JF Ptak Science Books // Blog Bookstore

A Trafalgar of the Air—the Flying Battleship of the Future (1907)

“Is t he Future War-Ship to be Aeroplane or Balloon?”, a glorious 2pp (16” x 23”) illustration in the Illustrated London News, August 31, 1907, pp 293-328. 16” x 11.5”. Original wrappers, removed from a larger bound volume Good condition. $100

This image was drawn by Harry Grant Dart only four years after the wrights’ powered flight at Kill Devil. It features four images of enormous aircraft as well as two smaller images, none of these seem to be the balloons in question in the title of the artwork, the artist seeming to have come down on the side of the aeroplane. That said, these aircraft are massive—iterating by the figures on deck the plane was close to 50’ tall with wings that must’ve been 100’ wide. Everything seems to be massively heavy, looking more like steam-fired ships (“flying battle-ships”) than anything else…except for their resemblance to birds and dragonflies.  Also of note in the upper right corner is a missile—an “aerial torpedo—fired at one of the aircraft.

Harry Grant Dart (1869-1938) was a correspondent, artist, and cartoonist who worked for the New York World, Life, and Judge, whose specialties seem to involve techno-future-vision. 

 

Reviewing Wells' "The Time Machine", July 1895, in NATURE

ITEM:  [Wells H.G. ] Review of Wells' The Time Machine in Nature, 18 July 1895.  We offer the issue for the week (pp 265-188, plus 8pp advertisements numbered pp xc-xcvi), removed from a larger bound volume, complete with the scarce outer wrappers. Provenance:  Smithsonian Astrophysical Obervatory Library, via the Library of Congress.  Very nice copy. Very good condition.  SOLD

I found this interesting 400-word bit in the 18 July 1895 issue of Nature (A Weekly Illustrated Journal of Science) coming just 7 or so weeks after the book was published in England on 29 May. (Nature then is Nature now, and of course still very much alive and still a great publishing scientific powerhouse.)  As Wells' treatment of time as a fourth dimension was still quite speculative, and his creation of the time machine as we now came from his hands, and as its reception by some literary journals was not very cordial, it is particularly interesting to see the positive review from this science journal.  As reported by Paul J. Nahin in Time Machines, Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics and Science Fiction (published by Springer Verlag in a second edition in 1999, a graceful book of splendid observations with an introduction by Kip Thorne, Cal Tech's Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics), Wells' book was seen as "hocus pocus"  and a "fanciful and lively dream" by  The Spectator and "bizarre" by the Daily Chronicle.

Nature's editors says of the book:

"...apart from its merits as a clever piece of imagination, the story is well worth the attention of the scientific reader, for the reason that it is based as far as possible on scientific data..."

"It is naturally in he domain of social and organic evolution that the imagination finds its greatest scope."

"From first to last the narrative never lapses into dullness."

And so Wells--who had cleaned up and rewritten an earlier version of thi sbook from 1885--received a happy review from one of the leading scientific magazines of the time. It is not because of a wide interest of Wells in the fourth dimension per se, but rather in rattling Victorian sniffy conceits of his day. 

*Time as the fourth dimension is a concept not much older than Well's idea, one of the earliest publications of the idea appearing ten years earlier (and written anonymously by "S") in Nature.  Charles Hinton, the person we most associate with the introduction of the fourth dimension  (or at least so on a popular level) didn't really establish time as the fourth dimension. (Hinton led a colorful, or at least interesting life--he was a brilliant guy, and also a convicted bigamist who was married to George Boole's daughter, and creator of an automatic baseball pitching machine. His books on the fourth dimension certainly were influential, and in the estimation of Florence was a contributor to the ideas of the coming modern art movements of the 1890-1910 period.)

And there were certainly many who came before Wells on the subject of the fourth dimension (though not many on the subject of time as the fourth dimension):  R.C. Archibald wrote on d'Alembert's (1754) use of time as a fourth dimension (in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society for May 1914); Cayley's "Analytical Geometry of n-Dimensions (Cambridge Mathematical Journal, 1843);  Grassmann's Die Lineale aus Dehnungslehre (1844); Riemann's 1854 effort on curved space (translated in 1873 for Nature by W. Kingdom Clifford); Beltrami's introduction of the pseudosphere in 1868;  J.J. Sylvester (again in Nature for 30 December 1869); Hermann von Helmholtz and his curvature for three-dimensional spaces; and Poincare's work in 1900, among others.  There is a rich field of these efforts, beautifully investgated for the general reader by Linda Dalrmple Henderson in her classic The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton 1983). 

