JF Ptak Science Books

Astronomical Stero Cards, 1913

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I own this series of stereoviews but they have yet to surface in our recent move--I did bump into them online at the beautiful University of Heidelberg site, nicely reproduced, though without the the rich glossy blacker-than-black finish in the originals--but these will work nicely. 

Max Wolf, Stereoskopbilder vom Sternhimmel (1. Serie), Leipzig, 1913.

Source:  University of Heidelburg

The Zero in Politics

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  A History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things 

 

In this blog's series on the History of Blank, Empty, and Missing Things there have been I think no contributions to nothingness in the political sphere--which is odd, given how much of the time politics is about just that, staffed by people of that same quality.  The experience of seeing nothing portrayed in a political caricature as seen below was such that it struck me how little I have seen any images quite like it.  The "zero" appears in J. Grand-Carteret's Les Moeurs et la Caricature en France, a thick book published in 1888 detailing the history of caricature and satiric expression in France.  The image appears in chapter eight, on the political situation in France between 1816 and 1848 (Louis XVIII, Charles X, and Louis-Philippe). (Two years after abdication of Napoleon and right up to the revolutions of 1848.  I wonder what it was like for Napoleon's mother, outliving her son by 15 years?)

And the full image:

It is a overt play on the missing color of the tricolor--the flag and the colors of the flag that came into existence in France beginning with the revolution of 1789, and became the flag of the new republic.  The color of course are red, white and blue (liberty, equality, and fraternity, or perhaps the colors of Paris (red and blue) and the white of the House of Bourbon, or something else.  In any event, the "white" as the artist/commentator saw it, the leader filling that space, was not yet present. 

The entire book is located at the University of Heidelberg site, here. The book is very highly illustrated, and it also has an appendix with a very useful list of caricature journals (pp 554-620) and biographies of artists (pp 620-675). 

"The Cost of Indians to the U.S."

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I came across this very interesting page in the phenomenal work produced as a part of the U.S. Census, Report Indians Taxed and Indians Not Taxed, printed in 1894 as part of the 11th Census of 1890. (The full text is available at the Internet Archive, here.)  It is a dispassionate recollection of monies spent on "Indian administration on account of treaties and other expenses, including yearly payments for annuities and kindred charges to the government", from 1776 to 1890, noting that "the military expenditures have exceeded the expenses of the civil administration by hundreds of millions of dollars".  Indeed--$250,000,000 19th-century dollars (or something on the order of 5 or 10 billion dollars in today's money). Certainly monies that went to "satisfy" treaty obligations or to support Indians driven from their land and life would have been a fractional amount of the overall expense. 

Details, below:

A Work on Hobo Slang by the Lifetime King of the Hoboes, 1947

JF Ptak Science Books 

There have been many Kings of the Hoboes, and Emperor of the Hoboes, in the history of American Hobodom.  The most widely recognized of all this royalty is, probably, Mr. Jeff Davis, who was elected King of Hoboes each year from 1908 to 1935--in that year at the Pittsburgh meeting of the annual "Hoboes of America" his minions gave up elected him King for Life. Of hoboes, that is, the Knights of the Road.  Davis was also a real hobo, unlike the pretenders and throne-seekers, who in general were not. (Nels Anderson, in his Men On The Move, written just as the Depression was broken, (1940) observed: "Whatever else may be said of King Jeff, his romanticizing the hobo is not without a basis in reality, and his poetic interest in the species arose from experience. But King Jeff has placed on a pedestal a man who belongs to the past. The hobo belongs with the pre-Hollywood cowboy and the lumberjacks of the Paul Bunyan legends.”)

The Mile-High Half-Vertical-Airport, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2134 

 

[Source: Popular Mechanics, June 1935, p 891.]

In the history of Mile High Things I doubt there are many entries for airports--or half-airports.  This if not highly questionable structure inverted the horizontal concept of airport into something else, or at least changed the take-off into quite something different while leaving the landing strips the same. (This is the "half-vertical" part of the title to this post; "half-vertical" doesn't mean "horizontal", though I like that idea.) The new method of getting a plane into the air was straightforwardly breathtaking:  haul the plane up one mile in an elevator and drop it through one of the "launching chutes". After everything is said and done, this is one idea that really didn't need to be three-dimensional.

There was a ride something like this on Coney Island that was very popular for years, a parachute ride where folks were hoisted skyward in a seat on a parachute and then dropped--a much better idea than this mile-high monster.

