JF Ptak Science Books

Picture Dictionary of Extinct Semi-Luxuries, Part 1

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1016       

Luxury for the not-wealthy, the luxuries of the working classes, is a relatively new invention in the West.  Virtually unmolested except by the aristocracy, "luxury" was a thing defined to exclude nearly everyone in Europe, the United Kingdom, America and virtually any other place.  Not until the second Industrial Revolution did capital become more "absorbent" to those working for it, with the working classes allowed to be paid more and keep more of it--money in the hands of the mass of society became expendable on the stuff of life that wasn't necessarily "necessary".   This picture dictionary--collected but not assembled by the social muse and graphical strategist Malcom Mumbry (of Landrum, South Carolina, working-class neighbors to the wealthy in the horse country of northern South Carolina)--displays some of the many new luxuries of the 1880-1920's period, most of which have now been lost to the dust and short memory.

The images are beautiful and unusual--their content may be even more so, and generally unexpected and--occasionally-unimagined. We'll be making posts to this site until we can construct a few representative alphabets of lost luxuries--their initial presentation will  not be made alphabetically.

H     Hat Ennui.  

 

By the time this photo was made in 1920 hat-need had surpassed itself to the point where only ennui could quench the continuing hat-thirst.  So much so as a matter of fact that Giles Rope, a French playwright, wrote and co-produced  (along with Guy la Flembeur) "Ennui Chappeu", an absurdist work on the developing hat anti-lust.  Intended as a silent/violent statement against hat ennui, it became a pro-ennui sensation--not only did men want hat ennui, they evidently wanted to watch other men with hat ennui, as well. The play ran 85 weeks in Paris, 50 in London and 102 in New York, closing in 1926.

H  Hats, Bologna

 

Perhaps a more unusual hat story in 1921 was the appearance of party hats for over-sized bologna.  The delicatessen standard was new in 1921, and in order to make it more somehow appealing to customers the bologna were dressed in large, flat-brimmed party/sun hats.  By 1922, bologna hat racks began to appear in some eateries; by 1923, the hat craze was over, and bologna had shrunk. 

S  Sob-watching/sob-watchers

The somewhat wealthier classes were offered a short "Exclusive Hirelings" pamphlet by Bent Gruel Company (of Chicago),  where well-dressed "Attendants" could be hired to "engage at a distance". This amounted to polite watching--interested parties could now hire one (or more) of Gruel's sophisticated cadre to "attend to the visual needs deserted" of people in joy or crisis so that whatever it was being experienced was now not necessarily experienced alone. (In the above scene a client has hired three men to equidistantly observe her weeping by a painted window.)

M   Maid Fainting

For the millions of Americans who were newly affluent in 1925 but not affluent enough to afford a fainting maid that they could attend to came the Maid Fainting Society Inc of America.  Bonded in 15 states, MFSA sponsored overseas maids to faint in good American homes.  They were hired out at $4/hour (a handsome hourly sum in 1925), the fainting maids being allowed to keep half.  In 1926 a sub-cult of Extra-Tall Fainting Maids was born (an example of which is picture above), and provided an income to thousands for several years.  (One of the last silent films ever made, Fainting Maid Maiden, with Clara Bow, 1944, used this phenomenon as a basis for its story; by that time however the craze had passed, the war was on, and no one cared anymore for silent films about fainting maids.)

C   Cigar Cane Rentals

An excellent example of an extinct semi-luxury that was almost entirely based in England and which never caught on anywhere else in the world was cigar cane rentals.  As seen in this photo (made in London in 1922), well-intentioned better-clothed country pensioners were brought into the city and made to pose with their renter canes.  Wooden canes evidently deprived Londoners of a "cigar aromaticity" need that was fulfilled with these canes made of cigars.  The short craze lasted for about 15 months, during which time better than 500 cane renter holders were stationed around London at walking parks on any given evening.  It was an essential part of care rental to do so on brick, as the cigar cane tip made a distinctive sound  (a harley-like individuality if you may), which was enjoyed by the renter and the non-renter alike.  AS we can see in the photo above, nearly all of the cane renter men have already rented their canes, pushing the last two men with canes to the front for greater visibility.  

