JF Ptak Science Books

A Warning from the Sky (April 1945)

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This is one of the few remnants that I have of a larger collection of surrender and various sorts of propaganda leaflets dropped on the Wehrmacht and Germany in general in the last two years of World War II. (A longer post on this collection can be found elsewhere on this blog.) This leaflet, the "dissemination" of which was orchestrated by the R.A.F. (Royal Air Force) and the U.S.A.A.F. (United States Army Air Force) and were literally dropped in the tens of thousands on the remaining troops in the final weeks of the war, with the document dated 25 April 1945. (Mussolini was killed on this day, the German forces in Italy would surrender on 29 April, Hitler would commit suicide on 30 April, and the Battle for Berlin would be over on 2 May, with the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich coming in the middle of the night at SHAEF HQ at Reims.)

This leaflet is particularly strong, warning that mistreatment of Allied prisoners in any way or form by Gestapo and its agents would not be tolerated and that if there was mistreatment then those responsible would "be ruthlessly pursued and brought to punishment".

This warning comes weeks after the liberations and "discoveries" of various concentration and death camps, the truths found in those places definitely helping to form bloody-minded warnings to anyone in Germany committing crimes against Allied POWs.

Even though the propaganda bombing no doubt involved millions of pieces of paper, only a tiny fraction seem to have survived.

Here's the original along (and transcription) with a government-sponsored translation of the leaflet

"W a r n i n g

The Governments of the United Kingdom, the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, on behalf of all. the United Nations at war with Germany, hereby issue a solemn warning to all Commandants and guards in charge of Allied prisoners of war in Germany and German occupied territory and to members of the Gestapo and other persons of whatsoever service or rank in whose charge Allied prisoners of war have been placed, whether in the battle zones, on the lines of communication or in the rear areas. They declare that they will hold all such persons, no less than the German High Command and the competent German military, naval and air authorities, individually responsible for the safety and welfare of all allied prisoners of war in their charge.

Any person guilty of maltreating or allowing any Allied prisoners of war to be maltreated whether in the the battle zone, lines of communication, in a camp, hospital, prison or elsewhere will be ruthlessly pursued and brought to punishment.

They give notice that they will regard this responsibility as binding in all circumstances and one which cannot be trans­ferred to any other authorities or individuals whatsoever.

Dissemination: R.A.F. and U.S.A.A.F.

Ancient Books and Manuscripts, Writing, and Writing Instruments

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Just a quick note about this fine and explicative image: it is a lithograph in color from Gustavus Ragn Schlyter's Monumenta Antiquitatis, printed by Junkopings Lithografica in 1876.  It is rather large (19"x14") and the work (on Greek and Roman antiquitiies) it is found in is scarce, as only four copies (two in Denmark, and one each in Sweden and Texas) are found in the librarians' standard cataloguing tool, WorldCat--and the book turns up almost not at all in google and other appropriate searches...its absence is a little curious.

In any event I found the bits and pieces of recording information to be interesting, so I went ahead and identified them for anyone who is curious about the segments of "book" production from 2000 years ago.  

Identifying the elements of the lithograph:

• Liber—literally, “book”, in this case being a Roman scroll written on papyrus.
• Cerae—(from the word for “wax”), was similar to the Greek tryptich, a kind of primer that was composed of three hard surfaces, the interiors of which were covered in wax so that they could be reused many times.
• Stilus—“stylus”, was used to incise figures in the wax Cerae, while the opposite (and flat) and was used to basically erase and smooth the wax.
• Arundo—a filament of a hollow-core plant, used as a quill would be used.
• Scalprum—a small cutting instrument
• Graphium—another form of stylus.
• Atramentarium—an inkwell (the inks being made of a mixture of carbon soot, resin, wine dregs, and cutdefish ink).
• Volumina—a collection of scrolls or texts, “volumes”.
• Capsa—a holder for volumina, the attendants of which were called “capsanii”.

Albert Robida, Visionary

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Albert Robida, a fabulous visionary born in France in 1848 (dying in  1926) was an illustrator, etcher, lithographer, caricaturist, and novelist.  His greatest achievement is his futuristic trilogy, including Le Vingtième Siècle (1883), La Guerre au vingtième siècle (1887) and Le Vingtième siècle. La vie électrique (1890).  In general he has deep, realistic vision, the sort that puts him a similar plain as Jules Verne, but is differentiated from his famous French compatriot in that his creations seem more compatible with possibility, being more common, more fashioned to what the average person might come to expect of their future creature comforts.  In spite of a fantastic and perhaps unparalleled scifi imagination, Verne seems a little beyond the scope of the mortal future, maybe a little too much for their appreciation of whatever common class the future might hold room for.   

