JF Ptak Science Books

Dreaming of the 10-Ton Eiffel Tower Bullet, 1891

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 736

People find inspiration everywhere, insight to creativity in the obvious and not so.  Great statues have been envisioned in the depths of slabs of marble, solutions to mathematical problems in the step of a bus, the beginning of a new physics in the rolling ball in a wagon.  Its an old and very warn cliché, but the world can be seen in a grain of sand if you could just pieces together the bits of glass:  just as pointillism was seen in the not-simple intercession of two colors and cinematography in the latent image and the structure of the universe in a patch of dancing dust.

The Eiffel Tower has had its own way with the visions of people, from it representing the birth of The Modern, to an icon of passion, to architecture and engineering innovation, and to general  adventure and the call of possibility.  It has moved other people to think “special” thoughts:  like, for example, what a lovely canvas it would be to place a 700’-tall electrified sign.*  And to M. Carron of Grenoble, who may have the most unusual inspirations from M. Eiffel, the tower was the perfect place to drop a 40-foot tall, 20,000-pound bullet filled with 20 people in leather armchairs into a 200-foot deep champagne-glass pool.

This is certainly a singular insight.  But in 1891 it represented something a little more than just giving people a thrill ride.  Physics of impact aside for the moment, M.Carron’s bullet capsule would be released from the top of the interior of the Tower, about 1000 feet high, and released to fall into an excavated pool 150’ across and 200’ deep.  The idea was that in addition to the springs inside the capsule, the water would act as a “shock absorber”, and so “the shock felt by the occupants on landing will be in no way unpleasant”.  

[Okay, so the thing would hit at 178mph or so, and, assuming that the whole thing didn’t get completely crushed on impact, I’m not so sure that 200’ of depth is very much wiggle room for the thing to come to a halt (if it didn’t deform).  I Also it would have to not have any wind deflection so as to not veer off its perfect entry into the water.  And so on.  Calculating the force of impact is difficult without knowing how far down the bullet would go, but hitting the water at 80 m/s and stopping at 30 meters would yield something like 28,600,000 KE and 1,274,000 N. There are lots of problems….]

The thing is, though, the thing that made this so appealing, is that for the 20-francs that get a person a seat in the bullet, that they would each get to go twice as fast as any human had ever traveled before ( 65 miles per hour was about the speed of the fastest train constructed).  So it was an extraordinary claim, an done that doesn't get made all that often in the history of locomotion.

And so this wasn't a practicable or workable idea; but, well, so what?  It was an unusual idea, inspired by some sort of different thinking, which are both good places to be in according to the Gazetteer & Atlas of Ideas.  Sometimes thinking like this is just prelude to something else, thought avenues that had to be explored before the real thinking could get done, introducing you to a new geography of thought.  That's what M. Carron had going for him; the newness of his thinking was much more important than the wrongness of it.

*This story comes at the end of a post called Bad Ideas Department:  the First Image of a Hypnotized Chicken, so in spite of the title you'll wind up in Paris.

Trikewriter: 19th C Bicycle as Outdoor Printing Press

  JF Ptak Science Books  Post 735 Blog Bookstore

Yesterday I posted a short note on the History of Extreme Writing with the example of cloud writing.  From clouds above to the mud below comes this second, very peculiar example of this exclusive genre:  tricycle writing.  This may actually come "on he heals" (so to speak) of another ancient form of writing coming from ancient Greece, where prostitutes would mirror-write 'follow me" on their footwear so that prospective clients would follow their message writ in the dust to their home. This present shows the invention at work in the streets of Paris: as you can see it really was a printing press, applying the messages that were attached to the two rear tires in a way similar to that which prints lines in the street. 