--end, Part I

Women at War: England, 1918 (Part 1)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1015

This is another (number 15 or so) in a series of posts on images from my News Service Photographs of WWI collection.  All thousand or so of them were made in the last half of 1918, in the last months of the grueling conflict, and were intended to be used by newspaper and magazines to illustrate stories about the war. An editor would send off a request to one of these agencies for, say, a photograph of marching American nurses, and the agency would send one back (for a fee) along with a caption.   There's really no way for me to determine if these photos were ever published, and there is never an attribution for the photographer. 
[Another example in this series can be found here. Also if you enter the search term for news service photo in the google site search box you'll get 55 or so returns.]

This is the first installment of women at war--there should be another 35 or so coming soon.

Also I've micromanaged the prints, pulling out a detail from each one of them, a detail of an appealing portrait perhaps difficult to see int he overall original.

For example:

comes from the sweeping woman at right, taking care of some debris in a munitions factory in October 1918, sweeping as the King and Queen of England stroll by on a visit/inspection.  I suspect she was instructed to say nothing and to not look up from her work.  She doesn't look nervous to me, though--her hands aren't tightly gripped around the broom handle, and her face looks relaxed...

WRAF in track and field exercises, Kent.  This is the third-place finisher, running while leaning back, trying to keep everything in place, mouth closed, arms down--pretty good results from such an awkward and highly-mannered style of running.  Also, the woman to her right is a dead-ringer for Alan Turing (if you've ever seen the Enigma Man running at track, I think you'd have to agree.)

The great Alan Turing

The full image of the race:

I just liked this woman from the typing/steno pool.

 

Detail of the image of the Forestry Corps of the Women's Land Army of England, working at cutting telegraph poles on some great-looking draught horses.  (The horse on the right--ears back--looks big and unhappy.)  I love that this woman is wearing a tie.

Detail from "Soldiers' children being care for by volunteer nurses, Berlin, June 19, 1919".

  xcxc

 

A History of Blank & Empty Things #70: Thought and Fox-Tossing

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1015

In the ten-level history of blank thought none are more cardinally ninth-level than the abuse of animals–except of course the abuse of animals for sport. (As unspeakable as this is there is always another level of the truly unspeakable.)  In the early 17th century, at about the same time that the two Electors of Saxony were legendarily and grossly dispatching animals of all shapes and sizes (including 110,530 deer, 54,200 wild boar, 6,607 wolves, 477 bears and all manner of small “prey”) there existed a German Court sport of fox-tossing.

What would happen is this: a coral would be made of cloth screens; court favorites would entire the enclosures with ropes while disabled foxes were also introduced; the people would pair up with a long rope between them, held slack t the ground; the animals would run in an enforced terror around and through the pairs and over the slack ropes; when the fox tried to run over the rope, the pair would yank the rope taught, launching the fox into the air.  And so on until everything was up in the air or dead.  And that’s it. 

Fleming’s  Deutsche Jaeger  (published in 1719) produced this (above) image, and commented on it: “Skilled male tossers could toss a fox 24 ft. high...At a famous fox-tossing in Dresden there were tossed some 687 foxes, 533 hares, 34 badgers, 21 wild cats, and at the end 34 young wild boar and 3 wolves....”

Oscar Wilde famously skewered fox hunting, which pales in comparison to this thing; I find it difficult to imagine what he might have said about fox tossing. 

The Great Rarity and Sublimity of Antiquarian Artwork by Children

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1014

I think that I can safely say that artwork by children does not make very many appearances in Western art prior to the 20th century--published images just don't appear.  Nor do the originals--considering the ephemeral nature of the effort at art by children, their work just don't seem to survive.  Some of that reason--particularly in America--was the scarcity of materials for kids to produce art with: paper was not inexpensive, and neither brushes and paints.  Crayons, invented for chubby and reachy fingers, were not invented for the mass market until 1903.  (Crayola sold eight crayons in a box for a nickel.  The colors?  Black, brown, blue, red, purple, orange, yellow, and green.)   Then of course the artwork would have to be saved, somehow, for generations.  As much as it would be fascinating to find artwork done at age four by your great-great grandparents, it would have to survive the cleansing tendencies of four generations of clean-up.  End result:  there's just not that much antiquarian chldrens' art floating around.

