Ptak Science Books

Helping Hitler, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2024

There are many unhappy episodes during WWII of small groups from the Allied countries which gave comfort and solace and economic and physical support to the Nazis.  The economic aspect gets very complex and pretty deep here in the U.S., with major companies lending assistance even in violation of the Trading with the Enemies Act into 1943, and of course there was the German-American Bund which was relatively full-throated until America got into the war on 8 December 1941, and so on.  There were also occupation Nazi-fueled governments like Vichy, but what I'm interested in for this post are the volunteers who materially contributed to the Nazi war effort, with time, and effort and fighting in uniform. The hard figures for the volunteers and conscripts who fought wth the Waffen-SS during the war totaled some 350,000 men^1.--and considering what was happening to the German army post-Barbarossa, that was not an insignificant figure.

 

 General Sir Frederick Maurice (1871-1951) , one of the subjects of the leaflet,  had a very long and sine-curve military career, and was an academic of some achievement--he was also along in there was head and founder of the British Legion.  And it was in this capacity and under his auspices that the British Legion offered 10,000 men to help Adolf Hitler and secure a modest success in the transition of control of that country.

What an enormously disappointing handbill this was to read, coming from the press of a militant right-wing and racist organization in support of Hitler and the Nazis in their swallowing-alive of a living Czechoslovakia. The Militant Christian Patriots² were the publishers of this handbill--this was a group were formed as part of an earlier organization called The Britons (founded in 1919), both of which were viciously anti-Semitic and severely racist, and were on board with most of the programs of the NSDAP.  (The publishing arm of the Britons, the Britons Publishing Company, for example published 85 editions of the vicious and ridiculous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.) They supported Neville Chamberlain and were happy to keep the U.K. out of any confrontation with Germany.   As we see in this handout, they were eager and able to support Hitler's invasion and destruction of Czechoslovakia by providing a British volunteer force of more than 1,000 to aid in the Nazi take-over by policing the supposedly audacious and Seudeten-German pillaging Czechs. 

The story of the Nazis in Czechoslovakia is a complex story, riddled with nothing by treachery-lust on the part of the Nazis, and of course ending very badly for the Czechs, the Germans living out a series of aspects of the Big Lie until it was all over.  The British Legion chose to believe what they needed to believe in order to sustain their own nationalist beliefs. 

There were many who found Chamberlain simply wrong in his negotiation with Hitler and where he was guiding the country, not the least of whom was the Communist Party via J.R. Campbell, who expressed a general outrage in this pamphlet (published October 10, 1938), the cover telling the story: 

Notes:

1. These included volunteers and conscripts from Albania, 9000; Armenia, 2000; Belgium, 27,000; British Commonwealth,  never more than 100 in the British Free Corps; Bulgaria, 700;  Croatia, 20,000; Denmark: 8,000; Finland, 1,500; France, 9,000; Georgia, 2,000 to 3,000; Hungary: 40,000; India, 3,500; Italy, 15,000; Latvia: 60,000; Netherlands: 25,000; North Caucasus, 1,000 to 2,000; Norway, 6,000; Russian (& Belarusian): 15,000, Russian (Cossack) 20,000, Russian (Turcic),10,000; Romania, 6,000; Serbia, 8,000; Spain: 3,000 in Spanische-Freiwilligen-Kompanie der SS 101 and SS 102; Sweden, 300-500; Switzerland, 800; Ukraine: 20,000.

2. There's another example of this publisher described in this blog, here:   http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2011/01/blank-empty-things-series-the-militant-christian-patriots-hitler-and-saving-britain-from-itself-1938.html

Propaganda Maps: the Big Lie and the Surrounding Threat to Germany, 1927

JF Ptak Science Books  

These two displays come at different ends of the beginning of WWII and, in a way, couldn't be further away from themselves in the stories they were trying to tell(some truth, some fiction), and were separated in time by  11 years or so.   The first "Der eiserne Ring um Deutschland" ("The Iron Ring and Germany") shows Germany surrounded by imaginarily aggressive (and aggressively-portrayed) neighbors nine years after the end of WWI.  They both display subsets of the Big Lie superset described by Hitler in 1925 in Mein Kampf (actually, sort of better described by the German term Lügenfabrik, or “lie factory”, used by Goebbels in his descriptions of the British.  The “Big Lie” was basically a lie so big and so preposterous, so outrageous, so impossible, that no one would possibly utter something so insane and dubious, and so therefore the massive untruth is taken as true.) 