 

The wheels actually could be fitted with movable type, making the message changeable. I imagine too that the messages could be written with water-soluble ink or whatever so that the advertiser could be paid again and again, and that the street canvas would be refreshed constantly.   I hate to say it--what with the possible destruction of public property aspect of it--but it looks to me as though this sort of thing would be very successful in getting a message across. At least the first time--it is easy to imagine hundreds of these buggers crisscrossing a city, messages on the ground everywhere, the streets confusions of sentiments and exclamation.  We have that now with billboards and other fixed advertising; so I imagine the only thing preventing ads from appearing on the roads are public safety issues. 

                                                                                                                                                                   
                                                    

 

Cloud Writing

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The History of Extreme Writing (for communicating across an uncommon distance) is relatively recent, given the thousands of years that humans have been communicating.  The 17^th century semaphore system for relaying telegraphic messages might be one, if you consider the semaphore’s decoration of a

building- or hill-top to be a piece of writing. Smoke signals and forms of communication relying on interrupted transmission of a powerful light source might look to be part of the environment, epically in regards to smoke, it message bright and visceral, and somewhat lasting, as it message moves and grows and dissipates (depending on the area’s climatic conditions for the hour).Church bells might apply (reminding the faithful and the fearful to consecrate  hope and fear), as might the Mullah’s voice, or the sound of a ram’s horn. Outside of things like mail, or the very short-lived super-mail Pony Express system, there was precious little that could be seen as a pre-electrical telegraphic regional internet. 

 

Perhaps the greatest example of Extreme Writing came this French effort to advertise on clouds.  Electrical advertising in general came a little slowly following the invention of commercial electricity. The, um, adventurous PT Barnum contracted the first electric bulb writing (utilizing the Edison invention) in Manhattan in 1892 to envious attention, resulting in less than 15 years with the Great White Way.  The world’s largest electric bulb writing was on the Eiffel Tower , with Andre Citroen agreeing to light the outline of the tower if he could put his name on the rest of it.  I’m not sure how this was seen as a good idea, but the sides of the tower were used for this purposes until somebody wised up and put an end to it all in 1937.  But the writing-on-clouds- bit was enormous and terribly disrespectful, and never really took any sort of hold in Europe, though it did get some amount of play in the U.S. from time to time.  Mostly, cloud writing worked best in fiction, and for one particular person—and there it worked rather well. 

Fabulous Victorian Technical Attempts at the Future Commonplace

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[Source: Scientific American, July 11, 1869; also [The full description of the apparatus (as seen in the American Phreonological Journal, September, 1869) can be read in the continued reading section, below.]

And so in 1869 came this odd Victorian appeal to a frosty blend of survivability and entertainment.  The fellow in this woodcut was decked out in the very latest lifesaving apparatus for making one’s waxed-mustachioed way through disaster. The surviving member donned a very resistant, very heavy suit made of rubber, including a helmet (of some sort), all of which was made to make the wearer impervious to cold or heat./ Under the rubber suit was a floatation/buoyancy undersuit which seems to fit snug around the wear’s waistcoat.  It looks as though the whole of the suit would increase the mass of the wearer by something like one-third.  Most intriguing here is the little companion buoy (complete with a “Eureka” flag), which was outfitted with water, food, “reading material so that he may read the news to pass the time of day”, cigars, a pipe and tobacco, plus torches.  Evidently, this was to keep the person afloat, alive, and entertained for days on end. 

 [Source: Scientific American via Google Books]

This magnificent 1877 non-SteamPunk telescoping india-rubber screw, invented by Trauggott Beek (of Newark N.J.), is supposed to be waterproof, so that the wearer could put it on over evening clothing (as is the case in this illustration) and enjoy a spin in the surf before contemplating other Victorian nighttime reveries.  It was said that the wearer could stow away a month's worth of food in the suit, somehow--I don't see how this could be, especially if there was a month's worth of water, which would like fitting in the suit with another (larger) person.

 

[Source: Scientific American, May, 1877, issue #18.]

