JF Ptak Science Books

Target Earth Redux and the Surprise Appearance of the Evidently Rare Phrase, "Earth is My Target".

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Not too much to say on this pair, except to say that you don't often find "Earth" and "Target" together like this. Surprisingly, "Earth is my target", the cover story for the pictured Mystery in Space comic book,  has exactly one hit on Google. Somehow with all of the Outer Space Space Monsters from Outer Space appearing in movies and comics in the 1950's that the phrase would've become a little second-hand, but apparently not.  This comic has the double-find of also showing the Earth being destroyed, which is a scene that you really don't see until the end of the 19th century (excepting the raw canvas painted via Biblical gloom which has been around for a long time). The other image, which is a movie poster for an $85,000 sci fi film from 1954 named Target Earth, is about the evacuation of a Major City as an attack by Venusian Robots comes near. (I've just had a sneak peek at the movie and I can tell you that very little money was spent on the robotic visitors from Venus--those buggers were very slow, wobbly, and about 5'10" tall, not much inspiring "raw panic the screen never dared to reveal". The film is only about 40 minutes long, which may be 40 minutes too long, or 40 minutes too short.)

"Earth is My Target" (comic book) & "Target Earth" (movie):

 

 Image source for movie poster: http://www.monsterbashnews.com/Movie%20Night/Target%20Earth.html

 

Industrial Steampunk and the Menace of Corporate Reach

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post--Poster Series #2

This striking image is the cover of a pro-union pamphlet leveled at the Australian iron-producer, B.H.P. (Broken Hill Proprietary, a 150-year-old firm), and published in 1943 by the Federated Ironworkers' Association of Australia. The great social observer and artist Thomas Nast was very aware that much of his "readership" couldn't read, and so he made his work (which was usually text-heavy) completely understandable as a purely visual message.  So too for artists like the anonymous person who contributed this great cover--there is no question about what might be in the pages of the pamphlet.

It is also interesting to think about the "menacing" part of the title of this quick post--I would consider this still to be an early depiction of a robot (the term then still about a dozen years old) acting in a threatening manner towards humans--and in this case squeezing them until blood money is drawn.  

This is a detail from the 600 dpi scan--click for an even larger image of this sample:

 

There is a very nice 13x19 inch 600 dpi poster being offered of this cover at the our POSTER Blog, here.  

Red Radio--Found & Manipulated Tech Art

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I just like the cover art for Radio News. For at least the decade that I know about this journal published with very heavily red covers.  This one, for April 1931, was really red and also had some unusual design going on--especially after the cover text was removed. That fellow is standing there with the giant tube that helped the venerable KDKA (Pittsburgh, one of a few contenders for the title of "first commercial radio station" in the U.S.) reach millions of people, with a very powerful 400 kW signal--it basically made the station a local-national. (As it turns out the highest power ever authorized for AM radio was 500 kW to WLW (Cincinnati) in 1934, but which was modified down to 50 KW.)

  [The only manipulation was removing the text from the bottom right that displayed the issue's contents--everything else is in situ.]

Portraits of Scientists & Philosophers on Baroque Title Pages

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1930

In the 16th and 17th centuries it was not terribly uncommon to decorate a title page of a scientific/philosophical work with the portraits of standard-bearers and significant people in the field.  This is particularly true in the Baroque era, when so much more of the title page seems to be decorated.  I should have kept closer memory of examples of these works, but for right now two will suffice--they are rather good. The first is the work of Pergaeus Apllonius (ca. 260-200 bce) in the Opera, per doctissimum philosopphm Iohannem Memum, printed in Venice in 1537, which contains the first appearance in print of Apollonius' Conics.

Around the title of the book we find the half-length portraits of Pliny, Cicero, Quintiliius, Plutarch, Lucan, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Plato, Aristides, Euripedes, Aristophanes, Pindar, Theocritus, Vergil, Horace, Livy, Sallustius/Sallust and Apollonius--a big cast with differing shadows.

