JF Ptak Science Books

Naive Surreal Titles (Series #15): Antique Ideas About Womanhood

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 645  Blog Bookstore

In a  continuing thread that I call The Naïve Surreal—common, ephemeral titles relating to subjects whose meaning has virtually no place outside its own era, creating art in their otherwise forgettable and forgetting covers and design—come these two examples relating to women and girls.  There’s really not much to say about their contents, really—so much has already been said.  They’re just a standard of their time.  Things People Won’t Talk About (1937)  is [sic] venereal diseases, and is an appeal for actual public discussion (“the foolish secrecy surrounding (the diseases) is what makes them so destructive”.

What Every Girl Should Know (1928) contains nothing I think outside what everyone would expect it top say, except that it is rather well written, and also (in places) quite strongly opinionated.  The little pamphlet also assumes that its readers already know its complaints:  “the evils of self-abuse are so well known, that there is no need to elaborate further on this point”.    Its “chapter” headings tell a lot of the story, and probably enough of it to make their reading the only thing you need to read:  “Know Thyself”, :Know Thyself Spiritually”, “Woman’s Mission”, “The Age of Puberty”, “The Ovaries”, “Harmoul—its Importance”, “Rash Marriage”, “Freedom and More Freedom”, “Lust and Love”, “The Value of Chastity”, “Buying Popularity”, “Selling the Body for Clothes”, “The Tragedy of Dual Love”, Menstruation”, “Masturbation”, “Promiscuous Sexual Intercourse”, “Gonorrhea”, “Syphilis”, “The Dreaded Third Stage”.  So. There you have it.

The History of the Evil Eye

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 644

Fortis imagination generat cassum (“A strong imagination begets the event itself”)

 The Imagination of the human heart is evil from his youth (Genesis 8.21)*

 

Barney Robbin’s A Dissertation on the Evil Eye was headed to my category on Icons of Shouted & Mysterious titles—until I started to read it.  It turns out that Mr. Robbins wrote a fine, sort of brightly-written exegesis on the history of evil and its manifestation in the evil gaze—a tough thing to do in 40 pamphlet-y pages and still have lots of references to The Ancients.  He also has a pretty liberal undercurrent towards the authenticity of the Bible, the basis of human history (“our human ancestors lived in savagery during practically the entire existence of the race”), the invention of the convention of privacy in human sexual affairs (and its representation in the OT vs NT), Old Testament superstition, and other varieties of contemporary social mores and their interaction with asceticism and pagan practices. He then deftly slides into the origins of  “the preposterous belief” in and personification/transference of evil spirits, and in religious intolerance of the assumed imagination of the human mind and its role in rapturous misinterpretations of the Bible and the growth of redemptive evil.

The last fifteen pages are spent solely on the evil eye, and is a pithy statement on how it was “given” in various cultures, and how people protected themselves from it. “They have the plague, and caught it of your eyes” writes Shakespeare in Love’s Labor Lost (V II), and this is the least of it, though Robbins points out that in various cultures you could seal yourself from this ”plague” by spitting, wearing bright colors, collecting and spewing rainwater collected on the 27th of April, cross dressing, keeping a phallic amulet on the body, keeping salt and coal in the pockets of children, blessing wine, blowing smoke into a child’s mouth, and so on.

Robbins points to Francis Bacon, who wrote: " It seems some have been so curious as to note that the times when the stroke or percussion of an envious eye does most hurt are particularly when the party envied is beheld in glory and triumph." And of Robert Heron, who in his travels in Scotland in 1793 wrote : " Cattle are subject to be injured by what is called an evil eye, for some persons are supposed to have naturally a blasting power in their eyes, with which they injure whatever offends or is hopelessly desired by them. Witches and warlocks are also much disposed to wreak their malignity on cattle. ... It is common to bind into a cow's tail a small piece of mountain-ash wood, as a charm against witchcraft." And then to Thomas Lupton, who in his Book of Notable Things (1586) wrote : " The eyes be not only instruments of enchantment, but also the voice and evil tongues of certain persons."  And so it goes, on and on.  Entertainingly so.

