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Physical Training for Business Men (1917)
Text by Adam Green
Jan 9, 2019

This superb series of photographs can be found in the wonderfully titled 1917 publication Physical Training for Business Men by American author Harrie Irving Hancock. The book's premise is that a certain quality of physical presence, "impressive carriage and appearance", are essential to "those who would succeed in the business world". This is not, however, all about pure athleticism. Despite his strength and endurance the athlete "may show many signs of bodily slovenliness" which would negatively effect his business dealings. More important than brawn is to foster "the appearance of physical ease, alertness, grace, and discipline." It is these qualities which Hancock promises to build through the exercises shown, a mixture, so he tells us, of those used in the military and certain martial arts.
Though the text is oddly compelling at times, it is the accompanying photographs that really standout. Taken by a "Mr Phelan" (who worked with Hancock on a number of other exercise books) they ingeniously make use of slow shutter speeds, and in some cases multi-exposure, to illustrate the movement of the particular exercise. Their functional value aside, this mix of austere poses and trails of motion blur make for wonderful and curious images. And novel too. According to Hancock, the "method of making these unique examples of camera work is Mr. Phelan's own invention now first set before readers." Four years earlier Swedish gymnast Theodor Bergquist published his Swedish House-Gymnastics (1913) which makes use of multi-exposure photographs to illustrate movement but not Phelan's trails of motion. Exactly how Phelan achieved the effect he does is not always clear, and though certainly the natural blur of slow shutter speeds seems to be involved it's also possible some of the trails were created, or at least significantly enhanced, in the darkroom afterwards. Whatever the method, the effect is marvellous.
The author Harrie Irving Hancock was best known for his many stories ("Boy's books") for children and juveniles, which often displayed a patriotic bent, and in particular for his 1916 four-book series The Invasion of the United States, which imagined the United States invaded by Germany in 1920–21. The popularity of the series is considered by some to have helped shift public opinion towards the United States getting involved in the First World War. Hancock was also an early Western expert on Jiu-Jitsu, and his The Complete Kano Jiu-Jitsu, co-authored with Katsukuma Higashi and originally published in 1905, is still in print today.


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Highlights from The Cleveland Museum of Art’s release of more than 30k images of public domain works

Jan 31, 2019

Last week The Cleveland Museum of Art announced the release of more than 34,000 digital images of public domain works — all high resolution and totally free from restrictions on reuse (using the Creative Commons Zero designation). Founded in 1913, the museum is renowned for the quality and breadth of its collection, which includes more than 61,000 objects and spans 6,000 years of achievement in the arts. Here we've picked out some of our favourites from a few hours browsing the public domain collection (which didn't get through nearly half of what is on offer). In addition to images of 2D media we've also included at the end a smattering of objects, including a wonderful array of masks.
You can get exploring yourself by visiting their online collection, which has itself seen a very slick revamp to coincide with this open content release.

source: public-domain-review

type: collection

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Medieval Pattern Poems of Rabanus Maurus (9th Century)
Text by Sam Dolbear and Adam Green
Feb 26, 2019

Take a quick glance at De laudibus sanctae crucis (translated as In Praise of the Holy Cross), a ninth-century manuscript by the Frankish Benedictine monk Rabanus Maurus, and you might think you are looking at an elaborate word search or even a medieval knitting pattern. But these spectacular images are actually parts of a devotional poem. Every other page of this unique work contains a poem written out in a grid of letters, a seeming chaos of letters from which emerge other forms: not only new words but figures and shapes too.
This text is an early case of what became known as "pattern poetry". In the definitive study of the form, Dick Higgins traces its history to the Cretian "Phaistos Disk", made in the 2nd millennium BC, in which hieroglyphic text spirals out of the centre, as if it is written on the shell of a snail. The technique took on many different manifestations over the centuries: from Aratea (another 9th-century manuscript), to George Herbert's "Easter Wings" (1633), to Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1918), to the poesia concreta movement of mid-1950s Brazil which tied up experimental typography with modernist poetic forms.
True even of its medieval incarnation, pattern poetry has always played with the entanglement between the signified and the signifier, between meanings and their conduits, whether letters or words. But the complexity and ingenuity of how Maurus has interwoven layers of meaning marks De laudibus sanctae crucis as a particularly unique example.
Each grid of letters gives birth to various additional layers, varying in complexity from page to page. Each of these additional forms — be they bodies, shapes, or larger letters — are placed into the grid in such a way as to incorporate and make use of the letters from the grid poem to produce new poems (or at least words or sentences). For example, in one the words CRUX SALUS (The Cross is Salvation) are boldly highlighted from the grid. But closer inspection reveals a third layer here. Each of these large letters itself is comprised of a word: for example, within the C is the word “Seraphin” and within the R another member of the heavenly hosts, “Cherubim”. Both these additional layers (of the large letters and the words within) fail to disrupt the background grid and its sense. It is a remarkable feat of planning and invention.
More angels appear elsewhere in the work, new words and sentences spelt out by the limits of their bodies. If angels are seen as envoys or messengers, then Maurus here makes the announcers become their very announcements. Another common theme is geometric shapes, utilised in the majority of the poems, of varying forms but always hinting at a cross in their arrangement. Here Maurus points to a long held connection between geometry, symmetry, and the divine, where shapes reflect a unified order in nature and thus the perfection of God.
Accusations have long been levelled against pattern poetry as an art form. Ben Johnson dismissed it as “a pair of scissor and a comb in verse”, as the crude prioritisation of form over content. One cannot, however, lay this accusation against the pages of De laudibus sanctae crucis, in terms of its beauty, its devotional care, and the many woven layers of its textual and visual interplay.
Originally composed around the year 810, there are around eighty different copies we know of that survive from the period, a sign that the work was very highly thought of at the time. The images we are featuring here are from a beautiful copy thought to have been done under the direction of Maurus himself and offered to the abbey of Saint-Denis in France between 845 and 847, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Another notable version is a strikingly colourful copy held by the Vatican from ca. 825. The British Library also holds this 12th-century copy.

author: Sam Dolbear and Adam Green


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Shakespeare Songs from Victor Records

Feb 20, 2019

From The Tempest

Where the Bee Sucks; 2. Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies

From Twelfth Night

O Mistress Mine

From Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure

Come Away Death; 2. Take, Oh Take Those Lips Away

From As You Like It

It Was a Lover and His Lass

From Twelfth Night and Henry VIII

She Never Told Her Love; 2. Orpheus with His Lute

From Love's Labours Lost

When Daisies Pied and Violets Blue (The Cuckoo Song)

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, The Victor Talking Machine Company produced a series of recordings of songs from the plays of William Shakespeare, sung by a variety of operatic vocalists of the day including American tenor Lambert Murphy (listed here under his pseudonym of Raymond Dixon), baritone Reinald Werrenrath, and soprano Laura Littlefield. If The Bard ever did specify melodies for the songs featured in his plays, nothing has survived today, and the arrangements used here by Victor are mostly more modern inventions. There are, however, a couple by the eighteenth century composers Thomas Arne and Joseph Haydn, and "O Mistress Mine" and "It Was a Lover and His Lass" by the Elizabethan musician Thomas Morley. Although contemporaries, it is not known if Morley and Shakespeare ever actually were acquainted, though some do suspect that they were and even collaborated.


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Robert Fludd’s Memory Tricks (1617)
Text by Adam Green
Jan 17, 2019

Inspired by the mnemonic alphabet featured in Jacobus Publicius' pioneering 1482 book on improving memory, the great English polymath Robert Fludd came up with his own system of correspondences, where each letter or number is paired with an object which echoes its shape. The idea was that a string of letters or numbers could be recalled by the picturing of a scene involving objects. So the date 1066 could become a speared donkey lagging behind two snails; the acronym PDR, a crazed axe-wielding editor chopping up a bow and then placing the bits into a jug. Both the mnemonic alphabet and the numbers feature in Fludd‘s masterwork Utriusque Cosmi ... Historia, first published between 1617 and 1621. These alphabetical and numerical tables seem to be the simplest elements in a very complex mnemonic system Fludd developed, largely based around the memorising of complex musical structures. If you are wondering why a donkey is used to signify zero, Fludd helpfully provides an explanation, the “zero signifies a donkey, because (as they say) the donkey is of no use”.

author: Adam Green


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The Private Life of a Cat (ca. 1945)
Text by Adam Green
Mar 19, 2019

The avant-garde film-makers Alexander Hammid and Maya Deren, married for five years between 1942 and 1947, collaborated on a number of films. One of their most influential creations was the highly experimental Meshes Of The Afternoon (1943), in which they explore the strange shifts and perspectives of human consciousness. A year or so later they turned from the inner lives of humans to that of animals: specifically the two cats (and then five kittens) with which they lived in their Greenwich Village apartment.
At 22 minutes long and full of lingering feline close-ups, your snappy cat meme video this is not. While not as overtly experimental as Meshes Of The Afternoon, the film is still fairly innovative for its time — featuring numerous takes from a cat's eye view, and graphic footage of five kittens being born seemingly unaided by the human hand (a scene which was to see the film banned by some cinemas). Indeed, the film is devoid of humans throughout, the wonderful footage cleverly edited to give an impression of a cat-only world, almost verging on anthropomorphism, as though these cats might be living in their Manhattan apartment independent of any owners.
Despite the fact that it is only Alexander Hamid's name which appears in the opening credits, many think it to be a collaboration: with Deren as director and Hammid as cinematographer and editor. Considering they explicitly shared the credit in other films from this time, including Meshes in the Afternoon, it seems likely that the two considered this to be purely Hammid's creation, the circulating notion of a collaboration perhaps referring to another version of the film, later scrapped, for which Deren supplies music and narration.