 

Triumphantly Unusual Images of the Eiffel Tower

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This image of the building of the foundation of the Eiffel Tower, which appeared in the Scientific American in 1888, appears both orderly and chaotic, a dizzy miasma of activity and a confusion of right angles.  (My six-year-old Tess says that it looks “worky”.)  Part of the issue is the fine quality of the jumble, with 90-degree angles everywhere, which confuses the eye.  Another part is the perspective, which is odd in places, and which takes the whole of it and makes the print into a near Escher-like experience of impossibility.  IT is this spatial confusion which makes this print so uncomfortable to me. For instance it seems that the observer’s point of view may be in several different positions, depending

on where you resolve to fix our eye: if you choose the worker’s shed in the upper left corner as a reference point, the height of you viewpoint will be different than if you used, say the first pointing man in the foreground as reference.  Also that pointing man sands next to a little rail track that seems to hoist itself into the air before disappearing.  There’s much else, but these examples will do for present.

These other images are the first nail & Eiffel Tower images I've ever seen.  The explanation is simple enough, though I think I'd much rather not know. 

This image and data is from the generally useful data and interesting if not useless info Scientific American Reference Book. A Manual for the Office, Household and Shop, by Albert A. Hopkins, and published in 1903. It gloriously depicts the annual American finish nail production in terms of Eiffel Towers:  there were evidently 10-million 100-pound kegs of these nails made in 1902; if they were made into one big nail, it would be this one--52' in diameter and 1000 feet tall.  I guess another useful visual bit would be the representation of the number of new houses built/kegs of nails, which would make this image a little more meaningful; though, perhaps, we may not be going for meaning, here, necessarily.

 

 

Powerhouse Woman Aviator: Amy Johnson, 1930

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Amy Johnson was the real deal. She was apparently hell-bent on flying:  she took her class “A” flying license in 1929 (at age 26) after just sixteen hours of training, and got her aviation engineer license a few months later (becoming one of the first women in England to do so.)  She was then off to Australia, by herself, becoming the first woman to make this as a solo flight.  Ms. Johnson covered all the bases in flight, knowing how to fly, having the stamina and courage for flight, and also being able to work a trade in the engine.  (Here she was the only woman ground engineer certified by the Air Ministry.)

When you look closely at this happy picture you can tell that Ms. Johnson came upon her frayed and worn pant cuffs honestly, as she did her oil/grime stained trouser legs.  This was no glam shot.

Amy Johnson accomplished other feats and firsts in aviation history before dying in the line of duty flying in 1942.     

Museum of the Impossible: The Basis for Goedel’s Attempt to Formalize the Logic of Boredom?

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(#17.5) Goedel’s Psychiatric Cheat Sheets

This description appears on pages 85-87 of the guide to the G.R."Joe"

Museum of the Imaginary and the Impossible*
The physical location of the collection is just south of Savannah on Tybee Island, Georgia.

Catalogue #17.5 (maths)  Received by Museum:  2 January 1960 

Kurt Godel’s Psychiatric Cheat-Sheet;  The Logician’s Notes on Surviving the 50-Minute Hour

Kurt Goedel, this century’s greatest logician (inventor/discoverer of the uncertainty principle and destroyer of what was thought to be the nearly-completed castle of Mathematical Finality) fled/escaped National Socialist Germany in 1940 and settled in Princeton's ’s Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS).  Goedel’s remarkable logical ability was followed closely by his collection of singularities—in a world of uneven people at the IAS, Goedel’s Unusual Prominences were highly unusual, and for many “odd” people Kurt Goedel was the definition of their three-letter defining disclaimer.

On exhibit is a collection of the intellectual paraphernalia that Goedel evidently assembled to bring with him to a September 1949 therapy session with his Trenton psychiatrist, Dr. R. Blister Kent.  Goedel put together a number of thoughts on various scraps of material that he must have used as “thought prompters”—their existence and purpose was  revealed in a series of letters to the Postmaster of Princeton describing these iconic objects “as Tibetan prayer rags…they were supposed to assure me of a certain level of attention and suffice to bring my mind to the business of the therapy session….without my scribbled clues I would have found myself bored beyond the supplication of mortal words.”