The Phonograph as a "Philosophical Toy" in April 1878, and then not so in May

JF Ptak Science Books    

"The Phonograph", being an article in the April 18, 1878 issue of Nature, volume 17, No 442, pp 485-6 in the weekly issue of pp 481-500. This issue comes complete with the scarce outer wrappers and ads, comprising another 7pp.  The issue has been removed from a larger bound volume, and shows that effect on the spine; that said the weekly is in crisp and bright condition.  VG  $150 

Only months into the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Edison (at Menlo Park in December of 1877 and patented in January 1878) Alexander J. Ellis reviewed a version of it constructed in London by Mr. Stroh, and found it, well, wanting.  Ellis (1814-1890) was a product of Eton, Cambridge, Trinity, and was a gifted mathematician, philologist, and a groundbreaking ethnomusicologist, and did see some limited utility of the machine to restricted areas of his research. In the short note he wrote for Nature in their April 18, 1878 issue, he mostly found that the phonograph was generally flawed in its reproductive capacity, and did not venture far from this interpretation so far as the possible applications of the machine was concerned, which seems iconically short-sighted from my perch here in the future. Even though Ellis recognized that "the effects produced are sometimes startling (as in cries, coughs, laughter, music), the philosophy of the process (making a permanent impression of a very complex compound vibration, and using it as a mould to reproduce that vibration is exceedingly attractive, but at present the instrument--at least the one that I saw..." he concludes that the status of the invention "...has not risen beyond a lecture illustration or a philosophical toy".  

That said, Mr. Bell himself saw somewhat not-very-expanded applications for his  invention at the time, although with time it became his favorite invention, his "baby" so to speak.

Mr. Ellis was cautious enough though to qualify his statements in the April Nature issue by restricting his phonograph experience to the one constructed by Mr. Stroh.  And then, a month later, Ellis returns to Nature with a new appreciation of the phonograph--this one constructed by the beautifully-named Fleeming Jenkin, which evidently was superior to the Stroh machine, as Ellis has a newer appreciation for the invention, though its future still seems limited to the study of phonetics and speech. 

• "The phonograph as I have said resembles rather a worn print than a proof of the human voice. This means of course that the delicate upper partial on which all brilliancy depends are absent In some respects this is advantageous for the very elaborate inquiry which Prof Fleeming Jenkin has instituted for it enables him to catch the bold outlines en which genera depend without being at first bewildered by the delicate details which give specific differences. Our speech sounds are of course individual and what is recognised as the same speech sound varies in the same speaker within the limits of its genus almost every time it is used. We shall do much if we establish the genus. The extent of Prof Jenkin's researches as he contemplates them end the ease with which his initial experiments tracings and analyses have been conducted lead us to hope that we have at least got an instrument which will enable us to solve the elementary problems of phonetics that have hitherto almost baffled us although it is not suited as yet to fix those delicacies of utterance which were my own special object of investigation." (Nature, May 9, 1878.)

Mr. Ellis does rescind many of the negative things he had found in the phonograph in this new May letter, though he still seems not so happy with it, and can see thus far in two letters that see only a very limited history for the invention.  At the very least though Mr. Ellis did say that the new machine constructed by Jenkin was definitely no longer merely a philosophical toy.  

TV and the Nazis, 1944

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

In all my exposure to the history of WWII  I am pretty sure that the only reference to Nazi television has been along the lines of the Berlin Olympics or Carl Sagan's Contact--that and some dim memory about Hermann Goering somehow in the great bowels of the labyrinthine Nazi bureaocracy being in control of German tv broadcasting. The International Future of Television, an address by Paul Railbourn before the American Television Society in NY in January 1944, discusses the possibility of television in the Post WWII era--and in that, stresses in no uncertain terms that the Nazis should not have access to the new medium. Railbourne (who would later become a VP at Paramount Pictures) talks about how Hitler utilized and dominated the radio, and how after the war re-education of Germany was necessary along with free enterprise undertaking of newspapers, radio, television, and motion pictures.

He notes that "The Nazis are well aware of the importance of television...destroy the Luftwaffe and the Krupps Armament works, but leave television in their hands, and we shall be leaving them with the most powerful weapon of all..."

To that end the author discusses post-war control of radio and television in German. He also talks about establishing television networks throughout the U,.S. as quickly as possibly to "capture world leadership in television programming" and "carry the gosphel of the Four Freedoms to all mankind".  "...Television will play a vital role, for good or ill as it is intelligently or evilly directed, in the establishment and maintenance of an enduring peace, once the present war comes to an end."

