text:
A Pantomime and Masquerade: Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Nov 17, 2022

“I have passed all my days in London”, boasted Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth in 1801, and “formed as many and intense local attachments, as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. . . . I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life.” Immersing himself in “all the bustle and wickedness”, “ the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles”, “the crowds, the very dirt and mud”, the poet and essayist proclaimed London to be “a pantomime and a masquerade — all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me without a power of satiating me”.
Written almost a century before Lamb fashioned himself as a man in the crowd of modernity, John Gay’s (1685–1732) Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London also pits city against country. It begins with a question cribbed from Virgil’s Eclogues, the textual wellspring that would feed many of British Romanticism’s idyll currents: “non tu in triviis, indocte, solebas, stridenti, miserum, stipula, disperdere, carmen?” Delivered by Menalcas as a slight to his fellow shepherd Damœtas’ attempts at song, these lines are translated in the Loeb as: “Wasn’t it you, you dunce, that at the crossroads used to murder a sorry tune on a scrannel straw?” By opening Trivia with the image of a shepherd bungling melodies on a poorman’s panpipes at a “crossroads” — trivium, in the Latin, literally a place where three roads meet — Gay performs a rhetorical maneuver akin to Lamb refusing the peaks above Grasmere for London’s squalid Arcadia. If Virgil’s third eclogue, with its gloating interlocutors, intimates that something is rotten in bucolic paradise, Gay seemingly sets out to prove that there is something analogously pastoral about seedy London. Yet this passionate urban shepherd will neither make a fold of Spitalfields, nor plant his crook in fallen Covent Garden, but instead, with an eye toward satire, relish the ironies offered by his mock georgic form.
Burlesquing the Augustan era’s fixation on classical tradition, as his fellow Scriblerian Alexander Pope did in The Rape of the Lock (1712), Gay renders practical advice for perambulating England’s capital into oftentimes absurd, hexametric verse. (Pope found a draft of Trivia “ludicrous [and] trifling”; Samuel Johnson thought it “spritely, various, and pleasant”, yet believed the poet wholly lacked “the dignity of genius”.) Trivia’s subject is a city whose grime and sinful denizens were wont to produce hyperbolic accounts of pollution, such as John Evelyn’s claim that he had visited “a spacious church where I could not discern the minister for the smoke, nor hear him for the people’s barking.” To capture the leeching sprawl of a fast growing metropolis, Gay riffed on the vade mecum (walk with me) genre: a kind of reference book that, according to David Alff, makes walking into artisanship, a technical craft.
Beginning in daytime with instructions for choosing a proper winter coat — kersey cloth trumps Russian bearskin — the poem dilates on the dangers of nightwalking. “Who can the various City Frauds recite, / With all the petty Rapines of the Night? / Who now the Guinea-Dropper’s Bait regards, / Trick’d by the Sharper’s Dice, or Juggler’s Cards?” Little is safe, except staying at home. Even nocturnal carriage rides provide an illusory sense of security. In one scene, a coach plummets through a poorly paved road into a vast subterranean cesspool. For Margaret R. Hunt, Gay's description of potholes as “dark caves” opening into sewers — “arched Vaults their gaping Jaws extend" — is not unlike the mythic vagina dentata described by Freud. Indeed, much of Trivia dwells on maleficent feminine forces, represented both by actual women and vulvar city infrastructure. London’s streets, Hunt writes, become “a kind of skin over the top of a heaving, pestilential sewer, one that keeps erupting into daily life via actual open sewers, like the Fleet Ditch, fish-women, predatory prostitutes, women stallholders, and ill-concealed potholes and gaps in the road.”
Even stranger, though consistent with the amalgamation of urban infrastructure and women’s reproductive systems, Gay classes decay not as deathbound entropy, but as a generative force of city planning. His scenes of uneven cobbles, clogged gutters, and dangerous inhabitants are “evidence of London’s health: the city’s incompletion occasions labor”, thinks Alff, creating the need for the work of maintenance, enforcement, and repair (the tasks divided between builders, constables, parishes, and such) and the labors of verse — the need for navigational guidance, which Gay’s poem purports to supply. Above you can browse a 1922 edition of Trivia, illustrated with engravings by William Hogarth, whose images of London were influenced by this text, and introduced by W. H. Williams, who thought that, unlike the “savage” Swift and the “spiteful” Pope, John Gay “came to scoff, but remained to pray”.


text:
Beetle Carapaces in Basohli Miniature Paintings (ca. 1660–1700)
Text by Erica X Eisen
Mar 16, 2023

In his fourteenth-century treatise on gemology, the Rajasthani scientist Ṭhakkura Pherū tracks the origins of precious stones back to a trip taken by the demon Bala to the heavens:
He was requested by the gods: “Become the beast in our sacrifice.” [Thus] propitiated, he replied: “[So] I shall become. You do your task.” . . . The parts of his body became precious gems; [they were truly] the abodes of the goddess of wealth, dear to the gods and beautiful.
Pherū ascribes to precious stones not merely incredible beauty but magical powers. “If one endowed with truth and good moral conduct wears on his limbs these gems belonging to the nine planets”, he explains, “the planets do not harm him”. Flawed gems, by contrast, “destroy money, sons, and prosperity”. According to the tale, Bala’s bile is what gave the world emeralds, in whose trade Pherū’s fellow Jains would long specialize in their capacity as sought-after court jewelers across India. And it is in the service of depicting emeralds — believed by Pherū to guard against the effects of poison and attract riches to their wearers — that a school of painters in what is now Jammu and Kashmir hit upon a particularly ingenious method: cutting and applying the iridescent carapaces of beetles to the page.
Rising to prominence in the seventeenth century, the Basohli School is particularly known for its vibrant use of color and inventive textural elements. The glimmer of iridescent beetle fragments as they catch the light captures something of the supernatural quality attributed to jewels, giving these paintings an unparalleled sense of vibrancy and presence. (In addition to their trick for simulating emeralds, Basohli artists often used raised dots of shell lime to lend a three-dimensional effect to pearls.) Tear-shaped beetle-emeralds accentuate the peaked crown of the fearsome goddess Bhadrakali as she sits on a corpse or stands surrounded by a sun-like orb whose luster pales in comparison to that of her jewels. In another image, cut shards of beetlewing adorn the foreheads and blankets of two warring elephants. Kalki, the final avatar of Vishnu, holds a beetle-studded shield as he prepares to mount his characteristic white horse. Within the context of religious paintings, this sense of life — the way in which adornments on the gods’ bodies seem to actively respond to the viewer and their setting by now flashing and now growing dim — evokes darśan, the idea that one simultaneously sees and is seen by images of the divine.
The materiality of Indian miniatures has been relatively unstudied compared to that of painting traditions in the West, though new projects like Mapping Color in History have created publicly available pigment databases to allow for a deeper understanding of where, why, and to what effect South Asian artists used their materials. In contrast to the Mughals, the rajas of Basohli were Hindus, and the work of the artists they commissioned reflected this. An unknown Basohli School artist chose to depict Krishna as the wayward lover mentioned in one exceptional (and beetle-studded) scene from the Rasamanjari (or Bouquet of Delight), a collection of Sanskrit poetry on varieties of romance. Jewel imagery plays a key part in the emotional intensity of the lines that pair with the painting as well: “Seeing her beloved’s forehead red with the color of the paint from another woman’s feet, the radiance of the corner of the eyes of the sweet-eyed Nayika made the pearls in her ears red as rubies.” Whether in the form of emerald pendants, gold bracelets, flower garlands, or floating scarves, ornamentation (alankara in Sanskrit) is a ubiquitous element in Indian figural art, not just an extra frill but a requirement — so much so that a body unbeautified is interpreted as a sign of something amiss. When these images are looked at correctly, the art historian Vidya Dehejia argues, “the word ‘naked’ should have no place in the Indian artistic vocabulary”.

source: public-domain-review

author: Erica X Eisen

type: collection

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


text:
Many-Colored Misdirection: Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909)
Text by Kevin Dann
Feb 7, 2023

When first looking upon the untitled frontispiece of Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909), one is not quite sure what the kaleidoscope of color represents. Turning the page to find the title “Peacock in the Woods”, the reader flips back to pick the bird out from its surround, but does so only with some difficulty — the very challenge that painter Abbott Handerson Thayer ascribed to predators of the spectacularly-adorned creature. In this one scene, Thayer extravagantly displays many of the techniques used by animals to achieve invisibility. The colored spots and streaks obliterate its silhouette. Green feathers on its back become foliage, while the copper feathers alternately mimic sunlit and shadowed tree bark and rock. The iridescent ocelli — smallest and dimmest near the body, progressively larger and brighter toward the periphery — draw the eye away from the bird, and our gaze gets lost in the blurred foliage beyond the tail’s “evanescent border”. Even the spectacular multi-plumed turquoise crest serves to deceive, mimicking a piece of shimmering blue sky. In his introduction to Concealing-Coloration — a work written primarily by Gerald Thayer to summarize his father’s theories — Abbott tells us that the peacock’s hues “‘melt’ him into the scene to a degree past all human analysis”.
While directing the reader’s attention to all these details, Thayer’s introduction fails to mention that, rather than being painted from life somewhere in India — the peacock’s native habitat — the artist and his assistant had contrived the scene using a taxidermied peacock from the family menagerie, which they had propped up on a stone wall running through the deciduous woodland outside his Dublin, New Hampshire home. The indistinguishable colors of figure and ground all have their origin on the painter’s palette, not in the real world, making “Peacock in the Woods” a stunning artistic and scientific misdirection in service of Thayer’s wildly erroneous assertion that the coloration of all animals was meant to conceal them from predators.
Perhaps Thayer had placed the peacock front and center since it had famously vexed Charles Darwin as controverting his theory of natural selection. Something so conspicuous as the peacock’s sequined tail surely could never have been produced by the deadly Malthusian game of predation that Darwin believed to drive biological evolution. Like Darwin’s co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace, Thayer was “more Darwinian than Darwin himself”, rejecting the theory of sexual selection proposed in Darwin’s Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) for a totalizing “law” of concealment compassing not just ground-dwelling birds and mammals, but bejeweled iridescent tropical tanagers, harlequin-hued coral reef fish, and dazzlingly patterned and painted butterflies.
Untrained in the art of optical illusion, of which painters were masters, zoologists could never discover Nature’s methods of rendering animals absolutely indistinguishable from their surroundings. “Our book”, declared Thayer — and it was indeed a family affair, for Abbott Thayer’s wife Emma painted many of the plates’ backgrounds — “presents, not theories, but revelations, as palpable and indisputable as radium or X-rays”. While his ex-cathedra pronouncements drove some naturalists, such as big game hunter Theodore Roosevelt, crazy, Thayer had many well-respected scientific supporters, including Wallace and evolutionary biologist Edward Poulton, with whom he collaborated on an elaborate interactive display at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
Thayer loved to take skeptics of his camouflage theory outside, where he would arrange elaborate demonstrations with disappearing duck decoys, cutout stencils of animal silhouettes, and a fantastic array of stuffed birds and mammals, some of which Thayer had painted in reverse countershading to make them stand out against the landscape. Many of the book’s 120 black-and-white photographs reproduce such demonstrations; while their relatively poor reproduction quality reduces their impact on a modern viewer (and leads to the question of how black-and-white images can effectively convey color), they seem to have struck Thayer’s contemporaries as convincing evidence of his obsession. The colored plates (gathered below) culminate in a clever pièce de résistance, in which a copperhead snake, invisible among dry oak leaves, leaps into view through a cutout overlay.