But there is something of Robbins that doesn’t sit well; perhaps it is his book on the New Testament, or the sniffly jaundiced Immigration and Americanization which form the background for some of the man’s thinking when he veers from liberal interpretations to right-wing political statements.  Out of nowhere comes the following gem:  “Communism is the accursed offspring of the evil eye with all its implications.  It is the collective evil eye of the masses…”

I think what Mr. Robbins is getting to, ultimately, is the delivery of his belief that savagery has continued for thousands of years and continued to his present, “flourishing long past its day”.  Maybe so.  In any event I found his work to be unexpectedly interesting, and was impressed that he was able to weave such a complicated summation of evil in such a small place. 
______
[Mr. Robbins also lobs in a  few unexpected grenades from the Old Testament, including this healthy reminder from the Book of Proverbs, which he uses in discussing a sidebar he pursues with Noah and the choice of god being evil and 58% alcohol:

It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine; nor for princes strong drink; Lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert the judgment of any of the afflicted. Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.]

*The imagination was also a source of sinful pride (Luke 1:51) and a source for idolatrous art (Acts 17:29), and still present in humans  in spite of the cleansing flood, and in spite of the races of man having been scattered and completely dis-united by Babel.

It turns out that the Robbins book is rare:  only six copies have been located in OCLC/WordlCat:  Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Chicago, NYPL, Libby Congress (although not the LC any more, as this copy used to be their’s.)

Bad Book Titles (and Worse Contents): Cruella DeVille and the Fur of Cats and Dogs, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 642  Blog Bookstore

How could one pass up the chance to browse through such a  compelling and revolting title such as   Standardized Fur Tags, Their Use and Purpose, (published in NYC by the Fur Research Institute in 1938)?  Titles like this cry out in equal parts of pity, shame and pride, calling to their readers like fur-lined Sirens beckoning to fur-encrusted sailors floundering in a fury sea, hell-bent to crash upon fur-slathered rocks.  In a world of covering things in fur that once belonged to another living thing, the thinking’s all over but for the process, pricing and standardization, so that the furriers were less inclined to cheat one another and focus on the fleecing of the buying public.  

 Opening this oversized pamphlet reveals the explanation of the fur identified by the tags that would appear on the interior-neck of the garment.  There are 125 descriptions and standardization of furs, though I must say that what caught my attention first was the fur of the “natural” house cat (followed by the “dyed” house cat)—they say that this was not an agoraphobic cat’s pelt used to make the apparel, but from cats “wild and semi wild”.  Like barn cats, I guess. (We are told that the fur “breaks off”, and is not a very good choice for outerwear, though it did seem to work for the cat.)

Then there’s the “dyed Chinese dog” and the “dyed Mongolian dog”—I’m not sure who would need pelts made of dog (or cat, or anything else for that matter), but I guess that they were popular enough to be included in these furrier  guidelines.  And so the list goes on and on: dyed skunk, pieced skunk, natural skunk, dyed squirrel, dyed weasel, natural wolf, dyed opossum, etc. 

Bizarre Titles with Real Content: the Fine Art of Squeezing

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 612   Blog Bookstore

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, This Side of Paradise, Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, In Praise of Folly, the Divine Comedy,  Pride and Prejudice.

Sometimes magnificent titles of books deliver magnificent things.

Then there are the uneven, unruly titles hiding great works like Aristtotle’s On Youth and Old Age, On Life and Death, On Breathing; Das Kaptial, On the Origin of Species, Paradise Lost, Brothers Karamazov,  Tractatus Logico-Philosohicus.

There are badly-titled books that are just bad--we don't need to get into that right now, wounding the wounded.

And then sometimes a book title promises a lot and delivers it--but not the "a lot" that you expected.  The Fine Art of Squeezing, god knows, is a title that demands attention.  I thought, well, I'm not sure what I was expecting--possibly it would actually be on squeezing things. (I've seen many examples of this sort of bizarre title/content continuity, so I thought it a possibility.)  But  the story here is delivered by the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and details their properties being nationalized--squeezed--by the government of Mexico in 1938.  It is one of a series of pamphlets, and it evidently sucked up every bit of creativity at Standard Oil:  The Question of Subsoil Rights in Mexico and The Accustomed Practices in Cases of Expropriation and Confiscation are two titles that deliver the contents' good accurately and dryly.  This singluarly-titled work also has chapter headings that equally lovely and bizarre:  "The Revolutionary Squeeze", "The Constitutional Squeeze:, "The Concession Squeeze", "Strangling the Goose "and other fortifies the reader with the possibility of a surreal experience.  It is not, of course--it is a competent and direct summation of Standard's deal with Mexico. 

