JF Ptak Science Books

Found-Poetry in a Technical Work on Bubbles (1896)

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 "The water of those wellis sprynge vp with grete bobles."--W. Caxton tr. Myrrour of Worlde ii. xxi. sig. h4   OED

Rummaging again through the eminently-rummagable early years of Nature¹ I found a lovely little article on the physics of bubbles. The language to me seems delightful, and it comes from the first part of a very long opening paragraph of the paper:

"He has studied the behaviour of big bubbles and of little ones,

of bubbles in large and small tubes,

of bubbles of air in a liquid,

and of one liquid in another,

of bubbles in heavy land in light liquids,

of bubbles in liquids of various degrees of viscosity

and with various degrees of surface tension at their surfaces."

• [IMAGE: "THAUMATROPE for showing the formation and oscillation of drops." From C.V. Boys' Soap Bubble and the Forces Which Mold Them, 1896.]

In spite (or because of) the fact that bubbles are serious things, they are wonderfully named and as C.V. Boys points out in his fantastic Soap Bubble and the Forces Which Mold Them (1896), they are as magnificent as they are simple: "I do not suppose that there is any one in this room who has not occasionally blown a common soap-bubble, and while admiring the perfection of its form, and the marvelous brilliancy of its colours, wondered how it is that such a magnificent object can be so easily produced".

Bubbles have a long history in experimental physics² and continue to work their magic today--when I googled this title I came up with only three pages of hits, including the following, which in their own little way beg to be read:

• "Film thickness measurements in liquid–liquid slug flow "
• "Effects of Bubbles on the Hydraulic Conductivity of Porous Materials "
• "Bubble deformations and segmented flows in corrugated microchannels at large capillary numbers "
• "Bubble transport through constricted capillary tubes with application to resin transfer molding"
• "Transport of bubbles in square microchannels"
• "Step-Wise Velocity of an Air Bubble Rising in a Vertical Tube Filled with a Liquid Dispersion of Nanoparticles"

From the 1894 article:

"EVERY student of physics has observed the motion of bubbles in tubes. Which of them has not used a big bubble to show the little ones their duty in clearing out the air when filling a barometer tube? Who has not spent his time and patience in whisking a spirit thermometer to drive a bubble out of the column? Mr. Trouton has recently communicated to the Royal Society the result of some researches on this subject. He has studied the behaviour of big bubbles and of little ones, of bubbles in large and small tubes, of bubbles of air in a liquid, and of one liquid in another, of bubbles in heavy land in light liquids, of bubbles in liquids of various degrees of viscosity and with various degrees of surface tension at their surfaces. From this enumeration it is evident that the number of different magnitudes involved is very great, and at the start it seemed almost hopeless to disentangle the effects due to each. The first matter to observe was that, as in other cases of fluid motion, two cases must be distinguished. These are the cases of slow motion and of quick motion. When the motion is slow the viscosity of the liquid causes the flow to be very simple. It entirely stops all whirling and swirling, such as is seen in the water behind a boat. When the motion is quick, on the other hand, the flow is very complicated. Whirls and swirls are set up, and the resistance is increased, owing to the increased energy that has to be communicated to the whirling and swirling liquid for each centimetre that the bubble moves. The slow kind may be described as viscous flow, and the quick as turbulent flow. The most interesting point observed in connection with the turbulent flow was that it was sometimes possible to increase the rate of flow by increasing the viscosity..."

Notes:

1. "On the Motion of Bubbles in Tubes", in Nature, a Weekly Illustrated Journal of Science, 8 February 1894 (vol 49 no. 1267)/ I should point out that Nature back then was almost entirely readable by almost anyone—nowadays of course it is a vastly different story; I stopped my subscription a while back when I found out that I wasn't understanding even the titles of some of the papers....

2. "I have freely made use of the published work of many distinguished men, among whom I may mention Savart, Plateau, Clerk Maxwell, Sir William Thomson, Lord Rayleigh, Mr. Chichester Bell, and Prof. Rücker. The experiments have mostly been described by them, some have been taken from journals, and I have devised or arranged a few. I am also indebted to Prof. Rücker for the use of various pieces of apparatus which had been prepared for his lectures."--C.V. Boys, Soap Bubble and the Forces Which Mold, 1896.

"Experiment for showing by intermittent light the apparently stationary drops into which a fountain is broken up by the action of a musical sound."--from the Boys book.  

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”.

"The vulcano's, or, Burning and fire-vomiting mountains..." The Luxurious Language of Science, 1669

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2833

I came to be working in the great and problematic Athanasia Kircher's glorious Mundus Subterraneus..., printed in 1665, which is a compendium of most things scientific though with the heavy flavor of application to the world underground. Figuring out what was going on in places that could not be seen or investigated or for the most part quantified didn't stop Kircher from extreme hypothesizing on the nature of the Earth, and so he came into possession of a hermetic-philosophico-alchemical-religio-scientific panspermic theory of the origin of all things. Of course there's a lot of good thinking that goes along with the Grand Theory, and some very innovative scientific thinking, and the expanse of the knowledge of this one man is extremely impressive—there is a LOT in this book.