A great example of a title page dedicated to astronomers is that for Jan Luyts' (1655-1721, an instructor in maths and physics at Utrecht), text Astronomica Institutio, in qua Doctrina Sphaericaa atque Theorica... printed in Utrecht in 1692. It features a "action shot" of five major figures in astronomy:  (from left to right) Galileo (who is rarely seen actually holding a telescope and here is brandishing one like a club, holding the instrument very weirdly), a ham-handed Hevelius looking slyly over Galileo's shoulder (though it sort of looks like Kepler in a way, I'm pretty sure that Galileo is Galileo), with  Brahe, Copernicus and Ptolemy each holding elegant demonstration devices for their own particular model of the solar system.  I'm not sure who the central figure is--perhaps just a generic philosophe.

Here's the frontispiece to Galileo's   which features Copernicus at right and the seated figure as Aristotle, which bears some fleeting resemblance to the figure above.

[Image source University of Sydney]

In this 1641 edition there are some slight alterations:

[Image source and full text here.]

Galileo's Dialogo (1632) was the open invitation to trouble that Galileo no doubt expected and then famously received, the work being a defense of the Copernican system which at the time of regressive church wisdom posed a direct threat to Catholic belief systems.  In the frontis to this work we again see some old friends, finding Aristotle, Copernicus and Ptolemy beautifully (and with realistic old-man slumpiness) portrayed by Stefan della Bella. 

(The full title of the Dialogo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo), in which the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems are described and compared.  Galileo almost worked within the Vatican’s matrix necessitating a balanced presentation between the different systems, and evidently did so enough for the book to become a best seller, but its ride on the list of the Vatican’s banned (“Prohibited”) books lasted until 1835.

Details of the portraits in "continued reading" section below.

Blankness and Design in the Title Pages of Great Scientific Works (Part 1)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1900

As I've written about on this blog before, Blank, Empty, Blank and Missing Things can be of great importance.  For example, if human conversation wasn't mostly filled with nothing, it would be difficult for us to process anything, everyone sounding like several mockingbirds calling away at once, all of the time.  Music would be difficult if there were no silent interludes. And of course since existence is made up vastly of nothingness, to have it be filled would present a, um, problem.  It also might be interesting to invent an 18th century board game based on the discovery of nothing through the ages...or maybe 16th century, when the idea of zero in mathematics was first coming into widespread use.

My interest in Nothing today comes along with design and epochal scientific publications--or at least highly significant appearances of great ideas.  Sometimes the typography and design of the title pages of Great Works turn out to be very surprising--and sometimes that surprise in blankness is an unintentional result.  

Also we'll just discuss relatively recent works of the past 150 years or so. Design changes quite a bit from the 18th to the 19th century so far as scientific and technical title pages go--the earlier design (and particularly the illustrated versions) are another matter.

First, the intentional bits, like this fine example of Niels Bohr's superb introduction to the rest of the world of modern atomic theory (based upon the Rutherford model and Planck's quantum theory),  "On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules" (in the Philosophical Magazine for July 1913).  In this case (which actually is a three-part paper), the offprint to the publication has an upper part that is blank because it excludes the closing paragraphs of the preceding article--offprints being the separately-published and bound author's article that were meant to be distributed privately and prior to publication of the appearance of the contribtution in the journal.  

Before I proceed though perhaps it would be interesting to see an attempt at anti-nothingness in design, which in many cases can be a work of high design art in themselves. For example, even though most of the white page is filled up, 

this is still somehow quite balanced and pleasing. (Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann delivered a series of eleven seminal papers from 1933 to 1939, this being one of the most important, signaling the discovery of nuclear fission, an event that started its own sort of chain reaction in physicists who awoke with the sudden realization of how very doable all of this was, and how close so many other scientists were to having discovered this themselves.)

Opening the Doors to Trigonometric Heaven

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  

There aren't many other title pages in the history of mathematics that swing the doors of beauty and heaven and opportunity and logic and thought than the (appropriately-named) Bonaventura Francesco Cavalieri/Cavalerius.  A Milanese (1598-1647) who taught at Pisa and who published eleven books and worked in wide fields in mathematics as well as astronomy and physics, published his Trigonometria... in Bologna in 1643, and sent a fabulous image to his new readers right there on his very illustrated and augmented title page. 