Here are a few other examples of Mile-High/Long Bits that are posts in this blog:

 

• Out-Eiffeling Eiffel  (above)
• Mile high pile of wood
• A 17 mile x 1 mile flying column planes
• 40 Miles of Warships

 

A Chicken in Every Pot, and a Car in Every Living Room

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Herbert Hoover--perhaps a better classical scholar than president--famously promised "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage".  Well, in this example of thrift and austerity, we see a summer cottage offered for sale for $375.00 (disassembled plus freight), with room for a car, and even for a family.  A small family. 

Which is a detail from:

A Tiny Publication of Enormous Longing--a REAL Car, 1932

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This pamphlet, Your Car as YOU Would Build It, published by General Motors in 1932, is a partial sales brochure--wish book--planning guide for a variety, bubbled to the top of a box in a series of boxes filled with similar interesting and widely obscure publications.  Its main intent was to increase the interest of the reader in the car designs offered by GM, and it certainly piqued my interest if only in memory and hope--looking at the suggestions and offerings and choices, who in their right mind wouldn't enjoying making  adecision as the pamphlet offers?

For example, the fender skirt, long gone now but just going nice and strong in 1934:

Towards an Alphabet of Piles: Church Bells, Sugar, & Nazis

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2133 

This six-year-old blog hasn't seen a new series in a few months--today will see the start of something new to go along with the various histories of dots, lines, nothing, memory, boredom, fear, blank things, missing things, imaginary things, and so on, something else a little different by which some information can be discretely categorized and collected and presented.

Piles.

Itg seems as though every other thing in the history of things and ideas can be resolved into piles of one sort or another, even in the history of mathematics, where piles can get very beautiful and interesting and challenging. 

Bells

To initiate the series will be a few images found in the pages of the Illustrated London News from the first month or two following the end of World War II.  The first:  piles of church artifacts, from the ILN issue of 13 October 1945.  These bells and other items were most likely ransacked by the Nazis for their precious metals, and the statuary, I guess, were taken for the sake of art and its taking.  The caption of this remarkable photo relates that the first shipment of 700 bells was just making its way to repatriation. 

And this--an awful picture that reminds me of what these piles created, where were similar piles of wallets and purses and other sorts of identification, and of glasses, and valises, and hair, and teeth, and then, finally, of bodies.  (Source: Illustrated London News, 3 November 1945.)

Casings, Shells

[American and Korean soldiers in an enormous stack of used shell casings--"this repreenbts four days of shelling on the west coast". Source:  Pacificparatrooper blog.]

Zoomology--Germany, 1945

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I've seen figures supporting 20 million people being "displaced" in the month following the end of WWII.  That figure has always seemed very low to me, considering the destruction and ravage--I thought that there might be half that number in the USSR alone.  In any event, "displaced" seems like such a polite word for something that is anything but that.  In browsing a volume for the second half of 1945 I found a photograph with a picture within it of something that might characterize what being "displaced" might actually be--and this is a more "civilized" displacement of a man on a train, not one of the hundreds of thousands of concentration camp survivors, who were considered to be "displaced persons" as well.  That "DP" tag has always rung wrong with me. 

Which is a detail of the following detail:

Outsider Charts of End Times and Other Biblical Imagery

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Wow.  These are some pretty weighty images--I'm not going to pretend that I know much about the symbolism and O.T. history of them at all, and will just stay with admiring what looks to be serious audacity from the simple design and presentation perspective. 

They appear in Frederick W. Childe's  Prophecies of Daniel and Revelation Compared  (1927), and were "drawn and designed" by Clarence Larkin.  They have a strong sense to them, and are at the same time kind of aerodynamic and sweeping, streamlined in a way that would take on design a few years later. 

 

A Word Book on a Book of Words: Counting Crows (and Everything Else) in Ulysses

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2132  

We're talking about JJ's Ulysses, not the older one. 

Miles L. Hanley performed an enormous and exacting (!) task of providing a word census for this first-among-the-Modernists novel.  Joyce used 250,000-odd words to take Mr. Bloom around Dublin that day, 30,000 or so of them different¹.

Hanley's very precise pre-spreadsheet undertaking was done in a year, somehow, and published in 1937.

What he and his team of 20 or so did was this:  working from the Randomn House edition (the most democratic of the editions at that time and the most accessible to the largest reading audience), he/they typed out each word on a miniature index card (above) and recorded the page and line in the text in which the word occurred.  The cards were specially designed and pre-pasted so that they could be linked together inb long lines and then stored afterwards in six long wooden trays.  At the end of the day there were some 220,000 of these little cards, each of which was checked and double-checked and edited and re-edited and then everything proof-read and then so again.  There was a LOT of small work in this procedure, but it is in the small work that the greatest of this undertaking happened. 