This representation depicts the threat posed to Germany-making an iron ring-by the potentially hostile French, Italians, Belgians, Czechs and  Poles.  It shows the ring composed of a combined army of 13.1 million men versus the standing army of Germany, which in 1928 was given as 100,000, and listing virtually no heavy weapons and no air force whatsoever.. (The interesting bit here is that neither the Soviet Union nor Great Britain is included in these aggressive forces, the Soviets less-so than the English.)   The designer goes so far as to shade in areas of Germany that were under immediate threat, extending from the Donau to the Rhine, to a 50-mile-wide area all around the country, with East Prussia almost entirely consumed.  (Certainly the Treaty of Versailles was a very troubling document closing the end of the war and, it cam be argued, opening the door for the next one.  It took six months to sign the peace treaty following the cessation of hostilities in November 1918, and the troubled negotiations produced a troubled treaty, ripping Germany up and saddling it with unrealistic retributions that began to wither in only four years, with the treaty virtually dissolved by 1935.)

It is no wonder when looking at propaganda such as this that Germany was immured with fear of national collapse at the hands of land-hungry neighbors, and that there was a huge need to re-instate the army and a system of "self protection".    (By 1936, only 8 years later, it was beyond question about what Germany was up to-I can say that after having at least breezed through every page of the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig)  from 1930-1940, that even a very casual reader could've tracked, graphically, the interest in military reporting and militarism in the page's of what would've been the German equivalent of LIFE magazine.  By 1935 there was so much glorification of weapons and the Nazi manifesto that it should've been a surprise to no one when the Germans moved into their neighboring countries.)  This was by no means the earliest depiction of this rampant sale of fear or fear mongering (a design which has existed for thousands of years and not at all a creation of the present republican administration), but it is a very big and bald one, a somewhat staggering one, a bright shining lie.  (A Bright Shining Lie by John Paul Vann is by the way a great book on American involvement in Vietnam.) 

The second image, a graph showing the successes of and very limited damage to the German Luftwaffe at the beginning stages of WWII, in August 1940.  This was a bad time for the Allies, this part of the war coined by Winston Churchill in 18 June 1940 in the House of Commons:  "The Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin". 

Hitler's Luftschlacht um England would start by air, where the Brits were far less the equal in military capacity, rather than by a land/sea assault, which would’ve tested the British at their strengths.  This second part of the assault on England was Unternehmen Seelöwe, or "Operation Sea Lion", which would've begun the land assault following the victorious air campaign. 
The graph shows aircraft losses from 9 July to 8 August, 1940, the German losses in black, and the British in gray.  As you can see, it was a pretty lopsided affair, made even more dramatic by the fictitious number of English planes being destroyed.

This would all change, of course, with the Germans losing this battle, in a big way, with a resulting decisive victory for the Brits. (Who would of course muscle their way through the war another seven months before the U.S. was attacked and entered the war.) . It would coming to a screeching and collapsing reverse for the Germans by May 1941.  The results of the battle, in terms of aircraft and humans, were,  for England: 1,023 fighters: 376 bombers, 148 coastal command aircraft  for a total of 1,547 aircraft and  544 pilots and aircrew killed.  There were also 27,450 civilians killed and 32,138 wounded.  The Germans lost 873 fighters and 1,014
bombers for a total of 1,887 aircraft and  2,500 pilots

I could find no graph of course showing the results of the endgame in the Zeitung.