We see here the contents of an aged manila envelope labeled “

Trenton  Dr. Can Not Sep49” including the following, (with Goedel’s notations in quotation):

(Two)  Pressed flowers  with “ask about the laundry”; (three) Ticonderoga pencils with penciled notes “at what time did I happen”;  matchbook cover (“Happy’s Coffee Happy Restaurant”) with “I thought to stay and I stayed to go…”; a U.S. penny with a penned “x” through Lincoln’s head and the tiny words “not to be The Eat”; a 2’ long and 1” wide rolled piece of paper with musings on the relationship between memory, truth and imagination; a menu for a 1954 formal dinner introducing the JOHNIAC computer at the IAS in which Goedel has drawn a self portrait next to all  listed honorees names except his own; and several other small, inscrutable items.

 In Goedel’s collected correspondence from his uninvited letters to the Dead Letter Office at the Trenton Post Office period it is can be seen that he was intending to construct a puzzle of these objects and writings which were believed to contain the key for his germinal theory on the mathematics of boredom.

“There is a small leap from genius to boredom; if that can be breached and the two great concepts brought together I believe that I can accomplish truly wonderful thinking” Goedel wrote.  “I believe in boredom.  It is the Kind Devil that allows thought to grow; it is the great emancipator of time.  Boredom always wins; if I can ally that great heaviness with the energy of genius in pure form [i.e. mathematical formalism—editor] there will be no end to my creation.” 

Curator’s Notes:  Goedel had (many would say “suffered”) a life-long obsession with his health and the things that he thought impacted negatively upon it.   He believed that medicines that were given him by doctors were toxic, that water from the faucet was toxic, that the sun was toxic, that most foods he received were poisoned or toxic.  By 1970, when he was convinced (and forced) to seek medical help, his weight was recorded as 86 pounds even though he was 5’ 6’’ tall.  Goedel  had perhaps the world’s most singular interest in numbers; he was also extremely interested in the minutiae of daily life. 

Microcards and the Paper Internet

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For several decades, say in the 1930’s-1970’s, microforms, microfiche, microfilm and their related compatriots certainly looked as though they were next the direct and epochal inheritors of printing traditions that was limited to papyrus, paper, Gutenberg, and, well, micro-whatevers.  They weren’t too terribly wrong, and were actually getting a  little close to Vannevar Bush’s (1890-1974) Memex idea, as these processes of reproduction could reduce bookcases worth of bound material into a pile of cards a few inches high. It really was a sensational idea, and a major advancement in the distribution of knowledge.

Out of all the important advancements in the history of printing, though, the mico- division of accomplishments lasted the shortest amount of time, being phenomenally replaced by the first real man-machine symbiosis (at least called so by the originator, JCR Licklider), the internet.

(It is interesting to point out that at about the same time as the Memex concept was published in 1945, another man, Murray Leinster, whose dates are very similar to that of Bush (1890-1975) published a short story in Astounding Science Fiction magazine called ”A Logic Named  Joe”. The first sentence of the story reads: "It was on the third day of August that Joe come off the assembly line, and on the fifth Laurine come into town, an' that afternoon I saved civilization." Indeedy! Read the whole thing here.)

Leinster foretold a future in which computers would be in every household and connected by an electrical grid.  The “logic” was the home node, or terminal; “Joe” was a logic that had developed a little past the machine stage,  gaining some human capacity.  It was an astonishing attempt, and actually perhaps a little more prescient than the genius technoid Bush’s idea. 