Seldom have the doors of knwoledge been thrown open so wide and invitingly as this, with Trigonometria lightly awarding the reader with a new portal to fantastic opportunities--who wouldn't want to walk on in?  The tools of trig are displayed on the ground at Trionometria's feet (arranged and not by happenstance), while five figures employ these same tools in the background hills, which are being bathed in a pure holy light of some sort, an inspiration from the sky.  The doors are decorated with astronomical figures and light calculation, as well as polyons and geometrical drawings.  And just to make sure that the author meant what he intended, we can see above the full/thick wind-blown hair of Trigonometria (which in itself seems very unusual to me, such a carefree adn tossled attitude) a fruit-garland, a horn of plenty in its way.  Make no mistake--Cavalieri was making a king-sized offer to his reader to open their brains. 

I did leave out a major part of the title--the section dealing with logarithms, which is basically a reprint of Cavalieri's early work (done in 1632), and which was the first work in Italian on that subject. 

 

Stylizing a Sameness in Early Flight Images

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1438

 

I found these elements of sameness in design, spanning prehistoric flight and prehistoric space flight eras, separated by 170 years or so, and they just seemed fascinating.  The first, by Boitard for Robert Paltock's (or Pultock, 1697–1767) The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man, Relating Particularly, His Shipwreck near the South Pole; his Wonderful Passage thro a Subterraneous Cavern into a kind of New World, his there Meeting with a Gawry or Flying Woman, was published in London in 1751 pictures the flying woman from the title (which also pretty much sums up the Robinson Crusoe-like story.  Wilkins does become shipwrecked and then has an extraordinary adventure underground at the South Pole--which is interesting in and off itself, to set the stage at the South Pole, since the exploration of Antarctica is really a 20th century endeavor.  (The first accurate summation of Antarctica as a continent isn't made until Charles Wilkes' expedition in 1839/40.)

The flying woman is striking, especially for the mid 18th century:  she is quite lovely, muscular, and tall, and has her limbs attached to a flying/gliding canopy which seems as though it would be operated in a way in which the people of that time thought birds to fly. 

The associated image is Walter Hohmann's prescient work on rockets and rocket flight, Die Erreichbarkeit der Himmelskoerper, Untersuchungen ueber das Raumfahrtproblem, which was published in that great heyday of German flight engineering, in 1925.  It was published very soon after the important work of Hermann Oberth², whose style, illustration and design are closely aligned. It is very interesting to note here that Hohmann (and Oberth) both suggested using teh Earth's gravitational field to orbit the spacecraft and then slignshot it off into space, rather than to try to simply lift of from Earth and then go directly into space. 

Notes:

1. Biographical Dictionary of English Literature was not impressed by it saying: "The description of Nosmnbdsgrutt, the country of the flying people, is a dull imitation of Swift, and much else in the book is tedious.

2.  Oberth's book, Die Rakete zu den Planetenraum was printed in 1923 by the same publisher as Hohmann, and was a cornerstone study of the issue of interplanetary space travel--the first of its kind, really, to address the full theoretical and practical aspects of rockets and space flight.  Oberth--who wrote this at age 28--could not submit the work for his thesis because of its advanced treatment of a little-known subject.

Protection from Aircraft, Part 3: the 1930's and Anti-Aircraft Philosophy

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1281

This series of drawings, published in the Illustrated London News 16 July 1938,  by the incredibly prolific and detail-oriented G.H. Davies depicts one segment of the city defense program being formulated by the British government in the last year  or two leading up to the beginning of the European end of World War Two. (I own 150 or so of these images by Davies--he never fails to provide the detail where you need it.)   The overall plan for defending major British cities consisted of anti-aircraft guns, searchlights, R.A.F. fighter squadrons and interceptors, and the "Balloon Barrage".  London and suburbs are featured here, all to be protected by a series of ten squadrons of fifty balloons each, handled by a crew of ten.  The thinking was that it would make low-level bombing by fighter aircraft (?!) impossible, and force any aircraft attempting such an approach to a higher altitude where they would be theoretically susceptible to the interceptor squadrons. 