In 1669, four years after the publication of the Mundus, came the English publication of a somewhat-beautifully and certainly surprisingly-titled book summarizing and cajoling the Mundus, called:

The vulcano's, or, Burning and fire-vomiting mountains, famous in the world, with their remarkables collected for the most part out of Kircher's Subterraneous world, and exposed to more general view in English : upon the relation of the late wonderful and prodigious eruptions of Ætna, thereby to occasion greater admirations of the wonders of nature (and of the God of nature) in the mighty element of fire. (London : Printed by J. Darby, for John Allen, and are to be sold by him ..., and by Benjamin Billingsly ..., 1669.)

How lovely is that? (By the way I cannot find any other book with "fire-vomiting" in its title¹.)

It is a stripped-down 82-page summary of some of the principle ideas of the massive two-volume Mundus, and appears with only one illustration², while the full work was magisterially published with fantastic illustrations and folding plates throughout.

There are many pleasurable turns of phrase and off-brand uses of common words, and unexpected and conjoined vocabulary throughout the work—at least so far as I have seen from the bits that I have read in it. For example, just in the first few pages of browsing I have come across “treasuries of Fire”, “forges in the profoundest Bowels of Nature”, “entrails of the Earth”, “nor as the Vulgar perswade themselves”, “sulphrous unctious matters”, “fire engendering all concocting Nature”, “ever-flowing flames”, are among the notables from the first pages.

Here's one paragraph from page three:

“The Prodigious Vulcano's therefore and Fire-vomitting Moun∣tains visible in the external surface of the Earth, do sufficiently de∣monstrate it full of invisible and under-ground fires. For where∣ever there's a Vulcan, there also is a Conservatory, or Store-house under, as certain, as where there is a Chimney or smoke, there is fire; And argue deeper treasuries and storehouses of fire, in the very heart and inward bowels of the Earth. In so much that from hence the Holy Father's have not incongruously placed the greatest of all the * Fire-conservative Abysses in the Centre of the Earth, for an eternal Jakes and Prison, destin'd for the punishment of the Damned; and some others for Purgatory (according to the received belief of Papists.)”

Sources:

Early English Books online  https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A65153.0001.001/1:11.2?rgn=div2;view=fulltext

Wellcome Library: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ygm2etrh/items?canvas=9&langCode=eng&sierraId=b1028090x

Notes:

1.  "Vomiting" in the title, however, is not horribly uncommon. For example, here's a long title for a broadside publication that including snake vomiting, as in vomiting up snakes: A warning for all such as desire to sleep upon the grass : By the example of Mary Dudson maid-servant to Mr. Phillips a gardener ... being a most strange, but true relation how she was found in a dead-sleep in the garden, that no ordinary noise could awake her. As also how an adder entered into her body, the manner of her long sickness, with a brief discovery of the cause at length by her strange and most miraculous vomiting up of about fourteen young adders, and one old adder ... the maid is yet living. The like to this hath not been known in this age. The tune is, In summer time.--London, printed for Charles Tyus, 1664.

2. Though there is only the one illustration (a folding frontispiece) in the English summary, it is pretty remarkable:

 

What is the World's Most-traveled Book?

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2778

What is the world's most traveled book? This question came to mind after I received an order for a book that had been sent to me from Florida after it arrived there from London, sending it off to someone in Baltimore. Does it go back to London after that and continue its travels?

Is the Most Traveled Book (MTB) a category of book, or a single title, or a single copy of that title? Is it thousands of people moving the book, or is it just the single book making the trip? If it was just a title, then the number of miles packed on Stephen King books traveling back and forth to the beach or wherever by millions of people over several decades would probably outweigh the travel of all of Homer on a galactic scale. My preference is for the single copy scenario. Also: I'd like this to be a published book rather than not, simply because the boundaries get a bit too misty for me.

The closer we come to the present time, the easier it would have been for a book and a person who might have been traveling with the book, to travel. It increases the chance for people to travel with a book, and with the invention of the middle class, it would encompass more people the chance to come in contact with books and travel with or send them. And of course it is the mode of transportation and the creation of parcel post that would add orders of magnitudes of miles to category—for example you could receive a book from London and send it out to Tokyo where it might be sent to Wellington all in two weeks. In 1822, raking in that sort of mileage would have been nearly impossible for almost all circumstances. No doubt books were carried to Botany Bay from London and then back again, perhaps over and over as the property of the ship's surgeon or some such, but that would be years worth of travel.

Maybe it was books carried by people who were professional travelers or at least traveled a lot, like Napoleon or Alexander going to “work”.

Is it a travel book, like Herodotus, Sterne, Twain, Stark, (or even Kerouac who had the words right in the title?), Xenophon...Cervantes?

Perhaps it was literature—no doubt Shakespeare, Dante, Sophocles, Euripedes, and Aeschylus have been hauled about for pleasure. What about professional books? I doubt that copies of Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, and so on have traveled very much on their own (though the ideas contained in them are probably among the best-traveled of that sort), but I suspect that anatomies (Vesalius, Gray) have some miles in them. There are no doubt other reference books like that that could have traveled save for their size (like Audubon, which could have been useful in the field but which would have needed their own caravan). There are unliekly titles that have made their way around the world (like Darwin's Lyell making the long trip on the Beagle), but that book ended its travels when Darwin got home.

And what about military strategy books like Lao Tsu, Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Thucydides? If in the field their owners could have lugged them far and wide, passing them along after enforced/sudden “retirement” or when their usefulness ran out.

What might establish the peripheries of this question are books that keep intact a belief system, or way of life, a secret-or-not codification of a state of well-being? A Bible? Alcoholics Anonymous? Probably that is the first place to visit, the religious book, though offhand it seems that the travel of this sort of book wouldn't transcend one owner. The Bible and company are enormously popular books and have been printed no doubt in terms of billions of copies, so they have a much better chance of being the leader of the category by sheer numerical possibility. On the other hand some of them were tremendously popular but relatively short-lived, like the “Little Red Book”, which was carried by most Chinese for decades, though I doubt that the work as an inherited object was inter-generational.

Maybe the best traveled book simply comes down to one that belongs to an aircraft pilot of 40 years' experience who has been flying with a single title because that is what they had with them on their very first flight, and has become a good luck token. Perhaps it is a King book, or Robert Pirsig; and maybe it is The Cat in the Hat which was an intended gift for a child, the pilot keeping the original as a charm for a successful first flight, and giving away another copy of the book, and so it has made thousands of flights. Maybe the book is never actually read—its just an icon.

Or perhaps it is an instruction booklet on the reading of nuclear codes and attack plans that has been basically airborne since 1960. This is far less romantic than a Dr. Seuss book, but more, well, “practical”.

And maybe the most traveled book is less-traveled than the most-traveled map?

The Mundane Glory of Pig Bristles, Hooking, and the Mystery of Filters--Pamphlet Covers, 1930s

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I wonder what is was like to be a traveling salesman hauling around hundred-pound barrels of pig bristles?

We don’t really find out the answer to that question in Origin and Development of the Paint Brush (1938), but that remarkable, far from the maddening crowd question does present itself in the text.  And that is why I love pamphlets like these.

Spending my professional life with the book, and being a reader, I’ve come into contact with and have been exposed to a good, solid, Big  Number of books, a Big Book of Big Numbers of books.  And so when the unusual creeps in or is stumbled upon, they shine like little novas in my book-sky.  And the ones that shine with their own special light are the titles come in three favorite flavors:  the Sublime Mundane, Outsider Logic, and Fantastic (and Impossible).  Today’s selection are from the first category, and exhibit titles and texts that look like non-luminous and uni-dimensional but turn out to be anything but mundane.

Earlier in this blog I’ve written on pamphlets entitled Flagpole Painting, School Safety Pioneers, Fortunes to be Made with Frogs, Where are the Dead?, How to Repair a Zipper, Mud’s Romantic Story, Soap in Everyday Life, The Fine Art of Squeezing, Salt Salesman’s Manual, Know Your Groceries, The Book of Envelope Facts (and others), and they’ve all shown a terrific inner quality that is completely hidden by their so-sleepy and yet strangely-compelling titles.  Like the paint brush history pamphlet.  Here are a few other new examples:

The Otis Elevator pamphlet (1947) is efficiently designed beneath its semi-bizarre cover, floating in odd typeface, completely lifeless design, mannequin humans, and washed-out pastels.  The Chinese coloring book style of its covers hides a superior content, complete with schematics and beautifully supplied with photos of elevators long-since removed from sight and memory. 

 

The Hooking pamphlet is not about its obvious contemporary counterpart, but is a luminous, luxurious introduction and stylizer to the science of hooking large objects to cranes via giant hooks and chains, and especially about how to keep yourself from being  crushed by tons of steel not hooked properly. 

 

The Mystery of Filters charm is wholly in its title and cover design, its text describing nothing but camera filters.  It is still a cool cover, nonetheless.

 

Elevators, published by Travelers’ Insurance Company, tried to protect themselves a little further by ensuring safe practices of elevator operation, mostly in industrial settings.  This was published in 1926 and was already in its seventh printing from its inception in 1913 when the elevator was just in its second decade of popular, relatively widespread usage. The haven’t-given-this-cover-design-a-moment’s-thought hides a thorough (and bland) treatment of elevator safety; too bad, the cover photosnap-art promises something more.  Its not there, except for this beautiful photo of an industrial elevator op with a tie.

 And coming back to wood barrels that are not necessarily filled with pig (or wild boar) bristles but with something else less advanced comes this manual on making wood barrels.  Everything is there, everything you’d need to make a barrel (and a good one at that), and I admire this sort of fantastic dedication to what is essentially (to our modern mind) mundane—except that it is as dry as well-cured barrel wood.  But I admire it still,  as I do the Elevator pamphlet, because, well, they’re done right.

 

Found Book Art: Franklin at Sea, 1787

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One of my favorite bits to compose for this blog is the Found Book Art series--which is odd because there isn't even a category for it. Maybe there are a dozen of these in the 4500 posts here, so there aren't many, though there could be,..I guess I could do one a day, but that might take the special flavor away for me. In any event, I like them; I'd probably like them even more if I hauled out one of the microscopes and did some close work on them.  For today, though, I'm just looking at this pretty spine of the journal Observations sur la Physique sur l'Histoire Naturelle et sur les Arts of 1787 which contains a seminal contribution¹ by Ben Franklin on the Gulf Stream.  

 

These are details of:

Notes:

1. Suite de la Lettre de M. Benjamin Franklin, a M. David le Roy, Membre de pluisseurs Academies, Contenant Differenres Observations sur la Marine, a three-part series printed in Observations sur la Physique sur l'Histoire Naturelle et sur les Arts, avec des Planches en Taille-Douce....dedicated to M. Le Comte d'Artois, and edited by l'Abbe Rozier, J.A. Mongez, and M. de la Metherie, in the issue for July-December 1787, volume 31, and Printed in Paris at the Bureau of the Journal de Phyique, 1787.

Spheres of Recognition: the Portable Gym and Expulsion from Eden

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There was some immediate shock of recognition¹ in seeing this image, not for its exact earlier-appearing twin, but in the sense of the spherical delivery of something. In this case, it is a Victorian woman and the depiction of her movements in exercise--but what I remember and associate with this is the Sienese Giovanni di Paolo, and his depiction of the monumentalist giveth-and-taketh cycle of the creation of Eden and the epic fall of humanity and its expulsion from it.  Di Paolo put a lot of history into that one image, the perfection of Paradise and the disposal of Adam and Eve, all via the intercession of the creator of the universe, with is hands of the sphere of being. (Talk about building a wall....).  

The image of the exercising woman is found in a delightful book used in the banner of  Chloe Roberts (@chloerabbits ) a web producer for the Wellcome Library (http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/) collection and which is available in full in a very nice copy at Internet Archive, here: The portable gymnasium : a manual of exercises, arranged for self instruction in the use of the portable gymnasium, by Gustav Ernst, London 1861: https://archive.org/details/b20399789  Image source for the di Paolo:  https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_di_Paolo#/media/File:Creation-and-the-expulsion-from-the-paradise-11291.jpg

Notes

1. And with that phrase comes other immediate recognitions, mainly in book form: William Gaddis' The Recognitions, and Edmund Wilson The Shock of Recognition; both are excellent, and the Gaddis may well be a contender for Great American Novel. 

The Anatomy of Creation: the Brilliance of James Ussher

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2563

[Source: undetermined, via Twitter]

["Ten Fathers Before the Flood"--what a great title for a book!]

Dublin-born James Ussher (1581-1656) was born into a well-placed family and achieved high theological orders, being the Irish Archbishop of Armagh and the Primate of All Ireland, and of course a polyglot and scholar above all. What he is remembered most for today--at least outside of Ireland--is his chronology of the world which placed the creation of all things at a very specific time, on the evening of 22 October 4004 b.c.e. (I guess the b.c.e. should be redundant, but it isn't.) 

I should point out that I'm writing about this today because Thony Christie (of the excellent Renaissance Mathematicus blog https://thonyc.wordpress.com/) shared a  tweet of Ussher's table of chronology from Australian Peter Harrison and it brought back memories of dealing with Ussher from years ago.  It is easy now to take a few potshots at the man and his work, daring to think that Ussher could figure this out using Biblical chronology and establishing the date of the creation of all things to an afternoon 6019 years ago.  

The thing about Ussher is that he was a very smart guy--very.  His work puts me in the mind of Robert Burton and his Anatomy of Melancholy, which is a great and probably unreadable book, filled with a staggering amount of everything. Ussher as it turns out uses the Bible of course but uses a vast amount of secular references as well, reaching out to all sorts of important and obscure sources, some of which have disappeared over the last 470 years.  As a piece of scholarship (he wrote on general history from Gensis to the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem) and the product of the mid-17th century, Ussher's work (completed evidently in just four years, though how long the overall research took is anyone's guess) is a tremendous accomplishment. All it takes is a little dip into it (forgetting the modern knowledge of geology etc.) to realize that this is a fantastic work.  

•  Full text of the Annals of the World appears here: https://archive.org/stream/AnnalsOfTheWorld/Annals_djvu.txt

In his introduction/epistle Ussher remarks that many of the great historians considered marking the event of creation to be an impossible task, some saying that only divine intervention would lead to the ultimate cause. He cites the preface of Censorinus in his (fantastically titled) Explication of Times Intervals: "If the origin of the world had been known to man, I would have started there." (Consor. in c. 20.)  And also Ptolemy in his Astronomical Supputations on the impossibility of this knowledge, "To find the details of the history of the whole world or such an immense period of times, I think it is beyond us that desire to learn and know the truth." (Ptolem. 1. 3.)

Ussher calmly explains how he did came upon doing it for himself without much fuss: "Anyone can do this who is well versed in the knowledge of sacred and profane history, of astronomical calculations and of the old Hebrew calendar. If he should apply himself to these difficult studies, it is not impossible for him to determine not only the number of years but even the days from the creation of the world. Using backward calculations, Basil the great, told us we may determine the first day of the world."

Ussher signs off from the epistle to start his work so: "Other things the prudent reader will figure out for himself. I wish you the enjoyment of these endeavours and bid you farewell."  Even if you don't get past this intro you'll still get a decent understanding of how deep Ussher went, and why he should be remembered for the content of his work in context of his time rather than just that beginning-of-creation date.  

Notes:

1. And we wont discuss here the whole end-of-creation thing, which should have come to pass about 11 years ago, if not earlier (if using the calculation of others), as found in 2 Peter 3:8King James Version (KJV) "8 But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." So six days of creation=6,000 years, 4004bce+6k=2004 ace.  

2. Other early estimates of Creation include:

• Bede 3852 bce
• Scaliger 3949 bce
• Kepler 3992 bce
• Newton ca. 4000 bce

Design in U.S.A-Themed Pamphlets, 1895-1945

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I've written a number of times on this blog on the now-unusual covers and titles and contents (sometimes all three combined) culled from a 90,000-item pamphlet collection. This afternoon I came across a small collection of U.S.A. patriotic (and otherwise) covers, published 1895-1945, most of which have a flag or other patriotic emblems on them.  Some of the 125+ so works are simply patriotic works, some are flag-emblazoned works on economics, some are anti-Commie, some are isolationist, and some are, well, a little meshuga--what they all have  in common is that they either have a flag or the (declarative!) words American/American on the cover.  There's more to this collection, but this will do for now--I think these would be very interesting, and attractive, displayed properly, and they'd have more than a design-related story to tell. 

And details:

A Remarkable, Outsidery Effort in Economics, 1934

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Hard Times: Cause and Cure, a Bankrupt Farmer and an Honest Judge Talk it Over was written by Tolley Hartwick and published by him in 1934, in the near-height/depth of the Depression.  Hartwick's work was extraordinary, though perhaps mostly within itself. From what I have read and understand, this may be a semi-private insight into the development of economic systems and the decline of the U.S. economy in 1929.  "Scientific Government/Scientific Taxation/Scientific Money" is the rallying point on the first page of this very long document that claims no title page and but scant  explanation of its origins.  The work is--in an odd and difficult way--an artwork in itself, mostly due to its dense and unrelenting design.  It is 15 inches high and 8.5 inches wide, typed single space so that on the page's very narrow-margined self there are more than 90 cramped lines of text; and with approximately 15 words per line, that means each page is very heavily worded with something like 1100-1350 words, which is pretty impressive.  And at 210 pages, the document is about 250,000 words long, making it highly combative.  

I'll never come to know what Mr. Hartwick was writing about because of the work's secret complexities, which is too bad, at least for me.  

But in its very dense, very full way,  printed on now-crumbling paper, and with a high degree of difficulty to decipher its message, the work presents itself as something larger than what it is--it has a certain look and feel of something very difficult to create, a certain "obviousness" of painstaking longevity that gives it more a feel of an artwork than a book.  

In any event, I like it. 

[This may be a unique--with its provenance being the Library of Congress and one of the copyright deposit copies--as I can find no trace of it except for its entry in the Copyright Office publication for materials received in 1934.]

The Small Story of Animal Glue, and other Small Stories

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In my collections of small collections I have a collection of small unusual pamphlets that tell the story of something uncommon. Everything in this sub-collection must have "The Story of ..." on the cover; after that, anything goes.  

This is a small selection, though enough for now...

 

 

Found Poetry in the Universal Knowledge of Huygen's Great "Cosmotheoros", 1698

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2291

It seems to me that as a representative of extraterrestrial imagination not being illustrated its hard to beat the case of the beautiful and polymathic Christiaan Huygens.  Huygens (1629-1695) worked across many fields, including astronomy, biology, math and physics, and was extraordinarily productive, making numerous contributions in the physical and theoretical areas, as well as being a prolific author and correspondent. 

Towards the end of his relatively short life (he died at age 66, completing work enough for a number of very gifted and exacting people) Huygens embarked down the science fiction road in pre-science fiction days, writing wonderful and provocative outre ideas within what was his general/.universal statement of knowledge of all things , a wonderful book entitled Cosmotheoros, The Celestial World Discover'd: or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets. (The book had a difficult coming-into-being, Huygens completing it at the end of his life, though he would see only one page of printed before he died on 1695, outliving his elderly father by a bit, an accomplished diplomat who died at age 91 in 1687. His request/bequest to his older brother Constantijn—named for his father—was for him to see the book through to publication. Unfortunately, the diarist/painter/gossip brother lived only two more years, and at his death the book was still not printed. The job finally fell to the direction of Burchard de Volder (1643-1709), a Leiden prof of math and physic who established the physics lab there and who was also the teacher of the "father of physiology", Herman Boerhaaver (a man of considerable taste, seeing his beautiful and tidy manor house at Oegstgeest, nearby Leiden). Happily de Volder saw the book into publication in 1698 (and survived it by 11 years). The book appeared in Latin and was in the same year (anonymously!) translated into English, followed by a Dutch translation in 1699, French in 1702, German in 1703, and Russian in 1717—in other words, a well-received an popular work.

See the introduction to the work and the digital version here at the University of Utrecht: http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/huygens/huygens_ct_en.htm

Huygens looked at everything in his world in this book, and many things outside of it: here he establishes the possibilities of life being lived on worlds other than that of Earth. He develops a detailed fabric for these new heavens, so much so that he can also establish samenesses for the ETs and humans, stating here his belief in the eternal/cosmological abilities of mathematics and music:

“It's the same with Musick as with Geometry, it's every where immutably the same, and always will be so. For all Harmony consists in Concord, and Concord is all the World over fixt according to the same invariable measure and proportion. So that in all Nations the difference and distance of Notes is the same, whether they be in a continued gradual progression, or the voice makes skips over one to the next. Nay very credible Authors report, that there's a sort of Bird in America, that can plainly sing in order six musical Notes: whence it follows that the Laws of Musick are unchangeably fix'd by Nature, and therefore the same Reason holds valid for their Musick, as we even now proposed for their Geometry"--page 86

Huygens holds close to the immutable nature and close association of music and mathematics,m which would be the same here and everywhere (everywhere else, the ET communities, being referred to here as "other Nations"). 

"For why, supposing other Nations and Creatures, endued with Reason and Sense as well as we, should not they reap the Pleasures arising from these Senses as well as we too? I don't know what effect this Argument, from the immutable nature of these   Arts, may have upon the Minds of others; I think it no inconsiderable or contemptible one, but of as great Strength as that which I made use of above to prove that the Planetarians had the sense of Seeing." page 86/7

Huygens is so sure of this that he is willing to take a bet with long odds that not only do ETs enjoy the possibilities of music but that they have also created instruments:

"But if they take delight in Harmony, 'tis twenty to one but that they have invented musical Instruments. For, if nothing else, they could scarce help lighting upon some or other by chance; the sound of a tight String, the noise of the Winds, or the whistling of Reeds, might have given them the hint. From these small beginnings they perhaps, as well as we, have advanced by degrees to the use of the Lute, Harp, Flute, and many string'd Instruments. But altho the Tones are certain and determinate, yet we find among different Nations a quite different manner and rule for Singing; as formerly among the Dorians, Phrygians, and Lydians, and in our time among the French, Italians, and Persians" page 87

Huygens then continues to make a beautiful distinction between the musics of Earthling and ETs, in that it may not sound anything like any music we have on Earth, but--since the laws that govern math and music are the same, everywhere--it still might be "very good".  And not only that, the alien music might be better than our's:

"In like manner it may so happen, that the Musick of the Inhabitants of the Planets may widely differ  from all these, and yet be very good. But why we should look upon their Musick to be worse than ours, there's no reason can be given; neither can we well presume that they want the use of half-notes and quarter-notes, seeing the invention of half-notes is so obvious, and the use of 'em so agreeable to nature. Nay, to go a step farther, what if they should excel us in the Theory and practick part of Musick, and outdo us in Consorts of vocal and instrumental Musick, so artificially compos'd, that they shew their Skill by the mixtures of Discords and Concords?"--page 88 

And so on.  But why I wonder with all of the great images painted for us in his text is there no venturing into a visual artform?  There's enough information in the Huygens work to allow for a map, but then there are none, not even something along the images of de Bergerac, who was perhaps among the greatest visionary of techno-anthropormorphic human flight.  Before he was the object of Edmund Rostand’s 1897 play, de Bergerac was a massively creative author, producing, among other things, the book Histoire des Etats et Empires de la Lune (History of the States and Empires of the Moon, published posthumously in 1657), followed by Histoire des Etats et Empires du Soleil (History of the States and Empires of the Sun, again, published further and deeper into his life’s surrender, 1662), both eventually collected as L'Autre Monde (Other Worlds).  Bergerac introduces us, the humble reader, to one of the most important concepts in the history of literature--namely that we humans were not only not alone in the universe, but that we were not even the dominant culture, and indeed we were actually hated by some of the other more advanced species.

The foundations for structuring a visual habitat for the ideas of Huygens are abundant, as you can see easily in the table of contents (which is like an annotated table of contents for a modern book)--the signs for a road map are there, mostly--there's just no road, but there are plenty of suggestions for one.

In general though the chapter titles are fantastic, and invite themselves to their own found-poetry—by simply listing and centering them, a person with a good sense for pause and continuity could read these out loud and make them sound like a considered piece of poetry.

 

The Chapter heads, in order (!):

Some have already talk'd of the Inhabitants of the Planets, but went no fartherThe Objections of ignorant Cavillers prevented
This Enquiry not overcurious
Conjectures not useless, because not certain
These Studies useful to Religion
Copernicus's System explain'd
Arguments for the truth of it
The Proportion of the Magnitude of the Planets, in respect of one another, and the Sun
The Lamell more convenient than Micrometers
The Earth justly liken'd to the Planets, and the Planets to it
Arguments from their Similitude of no small weight
The Planets are solid, and not without Gravity
Have Animals and Plants
Not to be imagin'd too unlike ours
Planets have Water
But not just like ours
Plants grow and are nourish'd there as they are here
The same true of their Animals
Great variety of Animals in this Earth
And no less in the Planets
The same in Plants
Vices of Men no hindrance to their being the Glory of the Planet they inhabit
Reason not different from what 'tis here
They have Senses
Sight
Hearing
A Medium to convey Sound to the Ear
Touch
Smell and Tast
Their Senses not very different from ours
They have Pleasure arising from the Senses
All the Planets have Fire
The bigness of their Creatures not rightly guest at by the bigness of the Planets
In the Planets are many sorts of rational Creatures as well as here
Men chiefly differ from Beasts in the study of Nature
They have Astronomy
And all its subservient Arts
Geometry and Arithmetick
And Writing
And Opticks
These Sciences not contrary to Nature
They have Hands
And Feet
That they are upright
It follows not therefore that they have the same shape with us
A rational Soul may inhabit another Shape than ours
The Planetarians not less than we
They live in Society
They enjoy the pleasures of Society
   They have Houses to secure 'em from Weather
They have Navigation, and all Arts subservient
As Geometry
They have Musick
The Advantages we reap from Herbs and Animals
And from Metals
From the discoveries of our Age
The Planets have, tho not these same, yet as useful Inventions 
Book 2
Kircher's Journey in Ecstacy examin'd
The System of the Planets in Mercury
In VenusIn Mars
 Jupiter and Saturn the most eminent of the Planets both for bigness and attendants
The proportion of the Diameter of Jupiter, and of the Orbs of his Satellites, to the Orbit of the Moon round the Earth
The periods of Jupiter's Moons
And Saturn's
This proportion true according to all modern Observations
The apparent magnitude of the Sun in Jupiter, and a way of finding what light they there enjoy
And in Saturn
Always the same length
They see the fixt Stars just as we do
The appearances of the Ring in Saturn
Very little to be said of the Moon
The Guards of Jupiter and Saturn are of the same nature with our Moon
The Moon hath Mountains
But no Sea, nor Rivers, nor Clouds, nor Air and Water
The Astronomy of the Inhabitants of the Moon
This may be applied to the Moons about Jupiter and Saturn
The immense distance between the Sun and Planets illustrated
No ground for Conjecture in the Sun
The Faculty in the Sun not easily seen
By reason of its Heat no Inhabitants like ours can live in the Sun
The fix'd Stars so many Suns
They are not all in the same Sphere
The Stars have Planets about them like our Sun
A way of making a probable guess at the distance of the Stars
Every Sun has a vortex round it, very different from those of Cartes 

 

 

 

Towering Minor Masterpieces

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2271

Years ago I purchased a very large collection of pamphlets from the Library of Congress, something like 2000 crumbling blue document boxes on two long ranges of metal shelving.  It was creatively called (and stamped) "Pamphlet Collection" and rounded up to about 90,000 items, all of which needed to be hand stamped "Library of Congress Surplus Duplicate".  Now the great majority of these were things like updates to the Cleveland plumbing code of 1922, but there were still many thousands of interesting items, and even after all of this time I really haven't dealt with all of it.

(The remarkable thing is that on the next range over was housed a very large collection of a (or the) Ray Eames archive.  There were models, boxes labeled  "1939 World's Fair", "IBM", so on--and his phone.  I walked the range of this collection but didn't touch or open anything, which was remarkably tempting.  It was all very dusty--years of dust.)

The arrangement of storage of the pamphlets was also very precise and thorough and also almost entirely useless. Even though if you squinted everything could be in its proper box, the sorting was very democratic, with things arranged by title and subject and author and period, all within one single category, making the notes on the side of the box just hopeful expressions of what might be inside.   It made for an interesting hunt. 

One of my favorite categories of pamphlets from this collection were the mimeographed or early-photo-mechanical reproduction productions, things that were home/office produced, and usually for a very restricted audience.  These people meant business.  For example:

The Struggle for Life in Los Angeles County, published by Edward Reimer (825 West 8th St), Los Angeles; presumably Reimer printed the document, as well, it just has that homemade feel to it, and it seems to be an early mimeographic reproduction production, and, probably, of very  limited distribution.  It was printed on 11x8.5" sheets in purple ink, 107pp, running about 60,000 words, and is also the Copyright Deposit copy (serial A 208715, July 6, 1936). This seems to be the only available copy of any interesting report on the conditions and remedies of social and economic conditions in Los Angeles in the mid-1930's, and I think in the right hands could be brought back to life again as a semi-lost social document.  

[All of the following are available for purchase via the blog bookstore/social history section.]

 

 And another, being everything you wanted to know and then more so on operating movable bridges in New York City, Isidor Lubin's Bridges and Bridge Operating in New York City, printed in 1939. It is 11x8", a 114pp, single-spaced typed and mimeographed document of about 70,000 words.  This also seems to be a copyright deposit copy, with no copy turning up in the massive WorldCat catalog, and seemingly no copy available in libraries worldwide. In exhaustive detail Lubin discusses the operations and maintenance of movable bridges--and I mean all manner of things, from oiling to fuse boxes and lighting scenarios of control boxes and communicating with landside control; uniforms, courtesies, questions given in promotion examination to bridge operators (with answers), duties of bridge operators and tenders in operating drawbridges, distress signals and on and on.  

 

Then there's this--a profesisonal production but still of very limited distribution, at least in this format,  a work produced at the Harvard University Department of Psychology by Henry A. Murray (1893-1988). The Worksheets on Morale. Seminar in Psychological Problems of Morale  was published in 1942 and contains a section that turns out to be the first psychological profile of Adolf Hitler--this copy was formerly in the library of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor and incubator of the CIA.

 

The sections include: (1) Aim of Seminar, 2 lvs; (2) Selected Bibliography, 1941, 3 lvs; (3) Notes on the Definition of Morale, 3+3lvs; (4) Determinants of Good and Bad Morale, 18 lvs; (5) Historical Trends of National Socialist Ideology, 14 lvs; (6) Hitler the Man, Notes for a Case Study, 22 lvs; (7) Education in Nazi Germany, 8 lvs; (9) Strategy and Tactics for anti-Nazi propaganda, 10 lvs; (10) Democratic vs. Totalitarian Morale in Groups, 5 lvs; (11) Standards of Democratic Morale-Building in the U.S., 6 lvs; (12) Civilian Morale Building Techniques, 7pp; (13) Psychology of Influence (Education Persuasion) Applied to Morale Building in America, 16 lvs; (14) Long-term Aspects of Democratic Morale-Building, 7 lvs; (15) Analysis and Execution of Propaganda Campaigns, 18 lvs.

The portions of this publication concerning the psychological profile of Hitler seem to pre-date the very recent re-publication of Murray's very obscure 1943 work again published for the OSS on the psychological composition of Hitler. The date of publication of these sheets is somewhat uncertain, although there are no references dated after 1941. 

These sheets were obviously not intended for a wide distribution. It is interesting to note the circulation card in the pocket at the rear of this work as it bears the signature of David N. Yerkes. I spoke with Mr. Yerkes about 15 years ago (he was a neighbor in Georgetown as it turns out, living about six blocks north of the store) and inquired after his interest in this work (taken out on 7 June 1944 and returned 14 June 1944). He told the story that Henry Murray was a pupil of his father's, who was Robert Yerkes, former president of the American Psychological Association, Professor of Psychology at Harvard and innovator in the use of psychological testing and training of American servicemen during WWI.  He didn't remember requesting or reading this report, though--after 55 years there's probably not a lot that most people remember about what they were reading, and when, six decades earlier.

 

These are just a few examples of these towering minor classics that I find fantastic and fascinating.  

The Task Book, 1819

JF Ptak Science Books      Quick Post

I would love to write a book like this.  The full title of the work by J. Birchall, The Admonitory Task Book;: Consisting of Prose and Poetry, Original and Selected: Interspersed With Striking Aphorisms, Useful Maxims, and Moral Precepts. Designed for the Use of Schools (1819).  I want very badly to open this book.  Unfortunately, it isn't anywhere to open--it seems not to be located in WorldCat/OCLC.  

The source for this lovely title is Holletts Rare Books from the U.K. --its beautiful.  

 

The Society for the Friendless, 1921

JF Ptak Science Books

 The Charities Bureau of Kansas City published this handbook in 1921 for the annual fund raising season: The Hand Book for the Campaign is a concise account of the principal helping-hand organizations, many of which have (from our seat here in the future) quite extraordinary names.  

We find "The Rest Cottage" ("maintained as a refuge and rehabilitation sot for homeless and unfortunate women and girls and their destitute children"), the "Receiving Home for Children", "The Home for Infants", "The Orphan Home for Girls", "The Child Welfare Club", "The Children's Hotel", "The Whatsoever Circle", "The Home for Aged Women and the Destitute", "The Presbyterian Home and School for Crippled Children", "The Helping Hand Association for the Blind", "The Girls Hotel", "the Childrens Bureau", "The Finding Society", "The Home for Aged Women of the Mexican Christian Institute", "The Hopkins receiving Home"  and of course "The Society for the Friendless" (providing aid to the "man who comes from prison", from Lansing, Leavenworth and St. Joesph.  Actually the members of this society would receive the newly released convict as well as visit them in prison; the society reached over 13,000 men (and "girls in Industrial Schools") between 1919 and 1921. 

There were dozens of these agencies that were providing help and relief to the needy in the Kansas City area in the pre-Federal-help days.  It is very interesting to see these charities divided along lines of need, rather than have them gathered together under a giant umbrella like, oh, the Department of Health and Human Services or some such agency.  Or just the Department of "Human Service"(?) on the state level of many states.  It seems more appropriate to actually specify the nature of relief rather than hide it away under a giant Orwellian blanketing cover of general services--it would be okay to be reminded that there are needs for abandoned children and destitute girls.  Perhaps it would make us all a little more aware of who needs what in this rich and capable society. It just seems to me that codifying the extreme of social need into more amorphous units like we have done in the last 50 years or so smooths the edges that people like Thomas Nast and Jacob Riis* and Charles Dickens and Virginia Woodhull and Dorothea Lange and Dorthy Day** managed to sharpen.  Sharp edges are good.

* Jacob Riis was perhaps the first documentary photographer of the American "underclass", putting an indisputable photographic face on the living and working conditions of the laboring poor.  A photograph of these conditions was irreproachable--it was something you could absolutely trust, mree so than an "artist's representation"; like seeing a photograph from the surface of the Moon.
** Dorothy Day, (above), perhaps the least-known of these names, was a tremendous figure in the civil and workers rights movement and the founder of the Catholic Worker.