 

God's Atomic Bomb: the Divine, the Infinite, and its "Gift" of the Bomb, 1946

JF Ptak Science Books    Reissue of Post 234//Archive

I'd like to say that this was a class-of-its-own sort of work, but as it  goes this is hardly the case.  If I cared a little I guess I could establish a collecting sub-category in the nuclear fission--atomic--nuclear  <continue>

 

 

A River of Odd Color: Unexpected Color Images of Food, 1949

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What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! Heart of Darkness

Coming on the heels of yesterday’s post about (impossible) retinal memory and the comfort of unusual color comes this bit of oddness from the House of La Rosa.  101 Ways to Prepare Macaroni seems about as benign and forgettable a title that one could write; that said, once opened, this little pamphlet poured its heart out to the Naïve Surreal in us all with the unforgettable (and accurate) color images of the promised linguine delicacies.  Honestly, the cover is why I have the thing—it is kind of perfect, a spare design that gets the message across, and leaves plenty of white.  It also uses a macaroni typeface.  But once inside the imagination is left to wander quite a bit between the colors of these foods that you were supposed to cook. And eat. 

I’ve long been a fan of taking a good close look at the foods on the  tabletops and dining tables of country homes, diners, and simple restaurants from the 1930’s—actually the Library of Congress is a wonderful source for this kind of image, having many thousands of them digitized from their monumental FSA collection.  The vast majority of these though are in black and white.  There seems to be not much more comforting than a checkered tablecloth on which a huge spread is laid for a farm family and their hired hands: giant bowls of mashed potatoes, big plates of corn, a huge pitcher of milk, and so on.  I could dive right in.  (The image below--by FSA great Russell Lee, shows a Kilgore, Texas, roughneck stopping for lunch.  This is not exactly what I had in mind, but the man has a real plate, a beautiful bottle of milk, cutlery, and all wrapped up in heavy paper--this is what brought-from-home lunches should look like.  And it makes me hungry.)

Then for some reason I started assembling a few hundred images of red photo ads of foods from LIFE magazine from the 1940’s—these are truly spectacular things, the reddest ads in the history of advertising.  (I’ll get to these in a week.) 

 And then came this funny little pamphlet and its bizarre display of food coloring that is so contentious that it might be able to put folks off their food.  Have a look. I’m uncertain of what happened to color selection for food advertising at this time; I do know that it is confusing to our sensibilities. (Color reproduction is accurate.)

 

 

 

 

Saving the Unsavable: Antique Wrapped Gifts and Retinal Memory (?)

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Don’t think, just look! --(early) Ludwig Wittgenstein  Don’t look, just think.--(late) Ludwig Wittgenstein

There is a certain class of things of the world that just weren’t intended to be saved.  There are the truly impossible things, like saving a battlefield in situ, or wrecks of various types (though there are war memorials featuring wrecked aircraft and tanks and such), and beautiful clouds¹, or waves, and so on. There are things that shouldn’t be saved, really, like unstoppable, non-foreseeably-useful biological agents, (real, and not the imaginary) massive weapons of mass destruction, and certain ideas that should never been taken our of the thought-vault and acted upon.   Down the list from the deeply impossible comes the extraordinarily not-probable, like the collection of things found in books that Marty Weil featured on his ephemera blog a few weeks ago. 

Which brings me to gifts—actually, gifts in wrapping paper meant for presentation.  These things in-and-of themselves wouldn’t survive unless the gift was lost, or given and then not unwrapped (a la Ms. Haversham—she still had her wrapped wedding presents, yes?), or something that interrupted the process.  Whereas some ephemera out there in the world might be saved for mysterious or obvious reasons—like baseball programs or ticket stubs—these things are generally post-usage; I’m not sure why anyone would save birthday/wedding gifts, unopened, unless they were one of the dark and disturbed characters in a black-and-white Jim Jarmusch film (with a musique concrete Tom Waits soundtrack).  Or a David Lynch toss-away character, the person standing by the side of the road, middle of nowhere (Texas), late at night, standing stiff, combing his/her hair, eyes closed. Anyway, I guess you can see now where I’m coming from with people who make collections of unopened gifts.