I'm not terribly sure why the thinking was against low altitude attack, but my best guess is that the planners were thinking about the He-111Bs and Ju52s or other such aircraft that the Nazis checked and tested out against the Spanish Republicans during the Civil War. Perhaps freshest of all memories of the German operation Feuerzauber (Magic Fire) was the Guernica raid, just a year or so before the publication of these images, where that militarily insignificant town was attacked from the air in twenty minute intervals over three hours, destroying it in a terror blitz.  If I was sitting around a big table at 10 Downing, I’d have that picture in my head.  .

Be that as it may, the "air mine field" looks terribly inefficient and vulnerable to me, sort of like an exposed Maginot Defense Line, but without the very deep misunderstandings that went along with the horrible French effort. 

Explanation of the Images:

a)    The first image shows the incredible perimeter defense network, which extended ten miles around St. Paul’s; the balloons were moored at 100 yard intervals, making for 1100 or so balloons to “fence” the perimeter.
b) The second image shows  London center and immediate suburbs, with another 500 balloons in a smaller circle inscribed in the larger.
c)  The third image is a close-up of the balloons, looking down;  seems as though they were tethered at about 2000 feet or so
d)  The last image is a close-up of London center.  .

Little Bizarredness: Bland Hyper-oddness in Published Works

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  

These pamphlets are samples from a larger collection whose attention to the detail of boredom and blandness and relative inexplicability are extraordinary.  The titles intact, it mostly doesn't matter what the contents have to say for themselves--everything, really, is right there on the front page, the meaning best left to the imagination. 

 

Polywog Airmail of the Future

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1042

The booze-driven future as seen by Seagrams (written about earlier in this blog as Atomic-Powered Farms) that appeared in the pages of LIFE magazine from 1945 to 1947 were quixotically science fictiony in the waterproof-duck department brand of invention.  Most of Seagram's visions were goofy even though they all seem to have been serious statements on the future.  This example, the polywog air mail delivery system, seems to be as bad as any of them--worse even since the technology that the artist/designer was trying to circumvent was already far more sophisticated/logical/beneficial than this weird parachute delivery system for  the mail.  Once all the effort of packaging the mail into this contraption, retrieving it and then setting it up all over again for the next go is calculated, one would've been far ahead at all levels by just landing the bloody plane and getting rid of the mail.  That, or of course, just pushing the mail out in a container with a standard parachute also would've been a better solution than the one pictured. here. 

Obviously Seagrams didn't have their heart in futurology, except that which calculated the shortest possible time it would take to convince people to replace their empty Seagrams bottles. 

Overall, this is just simply a very bad idea, no matter where you are in the timeline. 

Seeing Vision: Examples of Light and Sight, Personified

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 976

(On seeing the morning’s rising sun): “Looks like light to me.” SpongeBob SquarePants 

“All the fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no closer to answer the question, 'What are light quanta?' Of course today every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself.”  A. Einstein

“Are not gross bodies and light convertible into one another, and may not bodies receive much of their activity from the particles of light which enter into their composition?” I. Newton, Opticks, 1704, Query 30.

Depicting the capacity of sight and nature of light has been both an easy and a knotty problem in the history of science. Over the successive theories on the basis of light the artistic presentation of the phenomenon has been generalized (generally) in a very simple way:  by straight lines.  There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, the lines are just parenthetic place-holders suggesting direction, not actual descriptors of what light “looks” like.

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of images printed 1550-1850 to call upon to make this point, and I've selected but a few.  The first belongs to Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner and which appeared in his  Oculusm hoc est: fundamentum opticum...,printed in Innsbruck in 1619. His work is an out-and-out landmark in the history of optics,  physiological optics and ophthahlmometry, and provided a springboard for two generations following him, not the least of whom was Rene Descartes. The illustration above is the book's frontispiece, and features four camera obscuras demonstrating four principles of the eye, the middle ground of which is a beam of light 

Rene Descartes depicted the interpretation (in his  Principles of Philosophy of 1644) of light and its physiological reaction in the brain as follows:

the lines of sight depicting binocular vision, observed (and compressed) by the eye's "particles" and processed by the pineal gland which in turn manipulate the "fluids" in the control of nerves and muscles. 