A Work of High Beauty--an Architecture of Thought, 1944

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post 

I don't often have a chance to purchase manuscripts by significant scientists in their edited state, back from the journal to which they were being submitted.  This is the case with the material below, a paper written by Dr. Hans J. Reissner in 1944. It is a remarkable thing to look at, a precise and elegant archaeology of thinking, a sort of synesthesic display of thinking on different levels.  It is a beautiful thing:

[Hans J. Reissner (1874-1967) was a leading German pioneer in aeronautics and aeronautical engineering and mathematical physics. He was appointed to the chair vacated by Arnold Sommerfeld at the Technische Hochschul at Aachen, where he established the aerodynamics laboratory and designed the great experimental wind tunnel at Aachen where he was the second director (after T. von Karman). He went on to the University of Berlin where he remained until 1938, when he left Germany for the United States. Reissner held a chair at the Illinois Institute of Technology and in 1944 joined the faculty at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute.  Van Karman spoke very highly of Reissner and attributed his work in aerodynamics to be as important as those advances made by Prandtl (see von Karman’s Wind and Beyond). Reissner was also celebrated with two anniversary volumes of Applied MAthematiics for his 60th and 75th birthdays (in 1934 and 1949).]

TV's Quest for Illuminated Poetry and a Dirac Non-Equation, 1946

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2024

‘I don’t see how you can work on physics and write poetry at the same time. In science, you want to say something nobody knew before, in words everyone can understand. In poetry, you are bound to say something that everybody knows already, in words that nobody can understand.’--Paul Dirac (1902-1984, Nobel Prize in Physics for 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger, "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory"), quoted in The Book of Universes by John Barrow.

The opening sentence of this pamphlet breathes a lead: "The story of Television, as well as the smashing of the atom, must be explained in a non-technical manner, now that World War II has ended, so that the public may know the facts..."

I think that I would have preferred this quote to end a little sooner than it does--that way it might have been a little more poetical, a little on the absurd side:

the story of Television as well

asd smashing the atom

must be explained

in a non-technical manner,

now that World War II has ended.

This short pamphlet was produced in 1946, and at the time it was still possible to believe in the great possible poetry that the new medium could produce.  And it certainly did produce something, even in these early days, though I do not think it was poetry.  It did deliver some measure of truth and accountability, though.  It is difficult to imagine seeing the image of one of the earliest post-war atomic tests delivered to the DuMont Teleset in your living room.  I imagine that the societal reaction to seeing these events broadcast may have been like when photography was brought to bear in the news reporting business.  Harper's Weekly started to run woodcuts of Civil War battles with the imprimatur "from a photograph" rather than something like "drawn at the scene by our correspondent", readers were immeasurably more responsive to the drawing after a photography because of the undeniable archivitization that goes on when a photograph is made, as the memory of a photograph is for the most part unimpeachable.  This delivered an instantaneous increase in the belief in the reporting.

It seems as though seeing events such as an atomic explosion from a cozy home encapsulation may have had the same effect. It was a democratization of truth in a way (the title being People's Television) similar to that which you could experience seeing newsreels in the movie houses--there, everyone paid the same fee, sat where they wanted (for white people, anyway), and were exposed to the same images at the same time. 

Its character leaned and leaped further away from reality and truth with each passing moment, finally reaching a point in the early part of national broadcasting where reality and entertainment and commercials all blended into one socio-molding opinion-grinding unit.

The dreammaking units responsible for creating the bigness of artificial life were quite modest in 1946, as we can see in the pamphlet's  wonderful plan of a television studio:

 

With the description:

The next seven years would toss this pamphlet into the Obsoleteinator; 13 years more would make it seem as though this pamphlet never needed to exist.  The poetry part certainly seems to have disappeared somewhere in these years--not completely and entirely to make poetry in television extinct, but certainly enough to make it an endangered sub-species. 