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Class of 2019

Dec 29, 2018

Pictured above is our top pick of artists and writers whose works will, on 1st January 2019, enter the public domain in many countries around the world. Of the eleven featured, six will be entering the public domain in countries with a “life plus 70 years” copyright term (e.g. most European Union members, Brazil, Israel, Nigeria, Russia, Turkey, etc.) and five in countries with a “life plus 50 years” copyright term (e.g. Canada, New Zealand, and many countries in Asia and Africa) — those that died in the year 1948 and 1968 respectively. As always it’s a motley crew assembled for our graduation photo, including a major figure of the European avant-garde, two of the most important figures in the history of film, the urinal-loving father of conceptual art, and three key figures in social justice movements.
Learn more about each of them by clicking on their names beneath the picture which will take you through to each of their Wikipedia pages. And for more names of those whose works will be going into the public domain in 2019 in countries with life plus 50 and 70 years copyright terms then see the Wikipedia pages on 1948 and 1968 deaths (which you can fine-tune down to writers and artists), and also this dedicated page.
And what about works entering the public domain in the United States?
Unlike other countries the United States does not deem a work to be in the public domain according to who created it (i.e. worked out by the death date of its creator), but rather when it was published. As some of you may be aware, in previous years the United States has seen precisely nothing enter the public domain due to copyright expiration (apart from some unpublished works). However, this time around all that changes!. For the first time in more than twenty years, on the 1st January, published works will enter the US public domain. This will be all works — be it books, films, artworks, or musical scores — published in the year 1923. Exactly why this is suddenly the case is a complicated affair, but basically revolves around a series of unfortunate legal proceedings – essentially the fault of Mickey Mouse (or at least his creators) – which saw extensions to previous copyright terms. But now these extensions are expiring and so each coming year will see the works of 95 years ago added to the US public domain — so on 1st January 2019 the works from 1923, in 2020 those from 1924, in 2021 those from 1925 and so on and so on (until 2073). A massive and very welcome expansion of the US public domain! Below are some highlights that'll enter on 1st January 2019.
Literature
Men Like Gods by H. G. Wells"In the Orchard" ad ""Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" by Virginia WoolfThe Prophet by Kahlil GibranThe Ego and the Id by Sigmund Freud (original German version)Towards a New Architecture by Le Corbusier (original French version)The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Murder on the Links by Agatha ChristieThe play Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw"Hypnos", "What the Moon Brings", "The Lurking Fear", and "Memory" by H.P. LovecraftDuino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke (original German version)New Hampshire by Robert FrostSpring and All and also the novel The Great American Novel by William Carlos Williams Harmonium by Wallace StevensTulips and Chimneys by E.E. CummingsPoems by Edna St. Vincent MillayAntic Hay by Aldous HuxleyA Son at the Front by Edith WhartonKangaroo by D. H. Lawrence.

Films
The Ten Commandments by Cecil B. DeMille (not his 1956 version, but rather the earlier silent first attempt) Safety Last! and Why Worry? by Harold LloydThe Pilgrim by Charlie ChaplinOur Hospitality by Buster KeatonThe Little Napoleon by Georg Jacoby (which features debut of Marlene Dietrich)The White Rose directed by D.W. Griffith
Artworks
Robert Delaunay – Portrait of Tristan TzaraMarcel Duchamp – The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)Max Ernst – Pietà or Revolution by NightM. C. Escher – Dolphins George Grosz – Ecce Homo (portfolio of lithographs)Wassily Kandinsky – On White IIHenri Matisse - Odalisque with Raised Arms and Window at TangierPablo Picasso - The Pipes of Pan and Paulo on a DonkeyMan Ray – Object to Be Destroyed (destroyed 1957)Paul Klee - Architecture, Tightrope Walker, and Masks
See these Wikipedia pages for more literature, music, film and artworks published in 1923.
For a great further reading on this new expansion to the US public domain checkout this article in the Smithsonian, this in the Atlantic, and this in the New York Times. And for those in California, the Internet Archive and Creative Commons are holding a special event on January 25th at the Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco.

To learn more about Public Domain Day visit publicdomainday.org.
Wondering if "bad things happen to works when they enter the public domain"? Wonder no more.
(Learn more about the situation in the U.S. and why the public domain is important in this article in Huff Post Books and this from the Duke Law School's Centre for the Study of the Public Domain).


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Women at Work during World War I
Text by Sam Dolbear
Mar 27, 2019

Last year marked two significant centenaries: the cessation of fighting in the First World War and the passing of legislation that expanded the electoral franchise to include women for the first time (at this point limited, however, to property-owning and degree-educated women over thirty). Historians have long connected these two events. The war, after the mass conscription of men to the front line, allowed women to enter the public sphere in unprecedented capacities, both in terms of work and leisure. As is documented by this vast collection of remarkable photographs, held by London’s Imperial War Museum, women’s lives were entirely transformed. The images show women performing a whole host of tasks: casting bricks, generating electricity, solutionising cork, building ships, painting railway stations, warming rubber, milking cows, signalling trains, smelting iron, blasting granite, making glucose, digging holes, and constructing houses, in addition to the work already prescribed to them such as childcare and domestic labour.
Looking through the thousands of photographs, perhaps surprising is how many show signs of joy: scenes of rural cooperation and industrial progress, of mutual support and collective endeavour. Indeed, if one were to stumble across the collection with no idea of context, they might appear to document some kind of feminist utopia (albeit one heavily bent on arms production). The trauma of the war, the loss of loved ones, the toil of work are often not visible there on the surface. No doubt this partly reflects a genuine positive spirit present amongst the workers, but one wonders also what role the medium might play here: the transforming presence of the camera (offering perhaps a welcome novelty from the daily grind, or triggering instincts to pose), and simply the limitations of the visual in conveying the lived reality of working life (as the German playwright Bertolt Brecht would later remark, the reality of a factory or workplace cannot be conveyed by a "merely photographic" reproduction). And this is not to mention the influence of any motives or biases of the photographers (George P. Lewis and Horace Nicholls among others) or their employers, the British government.
The conditions these women worked in were often dangerous and accidents were common. The TNT factories were particularly hazardous. In January 1917, an explosion at a plant in East London killed 73 people, and workers were nicknamed "canaries" due to the dangerous chemicals turning their skin yellow. The women were also paid less then their male counterparts: the munitions factories paid their female workers as little as half what they paid the men  for doing similar jobs. In 1918, women working on London transport went on strike to demand equal pay, the first strike of its kind. Addressing the issue of unequal pay, in 1919 the Report of the War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry was published. It endorsed the principle of "equal pay for equal work", but went on to state that, because of women's "lesser strength and special health problems", the output would likely not be equal. In the same year, some advances in equal rights were made, enshrined in law with the The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919, which made it illegal to exclude women from jobs because of their gender. However, the 1919 Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act then forced most women workers to leave their wartime roles so as to make way for the returning men from the front.

author: Sam Dolbear


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Leave it to Psmith (1923)

Apr 1, 2019

P. G. “Plum” Wodehouse was a staggeringly prolific and deeply influential British humorist. The list of writers and entertainers full of praise for Wodehouse is a long one.  T. S. Eliot’s admiration was said to be “just this side of idolatry”. Douglas Adams named him a “great genius” who “writes pure word music”. Stephen Fry has called Wodehouse “the most amiable benefactor of mankind ever to tap a typewriter key” and labels him as a bridge "between great literature and ordinary, popular literature.” Wodehouse’s influence is not just restricted to the West. In 2018, the Japanese publishing company Kokusho Kankokai reported that, when Empress Michiko announced that upon retirement she intends to enjoy reading Wodehouse novels, they went from printing 100 copies annually, to “receiving orders for 100 a day”.
Of the countless number of characters Wodehouse invented in his seventy-two year career (over which time he published more than ninety books, forty plays, and two hundred short stories - as well as trying his hand at song lyrics and screenplays) the best known is the phlegmatic, savvy, and sagacious valet called Jeeves, from the long-running Jeeves & Wooster stories. But before Jeeves was Psmith — a character Wodehouse called "the only thing in my literary career which was handed to me on a silver plate with watercress around it”. Wodehouse based Robert Eustace Psmith on an acquaintance from his school days, Rupert D'Oyly Carte — an English hotelier and impresario.  Psmith is an unflappable and witty eccentric. Never without his monocle and always ready to dive into improbable (even criminal) scenarios. Psmith is also a keen mind and a fan of Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, the oft-quoted line “Elementary, my dear Watson” is never uttered by the original Holmes. Its first appearance in any novel is when spoken by Psmith in Psmith, Journalist (1909).
Psmith’s most popular adventure took place in Leave it to Psmith (1923), a novel which has just entered the US public domain this year. The book is a crossover — the blending of two of Wodehouse’s most beloved universes: The Psmith Adventures (four novels) and The Blandings Castle Saga (11 novels and nine short stories). Psmith enters the world of Blandings Castle to pursue romance with the modern and vivacious Eve Halliday.  There they encounter characters like the pottering and doddy Earl of Emsworth, the suspicious “extremely efficient” secretary Rupert Baxter, and a bevy of swindlers, imposters, dandies, and poets. It’s a classic Wodehouse rom-com, or, as he used to call his style, a musical comedy without music.