It also doesn't appear as art in artwork.  It is possible to find numerous examples of kids' scratches in stone and such in ancient graffiti, but it doesn't appear as elements of fine artwork, or, for that matter, in book illustration. 

Also it seems to me that the artwork for pre-school age children looks about the same—3-year-old kids drawing images of other people tend to look pretty much identical, and so this way over many centuries.  No doubt some group has studied this in depth and in detail, though I don’t know about it—to me, by seat-of-the-pants reckoning, the representations of people/animals/sun/sky and so on look like they can be coming from the same classroom, even when the art is coming from different centuries and from different parts of the globe.  (At least for the 99% of them.)  I find this remarkable.  Then of course things happen, children change, they get schooled, educated, informed, indoctrinated, and on and on.  But for that early period, the art of children has a spectacular commonality.

Reigning this in, the issue of childhood art was again rallied after finding an illustration of children’s school art—there was a sort of diorama, but then there was also an image of clay figures made by kids…and then there was the sand castle.  I honestly cannot recollect ever seeing a hundred-year-old image of a child’s sand castle.  Some woodcut must appear in Harper’s Weekly or some such magazine, showing play at the beach, perhaps the castle making an incidental appearance at the edge of the scene.  I was struck by the picture, and by its (perhaps) rarity.  I have no doubt that kids having been building things in sand and mud forever; whether there are many published pictures of the results, I really don’t know.

There is another fine example (pictured above, at top)  in Thomas Truman's The Nurse's Rhyme Book, a New Collection of Nursery Rhymes, published in Philadelphia in 1847.  The book is filled with unusual illustrations and fantastic ornamental borders, all used in support of some odd, scary, mean and occasionally pretty mid-century posies meant as night-time entertainment for the young ones.  Our prize is found on the very last page, the final slug of an illustration to a more-finely illustrated book: a coy, small boy, holding an example of his art, seemingly drawn on a framed slate. He looks happy, pleased, proud to me--on the one hand he is interested in sharing his achievement and on the other is really too shy to share, an emotion I've seen from time to time with my girls. As a matter of semi-fact, this is a rare emotion to see displayed in art, the too-shy-to-share routine saved more for fluttery self-conscious Victorian grown-ups more so than for children.. 

Believe me, after having dealt with books and prints as an antiquarian for almost 30 years, and also having a collection of sorts of antiquarian childrens' arts, pictures like this just don't surface very often at all.  Over the years I've made some annoying phone calls and emails to librarians at art galleries (especially at the National Gallery in DC where I was a pester) explaining my interest and trying to find out if this struck any bit of memory in their brains--I never once had a positive answer. (I expected at some point that someone would say, "Oh yes, of course--there's a census of that that Mr. Kemp of Yale did in 1977”. Or something, some sort of memory for this kind of image.) This is hardly an academic pursuit, but my occasionally ritualistic clawing seems to bear out that these things are just not available.

All I have to go with here is the sheer emotion of seeing some of these pictures--they strike such an utterly deep chord, and are so astonishing, and personal,and so completely resonating, that I  know they are important..  In a way I think that whatever is in the picture in that little boy's hand from 1847 is what everyone is looking for

The Fate of the Future & the Ironies of Artistic "Futurism"

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 1013

“The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to happen! They will come against us, our successors, will come from far away, from every quarter, dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, flexing the hooked claws of predators, sniffing doglike at the academy doors the strong odor of our decaying minds, which will have already been promised to the literary catacombs.”--from the “Futurist Manifesto”, by F.T. Marinetti, 1909

 

They came for Mr. Marinetti a little earlier than that, and continued to come, though whoever it was that came couldn’t quite reach the founder of futurism, who seemed to be one invisible step ahead of oblivion.  Or perhaps it was behind?  I’m not sure.

But futurism as a movement was more in the past than in the future, barely lasting long enough to have anything but a past.

Not that the movement wasn’t important–it was, obviously–its importance branched out into other areas and movements, morphing into necessary branches, leaving behind a shell of the original tended by the originator.  (It can be argued that this movement helped create the environment for Dadaism and Cubism [or at least Cubist-futurism as in the Russian sense of that art].)  Marinetti had some unsavory and some jsut downright weird political and social ideas, having a long and vested interest in fascism.¹  And not only the earliest part of Italian fascism –founded in 1919 with an interest in expanding the democratic process–but the later, Mussolini-controlled Italian fascism as well.  Marinetti sought the protection of Il Duce,² and even so during the war, when he sought to protect his movement’s art from being designated as “degenerate ” and therefore unacceptable and existence-deniable by Adolf Hitler.