 

Soap...in Everyday Life is another one of those lovely naive titles, though it only hides a very accurate and authoritative display of Soap Knowledge, published by the Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Co. The draw to this pamphlet for me stops as soon as you open it.  (It is a happy little soap-making theme on the cover, though.)

Thirst is another disappointment--weird title and design, and was written in 1937 (and self-published) by Elzoe Prindle Stead.  The joy of the title is quickly dissolved by the content, with chapter headings such as "Born Once", "Once to Die", "Going to Hell", "For Him of the Second Death", "Forgotten or rejected Savior", and "Jesus goes to the Cross.  Its a major proselytizing vehicle which defines itself with the last chapter title, "Why Not". 
 

A Short Homage to the Alphanetical Past of Union-Made American Brooms

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 584
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I was breezing through what seems to be an innocuous forgotten document:  the 1941 Union Label Catalogue-Directory. It lists the union labels of trades who were part of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a 32-page pamphlet advising its readers on how to hunt for union-made goods, and to get the union-earned dollar spent with other unions. Even though only 68 years old, the list of unions seems far more antiquarian, the unions and the jobs/workers they protected seemingly from another, earlier time: the Allied Printing Trades, Cigar Makers, Clerks Protective Association, Glove Workers, Hatters, Horse Shoers, Meat Cutters, Pocketbook Workers, Novelty Workers, Sheep Shearers, Stereotypers, Telegraphers, Wall Paper craftsman, and on and on.   

But it was the broom and whisk makers union label that really struck me. There is something beautiful and sad in this design--the design is lovely as is the idea of the workers who were probably protected by the union; what is instantly saddening is the recognition of the incongruity that such a trade was widespread enough to need protection and organization, and how far gone such industries are. Really gone. 

Looking through the names on the list of union shops of broom and whisk makers suggests elements for a poem on vanished brooms.  There is of course the Ace Broom Company, and the Acme, and, yes, the American Broom Company; followed by the Amor, Artzcraftz, Baria, Bard, Birminham, Best, Brown, Buckholtz, Burlington, Coleman, Continental, Eagle, Galesburg, Haferman and Hanset, Ideal, Imperial, Lighthouse, Mid-West, Montana, M & M, Mutual, National, Progress, Progressive, Rainbow, Reliable, Rich, Royal, Western, Terre Haute and Zenith.  The "R's" have the field, hands down. 

The pamphlet ably describes the design and its color, and where the label appeared on the product.  In the case of the brooms and whisks, it also assured the purchaser that the product was not made by "contract prison labor".  (I have a prison-manufactured catalog from Angola Prison here that I'll have to write about some day--published in 1937, it was glossy and thick, offering hundreds (?!) of items for the office and home, but mostly heartpine and heavy oak goods for white collar consumption.  The scale of the operation is pretty surprising to me.)

I like the whole idea of the handshake, the square deal, the care in the construction of the broom.  I just looks right.  And as you well know a good broom is a thing of beauty--it will do its just correctly and last forever. 

Women Meat Pioneers, 1943

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 570

(Science Book Blog)

This simply irresistible, charmingly uncomfortable, and semi-surreal title is an excellent example of what I've come to know (and forget) in my  career of doing whatever it is I'm doing.  Generally though the thousand or so titles in my Naive Surreal collection belong to pamphlets and the occasional book, but the occasional advertisement makes its way into the fray.  (None really come quite close to the work of the immortal Otto Fleiss, who produced America's greatest work on making art with fat,  White Art in the Meat Food Business.  A Practical Handbook for Butcher, Pork Stores, Restaurants, Hotels and Delicatessens on How to Make Lasting and Transferable White Art Decorations out of Bacon Fat Back for Window Displays, Ornaments on Meat Food Cold Buffets and for Exhibits and Advertising Purposes.  Enrich yourself with Personal Knowledge. It is a toweringly fantabulous work, and is one of this blog's most-viewed posts.)