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The Tomb and the Telephone Box: Soane’s Mausoleum (1816)
Text by Sam Dolbear
Jan 24, 2019

When London’s King’s Cross train station expanded north in the mid-1860s, the tracks cut through one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in the city: St Pancras Old Church. The novelist Thomas Hardy, at that point working as an architect, was charged with the task of clearing the site to make space for the station’s expansion north. Hardy exhumed the dead and placed their gravestones in a spiral around a tree. Today this tree remains, but the inscriptions are increasingly difficult to read, given the tree’s roots have begun to envelope the stones. Elsewhere in the cemetery, the gravestones mark the final resting places of other notable figures: there is Mary Wollstonecraft, writer of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) the mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818). Nearby is an imposing mausoleum inscribed with the name Sir John Soane, marking the final resting place of the collector-architect, whose eccentric house remains on Lincoln’s Inn Fields, as documented in the guide Description of the House and Museum of Sir John Soane (1835).
The mausoleum was erected in 1816, designed by Soane himself in memory of his wife Eliza, who died the year prior. Like much of Soane’s designs for London, of which only a few were realised, the mausoleum is built out of gleaming Portland stone, propped up in classical ruin. When Soane died in 1837, he joined his wife and their elder son John, who died prematurely in 1823, in the tomb that he had designed.
Visible from the graveyard and sharing its name with the same martyr, St Pancras, is the sister station to King’s Cross, a Victorian gothic masterpiece built by Sir George Gilbert Scott. Just under half a century after this station opened, the architect’s son, Giles Gilbert Scott had entered a competition to design a telephone box. He trod around the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church, in the shadow of his father’s masterpiece, and found inspiration: the central domed structure of Soane’s tomb. Though the design of the iconic red telephone box evolved over the years, from the K2 in 1926 to the K6 model in 1935, the structure remained the same: a column-like construction capped, like the tomb, by a domed roof.
Though Nikolaus Pevsner wrote that the nineteenth century “forgot about Soane”, it was ironically through his funereal-architecture that his spirit was revived. The ruined classical architecture of death had become one of the utilitarian icons of the twentieth century. These boxes are now relics on the streets, preserved by English Heritage and frequented by the occasional tourist, the occasional commuter with a flat battery, and the occasional poster of so-called "Tart Cards" that Gilbert and George (no relation to Sir George Gilbert Scott) arranged into artworks in 2011. Do these boxes still have a purpose? A number of years ago, a company selling coconut water ran adverts on the sides of old phone boxes in London: "FOR PEOPLE BORN AFTER 1994, THIS IS A PLACE ONCE USED TO MAKE PHONE CALLS", the text read. Like their architectural inspiration, these boxes now act as a memorial to a form of life now passed.


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Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature (1888)

Sep 18, 2012

A fascinating look at some of the more bizarre names given to children during the 17th century in England. Among the names explored are "From-above", "Free-gift" & "More-fruit" for unexpected additions to families; "Humiliation", "Abstinence" & "Sorry-for-sin" to express those qualities considered to be virtues; and just the plain brilliant/weird/mean, such as, "Job-rakt-out-of-the-asshes" and "Dancell-Dallphebo-Marke-Antony-Dallery-Galleiy-Caesar".


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The Hyginus Star Atlas (1482)

Sep 12, 2012

Hyginus' Poeticon Astronomicon is a star atlas and book of stories whose text is attributed to "Hyginus", though the true authorship is disputed. During the Renaissance, the work was attributed to the Roman historian Gaius Julius Hyginus who lived during the 1st century BC, however, the fact that the book lists most of the constellations north of the ecliptic in the same order as Ptolemy's Almagest (written in the 2nd century AD) has led many to believe that the text was created by a more recent Hyginus. The text describes 47 of the 48 Ptolemaic constellations, centering primarily on the Greek and Roman mythology surrounding the constellations, though there is some discussion of the relative positions of stars. The first known printing was in 1475, attributed to "Ferrara", though it was not formally published until 1482, by Erhard Ratdolt in Venice, Italy. This edition carried the full title Clarissimi uiri Hyginii Poeticon astronomicon opus utilissimum. Ratdolt commissioned a series of woodcuts depicting the constellations to accompany Hyginus' text. As with many other star atlases that would follow it, the positions of various stars are indicated overlaid on the image of each constellation.. however, the relative positions of the stars in the woodcuts bear little resemblance to the descriptions given by Hyginus in the text or the actual positions of the stars in the sky. As a result of the inaccuracy of the depicted star positions and the fact that the constellations are not shown with any context, the Poeticon astronomicon is not particularly useful as a guide to the night sky. The illustrations commissioned by Ratdolt did, however, serve as a template for future sky atlas renderings of the constellation figures. (Wikipedia)


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Ernest Shackleton on his South Polar Expedition (1910)

Aug 30, 2012

Ernest Shackleton on his British Antarctic Expedition 1907–09, otherwise known as the Nimrod Expedition, the first of three expeditions to the Antarctic led by the Anglo-Irish explorer. Its main target, among a range of geographical and scientific objectives, was to be first to the South Pole. This was not attained, but the expedition’s southern march reached a farthest south latitude of 88° 23′ S, just 97.5 nautical miles (180.6 km; 112.2 mi) from the pole. This was by far the longest southern polar journey to that date and a record convergence on either Pole. A separate group led by Welsh Australian geology professor Edgeworth David reached the estimated location of the South Magnetic Pole, and the expedition also achieved the first ascent of Mount Erebus, Antarctica's second highest volcano. For this achievement, Shackleton was knighted by King Edward VII on his return home. (Wikipedia)


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Morning on the Farm (1897)

Oct 5, 2012

A recording from the Library of Congress Berliner collection - the performer N.R. Wood imitates various animal sounds heard during the early morning, including sheep, cattle, cock, hens, guinea hen, turkey, hawk, crow, and other birds. Recorded in Washington, D.C. by Berliner Gramophone, 5th August 1897.


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The Coverdale Bible (1535)

Sep 10, 2012

The Coverdale Bible, compiled by Myles Coverdale and published in 1535, was the first complete Modern English translation of the Bible (not just the Old Testament or New Testament), and the first complete printed translation into English. The later editions (folio and quarto) published in 1539 were the first complete Bibles printed in England. The place of publication of the 1535 edition was long disputed. The printer was assumed to be either Froschover in Zurich or Cervicornus and Soter (in Cologne or Marburg). In 1997 the printer was identified as Merten de Keyser in Antwerp. The publication was partly financed by Jacobus van Meteren in Antwerp, whose sister-in-law, Adriana de Weyden, married John Rogers. The other backer of was Jacobus van Meteren’s nephew, Leonard Ortels (†1539), father of Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598), the famous humanist geographer and cartographer. Although Coverdale was also involved in the preparation of the Great Bible of 1539, the Coverdale Bible continued to be reprinted. The last of over 20 editions of the whole Bible or its New Testament appeared in 1553. (Wikipedia)


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Cartoon Portraits of Men of the Day (1873)

Aug 17, 2012

A book of caricatures of famous "Men of the Day" (as was the case in 1873) - including the likes of Darwin, Swinburne, Tennyson and Browning - drawn by cartoonist Frederick Watty and accompanied by biographical pieces on each of the subjects. With the exception of one, it is a compilation of all the cartoon portraits that were featured in Once a Week, a magazine originally founded as a result of a dispute between Bradbury and Evans and Charles Dickens. Bradbury and Evans had been Dickens' publisher since 1844, including publishing his magazine Household Words. In 1859, Bradbury and Evans refused to carry an advertisement by Dickens explaining why he had broken with Mrs. Dickens. In consequence, Dickens stopped work on Household Words and founded a new magazine, All The Year Round, which he decided would be editorially independent of any publisher. Bradbury and Evans responded by founding Once A Week, with veteran editor and abolitionist hero Samuel Lucas at the head. (Wikipedia)


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Cartoon Portraits of Leading 19th-Century Figures (1873)

Aug 17, 2012

A selection of the more well known of the (male) leading 19th-century figures featured in Cartoon Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Men of the Day (1873) with drawings by Frederick Watty and accompanied by biographical pieces on each of the subjects. With the exception of one, it is a compilation of all the cartoon portraits that were featured in Once a Week, a magazine originally founded as a result of a dispute between Bradbury and Evans and Charles Dickens. Bradbury and Evans had been Dickens' publisher since 1844, including publishing his magazine Household Words. In 1859, Bradbury and Evans refused to carry an advertisement by Dickens explaining why he had broken with Mrs. Dickens. In consequence, Dickens stopped work on Household Words and founded a new magazine, All The Year Round, which he decided would be editorially independent of any publisher. Bradbury and Evans responded by founding Once A Week, with veteran editor and abolitionist hero Samuel Lucas at the head. (Wikipedia)


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Roundhay Garden Scene (1888)

Sep 27, 2012

Roundhay Garden Scene is an 1888 short film directed by inventor Louis Le Prince, considered to be the world's first film ever made using a motion picture camera. According to Le Prince's son, Adolphe, it was filmed at Oakwood Grange, the home of Joseph and Sarah Whitley, in Roundhay, Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire, United Kingdom on October 14, 1888. It features Adolphe Le Prince, Sarah Whitley, Joseph Whitley and Harriet Hartley in the garden, walking around and laughing. It was recorded at 12 frames per second and runs for only 2.11 seconds.  Le Prince later used his camera to shoot trams and the horse-drawn and pedestrian traffic on Leeds Bridge. These pictures were soon projected on a screen in Leeds, making it the first motion picture exhibition. After returning to France, in September 1890, Le Prince was preparing to go back to the UK to patent his new camera, followed by a trip to the US to promote it. Before his journey, he decided to return home and visit friends and family. Having done so, he left Bourges on 13 September to visit his brother in Dijon. He would then take the 16 September train to Paris, but when the train arrived, his friends discovered that Le Prince was not on board. He was never seen again by his family or friends. No luggage nor corpse was found in the Dijon-Paris express nor along the railway. No one saw Le Prince at the Dijon station, except his brother. No one saw Le Prince in the Dijon–Paris express after he was seen boarding it. No one noticed strange behaviour or aggression in the Dijon-Paris express. The French police, Scotland Yard and the family undertook exhaustive searches but never found his body or luggage. This mysterious disappearance case was never solved. (Wikipedia)


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The Bestiarium of Aloys Zötl (1831-1887)

Aug 16, 2012

These beautiful watercolours come from the Austrian painter Aloys Zötl's Bestiarium, a series of exquisite paintings of various animals undertaken from 1831 through until his death in 1887. He was relatively unknown until, decades after his death, his work was "re-discovered" by surrealist André Breton who was taken by the surrealist aesthetic he saw present in the images - as he writes: "Lacking any biographical details about the artist, one can only indulge one's fantasies in imagining the reasons which might have induced this workman from Upper Austria, a dyer by profession, to undertake so zealously between 1832 and 1887 the elaboration of the most sumptuous bestiary ever seen." (Wikipedia)


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Moriarty Playing Cards (1916)

Oct 4, 2012

Actresses featured in the Moriarty playing card series issued in 1916 by the Movie Souvenir Card Co. of Cincinnati, Ohio. The back of each card is a reproduction in multiple-colors of the painting "The Chariot Race." The ad card within the pack proclaims: "Get a few packs of "Movies"--A Veritable Picture Gallery of the celebrities of the Movie World, treated with such a genius that it is the greatest novelty ever made in Souvenir Playing Cards, and is complete for playing all card games."