'Imaginary universes are so much more beautiful than the stupidly constructed 'real' one'--G.H. Hardy

Selling U.S. Airpower with Hermann Goering

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I know it makes a certain amount of sense to try and sell an idea by using the words of your defeated enemy and how they were defeated by the very thing you're trying to "sell".  But, still: at the bottom of the list (The American Legion Program on Adequate Air Power for National Security, 1947) of pictures and opinions of Truman, Eisenhower, Nimitz, Bush, Arnold, and MacArthur, comes Goering.  The soft, badly-placed, I-helped-to-kill-my-air-force Hermann Goering.  It just doesn't look right--particularly since this is the portrait of him as a skinny Goering, the Goering waiting to be executed, the Goering who lost all of that weight at Nuremberg while on trial before he swallowed a pill and killed himself.  On the other side, in the opposite column, is Roosevelt, Patterson, Spaatz, Wainwright, Hansaker, and Wright--president, secretary of state, commander-in-chief of the USAAF, commander of U.S. forces at Corrigador, chairman of NACA--and then Field Marshall (Generalfeldmarschalls) Albert Kesselring. Kesselring was a major leader, was highly respected, and very successful,  and also sentenced to death at Nuremberg for war crimes (though his sentence was commuted which found him relseased in 1952). 

This was a good and necessary argument--using Goering and Kesselring, well, was not such a good idea, or at least using their portraits in a line of American heroes to make the point was not a good move.

A History of Antiquarian Water: Line Segments

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2022

Images of rivers and oceans in 16th century maps can be beautifully-rendered objects.  Water can appear as lines thick and languid, curling and wavy, sparse, tentative, adventurous, willing, dashed, timid.  Cold. Mostly cold, and full of loneliness and foreboding.  And sometimes the sea is just a blank--it is more common to see blank skies in engravings and woodcuts before, say, the 1540's, but the blankness is usually covered by rhumb lines and compass roses and lines of longitude and latitude, compared to the blankness of blank skies, where there is usually nothing to spare us from the blank.

Today I'd like to have a look at the strong and long lines delineating activity in water as the first part of a short series of posts looking at the design of the representation of water by lines.  Then, when the lines are done, we'll take a look at dots. 

This example occurs in Masuccio Salernitano's (Tommaso Guadati, fl. c. 1476) Novellino, published in Venice by Bartholomeo Zanni in 1510, a tall book of a Decameron-ish flavor, with 50 stories told in five sections, mostly of a waning erotic nature.  The lines here are long and very languid. I also like the face in the window. 

This complex of lines illustrates the map of Africa found in Montalboddo Fracan's Itinerarium Portugallensium, which was about the earliest published collection of Spanish and Portugese travel and exploration relating to the New World.  The work was exceptional and very significant--and very popular, going through fifteen editions in 22 years to 1528. 

Titus Livius (59 BCE-17 ACE), better known to the English-speaking world as Livy, was a superior among superiors of Roman historians, writing on the history of his city and country.  His work, Romische Historie…,published in Mainz by Johann Schoeffler 1450 years later in 1514, was one of the most beautifully illustrated books ever produced in that city. This is a considerable statement, as Mainz was the birthplace/hotbed of moveable type printing, being home to Johann Gutenberg and a number of other early presses. 

One of the most famous printed water scenes is from the (numerous) editions of Christopher Columbus' letter describing his voyage to the New World. It was written (or at least finished)  soon after his arrival in Lisbon 4 May 1493, almost exactly 520 years ago, and quickly found its way into print. This image (depicting Hispaniola and Isabella) was printed in Basel in 1494, and served to illustrate the somewhat hopeful and inflated description of what he found on his new voyage.

[Source: Wiki, here.]

This image from the mid-16th century is found in the fantastic work on the history of Scandanavia (and etc.) in Olaus Magnus' Histotria di gentibus septentrionale ("History of the Northern Peoples", 1555).

[Image source: http://www.avrosys.nu/prints/index.htm]

The seas in the map of the Western Hemisphere in Joannes de Stobnicza's Introductio in Ptholemei Cosmographium (Cracow, 1512, and widely believed to be copied or at least very heavily inspired by the Martin Waldseemueller's 1507 map of the world) are very tightly drawn, neatly unifrom, and lovely, as wesee below).  This recitation could go on for quite some time, but this gets the point across on heavy lines.  Next stop: dots. 