This ad is innocent enough:  appearing in the 1 November 1943 issue of LIFE magazine, it was simply encouraging the modern housewife to go adventuring into cuts of meat that had been deemed unacceptable before rationing and the war, which brought about a meat drought.  (The Brits had a far worse time--this issue of LIFE also contained a photo of a leggy London showgirl posing with a "real lemon" which was being raffled off to raise hundreds of pounds for the general welfare.) 

I'm sorry to say that this image reminded me of an older, finer, more whimsical but far more damning and stern woodcut.  The two aren't terribly-well related, I know, but as I shocked myself in being able to locate it I'm bound to use it now before it slips back into my misty print purgatory. 

This image is probably the work of Georg Pencz and appeared in Hans Sachs' Nachred das grewlihc laster...published in Nuremberg in 1535 The booklet was a work directed against the evils of libel and lying and spreading rumor.  Pencz' woodcut personified all of this wrapped up in the form of a vice-charmed woman.

The libel-charged rumor-mongre woman (watched from under a tree by a poet who is protected from her by a fellow with an imperial seal and stanchion) is outfitted with very feathery wings and a crowned seat on a collection of snakes.  She carries a lidded pot, an offering of some sort, while she hides a knife behind her back with her other hand.  She advances with a breast barred and another breast vut and bleeding, while she tugs along in her wake a ball and chain, which sets her traveled path on fire.  All-in-all, Pencz paints a dismal picture of womanhood. 

As I said, it has little to do with the original image of a Pioneer Meat Woman, but they sort of looked similar in my memory. 

Sublime Mundane: a History of High School Lunches and the Commercialization of Children's Needs

JF Ptak Science Books  LLC  Post 561

This is another in a series of posts on the Sublime Mundane--books and pamphlets whose titles are nothing if not introductions to spectacular nothingness.  Sometimes these publications are indeed about disappearing wisps of lost lint, and sometimes not; sometimes the mundane and seemingly stupifyingly "normality" of their subject matter leads to something of deep depth.  Today's pamphlet, left, fits the second category. 
Part of the interest in this work--outside of its momentarily arresting title that has a potential for being a cascade of boredom-- is that it so quickly rights itself into an important topic.  That's not to say that it isn't a boring topic, as my quick and semi-feeble research reveals.  It does get interesting though when you consider that it took so long for the recognition that, since all of these children in school have been brought together, that there wasn't some sort of federally organized effort to make sure that the weakest members of this group had at least one decent meal a day.  That said, the earliest program were for students who could afford to pay for their lunches.  Perhaps it was assumed that, around the turn of the century, there were no lunch rooms per se and that children would eat wherever they could find the space, that many children were also going home for lunch, and that they were all being fed.  (I do remember that some classmates of mine in P.S. 29 would go home for lunch, and I remember wondering exactly what that was all about.  I can recall taking my brother for special every-so-often-Friday treats at Joe & Pat's Pizzeria for three slices and two cokes for a dollar back there in 1968.  But I digress.)  It actually took a little time before children's lunches at school were made to be free to those who needed it. 

Which brings us to Marion Nestle's Food Politics (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002), who discusses the early commodification of children's food: "School meal programs began during the Great Depression of the 1930's. From the outset, they had two purposes: to help dispose of surplus agricultural commodities owned by the government as a result of price-support agreement with farmers , and to help prevent nutritional deficiencies among low-income schoolchildren. Because chronic disease risk factors were not an issue at that time, the rules specified meals that used surplus commodities and were higher in fat, saturated fat, sugar, and salt---and lower in fiber---than recommended in later years."  All of which is detestable and unwholesome and immediately transparent.

Perhaps the really interesting stuff on feeding children at school starts here, in the 1930's, and that with the commercialization of children's biological needs, breaking the back of an agricultural finance problem in the school lunch rooms.  The lunch as commodity expands from massive leftover projects into something a little more insidious in the television age, when children not only get to dress their foods in the sorts of containers that they wanted (lunch boxes), but also were being deluged with displays of foods that they could select for themselves via television.  This commercialization process gets ramped up decade by decade, until in the 1990's and 2000's the lunchroom has in some cases become an extension of the t.v. commercial, and that local and state governments are counting the value of sugary waters, salt, and catchup packets while plying the rest of the arrested nutritional package with prepackaged conglomerate goodness.

And such is the value of the sublime mundane, at least for me--these items are filled with possibilities invisible to their titles. 