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Spring Morning in the Han Palace (17th.c)

Sep 26, 2012

A 17th century copy of Spring Morning in the Han Palace, a famous handscroll by the 16th century Ming Dynasty artist Qiu Ying [Ch'iu Ying]. It depicts imperial life at its most idyllic. During the years of the Qing [Ch'ing] Dynasty, copies such of this of Qiu Ying's painting were popular because they were considered an excellent guide to elegant behaviour. (Above image stitched together from images, below, in the collection of the Walters Art Museum).


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Illustrated initials from a German fairytale book (1919 edition)

Sep 20, 2012

Frontispiece and illustrated initials by the artist Friedrich Heinrich Ernst Schneidler for Deutsche Märchen seit Grimm (German Fairytales since Grimm), a German fairytale book originally published in 1912.


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Anatomically labelled X-Ray images (1920)

Aug 28, 2012

Images of the illustrative radiographs from Cunningham's Manual of Practical Anatomy 7th ed. (1920) revised and edited by Arthur Robinson.


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The Knife-Throwing Mother and her Children (1950s)

Sep 3, 2012

The knife-thrower Louella Gallagher throws knives at her daughters Connie Ann, 5, and Colleena Sue, 2.5 yrs old, in Austin, Texas. As the newscaster comments: "...Evidently Colleena Sue has more trust in Mother's aim than the audience has. It takes a steady eye and a stout heart to heave knives at the apple of your eye, but this female William Tell has no qualms and plenty of faith..."


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16th-century Prosthetics (1564)

Sep 28, 2012

Images of mechanical prosthetics as designed by Ambroise Paré in his book Dix livres de la chirurgie (Ten books of Surgery). Paré was the official royal surgeon for kings Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III and is considered to be one of the fathers of surgery and modern forensic pathology. As well as a designer of surgical instruments, he was also a leader in surgical techniques and battlefield medicine, especially the treatment of wounds. (Wikipedia)


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An Alphabet of Celebrities (1899)

Sep 24, 2012

Intricately rhymed and beautifully illustrated alphabet book on the world of late 19th century celebrity. It ends up creating quite  wonderfully bizarre a-historical scenarios by throwing names with the same beginning letter all in with each other - for the letter N: "N is for Napoleon, shrouded in gloom,/ With Nero, Narcissus, and Nerdau, to whom/ He's explaining the manual of arms with a broom."


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Bach’s organ works played by Albert Schweitzer (1935)

Sep 21, 2012

Albert Schweitzer was a German (writing in French also) theologian, organist, philosopher, physician, and medical missionary. As well as his important theological work (he depicted Jesus as literally believing the end of the world was coming in his own lifetime), he developed various theories on music, in particular the work of J.S. Bach. He explained figures and motifs in Bach's Chorale Preludes as painter-like tonal and rhythmic imagery illustrating themes from the words of the hymns on which they were based. They were works of devotional contemplation in which the musical design corresponded to literary ideas, conceived visually. Schweitzer's interpretative approach greatly influenced the modern understanding of Bach's music. His pamphlet "The Art of Organ Building and Organ Playing in Germany and France" (1906) effectively launched the 20th century Orgelbewegung, which turned away from romantic extremes and rediscovered baroque principles. In addition to his contribution to music theory, Schweiter also made many seminal recordings of Bach's organ recitals. In mid-December 1935 he began to record for Columbia Records on the organ of All Hallows, Barking-by-the-Tower, in London - the recordings above. He developed a particular technique for recording the performances of Bach's music known as "The Schweitzer Technique" which involved a new positioning of microphones. (Wikipedia)


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Russian Fairytales (1915)

Oct 2, 2012

A collection of Russian fairytales translated from the Russian of Nikolai Polevoy, a notable editor, writer, translator in the early 19th century. The translations were made by Robert Nisbet Bain, a British historian who worked for the British Museum, and a polyglot who could reportedly speak over twenty languages fluently. He famously taught himself Hungarian in order that he could read the works of Mór Jókai in the original after first reading him in German, going on to become the most prolific translator into English from Hungarian in the nineteenth century.


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The Hindenburg Explodes (1937)

Aug 26, 2012

Dramatic Universal newsreel footage of the Hindenburg disaster which took place on Thursday, May 6, 1937, when the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed during its attempt to dock with its mooring mast at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey. Of the 97 people on board (36 passengers, 61 crew), there were 35 fatalities; there was also one death among the ground crew. The actual cause of the fire remains unknown, although a variety of hypotheses have been put forward for both the cause of ignition and the initial fuel for the ensuing fire. The incident shattered public confidence in the giant, passenger-carrying rigid airship and marked the end of the airship era. (Wikipedia)


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The Hole Book (1908)

Aug 31, 2012

While fooling with a gun, Tom Potts shoots a bullet that seems to be unstoppable. A literal hole on each page traces the bullet's path as it wreaks havoc across various scenes until it meets its match in a particularly sturdy cake. A native of McDonough County, Illinois, Newell built a reputation in the 1880s and 1890s for his humorous drawings and poems, which appeared in Harper's Weekly, Harper's Bazaar, Scribner's Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Judge, and other publications. He later wrote and illustrated several popular children's books, such as Topsys and Turvys (1893), a collection of poems and images which could be viewed upside-down or right-side-up; The Hole Book (1908), featured above; and The Slant Book (1910), which took the shape of a rhomboid and told the story of a baby carriage careening down a hill. (Wikipedia)


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Tarzan of the Apes (1918)

Sep 17, 2012

The very first Tarzan film ever made, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' original novel Tarzan of the Apes of only 4 years earlier. The film is directed by Scott Sidney and stars Elmo Lincoln, Enid Markey, George B. French and Gordon Griffith. It is considered the most faithful to the novel of all the film adaptations, though only tells the first part of the novel, the remainder becoming the basis for the sequel, The Romance of Tarzan (also from 1918 but directed by Wilfred Lucas).


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Woodcuts from 18th-Century Chapbooks

Oct 8, 2012

A selection of woodcuts from an 1882 book compiling facsimiles of 18th-century chapbooks. To see the pictures in context and peruse the full chapbooks see our post in the Text section where we have the full book. See also our post dedicated to the "topsy-turvy" woodcuts.


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Chapbooks of the eighteenth century (1882)

Oct 8, 2012

Wonderful book offering facsimiles of hundreds of 18th century chapbooks upon a huge range of subjects - from tragic tales of revenge and murder to guides for interpreting dreams and moles - and the exquisite illustrative woodcuts which would often accompany the text. Included in this compilation is an informative introduction by John Ashton on the chapbook phenomenon, with additional commentary on some of the works.


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German Folk Dress (1887)

Sep 7, 2012

Images from Deutsche Volkstrachten, Original-Zeichnungen mit erklärendem Text (1887) by Albert Kretschmer, a book detailing the folk dress of the peoples in areas covering modern day Austria and southern Germany. Albert Kretschmer (1825-1891) was known for his highly detailed drawings, watercolors and lithographs usually in publications detailing varieties of German and international costumes and historical clothing. In addition, he worked until 1889 as a costume designer at the Königliches Schauspielhaus in Berlin. (Wikipedia)


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First Year Anniversary of the Berlin Wall (1962)

Nov 9, 2012

Universal newsreel from 1962 looking at the 1st year anniversary of the Berlin Wall.


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President Woodrow Wilson’s daughter singing Star Spangled Banner (1915)

Nov 6, 2012

Margaret Woodrow Wilson, the daughter of President at the time Thomas Woodrow Wilson, singing the U.S. national anthem "Star Spangled Banner" in 1915. After her mother's death in 1914 Margaret served as the First Lady of the United States until her father's second marriage in 1915. She would go on to make several recordings around 1918. In 1938 she travelled to the ashram of Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, India where she chose to stay for the rest of her life. She was later known in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as 'Nistha' (Sanskrit for "sincerity"). In 1942, she and the scholar Joseph Campbell edited the English translation of the classical work on the Hindu mystic, Sri Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna by Swami Nikhilananda, which was published in 1942. She was to die two years later, 6 years after entering the ashram, of a kidney infection aged 57. (Wikipedia)
The lyrics of the "The Star-Spangled Banner" come from "Defence of Fort McHenry", a poem written in 1814 by the 35-year-old lawyer and amateur poet, Francis Scott Key, after he witnessed the bombardment of Fort McHenry by the British Royal Navy ships in Chesapeake Bay 200 years ago this year in the War of 1812. The image above shows the U.S. flag flying above Fort McHenry in 1914. (Wikipedia)


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Manuscript Handbook of Firework Design (1785)

Nov 5, 2012

Beautiful hand-written and illustrated treatise on firework design and manufacture, including 'blue-prints' for the devices and explosive recipes.


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Posed Portraits of 19th-Century Baseball Stars

Oct 24, 2012

Selection of studio posed photographs from the New York Public Library's Spalding Collection, a series of over 500 photographs, prints, drawings, caricatures, and printed illustrations donated in 1921 by early baseball player and sporting-goods tycoon A. G. Spalding (whose name to this day is printed across every ball used in the National League). The photographs below feature players of different teams from New York and Philadelphia and seem to be mostly taken in the 1870s and 1880s.