This is the cover of a magazine edited by Marinetti and others, a hagiographic-porn hommage to the leader of the Italian fascist government, Benito Mussolini, featuring a very striking portrait of the leader on the cover. 

And so the unlikely prolonged existence of futurism--a movement transformed far beyond itself in a matter of years, held together by pieces of fluff and dust, supported in its old age on the hopes of a noxious political system which was itself doomed to rapid failure.

“At last they’ll find us—one winter’s night—in open country, beneath a sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. They’ll see us crouched beside our trembling aeroplanes in the act of warming our hands at the poor little blaze that our books of today will give out when they take fire from the flight of our images.”  –F.T. Marinetti, from his “Futurist Manifesto”, 1909

Notes

1. Marinetti's goal was to establish futurism as the official art movement of the government--something he specifically wrote against in earlier incarnations of himself.  He would come to loggerheads with much of his earlier social opinions, abandoning his beliefs in his never-ending quest to promote his movement.  I must say though that Marinetti did publicly speak against anti-Semitism.

2. Marinetti sought to have the Nazi traveling exhibition of degenerate art--which included works by futurists--banned from Italy.  So even though the Nazi fascists established futurism as degenerate, Marinetti was able to enlist the aid of Mussolini to shield Italians from what the Nazis thought of the art.  But the futurist manifesto seemed comfortable with the while idea right from the start, as we can see in proposition #9 of its self-proclamation: "We will glorify war – the world's only hygiene – militarism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for and scorn of woman..."

Skeptical Inquirer, 1584--Magic and Superstition Revealed, Displayed, Explained and Killed

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1011

Reginald Scot, a wealthy and landed Brit from a good family of the 16th century,
wrote a lovely proto-skeptical book revealing the so-called mysteries of people 
practicing witchcraft. Actually, there were all sorts of performance tricks and 
sleight-of-hand revealed in the book—cards, coins, spiritualism, juggling balls 
and such, as well as magic—and as such, in addition to the witchcraft part,
 was the first book in English to exhibit practical conjuring tricks, with all of their
intricacies displayed. 

In short, Scot explained all sorts and manners of miracles, a 16th century 
James Randi.

 
Scot was an enlightened humanist and a judicious man. His interest in 
witchcraft ran contrary to the general contemporary belief that witches and 
diabolical possession and so on, was real—he chose to explain the end results 
of witchcraft via rational means, exposing the tricks of the trade. He also 
believed and tried to show that those accused of witchcraft were either engaged
 in legerdemain or were mentally ill—but they were certainly not witches, as 
witches did not exist. 

I’ve reproduced seven of Scot’s explanations for miraculous tricks in part 
(A) below; part (B) contains just a couple of his card trick revelations. The 
whole book can be seen here 

(A) Demonstrations of Physical impossibilities all of which fake 
a great hurt.

How to: (1) cut off your head and make yourself able to speak; (2) eat a knife
and “fetch it out of any other place”; (3) stab yourself in the head with a knife
 without hurt; (4) put a piece of lead in your eye and take it out; (5) to cut your 
nose in half; (6) to put a ring through your eye; (7) stab and strangulate your
 bowels with a knife.

(1) To cut off ones head, and to laie it in a platter,which the jugglers call the
decollation of Johii Baptist, 

TO shew a most notable execution by this art, you must cause a boord, a cloth, 
and a platter to be purposelie made, and in each of them holes fit for a boies 
necke. The boord must be made of two planks, the longer and broader the
 better : there must be left within halfe a yard of the end of each planke halfe a
 hole ; so as both planks being thrust togither, there may remaine two holes, 
like to the holes in a paire of stocks : there must be made likewise a hole in 
the table- cloth or carpet. A platter also must be set directlie over or upon
 one of them, having a hole in the midle thereof, of the like quantitie, and also 
a peece cut out of the same, so big as his necke, through which his head may 
be conveied into the middest of the platter : and then sitting or kneeling under 
the boord, let the head onlie remaine upon the boord in the same. 