 Hence the pleasant surprise when I opened these two pamphlets, How to Do Gift Wrapping Magic with Cellophane (1937) and 33 Secrets of Gift Wrapping (1940).  Cellophane (from cellulose and diaphane, "transparent") is a polymer (along with rayon of glucose and was developed (patented in 1912) originally to protect table cloths from spills before the very much wider apps were seen for it. (Earlier in this blog I wrote about how plastics and cellophane changed the way the American public purchased their food, stuff now being sold by how it looked, with consumers pretty much or the first time being able to see what they were getting, among much else.) Ostensibly these two pamphlets are simple manufacturer’s promos to move cellophane products; but for me the interest was seeing all of the displayed examples of wrapped presents.

I had a  curious reaction to these pictures—somehow, even though the gifts tended towards the garish/gaudy by today’s standards of color schemes, the images and color selection seemed familiar and pleasing.  Certainly gifts couldn’t have been presented in such a way before, a high-sweet luster and translucence only available with cellophane.  It must’ve been quote a new and luxurious experience for folks to use, and so they used it quite a lot, much like the early days of Wordperfect (or WordStar!) when people were finding their sea legs for the wide new powers of presentation.

But seeing these present/gift pictures seemed a  little like sinking into a comfortable old chair, like a soft neural pillow finding a retinal memory of the long past, even though these gift exchanges happened decades before I was born. Weirdly, the colors seemed a little more than a description of the way my eye reacted to different bits of the visible spectrum.  Even though I know I don’t like these colors together—or separately sometimes—they still had a queer appeal to me. 

 This has swung a little far from the original target of this post.  The main point is still the survivability of stuff that demands to be destroyed in order for it to be used, and the use is entirely unknown until that destruction (of the wrapping of the present) is completed.

Notes:

1. These things can be imaged in 3-D, and holographed, but the thing itself cannot be saved; or at least, not yet.  Cool to imagine someone in The Future doing this...

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Museum of the Imaginary & the Impossible: Stolen Convicts' Letters Collection

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(#123.2) The Convict Letter Collection

This description appears on pages 188-189 of the guide to the
G.R. "Joe" Gebors Museum of the Imaginary and the Impossible*
The physical location of the collection is just south of Savannah on Tybee Island, Georgia. 

Catalogue #123.2  Received by Museum:  5 July 1957.  Originator:  Eric Mintz , born Erich Mintz in Paterson, New Jersey, 1830; died Archer City, Texas, 1913.]

Short Description:  Mintz’s leather-covered wooden steamer trunk (ca. 1855), with its contents of of undelivered, stolen letters from convicts under prisoner warder Mintz's charge.

• Trunk:  wood and leather with metal clasps (broken). 32x28x44”. 
  
• Trunk Contents: 2,412 letters, including 112 self-folding envelope letters; 2300 letters in "modern" envelopes; 1 volume, “Diary”, with dated entries from 1850 to 1892..

Summary:

Mintz was a prison guard for more than half a century and “collected” letters that were written by convicts and entrusted to him for delivery to postal officials.  He performed the acceptance part but ignored the delivery and simply kept all of the letters.  Over his many years Mintz accumulated some 402 letters.  All remained unopened.  Mintz’own diary--a scandalous affair of mostly repetitious, feverous, arithmetical nightmares in which he recorded his counting of one through ten many thousands of times--reveals that he stole the letters because he “liked the way they felt”. In our experience we have seen that people can be committed to deep and long-term heinous aberrations--like this--without very much thought at all as to why they're doing it.  Mintz may or may not have collected money for postage; though even then the remuneration for theft over such a long period of time--and committed in such a way as to cause extended suffering for those waiting responses that were never to come--would have been insignificant.  There is also no evidence that he held the email "for ransom".