The Only Photograph of Einstein's Derivation of the Mass-Energy Equivalence?

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

[The equation in question is at bottom-left; full explanation here.]

I came across an article while researching a work by H.P. Robertson--Lectures on Relativity (Princeton 1935)--and it is much more interesting than what I was actually looking for.  It seems that in the history of Einstein working his famous E = mc² on blackboards around the world that there are no surviving pictures of the man and the chalk and the equation. 

In their article "Einstein's 1934 Two-Blackboard Derivation of Energy-Mass Equivalence" (found in the American Journal of Physics, 75 (11), November 2007, pp 978-983) David Topper and Dwight Vincent of the University of Winnipeg sort it out and reproduce a not-sharp (but essential!) halftone newspaper file photo clipping showing Einstein doing just this, using two blackboards for the derivation of the equivalence of mass and energy during a public lecture in Pittsburgh in 1934. 

In their short excellent article they do a fine job of discussing the history of these sorts of images as well as provide a nice description of what's ont he blackboard.  I urge a reading of the full article found here. 

Biblio-Morality on One Piece of Paper, 1688

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post   Books with Unusual Title Pages series

The allegorical frontispiece of Gulielmus Saldenus' De libris variorum usu & abuso, (printed in Amsterdam in 1688) is a good outline for what this (little) book is contains--about being good and being bad--and extending that to the treatment of books.  The main image is of a bookseller and a customer; through the windows we see the pious headed to chapel, on left; and at right, a good-sized book-burning, which is a fairly rare thing to see on a decorated beginning-of-a-book illustration.  The allegory is fairly complete, and seems as though it could not be less not-subtle than it is.

[Source:  Bibliopolis website, for the history of the printing of the Dutch book, here.]

Heavy Stuff in Elegant White-on-Black Lines

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Henry Jullien produced a beautiful work with schematics of printing machinery rendered in white-on-black, though I'm reasonably certain that the images were printed in black. The work was a catalog for the leading Belgian firm of printing presses and bookbinding apparatus.  The design is simple and very elegant and reminds me of some of the kinetic and non-represntational artwork that would come a few decades later.  (Heny Julien, Construction de Machines Typographiques, Lithographiques et Chromo-typographiques et Chromo-Lithographiques, 1881)

The Agony and Beauty of Bad & Incredible Title Pages

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2022  Books with Unusual Title Pages series

 

Simply put, this is easily a first-percentile title and title-page design, the work of a man who set out to discover the world for/by himself and wound up taking a very long inner journey of Some Outsider-y Influence, and then felt the need to share it:

That is a lot of unnecessary information to share, particularly on the cover of your book.

This is a very good example of the combination of two main threads of odd title pages that have been slowly accumulating in a series of posts on this blog (a good example of which can be seen in the post "Little Bizarredness:  Bland Hyper-oddness in Published Works",  here) about books with "simply difficult" title pages: (a) those that are swift and contra-subtle, wispy cloudy bits that lack a cohesion and make them a little impenetrable, and (b) those that are bold and straightforward and mostly nonsensical. Here we have a composite, the elusive "(c)" category, which is a combination of a+b (where a+b=a+b, only)--both light and dense, simple and complex, all adding up to a little bit of bold almost-nothing.

When we open the pamphlet we see that Capt. Miles tries again with the title page of the book, changing the title on the cover but with high accomplishment is able to retain the overall largesse of mystery about what the book is about:

Evidently Capt. Miles did make a grand expedition, and he was away for a long time, and he did build himself an absolutely beautiful boat--and brought back with him the idea of some sort of international straight- and not bent-thinking ferocious logical thinking political party. His was the Peoples Party (I'm not so sure why he chose this name when it was taken by several other groups already), the "patriot's preportional [sic] part of the New International Party" ("a recorded reality"), that "with non-secret straight  thinking New Independent International Political Party the Third Party within All Nations will collectively end all empires" and so on.  He also referred to his political party by yet another name:  "Miles International Practical Brotherhood". Its hard to take the "practical" part of this seriously, especially when Miles' own political party gets referred to by so many different names.

