, Empty and Missing Things]

What is mostly missing in this fantastic illustration from Tratado de vendages.... (Madrid, 1785) are people.  These multi-image plates of various dressings usually did not address people directly, and so looking at them out of context gives them a very heavy taste of the found-absurd. 

For the time, of course, the book was an essential text on treating wounds, especially military ones. The author, Francisco Vila Canivell was born in 1721 in Barcelona.  By 1749 at only 28 years old, he had been educated in  France and received his medical education back in Spain at the Universtiy of Cervera, had fought in the Italian campaign (as a surgeon), became Surgeon Major of the regiment of Astiurias, and then on to keep charge of the Library of the Royal College of Surgeons in Cadiz. He was professor of osteology (and bandages!), as well as an obstetrician, ophthalmologist and midwife, until 1769 when he became Sugeon Major of the Army, and then proceeded on to other more esteemed positons, dying in 1797.