Giant Airship as a Floating Tuberculosis Hospital, 1930

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1010

Tuberculosis has been killing people in its nasty, eat-you-alive-from-within way, for thousands of years.  TB (for tubercles bacillus), also known as consumption (for just those properties mentioned), phthsis and scrofula, was the cause for every fourth death in early industrial age England (1815), and tended to nest among the urban poor.  It really wasn't well understood until the 19th century. when it was first actually named as a disease (by J.L. Schoenbein, 1839), and it wasn't identified as contagious for another 42 years or so.  The bacillus causing

tuberculosis wasn't identified until 1882 (by Robert Koch, who wound up getting the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in 1905), and although some early forms of immunization began as early as the first decade of the 20th century, it really wasn't until just after WWII that immunization and antibiotic treatment bean in earnest.

There have been many ways of dealing with the disease in the history of man and mythology, but prior to the late 1940's the mainstay of effective treatment for TB was isolation (or collection of affected in "clean air" sanitoria) or penumothorax--there wasn't much that could be done with this mass murderer. 

And so it came to be that  Dr. Karl Arnstein (a significant engineer and  the chief designer of the U.S. Navy airships USS Akron and USS Macon) proposed this flying hospital ship---a 6.5 million cubic foot airship, actually. The hospital was "a blister on the skin" of the airship, occupying very little of the entire surface area, looking as though it might be able to accommodate 75 or so patients, staying aloft for weeks at a time--there would even be an aircraft in the belly of the beast that could be released to fetch supplies from time to time (though I don't kow how  the whole return trip would work).  The airship was intended to follow the sun, skirting clouds and bad weather, keeping the TB patients "in the health rays of the sun" to help cure them of their disease.  It was an odd and desperate idea, which seems on one level to be a good effort, the best that could be done with the data available. 

NYC Miniatures, Glass Diaries, Cannon Alphabets and the Bio-Secrets of Sing Sing

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1009

Lost commonness is never so sweet as when it is unexpectedly recovered--and today it has happened for the second time in three days via tremendously obscure sources working in the same almost entirely unused medium.  Several days ago I wrote about the lost work of a German diarist who recorded tiny advertisement images for posterity on glass slides. "Onkel Karl's Berlin" is an assembly of tiny advertisement images published mostly during the days of Weimar Republic; the artwork for these images are now almost entirely lost to time.  

Another entry is made here today in the infrequently dynamic glass diary category--"The New York City of Karl von Onkel".  Aside from the advanced astonishment of another similar collection is the almost miraculous similarity of the names of the collector/observer, neither of whom were related, and who were also separated by an ocean and 50 years in time.  These two diarists also shared a great closeness in their appreciation for the ephemeral bits of their attractive present, with Mr. von Onkel's dedication directed towards miniature business cards from NYC in the late 1870's, most of which were almost entirely unknown before the unveiling of this collection.

The highly  attractive but perhaps dubious other soaring aspect of originality in this later collection was the method used to record written information.

Mr. von Onkel constructed an alphabet composed entirely of cannon and cannon parts. 

What is more remarkable is that he evidently outfitted an 1872 Remington typewriter with these miniature cannon bits, replacing the English alphabet keys with his own creations.  No one has yet deciphered the entire 118-page manuscript (entitled in script "The Other Anthon"), as there seems to have been a further bit of cyphering added to the cannon mix--the elements of the cannon-part alphabet would (evidently) change every third line or so, making the decoding part of it toweringly difficult.  

For example, the letter "e" which appeared in the first line of page one was represented by a spoke/half spoke/screw/burned spoke--four elements for one letter! But this would change by line three, where the letter "e" became fuse/spoke/broken half-spoke/powder/harness--a delightful but maddening mess.  Thus "he saw a dog" might be rendered in 45 cannon part bits, all of which would change every few lines.  Without the encoding device and without the means of determining when and where the symbols were changed in representing the alphabet, it is impossible perhaps to ever know the contents of the manuscript. There is also the further added difficulty of "missing" cannon parts--these are "blanks" that weren't so, their nothingness standing for something depending on their placement in the page.  

On the other hand, it seems as though all Mr., von Onkel was recording was the information already printed on the business card--plus a veritable haiku of his personal observation. (This could be determined from the few English language entries in the journal.  His narrative for "Stemp's Used Nail Emporium" was "not on corner; walked past; where breakfast used to be", while "Phlob's Gun Enameling" was limited to simply "Walked past". Perhaps there is no need to know anything beyond this. 

