JF Ptak Science Books

The Family Who Shoots Together...(1890)

JF Ptak Science Books  Daily Dose from Dr. Odd

The beautifully and accurately named  Rubber Tipped Arrow Company supplied an assortment of parlor games for children (and adults) for "perfectly harmless" shooting.  The truth is that I really liked the image of progression of shooters, reminding me a little of the "Ages of Man" prints.  This appears in the advertising section of the Scientific American for 3 August 1890--two issue before their famous cover showing Herman Hollerith's critical calculating machines at use in the American census.  

And this ad, from one of their competitors, found in The American Stationer, 1889, page 957:

 

America Has No Enemies in Asia (1938)!

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Ralph Townsend provided one of the oddest, least-time-conscious, and pernicious titles (printed in 1938!) in my experience with pulpy propagandistic quick-publications of the 1930's.  Townsend (1900-1976) was a Columbia School of Journalism product, but something happened, and emerged in the 1930's as a deep Sinophobe, an anti-Roosevelt anti-interventionist far-right apologist for the imperialism of the Japanese government.  

He got into trouble after Pearl Harbor, deeper in 1942, for being an unregistered agent of the Japanese government and was sent to jail. He survived himself and had a career writing about his very far right-wing ideas, and is evidently a favorite of some out-on-the-end-of-the-spectrum Right Wing folks today for his isolationist and ultra-orthodox America-for Americans views.  

What it boils down to in Asia, for Townsend, is that the Sino-Japanese war as the fault of the Chinese, and that Japan simply fought to protect its interests, and then, with the occupation of China, to further protect itself and (yes) China.  This sort of thing still happens.

Maps of Human Hair Streams (1902)

JF Ptak Science Books     Daily Dose from Dr. Odd

There is something exceptional about the exceptional.  In this case, the category is maps, and in this instance the map that takes us away, far away, from the expected or standard is one showing the flow of human hair streams.  (It fits very nicely with other exceptional maps found on this site, like Maps of the Cosmos of Moles--just browse the "maps" section in the archives.)  

 This unlikely title is the creation of Dr. Walter Kidd (Fellow of the Zoological Society, London) and his attempt to reconcile the the influences of gravity, inheritance, genetics, Weismannianism, and other assorted biological bits via his study of hair growth patterns.  The article appears in the (many) pages of the Scientific American Supplement for 13 September 1902, on page 22, 328. (Yes, the Supplement was paginated consecutively over dozens of years of publications, a cumbersome manner of ordering an 8-foot stack of paper over dozens of volumes.)  In any event, this was an article to simply explain some of Kidd's ideas and the chart that would appear in a more lengthy treatise of 153pp published in the next year by Adam Black.  Contemporary views of Kidd's book were not very supportive of his work.  I should add that I was attracted to this article solely for the possibility that this may well be the first map of directional hair growth. (I think the idea is pretty interesting, but I'm just not in the mood for it presently.)

 Some of the other posts on this blog dealing with unusual hairiana include the following:

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. 

Wake Up and Sleep! Riding Ether Waves to Bigger Brains, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books   Daily Dose from Dr. Odd

Q: What is the one sure thing that is very impressive about this publication by Mr. Rex Knight?

A:  The 35-ring wire binding on a six-inch tall publication. There's not much to recommend itself to recommendation and memory. 

[Perfection had better hurry up and get here given my own fast-short-sleep habits]

Mr. Knight had some ideas about sleep and well-being and achieving various states of normalcy and perfection, most of which had to do with waking up during hte night and staring at one of the many full-page neuro-demands which evidently were in direct confrontation with whatever it was in your head that was keeping you from success and strength and wealth and inspiration and self, combating "enslaving habits" and "lesser habits" by telling the brain what to do with the mind.  Or something along those lines.

In any event, Mr. Knight tried something out and used a lot of wire to bind the really rather nice paper his effort was printed on, so Wake Up and Sleep had at least that going for it.  Aside from that, his suggestions seem more disruptive and potentially rheumy-eyed more than anything else, waking you through the night to hand deliver messages to your sleeping and semi-enslaved brain to find its own appropriate "wave" to enrich your life.  "The prize idea that you seek is in the air all around you", he writes.  "Ether waves, mental waves, cosmic or whatever you choose to call them, are everywhere.  All you are trying to do is to get tuned in on the right wave". 

