Posters

Poster 10: Powerpunk Locomotives,1943

JF Ptak Science Books   Poster Series 

This magnificent photograph was made by Jack Delano (1914-1997) while working for Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration agency (FSA).  It is called "C & NW RR, Locomotives in the Roundhouse at Proviso Yard, Chicago, Ill.", and was made in December 1942.  This has long been one of my favorite images in the FSA color archives. 

POSTER 10: PowerPunk Locomotives, 1943

This image is available as a poster, as follows:

• 13x19 inch photographic matte paper
• printed from a 600 dpi scan with pigment inks
• original image cleaned to remove nearly all detracting defects
• orders processed within 48 hours

Price:  SOLD OUT, postage paid in the U.S., delivered in a tube

One of the great innovations in a sea of great things accomplished during the Franklin Roosevelt administrations was the formation of the Farm Security Administration, a division of the government established to help farmers through the devastating Dust Bowl and Great Depression.  A subset of the FSA was a photographic unit which was set up to document the progress made by the FSA (and provide, I am sure, for some much-needed good news, a hearts-and-minds campaign).  This division was headed by Roy Emerson Stryker, who wound up hiring a collection of dream-team photographers unlike any ever assembled for a single purpose.  Esther Bubley, Marjory Collins, Mary Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Gordon Parks, Charlotte Brooks, John Vachon, Carl Mydans, Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn were sent out all across the country and wound up with the greatest and most beautiful photographic history ever assembled in the United States.  There were about 77,000 images made, and I recall reading (somewhere) that the total budget for the Stryker group for the years 1936-1942 was about $100,000, meaning that each completed image cost just over a dollar apiece. So far as art funding by the government is concerned, that about the best it has done.

(I can offer a print of this image as all o fhe work done for the FSA and Office of War Information and for the federal government in general are without copyright or personal ownership and are the property of the people of the United States.)

Poster 8: Red America, 1936

 JF Ptak Science Books  

[This is a 150dpi version of the 600 dpi finished product--I should say that the final version is clearer than the above.]

I came to this pamphlet from a design/composition point of view, finding in it a peculiar attractiveness in its gritty-typeface and loud speculation.  That said, the title is of little use to tell us of its contents, and so opening to page 37 (in deference to my wife Patti Digh who finds much significance in the number) I found on the opposite page the "it does not matter that the German people of the Reich have a different form of State from America", and that the form of state so far as the Germans were concerned was "a matter of fate".  

POSTER 8: Red America

This image is available as a poster, as follows:

• 13x19 inch photographic matte paper
• printed from a 600 dpi scan with pigment inks
• original image cleaned to remove nearly all detracting defects
• orders processed within 48 hours

Price:  SOLD OUT, postage paid in the U.S., delivered in a tube

Interesting, and, well, unfortunate, because the publication date of the work is 1936.  The author, Mr. A.T. Fredex, implores the reader to consider that there is "no more a liberty-loving people than the Germans", and that they are a free and liberated people.  The German state of today was subject of certain internal "troubles" and that successions of leaders--for the good of the people--were forced to keep the nation together with "more or less gentle pressure".

And so the skeleton of the fleshy produce of the pamphlet is revealed.  "Already the sneers of the yellow and black races are haunting us", writes Mr. Fredex, who continues in just the next paragraph that all that remains to happen would be for Socialist France to "mobilize her millions of Negroes" along with the help of "Bolshevist-Mongolian Russia" against Germany, which would be the last refuge of normalcy in Europe, the thing protecting the Western world from who-knows-what.  

All of this is in three paragraphs of one page.  Then comes the race part, the Teutonic purity and excellence part, and the horrors of race-mixing and "mixed blood" that will wind up dooming America.

I skipped ahead, or behind, to the end, where we are warned by Mr. Fredex to awaken our Nordic interests should Germany fail to hold back the assaulting races.

This is really quite a story to unfold in just two of the pamphlet's 56 pages--the rest of which I think need no further exploration.  

The pamphlet cover, though, retains its interest, forensically speaking.  

Speed and its Imagination, 1928

JF Ptak Science Books      Poster 7

The ‘twenties is know as the “speed” decade—everything was going faster, increasing its speed, expanding to the limit:  this was true for the ability to communicate via telephone, the appearance of commercial radio, the great increase in the speed of trains and planes and automobiles; the music was fast, the movies were talking.  

 

POSTER 7: Speed, 13x19"

This image is available as a poster, as follows:

• 13x19 inch photographic matte paper
• printed from a 600 dpi scan with pigment inks
• original image cleaned to remove nearly all detracting defects
• orders processed within 48 hours

Price:  SOLD OUT, postage paid in the U.S., delivered in a tube

 

 

There are many iconic images relating speed and the roaring twenties—generally though this spectacular cover for Otto Willi Gail's Mit Raketenkraft ins Weltenal…vom Feurerwagen zum Raumschiff (1928)is much less frequently seen, though it certainly does get the message across.  Otto Gail was a creative German science fact and science fiction writer with a strong background in following the scientific and technical accomplishment in rocketry of the age, especially the works of Max Valier¹ and Hermann Oberth². Raketenkraft was more a peek into the future and pop techy work for kids than a straight-out scifi novel like his The Moon Stone, which was a story that brought us Atlantis, space travel and hidden ancient culture in the underground Ice World.

