The Great Green Eye and l'Espirit Humaine (1938)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

 The author of this attractive (looking) pamphlet seems an interesting man, and evidently was a busy and highly productive popularizer of science. I don't know his work at all, but looking at some of his books tells me that he was on the scene early and often for several technological breakthroughs. For example, he has several works on the bicycle (Cyclisme théorique et pratique,1892, Les recettes et procédés vélocipédiques 1893,  Suivis de l’Art de la bicyclette, 1894); plus a very early book on the automobile, (L'Automobile théorique et pratique and Traité élémentaire de locomotion à moteur mécanique,1893,  followed by  L'Automobile théorique et pratique II, Voitures à pétrole, 1899); and then another early book on the aeroplane (Éléments de locomotion aérienne,‎ 1907).

This nicely-designed pamphlet with the provocative cover (the work of "Kramer" in 1938) seems though to have strayed from the mark, resting for a while on the slim shoulders of popular interest in a person's interpretation of symbols and what they revealed about the viewer, for the "formule de l'espirit humain".  The book is arranged well, and has a dictionary of sorts of what people saw in Rorschach-like inkblots and what those interpreted images meant.  Ah, well, the cover is great, and one does not often see a big green eye on a tall French pamphlet, and so the cover design is good enough for me, soft&squishy contents or not. That said there are some interesting section headers, like "Do Not Confuse Messages and Beliefs" and "Good or bad, not everything is lost".