JF Ptak Science Books // Blog Bookstore

On Not Being Able to See Martians (Because We Can't See Them) (1944)

Donald Lee Cyr. Life on Mars, printed by the Desert Magazine Press of El Centro, California, and I believe self-published by the author.  7x5", 50pp. occasionally illustrated with drawings and maps. Original print wrappers, perfect bound. Provenance: Library of Congress, no doubt the recipient of their copy from the author. Condition: there is a 6mm "LC" perforated stamp on the title page, as well as a LC "surplus/duplicate" rubber stamp on the front cover.  But for these marks a Very Good copy. Surprisingly there are only four copies located in WorldCat/OCLC. $75

Mr. Cyr made some very wide and radical remarks and observations in this pamphlet on life on Mars, which he is convinced exists, and on an advanced level. The problem is that we can only see the results of the civilization, and not the society itself. The Martians, I read (quickly) can't be seen because they can't be seen ("like atoms"), "only the collective efforts of Martians are visible".  The canals (which run 1000' deep and cross the planet) also cannot be seen but not because they are so small as to be invisible, but rather it is due to the vegetation growing on their walls that obscure the structures themselves. The canals are also filled with water, or they are canyonlands, with animals using them as a highway. In another found paragraph we are told that "two or more craters near each other have an economic effect on Martian inhabitants".  And in my last bit of random reading, I saw that the canal networks of Ascraeus Lucas are more than likely built upon earlier trails, and that "the only comparable highway network on earth [sic] is that radiating outwards from Indianapolis". 

It seems that Mr. Cyr was an observer of Mars, and then went well beyond the observable to make his deeper observations.  

He liked this work enough to expand it in 1959.

 

America Has No Enemies in Asia (1938)!

JF Ptak Science Books  

Ralph Townsend provided one of the oddest, least-time-conscious, and pernicious titles (printed in 1938!) in my experience with pulpy propagandistic quick-publications of the 1930's.  Townsend (1900-1976) was a Columbia School of Journalism product, but something happened, and emerged in the 1930's as a deep Sinophobe, an anti-Roosevelt anti-interventionist far-right apologist for the imperialism of the Japanese government.  

• Townsend, Ralph. America Has No Enemies in Asia. Evidently self-published by the author in San Francsico in 1938. 48pp. Photo illustrated. Original wrappers.  Very good copy.  $95

[BROADSIDE]  Grave Folly of Pro-Czech Policy...  published by the Militant Christian Patriots, September 1938.  Rare.  From the Pamphlet Collection of the Library of Congress.  10x8 inches.  Old vertical fold.  Very good copy.  $175

Here's a slathering piece of propaganda published by the Militant Christian Patriots (of London) on how the British government was dealing with the Nazi/Seudeten problem in September 1938.  In their gunsights was Anthony Eden, who was seen by this group as a Bolshevist supporter, and who as the Foreign Minister of the United Kingdom under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was against the appeasement policy of the government towards Nazi territorial acquisitions, particularly in this case with Czechoslovakia.  Eden. identified here as "backed by the Zionists, Fabian_Scoailists and "pacifist" League of Nations enthusiasts" was a multiple threat, and seen to be capable of directing national policy towards a confrontation with Germany over the looming Czech problem.

On the other hand, Neville Chamberlain, who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at this time (and from May 1938-May 1940), was seen as a better ideological fit with his issues and policies of appeasement of the German nationalist needs and territorial rape. Chamberlain certainly gave what Christian Militants wanted--a free hand to Hitler in Czechoslovakia (and more), and perhaps an acknowledgement of defeat to the Nazi nation.  Winston Churchill certainly thought so:

"We have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat... you will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi régime. We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude...we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road...we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged..."  Winston Churchill, MP, 1938

The Christian Militants saw it all differently, tending to agree with Hitler on the Czech matter, and seeking to keep the U.K. out of confrontation and thus away from war by giving Hitler (and then Mussolini) what they demanded to satisfy their growing national needs. 

"I am asking neither that Germany be allowed to oppress three and a half million Frenchmen, nor am I asking that three and a half million Englishmen be placed at our mercy. Rather I am simply demanding that the oppression of three and a half million Germans in Czechoslovakia cease and that the inalienable right to self-determination take its place." -Adolf Hitler's speech at the NSDAP Congress 1938

Eden resigned his position earlier in the year, in March 1938, but stayed in the fray.  As everyone knows things went badly at the end of the month of September, 1938, with Chamberlain letting everything go and appeasing Hitler in the Munich Conference (known to the Czechs as the "Munich Dictates" and worse) in which bits of Czechoslovakia were given to Germany in a series of meetings in which that country was not invited.