While the copperhead is painted in an intensely naturalistic style (most likely because it was mainly executed by Rockwell Kent, listed as “assistant” for this painting), all of Thayer’s other subjects — wood ducks, blue jays, birds-of-paradise, roseate spoonbills, and flamingoes — are painted in the same impressionist style of the peacock, allowing him freer reign to metamorphose solid animals into diaphanous blotches of color that seem to mirror and match their environment. His son Gerald’s illustrations, on the other hand — depicting ruffed grouse, cottontail rabbit, and caterpillars — approach photographic realism, echoing the descriptive style of the text, which faithfully elaborates his father’s vision.
For more on Abbott Thayer’s theories and illustrations, we recommend two articles, by Emily Gephart and Hanna Rose Shell, from our friends at Cabinet Magazine.

author: Kevin Dann


text:
Downhill from Here: The Slant Book (1910)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Feb 16, 2023

Jack broke his crown falling down the hill and Jill tumbled after. But Bobby, the child protagonist from Peter Newell’s The Slant Book (1910), careens on his baby carriage with so much momentum that he disrupts all aspects of society. Let go by his careless nurse on a steep slope, he first takes on the law. “You’re scorchin, kid”, bellows a police officer, but he is no match for Bobby’s runaway “Go-cart”, which “smashed that Cop completely”. Next, he destroys urban infrastructure, snapping off a fire hydrant, and plays havoc with the economy: house painters, immigrant hawkers on the curbside, a Germanic marching band, glaziers, a shepherd, farmers and their egg-hauling wives — no trade is safe from the speedster Bobby. Even the leisure class cannot insulate itself from this child’s accidental antics. The pushchair upends a “perambulating” lady, “Chappies” battling out a tennis match at deuce, “Picnickers'' lunching on sardines and pickles, and Cremnitz White Mulvaney, an “Artist. . . so absorbed”.
A lovely piece of children’s literature in its own right, The Slant Book is made all the more curious by the book’s rhomboid form. It’s as if, along with the other mischievous disruptions caused by Bobby’s downhill journey, representation itself gets pulled into the mix, warping the book’s standard dimensions through gravitational force. (The format even estranges the expected left-to-right motion of a book’s pages: rather than moving downhill toward the direction of reading, the illustrations send Bobby’s stroller seemingly “backward” to its end, which is our reading journey’s origin.) A precursor to the multimodal storytelling of present-day popup works and metafictional classics such as Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955), The Slant Book also plays with the relationship between text and the physical world within its images. An advertiser’s sandwich board becomes a launch ramp; a paperboy is sent head-over-heels, an event that instantly makes the news: “A GO-CART BREAKS AWAY”. In this slanted world, however, Newton’s laws still hold — there is no perpetual motion, even in fiction: all plots, like all downhill races, must eventually halt. In The Slant Book, the child’s joyride and his narrative terminate together. The stroller crashes into a hemlock stump, Bobby is thrown safely into a haystack, and “scene”: “The longest night must have an end / As well as a beginning; / And so this Cart, you may depend, / Was bound to cease its spinning.”
Born in Illinois, where he worked as self-taught gallery portraitist, Peter Newell (1862–1924) trained at New York’s Art Students’ League before settling in Leonia, New Jersey, an early-twentieth century colony for artists and academics. He made a career illustrating for periodicals like the Harper’s magazines (Bazar, Monthly, and Weekly), drawing comics, and released beautiful editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1901), Through the Looking-Glass (1902) — which features a frontispiece of the mustached Newell — and The Hunting of the Snark (1903). He also provided illustrations for books by Guy Wetmore Carryl, John Kendrick Bangs, Mark Twain, and numerous other authors. When not illustrating, Newell created whimsical toys, the charm of which can be gleaned from the patents he filed, for devices like a “sounding toy”, which, when spun, makes an agitated bird orbit its nest of eggs. But Newell is today best remembered for his experimental children’s books, an author whom Joseph W. Reed called “the saint of book-eccentricity”.
Like The Slant Book, The Hole Book (1908) structures its story around a physicalized form of narratological metalepsis, “a paradoxical contamination between the world of the telling and the world of the told”: Tom Potts accidentally fires a gun at his wall and Newell’s hole-punched pages illustrate the damage the bullet does as it penetrates homes, apiaries, bagpipes, and more. The Rocket Book (1912) rotates the hole’s trajectory from the z-axis (into the book) to the y-axis (up through the book’s world). Fritz, “the Janitor’s bad kid”, ignites a rocket in the basement, which burns through various levels of an apartment building, and, by doing so, also traverses society. Up, up, up it flies — through the catsup-eating Steiner family’s dining table, the posh bubble-blowing Algernon Bracket’s toy room, Mrs. Maud’s new hat, and a taxidermist’s severed walrus head — before meeting the immovable object that is Billy Bunk’s can of cream.

author: Hunter Dukes


text:
Law and Ordure: Scatalogic Rites of All Nations (1891)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Feb 28, 2023

No matter how “repellent” the subject matter of this book, John Gregory Bourke (1846–1896) believed it to be “none the less deserving of the profoundest consideration”. Marked as “not for general perusal”, its topic is the use of human and animal excrement in religious and medicinal rites (or, “Filth Pharmacy”), and the survival of sanitized rituals into the present day. To arrive at his conclusions, Captain Bourke consumed a bizarre mélange of anthropological learning, from “The Urine Dance of the Zuñis”, through the “Tolls of Flatulence Exacted of Prostitutes in France” (mostly collected at bridge crossings), to Christian Stercorianism, which held that the blessed sacrament is processed into ordure like ordinary food stuff.
Little, it seems, does not lead back to excreta — a category that, for Bourke, includes the expected bodily waste, fingernails, and ear wax, but also the social expulsion of sacrificial objects. The colorful Easter eggs of children’s hunts, for example, are here a “survival” of the Wendish and Celtic “worship of the chicken-god”, who “remains to this day in his proud position, whence the first missionaries were unable to dislodge him, at the summit of the sacred tree or spired of the village church”. To expel disease and evil from their communities, these ancient believers scapegoated cocks, with hens’ eggs becoming the economical substitute at a later date. Leaning heavily on James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), much of Bourke’s discussion makes use of the sympathetic magic of similarity and contact. According to Peter Beveridge, another well-absorbed source in Bourke’s text, certain forms of Aboriginal spells used “excrement sausages”: an enemy’s waste wrapped in opossum skin and lubricated with kidney fat. When this “roll” was then consumed by fire, its human source would be devoured in turn.
Shot-through with nineteenth-century prejudices against so-called “primitive man”, Scatalogic Rites of All Nations pairs disgust for its subjects with perverse attention and descriptive care. As Benjamin Breen observes, Captain John Gregory Bourke seemed to embody “a distinctly American paradox”: serving in the Indian Wars on the western frontier, he was “an unrepentant jingoist”, whose early diaries were “unabashedly genocidal”. And yet, just a few years later, Bourke would begin to observe and record the peoples and cultures he had “once worked to exterminate”, writing books on The Snake-Dance of the Moquis of Arizona (1884) and The Medicine-Men of the Apache (1892). Bourke’s pivot from eradication toward gestures of cultural preservation parallels a larger settler fascination with sanitized images of indigeneity, propagated through frontier mythologies, dime novels, pulp magazines, and Western films.
One of Bourke’s favorite writing techniques is to alienate his audience (and himself) and then work to normalize the source of this discomfort. In Scatalogic Rites, he devotes a good deal of time to implying that “nations of high enlightenment” are not much less coprophilic than “primitive” societies. Soon after discussing the use of poisonous mushrooms in “Ur-Orgies”, wherein psychoactive urine is consumed and then expelled into the next participant’s cup — supposedly intensifying the effects with each “distillation” — Bourke turns his mind to Blighty. “Though we have not this custom among us, I foresee that if it were introduced, we might have many a toad-eater in England ready to drink from the wooden bowl on these occasions, and to praise the flavor of his lordship’s liquor”. What appears first as ritual, recurs in anecdotes of cloacal secular practices. We hear: stories of the Berlin cheesemonger who procured “the urine of young girls” to make his product “more piquant” (when he was exposed to the press, “people went, bought and ate his cheese with delight”); rumors of “love-sick maidens in France” who fill cakes for their paramours with philters of “human skull, coral, verbena flowers, secundines, or after-birth, and a copious flow of urine”; and the exploits of wives in England, seeking to “rekindle the expiring flames of affection in the hearts of husbands”, who kneaded dough with their “posterior”. That last tradition, thinks Bourke, has survived in a children's song, sung while wobbling to and fro on the floor: “Cockledy bread, mistley cake, / When you do that for our sake.” ※※Indexed under…UrinePiquant cheese made from
In his Histoire de la merde (1978), Dominique Laporte describes how “human excrement, like the soul, carries the ‘noxious’ trace of the body it departs”. An analogous trace is carried by each of the cultural practices under consideration in Scatalogic Rites. More than noxious, these repellent stories total into something profoundly human. During his 1913 preface to a German translation of Bourke’s text, Sigmund Freud lamented how “Civilized men . . . . deny the very existence of this inconvenient trace of the earth, by concealing it from another, and by withholding it from the attention and care which it might claim as an integrating component of their essential being.” In the shame, power, and curiosity that Bourke attributes to his subject matter, we find the promise of comparative anthropology in a surprisingly unadulterated form: a truly universal aspect of human life.