There are over 3,000 slides in the van Onkel collection, covering everything from braided baby hair ropes to margarine slippers to corset burners--items all relegated to a history that is almost beyond memory. 

Carter Crotchgroin, a registered library card holder and patron of the Port Authority Department of Lost Things and renowned glass-transfer image collector, remarked that the Onkel collection ":is a savagely didactic ensemble, a color opera in shatterable black and white". 

"True and not so true", says Dr. Grownhand Heap, Director of the New York Center for the Advanced Invisible. As an Invisibility Expert, Dr. Heap has discovered the collection's beauties and its "unfortunabilities".  "It was not known until we investigated the background of the slides" said Dr. Heap, "that all of the background glassware was appropriated somehow from the state correctional facility at Ossining. More accurately, they came from the archives which held the Medical Welfare Support Society, which was a group of "medical" doctors intent on improving the position of society in general by experimenting on the prisoners. (The Socity existed apart from Sing Sing proper, their samples collected by the prison barbers.  Of particular interest is the sub-colelction of the blood and hair of every prisoner executed at Sing Sing, most of these being the work of one man, the longest-serving barber-of-the-condemned, Scott "Simple" Malfesance.)  The Society was disbanded in 1872 for its questionable practices, and it was thought that their medical collection was either removed to the archives in Albany or destroyed.   The slides contained blood and hair samples of every prisoner who was part of the Sing Sing system for the 1830-1873 period.  To find this sort of ancient biological archive is nothing short of phenomenal".

A detail of one of the slides clearly shows the blood samples; an etched numbering system refers to prison records which clearly identifies the prisoner.  

The contention now is to how to deal with the von Onkel collection--as art, or as a medical goldmine. 

In addition to his glass diary, Mr. Onkel was also a lateral brick collector, and was founder of the Louisville (Kentucky) Society of Line Collectors (a subsidiary of The Horizontal Society of Wilmington, North Carolina AND the Right Angle Society of Grove Park, Indiana).  A 20th century photo of the Louisville group celebrating their 25th anniversary in honor of their founder is shown below.:

 

 Additional images from the von Onkel collection can be seen below:

History of Anticipation #2: Nothing. Moses and the Rock.

JF Ptak Science Books

During the Exodus Moses and the Israelites were often  in deep, mortal danger—perhaps none more dangerous as when they ran out of water.  Moses’ leadership (and safety) came under question (Exodus 17:4), with Moses crying out to the Creator that he needed help, and that his people were about ready to stone him.  The answer came quickly, with Moses directed to strike a rock with his staff, the resulting action bringing water/a stream from the rock (Exodus 17:5-6). 

 

And that’s what is going on here in this little scene from a 15^th century (unfortunately unspecified) French Bible. The rare use of almost all white set against a blue background gives the whole a marble-like, lifeless effect—which seems to mirror the sense of nothingness in the Israelites reactions to the great miracle.  Their prayers were answered, but their anticipation of fulfillment and the act itself goes emotionally unregistered.

Moses also looks removed, gently touching the rock with a rod which s very lightly controlled by a mostly-open hand—his bearing is one of great lightness. 

This scene is often repeated and represented throughout the history of art, though usually with more (or actually, “some”) emotional quality.  When the scene is depicted with little emotion it seems usually to be a small piece of art, a touchstone, showing just the head of Moses/the rock/the staff, a bit of simple visual shorthand to remind eh viewer of the story (as in the work by Giotto in 1305).  Generally though the scene is shown in high drama, as with the work of Joachim Anthonisz Wtewael (1664), Abraham Blaemaert (1596), Nicolas Poussin (1649), and many others. Sometimes in some very early work the woodcutters show Moses wielding his staff over his head, getting ready it seems to crack the rock open. Bu not here, not in this image—the emotion of the scene has been literally whitewashed away…it is beautiful, but it is a cold beauty of nothing.

(Wtewael, below).

