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People Out of Place: Mailrooms and Traffic Islands, Military, 1918

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This is the U.S. Army mail depot at Regents Park, London, braced for and under siege by  Christmastime mail in 1917. It strikes me that there are not a million items in this photo--at this time in the war there were something like 35 million people in the services for all countries dedicated to the war effort, which is approximately half the number that served in total.  If these letters in this picture were bodies, I reckon that there would be five more rooms like this necessary to tell the visual picture of the war dead and wounded.  This aside, I initially focused on the guy in the rear with the white shirt and tie, standing there pretty much overwhelmed by the task of moving all of that stuff...and perhaps with the idea that much of the mound would wind up being undeliverable because the recipient was killed.  I wonder if that mail was returned, or not?

 

                            

On the other end of the spectrum is this bizarrely-titled photo of a British soldier "guiding" a traffic signal device...the description says that this is the busiest intersection in all of British-occupied France.  Maybe so, but not at this particular time.  Perhaps the photographer should've waited a bit to get a different sort of picture to make his point, rather than settle for this lonely (if not beautifully arranged) situation.

                                                                                                            

Here's the image without the accompanying text, which was supplied for the end-user of the photo by the news service photography supplier. 

 

“Lesser Light Rules the Night…”—an Early Picture of Multiple Universes?

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Blank and Empty Things #56

This sort-of famous image, found in a French Bible Mortalisee made in Reims in the 13^th century,

displays The Creator measuring its creation, a sphere of the universe containing all of the stuff of creation, and including the Earth (pictured at upper right).  At least that is what I think this is—Creator stepping into the frame (its right foot outside the drawn border of the image), holding everything that it has made, and holding it all in the midst of another environment of some sort.  What that place might actually be, I don’t know.  Is that the space in-between the light created on the fourth day (pictured below from Schedel’s so-called Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493), the space that wasn’t the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night?  In this spirit it was the stars that were supposed to separate these two lights, but the stars themselves in many of the concentric circle cosmologies weren’t part of the Heavenly sphere itself, which is what the Reim’s illustrations seems to say.  I suppose that it is all simply displayed somewhere in the OT, but from where I sit right now, this looks like a painfully early Western image of multiple universes. 

The other thing is:  what is the Creator looking at?  It is definitely very focused and wide-eyed, and is lasered on something about half of the diameter of the universe to the right, just on the other side of the dividers. Is this the biggest of the Blank and Empty Things that can be imagined? 

Curious, Secretive, Sacred Irish Independence Political Icons (?)

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"Malone. … My father died of starvation in Ireland in the black ’47. Maybe you heard of it?
Violet. The Famine!
Malone (with smouldering passion) No, the Starvation. When a country is full of food, and exporting it, there can be no famine. Me father was starved dead; and I was starved out to America in me mother’s arms. English rule drove me and mine out of Ireland . …" --George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)

 

 

"The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight but the English created the famine...a million and half men, women and children were carefully, prudently and peacefully slain by the English government. They died of hunger in the midst of abundance which their own hands created."--John Mitchel (1815-1875), Irish Nationalist (and listed as a "martyr" in one of these badges/stamps)

I'm sorry to say that I do not know the origin of these diminutive, powerful emblems, and that what follows is all guess-work. They are only about a half-inch square or so, but they hold very powerful meanings in their messages.  I imagine that they were political messages to be worn, or posted in the mail, or used in subversive ways--because their messages were enormously subversive, taking on the occupying power of Great Britain at a time of supreme and enforced deprivation, an occupied people fighting against a spectacularly-better equipped foe.  The messages related to the Great Famine of 1847-1849, when the potato crops failed for three consecutive seasons , initiating a chain of events that caused the deaths of perhaps two million people, or 20% of the entire population of Ireland.  People didn't starve so much as they did die of associative diseases related to the process of starving to death, al of which it seems could have been addressed by some sort of effort by the British government.  It does seem to me as though the people of Ireland were left to flounder and drown.  The stories of the extreme deprivation are horrible:  starving dogs digging up the bodies of the recently unguarded dead, rats attacking the dying for food, and so on.  Terrible, miserable stories coming from what is probably the worst of period of starvation in European history.  the scene has been duplicated numerous times in this century killing hundreds of millions of people:: in Soviet Stalin's filthy anti-human pogroms, under the equally filthy Maoist adventures in production and nationalist strength in China, in Biafra, in Darfur, and on and on in our frailly stupid political existence here on Earth.