And so the P.M. returned to the home country having done nothing in Germany but give away a part of someone else's country, all in a feeble attempt at maintaining peace for Europe's key players.  He landed at Heston Aerodrome and held a piece of flimsy paper in his hand, which was battered by a tiny wind, and declared that there would be "peace in our time" because Hitler's signature said it would be so, all of which was a "prelude to peace" in Europe as a whole:

"My good friends, this is the second time there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Now I recommend you go home, and sleep quietly in your beds."

Less than a year later it would all come crashing down, the appeasement policy (such as it was) a shambles, and the world plunged into war.  Chamberlain would last as P.M. for a little longer, until May 1940, when he was at last replaced--by Winston Churchill. 

A Vision of the Future: Filling Up Manhattan, 1887

ITEM: original woodcut print from Harper's Weekly, 28 May 1887.  Fragment, 11x10 inches.  Fair condition.  $75.00, in mat. 

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Qick Post

This peep into a possible future appeared in Harper's Weekly on 18 May 1887.  It is the work of artist W.A. Rogers and depicts a filling-up lower Manhattan, complete with broad avenues lined by elevated trains whose reach evidently knows no bounds. The new elevated subway winds its way across the harbor to Liberty Island, where it wraps itself around the feet and up the body of the newly--dedicated Statue of Liberty (opened in October of the previous year).  In the foreground is the cupola of a transit station with a fluttering flag advertising "Coney Island via Broadway"--I'm not sure what this is all about, as the placement of the island has nothing to do with anything except making a point in the cartoon.  (The original is offered at our blog bookstore.)

A very full interpretation of this image may be found at HarpWeek, here. 

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)

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.  SOLD

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….

Floating Transoceanic Airports Network, 1930's

ITEM: Application of Seadrome Ocean Dock Corporation (a private corporation) for a Loan Under the Provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act, printed ca. 1933.  11x8 inches, 34pp.  WIth two original photographs one of the floating airports, and a map.  This copy come from the White House Library, posted 1933. Printed wrappers.  Very nice copy.  $500

This short shelf-lived idea was that of Edward R. Armstrong (1880-1955), who in 1927  first published his plan for a series of ocean-moored 1200’x200’ floating platforms standing 100' above the waves for refueling and whatnot for transcontinental flights.  These five-acre stations—named the “Langley” in honor of Samuel Pierpont Langley¹-- would be placed every 375 miles across the ocean.  Or perhaps there would be just five of these floating emplacements--the data changes. It doesn’t look like a very practical (or good) idea, but Armstrong received a $750,000 piece of development change from du Pont and GM, which was major dollars in 1929. 

 

Armstrong’s idea would get major play in the popular press from time-to-time, his project renamed “The Seadrome” and discussed as a series of floating islands.  Armstrong himself would organize the Seadrome Ocean Dock Corp. in the late 1930’s, his pretty but enormously impractical idea (reported by Time Magazine² in 1933 as little more than “a perennial gift to Sunday feature editors”)  finally grinding to a salty end with greater fuel capacity and efficiency in transatlantic aircraft. 

An even worse idea appeared in the pages of Science and Mechanics in 1936:

 
Notes:

1. A Time Magazine article published 28 October 1929 [a day before the market crashed!] about the Langley oddly states that Langley was the “designer of the plane which, except for accidents, might have flown before the Wrights' plane did in 1903”.  Tough potatoes. What the magazine didn’t state was that Langley, who was the president of the Smithsonian Institution at the time with access to major money and benefactors simply went about the flight problem incorrectly, and produced an airplane (or “aerodrome”, as he called it) that did not and would not fly. Not flying because of accidents means, well, not flying.  The Wrights’ approach to problem solving was elegant and beat Langley by miles.  Langley deserves credit for his other (many) achievements, but not for this aircraft.

 

This same article only references Armstrong as a “swarthy engineer" (the article is reprinted below).

 

The following document, Application of Seadrome Ocean Dock Corporation (a private corporation) for a Loan Under the Provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act (ca. 1933) asks the federal government for a loan of $30 million (depression) dollars to undertake the construction of the five  floating airport transoceanic network.  "It will require the work of approximately 10,000 men per month for a period of twenty-four to thirty months".  The labor figures did not nclude that necessary to produce all of the material necessary for the project ( for reasons unknown).  The palnes would have been to make it across the ocean in 18 to 36 hours.  