Cap't. Miles excuses himself right at the beginning for his grammatical and spelling errors, which is a good thing because there are so very many of them, as he "had little of the artifica [sic] education (schooling)".  He does recount his voyage but it is riddled with internal Socratic monologues that lead the reader to question many things, not the least of which is the simplest of questions:  "why?"

In any event Cap't Miles does drag teh reader through 175 pages of poorly written and badly spelled oddnessment.  His outre design capacity and presentation though makes this a fine example of outsider thinking. 

Deep in the book Miles takes a deep breath and dips into the snipe-like "(d)" category, which is a very rare occurrence of reproducing the title page of a book deep within the text and not getting the title correct, which is a peculiarly beautiful agony:

Evidently there is no distinction between the 'first" page and the 'front" page, both of which are different, anyway.

There are also bits like this half-page announcement laced throughout the book, looking like salty sprinkles in a foamy Guinness:

And just when you think that you're through the book and its brilliant cloudiness you find this:

It is all really quite breathtaking, in a way. 

The book--whatever its title--was written and published by Capt. Edward Miles and issued in 1942 as a first edition "Series A"--no doubt this was supposed to be the first of many such installments.  I'm trying not to imagine the disappointment that Miles must've felt when there was no need for more.  I guess he could've blamed it on the war...

My copy is the copyright deposit copy, no doubt sent by Miles as part of the process to secure a copyright for his work in the United States.  I can find only one library in the world (via the OCLC)  with a copy of this book--the hometown Newbury, in Chicago--the record for which states that their copy was "number 105 of the first edition". Perhaps Miles numbered the pamphlets as they went out, and perhaps the numbering was truthful. In any event, this is not the solo-lonely outcome of big and lonesome high-seas thinking, and at least one other copy exists 515 miles from here.

I think this is one of those works that is best appreciated at a distance, and that a reading of it would only ruin things by the accumulation of painful and what looks like embarrassing detail. Looking at the large font aspect of the book is good enough to allow this work to be treated as a kind of artwork which would only be obscured by weed-prone narrative. 

Bottom line:  the man did build a beautiful boat.

Ice Hooves and Blank People, 1555

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post   Blank, Empty and Missing Things series

 

This image may be unusual to the modern eye but not so for Nordic vision in the mid-16th century.  The appeal comes in the detail, which at least in a crafty title description seems a little odd, even though I have no doubt that it was all very sensible to the people of the time.

The scene is from Olaus Magnus (Swedish historian and geographer, born. at Skeninge, Sweden, 1490; and died at Rome, 1558) who wrote the legendary and Renaissance-high-point Historia delle genti et della natura delle cose setentrionale¹… in 1555.   Among many dozens of generally fabulous images we find this horse race on ice--naturally, in order for this to happen, the horses need to be specially outfitted with crampons, which is a good thing to do if you absolutely have to take your horse out on an iced-over river.  Still, it just seems entirely anithetical to riding a horse.

The first image is one in a developing series on this blog concentrating on blank and empty things--in this case, the detail of faces in the small crowd in the background is the issue.  It is interesting to note that the group holds on to one another to form a line for stability while moving across the ice without any special footgear--the leader however is more prepared, and pushes along the ice with a staff while wearing bone skates. 

Notes

1.  The full and rather lengthy title of Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus... is translated as  "Olaus Magnus Gothus', the Upsala Archbishops', history of the nordic people's different manners and camps, also about the wonderful differences in customs, holy practices, superstitions, bodily exercises, government and food keeping; further on war, buildings and wonderful aids; further on metals and different kinds of animals, that live in these neighbourhoods ".

Visionary Map: the Earth Without Water, 1694

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2020 

Part of the series on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things

I stumbled upon this fantastic leap into science affliction, an attempt to display the absolutely enormous idea of draining the Earth of all water revealing its ultimately rocky structure.  And this in the relatively young modern cartographic days of 1694. 