The small badges have always seemed somewhat sacred to me; there's just such a feeling of hope and inspiration and overwhelming empathy in them.  

 

 

Visual Display of Quantitative Data: Solomon Islands Battle Results

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I'm always ready to see different and interesting methods of displaying quantitative data, and this work--published in LIFE magazine in 1942--certainly fits that category.  That the ship losses are printed in reverse--white on black--is unusual in itself, but the design is just particularly good, fitting a lot of data on a single sheet of paper.  The image dramatically displays some very good (and very welcomed) news for the American public as the campaign for the Pacific dug in.  This was a major Allied victory in November 1942, and one of the pieces of the end for a campaign that stretched itself out over three years. 

--Solomon Island WWII battle chronology found HERE.

--General history of the Solomons campaigns HERE.                                                                                                           

Detail of the above:

Beautiful Title Pages 7: Gorgeous Design for Childen by Christoph Weigel, 1726

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"O Babees yonge, my Book only is made for youre lernynge” says what well may be the first book made in the West for children, written in the 14th century.  It was made for the eyes of noble blood, of course, and was basically a contribution towards how the children should act and behave, rather than teaching them anything outside of their immediate interactions with each other or their parents.  Books of manner and behavior was the dominant—if perhaps the only(?)—category of books for children until the late 16th century.

John Locke, in his Thoughts on Education (1691), suggests that "when a child begins to read, some easy, pleasant book, like Aesop's Fables or Reynard the Fox, with pictures if possible, should be put into his hands". He adds, "What other books there are in English of the kind above-mentioned, fit to engage the liking of children, and tempt them to read, I do not know, but am apt to think, that children, being generally delivered over to the method of schools, where the fear of the rod is to enforce, and not any pleasure of the employment to invite them to learn, this sort of useful books, amongst the number of silly ones that are of all sorts, yet have had the fate to be neglected; and nothing that I know has been considered of this kind out of the ordinary road of the hornbook, primer, Psalter, Testament, and Bible." (This quote from C.M. Watkins article in The Atlantic Monthly, 1880.)

Perhaps the most beautiful of early books for children is found behind this deeply designed title page, brought to us by Christoph Weigel (German, 1654-1726), the author, illustrator and engraver of Die Welt in einer Nuss oder die Historien vom Aufgang der Welt…¹ published in Nurnberg in 1726.  The book was a tall, thin production, with 16 pages of text and 43 engraved plates, much like this one, emblazoned with emblematic studies and dedicated to a particular point in the historical continuum.  And it was intended, believe it or not, for children—the title can be basically translated as “The World in a Nutshell” and was absolutely intended for kids, compressing all of the human story into 16 terse pages and a whole bunch of gorgeous illustration. This image shows the second millennium after the birth of Christ, illustrated with seven engravings (secula septem).

Notes:

1. Weigel, Christoph: Die Welt in einer Nuß oder Die Historien vom Anfang Der Welt samt deren Zeit-Rechnung bis auff unsere Zeit auf eine besondere und ganz leichte Art kurz zusammen zufassen oder ausgebreitet in einem Augenblick auf einer einigen Tafel zu wiederhohlen, fürgeschrieben und fürgebildet. [Nürnberg]: 1726

A short timeline of Early Children’s Literature:

Orbis Pictus (1658) by John Amos Comenius: perhaps the first book of stories written for children to be illustrated. 

Charles Perrault, the inventor, perhaps of the new genre of the fairy tale,  wrote (in the 1660’s-1690’s) tales that include Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (Little Red Riding Hood), La Belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty), Le Maître chat ou le Chat botté (Puss in Boots), Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de vair (Cinderella), La Barbe bleue (Bluebeard), Le Petit Poucet (Hop o' My Thumb), Les Fées (Diamonds and Toads), La Marquise de Salusses ou la Patience de Griselidis (Patient Griselda), Les Souhaits ridicules (The Ridiculous Wishes), Peau d'Âne (Donkeyskin) and Riquet à la houppe (Ricky of the Tuft).  Some of the stories were simple, some not; some were hard, some not.  Reading the originals (or close to them) and reading them fully leaves them outside my taste, especially for kids.

A Token for Children. Being An Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of several Young Children (1672) by James Janeway. One of the first books specifically written for children and which shaped much eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writing for kids--as you can tell, not a happy go.  Its a wonder we're all not dead.