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The Sonnets of Michelangelo (1904 edition)

Nov 19, 2012

Most famous for painting the Sistine Chapel and his sculpture of David, the Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo was also a prolific poet, in his lifetime penning more than 300 sonnets and madrigals. It is in his poetry that many critics have seen present the clearest evidence of his homosexual leanings. The openly homoerotic nature of the poetry has been a source of discomfort to later generations. Michelangelo's grandnephew, Michelangelo the Younger, published them in 1623 with the gender of pronouns changed, and it was not until John Addington Symonds translated them into English in 1878 that the original genders were restored - the book featured here is a later edition of this work which features the Symonds translations side-by-side with the original Italian (see here for the 1st edition, with no Italian). Even in modern times some scholars continue to insist that, despite the restoration of the pronouns, the sonnets represent "an emotionless and elegant re-imagining of Platonic dialogue, whereby erotic poetry was seen as an expression of refined sensibilities". (Wikipedia)


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Robert Louis Stevenson’s Baby Book (1922)

Nov 13, 2012

A remarkable record of the first few years of author Robert Louis Stevenson's life, as noted down by his mother in a "Baby Book". The book featured above, published in 1922, consists of a facsimile of the original handwritten baby book followed by a transcription. Amid various baby-related milestones, such as first teeth, crawl, walk, etc., we hear reports of a young "Lou" (also called "Boulihasker, Smoutie, Baron Broadnose, Signor Sprucki,.. Maister Sprook") first engaging with and questioning the world around him... here's a few little golden snippets:
When 1 year old...
Jan 13th: Smout gives up his forenoon sleep and calls books "oufs" because he expects to find pictures of dogs in them.
3 years old...
April 17th: When Smout was drawing pictures he said "I have drawed a man's body, shall I do his soul now?"
4 years old...
January 10th : When Lou saw the sun looking red he said "It's just like a great big orange thrown up into the sky."
February 6th: Lou dreamt that "he heard the noise of pens writing."
March 17th: Smout's dream " I dreamt that I was going downstairs and I saw a Russian bear looking out at the pantry door, and it came up and took hold of my foot and I awoke and it was just a dream."
March 27th: Another dream." I dreamt that I was at a marriage and a boy asked me to go to his room and when I looked out at the window I saw a basket hanging down from the sky and it was full of doors all around and somebody gave me something that wasn't good for me and I would not take it." The something appeared to be a cookie of some kind and he said the basket "was hung on a nail driven into a cloud."


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17th century Calligraphy from Germany

Oct 18, 2012

Select full page spreads from a 17th century German book on calligraphy entitled The Proper Art of Writing: a compilation of all sorts of capital or initial letters of German, Latin and Italian fonts from different masters of the noble art of writing. Although some can be recognisable as letters, it seems that a penchant for elaborate decoration has made most of them wonderfully illegible.


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The Proper Art of Writing (1655)

Oct 18, 2012

A 17th century German book on the art of writing. The full title (in English) reads The Proper Art of Writing: a compilation of all sorts of capital or initial letters of German, Latin and Italian fonts from different masters of the noble art of writing. A great range of different styles are represented seemingly increasing in elaborateness, and also illegibility, as the book goes on.
See a selection of the full page spreads in our post for the Images collection.


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The Calaveras of José Guadalupe Posada

Nov 2, 2012

José Guadalupe Posada (1851–1913) was a Mexican illustrator known for his satirical and politically acute calaveras. Deriving from the Spanish word for 'skulls', these calaveras were illustrations featuring skeletons which would, after Posada's death, become closely associated with the mexican holiday Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Most of these calaveras were published by the press of Antonio Vanegas Arroyo which produced inexpensive literature for the lower classes, including thousands of satirical broadsides which Posada illustrated. Through this focus on mortality Vanegas Arroyo and Posada satirised many poignant issues of the day, in particular the details of bourgeois life and the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. On January 20th 1913, 3 years after the start of the Mexican Revolution, José Guadalupe Posada died at his home in obscurity. He was penniless and buried in an unmarked grave. It was only years later in the 1920s that his work became recognised on a national and international level after it was championed by the French ex-patriot artist Jean Charlot who described Posada as “printmaker to the Mexican people”.


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Illustrations from Vincenzo Requeno's Discovery of Chironomia (1797)

Nov 15, 2012

After “reviving the practice of painting with encaustic colored waxes” and having “revitalized the lost, ancient method for speaking at a distance with telegraphy”, the Spanish monk Vincenzo Requeno fixed his gaze on a new task in Scoperta della Chironomia (1797): reestablishing the “unknown and necessary” practice of communicating intelligibly with the hands.
According to Requeno, this gestural art was employed for two different audiences in Ancient Greece and Rome: on stage, as a method for expression, and in the forum, as a technique for calculation. Since emotions do not express themselves regularly — “burning passions . . . modify people’s bodies different” — Greek and Roman theater developed “a fixed and stable law of convention” that governed a performer’s hands. “Without the intelligence of this art it is impossible to understand the structure of the Greek tragedies, the strength attributed by the ancients to the gestures of their pantomime,and many historical passages of the ancient theater.” On the other hand, chironomia allowed orators in the Roman forum to practice a form of shorthand computation, which Requeno suspects has roots reaching back to “the heroic times of Greece”. Furthermore, since alphabetic letters can be mapped to numbers, he conjectures that it was once possible to spell out written composition rapidly across the fingers’ pads and joints. Like his predecessor John Bulwer, who drew upon a similar corpus of classical writers in an attempt to fashion a universal sign language, Requeno is haunted by the emotional registers that were lost when our modern hands became expressively arthritic.
The images below come from Requeno’s Appendix to Scoperta della Chironomia and offer techniques for signing both numbers and letters. He offers a blueprint for assigning the first eleven letters of the Italian alphabet to the left hand — gestures that could be mirrored with the right hand for communicating the rest of the alphabet — and concludes his treatise with a belief that ancient art forms might find new life if the proper gestures are employed. “By making use of the gestures of the Greeks, leaving aside their alphabet, we will be able today with golden simplicity to renew ancient art”.
For more on “digital” computation and memory, see Kensy Cooperrider’s essay, “Handy Mnemonics: The Five-Fingered Memory Machine”. For an English project contemporary to Requeno’s own, see Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia (1806), which attempted to create a rhetoric of gestures based off of the works of Cicero and Quintilian.


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Dennison’s Bogie Book for Halloween (1920)

Oct 30, 2012

Decoration, costume and party suggestions from 1920 for the night of Halloween, that one time (according to the book) "of all the year when an opportunity is supposed to be given for looking into the future and having one's fate settled for the coming twelve months". Full of lots of handicraft tips on making that perfect spooky zone, as well as various party games (mostly involving blindfolds and choosing future loves) and a couple of ghost stories to read when midnight strikes. So.. "Why not invite your friends to a Hallowe'en party and join in the fun of trying some of the time-honored ways of finding out what the future holds in store?"


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Birds from The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands (1754)

Oct 10, 2012

A selection of birds as featured in Volume 1 of (the magnificently titled) Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands: containing the figures of birds, beasts, fishes, serpents, insects, and plants: particulary the forest-trees, shrubs, and other plants, not hitherto described, or very incorrectly figured by authors. Together with their descriptions in English and French. To which are added, observations on the air, soil, and waters: with remarks upon agriculture, grain, pulse, roots, &c., by Mark Catesby and George Edwards.


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Recital of The 23rd Psalm and “He Leadeth Me” (1919)

Oct 19, 2012

The 23rd Psalm recited by Rev. William H. Morgan D.D. and followed by a rendition by the Calvary Choir of the hymn "He Leadeth Me", originally written by Joseph Gilmore who had this to say about its creation:
As a young man who recently had been graduated from Brown University and Newton Theological Institution, I was supplying for a couple of Sundays the pulpit of the First Baptist Church in Philadelphia. At the mid-week service, on the 26th of March, 1862, I set out to give the people an exposition of the Twenty-third Psalm, which I had given before on three or four occasions, but this time I did not get further than the words “He Leadeth Me.” Those words took hold of me as they had never done before, and I saw them in a significance and wondrous beauty of which I had never dreamed.
This recording from 1919 is made by Thomas Edison and housed at the Library of Congress. The 23rd psalm is perhaps the best known of them all, importnat in both the Christian and Jewish traditions. It is particularly popular in the world of cinema where it is used in an interesting variety of scenes - to give just a few examples: at the end of the 1973 film The Wicker Man, Howie recites it as he is being engulfed in flames; in the 1980 David Lynch film The Elephant Man, Merrick recites it and so reveals his intelligence; in the 1997 film Titanic it is recited while the ship is sinking.


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A Description of the Brain of Mr. Charles Babbage (1909)

Nov 12, 2012

Charles Babbage, (1791–1871) was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer. Considered the "father of the computer", Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer that eventually led to more complex designs. Babbage himself decided that he wanted his brain to be donated to science upon his death. In a letter accompanying the donation, his son Henry wrote:
I have no objection...to the idea of preserving the brain...Please therefore do what you consider best...[T]he brain should be known as his, and disposed of in any manner which you consider most conducive to the advancement of human knowledge and the good of the human race.
Half of Babbage's brain is preserved at the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons in London, the other half is on display in the Science Museum in London. The 1909 article featured here, as well as a wonderfully detailed  description of the brain complete with a gloriously dizzy abundance of scientific terms, includes in its latter half a series of photographs of the brain itself. We've featured these images below.