Another example of even greater fame than the iconic image by Descartes is that of the diagram showing the connection between color and its reflective index by Isaac Newton, appearing in his Opticae of 1706.

 

Another fine example comes from Zacharias Traber's (1611-1679) beautifully illustrated classic of optics (and physiological optics) , Nervus Opticus sive Tractatus Theoricus..., published in Vienna in 1690.  Traber is a great collector and synthesizer of the work done during and before his time, using the work of Descartes, Kepler, Schott, Kircher, Scheiner and Aguilon (for example), and then further implementing their ideas especially in the areas of color theory  and light refraction.  The image certainly reflects Jesuit Traber's religious training, depicting the holy source of light (originating with the almighty force) which directs it to the sun; the light then is left to the inquisitive and playful hands of cherubs who reflect and magnify it, as well as use it to start a fire (from the condensing lens) and observe it through a telescope. The main cherub empties a sack containing a number of different optical tools, no doubt for the playful brethern beneath. 

 

And then of course there is the great, unstoppable, polymathic and sometimes incorrect Jesuit Athanasius Kircher.  This image appears in his masterwork Ars Magna lucis et umbrae, printed in Amsterdam in 1671, which deals with light and shadow, optical illusions, color, refraction, projection and distortion, sundials, mirrors, as well as astronomical subjects. Most of these subjects are clearly seen in the engraved frontispiece to the work (below), the source of all of the "rays" of light coming from the godhead, relayed through a telescope, reflected from a mirror, and gathered in a camera obscura. 

 

Other interesting images from the Kircher include this spotlight.

Magnificent Titles, Ranters and Hell Breaking Loose (England, 1650)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 946

Ranters, Diggers, Manifestarians, Puritans, Muggletonians, Shakers, Quakers, Levellers, Seekers…terrific names all for religious or religioesque movements, most now gone, though it seems that of the most-gone the Ranters are probably the most-goned gone--which must’ve been a function of their unstated aims of not having a particular course of action.  As an anti-movement their movement was tautologically doomed, as they flourished for only a decade or so, sandwiched into the very full mid-17^th century. 

{The image above is an illustration from the book, Hell Broke Loose... below. It also is a pretty tame version of other images that show more nudity/drinking/sexual activities.]

Ranters were an English Free Spirited heretical group of wide interpretation of social and moral value. Their questioning of the potency of the man’s fall doctrine steamed together with a quasi-semi-millenialism evidently led to an alehouse-based loosening of socially governed restraints. According to the many People magazine-like pamphlets and soft porn reporting, their activities made for sugary eating by the bawdy-eyed ha’penny people buying gossip in cheaply printed formats.   Free of Sin and Law, the Ranter celebrations were soaked in alcohol and nudity, which are ripe pluckings for any non-serious journalist, then or now.

Judging from the list of publications (listed below in the "Continued Reading" section) there must've been a very immediate lusty interest in the Ranters' lustily interesting ways.  I've written this post for the simple interest in one particular, extraordinary title: [with apologies for the underlining, but I cannot convince the Typepad gods to remove it.]

Hell broke loose: or, the notorious design of the wicked Ranters, discovered on Sunday last at Black-Fryers Being a true relation of the strange proceedings of Mr. Vaughan, and his wicked proselytes; and their entring of Black-Fryers church in sermon time, like so many spirits from hell, with four damnable papers in the hands, containing such horrible, audacious, and abominable songs, the like not to be parallel'd in former ages. With the manner how this onsolent Ranter traced the streets from Black-Fryers to Saint Paul's Church-yard, in his Holland shirt, without doublet or breeches, a treble cap, like the Pope's miter, with silk fring, and white shooes, and stockings. With their damnable plots, and conspiracies against the ministers of the gospel: their examination before the right honourable the Lord Mayor of London; the sad and woful speeched, made by the ringleader of the Ranters, concerning the city magistrates, and golden chains: and the committing of them to Bridewell till the next sessions. 1650

See?  That's just fabulous, and represents a Title Page Extravaganza that seems to be a 17th century feature--including as much as humanly possible on a title-page.  As does this book, with all manner of detail in the title, not the least of which is the description of a man running around with no pants but with a Pope's mitre and white shoes and socks.