Among many other things that Hanley recorded was the equipment and production expense, which totaled $148 for the project, most of which was spent of 250,000 1.5x2.5" cards (which cost $100).  There are two dozen pages of introduction and explanation of process, as well as about the same number in the appendix (which is interesting and useful)--there is basically nothing that is contributed for interpretation, or what any of the word usage/occurrence/frequency/rarity and so on might mean. That was certainly another project. 

I must say that this was an extremely sharp operation, well-planned and directed, and done in sort of no time at all. Simply impressive.

The first edition of the work is relatively rare (it went through a number of editions and iterations and reprintings), and the one I have in front of me now is from the Library of Congress via the Copyright Office.  It is always troubling to say that something is "rare" and then have two of them, which is the case here--not only that, but both are from the Copyright Office, and (excitingly!) they have their original carbon cards of their LC card catalog cards tucked in.  Pretty cool. 

 Notes:

1.  Word count is complicated, and inlcudes plurals and other variations of the same word. Suffice to say that it is around 30,000. Or 33,000. 

A Mini-Monumental Incidental Image, 1889

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[Source: the author]

This glorious and anonymous photograph features 22 women, 20 of whom appear in U.S. flag dresses in front of a 40-star American flag.  The 40-star appeared in 1889 with the entrance of South Dakota into the Union, one of the four new states in that single year. 

When I looked though the original, looking for the image-within-the-image, I was surprised by a photobomb by the fellow in the tie and cap.

Here he is:

The outfits/costumes are nothing but stars and stripes, and each woman holds a staff with a small flag. 

There is a great experience in this not-so-incidental image.

Uncomfortable Dissection Placements of Dissected Material(s), 1546

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2131 

These remarkable woodcut images come from Charles Estienne's (1501-1564) De Dissectione Partium corporis Humani linri tres, a 375-page opus illustrated with 62 fantastic full-page woodcuts and published in 1546  This work is surpassed I think only by the masterpiece Fabrica by Vesalius (1543)--the great standard of anatomical illustration.

The images are remarkable not only for their superior and significant anatomy, but--for me--also for the placement of dissections with the body from which they were taken. 

The particulars:

Artist: La Rivière, Étienne de, d. 1569. Engraver: Jollat, Jean "Mercure," fl. 1530-1545.

Title: De dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres.

Publication: Parisiis: Apud Simonem Colinaeum, 1545.

The entire series of illustrations from the National Library of Medicine, here.

A Semi-Proto-Cubist Technical Work, 1908

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This graphic from Nature magazine (volume 76, page 670, 1908) features a host of early flyers from five years or so following the first Wright powered flight.  The diagram, which was also made in the first few years of the Cubist movement (and only a year after Picasso's Demoiselles), has a certain geometrical semi-proto-Cubist feel to it.  The slickee, hard-edged approach to depicting the flying machines and placing them on the single sheet gives the work a modernist artistic feel to it in the earliest period of 20th c modernism in the first movement of abstract art. 

 

The other thing is that so far as I can tell no major Cubists used the airplane as a subject matter in a painting in the first few years of the movement--which seems a little odd to me, given that it was such a major technological advance that took place in about the same time period as Cubism. 
Just a year later another collective.montage appears ina quite different form;

[Source, Nature, volume 81, page 399, 1909. And the detail, below:]

And speaking of precursors, now that I have mentioned the Picasso I should also say something about El Greco's The Opening of the Fifth Seal (or The Fifth Seal of the Apocalypse or The Vision of Saint John), painted three hundred years before the Demoiselles.  El Greco (1541 – 7 April 1614) was not of his own time, not really...

11 11 11 2013

Veterans Day repost:

I want to thank all Veterans today, all of our Veterans everywhere, for all of your sacrifices.

I particularly want to say to say how much I appreciate the members of our family who have served: Uncle Pete (USMC, WWII), Uncle Ray (RCAF, RAF+USAAF, WWII), Uncle Stan (Navy, WWII), Uncle Alex (Army, WWII), Uncle Joe (Army, Korea), Uncle Jerry (Army, WWII), Uncle Frank (USAAF WWII), Uncle Walter (Navy WWII) and my other Uncle Stanley (Army, WWII), Uncle Francis (Army, WWII), Uncle Vincent (Army, WWII), cousin Billy (USMC, Vietnam) and Grandpa (Army, WWI); Patti's father Melvin Lonnie (Navy, WWII) and stepfather Boyce (Army, 2nd US Cav WWII), Uncle Guy (USMC WWII), Uncle Max (Army WWII) and her four relatives in the CSA. Nearly everyone was in battle, and nearly everyone came home. [Image: Uncle Walter looking at the 5-star Blue Star flag, Housatonic, Mass, 1943.]