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Live footage of King Alexander’s Assassination (1934)

Oct 9, 2012

One of the most notable newsreel films in existence - footage showing the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia on 9th October, 1934. While the exact moment of shooting was not captured on film, the events leading to the assassination and the immediate aftermath were. The body of the chauffeur (who had been killed instantly) became jammed against the brakes of the car, allowing the cameraman to continue filming from within inches of the King for a number of minutes afterwards. The film was later revealed to have been manipulated slightly in order to give the audience the impression that the assassination had been captured on film. Three identical gunshot sounds were added to the film afterwards, when in reality Chernozemski shot over ten times, killing or wounding a total of 15 people. The exact moment of assassination was never filmed.
On Tuesday 9 October 1934 the King Alexander arrived in Marseilles to start a state visit to the Third French Republic, to strengthen the two countries' alliance in the Little Entente. While Alexander was being driven in a car through the streets along with French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou, a gunman, Vlado Chernozemski, stepped from the street and shot the King and the chauffeur. Alexander died instantly, slumped backwards in the car seat, eyes open. Barthou was wounded in the arm but died later due to inadequate medical treatment. The assassin, Vlado Chernozemski, was a Bulgarian, member of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) and an experienced marksman. Immediately after assassinating King Alexander, he was cut down by the sword of a mounted French policeman, and then beaten by the crowd. By the time he was removed from the scene, he was already dead. (Wikipedia)


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Plates from Robert Thornton’s Temple of Flora (1807)

Nov 8, 2012

"The Temple of Flora" is the third and final part of Robert John Thornton's New illustration of the sexual system of Carolus von Linnaeus, considered by many to be the greatest of all flower books. It consists of a series of sumptuous depictions of flowers notable for their epic and unusual settings. Interwoven amongst the images are various descriptions, histories and poetic odes regarding the flowers featured. The first plates were engraved by Thomas Medland in May 1798 from paintings by Philip Reinagle. Between 1798 and 1807 they produced a total of thirty-three coloured plates, engraved in aquatint, stipple and line. Others engravers included Joseph Constantine Stadler working from the painting of Peter Charles Henderson. When he planned the project, Thornton had decided to publish seventy folio-size plates. Lack of interest from the general public spelled disaster for the scheme, and the holding of a lottery could not save it from financial ruin, neither did a page in the work dedicated to the spouse of George III, Queen Charlotte, patroness of botany and the fine arts.  (Wikipedia)


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Illuminated version of Lord Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur (1912)

Oct 25, 2012

Alfred Lord Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur, written as early as the spring of 1835, was a retelling of the third, fourth and fifth chapters of the twenty-first book of Malory's Romance about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and the Knights of the Round Table. Tennyson later would incorporate a much extended and altered version of the poem into his The Idylls of the King, as the last section titled 'The Passing of Arthur'.
The illuminator Alberto Sangorski (1862-1932) was late to the world of calligraphy, at the age of 43 beginning to work for his younger brother Francis in the famous Sangorski and Sutcliffe bookbinding firm. One of his greatest achievements was a unique jewel bound version of Omar Khayyám's Rubáiyát, now referred to as 'the Great Omar,' which never reached the American collector who commissioned it as it was sent across on the ill fated Titanic in 1912.


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Cantonese Opera - White Hibiscus at Night (1920)

Oct 12, 2012

The traditional Chinese song "White Hibiscus at Night" sung by Peony Su, a star of the Cantonese Opera during the 1920s and 30s. Learn more here.


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Will Rogers Talks to the Bankers (1924)

Nov 16, 2012

William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers (1879–1935) was an American cowboy, vaudeville performer, humorist, social commentator and motion picture actor. He was one of the world's best-known celebrities of the interwar period and by the mid-30s was internationally known as a leading political wit and top-paid Hollywood movie star. At the peak of his success, in 1935, he died when a small airplane he was travelling in crashed in Alaska. He joked about his own early death:
When I die, my epitaph, or whatever you call those signs on gravestones, is going to read: "I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I dident like." I am so proud of that, I can hardly wait to die so it can be carved.
In this recording Rogers turns his satirical wit to the world of bankers. (Wikipedia)


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“I Reunite Architecture and Perspective”: Hirschvogel’s Geometria (1543)

Oct 15, 2012

One theory about wormholes — those speculative cosmological structures that tunnel between distant points in the universe — holds that spacetime can be folded like a piece of paper, bringing the near and far into proximity. Examining the manuscript pages from Augustin Hirschvogel’s Geometria (1543), collected below, we are thrust into an analogous encounter with early solid geometry; suddenly the distant past is thrown up before our eyes on screen, and we glimpse another form of interdimensional folding, one much less hypothetical.
Visualizing various polyhedra in three dimensions, Hirschvogel unfolds these bodies on the page, creating flat “nets” (as mathematicians call them) that resemble blueprints for paper sculpture. Dürer was the first to use this method, in Underweysung der messung (1525), and Hirschvogel expresses his debt to him in Geometria, a volume with grand and humorous ambitions, judging by the title page’s inscription: “The Book of Geometry is my name. / All liberal Arts were originally derived from me. / I reunite Architecture and Perspective”. Standing on his master’s shoulders, Hirschvogel drew an Archimedean solid that Dürer’s hands never touched, the rhombicosidodecahedron, which has thirty square faces, twenty triangular faces, twelve pentagonal faces, sixty vertices, and more than one hundred edges. Hirschvogel was evidently proud of this accomplishment, for it adorns his title page too, refashioned as a perch for an owl, the ancient avian symbol for wisdom — here mobbed by lesser birds, perhaps enemies of knowledge. When not drawing shapes, Hirschvogel made solid objects, specifically “Tyrolese owl jugs” (or so some scholars have conjectured), which may have been awarded for feats involving archery or drunkenness.
In Ancient Greek geometry, the Platonic solids were connected to the foundational elements of matter: earth, water, fire, and air. Born in Nürnberg and living the majority of his life in Vienna, Hirschvogel witnessed a fifth association come on the scene in the sixteenth century, the association of dodecahedrons with heaven. Hirschvogel took this sacred geometry further, mapping the Latin alphabet’s vowels onto polyhedra. What purpose this may have served, we do not know, but it hints toward a divine, mathematical language, in which sounds and solids cohere in the eye and on the tongue. The abstractions on the pages of this manuscript, held by Dresdon’s Saxon State and University Library, have gained depth as they’ve aged — smudgy stains litter the paper, interacting with its complex geometry. This decay seems to drag the geometer down from the lofty world of mathematical forms, back into the irregular geometry of embodied life.
For more on Dürer and Renaissance geometry, see Noam Andrews’ essay “The Polyhedral Perspective”. For some lovely stellated and uniform polyhedra, see our post on Max Brückner’s collection.


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Coloured plates from Gautier D'Agoty's Essai d’Anatomie (1745)

Oct 22, 2012

These extraordinary illustrations were produced in 1745 by Gautier D'Agoty, and form a remarkably detailed atlas of the head, neck, and shoulder areas of the human body, with explanatory text in French. The scenes were based on cadavers dissected by Joseph Duverney and made using the mezzotint method (from the Italian “mezza tina” or “half tone”). Mezzotints  are produced by rocking a toothed tool over a metal plate to create tiny holes that hold ink. The roughened surface is then polished to varying degrees of smoothness, thus reducing ink-holding capacity and creating subtly darker and lighter tones. Coloured mezzotinting was invented in 1719 by Gautier D’Agoty's master, Jaques Christophe Le Blon, and involves making three separate impressions (of blue, yellow, and red ink). Since the mezzotint technique is quite labor-intensive, it had largely fallen out of favour by the twentieth century. As the Internet Archive description explains:
Most often used to reproduce paintings by famous artists, mezzotint printing was rarely used for original works of art, making the "Essai d'Anatomie" a work of great scientific and artistic significance. The original copy of the "Essai d'Anatomie" held by the Rudolph Matas Library of the Health Sciences at Tulane University was restored, bound, and digitized by William Kitchens. The restoration work was completed on May 6, 2008. These remarkable anatomical images from the 18th century provide a fascinating look into both the artistic and scientific climate of the period.


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Clay animations of Joseph Sunn (1926)

Oct 16, 2012

From the Prelinger Archive - two early clay animations (The Penwiper and Green Pastures) by pioneering Chinese American animator Joseph Sunn from San Francisco. These films are part of the "Ralph Wolfe's Mud Stuff" series.


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The Art of Invigorating and Prolonging Life (1822)

Oct 11, 2012

A comprehensive look at all the tricks in the trade in securing a longer and fuller life. As well as detailed regimes (often involving drinking wine and taking siestas), there is included in its pages this view of life laid out by William Jones.


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A Wake in Hell’s Kitchen (1903)

Oct 27, 2012

Strange little short from the American Mutoscope & Biograph Co, housed at the Library of Congress. From Biograph picture catalogue, Nov. 1902 [MI], p. 39:
This scene is laid in the parlor of a New York tenement. Two watchers at the wake are smoking and drinking, while the widow is weeping over the coffin. The attention of the three is attracted for an instant, and the supposed corpse rises up, drinks all the beer in the pitcher which is standing on a table nearby, and lies down in the coffin again. The mourners return, and seeing that the beer is gone, engage in a controversy over it. During the scrap the corpse jumps out of the coffin and takes part in the melee.


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The Celestial Atlas of Andreas Cellarius (1660)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Oct 4, 2018

Harmonia Macrocosmica (1660), an atlas of the stars from the Dutch Golden Age of cartography, maps the structure of the heavens in twenty-nine extraordinary double-folio spreads. We are presented with the motions of the celestial bodies, the stellar constellations of the northern hemisphere, the old geocentric universe of Ptolemy, the newish heliocentric one of Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe’s eccentric combination of the two — in which the Moon orbits the Earth, and the planets orbit the Sun, but the Sun still orbits the Earth. The marginal area of each brightly coloured map is a hive of activity: astronomers bent over charts debate their findings, eager youngsters direct their quadrants skywards, and cherubs fly about with pet birds in tow.
The life of the Dutch-German creator of the folio, Andreas Cellarius, has only come down to us in skeleton form. He was born around 1596 in a small town near Worms and spent his adult life as a schoolmaster in Amsterdam, the Hague and finally Hoorn. Around 1637 he was appointed rector of a Latin school in Hoorn where he wrote the Harmonia Macrocosmica and all his other scholarly works (including one on designing impregnable fortifications).
Intended as a historical introduction for two-volume treatise on cosmography, only this first part, printed by the Amsterdam publisher Johannes Janssonius in 1660, was ever realised. In 1708, some forty years or so after Cellarius' death, the Amsterdam publishers Gerard Valk and Petrus Schenk the Younger published a version just containing the plates, and it is this later edition from which many of the images in this post come.
The highlights we've featured here all sourced from the digital repository of Stanford University Libraries, however in two separate collections each with different licenses regarding sharing and re-use. Six are from The Glen McLaughlin Map Collection of California as an Island and published under the Public Domain Mark and seven are from The Barry Lawrence Ruderman Map Collection which is (frustratingly and for seemingly no good reason) published under a CC BY-NC-SA license (so be careful how you use those).