"Expect more and more of sleep" says Mr. Knight--at least that is one remedy that would sound good to almost everyone. 

It is interesting to note that "Rex Knight" is very close to being "R_x Night".  And "King of the Night".

Lastly, according to WorldCat, there is only one copy located in libraries worldwide--that at NYPL.  My copy was from the copyright office/collection at the Library of Congress when it came to me in a Very Large Grouping (called with little imagination "The Pamphlet Collection") many years ago.  It never was a hit for the libraries.

 

The Illuminated Artifical Hand-Held Hand Directional for Cars, 1916

JF Ptak Science Books   Daily Dose from Dr. Odd

In general I'm not in favor of left turns for autos in cities of a size where traffic congestion is an issue.  It seems that from a main thoroughfare that three rights should make a left, easy congestion in the center of a busy street, eliminating lines of cars waiting behind a left-turning car waiting for a break in oncoming traffic, and so on.  This semi-crackpot notion was just sparked after seeing this As Seen on TV-style pre-televsion promotional for an artificial hand for a left-turning hand-directional 1916 automobile.  The hand is actually illuminated, which would have made it more effective than a stark hand in the night.  It seems that they were just about <this close> to figuring our a less mechanical-anthropomorphic and more elegant solution than the illuminated artificial hand-held hand.

[Source: Illustrated World, 1916, page 257.]

"The Machine You Will Eventually Buy": 12-ton Typewriter

JF Ptak Science Books    Daily Dose from Dr. Odd  

These would certainly make nice counter stools, if they were a little bigger--but they not, and they weren't, though they were just what they looked like--typewriter keys--and were part of a working 28,000-pound machine built for the San Francisco Exposition in 1915. 

Evidently the machine was operated by using a regular -sized typewriter, the keys working in unison to produce a gigantic text on a big piece of paper.  It was an advertising vehicle built by the Underwood typewriter company, and seems to have been a star of the expo--it certainly got a lot of attention, and successfully delivered to itself plenty of hopeful buyers who would round-out the company motto about their product: "The machine you will eventually buy".

[Source:  Technical World Magazine, May 1915, page 346.]

 

The World's First Cookbook of Toast, 1937

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

 

I'm not so sure that this is "odd"--it is certainly unusual, and unusual in an interesting, surprising, and constructive way.  A Book of Recipes and Suggestions for the Use of Toast at first glance stretches the idea of necessity, and maybe it still does, but at the end of the day this is a very nicely designed, considered and encyclopedic end-all treatment of toast.  It states on the title that it is "the first exclusive Toast Recipe Book ever published", and I'll take it at its word. Happily.

So, we have recipes for the Cinnamon: cinnamon toast,  honey, marmalade, jam (!), maple, pineapple, marshmallow orange, super-toast griddle cakes, super toast waffles.  the French Toasts: raisin, milk, prune, orange, banana, eggs royal, and French toasted bacon. Then there's eggs in bread cakes, meat pies, deviled rarebit a la toast, tuna a la super-toast, shrimp Louisiana toast, sausage toast rolls, super-toast meat pies, toasted super cheese rings, super toast hash, crown frankfurter roasted toast, eggs benedict on super-toast, cannibal toast rarebit waffles, and so on.  That's about a quarter of the recipes, and it seems about 300% more toast recipes than I've ever heard of before.  Probably more. 

Toast.

 

A Tiny Worm, 1839

JF Ptak Science Books   Daily Dose from Dr. Odd 

 

I'm just passing this engraving along--the last dot in the right-hand column in the engraving below (shown in more detail just below that) exhibits the life-size dimensions of the guilty worm.  The way in which the worm is presented is just very well done and beautiful in its own way. 

[Source:  The American Journal of Pharmacy, January 1839, volume 10, "Remarks on Ergot", by W.H. Miller. 

"They crept leisurly about, and seemed to regale themselves on the mouldy matter on the surface of the grain, which, through the microscope, resemed a saccharine paste..."

And the detail:

A Top 1% Card Catalog Title Entry. Seriously.