Even after all of this, I must confess that I would dearly like to have a Fireball XL5 lunch box to take with me into eternity.  All systems go!

Some interesting links with more than you need to know about school lunch history:

The Food Museum Online Exhibit:  School Lunch History
School Lunch Programs in the USA (according to city)
School Lunch Programs in Europe

The "Huh?" Department: Pig Graphs, Pig Checkers and Other Small Confusions. Naive Surreal Advertising Art

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 485

 

“Always remember, a cat looks down on man, a dog looks up to man, but a pig will look man right in the eye and see his equal.”--W.S. Churchill

Well.  Some things can just speak for themselves, as in the case(s) of these curious images brought to you by the graphic design folks working to push feed for Purina Company.  There were still tens of millions of farmers in the U.S. when this pamphlet was printed in 1935, and most of these farms were quite small, and so the Purina Company was reaching out with a broad stroke, right down to the neighborhood guy with 6 pigs on a half acre.  Of course what makes these images so appealing now is that they seem other-worldly, from a time that we have very little connection to even though it existed in the lifetimes of my parents.  The images are discordant, off-centre, not-quite-right--which places them perfectly into my Naive Surreal category.  The images are in their own accidental way quite surreal in that they look to be intentionally bizarre, when the opposite is true.

 

Nestled snuggly away though is this remarkable graph of pig value versus time--its interest has nothing to do with the data which I suspect was accurate and universally known to be so (at the time), but for the PIG MARKERS at the X/Y interface.  That is something I'm sure I've never seen before, and I pay very close attention to the history of the display of quantitative data.  It is a small jewel.  a pearl among, well you know.

 

As for some of the other images and their pig-centeredness, I can only speculate.  "Profit begins with the sow" is a solar porcine sunrise with little pig radiances.  "Purina Sow and Pig Checkers" I thought at first and continue to wrongly think that the cube in the middle was a loaf of bread (complete with shadow!), beautifully confounding the image-heading dichotomy; but it isn't.  It is still a small magnificance of confusion, thank goodness.

America’s Greatest Social Export: “We Shall Overcome” and the Importance of Guy Carawan

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 474

Thinking about (really) high explosives for yesterday's post led me to the American export of arms.  This in  turn led me to consider the non-lethal aspects of American exports--specifically, great, large-scale  American contributions to global society, and about what our greatest non-technical export might be.  (So far as the tech side goes, the most important of our exports over the last hundred years or so I would be, I guess, the computer—it is basically an American innovation, Charles Babbage and Konrad Zuse and a few others notwithstanding. I can’t imagine anything more superior; on the other hand, something like “fast food” might be considered, though it is ultimately an horrendous blight more than anything else, worldwide phenomenon and moneymaker or not.) 

My candidate for this honor of Great American Export is a song:  “We Shall Overcome”. It is  a meme, really, understandable by anyone, anywhere; it meaning universally understood, and it power for gathering people together to fight for the  common good  is  powerful and undeniable.  It  is  a remarkable song, standing for the hope and dreams and  accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement and the vision of Martin Luther King.

The other candidates that come to mind don’t come close to the power, crushing visibility and instantly-attaining recognition of WSO.  Free enterprise has been mentioned by lots of folks for this honor, but I honestly don’t see how it is an American invention—the Brits and Austrians were all over the concept in the mid 19^th century, so I’m not so sure it can apply.  Perhaps these folks are talking about “virulent capitalism”, which may be American, and which may again rank quite high on this list, but not necessarily so proudly.  American Constitutionalism is another idea, as is the concept of image and (Martin Amis’) the cool.  Equally significant is debt accumulation, which is as interesting as a rash, and the insidious post-9/11 Fear, where all of our dreams’ life spans are color coded in segments away from oblivion.   Happier and more filling ideas are feminism and women’s rights (American only in the last 5- or 75 years or so), which leads to the general appearance of Civil Rights, which gets us right back to where we started, with WSO. In doing a quick mental accounting, WSO trumps all-comers. 

