About where the books and pamphlets I write about come from...

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

I've been asked a few times this week about the source of the materials that I write about.  The overwhelming majority of the books and pamphlets are right here, in my store or warehouse (see the above link for the science bookstore), so I see allot of this stuff everyday, currency of the realm and all that.  Most of the odd things that are found in my blog--flagpole painting, zipper repair, finding England in the Great Pyramid, building the Great Pyramid in Detroit, and so on) have come to me via the Library of Congress, where for many years I managed to purchase/trade for bits and pieces of their surplus.  One large purchase in particular from the LC--the 90,000-item "Pamphlet Collection--has provided thousands of the sublime mundane, naive surreal masterpieces that I've found so irresistible.  Most of this material hasn't found a place in my store, which as you now know specializes in classics in modern physics and mathematics, but I do hope to be able to place them as a collection at some dim point in the future.  I would love to generate a few books out of them, and I think that a choice 500 of them or so would make a tremendous show somewhere (Brooklyn?) as a Found Art, Unexpected Dadaist, The Surprise of the Naive Surreal, show or some such thing, showing a marriage of design, outsider intellect and sublime mundane.   There are at the very least several thousands of these things from the Pamphlet Collection that are gorgeous and so unexpected, that are such intellectual (or non-intellectual) surprises, that they would (I think) make for a bang-up show. 

And so that's where these things come from.  They come to be posted by chance, generally because I bump into one of these things while looking for something else. 

Comments

[Jeff]

How about a traveling collection of select pamphlets for display at small public libraries? A selection of fascinating content, history, art & design, and weirdness would make a great display. We could have an opening reception and let people with washed hands or white gloves handle some or all of them (I recommend the washed hands).