JF Ptak Science Books

A Plate Full of Eyes (1851)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post   Overall Post  2529

J.G. Heck wrote and compiled a fascinating and complex work entitled The Iconographic Encyclopedia of Science, Literature and Art, which was published in the U.S. for the first time in 1851 in Spencer Baird’s translation from the German.

[Detail--60mm in the original.]

The key to his work is the amount of data displayed on each of the 500 engraved plates illustrating this work and the way in which it is arranged.  The design and layout of the 30,000 items on these 500 plates was a work of genius, and for my money it is easily the best-presented complex means of the display of data and objects that was published in the 19th century.  

The image above is from one engraved plate featuring 43 aspects of the human eye--beautifully arranged, and somehow fitting perfectly on the 9x11" sheet of paper.  It is a work of real design engineering.  

The image above is a detail from:

"Whether Slavery was Right or Wrong..." On the Future of the Freed Slaves in the U.S. (Nashville, 1867)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2528--expanded 

De Bow's Review in 1867--in the dire straights of the antebellum South, in the doom and despair of the just-finished war--lashed out like a wicked Alex Jones conspiratorial wingnut against the Northern states and anyone who comforted them.  Published in Nashville, all I have of the magazine presently is this loose issue for November 1867, and in spite of the energetically positive view depicted on the cover of the magazine had little to do with what you found in the writing inside.  

The leading article is an odd one, yelling about Great Britain manufacturing the cause of anti-slavery in the United States, which pretty much is made abundantly clear in the title,  "Black Republicanism, the Dupe and Agent of British Policy in Respect to American Interests". The "scheme of so-called Negro Emancipation...is a British Invention" crushing the U.S. which "suffered immeasurably" under the Abolition Program, "the fatal deadfall of the abolition trap", all of which in the end will "crush the innards out of the "Black Republican Yankee".  It was the Brits according to the writer of this article who FORCED THE UNITED STATES TO ABOLISH SLAVERY" [caps in the original].