The song’s creation is credited to the preacher and songwriter Charles Tindley (1851-1933), the son of a slave, who wrote I Shall Over-Come in 1901. The song came to greater life in 1945 as a result of a strike against the American Tobacco Company by the Tobacco Workers Union. Lucille Simmons, who was a striker, began singing the song at the end of the day’s striking activities—it came to the attention of the union’s organizer, Zilphia Horton, who was also at the time the musical director (and co-founder, with her husband Frank Horton) of the Highlander Folk School (of Monteagle, Tennessee. Highlander was started in the 1930’s as a place to instruct people how to organize and strike, and evolved over time into an extraordinary place of learning (and which was also “stolen” and seized by the U.S.  government in 1960, but that’s another story).  In the hands of Ms. Horton (who tragically died in 1956 at the age of 46) the song was introduced to Pete Seeger, who published it in  Bulletin No. 3 (Sept., 1948), #8, in 1948 in People’s Songs. (Photo at above/right is of Guy Carawan and Cnadie Carawan.)

It would take another four years before the song made its first recorded appearance. “We Shall Overcome” (changing the “will” to “shall” as in the Seeger version) by Laura Duncan and the Jewish Youth Singers (Hootenany records).  In 1953 the song was critically introduced to Frank Hamilton from Zilphia Horton, and from there to Hamilton’s friend and south-swing travelling companion Guy Carawan. (Carawan is seen at left with MLK in 1962.)

It is in Carawan’s hands that the song , I think, received its most important treatment.  Carawan became the music director at Highlander in 1959 and re-introduced the song there, the school now being principally concerned with civil rights and student activism.  What makes Carawan so supremely important is that he traveled with the song and taught it to many groups of the important Student Noviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); the members of these groups in turn taught it to other groups, and so on and so on.  Carawan in fact taught the song at the initial meeting of SNCC in Raleigh in 1960, and has been credited with his importance by Julian Bond, Pete Seeger and many others.  The song is now perhaps the most recognized modern creation in existence, and may very well hold more significance than any other song in recent memory.  It is an anthem of belief, and of hope, and stands for what can be accomplished; it also stands for all of those who have given so much for their beliefs and for the betterment of society--a holy inspiration.
(Thanks to Jeff Donlan for pointing me to the Mahalia clip on Youtube.)

[My wife, Patti Digh, and I traveled to interview Guy and Candie Carawan a few days ago to talk to them about their lives in social awareness and about the song "We Shall Overcome". To read her article on this experience, visit her blog at 37days.com.]

 
Note on the WSO sheet music:  the fine print reads as follows:  (copyrighted) by "Horton, Silphia; Frank Hamilton; Guy Carawan; and Pete Seeger.. "We Shall Overcome." Ludlow Music, Inc., 1963. Music Division, Library of Congress, Courtesy of Ludlow Music, Inc.

Celebrating a Good Idea that Sounds Silly: Concrete Ships

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 459

This 1919 pamphlet's title certainly sound more odd than the concept it describes:  concrete boats have been around for a long time, (160 years at least), and they make a lot more sense than a quick-think would give them (lumbering, unstoppable, heavy prep trucks come to mind).  For boats over 25 feet long, it is probably the easiest and cheapest material to employ, and it doesn't need weatherproofing.  And, as an interesting website dedicated to concrete boats (ferro-boats) observes, a 30-foot 8-ton displacement ship made of either wood or concrete will weigh the same, which means that the very first image that comes into our heads when you say "concrete ship" is just wrong. 

It looks like the French were the first to come up with the idea in about 1848, patenting the most winning methods of construction in 1855.  Since then there have been 12,000 or so of these 25-ft+ ships built, including a 130' yacht and a 120' British sub.  This method of construction certainly saw its time, especially during wartime, when steel production was in high demand.

Please note:  posts over the next seven days or so will be somewhat truncated; I'm moving my store so time is a little scarce. Thanks for bearing with me.

The Alpha and Omega of "40"

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 453

Perhaps this is more the Alpher and Omeger of the concept of 40, but, then, one never knows about these things, even when they're pronounced in the manner of  Mr. Eugene Krabs (a  Spongebob reference; Mr. Krabs tends to put "er" at the end of words ending in "a", like "spatuler").  

Ah, well. 

The warnings of death AND light beginning at 40 seems to be a little contradictory, a little bit of singularity happening at a place  that I left behind 12 years ago. But all these beautifully designed pamphlets are yelling about is traffic speed and life insurance:  traffic deaths start piling up at 40 m.p.h. and men (not women) should start buying life insurance then because their big earnings years "come to light".