author: Ned Pennant-Rea


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Kumataro Ito’s Illustrations of Nudibranchs from the USS Albatross’ Philippine Expedition (ca. 1908)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Nov 1, 2018

If you ask people what the most spectacular creatures on Earth are some might say the flamingos of the Andes, the birds-of-paradise of Papua New Guinea, or the tropical fish of the Galapagos. How many would say sea slugs? Yet the roughly 3,000 species in the family nudibranchia are legitimate contenders, coming as they do in a delightful, dizzying array of shapes, patterns and colours. Though most abundant in shallow and warm waters, nudibranchs can be found from the Arctic to the Antarctic, down to a depth of 2,500 metres. The barely believable forms of these horned marine wonders have been captured by modern divers and their underwater cameras. A century ago, only a skilled on-site artist stood any chance of doing a nudibranch aesthetic justice, particularly in relation to its brilliant but ephemeral colours which would dullen after death.
The vibrant paintings below are the work of Kumataro Ito, the chief illustrator aboard the USS Albatross as it undertook the monumental task, for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, of surveying the aquatic resources of the 7,000 islands of the Philippines. The Tokyo-based Ito cuts a somewhat mysterious figure on the expedition. We do know that he was on board the Albatross for a total of about 16 months, in three separate stints, during which he sketched and produced final paintings of about seventy nudibranchs, and over a hundred fishes. In 1912, following an invitation from the director of the Philippines expedition, Ito lived in Washington DC for up to a year, where he illustrated fish from North America and the deep seas of the Phillippines. Before his involvement with the Albatross, he had established his reputation as an illustrator of sea life with the publication, in Tokyo, of Fishes of Japan (1903–7). Though he was properly attributed in that book, he was very seldom so in those that followed the Philippines expedition.
The voyage ran from 1907 to 1910 and contributed greatly to scientific knowledge of the archipelago. Through various collection methods, from handlines to dynamite, an astonishing 490,000 specimens were delivered to the US National Museum (now the National Museum of Natural History). More on the expedition can be found in this Smithsonian article and more on Ito's role in particular in this 1999 article for the Marine Fisheries Review by Victor G. Springer.


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Pepys’s Ghost (1899)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Oct 2, 2018

In this strangest of diaries, the author and adventurer Edwin Emerson Jr voices one year in his life through the mouth of Samuel Pepys. London of the 1660s meets New York of 1898. It sounds a bizarre union, and it is, but to give Emerson his dues he does have a fair bit in common with the famous English chronicler. Both are connoisseurs of books, theatre, humour, amour and drinking:
What with good sack, ale, wine, and all manner of drink, we all mighty frolicksome and nothing to stay us, but we must have more of each until all were dancing and leaping merrily with rag, tag, and bobtail, dashing wine everywhere, soyling each the other’s shirte.
This latter-day Pepys visits the theatre to watch and opine on productions of Faust and As You Like It. He converses and cavorts with various literary lights most of whom no longer shine brightly to a twenty-first century reader. Nor in fact did they to contemporary readers, for Emerson deems it necessary to explain many of them in footnotes: “Robert G. Ingersoll, noted lawyer and infidel”; “Hutchinson Hapgood, journalist and miscellaneous writer.” The book is at its most enjoyable when Emerson forgets about high society and imagines instead how old Samuel Pepys would fare in fin-de-siècle NYC:
In comes my cozen James, and he must have it for me to ride on his new-fashioned machine made of two wheels all a-tilt and saddled. Then he sustaining and I bestriding the pesky thing did we venture forth on the high road, I sweating over my whole body and pulling forward now this leg, now that, till he with a loud outcry overturned me where the road was most dirty.
New York is about as noisy as Pepys’ London: full of laughter, swearing, and barking at the annual exhibition of prize dogs in Madison Square Garden. The narrative has all the energy of its bon vivant author, who is never shy of revealing the personal:
My Birthday — To-day am I entering on my thirtieth yeare, and so lay long in the morning, hugging my bed, with high resolves how I must turn all things to a better accounting. My wife up early, and anon bestoweth upon me a rich gowne for to stay at home in, the skirts whereof fall to mine ankles, warm and cozy withal, and a noble cake, wherefore she did demand toll of twenty-nine kisses, one for each of my years, and so we bussed one another right heartily.
In April, Pepys joins the Rough Riders cavalry unit to play his part in the Spanish-American War. There he meets his commander and a future president: “‘Ha,’ quoth Colonell Roosevelt gritting his teeth. ‘Thou here. What can I do for thee?’ Then did I tell him how I was still bent on following his standard, whereat he did show his teeth and laugh.”
After the conflict, in which Emerson has also operated as a secret agent for the US Military Information Bureau, he becomes a soldier of fortune in Panama and South America, though that is not covered in Pepys's Ghost. Nor is the fact that some decades later, when in his sixties, Emerson would become a champion of National Socialism in America. An ignominious phase in a clearly extraordinary life.


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Nineteenth-Century Textspeak
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Nov 13, 2018

Long words can be mellifluous, pulchritudinous, even pericombobulating things to behold. But sumtimes we jst nd 2 get 2 da pt. The very earliest writing, by the Sumerians circa 3000 BCE, was in pictographs. These representations of discrete ideas in small pictures, these proto-emojis, continued life in the early modern era, in places like Le Petit Livre d’Amour where we see “cœur” replaced by a ❤. But from the ancient Greeks onwards, rather than draw pictures, writers striving for concision in alphabetic languages have usually preferred to omit non-crucial letters. Abbreviation of this kind had an unexpected renaissance with “textspeak”, a sublanguage formed in the 160-character-limited SMS (short message service). On early mobile phones you had to type each message on awkward little keys designating up to four letters. These spatial constraints, along with the simple desire to communicate quickly, gave rise to some wonderful abbreviations and acronyms — even if some take the receiver more time in the decoding than save the sender in the composing (e.g. “CURLO: See you around like a donut”).
Two nineteenth-century precursors to textspeak, both hotbeds of radical concision, were the telegram and shorthand. Shorthand had been around since the ancients but the famously innovative Victorians devised a host of new systems. Isaac Pitman, the creator of Stenographic Soundhand, opined that when people correspond by shorthand, “friendships grow six times as fast as under the withering blighting influence of the moon of longhand.” Though Dickens joked in David Copperfield that to acquire "a perfect and entire command of the mystery of shorthand writing and reading was about equal in difficulty to the mastery of six languages". As for telegrams, companies used to charge by the word, so correspondents would leave out unnecessary ones as well as punctuation, to produce messages with a distinct clipped style. And when telegraph operators communicated directly to each other, they would abbreviate words too.
It is this “telegramese” that provides the context for the comic love poem we've featured above. “Essay to Miss Catharine Jay” appears in C.C. Bombaugh’s excellent Gleanings for the Curious from the Harvest-Fields of Literature: A Melange of Excerpta (first published 1867). Its elliptical style – “I wrote 2 U B 4” (line 6) – bears an uncanny resemblance to the textspeak that would flower 150 years later. The bathos of the following four lines is particularly wonderful, their descent from sophisticated abbreviation work at the end of the first and third lines into something pretty teenaged at the end of the second and fourth:
He says he loves U 2 X S,U R virtuous and Y'sIn X L N C U X LAll others in his i's.
Though a fine example, Bombaugh’s poem is not the first of its kind. It is based on a number of similar poems that appeared in newspapers and magazines on both sides of the nineteenth-century Atlantic. The following example was published in an 1828 issue of The New Monthly Magazine.
And here, in a subsequent issue in the same year, a riposte (an annotated version of which you can see at this great article on Visual Thesaurus).


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John Milton’s Frontispiece Prank
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Oct 9, 2018

When John Milton’s publisher insisted that he include a portrait in his first collection of poetry — Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645) — he called on the services of the prolific engraver William Marshall. Milton was thirty-seven and had that year begun losing his sight. He would however not be blind for another seven years and could see well enough that the resulting frontispiece was appalling. Comparison with other Milton portraits suggests that Marshall supplied the poet and polemicist with an overly large nose, extra greasy hair and puckered lips. Milton got his own back with an erudite joke. Underneath the frontispiece he had Marshall painstakingly engrave a scathing appraisal of it in a language he clearly could not understand, Greek:
Looking at the form of the original, you could say, perhaps, that this likeness had been drawn by a rank beginner; but, my friends, since you do not recognize what is pictured here, have a chuckle at a caricature by a good-for-nothing artist.
Although Marshall did not know Greek, he likely could make at least some sense of Latin, which makes another aspect of the portrait surprising. Surrounding its oval border is a Latin description, “John Milton, Englishman pictured at age twenty-one.” Yet the face peering out looks much nearer forty than twenty. Was Marshall too inept or perhaps rushed — working as he was during the Civil War when engravers were in short supply — to imbue his subject with youth? Or was was he perhaps simply having a laugh at the expense of a poet past his physical prime? To round off the lamentable frontispiece, the four muses in its corners all look like they’d very much rather be somewhere else.
When Milton brought out an updated version of his Poems in 1673, he saw fit to remove the frontispiece entirely, although not his literary insult. Appearing in the main body of the book, still in the original Greek but now under the title “In Effigiei ejus Sculptorem” (On the Engraver of his Portrait), his barb at Marshall has been elevated to the status of a poem. In another amusing twist to the tale, in Jacob Tonson’s 1713 edition of the Poems, Marshall’s frontispiece was copied by an engraver named M. Vandergucht, who saw fit to replace Marshall’s signature with his own and so thus inadvertently direct the insult to himself.


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Polychrome Woodblocks of Itō Jakuchū Birds

Nov 27, 2018

These beautiful polychrome woodblock prints are Meiji era copies (ca. 1900) of original designs (ca. 1771) by Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800), a Japanese painter of the mid-Edo period notable for his striking modern aesthetic. Born in Kyoto, Jakuchū was strongly influenced by Zen Buddhist ideals throughout his life and his name is taken from the Tao Te Ching and means "like the void". He was considered a koji (a lay brother) and he named his studio Shin'en-kan, which translates as "Villa of the Detached Heart [or Mind])", a phrase included in a poem by the ancient Chinese poet Tao Qian.