Mintz worked in 13 jails in 7 cities in two states, and collected letters from felons convicted of crimes such as wire cutting, brand stealing, chicken gutting, soil teasing, indiscretions with hoofed animals, stump mangle, murder, arson-murder, fright-murder, and wanton abduction. The letters, dating from 1850 to 1910, and ranging in locations from San Francisco to San Antonio, were found intact in a trunk in the estate of Samul Wundt, a trunk collector.  The letters--still unopened--are now all subject to inspection in a court of law to settle the question of ownership resulting from multiple lawsuits between the Mintz heirs (to recover all of the letters), the Wundt heirs (to recover the trunk with the letters), the descendants of the persons writing the letters (to recover the letters), and the state of California (saying that the letters belonged to the state because they were stolen by a California resident of California residents).  All in turn sued the state of California for allowing the thefts to occur.  There was one lawsuit filed against New York City, which was deemed responsible for the entire series of events because the city government invented the use of ships as prisons. This puts the Museum in a frightful place; we will not be a party to any lawsuit and will abide by the court's decision(s).

Mintz died in 1913, a suicide, in Archer City, Texas, by swallowing a deputy’s badge.  

*Just to make sure, the Museum of the Imaginary and Impossible is my own fiction.  Everything else on this blog is factual. 

Museum of the Imaginary and Impossible: Found Word Biblopathology Poetry

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 724

(#156.2) Found Word Bibliopathology Poetry  [The following description appears on pages 67-69  of the guide to the G.R. "Joe" Gebors Museum of the Imaginary and the Impossible.]

 

Poetry from Found-Wordist and Book Pathologist Mr. Ignatio Norme

• [Catalogue #156.2  Received by Museum:  19 September 2006.  Originator:  Mr. Ignatio Norme [b. Boston, Mass, 1923; d. Hyannis, 25 January 1988.]

Short entry catalog  description: 

Ignatio Norme, Found-Wordist and Page Number Collector (Boston, Mass.; 1923-1988)

The man who found obscure phi-related connectivity between random word placement, page number and the poetic ideal.

 

 

 

Mr. Norme’s work first came to the attention of the literati in 1952 when Dallas Headman of Case Western described it as “a unique approach to approaching uniqueness”; this would be the only phrase ever used to evaluate Norme’s efforts in every review from 1922 to 1975, when his work stopped being noticed.  In a spectacularly prolific career Mr. Norme produced some 8,000 poems, most of which were produced on broadside sheets of paper or on large pieces of wood.  The combination of the materials of production and the many tens of  thousands of books led to Mr. Norme’s house being an internal castle, letting in neither visitor nor light, a friendly singularity for his pursuit.  As his utilities and taxes were paid decades in advance, Mr. Norme’s death, and the discovery of his corpse, was not discovered until 2005, seventeen years after his passing.

 

According to his unpaginated journals, Mr. Norme’s pattern of poetic creativity and discovery involved removing all page numbers from the book he was reading and then choose a number of the “poem lugs” at random.  He would then reverse the number, go to that page of the book, and then add the page number and go to that line of the book, and tear out the number of words as indicated by the page numbers ending numeral.  The bits would then be assembled, and the page numbers glued to the walls of his house.  (We estimate that there were some 60 million page numbers glued to all surfaces of Mr. Morme’s home.  The house itself has been purchased by the Museum of American Art, a full room of which will be on display in that museum’s Outsider Art collection in the Henry Darger wing.)

 

 

 

Mr. Norme found poetry everywhere he found it, seeing in the simplest verb the most compound noun; even when the poetry seemed not to find an external logical sensate, the internal phi-correlated word relations played in the mind behind all phases of knowledge, an unheard neuro-music that encapsulated the idea of unknown “correctness” in the vision of the poem. 

Sarah Mapp, Shape Mistress: a Bone-setting "Osteopath" of the 18th Century

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Bibliodyssey, a fantastic, unstoppable resource for endlessly interesting images and ideas, celebrates its 1000th post today.  Its creator and master, “Peacay”, has provided a tremendous visual resource to those interested in history and design and art and all manner of oddiana, important and not, big and small, significant and ephemeral.  I estimate that in his 1000 posts that there must be 10,000-20,000 images.  It is a beautiful and exhaustive site of high quality, it is hard to think of it all being created and maintained by one man.  It exposes its readers to such a expanded selection of very highly unusual sources that it is impossible not to come away from each post with an idea.  