text:
The Procession of the Months (ca. 1889)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jan 3, 2023

While others celebrated New Year’s Eve, Walter Crane (1845–1915) mourned December’s passing. Honeymooning in Rome as 1872 drew to a close, the young artist found himself contemplating Shelley’s Dirge for the Year (1821): “January gray is here, / Like a sexton by her grave; / February bears the bier, / March with grief doth howl and rave”. This striking image of a personified calendar inspired Crane’s tempera and gouache The Death of the Year, in which a procession of Months entomb the bier of yesteryear in “a pillared porch of a temple — the house of time.” Shelley aside, Crane was fresh from a trip to the Uffizi, where he had feasted on Spring (ca. 1480) by Botticelli, whose paintings, remembered Crane, had not yet been “re-discovered by the critics” and were “more or less scattered, and sometimes ‘skyed’ in less important rooms”. Crane may have found inspiration for his funeral scene in the ensemble of Spring and perhaps also saw, in Botticelli’s highly hung masterpieces, an artist equally underlooked. Infatuated with the pre-Raphaelites, Crane and his circle had been panned by London critics as of a mode “mystico-medieval” and “loathly”, with Crane in particular being a “academician of the nursery”.
As if taking that last criticism to heart, Crane’s Death of the Year is a sober, adult reworking of his 1870 King Luckieboy’s Picture Book. In this children’s story, the boy king Luckieboy sits on a throne and greets the months as they are ushered past by his footman Tempus. A monocled Mr. March arrives arm-in-arm with Mr. March Hare. May is predictably beautiful, “with a nose-and-a-gay, and a train which was borne by two little twins”. September, the recipient of summer’s harvest, balances bottles of wine on either side of his Dionysian wreath. And, approaching expiry, December rides in on a yule goat seeming “very old”, but there is not a hint of death. He comes laden with crisp holly and “all that was jolly”, mainly puddings and gifts. Treated as a diptych, King Luckieboy’s Picture Book and The Death of the Year offer a parallax view on aging. The passage of time can seem like a frolic or entombment, depending on how much remains.
Created sometime around 1889 with his daughter Beatrice (1873–1935), The Procession of the Months synthesizes Walter’s two earlier treatments of the calendrical theme, reflecting age across the gutter between text and image. As with their contemporaneous collaboration Flora’s Feast: A Masque of Flowers (1889), Walter illustrated the verse that Beatrice wrote. In the case of The Procession of the Months, it seems the images came later, for the preface notes the poems’ creation when she was “quite a child”, demonstrating how “each Season, with its ever-changing beauties, was fully realized by the child’s quick, artistic imagination.” In the case of Beatrice Crane, her imagination was especially quick, with Oscar Wilde publishing her poem “Legend of the Blush Roses” (and her father’s accompanying illustration) when she was just fifteen. In all of their collaborations, Walter seems to follow his daughter’s lead: “he does not attract unnecessary attention by telling part of the story through his picture”, writes Andrea Korda, “but instead allows Beatrice’s words to make meaning on their own.”
Originally serialized in Little Folks magazine, the processional months are personified as women, each of whom, in the published book, are followed by a calendar and a list of that season’s flowers (which, the backmatter reminds the reader, “may be had, freshly-cut each day, direct from The Floral Farms, Wisbeach”). December is much bleaker than the jolly Claus of King Luckieboy’s Picture Book: her “eyes grow sad / And fainter still her tread; / One hears a long, low sigh / Which tells the year is dead.” But January is full of hope and joy and new life. Notably, it is the only month where a child appears hand-in-hand with its elder. Beatrice was born to Mary Frances and Walter Crane in Rome, 1873, just months after her father conceived The Death of the Year.


text:
Ellen Harding Baker's “Solar System” Quilt (1876–ca. 1883)

Dec 7, 2022

Two years after a naked-eye comet pierced the blanket of night in the spring of 1874, Ellen Harding Baker (1847–1886) began a near decade-long project to bring the stars farther down to Earth: an appliqué quilt depicting the solar system, complete with a green-tailed comet, its slingshot course plotted around the Sun. On this dreamy textile, measuring seven by eight feet, moons orbit their various planets in running stitch, asteroids clump in circular fields, and embroidered stars of wool and silk blaze out in concentric rings of yellow, blue, and red. As Maria Popova notes, Baker was born the same year that Maria Mitchell discovered her eponymous comet, and seems to embody the astronomer’s hope that sewing needles and crewelwork, rather than tack women to domestic tasks, could aid scientific perception. “The eye that directs a needle in the delicate meshes of embroidery” — wrote Mitchell in an 1878 diary entry, at about the time Baker’s quilt was halfway complete — “will equally well bisect a star with the spider web of the micrometer.”
Working as an astronomy teacher in Lone Tree, Iowa, Ellen Harding Baker quilted this representation of the cosmos for her students. News of its completion reached the national press, with the New York Times lightly mocking her pedagogy as “somewhat comical”, but nevertheless praising the quilt’s accuracy and its maker’s diligence for undertaking a trip to a Chicago telescope to view Coggia’s 1874 comet. Using a color palette resembling that of Orra White Hitchcock’s scientific classroom illustrations, and exhibiting a scalar ambition that rivals Emma Willard’s maps of time, Baker joins a lineage of nineteenth-century American women educators who produced visual aids for teaching that are also magnificent works of art.


text:
Cultus Arborum: A Descriptive Account of Phallic Tree Worship (1890)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Mar 14, 2023

There are few of the works of nature that combine so many and so varied charms and beauties as a forest; that whether considered generally or particularly, whether as a grand geographical feature of a country or as a collection of individual trees, it is alike invested with beauty and with interest, and opens up the mind a boundless field for inquiry into the mysterious laws of creation.
So begins Cultus Arborum: A Descriptive Account of Phallic Tree Worship, published anonymously in 1890. The fourth entry in a ten-volume “Phallic Series” printed privately in limited number, Phallic Tree Worship was preceded by three 1889 studies: Phallicism: A Description of the Worship of Lingam-Yoni in Various Parts of the World; Ophiolatreia: An Account of the Rites and Mysteries Connected with the Origin, Rise, and Development of Serpent Worship; and Phallic Objects, Monuments and Remains. Less a self-contained book than a series of extended quotations from historical sources (ranging from Pliny to the Kangxi Emperor) and contemporary works on comparative religion, the text leans heavily on Henry Clark Barlow’s Sacred Trees (1862), James Fergusson’s Tree and Serpent Worship (1868), and James Forlong’s Rivers of Life (1883), which contains sections on “Tree Worship” and “Serpent Worship”.
As such, this book intentionally seems to relish missing the forest for the trees, offering hundreds of examples from religious history connected only by the soft logic of association. A sense of this volume’s eclectic breadth can be seen in the table of contents: “Invocation of Tree Gods”; “Origin of Groves”; “Persian bushes”; “The ‘Ash Faggot Ball’ of Somersetshire”; and “Universal Sacredness of the Oak”, to take examples almost at random. At times, the montage pace of the author’s quest produces dizzying, if unconfirmable, results. Tracking the oracular trees of the Sun and Moon, as described in a fictional fourth-century letter from Alexander the Great to Aristotle, the author ferrets out their supposed location from the Pseudo-Callisthenes and John Mandeville’s Travels (ca. 1350). He speculates that one of these specimens might have been a cypress tree “said to be 1,450 years old, and to measure 33 ¾ cubits in girth” near Kashmar, Iran, grown from a paradisical shoot brought down to Earth by Zoroaster, which was felled by al-Mutawakkil in the ninth century and transported to Baghdad on rollers by thirteen-hundred camels. In his footnote-chasing foray, the author elevates hearsay to a literary style.
Elsewhere, this associative method leaves only soughing prose where scholarship should be. The author dismisses the idea that Christmas trees, which have “become a prevailing fashion in England at this season”, find their roots in a Germanic Protestant tradition, and instead posits that they date to pre-Christian Egypt — a theory he substantiates with the observation that modern Germans, without tree-buying means, create “pyramids [formed by] slight erections of slips of wood, arranged like a pyramidal epergne, covered with green paper, and decorated with festoons of paper-chain work, which flutters in the wind and constitutes a make-believe foliage”. The sole unifying thesis seems to stem from the earlier Phallicism, where the practice under consideration is “the adoration of the generative organs as symbols of the creative powers of nature”.
Speaking of organ adoration, and despite the book’s title, there is very little explicitly sexual here. Describing the lingam worship of Hindu Shivaism, which takes place under “an umbrageous Bael” or “fine Ficus” — and, if both are lacking, “the poor god is often reduced to the stump of a tree” — the author cautions a potentially salacious audience: “My readers must not fancy that this worship is indecent, or even productive of licentiousness. It is conducted by men, women and children of modest mien, and pure and spotless lives.” He proceeds to admit that, at certain seasons, “the passions are roused and the people proceed to excesses” — but these are, he thinks, significantly less common than in the rites of Eastern Christianity.
Although published anonymously, the Phallic Series is undoubtedly the work of Hargrave Jennings (1817–1890), whom Paschal Beverly Randolph heralded as “the chief Rosicrucian of all England”. The author’s anonymity may have been as much about saving face as cultivating mystery: the Westminster Review deemed his 1870 The Rosicrucians as “the most absurd book”, with A. E. Waite flagging its associative methodology as “ill-digested erudition”. Mostly forgotten today, Jennings was nevertheless a key precursor of the occult revival in the 1880s. Joscelyn Godwin, one of the few scholars to have written on Jennings, believes him to be “an unrecognized pioneer in the exploration of oriental metaphysics and the reconciliation of East with West”. Acknowledging the “slapdash way that Jennings throws together his facts and fantasies”, he nevertheless encourages us to celebrate this “lonely intellectual adventure”, carried out “with minimal support, moral or financial, from anyone”.