Railbourne made good sense, and had I think a pretty good idea of the coming possible influence of the new medium.

 

The Computer Cyborg of 1867--the Typewriter

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1635

• Cleator, P.E.  The Robot Era.  New York, Crowell, 1955.  First American edition.  Lovely copy in fine distjacket.  $100

• Cohen, John.  Human Robots in Myth and Society.  London; Allen & Unwin, 1966.  First edition.  156pp, illustrated.  Fine copy in a fine dustjacket.  $45

Every age, every generation has a calling to the future that once that particular future arrives looks sometimes strangely like a past that was much further away than it was. Such is the case here, in September, 1867. in the pages of London's Punch Magazine, when Mr. Punch rhapsodized on the future possibilities of the new invention, the typewriter.

"Good News for Bad Writers" announced to the readership:

"Writing Superseded.—Mr. Pratt, of Alabama, is the inventor of a typewriting machine, lately exhibited to tho London Society of Arts, which is said to print a man's thoughts twice as fast as he can write them with the present process. By a sort of piano arrangement the letters are brought in contact with carbonised paper, which is moved by tho same manipulation,"

The editor of Punch sniffed out a deeper deal in the typewriter than simple legibility:

"Every author his own printer! What a happy state of things! No more struggles to write legibly with nibless tavern-pens: no more labour in deciphering the hieroglyphs of hasty writers. Literary work will be in future merely play—on the piano. The future Locke may write his essays by a touch upon the keys."

But the disappointments of the possible future wouldn't stop there, and would or could or should go screaming into the dark night, the invention marking time in the brain of the writer, making able for him or her to compose without thinking, pillows taking over for the mind:

"In this inventive age there really is no saying where discovery will stop. Now that authors are to put their thoughts in print with twice the pace that they can write them, perhaps ere long they will be able to put their works in type without so much as taking the trouble to compose them. A thought-hatching easy chair may very likely be invented, by the help of which an author may sit down at his ease before his thought-printing piano, and play away ad libitum whatever may occur to him. Different cushions may be used for different kinds of composition, some stuffed with serious thoughts, fit for sermons or reviews, and others with light fancies, fit for works of fiction, poetry, or fun. By a judicious choice of cushions an author will be able to sit down to his piano, and play a novel in three volumes twice or thrice a week, besides knocking off a leader every morning for a newspaper, anil issuing every fortnight a bulky epic poem, or a whole encyclopaedia complete within a month."

The typewriter was just another in a series of "robots" from antiquity, of the creation of moveable type printing taking over the job of scribes and scribes over the jobs of story tellers, of fabrications of automata, of rudimentary calculating machines of the 17th century, of the creation of the lighted semaphore, of the electric telegraph, of the telephone, of the wireless, of the radio, television, computer, internet.  Each offered a similar challenge to the people of their day and a similar challenge to their future--some of which came true, some didn't. I know that Punch was kidding--mostly. 

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. 

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

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

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1421

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Almost-Tomorrow Department: Radio-Vision, 1928.

Cooley,  Austin G.  How to Receive Radio Pictures at Home.  New York:  Radiovision Corp,  1928.  1st edition.  26pp, 2 folding blueprints  4to.  Printed wrappers.  Very good copy.  Some wear and dirt on front wrapper.  $450

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1415

Tomorrow seemed to be almost there to readers of this pamphlet, what with the idea of looking at pictures relating to the radio broadcast you were listening to looming before a slightly disbelieving mind.  The fact of the matter though is that this breakthrough by Mr. Austin G. Cooley¹--basically attaching what we would know today as a fax machine to a radio cabinet which would receive and print images relating to the show being heard--was rubbing up mightily against the real wave of the future, the television.

Mr. Cooley's invention of the Rayfoto just didn't quite fit the demands that would soon be established and met by television.  The idea of practical television goes back a fair way², at least to Arthur Korn in the late 1890's, which much work being done on both broadcast television and facsimile transmissions.  But tv was definitely a high scent in the air when Cooley published his Rayfoto pamphlet in 1928--as a matter of fact, this was the same year in which the first television license was granted (to Charles Jenkins, W3XK).  And just two years later the BBC would begin regular television broadcasts, while also in 1930 Mr. Jenkins initiated another television-first, the t.v.commercial. 