A Note on Reverseness--Time

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I was working on a paper by H.C.Corben on time dilation ("Time Dilation Effects in Space Travel" 1959) and the clock paradox and thought about just time moving backwards, in whole or in part, and went poking around the edges of things a little bit to see a few examples in the arts.  

One story--or a piece of one story--is  in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five (1969), where we are introduced to backwards WWII narratives of B-17's getting bullets sucked out of them by Germans while going in to retrieve their bombs to return to base. Martin Amis' Time's Arrow (1991) is another good one, though the end result was very troubling, where a doctor brings people back to life through his life though we are disgusted to see how much life he “gives back” as a medical doctor at Auschwitz. There's Philip K. Dick , Counter-Clock World (1967) , with the charming idea of “old-birthing” in the grave and emerging from wood and dirt (don't know about cremation); Fitzgerald's Benjamin Button (1922) in which only one character lives in a reverse chronology; WR Burnett’s Goodbye to the Past (1934), which is a standard story except that it moves continually from 1929 to 1873; and Iain Banks' Use of Weapons (1991) which tells one story going forwards and the other backwards, together. Remember, this is just a little taste of the literature, a ramble. 

A few examples from the stage: George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s play, Merrily We Roll Along ( 1934 ), which is a narrative told in reverse order. Here's an interesting theatre example: Harold Pinter's Betrayal and Seinfeld's “The Betrayal” episode, in which the later pays homage to the former, maybe, going so far as to name a principal character in the story “Pinter”--no doubt this is toxic to post-structuralists. 

In cinema, Jean Epstein ‘s The Three Sided Mirror (1927) features a sequence where the events happen in reverse, while more modern examples include Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, 1997), Christopher Nolan (Memento, 2000),  Jean-Luc Godard’s short (From the Origin of the 21st Century for Me, 2000), and many others.

Then there's the not-quite reverse storytelling line of the nonlinear story, which can go back and forth, or partially this or that, in movies like Citizen Kane (1941), Once Upon a Time in the West (1984), and Gance's Napolean (1927); and in books like Ulysses (1922), Finnegan's Wake (1939), and Flann O'Brien At Swim Two Birds, and many many others. It seems this category (and anachronism and parachronism) are much larger than the reverse time story, and seems to be initiated a little earlier as well.

I'm not going anywhere with this one, just making notes...

Another Episode in the History of Blank and Empty Things

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post (A small but useful part of the History of Blank and Empty Things series)

This wide expanse of white and unmodified map space exhibits the more-or-less total absence of daily (or weekly) newspapers in the West and Far West of the U.S. in 1880.  The measure of the gradient colors depict the "newspaper per capita of population, the "absence of color indicate a population of less than two people to a square mile, being practically an absence of settlement". making up about a third of the country.  

Source: History and Present Condition of the Newspaper and Periodical of the United States, by S.N.D. North, U.S. Tenth Census Report (1880), printed 1884.  

1.8 Million Planes and 2 Million Tanks (1918)

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Here's a fine and somewhat misleading representation of the U.S. Congressional war allocation of 1918 for what was then the staggering figure of $18,000,000,000 (or about $387 billion in 2020 according to the BLS), found in the pages of Popular Mechanics for May 1918. To visualize the 18-billion, the editors displayed the amount in terms of something somewhat familiar to most readers.  For example, if the appropriation could be laid directly and only into the manufacture of airplanes (and bombs I guess) the editors guessed that the force would lay waste to all of Germany in about two days.  Guessing that each aircraft cost about $10,000 in 1918 that would mean there would be an attack force of 1.8 million planes.  Granting each a capacity of 500 pounds carriage, their entire force could deliver about 20% of the total tonnage dropped on Germany by the US and UK during WWII for each 1.8 million plane sortie.  (I'm guessing at some of the figures but I think that this is about correct.) Given that the "bomber plane" was still in its cradle, this could not have painted a very clear picture of what $18 billion dollars could buy.  Further guessing here is that there were fewer than 50,000 aircraft in existence in 1918, so imaging the 1.8 million figure would have been staggering. 

 

Another example from the same article involves envisioning $18,000,000,000 worth of tanks, which in 1918 would cover fielding 2,000,000 of them. This of course is an enormous number, particularly having in mind that about 50,000 U.S. Sherman tanks were constructed between 1942 and 1945, which is about 3.5% of the total talked about in the article, and the largest tank battle in history at Kursk in July and August 1943 involved about 6,000 tanks between German and Soviet forces. Given too that the tank is only a few years on the battlefield at this point there was really no way that a person could visualize 2 million tanks--I suppose no commander in 1945 could have envisioned it, either.  