This map ("Den Aardkloot van water ontbloot, na twee zijden aante sien", published in Amsterdam in 1694 by Wilhelm and Jan Goeree in a Dutch edition of the expansive and imaginatively suggestive cosmo-theo-geographical work, Telluris Thoeoria Sacra) reveals the half-believed idea of California being an island was we can clearly see the enormous canyon separating it from the North American mainland. On the other hand, the "opposite" (in a way) belief takes place in the north, showing a large and towering land mass at the North Pole.

All-in-all, given the state of geographical knowledge for the unseen stuff of the Earth, this was an excellent attempt to reveal the structure of the globe.  Sure, the depths of the oceans are a little off, the idea and the attempt to depict it was an extraordinarily interesting display for the time, especially with limited hard data.  This is even a more-remarkable series of observations considering the theoretical framework in which all of this was taking place. 

Burnet (1635-1715) poured out his pounding heart into the pages of his sacred history, teaching people about the structure and history of the  Earth with generally little or unsuccessful regard to science--but no matter.  (Burnet did try to figure out where all of the water came for the flood, which is  a great question.  It is impossible for it to come from a natural rain of any sort, and Burnet probably came to the conclusion this the answer for the flood couldn't come from the surface of the Earth.  So to keep things in compliance with his faith, Burnet established that the water necessary for the flood came not from the surface of the sphere, but below it, in the hollow Earth which was actually filled with water.) This was a work of structured faith and a belief  system, and wasn't seen as much more than that except to the initiated. But a resulting map of the structure of a waterless Earth seems to me a more powerful piece of imaging than an Earth simply covered by water. 

[Black and white image source  Barry Lawrence Ruderman Rare Maps, here.; color version from Oldmaps.com, here]

The Electronic Beds of Electronic Dreams, 1945

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2019   (expanding an earlier post)

  I am very attracted to the innocence and softly bizarre category of my store’s Outsider Logic Collection, like this little pamphlet that was published in  New York in 1944.   The pamphlets in this category are odd but still understandable, and the "what the ____!" response to the subtle ones isn't quite so high and the exclamation points not so many as in the cases of the Outsider Logic titles.  Bizarre is different from that, certainly not hiding behind any lesser or ambiguous title--it stretches the category a bit as it is intended to be a parody of the more-popular magazines and their advertising sponsors, but it is really quite a bit different from a simple humous and pun-laden trip into dead-end future visions.  It was copyright by the very far-reaching Hugo Gernsback, who in 1926 started the first magazine dedicated to the genre of science fiction (Amazing Stories) and for whom the World Science Fiction Society’s annual award for Science Fiction Achievement is named (the “Hugo”).  Gernsback evidently had a taste for cheeky parody, producing similar magazines to this called Quip, Forecast, Jolliers, Tame and Newspeep--it seems though that Bizarre may have ultimately morphed into Forecast.

I guess that this was deeply weird for mass-production publication, and it was probably funny--now it is just weird, odd, and somewhat discomforting--a successful and intentional reach for being part of the Uninentional Outsider right from the start.

Most of the magazine is dedicated to imaginary electronic delights--analog electronics (though it is still fairly early to be having such dreams and using the word "electronics", as it was just barely two decades old at this point).  One of the oddest of these inventions of the near future was the Electronic Odoranalyzer, which was necessary for reasons I couldn't discern. (I'd like to assume that odors are calculated and calibrated and a scent is chosen specifically for them, or it.)  

The advertising was unusual as well:  there were hats you could potnetially purchase of weeping willow Platina fox tails; some hats had tanks (as with the Le Chapeau Tank hat, modeled for the magazine and "worn pugnaciously at a slant"), and other hats had simple canons (as with the French Mitrailsuese).  While wearing your tank hat you could also theoretically relax to your favorite tunes in style with a $125,000 radio--it was made for war profiteers who couldn't find banks enough to hold their cash and was billed as too expensive to steal.