 

The members of the Seadrome Corporation estimated that the entire 30 million would be paid back by 1945,  and that the corporation would be completely debt-free.  Perhaps all of  this made sense when Armstrong first developed the plan in 1913; but even by 1933 it was becoming quite obvious that non-stop transoceanic flight was coming, and coming soon.  That would of course make an investment in the Seadrome project superfluous, like building an antique, though an unnecessary one. The first transatlantic non-stop flight was made by John Alcock and Arthur W. Brown in 1919--by the early 1950's jet aircraft would be making the trip with regularity, which means that  for most of the life of the completed Seadrome it would have been unnecessary.  I feel certain that the Seadrome--which was supposed to be paid off by 1945, though in 1933 there was no inkling on the part of the Corporation members who wrote the request for hte money that a war was looming and that there would have been almost no way for them to have been made at any time betweem 1939 and 1945--would never have been paid for. 

 

SuperBad Ideas: Superhighway Through the Center of Washington D.C., ca. 1925

ITEM: Map--Six Way Motorway. 20x13 inches.  Tri-fold map.  Printed ca. 1925.  Origin unknown. Very good condition. $125

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1346    

"A Paved United States in Our Day"

If the planners of this highway had a crystal ball to see deep into the future--say, 1955--they would have been horrified to see the errors in their ways.  The equivalent of this plan might be something like picking up the Beltway, straightening it out, and running it  through D.C. along 16th street, with massive flyovers for the White House and other associated et ceteras.  This idea was published in an odd source, published by the Pennsylvania Railway Company/Lee Highway Association/National Highway Association auspices and the Hudson River Bridge and Terminal Association in about 1925, or thereabouts, just prior to the construction of the George Washington Bridge in NYC.  

 

The plan was for a six lane ("six-way") motorway from New  York to Washington, starting with the Lee Highway (or King's Highway, Route 1, one of the south's oldest roads, and part of what was supposed to be a national autotrail connecting New York with San Francisco) and taking that highway across the proposed Arlington Bridge (called Lincoln-Lee here, without irony), up New York Avenue to the ellipse, rounding the White House, going down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, and then out again to Baltimore and NYC.  Another version called for the highway to go across Key Bridge, dumping everything in Georgetown, hooking right on M Street to Pennsylvania and on out again.  Having lived in D.C.(with my store in Georgetown) for 29 years, I can say without fear of ____  that this would ave been a massively bad idea then and in every decade since then, and probably would have been removed by 1960 just to recognize and correct the sheer, overwhelming badness of its conception.

 The Memorial Bridge wound up being pretty close to this design--lacking the statuary, especially--and is quite a beautiful thing, especially when the designs for its rivals were considered.  The bridges in DC are almost all lovely, or at least those built before 1950. 

 

 

 

Fantastic Contrivances of Massive and Unneeded Difficulty--Bikes in War, 1897

ITEM:  cover from Scientific American Supplement, June 26, 1897.  14x10 inches.  $125.00

ref: JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1345

  

When I see images like this, I can feel a symphony of bad ideas rattling  my bones.

Of contrivances great and unnecessary,  that of bringing the bicycle into the field of war--banking on a fabulous interest in the machine and riding a wave of enthusiasms enjoyed by millions--is among the loftiest of lofty unnecessaries of the past 150 years or so. When these pictures were published in 1897 interest in the bicycle was shattering; it was a popular conveyance, and then in just two or three years, an explosion:  millions of people suddenly needed one.  Bikes seemed to be everywhere,  which forced people to imagine new and different uses for the machine.  And so the Austrian army came up with a plan to include the bike in its plans of war, and it proved to be as about as useful as a double-decker horse.  And just like that--poof--the fragility of the bike's expansive uses fell right off the table, along with the popular interest in it, which by the turn of the century saw the millions who had turned towards the bike turn away. 

It is difficult to image a more unpleasant (real) use for the bike than this.  The pictures seem as though they are part of a Monty Python montage, but they were indeed deadly serious--though I do need to credit someone, anyone, who came up with the idea of a folding bike to make it slightly more transportable.  (Overall though it seems almost as useful as a folding tuba.  Or sousaphone.)  If employed I think the idea would've proved to be more deadly to the biker than whomever the biker was attacking.  Or, more likely, fleeing.