Looking at his post today—which is a review of the most popular/interesting posts, I worked my way through the “remarkable people” segment and came across some extraordinary, outsider-y, edge-of-society folks.  There were those more interesting than Sarah Mapp—the person I’m choosing to write about right now—though I think none have  a more curious, ethereal or causative descriptor than she.  She is referenced as a shape mistress.  

Sarah was one of the most famous of the 18th c (ca. 1730’s) women “doctors”/quacks/potent peddlers/pill makers/medicant dabblers, and was evidently a “colorful”, unique package of a person.  A daughter of a bone setter, Sarah was described as one herself, as well as a “shape setter”, which is just simply a beautiful term. She was born Sally Wallin until her marriage to Mr. Mapp, who beat and abused her soon after marriage, after which, evidently, she took to London to ply her trade.  Ms. Mapp rode in a glorious chariot pulled aby a four-horse team, charging 20 guineas a session (at times), and would make her return trip with the crutches of those she had cured displayed proudly on her coach. She was successful—I’m not sure what that actually means, probably that she reset broken bones without causing deformities—and then not so.  Forty years after her death, aristocrat and physician Percival Potts sought to scrub Ms. Mapp (also known as "Crazy Sally of Epson")  from medical memory, calling her “an ignorant, illiberal, drunken female savage”. (This sentiment was echoed in an 1884 edition of the American Journal of Pharmacy, vol 93. page 534, which less fluently descirbed her as an drunken, ugly, gross and cross eyed sot.)

Ms. Mapp was a (wild?) maverick in a very small field of women practioners, a collection without collective, never joined or organized.  High case of weird or not, she was a significant figure in getting women into a more public place, dealing with women and men, a certainly uncommon occurrence. 

See:  Power and the Professions in Early Industrial Britain, by Penelope J. Corfield, 1995.  http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2007/05/remarkable-persons.html

Odd Things on Title Pages Department: Circumcision, 1507

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When Johannes Pfefferkorn (1469-1523) was released from prison he rushed himself into a conversion to Christianity (having come from a Jewish family in Nuremberg) and published a notorious diatribe against his former people.  Speculum Adhhortationis Iudaice ad Christum, which was published in 1507, savaged the Jews, calling for immediate

conversion to the recognition of Christ as savior, giving up all banking concerns, and throwing out the Talmud.  It packed a lot of sneering speculation into a mere twenty pages, and was one a of a number of anti-Jewish pamphlets (also including his en ihr Ostern halten (1508); Judenbeicht (1508); and Judenfeind (1509)) in which Pfefferkorn unleashed horrible prescriptions.  He came to believe that the best way to deal with the Jews was to kill them, convert them, expel them, or enslave them; that was about it.  He waged a successful campaign against the Jewish intellectual life by convincing the Emperor to allow the confiscation of all Jewish books (except for the Old Testament), embarking on an extended tour of Germany to do so.  At the bottom of it all, he thought that the best way to deal with theological issues that opposed his own was to crush the believers and steal their books. 

Of interest to me here though is the remarkable woodcut on the title page.  On a very wide crucifix we see the blood of the bleeding wounded Christ pouring itself into a baptism font, with eight (or so) praying people waiting to avail themselves of it, including the onlooking attention of the Virgin Mary and a Pope (Peter?).  In the foreground is a dismal portrayal of a group of Jews, showing them small, gnarled, without benefit of vision and legs.  At the extreme bottom left is the circumcision, he only time I can remember seeing such a thing on a title page.  It was an awful visual propagandistic  juxtaposition, a fitting illustration for an awful pamphlet.