JF Ptak Science Books  Daily Dose from Dr. Odd 

 

 
Triple-F (Frank Freemnont Frazee) came up with an all-time-great-title entry when he wrote his pamphlet about _____ back in 1947.  I have a copy of it, purchased in a 90,000-item collection from the Library of Congress--something called "The Pamphlet Collection", housed in 1,500 blue document boxes from 1952, all of which were categorized in a Borgesian nightmare way, according to nothing. Therefore the "General" box might have had General Electric pamphlets, or something about General Malaise, or Boston General, or General Rules of Parking in Providence (R.I.), and so on.  So, although categorized and alphabetized, it was all useless.  Among this beautiful mess were a thousand or so pamphlets like Mr. Frazee's--incredibly titled, about stuff visible and invisible, complaints, claims, praises, warnings, sufferings, advanced supra-backwards premonitions, and so on.  My Frazee copy happened also to be the U.S. Copyright Deposit copy (or one of them, rather) that was sent to the Library of Congress to be housed forever (or until I got them), along with a carbon copy of the card catalog entry. 

The card is a work of art. (More about this pamphlet here.)

The Batmobile of Teacher's Desks, 1898

JF Ptak Science Books    Daily Dose from Dr. Odd
 

 

Sometimes there are certain things that must not be refused--this is one of them.  St. Jerome may have had a number of interesting  and complex desks granted him during his imaging heydays in the late Medieval through Renaissance periods, and  there have been fabulously simple approaches like the table-top/lap desk of Thomas Jefferson or the Easy-Boy arm desk of Roald Dahl, and there have been desk/floors like that of Albert Einstein, and desk beds like George Costanza's, and refigerator-desks like Thomas Wolfe's, and standing desks like Winston Churchill's, and non-desks of Sherlock Holmes, and so on; but I think given all of those I'd rather have the desk below, patented by M. McC. Parr in 1898.  It seems to have it all, including a possible built-in bed--the only thing it is missing is an engine and a driveshaft and some wheels...you can add the brakes later on.  

Isolated Crowds & People in Crowded Isolation

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

There are crowds and then there are crowds, crowds that are big and filled with people, and then crowds that are filled, but somehow strangely not with people even though they are there--large groups of isolated people.  These photos show up now and again, as they did today--I gathered four examples, below.

[Student nurses, Roosevelt Hospital, New York City, 1938. Found at the Pinterest collection of Christian-Paul North, here]

 This image is of a church or social service at Pentonville Prison in 1855. 

Lonely hatted man in a very large crowd on Coney Island, Brooklyn, U.S.A, as captured by Weegee, ca. 1950.   (The Hat Man is at the extreme bottom right corner.)

 

 

A Telephone Book for the Dead and a Telephone to Deadville Redux (1912)

JF Ptak Science Books     Daily Dose from Dr. Odd  

 

 

Two years ago I posted "My Zombie 'Phone to Deadville" and Tales of the Infinite Boneyard, by Tom Edison which addressed a prickly mock-interview that the great inventor gave in 1910 about the possibility of communicating/telephoning with/to the dead.  On the other hand, his recording phonograph did accomplish this, in a one-way way--for the first time in human history it allowed a person to listen to the sounds of something that couldn't make sounds anymore.  Dead People Talking must have been an enormous idea to those of the first few years of Edison's 1877 recordable/playable device--it still its own enormity if you stop to think about it for a moment. 

This is to some degree what was in the minds of the members of the Talking-with-the-Dead Club in Chicago's Oak Park as seen in an article in the endlessly interesting Popular Mechanics (for 1912). The members of the "Borrowed Time" club really weren't so much interested in talking with the dead but rather were more consumed with the dead talking to them. On waxed cylinders.  Perhaps it was a new modern miracle and a possible comfort to their own soon-to-be demise that it would be possible to reach out from the grave to have your voice heard.  The club was founded in 1902, and of its 25 charter members only 10  survived in 1912. It would have been an odd conceit to join a club to sit with fellow members to listen to the voices of dead members, a strange if new insistence on corporeal attention to dead stuff. But it is a very recognizable wish--"need', even--to have your the memory of your dead self improved or at least substantiated with a recording of your years-dead voice available to the curious. 

This makes me think about a telephone book for the dead--there's certainly enough material out there for one, or to at least think about organizing one. Certainly in the near future there will be millions of new dead people, and given the extent of cell phone communication and etc. this will be one of the fastest-expanding communities of potential communicants. Probably the idea of a "telephone book" for the Dearly Departed is old fashioned, especially when we can have an entire internet (the world wide dead web) devoted to them, the them that are us. This may sound trivial and snarky, but it isn't and I'm not trying to be--I'm dead serious.