It’s the unfortunate Ice World that attracts my attention around Gail, swimming around his interesting and tech-involved scifi world like a melting and failing Moon made of hundred-year NYC garbage scows, the idea of a good engineer-turned-trash cosmologist named Hans Horbiger, whose ideas wound up being whispered into the ears of many monsters. Horbiger had some sort of vision-dream about stuff in 1894 and spent the next 30+ years fleshing out the idea, which sounds bad from the very start when the author admits to finding “Newton wrong”.  Anyway without losing too many minutes thinking about this time-hole, Horbiger’s theory worked ice up to being the primary and primordial ingredient of all processes in the universe, with ice planets circled by ice moons, and some sort of gooey ice ether to make it all go ‘round. Oh yes: there were superior ice people living in the interior of the earth.  Horbiger died in 1931, but his many followers managed to work the theory into a presentable Jewish-baiting anti-relativity Deutsche Physik form for the new government of Adolph Hitler in 1933, and it was there that his ideas took hold in the cancerous Himmler and Hitler and others, a happy marriage at last, the ridiculous to the unspeakable. I’m not sure where the ice people are today, but I did saw some awful History Channel show that stated that Hitler never did die in the bunker and was removed by submarine to the interior ice people of earth, flying around the insides of our globe “in a UFO”.

And so I associate poor Gail (1896-1956) with the Horbiger mess, and not his good work in science reporting and popularization.  So it goes.

The other thing that you can say about Horbiger—he had a full-out behemothian mustache.  That’s about it.

Notes

1. Valier seems to have been the first person  killed in a rocket-related incident, blistered by his exploding rocket-car.

2.  Oberth is another one of those Germans working at Peenemunde (along with Wernher von Braun and a great host of others)  trying to kill as many people in the UK as possible who wound up in Huntsville, working for our government.  It is all so problematic.  It is interesting that there is little in the Air and Space Museum (as part of the Smithsonian system)  that mentions von Braun.  He is burioed in a simple grave in a cemetery next door to a Jewish cemetery in Alexandria , Virginia.  I also remember going to some restaurant in the diamond district that, in very high bad taste, served up a beer called the Wernher von Brown--von Braun certainly had his hands covered in Jewish blood at least to the wrists, and to have a product so stupidly named as that in that place was just one of those impossible things that happen every day.

Poster 7--The Color of Mud

JF Ptak Science Books   Poster Series 7

 

 

Okay, so, this may only be a detail of a cover of a quietly-uncommon and proto-bizarre pamphlet on bricks, but when you look at it in a certain way, it may suggest a bit of found abstract expressionist art. Or even a Cubist-something.  I can see it as a color field--a very, very hard-edged Rothko detail comes to mind.  Perhaps if Pollock arranged entire bricks as his medium rather than dripped paint, he may have come upon an expression such as this. Or not.  

POSTER 6: Mud and Art. 13x19"

This image is available as a poster, as follows:

• 13x19 inch photographic matte paper
• printed from a 600 dpi scan with pigment inks
• original image cleaned to remove nearly all detracting defects
• orders processed within 48 hours

Price:  SOLD OUT, postage paid in the U.S., delivered in a tube

The pamphlet comes from my collection of fantastically-titled and creatively naive pamphlets and books.  After considering their reaching, speculative, bizarre, and surreal titles, they fall into a number of sub-categories, including:

• titles with question marks “?” (like the two wonderful pamphlets simply entitled "What ?" and of course the two that have no titles but question marks);
• titles with exclamation points “!” (these two marks actually don’t occur very often at all in titles, especially when the title itself already has a built in question/exclamation mark); 
• titles that include the phrase “the history of…” or “the story of….” so long as that history/story is (very) unusual; 
• titles that demand something or other of  “America”  (i.e., “Will America be Invaded?” or “America, Mussolini or Moscow” or "Sandbags, Worms and America");
• title pages with American flags.

This excludes a lot of the general naïve-surreal and historical pamphlet collection, but these, I think, would make a great exhibition of book of books, simply because so many of them have an unquestionable “what in the _” reaction capacity to them.

The found-abstract detail comes from Mud, its Romantic Story, (by Richard G. Collier, for the Common Brick Manufacturer Association of America, Cleveland, Ohio) and is a prime example for the collection:  a terrific title and a beautiful design that offers a lot more than a simple story about bricks (even though it does contain a lively little history of brick making in America--the good content almost takes away from the fantastic title, but so it goes).

Diagrams of Outsider Logic, with Synesthesic Angels (1925)

JF Ptak Science Books     Poster Series #5

 

There are some other more recent contributions in our Outsider Logic collection that reach the limits of outside, reaching far into the aspects of knowledge that lies more or less completely hidden and inaccessible to the vast majority of readers.  Sometimes bumping into outré thinking like this is very useful because it is just so very different; and sometimes this thought process is just and only that: very different.

 This image is available as a poster, as follows:

• 13x19 inch photographic matte paper
• printed from a 600 dpi scan with pigment inks
• original image cleaned to remove nearly all detracting defects
• orders processed within 48 hours

 

Price:  SOLD OUT, postage paid in the U.S., delivered in a tube