German Design Elements: Miniature Advertising Art, 1880-1930

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1006

The Illustriete Zeitung, published in Leipzig beginning in 1855,  was a popular, middle-road/middle-class Life-like magazine.  I have a long run of this big, well-written, sumptuously-illustrated journal, beginning about 1870 and extending though the end of the war in 1945, and at this point I've looked through just about every issue. It is fascinating on many levels, and has proved to be a valuable source of historical minutiae as well as an excellent  resource for images and graphical displays of quantitative data. One aspect that I've never looked at very closely though are the advertisements--actually, the miniature advertisements. There are thousands of them sprinkled throughout the magazine, the thyme on the rice, the za'tar on the bagel.  

Here are three decent  examples showing the complexity and superior design of these little bits:  the top-right image is only an inch square, and was published in 1924;   the slim image just above is only an inch tall, while the example below-right is smaller yet, about a third (!) of an inch 'round.

I've decided to begin to reproduce some of them here, mainly because so many of them are gorgeous design elements, many of which just don't exist past the pages of this journal. 

 

One thing that I've done with them is to construct "Onkel Karl's Berlin Glass Diary", a series of microscope slides with these small images as specimens illustrating the imaginary diary of Karl Muefler as he strolls the streets of Berlin in 1925 looking for "missing paper".  The original images are all very small, generally smaller than an American penny, and can be fantastic: sometimes there are thirty of them clustered on one of the Illustriete Zeitung's back advertising pages.

I'll return to this category from time to time and add more images, hopefully compiling several hundred or so examples.   

  

Image is 1.5 inches tall and printed in 1930.

Image is 2 inches square, printed 1938.

 

Image is 2 inches square and printed in 1938.

 

(This image is less than half-an-inch tall, printed 1919)

This image measures about 1/3 inch, printed 1925.

Image meaures about 1.5 inches tall, printed 1919.

 

(This measures about 1/3 inch, printed 1882.)

The Sanctity of Sainted Truck Drivers, 1942

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1005

Every so often I meet a pamphlet that makes me want to travel back in time, even if that time was mostly a wispy bit of creative analogy.  Men You Like to Meet (subtitled Stories of Highway Heroes), written and published by the American Trucking Association in 1942, is one such example:  what a handsome truck!  The driver greets you with his snappy brimmed cap in hand, neat jacket and a tie (!), looking like he takes his job seriously.  (On the other hand, I take my job seriously, and I don't wear a tie; I do know though that people take me more seriously the more clothing I wear.) 

The Trucking Association wasted absolutely no time in this publication in telling he very many stories of the superb highway behavior of its members-it fills the publication with stories of heroism, courtesy, delightfulness, courage and general human respect with as much as could possibly fit in 23 pages including illustrations). Here, four women can do nothing with their tire but look at it, waiting for the knoght of the road to come and help them out.

(I'm not sure why this woman is unconscious and missing her shoes--the car seems to be only about half covered.  I'm surprised that the trucker lost his hat, though he did have the presence of mind to make sure that the unconscious woman's blouse covered her knees.)

Well.  The roads were evidently filled with Good Trucking  Samaritans, and the Trucking Association wanted the public to know that--especially when they were butting heads in D.C. with the railroads and battling a poor public image.  I'm not saying that truckers weren't/aren't saints--I'm just saying that I like the idea of truckers with caps nd ties.  

Monetizing Madness

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1004

Hail, horrors! hail
Infernal world! and thou profoundest hell,
Receive thy new possessor, one who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by place or tie.--Milton

I wonder when it was that people began to institutionally capitalize the monetary value of madness?  People of course have been “mad” for as long as there have been people; but the issue of centralizing them, of locating people with mental disorders, or collecting folks who displayed far-ranging attributes of the norm, I think is relatively recent.  Certainly it is a more modern invention of capitalizing on madness, as “hospitals for the insane”, “institutions for the feeble-minded”, “lunatic asylums” and so on are mostly an invention of the 17^th century. 

In many instances these institutions were for-profit ventures, and most of these were run for the benefit of making money more helping the people who would be confined there.  It was certainly not pretty.

The conditions for being sent to one of these places varied from country to country, region to region, judge to judge.  Insanity was not a necessary condition, either—many wives who stood in the way of mistresses wound up conveniently out0of-the-way in mental institutions; it was also a way to gain control of a relative’s estate.