One can only shudder and what it must've been like, sitting on top of that fence, handing bikes (with lights and horns) from one side to the other, bullets flying, attempting an attack with 75 pounds of cumbersome trouble slapped to your side.  It must have felt insane.

   

I think these men would have heard the music too as they slogged their ways through brush and trees and muck and the like, sliding their bikes along that log to keep them dry while the men stood in the wet. They would've heard the music too, a short little symphony played on folded instruments, which sounded as bad as it looked.

The Big Lie Department: Japan and its Version of Chinese "Aggression", 1937

ITEM:  What is the fighting about?  Common Questions on the Far East Answered by Facts, not Generalities.  The California Committee of Pacific Friendship, San Francisco, 1937.  20pp.  Very good condition.  $75.00

Ref: JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1319

This little  pamphlet is a great example of The Big Lie--propaganda so vast and so vicious and so far from the truth that people tend to believe it because, well, because no one would or could tell lies so Gargantuan and Pantagruelian and expect to get away with it. They were statements so spectacular and seemingly untrue that their very reverse weight gave them weight enough to necessitate "truth".  Mostly on this blog the Big Lies I've dealt with came out of Germany--these had to do with the International Jewish Conspiracy, the plot of Poland to attack Germany, the resettlement that was going to be provided for French workers who came to the Nazi's side to do technical work for the Wehrmacht, and so on. 

In this case it is Japan's turn at The Big Lie to make its case to justify its already long and very bloody attack and occupation of China.  In short, what the publishers--the California Committee of Pacific Friendship (located at 1407 Laguna Street in San Francisco, the site of which today is ironically occupied by the Chinese Consulate)--tell their American audience is: that the Japanese are not aggressive; that China was planning to attack Japan to help unify their own country; that Japan needed to occupy Manchuria to protect Japanese citizens; that at the same time Japan was invited into China and was not going to leave because no one else does; and that is it is in the best interest of the U.S. to continue its valuable trade with Japan in order to protect the  poor people who pick cotton that goes into essential American-Japanese trade.  Virtually everything in this report is nothing.   Thats what makes it a Big Lie. [This pamphlet is available at our blog bookstore.]

Part of the issue of invading China' was to prevent Chinese aggression towards Japanese citizens, which was “a politically attractive campaign” and a cause of :China’s backwardness”. 

There is no mention of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in September 1931 following the Mukden Incident, an earlier version of a Gulf of Tonkin incident, a manufactured bit of terrorism by the Japanese military perpetuated against itself to give the Empire a reason to attack China. .  Manchuria was subdued by 1932 and  renamed Manchuko, and then used by the Japanese for its fantastic assembly of raw materials.

In the same vein it was alleged in this pamphlet that it was China which bombed itself at Shanghai (Songhu), not the Japanese, starting what would be months of fighting in one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the 1937-1945 war.  It doesn’t make much sense for this top be the case, as the  National Revolutionary Army of the  Republic of China was vastly over matched by the  Imperial Japanese Army of the Empire of Japan.  (The Chinese enjoyed a 2:1 advantage in troop strength, but totally overwhelmed by Japanese tank and aircraft numbers and tech superiority.)  This pamphlet was published in November 1937, so the end of this battle–the first really of that would be twenty-two or so major engagements of the war--was still months away.  No doubt that an updated version of this pamphlet printed in 1938 would note the 70,000 Japanese soldiers killed without mentioning their own belligerent status or the 200k Chinese killed during the same time.     

   

The Japanese wouldn’t have to bother with this sort of propaganda after 7 December 1941.  It would’ve been hard to explain it all, especially the 17,000,000 Chinese civilians being killed in the process. And the 3 million Chinese soldiers¹. Quite a long and twisting road from protecting Japanese citizens in Manchuria in 1931.

Notes       

1. Nationalist Chinese military forces included 1,320,000 killed in action, plus 1,797,000 wounded, with another  120,000 MIA. The Communist Chinese forces included another : 500,000 total casualties. Japanese forces include about 396,000 KIA plus another 430,000 MIA and WIA. Another estimate from the Japanese side gives the figures for Japan’s losses at ( 1937–1941) 185,647 KIA. 496,000 wounded, and 430,000 incapacitated; plus for the  1941–1945 period,  another 202,958 dead.   Nationalist Chinese estimates for Japan’s losses for 1937-1945 were 1.77 million KIA and 1.9 million WIA