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Gertie The Dinosaur (1914)

Aug 1, 2011

Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 American animated short film by Winsor McCay. Although not the first animated film, as is sometimes thought, it was the first cartoon to feature a character with an appealing personality. The appearance of a true character distinguished it from earlier animated "trick films", such as those of Blackton and Cohl, and makes it the predecessor to later popular cartoons such as those by Walt Disney. The film was also the first to be created using keyframe animation. The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, and was named #6 of The 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time in a 1994 survey of animators and cartoon historians by Jerry Beck.


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Halloween Postcards, ca. 1900–1920

Oct 29, 2011

Halloween and picture postcards have a shared history, and both captured the anglophone imagination at the turn of the twentieth century. As the October 31st festival began to emerge in its modern guise thanks, in part, to an influx of immigrants from the British Isles in the United States, picture postcards entered their so-called “golden era”, ca. 1905–1915. Rarely seen or used in the US before 1893, an estimated 900 million postcards had been mailed two decades later. And quite a few of these were Halloween themed. Historian Lisa Morton reckons that around 3,000 unique designs for spooky cards were created in the golden era alone, cards which helped popularize the celebration and standardize its imagery. Viewing them today, much of the iconography is familiar — black cats, jack-o’-lanterns, witches’ brooms — but many of the games and rituals have fallen out of favor: scrying, ducking or bobbing for apples, pranks involving cows. Viewing these archival postcards at length is a somewhat uncanny experience — missives intended for other eyes than our own arriving instantaneously to greet us through digital displays. It’s almost as if the postcards never actually reached their final destination, and might not have still. Hurling through time, carrying images of long-gone landscapes and the heartfelt messages of deceased speakers, the picture postcard is a well-matched medium for a day when the dead are said to be given one last chance to seek vengeance on their enemies.
Below you will find a selection of Halloween picture postcards, most created in the “golden era”, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, the New York Public Library, the Toronto Public Library, and Digital Maryland. It’s a hodgepodge of hobgoblins, joyous skeletons, and truly terrifying gourds. Personified pumpkins drive automobiles, line up to salute the toes of young women, and saunter on high heels fashioned from turnips. Cats do their usual thing — creating charming chaos. They pop out of jack-o’-lanterns with sealed letters in their paws and dig their claws into the bewitched full moon. Several of the postcards contain scenes of scrying and amorous divination: girls using mirrors, candles, and backward steps to reveal their future husbands.
Whether you are trick-or-treating, marathoning scary movies, or trying to avoid the gaze of ghouls this All Hallows’ Eve, The Public Domain Review wishes you safe passage and a successful arrival at your intended destination.


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General Pershing March - Imperial Marimba Band (1918)

Oct 5, 2011

A rousing march composed by the Vandersloot Publishing Company in honour of General "Black Jack" Pershing who led American troops in World War One.


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Maps from Geographicus

Sep 22, 2011

In March 2011, Geographicus Rare Antique Maps, a specialist dealer in fine and rare antiquarian cartography and historic maps, donated their collection of over 2000 digital images to Wikimedia Commons. Here is just a small selection of a really great collection. Explore more, and help Wikimedia to categorise them, here. Each map shown below is linkable to the Wikimedia Commons page with more info about the map and higher resolution images. A huge thank you to Geographicus for sharing these amazing images!


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The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, Illustrated with the Zoopraxiscope (1882)

Nov 4, 2011

Published lecture given by the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge on March 13th 1882 at the Royal Institution in London in front of a sell out audience that included members of the Royal Family, notably the future King Edward VII. He displayed his photographs on screen and described his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip. Learn more about Muybridge's groundbreaking research into human and animal locomotion, and see the wonderful photographs, in Taschen's epic 2014 tome Muybridge: The Human and Animal Locomotion Photographs. Also see our post on his tennis photographs.


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Dutch Fashion Reel (1969)

Sep 18, 2011

Strange little fashion film from 1969 courtesy of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision via Open Images. From the site: "Dressed in a circle shaped plastic cape, model Joke de Kruijf gets on tram line 8 to The Hague at the Gevers-Doynoot square in Scheveningen. Somewhat later a similiar tram rides through Madurodam, where De Kruijf walks between the minature houses as part of a fashion show with clothing by designer Pierre Cardin. Also with a woman's suit, jersey men's wear, woollen checked men's wear and evening gowns. Cardin looks on."


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Cyrano De Bergerac (1950)

Oct 22, 2011

José Ferrer received the Academy Award for Best Actor for his starring performance as Cyrano de Bergerac, the charismatic swordsman-poet with the absurd nose and "crowned with the white plume freedom". This film adaptation directed by Michael Gordon of the 1897 French Alexandrine verse drama by Edmond Rostand, uses poet Brian Hooker's 1923 English blank verse translation as the basis for its screenplay. The story tells the tale of our large-nosed hero Cyrano falling in love with the beauteous Roxane; she, in turn, confesses to Cyrano her love for the handsome but tongue-tied Christian. The chivalrous Cyrano sets up with Christian an innocent deception, with tragic results.


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American Day in Tripoli, Libya (1962)

Oct 22, 2011

Filmed at Tripoli International Fairground eleven years after independence from Italian colonial rule and seven years before a group of military officers led by a 28 year old Muammar al-Gaddafi staged a coup d’état against King Idris bringing the monarchy to an end and beginning Gadaffi's 42 year rule.
National Archives and Records Administration - ARC Identifier 37715 / Local Identifier 151.56 - [AMERICAN DAY IN] TRIPOLI, LIBYA - Department of Commerce. (1913 - ). Silent. DVD copied by IASL Master Scanner Timothy Vollmer.


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Kitab al-Bulhan or Book of Wonders (late 14th C.)

Nov 17, 2011

The Kitab al-Bulhan, or Book of Wonders, is an Arabic manuscript dating mainly from the late 14th century A.D. and probably bound together in Baghdad during the reign of Jalayirid Sultan Ahmad (1382-1410). The manuscript is made up of astrological, astronomical and geomantic texts compiled by Abd al-Hasan Al-Isfahani, as well as a dedicated section of full-page illustrations, with each plate titled with "A discourse on....", followed by the subject of the discourse (a folktale, a sign of the zodiac, a prophet, etc.).


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Five Minutes To Live (1961)

Oct 2, 2011

Bank heist movie starring country star Johnny Cash as a guitar playing, sadistic psycho-killer, as well as Vic Tayback, a young Ron Howard, and country music great, Merle Travis.


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The Diary of a Nobody (1919 edition)

Oct 28, 2011

This fictitious diary details fifteen months in the life of Mr. Charles Pooter, a middle aged city clerk of lower middle-class status but significant social aspirations, living in the fictional 'Brickfield Terrace' in London.  The diary was written by George Grossmith and his brother Weedon Grossmith who also contributed the illustrations. It first appeared in Punch magazine through the years 1888 – 89, and was first printed in book form in 1892. Due to much of the humour deriving from Mr. Pooter's comical tendency toward self-importance, the book has spawned the word "Pooterish" to describe the taking of oneself excessively seriously.


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World War II from the Air

Oct 13, 2011

A selection of World War II aerial photographs collected from Wikimedia Commons, including the Allied bombing of Hamburg, scenes from Operation Market Garden, and views of Birkenau extermination camp in Poland. Each photograph links through to its Wikimedia Commons page where you will find more information on the image and higher resolution versions.


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Buffalo Dance (1894)

Oct 1, 2011

Short Edison film featuring Native American Indian dancers from Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. The first appearance of Native Americans on film.


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Hydriotaphia/Urn-Burial and The Garden of Cyrus (1658)

Sep 21, 2011

Sir Thomas Browne (19 October 1605 – 19 October 1682), an English author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including medicine, religion, science and the esoteric, conceived of these two books as a diptych. The nominal subject of the first book, Hydriotaphia (Urn-Burial), was the discovery of a Roman urn burial in Norfolk which prompts Browne to deliver, first, a careful description of the antiquities found, and then a careful survey of most of the burial and funerary customs, ancient and current, of which his era was aware. The most famous part of the work, though, is the fifth chapter, where Browne quite explicitly turns to discuss man's struggles with mortality, and the uncertainty of his fate and fame in this world and the next, to produce an extended funerary meditation tinged with melancholia. A piece of exquisite baroque prose that George Saintsbury called "the longest piece, perhaps, of absolutely sublime rhetoric to be found in the prose literature of the world," Hydriotaphia displays an astonishing command of English prose rhythm and diction. It has been admired by Charles Lamb, Samuel Johnson, John Cowper Powys, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said of it that it "smells in every word of the sepulchre." The Garden of Cyrus is Browne's mystical vision of the interconnection of art, nature and the Universe via numerous symbols including the number five, the quincunx pattern, the figure X and Network pattern. Its slender but compressed pages of imagery, symbolism and associative thought are evidence of Sir Thomas Browne's complete understanding of a fundamental quest of Hermetic philosophy, namely proof of the wisdom of God.
(Note: this text taken from the excellent Wikipedia articles on the two books, see them here and here)
(HTML version of the books can be found here)


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Apollo 11 Onboard Recordings (1969)

Nov 2, 2011

From NASA: Apollo 11 Onboard Audio Highlights - These are not necessarily major milestones of the mission but are some of the more interesting and clearly recorded conversations the crew members had among themselves as the mission progressed.
Highlight clip 1(mission time: 1:24-1:29, tape 11-03302)
As the crew members complete their first orbit of Earth after launch, they talk about the beauty of the planet below.
Highlight clip 2(mission time: 003:03:48-003:04:00, tape 11-03348)
The crew members debate the color of the moon before, and after, they fire Columbia's engines to enter lunar orbit.
Highlight clip 3(mission time: 003:04:03-003:04:16, tape 11-03348)
After entering lunar orbit, the crew members are amazed at the lunar terrain as they fly 60 miles above the back side of the moon and await Earthrise and to resume communications with Mission Control.
Highlight clip 4(mission time: 004:03:42-004:03:47, tape 11-03352)
As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin prepare to depart for the lunar surface in the lunar module Eagle, Mike Collins, in the command module Columbia, bids them farewell ... and tells them to take it easy.
Highlight clip 5(mission time: 005:04:21-005:04:33, tape 11-03330)
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin lift off from the moon to rejoin Mike Collins in lunar orbit.