The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come by John Bunyan (1678):  Christian allegory serving as a model for many more such works to come.

A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744) by John Newbery: avery early book of really nothing but fun and a few promos.

The Governess; Or, Little Female Academy (1749) by Sarah Fielding: Often described as the first novel for children

Lessons for Children (1778-9) by Anna Laetitia Barbauld.  A best-selling book series made for little and grubby hands, easy to hold, wide margins and easy to read and adaptable to different age groups. 

The Brothers Grimm (German: Die Brüder Grimm also Gebrüder Grimm), Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Karl (1786–1859). Myths and stories told without holding back on what might cause years' worth of nightmares. Very tough going by today's standards. Very.

Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) fairy tale-ist,  "The Snow Queen", "The Little Mermaid", "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "The Ugly Duckling"; storie smore suited for a kinder and more comfortable bedtime once th elights go out.

Cars Driving in the Sky: the Future of the City, 1930's

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In an earlier post here I wrote about  living a big life in a big airplane--I saw this weird little print and was attracted to its unrepentent awfullness and the sleeky bulbous nature of this exotically unflyable aircraft.  I guess it bothered me becuase even though it was unsupportably  big it didn't bother to have any of the luxurious features that other, similarly bloated-enormous aircraft had at the time:  swimming pools, greenhouses, landing strips for other planes...  This one didn't have anything like that, and didn't really seem to make any sense, unless that big belly part was actually a zeppelin or something like that, filled with helium--but even that doesn't make sense.  Perhaps we need to assume that it is supported in the air by something yet named and unknowable, powered by engines that were far advanced.  But what is more interesting in the print are the multi-tiered auto-skyways and suspended nonsensical roads that hang between the skyscrapers like a gravity marble game.

These other cities of the future at least take a greater leap of faith in the belief of extraordinary inventions and abandon the generally stylized shape of known aircraft and propulsion systems.  At least for the next two images, even the architecture is mostly new.  What I'd really like to know is what people were doing in those buildings and where they were going in those hover cars.  For the most part in stories of the future like this people were simply going to work as they would in 1937, driving off with anti-gravity sumpin' to Spacely Sprockets to do office work as it was in the past. 

 

 

For the most part future vision seemed grounded in the past, techno-wizzardry  carved into the fabric of existing society.  I'm not so sure what was so "futuristic" about elevated railways stacked up on top of each other like flapjacks, but to someone there in the 1930's past it looked like a great thing about to happen....in 1965. 

The Devil in the Mirror, ca. 1560

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There’s plenty of interesting images in the Renaissance and Baroque featuring images caught as reflection in a mirror, none more famous I guess than Van Eyck's marriage scene (which I’ve written about several times in this blog, most recently in "Original Reflections: unique experiences with mirrors, Van Eyck and Brunellesci, here).  What is unusual here is that we see the Devil in the mirror (actually the devil’s hindquarters), which to my experience is very uncommon. Also I thought the phraselet “the Devil in the Mirror/Mirrour” was well used and worn, but, as it turns out, it is hardly so, though there’s a near-alphabet of things that the devil could be in. 

For example, when looking through FirstSearch/WorldCat (a massive catalogue of books in libraries world wide and a cataloguing librarian’s best friend) for the things that a devil might be in, as in the phrase “the devil in the ____” we find the devil in a belfry, book (a Dalton Trumbo novel!), bush, candle, cheese, classroom, cross, dark, details, drain, desert, deep blue sun, flesh, fog, gateway, hills, junior league, kitchen, Middle Ages, milk, modern world, mountain, New World, shape of a woman.  The devil in the mirror turns out only to be so in a song. 

None of this amounts to a hill of  ____  (beans, cocoa, molasses, moolah, fritos), but I found it unusual that the phrase and the whole devil-in-a-mirror idea to be so scarce.  Unless he can’t be seen in a mirror….No wait, that’s a vampire

I know I'm wasting this image with this trivial pursuit when a decent writer would be looking at Satan over the ages, or its virtual non-appearance in the Bible, or the different names of the devil or its infernal helpers, and its other unholy images, or the history of Hell itself., or of the history of guilt, or fear (see Jeff Donlan's lovely appraisal of Daniel Gardner's The Science of Fear, which doesn't really have anything to do with the devil but is a great idea) or temptation, or general unacknowledged dark worry.  I just stuck to the picture. 