The later may be true in the very celebrated case of William Belcher, who spent seventeen years in a private asylum (from 1778 to 1795).  Belcher wrote (as “a victim of the trade of lunacy”) about his experience with vindictiveness and vitriol in his Address to Humanity: Containing a Letter to Dr. Thomas Monro, a Receipt to Make a Lunatic and Seize his Estate, and a Sketch of a True Smiling Hyena (1796, which can be seen in full here).

Another famous case was that of John Perceval, who recounted his story in his 1838 book, A narrative of the treatment experienced by a Gentleman during a state of mental derangement designed to explain the causes and nature of insanity, and to expose the injudicious conduct pursued towards many unfortunate sufferers under that calamity.  Perceval did actually have some sort of something going on, a suspension of his normal facilities, as he says in the first lines of his book: “"In the year 1830, I was unfortunately deprived of the use of my reason. This calamity befel me about Christmas. I was then in Dublin. The Almighty allowed my mind to become a ruin under sickness - delusions of a religious nature and treatment contrary to nature. My soul survived that ruin.”  But the base of it all was  the seizure of his considerable property, against which he could barely fight.  Perceval continued his fight against the lunacy trade for the rest of his life (he died in 1876). As a matter of fact Perceval was one of the founders of one of the first patients’-advocacy groups, the very bouncily-named Alleged Lunatics' Friend Society. 

Evidently the was a certain porosness to the definitions of “normalcy” and “lunacy”, the distinctions between the two sometimes settled for a cool lump payment. 

Controlling Motion and Time—Primitive Robotics and the Extension of Human Control: the Telephone Answering Machine, 1958.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1003

Is the telephone answering machine the greatest non-transportation contributor to expanding human motion and time in the 1850-1950 century?  Certainly photography (from an earlier period, invented in 1839 and more or less popularized by the mid-1840’s) should be considered in this category, what with the visual capture of a moment in time and all; Marey/Muybridge and their primitive photographic motion studies is another; George Carey’s prehistoric selenium/light sensitive “seeing by electricity” invention and the more modern television by Jenkins and Farnsworth are others. And of course there is the invention of the telephone itself by Alex Bell  in 1876 (and a man whose house and lab was only a few blocks removed from where my store used to be on Volta Street in Georgetown DC many years ago) as another paramount example.

But I think the telephone answering machine is certainly one of them, I think, and not a modest example either.  The answering machine (for “him”, of course) allowed a person to be in two places at one time, allowing the telephone to function not only as a communication device but as a secretary, liberator, device as well.  Now (in 1958, when this ad appeared) that people had completely embraced the phone for business and for pleasure, it added immeasurably to the well of free time.  The telephone enabled immediacy; but for that immediacy to work, a person had to be there to tend it.  With the answering machine, however, a person could in a way save that immediacy for a more convenient time, liberating their necessary presence the telephone experience. 

The telephone allowed as person to instantaneously be in two places at the same time, basically; the answering machine contributed a third (or more) place, and freed up the time element. 

In effect the thing was/is a time machine, making it possible to either instantly speak with someone 12,000 miles away, or save the conversation for a more convenient time, sort of going back into the past to replay the communication..(Or dump it, extracting the necessary info or whatever without having to actually interact with the caller. ) 

Its easy to slip and refer to the machine as simply “an answering machine”, leaving out the “telephone part; it would be nice to have a machine that could reliably answer questions like that (though I think that this is what Google imagines itself to be).  The “answering machine” four generations or whatever from now may be something that is today unimaginable.  Maybe there will be a general death of the question, because everything has been answered.

Maybe the greatest machine in the future will be the questioning machine, something that skirts all of the known answers in whatever earth-sized database exists at the time.  Something that asks for information or for a synthesis of answers that doesn’t (yet) exist. 

Anyway, I like what I think is the great importance of the telephone answering machine.  And I don’t know how The Rockford Files would’ve functioned without one.  

French Visionary Architecture: Jean-Jacque Lequeu. Image Dump.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Picture Dump

I've made a number of references to the great French visionary architect, Jean-Jacque Lequeu, throughout this blog, here. (Included are a number of Lequeu's unusual self-portraits...)

French Visionary Architecture: Ledoux. Image Dump.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Picture Post/Image Dump

For the  posts and references on this site to the great French visionary architect, Claude Nioclas Ledoux, see here.