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Across the Zodiac: the Story of a Wrecked Record (1880)

Sep 30, 2011

Centering around the creation of a substance called "apergy", a form of anti-gravitational energy, Percy Greg's novel details a flight to Mars taken in 1830. They discover the planet to be inhabited by diminutive beings who, convinced that life couldn't exist any where else apart from on their world, refuse to believe that the unnamed narrator is actually from Earth - deciding instead he is an unusually tall Martian from some remote corner of their planet. The book is notable as containing what is probably the first alien language in any work of fiction to be described with linguistic and grammatical terminology. It also contains what is possibly the first instance in the English language of the word "Astronaut", which features as the name of the narrator's spacecraft. In 2010 a crater on Mars was named Greg in recognition of his contribution to the lore of Mars. Volume 2 available here.


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Engravings by Dominicus Custos

Nov 1, 2011

Dominicus Custos (1560 - 1612), was a Flemish artist, printer and copperplate engraver, who specialised in depicting notable figures of his time - producing books akin to a 16th century "Who's Who". The most famous of these was the "Atrium heroicum" which he made between 1602 and 1604; a collection of 171 engraved portraits of rulers, nobles, statesmen, dignitaries, celebrities, military leaders and important businessmen of the time.


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The Eccentric Mirror (1807)

Nov 12, 2011

Reports on a marvellous menagerie of weird and wonderful characters from the past and Georgian-present, including Daniel Lambert, a gaol keeper and animal breeder from Leicester, famous for his unusually large size, more than 50 stone, and the Polish-born 3-foot 3-inch Józef Boruwłaski who toured in European and Turkish courts, (and who incidentally met Mr Lambert amid much public interest in 1782).


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Arnoldus Montanus’ New and Unknown World (1671)

Sep 29, 2011

A selection of from the 125 copper engravings featured in Dutch explorer, missionary, and theologian Arnoldus Montanus' monumental De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld (1671). The rather impressive full title of the work in English reads "The New and Unknown World: or Description of America and the Southland, Containing the Origin of the Americans and South-landers, remarkable voyages thither, Quality of the Shores, Islands, Cities, Fortresses, Towns, Temples, Mountains, Sources, Rivers, Houses, the nature of Beasts, Trees, Plants and foreign Crops, Religion and Manners, Miraculous Occurrences, Old and New Wars: Adorned with Illustrations drawn from the life in America, and described by Arnoldus Montanus". Never himself actually travelling beyond Europe, Montanus borrowed from descriptions of those who had, repeating many fantastic conceptions along the way. The same goes for the illustrations, with Montanus' engraver-publisher Jacob van Meurs likely basing many of the images entirely from descriptions alone (note the unicorn in the fifth picture down).


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Superstitions About Animals (1904)

Oct 14, 2011

Author's Note: My sole object in writing this little book has been to do something towards arousing a more general interest in a subject which has at no time obtained the attention it deserves. Yet there is no subject which so fully repays the thoughtful student as that of Natural History. In bringing together some of the most common superstitions about animals, and dealing with them in a light and popular way, I trust my object will in some measure be attained. If by the publication of this unpretentious work only a little of the prevalent superstition is swept away, and further interest is created in the wonders of the animal kingdom, I shall be more than amply rewarded. FRANK GIBSON. Bishop Auckland, July 1904.


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Your Name Here (1960)

Nov 8, 2011

Bizarre film from Calvin Communications, in which they satirise their own formulaic approach to industrial promotional films, showing how the idea of the "American Dream" is utilised to sell products. A real insight into the humour and tongue-in-cheek attitude lying behind a lot of the industrial films of the 50s and 60s.


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Kodak No.1 Circular Snapshots

Nov 10, 2011

Popular photography can properly be said to have started 120 years ago with the introduction of the Kodak camera, the invention of an American, George Eastman (1854-1932). It was a simple, leather-covered wooden box – small and light enough to be held in the hands. Taking a photograph with the Kodak was very easy, requiring only three simple actions; turning the key (to wind on the film); pulling the string (to set the shutter); and pressing the button (to take the photograph). There wasn’t even a viewfinder - the camera was simply pointed in the direction of the subject to be photographed. The Kodak produced circular snapshots, two and a half inches in diameter. The Kodak was sold already loaded with enough paper-based roll film to take one hundred photographs. After the film had been exposed, the entire camera was returned to the factory for the film to be developed and printed. The camera, reloaded with fresh film, was then returned to its owner, together with a set of prints. To sum up the Kodak system, Eastman devised the brilliantly simple sales slogan: ‘You press the button, we do the rest.’


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The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Nov 19, 2011

A silent horror film directed by Robert Wiene from a screenplay by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. It is one of the most influential of German Expressionist films and is often considered one of the greatest horror movies of the silent era - notable for having introduced the 'twist ending' in cinema and for its weird and distorted set design. Our hero Francis grapples with the deranged Dr.Caligari in a world which is not quite all that it seems...


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Thief of Bagdad (1924)

Oct 2, 2011

This swashbuckler film, directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Douglas Fairbanks, tells the story of a thief who falls in love with the daughter of the Caliph. The film, strong on special effects of the period (flying carpet, magic urn and fearsome monsters) and featuring massive Arabian-style sets, also proved a stepping stone for a scantily-clad Anna May Wong, who portrayed a Mongol slave. Fairbanks considered this to be his personal favorite of all of his films, according to his son.


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VD is for Everybody (1969)

Oct 15, 2011

From the Internet Archive courtesy of the A/V Geeks: "The American Social Health Association was always experimenting with new ways to educate the public about venereal disease. They helped produce the first VD education film, "Fit to Fight", in 1918 in order to educate soldiers being shipped abroad to fight in the first World War. Although this popular TV public service announcement informs the public that everybody is susceptible to venereal disease, strangely, it also seems to imply that having VD will make you successful, attractive and happy. Also, the song is quite infectious...".


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The Medical Aspects of Death, and the Medical Aspects of the Human Mind (1852)

Aug 2, 2011

A fascinating book containing countless anecdotes relating to strange manners of death with an additional book relating to interesting states of mind.


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Chopin’s Funeral March - The Edison Concert Band (1906)

Aug 2, 2011

Chopin's "Funeral March" is the third movement of his Piano Sonata No. 2. It was used at the state funerals of John F. Kennedy and those of Soviet leaders, including Leonid Brezhnev. It was played at the graveside during Chopin's own burial at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris in 1849 with Napoléon Henri Reber's instrumentation.


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Infant’s Cabinet of Birds and Beasts (1820)

Aug 2, 2011

This little book of fine animal engravings was published in 1820 by Harvey & Darton, a publisher set up by two Quakers in London in 1791 with the intention of disseminating Quaker works. They began dabbling in children's book and by the early 1800s were the established leader in the field. If early literature for children piques your curiosity, have a read of our essay on arguably the very first children's picture book — The World of Things Obvious to the Senses drawn in Pictures (1658).


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Houdini on his Water Torture Cell (1914)

Aug 2, 2011

Houdini made the only known recordings of his voice on Edison wax cylinders on October 29, 1914, in Flatbush, New York. On them, Houdini practices several different introductory speeches for his famous Chinese Water Torture Cell. In the trick, Houdini's feet would be locked in stocks, and he would be lowered upside down into a tank filled with water. The mahogany and metal cell featured a glass front, through which audiences could clearly see Houdini. The stocks would be locked to the top of the cell, and a curtain would conceal his escape. In the earliest version of the Torture Cell, a metal cage was lowered into the cell, and Houdini was enclosed inside that. While the escape was advertised as "The Chinese Water Torture Cell" or "The Water Torture Cell", Houdini always referred to it as "the Upside Down" or "USD". The first public performance of the USD was at the Circus Busch in Berlin, on September 21, 1912. Houdini continued to perform the escape until his death in 1926.


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The Great Train Robbery (1903)

Aug 2, 2011

Considered to be one of the first significant early US narrative films. Greatly influenced by the British film "Daring Daylight Robbery" (1903) it introduced many new cinematic techniques (cross cutting, double exposure, camera movement and location shooting) to American audiences. It was directed by Edwin S Porter and stars Justus D. Barnes as the head bandit, G. M. Anderson as a slain passenger and a robber, Walter Cameron as the sheriff.


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Collected Works of Billy Jones & Ernest Hare (1920s)

Aug 1, 2011

Tenor Billy Jones (1889-1940) and bass/baritone Ernie Hare (1881-1939) sang as The Happiness Boys in a radio program of the same name which ran in the early 1920s. Dave Kaplan was usually the team's pianist on records. Fannie Heinline, regarded as the best American female banjoist at the turn of the century, made guest appearances on The Happiness Boys as banjoist and vocalist.


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Wonderful Balloon Ascents (1870)

Aug 5, 2011

A wonderful book of balloon travel tracing the rise of "Balloonomania", the huge fad in hot air balloons that originated in France in the late 18th century and continued into the 19th century, during the advent of hot air balloon flights. The interest began with the first flights of the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, and quickly spread in France and across the channel in England. (Read more at Wikipedia). Wikicommons has a collection of the amazing illustrations in the book here.


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Hungarian Rag - Pietro Deiro (1913)

Aug 1, 2011

"The Daddy of the Accordion", Pietro Deiro, plays Julius Lenzberg's Hungarian Rag


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The Unappreciated Joke (1903)

Aug 2, 2011

A very short silent comedy from Edison's studios, directed by Edwin S. Porter


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Princess Nicotine (1909)

Aug 1, 2011

Comedic short from J. Stuart Blackton and Albert S. Smith that pits a smoker against a tiny fairy, brought to life through early special effects. In his Moving Pictures, How They Are Made And Worked (1912), Frederick Arthur Ambros Talbot referred to the film as being "one of the finest trick films made in the United States... mystifying from beginning to end."


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Frankenstein (1910)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Aug 2, 2011

This 1910 Edison Manufacturing Company production, newly restored by the Library of Congress, is the only extant nitrate print of the first film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Subtitled “a liberal adaptation”, Frankenstein bears only a vague resemblance to its source text. Directed by J. Searle Dawley and shot in three days, the film downplays the social aspects of Shelley’s novel in favor of a story about the creature as an uncanny doppelgänger of its creator. “Instead of a perfect human being”, the intertitles tell us, “the evil in Frankenstein’s mind creates a monster.” Rather than being “born” innocent and made monstrous through the dark mirror of prejudice, this creature is violent by design. His creation in what looks to be a steaming cauldron or crucible — staged with still-terrifying special effects, as he waves a semi-animate arm — anticipates the creepy mechanical bodies of later horror villains such as Chucky and Jigsaw. And yet, once the creature assumes its human form, he looks more like a lost member of Kiss. The film culminates with a kind of integration of Frankenstein’s shadow material, with a plot device that feels closer to Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray than Shelley’s Frankenstein. Escaping into a mirror, the creature looks back at his creator. Suddenly, he vanishes with a jump cut, and Frankenstein is left pointing an accusatory finger at himself.