And another example from the same article: using pennies and the Woolworth Building as comparables.  The Woolworth structure has found itself in a number of similar articles in the 'teens, though I don't recall seeing it compared to a 1.8 trillion penny mound, as we see below.  

I think that the editors were just out and beyond their capacity in trying to visualize war funds in these comparative ways.

 

"The Perfect Smoke Column"—the New Miracle of Electronics, 1952

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Liggett & Myers, the producer of Chesterfield cigarettes, sounds the triumphal blast of "the greatest cigarette improvement in thirty years" in this LIFE magazine ad from 1953. It was all made possible by SCIENCE and the sacred mysteries of electronics, which helped create the "perfect-smoke-column-from-end-to-end", which doesn't sound all that appetizing though I guess it was if you were a lazy or distracted ciggie consumer. To prove the claim we see a model with perfect un-ciggied teeth with an inset of electronic machinery in the background, which made it look as though the stuff was being produced by the machine.

The machine doing the great scientific deed was the AccuRay. It was a measure and control system produced by Industrial Nucleonics (beignning their industrial life in 1912 as a steam power supply systems company), which ensured that the cigarettes would be the same, million after million, each being the same length and with the same mount of tobacco. "Scientific miracles never cease", said the Liggett & Myers people, and I guess the stained proof was in the smokey pudding.

It may have been all about the burning, as a cigarette that doesn't need to be drawn on to keep it lit means that it will burn itself out in the allotted time even if you just lighted the thing and kept it in the ashtray. Better burning meant more cigarettes consumed, and so on.

And by the way Industrial Nucleonics was sold in 1987 to a perhaps more appropriately-named Cumbustion Engineering, at least so far as cigarettes were concerned.

Worse than "Science Jokes": Songs of Biology (1945)

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Tonight I found a wonderful little biology pamphlet sandwich between two other very thin pamphlets—Free Our Political Prisoners, by the League for the Amnesty of Political Prisoners, ca. 1920, and A Grammar of the Marathi Language, 1868—the three of them together not weighing four ounces. The bio pamphlet is a very non-droll and forced-funny publication out out by the Beta Beta Betans of Mt. Vernon, Iowa, at the end of the War in 1945, and is called Songs of Biology. None of them are any good, though they're not quite bad enough to land in the safety zone of so-terribly-bad-that-it-is-good. The only simultaneity that occurs here is the level of badness living down to its expectation.

I do have to commend them on at least some of the song subject and titles, several of which were very unexpected. For example, I doubt that many other songs have been written about turpentine. A few of the others that are more enjoyable to imagine the lyrics than to read them are "The Sad Fate of a Youthful Sponge", "Objective Tests", "Parasites on Parade", "The Germ-Laden Bucket", "The Simple Arthopod", and :"ode to Drosophila". They'd be better with no music and no lyrics.

Anyway, I present the glory of turpentine...

 

The Beauty of Simple, Tiny Windows (1940)

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Here's another of my Quiet-Likes in cover design of pamphlets: simple representations of industrial/factory scenes with smoke and windows! This example is the cover of For a Better Tomorrow, published by the State Labor News (East Gay Street, Columbus, Ohio), 1940:

 

Radical and "Socialistic" Ideas of 1939 Mainlined, Mainstreamed, and Main-Streeted

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Here's another very striking cover for a pamphlet embracing   once-radical semi-socialist pseud-Commie agendas that are today a de rigueur part of our social existence. This is a pro-Union, pro-educational work presented by the International Ladies' Garment Union (education Department) to its members, getting them up to speed on the major issues of the day. Many of these battles fought by the union were bitterly opposed by industry and (sometimes) the government were for programs and agencies that many take for granted, and something utilized by everyone no matter the political leaning, the bright shining "Socialist" aluminum coating for the future long gone as these programs have become "normalized".  Some of the issue addressed by the pamphlet were whether or not women could join a union or a labor movement (though 1940 seems a little on the late-ish side for these questions), the necessity of unemployment insurance, social insurance, maternity insurance, old age security, health insurance, and safeguards on the working life of children under 14 years of age.  

That, and I also liked the design, the giant parade of women coming from out of the rising Sun.  I'm partial to these mass/crowd images on pamphlet covers--you don't see them terribly often so when you do the work really stands apart. Here's another example I wrote about in August 2020, Katherine Pollack's 1932 Why Bother About the Government, the third installment of the Leftist Brookwood Labor College pamphlet series. It is a bit of a Socratic polemic about the problems and advantages of government, owners of the means of production, workers, and labor organizers...coming down firmly in the square of very-pro forces of organized labor: