JF Ptak Science Books

The Future as the Color Red

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2172

In 1947 the future looks a little red, and sparky, and filled with television.  

This image is that of the television antenna of station WNBT and for many years it sat on top of the Empire State Building.  WNBT was the flagship station of NBC, which was owned by RCA (Radio Corporation of America, 1919-1986) which (according to its name) was really the first national broadcasting radio network in the United States, and which (as experimental station W2XBS) became the first to broadcast a television picture (of a papier mache Felix the Cat) in 1928.  This fantastic cover art for a 1947 promotional for the company pictured the famous antenna,  the great visual of the company's external hardware, right there on top of the world's tallest building. 

This was really a picture of the future, and in 1947 the future of mass communications and entertainment (and in making money in the two) was seen in television, much more so than the formerly gargantuan radio.

And why red?  Was it latent images for a few decades of seeing Lenin marching forward with a poiny figure and folllowed by legions againsst a background of deep red?  Or is it the hundreds of years of red being associated with power--it did cost a fair amount, centuries ago, given the difficulty of its manufacture.  

And in the history of red the business of its business was obtuse and secret.  The Spanish began exporting the source of red--the cochineal bug, which was a tiny cactus-borne bug--from Mexico.  They sent barrels of these bugs back home, where they were pounded and prepared for the Spanish worthies' textiles.  The source of the color was held as secretly as possible, making the bug as odd a guarded source as the secretive history of medical forceps so long shrouded in mystery by their progenitors, the Chamberlain family.  So red was expensive, limiting its use to the ruling/economic powers.  It would also start showing up in art in the depiction of robes for royalty, or for robes for Mary and Jesus, and occasionally in Renaissance skies.  Alternatively, it is also associated with Hell and Satan, I assume that is the case since red was not-often used (given the cost) and so it was a rare-ish color that would strike the viewer as being exceptional. 

 

That said, I'm not sure why RCA chose red for their sky in 1947, though the company did have its famous "red Seal" label beginning in 1902 and used the color freely in its logo. Aside from that, why there is a red sky is a bit of a mystery.  

Great Book Titles: The Does/Don'ts of Septic Tanks, Charm, and Gold.

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  Part of the series on Unusual, Obtuse, and Outsider Book Titles 

At some point I think I would like to post an exhibition of some of the collection of the vastly/quietly weird/surreal/Outsidery titles from my BizzaroLand Today! pamphlet collection.  Sometimes the titles are just incredibly weird, or wrong, or they're not titles at all but something else, or they're unintentionally absurdist of dadaist or Surreal, or they are just Outside what we might come to expect in the world of logic and its extensions.  Sometimes the titles are just odd and the work is real; sometimes not. Sometimes they're just terrifically understated or heartbreakingly simple, and even useful, like this example (from Clymer, New York, 1945):

Atlas of Dead Ideas. Q: When is Israel Not So? A: When it is Great Britain (1929)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post   Daily Dose from Dr. Odd 

There was a Bible-studying group headquartered in Haverhill, Massachusetts whose inspiration/idea  interpreting the true nature of what was "Israel" according to bits and pieces in the Old Testament, and which found something to be radically different from what was seen to be  the case.  The pamphlet documents that the place we think of as Israel is not really so, and that the country best fitted to these OT statements was actually Great Britain.  There are many reasons for this and they get mistily presented in the pamphlet Restoration of Kingdom Administration the Anglo Saxon Responsibility (published by the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America in 1929), but it is rather too much and tedious and tiresome to get into the milky details, except to say that Israel as was currently recognized could not be so unless they adopt the Christian faith.  And so on. 

The address of the organization put it on Merrimack Street in Haverhill, a block away from the river--the four story building now has it middle floor obscured by some teal 1950's architectralolypse facing, and the bottom floor is now a dollar store (with redundant signs) with a sandwich board out front (captured by the Google car) reading "Design Perfume on Sale Beauty Supply".  I'm sure the store is necessary and fills a need, but it is a long way and many years from redefining the concept of Israel. 

Title from BizarroLand--a Daily Dose from Dr. Odd

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post   Daily Dose from Dr. Odd  series

In my heaping pamphlet collection there is a sub-collection of works with impossible, outsider-y, and stubbornly semi-confused titles that simply cannot be ignored--I mean the titles can't be ignored, though most of the time their texts beg to be. 

Some of the titles change from cover to title page; some titles are non-existent and replaced by simple exclamations.

In this case, and the first instance that I can recall, there is a "Library Classification" at top-center of the cover, leading to other information about the book just before we get to the title, which seems nearly secondary, and which is followed by other non-title information right there on the cover. There is all manner of info there, a cover with a very busy pace--data galore for what should be a mostly blank space, except the author's name. 

Tiny Electoral Art, 1920

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I admit to a weakness for early 20th century American political found art in barely-existent pamphlets.  And so this fine example:

This is the top quarter of a tiny (3") pamphlet on the presidential election of 1920, a small bit of political ephemera found in exactly one library worldwide.  It provides a little coverage for the James Cox (a Democrat from Ohio whose running mate was FDR and who found the still-very-existent Cox Communications) and Warren Harding (another Ohioan newspaper magnate but a Republican).  Harding was the compromise candidate in a field showing La Follette, Hoover, Coolidge, and Leonard Wood (among others) who became the party's choice on the eight ballot.  Cox was the Democrat favorite, but it didn't help much, as Harding went on to a tremendous victory with 60% of the vote (and a 404-127 electoral college landslide).  Harding had a number of problems in his presidency, including his 1923 death, an administration pockmarked by scandal, but punctuated by some forward-paced and interesting movements in finance and social issues.  My feeling is that he doesn't deserve the 40's that he pulls in POTUS rankings, but Teapot Dome (and etc) are remembered still for him more than anything else.

None of this helped Cox, who managed to lose the solid south, causing Tennessee to be the first of the eleven original Confederate states since Reconstruction to vote Republican. 

 

Naive-Outsider Titles--Masterpieces of Nothing

JF Ptak Science Books 

In my heaping pamphlet collection there is a sub-collection of works with impossible, outsider-y, and stubbornly semi-confused titles that simply cannot be ignored--I mean the titles can't be ignored, though most of the time their texts beg to be. 

Scorn Not That Which You Do Not Understand

is about as ungainly a title for a book that you could construct in eight words or less.  Then there's

Total Omitters of Realities

a title which is as anti-compelling as the first but accomplishing that feat in half the words, and uses the plural of "reality" just for good measure. Creating another competing title in two words would be fairly improbable. 

Then there are the pamphlets that have no titles on their covers, though they do have title pages, though they really don't look like it, even though they are.  And even when they are what they seem to be not, they really aren't even that.  Such is the case of

When Where and How do you see RED ask me one of the Million.

 

I have no idea what this pamphlet can be about. 

Opened to a random page, I see in heavy underline "The human knower's point of view inside your head and mine and the power of the pen".

It is a mystery--it is also one of the few title pages I have seen that asks for the signature of a "witness". 

 

 

Enormous Title of Visionary Work Utterly Defeats Library Cataloguer

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2076   Outsider Logic  Daily Dose from Dr. Odd

 There appeared on this blog last week a post regarding a library cataloguer who was not threatened or defeated by a work with an enormous and meandering title. The good librarian got right to it, recorded the deed, and moved on. Today's installment of card catalog magic presents a Library of Congress librarian who decided that enough-was-enough, and that there was simply too-much-title to record, and so simply left the rest of it to dots and to the imagination.

Now for the pamphlet itself and the rest of the title:

The author of this 1938 pamphlet simply started to write on the cover and continued through the rest of the work, and ended on the back cover.  There was no title page, no chapter headings, just a collection of ideas with lots of lists and seemingly nowhere to go.  For a short work (36 pages) the author could've dedicated another quire to some blank space, which really doesn't exist in the pamphlet but which is surprisingly helpful even if the message you are trying to deliver is somewhat, well, outre.  There is a lot of very compressed talk about multi-dimensional spirit and conscience and bank deposits and replacing the dollar and tax collection with "circulation of values", and so on, deep into itself and a closed system of interpretation of the existence of the universe, harmony of spirit, and economic interpretations of "radio bulbs" and the (often misspelled) fourtth [sic] dimension.  The writing is exhausting and enumerated, and even though by its colossal subject matter and the complex brevity it should be a reliably porous document, it is fairly rigid and brittle. It is a visionary work that somehow worked its way into print, and I'm happy for that, and even it is impossible to keep up with its runaway logic it is still a good ride.

The author's representation of a semi-vitruvian spiritual anatomy of humans, called Spirisoulman:

A detail of the fabulously-decorated heart region:

And of course part of the plan for universal economics which somehow wraps up the theory of in I.R., or the Inductive Rightousness of Inductive Truths:

Early on in the history of printed books there was a practice of extended title pages, where there would be the title, and then "support literature" further explaining the title to sometimes some great detail, occasionally winging its way into a title 200 words long.  But that was pretty much before the 18th century and mostly before the 17th and mostly a not-common practice.  The gigantic title in the 20th century seems to be mostly relegated to the less-traveled-road variety of public thinking.

And the card catalog for the undefeated librarian mentioned above:

 

 

Odd Designs in the Meat Spectrum & Butter Tub Comparisons

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post     Part of a Series on Unusual Book Titles & Design

This is another entry in a developing thread on marvelous/incredible/Outersider-y book covers and the ideas that go with them.  "Butter Tub" units of comparison jumped straight into my brain when I flipped through the pages of Cow Paths to Prosperity (1934), which is basically a very sober appraisal of the cattle industry for the smaller rancher--except of course that it has a fabulous cover and also has a bar graph employing tubs of butter. The Butter Tubs makes perfect sense, of course, but if view just slightly out of context the graph sustains a slightly covert semi-absurdist feel to it.

The graph comes from this jumpily-designed pamphlet:

And not to be outdone in the serendipity department, I offer this unusually-titled effort from the other side of the Meat Spectrum Civil War between beef and chicken:

$10 grand doesn't sound like a lot in today's money for having to put up with 4000 modern dinosaurs on an egg farm--but when this pamphlet was printed in Pasadena in 1925, it was a 300+% increase over the average American yearly income.  I think the money was a little better and certainly much cleaner for writing about making chicken money than it was to actually do it. 

Selling U.S. Airpower with Hermann Goering

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I know it makes a certain amount of sense to try and sell an idea by using the words of your defeated enemy and how they were defeated by the very thing you're trying to "sell".  But, still: at the bottom of the list (The American Legion Program on Adequate Air Power for National Security, 1947) of pictures and opinions of Truman, Eisenhower, Nimitz, Bush, Arnold, and MacArthur, comes Goering.  The soft, badly-placed, I-helped-to-kill-my-air-force Hermann Goering.  It just doesn't look right--particularly since this is the portrait of him as a skinny Goering, the Goering waiting to be executed, the Goering who lost all of that weight at Nuremberg while on trial before he swallowed a pill and killed himself.  On the other side, in the opposite column, is Roosevelt, Patterson, Spaatz, Wainwright, Hansaker, and Wright--president, secretary of state, commander-in-chief of the USAAF, commander of U.S. forces at Corrigador, chairman of NACA--and then Field Marshall (Generalfeldmarschalls) Albert Kesselring. Kesselring was a major leader, was highly respected, and very successful,  and also sentenced to death at Nuremberg for war crimes (though his sentence was commuted which found him relseased in 1952). 

This was a good and necessary argument--using Goering and Kesselring, well, was not such a good idea, or at least using their portraits in a line of American heroes to make the point was not a good move.

Should Insanity be Cured? (1938)

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2001

Dr. C. Sterling Cooly wrote an incredibly-titled pamphlet of slim means called Should Insanity be Cured?  How could anyone proceed further than this?  Dr. Cooley wasn’t a eugenic apologist, nor was he an accountant for a life insurance firm—he was advocating a drugless cure for all different sorts of “insanity”, which was a term he doesn’t really stop to identify and classify, which of course is deeply problematic. 

Or it is so until you hear how one can treat the insane via his new drugless method:  chiropractic.  I didn’t see that one coming.  “An insane mind is a sick brain, a sick body is an insane body” writes Dr. Cooley with leading confidence, claiming that chiropractic can release “the power within…marvels of healing are performed not only in mental cases but in virtually ALL forms of disease”.  That’s a lot to live up to in theory, let alone in practice. 

Dr. Cooley was evidently a deeply important founder father of modern chiropractic, with a 50-year career in the area (1908-1957), and who was also very prolific--this is one work that he probably shoud've edited out of the publishing phase. 

I don't know why the eyes are so very prominently featured--except I guess to enhance some understanding of the subject area,

A Sharp Insight on Fascists, Union-Busters & other Armed Vigilantes, 1937

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post 

 

The iconic, prodigiously-talented illustrator, old lefty and great inventive soul Rockwell Kent designed and drew this cover for Isobel Walker Soule's The Vigilantes Hide Behind the Flag, a slim but powerful little pamphlet published by the National Committee for Defense of Political Prisoners in 1937.  Ms. Soule was a very present social worker and protagonist for the rights of workers--she and Kent would have shared this great passion--and published this work dealing with armed strike breakers (the "vigilantes") as small targets and Fascists and the like as the larger--those, as well as the groups established by "the economic royalists (who) have given marching orders to their hordes and hope to trap the middle class into the vigilante net they've spread".  

{Soule could really spike a paragraph:  here's an example of her addressing former Ashevillean William Dudley Pelley, founder of the lost-soul hate group the Silver Shirts:

"...He was a YMCA representative with the AEF to Siberia in 1917. Returning to America he wrote for pulp magazines. he became a spiritualist. He had an inspiration and wrote  a story in which he claimed to have died,and spent seven minutes in eternity. On the basis of his fan mail he founded a magazine in North Carolina  with his clair-audient voices from the ether as assistant editors. Out of the magazine he founded the Silver Shirts".)

Soule fills up a stubby thirty pages like few others, addressing the very-present issues of thug-backed union-busting and the powerful growth of fascists at home and abroad.

Drugs Against Men (1939)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This is a fairly straight-forward report on the growing drug menace in the U.S.--it is a little melodramatic in places but beyond that it is a reasoned and sensible account of the terrors of addiction and its social cost. And as the cover art suggests, this short pamphlet by Dr. S.S. Weinberger (which was published in 1939) the work takes it aims mostly at the social and family damages associated with drug use. 

This is a detail from the full cover, as so:

[As it turns out this is a rare pamphlet, with no copies located in the 150-million-item library cataloging tool, WorldCat.]

Dogs as Book Reviewers, 1697

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Having a go at Pinterest I came across a very interesting image--a satirical, and very biting, portrayal of a woman as a scholar (here, with thanks to Whitney Trettien). The artist gives the woman a very monkey-ish feeling, a trained animal aspect, sitting there trying to figure our the words in a book with a right angle and a compass, and sporting monstrous glasses. 

The work is by Gregorio Leti (1630-1701), Critique historique, politique, morale, economique et comique sur les lotteries, which was published in 1693. (Available at the Folger Shakespeare Library, here.) Leti was a critic of many things, but most particularly of the Catholic Church and of the Pope, a collection of efforts which earned a place for all of his works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Within the same book is another double page image, the top showing a writer besieged by his demons, and the bottom, well, the bottom shows the work of dog reviewers of the written word. It is the only antiquarian print that I have seen of such behavior.   

German Rocketry, 1920's & 1930's: Cover Designs

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1901

I've selected a few representatives of design for the covers of pamphlets and books published in the field of rocket development and space flight published in Germany in the 1920's and 1930's (with one from the 1951).  They have a certain expectant sameness them, and, as leading publications in their field, have a remarkable similarity in their (black and white) design.  The combined efforts of these works wound up in the engineering labs of Peenemuende and then int he V-1 and V-2 rockets that pulverized the United Kingdom during WWII.  Later this same expertise, and some of the same engineers, "wound up" in the United States developing the American space program.  The most famous of these Paperclipped scientists was Wernher von Braun, whose name is so intimately connected with the Vengeance Weapons as well as the Apollo space program.  It is interesting to note that for many years if twas impossible to find von Braun's name on any exhibition description in the Air and Space Museum in D.C.--it just wasn't there, so far as I could tell, on no displays, even though I went looking for it pretty closely.  On the 30th anniversary of the Moon landing, I went to von Braun's grave to see if it had been remembered in any way--there wasn't anything there, just his simple small slab, next-door to and within eyesight of a Jewish cemetery. 

Rudolf Nebel (1894-1978), very early member of the Raketenflugplatz, assistant to Hermann Oberth and very nearly the first to successfully conduct an experiment with a liquid-fueled rocket, beaten to the finish line by a man whose work he was not familiar with, Robert Goddard.  He defined right-wing in the Weimar era, and was part of a paramilitary organization called Stralheim; Wernher von Braun seems to have succeeded in the avenue that Nebel tried to travel along.  Nebel published this work in 1932, a year before the Nazi party came into power, and before his crotchety problems with teh SA began.

Unusual Title Pages: Burning Metal, 1530

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

The Probierbuchlein (Probir Buechlin/auff Goldt/SIlber/Alle ertz und Metall. Mit vil kostbarlichen Alechimeijischen Kunsten...) printed in Augsberg by Christian Egenolph in the autumn of 1530, was the first German book to deal with the significance of alchemy and metallurgy.  I think it usual to think of the work of Georgius Agricola (1495-1555)  and his justifiably famous  De Re Metallica, but the anonymous (?) Pribierbuchlein predates the work by at least 36 years. There's not much else of a comparison between the two works save for the earliness of the Probierbuchlein, as it was 48 folio leaves and somewhat restricted--but first is first, and it may have made the way easier for Agricola, whose own efforts paved the way for the systematic study of the Earth   Agricola made fundamental contributions to mining geology and metallurgy, mineralogy, structural geology, and paleontology, and outlined them all beautifully in a book that was ten times the length of the Probierbuchlein, and also fabulously and sumptuously (and usefully) illustrated.