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Hamonshu: A Japanese Book of Wave and Ripple Designs (1903)
Text by Adam Green
Sep 16, 2018

The three volumes above bring together a wonderful selection of wave and ripple designs produced by the Japanese artist Mori Yuzan, about whom not a lot is known, apart from that he hailed from Kyoto, worked in the Nihonga style, and died in 1917. The works would have acted as a kind of go-to guide for Japanese craftsmen looking to adorn their wares with wave and ripple patterns. The designs would have found their way onto swords (both blades and handles) and associated paraphernalia (known as "sword furniture"), as well as lacquerware, Netsuke, religious objects, and a host of other items. Peruse the pages above and also see some of our favourites below, including the excellent triple-page composite image (from volume 3) featured near the end.
[NOTE: This post is an expanded and updated version of a previous post which only featured Volume 3 and incorrectly labelled it as Ha Bun Shu, a later post-humous collection of Mori Yuzan's work -- that URL now redirects to this new post. Thank you to all our wonderful community who pointed out this error which was inherited from an incorrect Internet Archive description.]


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Cosmography Manuscript (12th Century)

Jul 25, 2018

This wonderful series of medieval cosmographic diagrams and schemas are sourced from a late 12th-century manuscript created in England. Coming to only nine folios, the manuscript is essentially a scientific textbook for monks, bringing together cosmographical knowledge from a range of early Christian writers such as Bede and Isodere, who themselves based their ideas on such classical sources as Pliny the Elder, though adapting them for their new Christian context. As for the intriguing diagrams themselves, The Walters Art Museum, which holds the manuscript and offers up excellent commentary on its contents, provides the following description:
The twenty complex diagrams that accompany the texts in this pamphlet help illustrate [the ideas], and include visualizations of the heavens and earth, seasons, winds, tides, and the zodiac, as well as demonstrations of how these things relate to man. Most of the diagrams are rotae, or wheel-shaped schemata, favored throughout the Middle Ages for the presentation of scientific and cosmological ideas because they organized complex information in a clear, orderly fashion, making this material easier to apprehend, learn, and remember. Moreover, the circle, considered the most perfect shape and a symbol of God, was seen as conveying the cyclical nature of time and the Creation as well as the logic, order, and harmony of the created universe.
A couple of the diagrams feature the so-called "T-O map", which Walters describes as "a conceptual diagram intended to show the relative positions of the three continents".
The T, the Mediterranean Sea, separates Asia, Europe, and Africa, while the O is the surrounding ocean. Although the origins of the T-O map lie in the literature of classical antiquity, some of the earliest surviving pictorial examples occur in early medieval manuscripts of the works of Isidore of Seville.


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The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy (1917)
Text by Adam Green
Sep 25, 2018

This is the first film by stop-motion animation pioneer Willis O'Brien. From the age of just 11, O'Brien worked a huge variety of jobs including cattle rancher, farmhand, factory worker, fur trapper, cowboy, bartender, rodeo man, and guide to palaeontologists in Crater Lake. Spending his spare hours sculpting and illustrating he soon became employed as architect's draftsman and then as cartoonist for the San Francisco Daily News. After a period working the railways he returned to more creative endeavours, becoming a marble sculptor and assistant to the head architect of the 1915 San Francisco World's Fair, where some of his work was displayed. During this time he began to make little models. Perhaps inspired by his time at Crater Lake, amongst his creations was a dinosaur and caveman and he soon began to animate using the stop-motion technique. In 1915, after a San Fransico exhibitor saw his test sequences, O'Brien got his first film commission to make The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy for a budget of $5000.
Thomas Edison saw the film and was impressed. O'Brien was promptly hired by the Edison Company to animate a series of short films with a prehistoric theme, including R.F.D. 10,000 B.C. and Prehistoric Poultry (both 1917). The dinosaur theme continued when he gained a commission from Herbert M. Dawley to write, direct, co-star and produce the effects for dinosaur film The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918), though their relationship turned sour and Dawley made sure O'Brien received little financial reimbursement from this success. The film however did help to secure his position on Harry O. Hoyt's The Lost World, a 1925 film based on the novel by Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle. Eight years later he would do sop-motion animation for best known film, King Kong (1933).


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East of the Sun and West of the Moon, illustrated by Kay Nielsen (1922 edition)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Nov 6, 2018

There was an appetite in the early twentieth century for luxurious collections of children’s stories, often bound in gold-toothed vellum, to be given as gifts. Brilliant artists of the day including Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac were commissioned to illustrate them. Perhaps one of the finest creations to emerge from this golden age of illustration was an edition of East of the Sun and West of the Moon which boasted twenty-five colour plates and many more monochrome images by Kay Nielsen, a young Danish artist who had studied in Paris before moving to England in 1911. The compendium consists of fifteen fairy tales gathered by the Norwegian folklorists Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe on their journeys across mid nineteenth-century Norway. Translated into English by George Webbe Dasent (1817–1896), the stories — populated by witches, trolls, ogres, sly foxes, mysterious bears, beautiful princesses and shy country lads turned heroes — were praised by Jacob Grimm himself for having a freshness and a fullness that “surpasses nearly all others”.
The Great War interrupted Nielsen’s career and he never quite reached the same heights as an illustrator afterwards. But his work did embellish some further collections of stories, notably by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. In his fifties he moved to Hollywood to work for Walt Disney and some of his illustrations graced the "Night on Bald Mountain" and "Ave Maria" sequences of Fantasia (1940). He was let go by Disney in 1941 and spent the final sixteen years of his life in poverty.
Originally printed in London in 1914 Nielsen's East of the Sun and West of the Moon saw a number of reprints over the years and decades, most recently in 2015 when Taschen published a glorious edition with three accompanying essays (illustrated with dozens of rare artworks by Nielsen), exploring the history of Norwegian folktales and Nielsen's life and work.
Below we've picked out some favourites from the book's stunning series of colour plates, mainly sourced from the Internet Archive's 1922 New York version featured above but also some from Wikimedia Commons.


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Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906)
Text by Adam Green
Oct 17, 2018

A short, silent film starring John P. Brawn as the titular fiend, who having gorged himself on Welsh Rarebit — melted cheese on toast — stumbles to bed via a rather hallucinatory encounter with a lamp post and falls into a troubled sleep. Inaugurated by a trio of pickaxe-wielding demons, his subsequent cheese-fuelled dream involves an inelegant flight through his window and over an urban nightscape, ending skewered by his pyjamas on a weather vane. The film features some pioneering special effects including a fully spinning sky and the aforementioned demons.
The sequence is based on a comic strip by Winsor McCay, alias “Silas”. Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was McCay's longest running comic, totalling over 300 episodes more than his better known Little Nemo. It begun with a seven year stint in the New York Herald, running from 1904 to 1911, and then from 1911 to 1913 appeared in various other papers under different titles, before undergoing a brief revival in the 1920s under the title Rarebit Reveries. As in the 1906 screen version, each episode involves an instance of indulgence in some food or other (usually Welsh Rarebit) followed by an often unsettling trip through a turbulent dreamscape. The darkish nature of these postprandial wanderings through the human psyche lie in stark contrast to the happier dream world excursions presented in the all-colour Little Nemo begun a year after Dream of a Rarebit Fiend launched.


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The Laughing Song (1904)

Jul 17, 2018

In this novelty recording by the Norwegian actor Henry Klauser, a mournful refrain gradually gives way to laughter. According to The Incredible Music Machine (1982), the record found a perhaps unlikely fan in the form of the fifth Qajar king of Persia, Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar.
The Shah became a great fan of the gramophone. Later that year, he asked [Gramophone] Company representative E.W. Emmerson to bring some of the latest records to the Palace. One of them was the famous "Laughing Song" by Henry Klauser, and Emmerson reported that the Shah laughed out loud when it was played. He added: "The contortions on the faces of his people, who are not supposed to laugh in his presence, baffled description."


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Images from William Saville-Kent’s The Great Barrier Reef of Australia (1893)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Sep 20, 2018

While naming and arranging corals in the Natural History Department of the British Museum, William Saville-Kent daydreamed of seeing the beautiful grey organisms in front of him “in their native seas and wonderful living tints.” Years later he would realise his dream at the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland. There he conceived of a book that would be the first to extensively depict a coral reef in photographs — a selection of which are embedded at the bottom of this post.
Saville-Kent had grown frustrated by lack of promotion at the museum (where he worked under Richard Owen) and left in 1873 to become a resident naturalist at aquariums first in Brighton, then Manchester, and finally London. In 1884 he voyaged to the other side of the world and spent the next twenty years laying the foundations for fisheries development in Australia. He was particularly spellbound by the corals, polyps and other lifeforms on the Queensland coast. He hoped his book The Great Barrier Reef of Australia (1893) would increase public awareness of the reef and its origins, as well as encourage “development of its marvellous resources” — which was ominous when you consider its highly precarious predicament today.
The forty-eight photographs in the book were captured by Saville-Kent and then reproduced by the London Stereoscopic Company. The book's biggest aesthetic delight, however, is perhaps reserved for the end. Here the reader would find sixteen beautiful colour lithographs created by a Mr Riddle and Mr Couchman from Saville-Kent’s original watercolour sketches. Though perhaps not the most accurate of depictions, something in the naive and almost cartoon-like representation seems to emphasise the vibrancy and life of the reef.
The achievements of Saville-Kent never entirely shook a scandal which had followed him since he was fifteen. In 1860, his infant half-brother, Savill, was found murdered. His 16-year-old sister Constance was arrested but released without trial — public opinion distrusted the case of a working-class detective against a lady of breeding. Five years later, Constance confessed to the murder (though the Australian Dictionary of Biography calls it a "doubtful confession") . Wilkie Collins put details of the case in The Moonstone (1868), the founding text of English detective fiction. As for William, there were suspicions that he had been an accomplice to his sister though he was never charged. His sister Constance escaped the gallows and died in 1944, at the age of one hundred, in Australia.