The 17th century "Hell Broke Loose" extended-title (but non-Ranter) category has a number of other entries in it, too, for published books, including the following lovilies:

Hell broke-loose; upon Doctor S--ch--ve--l's sermons or, Don Quevedo's vision, of an infernal cabal of Whiggish papists and popish Whigs in Utopia; upon a mock-tryal of the doctor. Translated from the original; by Jack the Spaniard.  1713

Hell broke loose, or, An answer to the late bloody and rebellious declaration of the phanatiques, entituled A door of hope, &c. wherein their horrible conspiracy against our gracious soveraign, and the city of London, in their late rebellion is discovered : together with a brief view of our lives, manners and malice of those desperate and unparallel'd traytors. 1661

 Hell broke loose : or an history of the Quakers both old and new. Setting forth many of their opinions and practices, published to antidote Christians against formality in religion and apostasie 1660

Some of the other big-title Ranter titles from this time include the following:

The Ranters creed being a true copie of the examinations of a blasphemous sort of people, commonly called ranters, whose names are herein particularised, together with the name of their pretended God almighty, and their false prophet : taken before Thomas Hubbert Esquire ... with a declaration of their fantastic gestures and deportments as they were coming before him, and in his presence : and now committed to the New Prison at Clarkenwell., 1651

The great mistery of the great whore unfolded, and antichrists kingdom revealed unto destruction in answer to many false doctrines and principles which Babylons merchants have traded with, being held forth by the professed ministers, and teachers, and professors in England, Ireland, and Scotland, taken under their owne hands, and from their owne mouths, sent forth by them from time to time, against the despised people of the Lord called Quakers, who are of the seed of that woman, who hath been long fled into wildernes ... in this answer to the multitude of doctrines held forth by the many false sects, which have lost the key of knowledge, and been on foot since the apostles dayes, called Anabaptists, Independents, Presbyters, Ranters, and many others, who out of their own mouths have manifested themselves not to be of a true descent from the true Christian Churches : but it's discovered that they have been all made drunk with the wine of fornication received from the whore which hath sitten upon the beast, after whom the world hath wondred /  1661

The Ranters reasons resolved to nothing. Or, the fustification instead of the justification of the Mad Crew Being, a serious answer returned to one who in his letter desired an unlawfull and wicked book to be sent unto him, call'd the Justification of the Mad Crew. Instead of vvhich, the author of this letter sent him the Act of Parliament made against the Ranters; and did also both justifie their way, and ingratefully asperse some, who in Christian love would have reduced them to the life and truth of Christianity. Wherein the people called by themselves god and by some others, the Gods of Godmanchester, may, as in a glasse, behold, that they are a deluded and defiled people, if not incarnate Devils.  1651

How FDR Made Women (1) Nervous and thus (2) Older. An Appeal to Vote Republican, 1936

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 921

{This continues "The Coming Sex War of 1919")

Theodore J. Goe, the author of “Let’s Protect our Women”, must have been a synesthete, with the ability to smell the future.  My copy of this pamphlet used to be the Copyright Deposit copy, and is dated January 18, 1936, and what Mr. Goe was smelling were the winds of the November presidential election; and since he was a Republican—or at least an anti-Rooseveltian—what he smelled was outrageous defeat for his cause. 

And so he wrote this elegantly-produced little oddness, trying to dip into the wellspring of the enfranchised female vote (just sixteen years old at this point), trying with fatherly will to scoop women out of the harmful ways of Roosevelt’s policies.