Part of the “monstrous” nature of Shelley’s novel is its bricolage form. Like the creature himself, we read a patchwork story composed of different nested accounts, letters, and voices. The book only comes “alive” under the reader’s attentive observation, as we work to create a unity out of scavenged parts. Of course, translating this story from text to film requires accommodation, but something of the same effect might have been achieved through the kind of psychological techniques employed by Akira Kurosawa in Rashomon (1950): using the uncertainty of subjective memory and visual perspective to preserve Shelley’s ambiguities. This is asking a lot of a ten-minute silent film created in 1910. Yet its legacy is perhaps partly to blame for the violent intensifications of subsequent filmic adaptations of this novel, such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), where the creature is less a Miltonian Satan, more simply satanic.
None of this mattered to contemporary audiences, for the film was well-received primarily because of its infidelity. A review in the Fairmont West Virginian noted how the filmmakers “carefully tried to eliminate all the actually repulsive situations and to concentrate its endeavors upon the mystic and psychological problems that are to be found in this weird tale”. Wherever the story was changed, the reviewer proceeds to note, it is solely for the benefit of motion picture audiences — and the results spoke for themselves. Writing about the creation scene, he calls it “probably the most weird, mystifying and fascinating scene ever shown on a film.” Salt Lake City’s Herald-Republication agreed: “the scene in the laboratory where the monster seems to gradually assume human semblance is probably the most remarkable ever”.
For audiences today, the story of this nitrate print’s acquisition is almost more exciting than the film it contains, notes Wendi Maloney. It was unknowingly acquired by Alois F. “Al” Dettlaff of Wisconsin — remembered for dressing as Father Time at cinema conventions, complete with scythe and hourglass — as part of a larger trove in the 1950s. Only when the American Film Institute put Frankenstein on its list of lost movies in 1980 did Dettlaff realize what he had been sitting on. From there, the Library of Congress recovered the missing credits from the Edison Company’s archives, and commissioned a composer to score the film.


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An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism (1803)

Aug 2, 2011

Giovanni Aldini (April 10, 1762 – January 17, 1834), an Italian physicist, became professor of physics at Bologna in 1798. His work was chiefly concerned with galvanism and its medical applications, with the construction and illumination of lighthouses, and with experiments for preserving human life and material objects from destruction by fire. He engaged in public demonstrations of galvanism, such as on the executed criminal George Forster at Newgate in London.


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Meet John Doe (1941)

Aug 1, 2011

A comedy drama directed and produced by Frank Capra and starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. The film, about a "grassroots" political campaign, created unwittingly by a newspaper columnist and pursued by a wealthy businessman, became a box office hit and was nominated for an Academy Award for best original story (for Richard Connell and Robert Presnell Sr).


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Enrico Caruso - A Dream

Aug 2, 2011

Enrico Caruso made approximately 290 commercially released recordings from 1902 to 1920. This was one of


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Letters From A Cat (1879)

Aug 2, 2011

H.H. was the alias of Helen Maria Hunt Jackson (October 18, 1830 – August 12, 1885), an American writer who became an activist on behalf of improved treatment of Native Americans by the U.S. government. She detailed the adverse effects of government actions in A Century of Dishonor (1881). Her novel Ramona dramatized the federal government's mistreatment of Native Americans in Southern California and attracted considerable attention to her cause, although its popularity was based on its romantic and picturesque qualities rather than its political content. She also wrote about a cat.


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Wolf Blood (1925)

Aug 2, 2011

Dick the lumberjack gets a blood transfusion with unexpected results. Wolf Blood, also known as Wolfblood: A Tale of the Forest, is the oldest surviving werewolf movie. Starring and directed by George Chesebro.


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Last of the Mohicans (1920)

Aug 1, 2011

First film adaptation from the James Fenimore Cooper novel of the same name. This film also features one of Boris Karloff's earliest film appearances in a small uncredited role as a Native American.


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Quarles’ Emblems (1886)

Aug 2, 2011

Francis Quarles (8 May 1592 – 8 September 1644) was an English poet most famous for his emblem book entitled Emblems. It was originally published in 1635, with grotesque illustrations engraved by William Marshall and others. Each "emblem" consists of a paraphrase from a passage of Scripture, expressed in ornate and metaphorical language, followed by passages from the 'Christian Fathers', and concluding with an epigram of four lines. In the 19th century a new edition of the Emblems was published, embellished with new illustrations by Bennett and Rogers.


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Old French Fairytales, illustrated by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1920)

Aug 2, 2011

In 1920, at the tender age of 19, Chicago-born artist Virginia Frances Sterrett received her first commission from The Penn Publishing Company to illustrate Old French Fairy Tales — a collection of works from the nineteenth-century French author, Comtesse de Ségur (Sophie Fedorovna Rostopchine). Shortly after completing the work Sterrett was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She would manage a few other commissions, including illustrations for Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales the following year, and for a 1928 edition of Arabian Nights, but her failing health meant she could only work in short bursts. She eventually passed away in 1931, at the age of 30.
Upon her death the St Louis Post-Dispatch paid this tribute to her life and work:
Her achievement was beauty, a delicate, fantastic beauty, created with brush and pencil. Almost unschooled in art, her life spent in prosaic places of the West and Middle West, she made pictures of haunting loveliness, suggesting Oriental lands she never saw and magical realms no one ever knew except in the dreams of childhood ...Perhaps it was the hardships of her own life that gave the young artist's work its fanciful quality. In the imaginative scenes she set down on paper she must have escaped from the harsh actualities of existence.


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The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895)

Aug 2, 2011

This re-enactment — just 18 seconds long — of the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots, is among the first films to use trained actors, as well as one of the first to use editing for the purposes of special effects. Produced by Thomas Edison and directed by Alfred Clark, the film shows a blindfolded Mary (played by Robert Thomae, secretary and treasurer of the Kinetoscope Company) being led to the execution block. When the executioner's axe is raised, an edit occurs during which Thomae is replaced by a mannequin, the head of which is then summarily lopped off. It is the very first death scene (of many) in the history of cinema.


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Beela Boola - Electric City 4 (1920)

Aug 1, 2011

Test pressing of Joe Rosey's "Beela Boola", by the Electric City 4 on Edison matrix 7596-B, recorded October 20/9, 1920


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The General (1926)

Aug 2, 2011

A Buster Keaton classic. Johnnie loves his train ("The General") and Annabelle Lee. When the Civil War begins he is turned down for service because he's more valuable as an engineer. Annabelle thinks it's because he's a coward. Union spies capture The General with Annabelle on board. Johnny must rescue both his loves.


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Armata: a fragment (1817)

Aug 2, 2011

Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine, (10 January 1750 – 17 November 1823) was a British lawyer and politician who served as Lord Chancellor of the United Kingdom between 1806 and 1807 in the Ministry of All the Talents. In his retirement, as well as fighting for animal rights, Greek independence, and the defence of Queen Caroline, he wrote Armata, a strange tale of a man sailing to the moon upon a highway of ocean.


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Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)

Aug 2, 2011

Written and directed by infamous director Edward D. Wood, Jr. The film features Gregory Walcott, Mona McKinnon, Tor Johnson and Maila "Vampira" Nurmi, and also bills Bela Lugosi posthumously as a star, although silent footage of the actor had been shot by Wood for other, unfinished projects just before Lugosi's death in 1956. The plot of the film is focused on extraterrestrial beings who are seeking to stop humans from creating a doomsday weapon that would destroy the universe. In the course of doing so, the aliens implement "Plan 9", a scheme to resurrect Earth's dead as what modern audiences would consider zombies (called "ghouls" in the film itself) to get the planet's attention, causing chaos. Wood was posthumously awarded the Medveds' Golden Turkey Award as the worst director ever.


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Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Aug 12, 2011

Considered one of the most important films in the history of silent pictures, as well as possibly Eisenstein's greatest work, Battleship Potemkin brought Eisenstein's theories of cinema art to the world in a powerful showcase; his emphasis on montage, his stress of intellectual contact, and his treatment of the mass instead of the individual as the protagonist. The film tells the story of the mutiny on the Russian ship Prince Potemkin during the 1905 uprising.


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The Kiss (1896)

Aug 13, 2011

"An osculatory performance by May Irwin and John Rice".... Scene from the New York stage comedy, The Widow Jones, in which Irwin and Rice starred. According to Edison film historian C. Musser, the actors staged their kiss for the camera at the request of the New York world newspaper, and the resulting film was the most popular Edison Vitascope film in 1896. The first ever kiss to be caught on film.


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Experiments in the Revival of Organisms (1940)

Aug 13, 2011

A film documenting Soviet research into the resuscitation of clinically dead organisms, research which in the film appears to be successful. The experiments were conducted by Dr. S.S. Bryukhonenko in 1939 at the Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy, Voronezh, U.S.S.R. The film includes an introduction by the renowned British scientist Professor J.B.S. Haldane. Read a Time Magazine account of the 1943 première shown to US scientists here.


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Sessions for the Blind at Sunderland Museum

Aug 9, 2011

From 1913, John Alfred Charlton Deas, a former curator at Sunderland Museum, organised several handling sessions for the blind, first offering an invitation to the children from the Sunderland Council Blind School, to handle a few of the collections. They were so successful that Deas went on to develop and arrange a course of regular handling sessions, extending the invitations to blind adults.


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Eugène von Guérard’s Australian Landscapes

Aug 15, 2011

Selection from Eugène von Guérard's Australian landscapes: a series of 24 tinted lithographs illustrative of the most striking and picturesque features of the landscape scenery of Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia & Tasmania, printed and published by Hamel & Ferguson in 1867. Von Guerard hailed originally from Austria but moved to Australia in 1852 to try his luck   on the goldfields of Victoria. The venture proved unsuccessful, but he soon realised there were opportunities to pursue a career as an artist in Australia. He started undertaking commissions recording the houses and properties of wealthy pastoralists, and his reputation grew. In 1870, he became the very first Master of the School of Painting at the National Gallery of Victoria.