These pamphlets are both part of my Naive Surreal Collection--works that seem commonplace and standard when they were published but whose context is decidedly antiquarian and semi-existent in 2009.  Often the best part of these pamphlets are their covers, though they can all be mined for the forgotten social ephemera that lurks just beneath their surface.  But in these cases it is really just the incredibly arcane messages in the artwork that I find most interesting. 

Private Smoe, Latrine Orderly, and a Sub-History of the Word "Latrine" in the Titles of Books in English

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 452

Is it possible that James Steveson's Paddington : report on the necessity of latrine accommodation for women in the Metropolis, published in 1879, is the first book published in English to use the word "latrine" in the title?! Well, in a lightly interesting and perhaps stupefying way, the answer is "yes".  And this just to get to this very obscure graphic.cartoon book, Smoe, the Latrine Orderly, by H.E. Swinney, published by the Ledger Company in Fort Worth, Texas.  According to WorldCat/OCLC, the massive cataloging tool used by librarians everywhere, there aren't any copies of this book in any library anywhere in the world.  I'm both surprised and underwhelmed.  The cartoons all appeared in the Fort Worth Army Air Field's newspaper "Lone Star Scanner", which is also a publication that doesn't seem to have survived anywhere.  H.E. Swinney may be Sergeant H.E. Swinney, who was present at Pearl Harbor on 7 December and who fought his way through WWII, though I'm not sure.

The pamphlet's  jokes and cartoons I can appreciate as having been funny once upon a time, making people laugh as they snapped their newspapers over their eggs at the PX.  Maybe they made people laugh for a few years, but probably not much more.  It makes me think for just a little about the average age for how long jokes are "funny".  I'd say that the Smoe funny lasted about 2 years 5 months and 5 days.  More or less.

The word "latrine" is from the French and from the Latin before that, and appears fairly early in English (1642 according to my 1933 OED), but for whatever reason, it just doesn't find its way into the title of any English books for more than two hundred years.

The reason I'm spending any time at all on this little pamphlet is because its title is so entirely unexpected.  And that, as the man said, is all I have to say about that. 

Elves, Fairies, Wanton Spirits, Genius, Spectres and Ghosts: Tremendous Titles in the History of Witchcraft.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 447

Below are 31 titles relating to witches and witchcraft, printed in the 16th through 18th century--they all share some absolutely fabulous title constructions, elements and phrases. For example, the great work by Reginald Scot (listed first, below) contains the following phrasing IN ITS TITLE:

"lewde dealing of witches and witchmongers 
knaverie of conjurors
impietie of inchanters
follie of soothsaiers
impudent falsehood of cousenors
infidelitie of atheiststs
pestilent practises of Pythonists
curiositie of figurecasters
vanitie of dreamers
beggerlie art of Alcumystrie
abomination of idolatrie, the
horrible art of poisoning
vertue and power of naturall magicke,
conveiances of legierdemaine and juggling are deciphered..."

Laurent.Bordelon's title includes the following spectacular efforts:  "Ridiculous Extravagancies of...Magick, the Black-Art, Daemoniacks, Conjurers, Witches, Hobgoblins, Incubus's, Succubus's and the Diabolical-Sabbath,Elves, Fairies, Wanton Spirits, Genius's, Spectres and Ghosts, Dreams, the Philosopher's-Stone, Judicial Astrology, Horoscopes,Talismans, Lucky and Unlucky Days, Eclipses, Comets, and all sorts of Apparitions, Divinations, Charms, Enchantments..."

And on and on.  In my experience the titles of books on witchcraft and demonology are among the most creative and imaginatively flouncy.
Enjoy.

Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Wherein the lewd dealing of witches and witchmongers is notablie detected, the knaverie of conjurors, the impietie of inchanters, the follie of soothsaiers, the impudent falsehood of cousenors, the infidelity of atheists, the pestilent practises of Pythonists, the curiositie of figurecasters, the vanitie of dreamers, the beggerlie art of Alcumystrie, The abomination of idolatrie, the horrible art of poisoning, the vertue and power of naturall magicke, and all the conveiances of legierdemaine and juggling
 are deciphered: and many other things opened, which have long been hidden, howbeit verie necessarie to be known, 1584. Imprinted at London, by William Brome.