"No greater thrill awaits the radio experimenter than receiving his first picture through the ether…Not many months will pass before picture broadcasts will be a part of every radio broadcast"--A. Cooley, 1928

So the time was definitely note ripe for Cooley's idea as an image supplement to radio, though it did have other possible applications--like the "fax" delivering newspapers to your home--though they are not listed in the pamphlet. 

What we see here the drum of the apparatus (we don't see the three-tray developer/fixer wet set-up inside the apparatus), one of the listeners retrieving an  incoming vision-image, something that evidently took quite some time, depending on the image and the ways in which the developing trays have been set.  Dark images might've taken the entire length of a 15-minute broadcast to transmit and print; other, simpler efforts took less time.

Here's an example of a successful, medium-quality image that one could expect using Cooley's Rayfoto system:

It doesn't look like much now, and maybe it wouldn't've looked like much to people familiar with the new television.  But even a grainy, static image accompanying a voice performance is a fabulous thing when compared with never having seen anything like it before, never having had such an experience, if even only as a novelty.

_______

Notes:

1. Cooley,  Austin G.  How to Receive Radio Pictures at Home.  New York:  Radiovision Corp,  1928.  1st edition.  26pp, 2 folding blueprints  4to.   This unusual publication describes the construction and use of an apparatus which would receive broadcast (facsimile) images that would be used to illustrate radio transmissions/shows.  The idea (in this form of illustrating radio shows) at this date would be reduced to almost-nothingness once television entered the picture in the next year or so.  Still, it was an elegant idea to illustrate the spoken word.

This system was offered by Austin G. Cooley (1900-1993), inventor of the Rayfoto system, "the first authentic radio picture apparatus". This was a very early attempt at mass entertainment via a mechanical medium that proved ineffective by 1929/1931 against the advances of television. (The radiovision method was something like a facsimile device, offering a static image every now and again, and was completely outclassed by the moving image).

2. Followed by Paul Nipkow's rotating discs in the earliest part of the 20th c, then by Vladimir Zworkin's iconoscope (1923), Charles Jenkins and John Baird's television of 1924, and then of course by Philo Farnsworth's 1928 image dissector.

Technical Drawing: an Early, Convict-Powered, Revolving Turret Ship

ITEM:  engraved sheet from The Engineer, 30  October 1874, 15 x 10 inches.  Good condition. $50  As follows:

This image (from the Illustrated London News for April 26 1871) shows a plan of the top floor of a revolving battery designed by M. Baltard in 1831.  This idea is probably ancient, though it really only had major technological legs by the 19th century. Even though Baltard is given some fair credit for the modern rediscovery of the revolving turret--and in this short article he is given premier status--there were earlier engineers at work before him.  For example, in the earliest part of the 19th century Col. John Stevens designed a saucer-shaped floating battery that was supposed to be able to fire in any direction; T.R. Timbly--slightly after Baltard--applied in the U.S. Patent Office in June 1843 for a device he called a "metallic revolving fort".  Then came the great John Ericsson--very long on accomplishments but very short now in modern memory, he is also one of those memorialized men in marble in DC for whom people have almost no modern recognition--who in 1854 produced an "impregnable battery revolving cupola", which led to his great innovation on the Monitor.  And as we recall, the Monitor's defeat of the Merrimack in Hampton Roads in 1861spelled the coming end of the wooden ship of the line--metal ships with mounted revolving turrets fore and aft would prove entirely too far superior to the 19th century wooden ship.

What we are seeing in the first engraving is the top floor of a two-story fortification--roof removed--showing the floor plan of the battery.  The walls and roof were stationary; the floor was not.  The two cannons were located on a revolving floor and were moved by turning the floor (basically) to one of the open firing windows (embrasures) a detail of which is above. When the barrel of the canon was pulled out of this opening, it was turned closed to prevent any fire coming into the fort.

The engraving below shows a cross-section of the two-turret land structure.

 

The engraving below shows the idea of the land fortification shipboard, one revolving turret fore and aft. It turns out that the engine for the vessel was human, the engineer calling for "either" convicts (forcats) or soldiers to row to move and position the boat

 

And a detail we can clearly see the long sweep oars:

And the turrets on the ship, the pre-Monitor-style ship:

I assume that the boat was being used for coastal or harbor defense, or at least something very close to land, and was really more a floating, positioning battery than a boat.  Seems to me though that after everything was said and done, after all the work was accomplished and the boat built, that making the whole thing dependent on sticks of wood was a fatal flaw. 