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Cat and bird stories from the “Spectator” (1896)

Aug 5, 2011

A sequel to Dog Stories from The Spectator, this book brings us mysteries and anecdotes relating to cats, birds, and other animals which found there way into the pages of The Spectator.


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The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)

Aug 14, 2011

Film based on Hemingway's classic short story, directed by Henry King, and starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Susan Hayward. The story centers on the memories of a writer (Gregory Peck) who is slowly dying after developing a dangerous wound from a thorn prick while on Safari in Africa. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards; for Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction (Lyle Wheeler, John DeCuir, Thomas Little, Paul S. Fox)


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Rhapsody In Blue - Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin (Original 1924 recording)

Aug 15, 2011

This is the original recording of Gershwin's masterpiece, acoustic as opposed to the later more famous and more well known electrically recorded version. In 2 parts.


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Operation Doorstep (1953)

Aug 8, 2011

The first nuclear blast broadcast live on television took place March 17, 1953, in northwestern Nevada. The Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) called this weapons test Operation Upshot–Knothole Annie. In conjunction with it they also conducted a civil defense test they called Operation Doorstep.
Operation Doorstep was meant to determine the effect of a 16-kiloton nuclear explosion on fifty automobiles, two wood-frame houses, eight backyard bomb shelters, and a goodly number of mannequins. The houses were built specially for the test, and the other objects were carefully arranged, as though for a dollhouse. The ostensible purpose of all this was “to show the people of America what might be expected if an atomic burst took place over the doorsteps of our major cities”.
In the booklet published in 1953 (which can be read above), FCDA administrator Val Peterson reported on the findings. He assured his fellow Americans that “the family automobile would be relatively safe outside a ten-block radius…provided that some windows were left open to prevent the roof from caving in on the passengers”. The wood-frame houses, built at various distances from ground zero, “performed” as predicted: The one built 3,500 feet away from the blast was destroyed (though the basement was found, as predicted, to provide protection) and the other, built 7,500 feet away, was charred and damaged but remained intact.
To measure levels of gamma radiation and “excessive temperature”, film badges and fusion strips were placed in the houses and shelters. The many mannequins, weighted with sand — except for a child mannequin — were also placed in these structures, as well as in some of the cars.
“Lack of funds prevented instrumentation of the…interiors for air pressure, mannequin motion, and wall and roof displacement,” the booklet tells us. (Lack of funds is one of the booklet’s much-repeated themes!) However, based on the evidence provided by the badges, strips, and the post-blast distribution of dummies, the FCDA concluded that, while persons on the upper floors of the house at 3,500 feet would have been critically injured or killed, either by flying debris or radiation sickness, persons in the house at 7,500 feet and in most of the basement and backyard underground shelters. In the end, these backyard underground shelters were most highly recommended.
The photographs taken of the Operation Doorstep sites, before and after the explosion, were made available to the public in a booklet sold for twenty-five cents. These photographs, especially the ones of aftereffects, are eerie to say the least. Some of them are also slightly absurd — for example, the photograph of the mannequin at the window of one of the houses, which features the caption: “This mannequin can only stay in the position in which he was placed, staring through the window at the coming disaster. A real occupant of this house could prepare — and survive.”
Obviously, the idea of Operation Doorstep was to inform the American public about “the coming disaster.” But as with many similarly intended Cold War projects, one wonders whether the effect wasn’t to make people more terrified than ever. The sight of a charred car in a desert landscape being tended by a man in a radiation suit and a gas mask is not exactly reassuring.
You can see more photographs from Operation Doorstep below and watch a US Department of Energy film about the operation (as well as the 1955 Operation Cue) here.


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Orson Welles Show (1941)

Aug 7, 2011

Welles' first almanac/variety radio show, as sponsored by Illinois-based cosmetic maker Lady Esther, and featuring members of his Mercury Theatre. The show sought to provide something new to radio listeners. Unfortunately, the program format proved unpopular with the target audience of Lady Esther (ie middle class women), and the show eventually settled into a "story of the week" format. Originally scheduled for 26 weeks, the show ended prematurely when Welles left on his ill-fated It's All True trip to Brazil.


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Dr Julius Neubronner’s Miniature Pigeon Camera
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea and Adam Green
Aug 8, 2011

Photographing the earth from above in the early twentieth century required great ingenuity. One hundred years before drones, the two best ways both had their drawbacks. Balloons and kites could take a camera but were very restricted in their movement and speed. The stage was set for a faster, rangier kind of aerial reconnaissance. In 1907 the apothecary and amateur pigeon fancier Dr Julius G. Neubronner presented a solution to the German patent office — the pigeon camera.
Since 1903 Neubronner had been using pigeons to exchange prescriptions and urgent medications with a sanatorium a few miles from his home in Kronberg near Frankfurt. A pigeon lost during one of these flights had delighted Neubronner by returning to its dovecote four weeks later, safe and sound. The episode gave Neubronner the idea of creating lightweight, wearable cameras to record his couriers’ flights. He built several models which included a pneumatic timing mechanism to activate the shutter at set intervals, leather harness, and aluminium breastplate. Neubronner would take the pigeons up to 60 miles away before releasing them, knowing that they would want to take the most direct route home to unburden themselves. To increase the mobility of his fleet, he also built a horse-drawn dovecote with an attached darkroom.
The German patent office objected to Neubronner’s application on the grounds that domestic pigeons could not possibly carry a 75 gram load. Neubronner countered the objection with photographic evidence and, in 1908, finally gained his patent. The invention brought Neubronner international notability after he presented it at expositions in Dresden, Frankfurt, and Paris in 1909–11. Spectators in Dresden could watch the arrival of the camera-equipped carrier pigeons, and the photos were immediately developed and turned into buyable postcards.
The photos – with their skewed angles and random framing – share a live, wild quality familiar to Generation GoPro but completely novel at the time. One in particular (the first of the aerial shots featured below), of the Schlosshotel in Kronberg, became famous for accidentally capturing the wing tips of its intrepid creator. The German military considered the images sufficiently impressive to test the pigeon cam on the battlefields of the Western Front. However, rapid improvements in aeroplane reconnaissance consigned Neubronner’s birds to their traditional role of carrying messages. Pigeons would go on to also play a similar role in the Second World War, as detailed in this amusing documentary.
Below we feature a selection of the fruits of Neubronner’s pigeon cam. Rorhof has published a wider selection in their 2017 book The Pigeon Photographer.

author: Ned Pennant-Rea and Adam Green


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Fats Waller and His Orchestra live at The Yacht Club (1938)

Aug 7, 2011

Fats Waller and His Orchestra live at The Yacht Club in New York: "You Can't Be Mine and Somebody Else's Too", "Monday Morning", "What Do You Know About Love?", and "I Had To Do It". Also included is a live recording "Hold My Hand".


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Huexotzinco Codex (1531)

Aug 9, 2011

The Huexotzinco Codex is an eight-sheet document on amatl, a pre- European paper made in Mesoamerica. It is part of the testimony in a legal case against representatives of the colonial government in Mexico, ten years after the Spanish conquest in 1521. Huexotzinco (Way-hoat-ZINC-o) is a town southeast of Mexico City, in the state of Puebla. In 1521, the Nahua Indian people of the town were the allies of the Spanish conqueror Hernando Cortés, and together they confronted their enemies to overcome Moctezuma, leader of the Aztec Empire. After the conquest, the Huexotzinco peoples became part of Cortés’estates. During 1529-1530 when Cortés was out of the country, Spanish colonial administrators intervened in the daily activities of the community and forced the Nahuas to pay excessive taxes in the form of goods and services. When Cortés returned, the Nahuas joined him in a legal case against the abuses of the Spanish administrators. The plaintiffs were successful in their suit in Mexico, and later when it was retried in Spain. The record shows [in a document uncovered in the collections of the Library of Congress] that in 1538, King Charles of Spain agreed with the judgement against the Spanish administrators and ruled that two-thirds of all tributes taken from the people of Huexotzinco be returned.


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Art in Art

Aug 9, 2011


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La Paloma (1903)

Aug 7, 2011

Zélie de Lussan (21 December 1861 – 18 December 1949) was an American opera singer of French descent. This is her singing the oft recorded classic La Paloma, originally composed around 1863 by Spanish composer Sebastián Iradier.


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English As She Is Spoke (1884)
Text by Adam Green
Aug 15, 2011

Pedro Carolino wrote this classic in the genre of unintentional humour to help Portuguese students peer into the murky bubble of English. Instead he added considerably to the murk. It seems Carolino knew next to no English and had no Portuguese–English dictionary to hand. Thus he was forced to embark on a convoluted workaround. For each entry he first consulted a Portuguese–French phrasebook, then a French–English dictionary. This complicated translatory journey led to some hilarious results. Carolino tried to cover his tracks by claiming in the preface to have made his book “clean of gallicisms and despoiled phrases.” As just a quick glance at the book's pages betrays, this was more than wishful thinking on Carolino's part. His failure is, however, comedy's success — the book is now known and loved for just the despoliation he tried to avoid.
In the first part of the book Carolino introduces the key English vocab and phrases, such as "You come too rare", "He was the word for to laugh", and "I am catched cold in the brain". In the second part, Familiar Dialogues, he features conversations to help the student-reader put a native English speaker at their ease. When out on a walk the reader is encouraged to comment, "You hear the bird's gurgling? Which pleasure! which charm! The field has by me a thousand charms." And what to do if their walking companion gifts them some fruit? “These apricots and these peaches make me and to come water in mouth.”
Next there is a series of letters from famous personages, a collection of anecdotes, and finally the perfectly titled "Idiotisms and Proverbs." Mark Twain, who wrote the introduction to the first English edition (published a year before the one we are featuring) declared: “Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect.” We can't help but agree.

author: Adam Green


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Reefer Madness (1938)

Aug 8, 2011

Considered the archetypal sensationalized anti-drug movie but can also be seen as an exploitation film made to capitalize on the hot taboo subject of marijuana use while skirting the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 which forbade the portrayal of immoral acts like drug use. Directed by Louis J. Gasnier.


