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Music Hall Performer Billy Williams

Jan 14, 2013

Richard Isaac Banks (1878–1915), who changed his name to Billy Williams after leaving his birthplace of Australia, was one of the most recorded popular entertainers of his time. Born in Melbourne, Williams tried a number of jobs before embarking on an entertainment career which led him to come to England in 1899. He became a popular entertainer in the music halls singing what were known as chorus-songs, and  also appeared in pantomime. The year 1912 seemed to be the zenith of Williams' career – he appeared in the first Royal Command Performance of that year and achieved glowing reviews in the national press. Sadly this fame was not to last as Williams became ill in late 1914 and died in Hove near Brighton in March 1915, the proximate cause being complications after an operation, but rumoured to be connected with "previous social excesses." (Wikipedia)


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Illustrations from The Six Voyages of John Baptista Tavernier (1678)

Jan 18, 2013

Illustrations from (to give its full title) The six voyages of John Baptista Tavernier, a noble man of France now living, through Turky into Persia and the East-Indies, finished in the year 1670 giving an account of the state of those countries : illustrated with divers sculptures ; together with a new relation of the present Grand Seignor's seraglio, by the same author / made English by J.P. - a remarkable account of travel through 17th century Asia. Tavernier (1605-1689) was a French diamond merchant, traveller and pioneer of diamond trade with India, who covered by his own account, 180,000 miles (290,000 km) over the course of forty years and six voyages. Though he is best known for the discovery and sale of the 118-carat (24 g) blue diamond that he subsequently sold to Louis XIV of France in 1668, (it was stolen in 1792 and re-emerged in London as The Hope Diamond), his writings show that he was a keen observer of his time as well as a remarkable cultural anthropologist. (Wikipedia)
See the English translation of Tavernier's book, from which these images comes, in our Text collection post.
You can also read a nice post on Tavernier's book over at the Res Obscura blog.

source: public-domain-review

type: collection

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


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The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents (1658)

Apr 3, 2013

A selection of woodcuts from a book entitled The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, published in 1658. Most of this three-volume compilation is comprised of the zoological works of the English clergyman Edward Topsell who published several books on religion and other matters during his lifetime. A whole host of animals are represented in Topsell's illustrations, all of which which came directly from earlier works by the Swiss physician, naturalist, and author Konrad Gesner. Amongst the usual suspects there are also more unusual mythical specimens, such as the “Hydra,” with two claws, a curled serpent’s tail, and seven small mammalian heads; the “Lamia,” with a cat-like body, hooves on the hind feet, claws on the front, and a human woman’s face and hair; and the “Mantichora,” with a lion’s body and mane, a man’s face and head of hair, and a grotesquely smiling mouth.


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Extracts from the Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks (1769)