This naturally leads to looking at some antiquarian book titles involving devils and the nonsense and hokum that they got into.  Here’s a few lovely examples of titles-as-long-as-opening-paragraphs; it seems that the less old they are the less detailed they become.  But I’m probably wrong about that, too. 

The displaying of supposed witchcraft : wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of deceivers and impostors, and divers persons under a passive delusion of melancholy and fancy but that there is a corporeal league made betwixt the devil and the witch, or that he sucks on the witches body, has carnal copulation, or that witches are turned into cats, dogs, raise tempests or the like, is utterly denied and disproved ; Wherein also is handled, the existence of angels and spirits, the truth of apparitions, the nature of astral and sydereal spirits, the force of charms, and philters; with other abstruse matters / 
Author: Webster, John, 1610-1682.

War with the devil, or, The young mans conflict with the powers of darkness in a dialogue : discovering the corruption and vanity of youth, the horrible nature of sin, and deplorable condition of fallen man : also a definition, power, and rule of conscience, and the nature of true conversion : to which is added an appendix containing a dialogue between an old apostate and a young professor, worthy the perusal of all, but chiefly intended for the instruction of the younger sort / 
Author: Keach, Benjamin, 1640-1704.

A Whip for the Devil, or, The Roman conjuror discovering the intolerable folly, prophaneness and superstition of the papists in endeavouring to cast the Devil out of the bodies of men and women by him possest ... / 1683

I find these title strangely satisfying, much like the dime library westerns of the late 19th century with their tow-parter extendo-titles:  Valerie of the Blazing Sands; or, Colonel Ingraham and the Satisfied Sod Buster, a Tale of Woe and Heroism and such.  

Fat Maps and Underwear-Generated Sterilizations: Eugenics

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JM Turner (an M.D. and a Ph.D.) wrote "Physique and Choice of Career" for The Eugenics Review of October 1954.  He reported on the statistical survey correlating body type and profession, one in a considerable line of such statistical drunkenness which found pseudo-scientific results from closeness of fit between fat, muscle and criminality and professions. I really don't want to get very much into the details of this story because it just isn't worth it--simply put, the doctor was finding correlations between some body types and students at an officers' training academy and Oxford. The military officers in training were heavier than the Oxford students.  The end.  [Interestingly the author references an earlier study from 1939 which found correlations between body types and different sorts of crimes among 17,000 incarcerated juvenile offenders.   Turner uses the results to support his own but also finds fault with the earlier study, stating that it lacked "any very workable classification of physique...his study was more of a high altitude aerial survey than a detailed map of the ground". This doesn't prevent the use of the findings, however.]

It was this sort of thinking that the sniffy and in-its-own-peculiar-way venerable The Eugenics Review (1909-1968) its influence, a cancerous spittle which found its way all over the globe. Eugenics was seated in the work of the very formidable work of the polymathic Sir Francis Galton (the word coined in his Inquiries into human faculty and its development in 1883), and found its way into some deep scientific corners until its was generally rejected at about the same time of the journal's death.

The influence of eugenics reached far and deep and wide, finding its place even here near where I live--deeper here, and later than expected, as it turns out.  The Human Betterment League, started in 1947 in Winston-Salem (North Carolina) with the influence and money of James G. Hanes (of the Hanes hosiery and underwear fortune), instituted a vicious resurgence of interest in eugenic sterilization just at the time when this practice was beginning to come to its end in other places.  As you can see, eugenic-based sterilization in North Carolina was sliding into  social consciousness and decline just at the beginning the the Human Betterment reign of terror, spiking to over 700 sterilizations in just a few years after its underwear-y inception.  The majority of the victims of this social cleansing, of this cleaning of the gene pool, of this save-us-from-"them" mentality,were black. SOme of these people were classified as "morons" according to standardized testing that many were never before exposed to; some were classified as deviants and defectives ready for sterilization if they chose to have a baby produced by rape.  The road to  racial purity was a wide one for the Betterment  folks; fortunately, it was not a long road, though they were able to force sterilizations of thousands of unfortunate victims and did so until the late 1960's.  This is a bad story for the history of this state and one which is not frequently discussed, though reparations discussions are underway, cushioned by a very skimpy installment of 250,000 from the state coffers to establish offices and a board and bureaucrats to study the issue.  This is many millions of dollars off the mark, but it does benefit some mid-level manager somewhere in the state capital at Raleigh... 

[Source for sterilization pamphlet and graph: Against Their Will--the North Carolina Sterilization Program.]

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