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The Spirit Photographs of William Hope

Aug 8, 2011

This remarkable collection of photographs was unearthed in a Lancashire antiquarian bookshop by one of the curators at the National Media Museum. Known as "spirit photographs", they were taken by a controversial medium called William Hope. Born in 1863 in Crewe, Hope started his working life as a carpenter, but in 1905 became interested in spirit photography after capturing the supposed image of a ghost while photographing a friend. He went on to found and lead a group of six spirit photographers known as the Crewe Circle. Following World War I, support for the group, and demand for its services, grew as the grieving relatives of those lost to the war sought a means of contacting their loved ones. By 1922 Hope had moved to London where he established himself as a professional medium. The work of the Crew Circle was investigated on various occasions, the most famous of these taking place in 1922, when the Society for Psychical Research sent Harry Price to investigate. Price collected evidence that Hope was substituting glass plates bearing ghostly images in order to produce his spirit photographs. Later the same year Price published his findings, exposing Hope as a fraudster. However, many of Hope’s most ardent supporters spoke out on his behalf, the most famous being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who wrote The Case for Spirit Photography, in response to Price's claims of fraud. Hope continued to practice, despite his exposure, until his death in 1933.


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The Danger of Premature Interment (1816)

Aug 15, 2011

"The Danger of Premature Interment proved from many remarkable instances of people who have recovered after being laid out for dead, and of others entombed alive, for want of being properly examined prior to interment. Also a description of the manner the ancient Egyptians, and other nations preserved and venerated their dead, and a curious account of their sepulchral ever burning lamps and mausoleums. Likewise the pernicious effects of burying in the body of churches, and confined church yards pointed out, whereby many valuable lives have been lost to the public, and their friends."


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The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (1899)

Aug 5, 2011

"De Rougemont" was born Henri Louis Grin in 1847 in or near Paris, France. In 1898 he began to write about his invented adventures in the British periodical "The Wide World Magazine" under the name Louis De Rougemont. He described his alleged exploits in search of pearls and gold in New Guinea and claimed to have spent thirty years living with Indigenous Australians in the Australian outback. He claimed that the tribe with whom he had lived had worshipped him as a god. He also claimed to have encountered the Gibson expedition of 1874.
"Truth is stranger than fiction
But De Rougemont is stranger than both"
—The Wide World Magazine, June 1899, No. 14


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The Book of Topiary (1904)

Aug 5, 2011

"The most perfect specimen of topiary work with which we are acquainted is at Levens in Westmoreland. At that place a profusion of yews, hollies, and other evergreens have been transformed into more shapes than Proteus would trouble himself to assume, unless he happened to be in a more than usually changeable humour. Here is Madame la Reine with her arms most royally akimbo, opposite to Monsieur le Roi bearing the semblance (we will not say how near) of a kingly crown. Not far distant are some trees like gigantic chessmen. The smaller shrubs, of which there is a vast number, greenly shadow forth cones, cubes, vases, foaming tankards, &c."


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Tokyo Rose (1944)

Aug 7, 2011

Tokyo Rose was a generic name given by Allied forces in the South Pacific during World War II to any of approximately a dozen English-speaking female broadcasters of Japanese propaganda. The intent of these broadcasts was to disrupt the morale of Allied forces listening to the broadcast. American servicemen in the Pacific often listened to the propaganda broadcasts to get a sense, by reading between the lines, of the effect of their military actions. Farther from the action, stories circulated that Tokyo Rose could be unnervingly accurate, naming units and even individual servicemen. The name "Tokyo Rose" is most strongly associated with Iva Toguri D'Aquino. D'Aquino broadcast as "Orphan Ann" during the 15-20 minute D.J. segment of the 75-minute program The Zero Hour on Radio Tokyo (NHK). The program consisted of propaganda-tinged skits and slanted news reports as well as popular American music. After the war the US born D'Aquino was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison for treason. She was given a pardon from President Ford in 1977. Read more about the life and trial of Iva Toguri D'Aquino here.


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The Maps of Piri Reis

Aug 8, 2011

Piri Reis was a sixteenth-century Ottoman Admiral famous for his maps and charts collected in his Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Navigation), a book which contains detailed information on navigation as well as extremely accurate charts describing the important ports and cities of the Mediterranean Sea. In 1513 he produced his first world map, based on some 20 older maps and charts which he had collected, including charts personally designed by Christopher Columbus which his uncle Kemal Reis obtained in 1501 after capturing seven Spanish ships off the coast of Valencia in Spain with several of Columbus’ crewmen on board.


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Rudolph Valentino (1923)

Aug 15, 2011

Two songs from Rudoph Valentino: "El Relicario" and "Kashmiri Song". Rudolph Valentino (May 6, 1895 – August 23, 1926) was an Italian actor, and early pop icon. A sex symbol of the 1920s, Valentino was known as the "Latin Lover". He starred in several well known silent films including The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Sheik, Blood and Sand, The Eagle and Son of the Sheik. His sudden death at age 31 caused mass hysteria among his female fans, with reported resultant suicides, and an estimated 100,000 people lining the streets of New York City to pay their respects at his funeral.


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“Mother Will Be Pleased”: How It Feels to Be Run Over (1900)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Oct 6, 2022

From their beginning, movies have been fascinated with motion and its termination — the play between stasis and animation that is inherent to how we perceive the rapid transit of still images across a screen. Nearly a century before David Cronenberg’s adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s Crash (1973), a novel in which characters yearn for “the ecstasies of head-on collisions”, Cecil Hepworth’s How It Feels to Be Run Over found pleasure in blunt force trauma. In this minute-long film, a stationary camera, placed on the edge of a dirt road, records the approach of a horse-drawn cart, which passes safely out of the frame. Through the dust kicked up by hooves and wheels comes a motor car, driven by Hepworth, veering wildly toward us. As this automobile collides with the camera, the screen cuts to black and hand-written text flashes almost imperceptibly before our eyes: “?!!!? ! Oh! Mother will be pleased”.
One of the earliest uses of intertitles, Hepworth’s film belongs to a genre of fin-de-siècle accident pictures, which includes his own Explosion of a Motor Car (1900), Walter R. Booth’s An Extraordinary Cab Accident (1903), and the Lumière brothers’ infamous L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896), the screening of which has been apocryphally associated with audience members fleeing the theater to avoid being crushed by the train coming toward them. This is heavy subject matter, leavened only in Looney Tunesish universes where victims recover with comic elasticity. As such, it is tempting to read these “crashes” as weighted with allegorical gravity: the shocking arrival of cinema as a new media form. “When we watch this film”, writes Richard Howells in reference to How It Feels to Be Run Over, “we are at the same time watching the cinema discover its potential to communicate in new ways.” And yet, the invocation of the personal in this film, both through its affective title (how it feels) and by the attempt to represent something like interiority with the closing intertitles, trains our gaze not on history, but on something closer to narrative: the way endings can ripple backward through plots — whether cinematic or biographical — to lend them consistency.
Witnessing a narrowly avoided transport accident in the same decade as Hepworth’s film, James Joyce asked his brother: “Do you see that man who has just skipped out of the way of the tram? Consider, if he had been run over, how significant every act of his would at once become.” Watching How It Feels to Be Run Over is to spend a minute in suspension as we await the title’s significance. We learn less about how it feels to be crushed by heavy machinery, more about the conventions of cinematic sensation itself. Like the catharsis promised by tragedy, we can explore the perverse thrill of a virtual car crash from the safe remove of our sofa. We barely have time to feel anything, only a flurry of question and exclamation marks before consciousness cuts to black. Of greater accessibility here is the way that “death” provides a sense of formal closure, lending significance, as Joyce describes, to “inciting incidents”. Mother told us to stay out of the road. If she is pleased, it is because she knew how this story would end.
Strangely, in a suppression that Sigmund Freud might enjoy, the version of How It Feels to Be Run Over above omits the frames containing “Mother”. An alternative version is available on YouTube.


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Synaesthesia’s Colour Debut (1883)
Text by Kevin Dann
Oct 25, 2022

Victorian polymath Francis Galton is known as the inventor of many things: the world’s first weather and isochronal climate maps; the statistical concepts of correlation and regression toward the mean; the ultrasonic whistle; and — with a more harmful afterlife — many aspects of the field he named “eugenics”, as well as its supposed application to criminology. An indefatigable student of physical appearance, who is remembered (and often reviled) for a fanatical dedication to hegemonic British imperial norms of behavior and appearance, Galton also turned his curiosity to the inner world and its perceptions. Pioneering research into the visual-spatial complex known as “number form” — in which individuals experience numbers as possessing distinct spatial properties — Galton published the very first color plate of synaesthetic visualizations in his 1883 Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development.
In April 1879, Galton received a letter from his friend George Parker Bidder, a London barrister whose father had been a famous prodigy of calculation. The letter included diagrams of his visualizations for numbers, the months of the year, and historical time figured as the succession of English kings, prompting Galton to work up a “kitchen table questionnaire” that he distributed to hundreds of scientific and literary associates in England, America, Russia, France, Germany, and Italy. Though his earlier publications on number forms report the colors as described by respondents, only in 1883 did Galton enlist “no less than thirteen different lithographic stones” to faithfully depict them.
Never using the term “synaesthesia”, which assumed widespread currency only after 1893, Galton assembled Plate 4 from a small roster — including novelist Rose Kingsley (Figure 64) and botanist George Henslow (Figures 70–73) — of his synaesthetic correspondent “seers”. The middle row depicts the word, letter, and number associations of Dr. James Key, sent to Galton from Cape Colony in South Africa. Along with supplying the colors he saw in his visual field when thinking of “Francis Galton”, “London”, and the word “visualization”, Dr. Key provided samples of wallpaper together with the words that the colors suggested to him. When Galton showed these to another synaesthete, she was scandalized to see how different they were from her own mental colors.
Estimating that number forms were more common among women (one in fifteen) than men (one in thirty), Galton also concluded that: 1) the persistence of color associations with sounds was as prominent as that of number forms with numbers; 2) vowel sounds evoked colors more often than consonants; 3) seers had very precise color terminology; 4) no two people agreed on the color associations; and 5) these forms of mental imagery were “very hereditary”, and likely quite universal. Founded upon the most diverse idiosyncratic associations in childhood, Galton discovered that these concrete, stereotyped, and unchanging visual patterns only persisted among those individuals who continued to employ the associations in the inner life of their minds.