 

What Color "Is"--an Unintentional Modernist Masterpiece of Book Illustration?

ITEMS

Ref: JF Ptak Science Books Post 1282   [With 20 extra images in Continued Reading section]

All images are original from the Vanderpoel book (from a hobbled, semi-dead copy), and are 7x5 inches, printed brilliantly on a heavier, treated, high-clay paper.  Each image is $75.00

[Earlier in this blog, about 1200 posts ago, a million words ago, I wrote about an extraordinary book by an aesthetician named Emily Vanderpoel.  It is "extraordinary" in a narrower sense, and that "extraordinary" might not actually be positive for its original intent.  The extra-intent of the book, what has come out of it for me, was something that was unintentionally accomplished by the author.  The images that she used to illustrate her color theory ideas--the basis of which are not really comprehensible to me--turn out to be artwork in themselves, a found art, the artistry of the images taking over the original intention for the arrangement of their color. ]

The idea of how we put parameters to something like the visual field is a gargantuan topic—it is something that architects and geometers and physicists and mathematicians (in general) have dealt with forever.

  Mapmakers have perhaps the most visualized aspect of this on paper, performing the semi-miracle of translating three dimensions into two; physicists have a more difficult time, taking the opposite approach, sort of , and translating two or three dimensional space into x-number of dimensions.  Anatomists had a difficult time of their subject until relatively recently in human history, what with the sublime religious curfews on messy knowledge and all coming into play, poking around into the heart and such as though it was an affront to the sanctity of the creator (M Servetus’ ideas on the circulation of the blood via the heart, making the heart a tool and not the brain or some odd conjunction of creative divine power, cost him his life, burning slowly alive at the stake…how mysterious the whole world of RNA Genotype-Phenotype Mapping and such would seem to him if he could have a peek into the future/present from wherever he is.)

Color theory is old and pretty—as a matter of fact there is a very attractive gathering of color theory models (in black and white, though) displaying some two dozen or more color models from the last 400 years.  People like Della Porta (1593), our old friend and resident oddball polymath crank Kircher (1646), the smarter-than-you-could-believe Newton (1660), Waller (1686), Lambert (1772), the wide ranging and again polymathic Goethe (1792), Herschel (1817, who also ushered in our understanding of the other light-sensitive shape spacing medium of photography in 1840), the semi-forgotten Chevreul (1835), the beautiful Maxwell (1857), Wundt (1874, the early experimental psychologist who also looked for spirits/spiritmus and ghosts), von Bezold (1878), Rood (1879), Munsell (1918) Kandinsky (1914 and not decipherable by me) and Klee (1924), and so on towards the present, all tried to analyze the prospects of color.

Not in this list is the very highly problematic Emily Vanderpoel, who in 1901 and 1903 produced (in two editions) a lovely but mysterious book called Color Problems for the Layman, in which she sought not so much to analyze the components of color itself, but rather to quantify the overall interpretative effect of color on the imagination.  I know this sounds begging and vague, but I really haven’t been able to make much headway in the work.


I’m attracted to this effort because of its attempt at quantifying such abstract thoughts.

By virtue of this effort, though, Vanderpoel had produced a strikingly illustrated book, with 118 color plates, all very intense, and beautiful, and in its way exceptional—unique for it time perhaps.  Had the book been written thirty years or so hence we’d call it some sort of constructivist/constructionist artform.  But since the artwork in the book comes a decade before the first non-representational artwork in human history (or so), I don’t know exactly what to call it. 

I really don’t know what it is, but I know that it is not entirely accidental, this pre-non-representational artform, because controlled geometrical color art is not accidental. 

In trying to quantify the color images of the objects in her study, Vanderpoel establishes a 10x10 square grid, dividing all of the color in that object into individual units numbering to 100.  Then, somehow, she identifies the major colors and places them according to a system that I cannot understand within the grid.

The net effect is glorious.  I just don’t know how she got there—which isn’t normally a consideration in art, except that this work is an instructional on how to understand color in art and nature, and the explanation of the procedure is ethereal.  Vanderpoel was and remains a respected author on porcelains and other applied and plastic arts.  In this work she looked at her fair share of porcelain, limogues, clay pots, burial urns, glass shards, and the like; she also analyzed clouds, mummy cloths (and casings), dew on morning grass, brocade, the eye of a blue jay, feathers, and another hundred or so poetic arragenments of the stuff of teh world.  I still do not know what this book is trying to tell me, but I do know that it is remarkable.