The “protection” that women needed was for uncertainty which led to nervousness and which attacked their youth to send them into a slavery. The thinking here went sort of like this:  women were being attacked by FDR, who was “cruelly prolonging the depression” by not helping people with jobs, thus depriving their men of a fair wage which is what made women happy; without the “happiness” of a husband with a good job, “life becomes more serious than it should be”; this fights against “national influence which tends to rob [women] of their youth”, making women older sooner. And it was this premature aging that the women are to vote against in 1936.

Mr. Goe may well have been a crank, but to him and his readers this thinking might’ve made some sort of contemporary sense, after a fashion.  He did forget that women made up more than 30% of the workforce at this point, and had more sources of happiness and youth than a man with a decently-paying job, plus having a life and opinion outside of serving home/hearth/husband, but no matter. (This, by the way, is where Mr. Goe thought American women lived:)

Women didn’t rush to aid FDR’s competition in the ’36 race, when Roosevelt redefined “landslide” by crushing his Republican challenger, Kansan Alf Landon.  There wasn’t any election like it since the two-party system became nationalized 80 years earlier, Landon loosing to Roosevelt by an electoral balance of 523-8. Landon swept Vermont and Maine, with FDR taking everything else.  (No one would quite clear the plate like this ‘till Reagan turned Walter Mondale inside-out in 1984, 525-13.)

Landon was a decent man who had an interesting post-political career—even so, it’s a good thing that he lost.

The Hidden Beauties of Barrels, Pig Bristles and Forgotten Escalators

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 776    Blog Bookstore

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.

History of Vacations; The Great Depression and Cowboy Chaps, 1934

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 754  Blog Bookstore

The Depression didn’t stop professional theorists from working on the issue of what people should do with what was seen as the impending explosion of leisure time.  Arthur Pack (The Challenge of Leisure, 1934) for example wondered about the impact of free-ish time and the implementation of “constructive leisure”. Walter Lippmann worried about the impact of “commercialized pleasures” rather than those that were creative and involving an idea.  Still, in 1934, the ideas of leisure and pleasure as institutions were a distant, deeply fuzzy notion to most Americans.

 In 1935 the Depression in the U.S.(which started with the October Crash of 1929) had bottomed out, the worst of it all behind us (except for the recession of 1937).  Industrial production was coming back (it had fallen about 45% by 1932), home building was making a rebound (coming around from an 80% drop in 1932 and after 274,000 people had been evicted in 1933), the bank failures had stabilized (having reached about a 40% failure rate in 1933), and the unemployment rate had “fallen” to 20% (following a 3% rate in 1929 and a 25% high in 1934).  In 1932 the corporate profit rate had dropped 90% as had the value of the stock market, industrial production was off by about half, immigration had fallen to one-tenth of its 1929 figures, and over two million people were roaming around the country, forced from farms or homes, seeking destiny in trucks loaded with all of their possessions, walking, or riding the rails. 

But that doesn’t mean that the other segments of the American economy, those happy and personally unaffected in the Depression, couldn’t remain so:  there was money and money to be spent, and spent well in the dwindling power of the mid 1930’s dollar, the purchasing power of the wealthy growing as the economy declined. 

Which brings us to this pamphlet for Flaming-Arrow dude ranch and the kids outfitted in the high, big-chaps fashion of thin-lipped, vocabularily-challenged cowboy stars of the 30’s matinee.  But by Neptune’s soggy trousers, the kid on the front cover just looks so wrong—historical placement and societal understanding aside.  Kids were sent to Flaming-Arrow (“for the discriminating family”) near Bozeman to spend the summer in a “semi-military” fashion, comforted in fine cabins with first-class appointments, all for about $395 for eight weeks.  That figure would have been out of reach for a great majority of Americans (the average income at this point for a family having fallen to about $1500 a year), costing about a quarter of all family yearly money.

I’m not so sure why this cover is so disturbing to me—maybe it is just something so simple as the war between the enjoyed leisure time of people with money and the enforced unpleasant leisure time of the unemployed and unmonied.