Bordelon, L. A History of the Ridiculous Extravagancies of Monsieur Oufle; Occasion'd by his reading Books treating of Magick, the Black-Art, Daemoniacks, Conjurers, Witches,  Hobgoblins, Incubus's, Succubus's and the Diabolical-Sabbath; of Elves, Fairies, Wanton Spirits, Genius's, Spectres and Ghosts; of  Dreams, the Philosopher's-Stone, Judicial Astrology, Horoscopes,
  Talismans, Lucky and Unlucky Days, Eclipses, Comets,sorts of Apparitions, Divinations, Charms, Enchantments and other
       Superstitious Practices. With Notes containing a multitude of
       Quotations out of those Books, which have either Caused such
       Extravagant Imaginations, or may serve to Cure them. Written
       originally in French, by the Abbot B--; and now translated into
       English. London, Printed for J. Morphew near Stationer's Hill,
       1711.

One of the Worst Santa Claus Titles, Ever: St. Nick & Eraserhead.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 411

In the world of bizarrely entitled written works, this extreme effort, written by E.J. Drew (in 1937)   is a prime, glowing, poster-boarded champion.  When you throw Mr. Claus into the mix of bizarre, naive surreal and badly-titled Things Which Have Been Written by Humans, greatness is achieved.  Great badness--even after reading this, um, this written thing (and I'm not sure what category this might occupy but I am sure that whatever it was intended to be written as was written with words, and that's about it, a Word Written Book, so to speak) I am not sure what it is about. 

It was a "story written for children", and such an un-tender Santa-related bad-inducement should certainly never find its way into any hands measuring less than four inches wide; or for that matter, more than four inches wide.

But getting back to the "about" part--I really can't tell.  Suffice to say that it involves some bad stories about being in the Dust Bowl, and about children so poor that they were FORGOTTEN by Santa. Then somehow Santa is beaten to a pulp by bad boys, rescued by newspaper boys (the "Goodfellows"), some other stuff, and then everyone winds up being judged by St. Peter as to where they would spend eternity. Santa replaces St. Pete, and then sends people like John Dillinger to the Bad Place. 

Well.  If there is a moral in here I cannot find it; I can't figure out the title, either.  The Goodfellows were good and weren't "Goodfellas", and the hanging and stopping I just don't know.  The whole thing is a little disturbing, sort of like the feeling you get when you get your *first* disturbing feelings seeing David Lynch's twisted/broken Eraserhead.  Pound-for-pound, Drew's sweaty and nightmarish thing is as unpretty as Lynch's third-worst. 

As if one copy wasn't enough. you can "get additional copies" of this work if you go back in time seven decades years and order them from E.J. Drew, 4034 West Warren Avenue, Detroit, Michigan. No price was listed.

Blasting Stumps with Stump Blasting Farm Dynamite

  JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 386

                                                                                                            
Hercules Dynamite on the Farm (published by the Hercules Powder Company in 1943)--isn't that a title that just begs to be read?  "Ditch Blasting, Stump Blasting, Boulder Blasting, Soil Blasting, Gully Blasting, Tree Planting, Tree Rejuvenation"--keyword:  blasting.  Actually, the tree planting and rejuvenation parts also involved blasting:  blasting was done to create the holes for planting tree; blasting was also done deep near the deepest roots of a stumpy tree to help create space for root growth. I have no idea if this was actually a good idea or not, but on the face of it, the blasting part seems to make sense.

It is a tidy and well written account the foundations of which are terrific understatement and adverbial creationism.  We read that "success in stump blasting is a matter of ordinary care and discretion" and this pithy little sentence, "Every stump is a problem to itself."  And: "The size of the hole depends on the size of the stump."  Actually, aside from the extraordinary number of times that the word "stump" appears in these pages, I feel quite confident (after having sort-of read this thing) that if

need be I could go out and blow the crap out of one, and correctly:   considering the age of the stump, the type of tree,the SIZE of the stump, the depth of the roots, the type of soil; I believe I (and by "I" I mean "all of us") could calculate the amount of the charge, the placement (depth and angle) of cartridge, use of stemming and fuse, and get the stump the bleep outta there. There's much much more, of course, but it is the stump blasting that caught my eye...and the root blasting rejuvenation as well