Then there's the EBC--the Electronic Bed Company--with their magnificent new product, an invention "by the great sage of Hackensack" so spectacular  as to make ordinary sleeping obsolete.  The bed was an air-conditioned, self-washing, self-adjusting, self covering, fiberglass-cushioned, telephone-capable, air pillowed, air conditioned masterpiece that looked like it was about ready for anything but sleep, which I guess would make it revolutionary.

Books-Times-Eight Found-Art, South Carolina, 1836

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This Found-Design on the cover of the Catalogue of the Library of the South Carolina College--a pamphlet printed in Colunbia in 1836--presents us with a scratchy biblio-lovliness, and a little bit of smokey mystery. Why did someone scrawl "Books" eight times on the cover of this work, I wonder.  (8⁸  certainly was a number greater than all of the books in libraries or anywhere else in North America at the time, though I am sure that this calcualtion has nothing to do at all with the scirbble.)  I just don't know--the annotations are just so inscrutable. Books books books books times two, writ on the cover of the skinny library catalog of the school founded in 1801 that would become the Universtiy of South Carolina. 

The full image, via the new Digital Library of America, here.

There are 108 pages of entries for books, making roughly 5,000 titles.  Books classified as "history" take pages 1-59, "philosophy" 61-96, and "poetry" 99-109. Given that this is supposed to be a history of science blog connected to my phys/maths bookshop, I looked for "math" and found it among other contenders in the second division, "philosophy". It is categorized such along with the book entries for ethics, metaphysics, general theology, philology, criticism, rhetoric, orations, epistles, government, politics and medicine.  Math here is "Math, Pure and Mixed" and "Math Mixed, Tactics", and occupies the largest section of the philosophy section--unless of course you add together al o fthe variations of "theology", and then the maths come in second. 

Just for the record, according to the American Almanac, the South Carolina College library holdings are right at the average of 57 American colleges libraries on which they reported.  They indicate 10,000 volumes for South Carolina, one of the 57 colleges totalling 580,000 volumes, or about a 10k average per library. (Just for the record, Harvard had about the biggest collection at 50k, followed by the Boston Athanaeum at 30k and Yale at 25.5; there was also Georgetown (12k), Library of Congress (24k), University of Georgia (7.5k), University of Kentucky (4.4k), Bowdoin (12k), LSU (10k), Dartmouth (14.5k), Princeton (7.5k), Cooper Union (14k), UNC (4.8k), Dickinson (8.5k), Brown (11k), and the University of Virginia (10k) to name a few.)

[Source:  Public libraries in the United States of America; their history, condition, and management. Special report, Department of the Interior, Bureau of  Education. Part I, (1876), Chapter XXXVII. Library reports and statistics,   pp. 745-836, this section pages 760-772; with thanks to TLBKlaus for finding this reference.]

The book categorizations make for an interesting read.

"Hog Bond", a Found-Poem in a 1960 FBI Deposition

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  

The very first thing I saw on the new Digital Public Library of America website (here) was a randomly-selected timeline--I selected 1960 and then clicked on the first thing I saw. It was a deposition of a Mr. Johnny Bryant of Savannah, Georgia, on a case involving hogs in some way, and made on 23 May 1960. It is a single-page typed document made to the F.B.I., and it has a certain Surreal style to it wrapped around a problematic content.  The following is the document after running it through our Poem-O-tizer--it is the entire text with different spacing.  It makes its own case as, well, something. 

Hog Bond

I

First, it was this man
come down to see me

about some hogs was
running out,

so he told me to come and
go to the Court House with him to see Judge Harbison.

So I got in my car and
drove ahead and so he drove to the Court House

 

II.

When I got to the Court
House Yard,

I saw two policemen in the
yard, so I ask him

where is Mr. Harbison,

so he said

never mind that.

You are going to jail.

So I went to jail.

I said OK.

I will go to jail.

So I went to jail. 

Monday morning, Benjamin
Warner got me out on a $200 bond.

That Tuesday I came back
to see the judge about getting

a warrant

for the hogs,

so he said he couldn't do it,

so I told him if he couldn't do it I wouldn't own the hogs.