Apr 5, 2013

Appointed as the expedition's official botanist, a 25-year-old Joseph Banks travelled on Captain Cook's first great voyage to the South Pacific in 1768. After landing on the island of Tahiti, Banks was soon to become an invaluable member of the crew by virtue of the friendly relations he struck up with the islanders; a mutual trust he built up through his openness, natural curiosity and fascination with their customs and way of life. In his willingness to learn their language, eat their food, sleep in their huts, record their customs and partake in their rituals, Banks was pioneering a new kind of science - that of ethnology. As the weeks progressed his botanical observations increasingly gave way to a study of the people ("studies" that were not always at arm's length!). His experiences in his three month stay on the island are recorded in his Endeavour Journal. The journal is unique in character, not merely in terms of its content but also, as the writer Richard Holmes comments, "for their racy style, appalling spelling and non-existent punctuation". Below are a few choice extracts, highlighted by Richard Holmes in his (highly recommended) The Age of Wonder - a book exploring the Romantic revolution in science, in which Banks, who would go on to become President of the Royal Society, played a crucial role.
Read also Patricia Fara's excellent article for The Public Domain Review, "Joseph Banks: Portraits of a Placid Elephant".
(All journal entries below from a transcription of Banks's Endeavour Journal housed at Wikisource. You can also read an 1896 edition, which omits scenes of a more sexual nature, edited by Sir Joseph Dalton at the Internet Archive)
10th May 1769 - THE ENGLISH CREW GET TAHITIAN NAMES
We have now got the Indian name of the Island, Otahite, so therefore for the future I shall call it. As for our own names the Indians find so much dificulty in pronouncing them that we are forcd to indulge them in calling us what they please, or rather what they say when they attempt to pronounce them. I give here the List: Captn Cooke Toote, Dr Solander Torano, Mr Hicks Hete, Mr Gore Toárro, Mr Molineux Boba from his Christian name Robert, Mr Monkhouse Mato, and myself Tapáne. In this manner they have names for almost every man in the ship.
2nd May 1769 - MR BANKS GETS INTIMATE WITH THE FEMALE ISLANDERS
Cocoa nuts very plentifull this morning. About breakfast time Dootahah visits us. Immediately after while I sat trading in the boat at the door of the fort a double Canoe came with several women and one man under the awning. The Indians round me made signs that I should go out and meet them, by the time I had got out of the boat they were within ten yards of me. The people made a lane from them to me. They stopd and made signs for me to do the same. The man in company with them had in his hand a large bunch of boughs; he advancd towards me bringing two, one a young plantain the other. Tupia who stood by me acted as my deputy in receiving them and laying them down in the boat: 6 times he passd backwards and forwards in the same manner and bringing the same present. Another man than came forward having in his arms a large bundle of cloth, this he opend out and spread it peice by peice on the ground between the women and me, it consisted on nine peices. Three were first laid. The foremost of the women, who seemd to be the principal, then stepd upon them and quickly unveiling all her charms gave me a most convenient opportunity of admiring them by turning herself gradualy round: 3 peices more were laid and she repeated her part of the ceremony: the other three were then laid which made a treble covering of the ground between her and me, she then once more displayd her naked beauties and immediately marchd up to me, a man following her and doubling up the cloth as he came forwards which she immediately made me understand was intended as a present for me. I took her by the hand and led her to the tents acompanied by another woman her freind, to both of them I made presents but could not prevail upon them to stay more than an hour. In the evening Oborea and her favourite attendant Othéothéa pay us a visit, much to my satisfaction as the latter (my flame) has for some days been reported either ill or dead.
28th May 1769 - MR BANKS LOSES HIS TROUSERS
Night came on apace, it was nescessary to look out for lodgings; as Dootahah made no offer of any I repaird to my old Freind Oborea who readily gave me a bed in her canoe much to my satisfaction. I acquainted my fellow travelers with my good fortune and wishing them as good took my leave. We went to bed early as is the custom here: I strippd myself for the greater convenience of sleeping as the night was hot. Oborea insisted that my cloths should be put into her custody, otherwise she said they would certainly be stolen. I readily submitted and laid down to sleep with all imaginable tranquility. About 11 I awakd and wanting to get up felt for my clothes in the place in which I had seen them laid at night but they were missing. I awakd Oborea, she started up and on my complaining of the Loss candles were immediately lit. Dootahah who slept in the next canoe came to us and both went in search of the theif, for such it seems it was who had stolen my coat and waistcoat with my pistols powder horn etc., they returnd however in about ½ an hour without any news of the stolen goods. I began to be a little alarmd, my musquet was left me, but that by my neglect the night before was not loaded; I did not know where Captn Cooke or Dr Solander had disposd of themselves, consequently could not call upon them for assistance; Tupia stood near me awakd by the Hubbub that had been raisd on account of my Loss; to him I gave my Musquet charging him to take care that the theif did not get it from him, and betook myself again to rest, telling my companions in the boat that I was well satisfied with the pains that Oborea and Dootahah had taken for the recovery of my things. Soon after I heard their musick and saw lights near me; I got up and went towards them, it was a heiva or assembly according to their custom. Here I saw Captn Cooke and told my melancholy story, he was my fellow sufferer, he had lost his stockins and two young gentlemen who were with him had lost each a Jacket. Dr Solander was away we neither of us knew where: we talkd over our losses and agreed that nothing could be done toward recovering them till the morning, after which we parted and went to our respective sleeping places.
29th May 1769 - THE FIRST RECORDED DESCRIPTION OF SURFING
In our return to the boat we saw the Indians amuse or excersise themselves in a manner truly surprizing. It was in a place where the shore was not guarded by a reef as is usualy the case, consequently a high surf fell upon the shore, a more deadfull one I have not often seen: no European boat could have landed in it and I think no Europaean who had by any means got into [it] could possibly have saved his life, as the shore was coverd with pebbles and large stones. In the midst of these breakers 10 or 12 Indians were swimming who whenever a surf broke near them divd under it with infinite ease, rising up on the other side; but their cheif amusement was carried on by the stern of an old canoe, with this before them they swam out as far as the outermost breach, then one or two would get into it and opposing the blunt end to the breaking wave were hurried in with incredible swiftness. Sometimes they were carried almost ashore but generaly the wave broke over them before they were half way, in which case the[y] divd and quickly rose on the other side with the canoe in their hands, which was towd out again and the same method repeated. We stood admiring this very wonderfull scene for full half an hour, in which time no one of the actors atempted to come ashore but all seemd most highly entertaind with their strange diversion.
10th June 1769 - MR BANKS STRIPS NAKED AND TAKES PART IN A RITUAL DANCE
This evening according to my yesterdays engagement I went to the place where the medua lay, where I found Tubourai, Tamio, Hoona the Meduas daughter and a young Indian prepard to receive me. Tubourai was the Heiva, the three others and myself were to Nineveh. He put on his dress, most Fantastical tho not unbecoming, the figure annexd will explain it far better than words can. I was next prepard by stripping off my European cloths and putting me on a small strip of cloth round my waist, the only garment I was allowd to have, but I had no pretensions to be ashamd of my nakedness for neither of the women were a bit more coverd than myself. They then began to smut me and themselves with charcoal and water, the Indian boy was compleatly black, the women and myself as low as our shoulders. We then set out. Tubourai began by praying twice, one near the Corps again near his own house. We then proceeded towards the fort: it was nesscessary it seems that the procession should visit that place but they dare not to do it without the sanction of some of us, indeed it was not till many assurances of our consent that they venturd to perform any part of their ceremonies. To the fort then we went to the surprize of our freinds and affright of the Indians who were there, for they every where fly before the Heiva like sheep before a wolf. We soon left it and proceeded along shore towards a place where above 100 Indians were collected together. We the Ninevehs had orders from the Heiva to disperse them, we ran towards them but before we cam[e] within 100 yards of them they dispers'd every way, running to the first shelter, hiding themselves under grass or whatever else would conceal them. We now crossd the river into the woods and passd several houses, all were deserted, not another Indian did we see for about ½ an hour that we sepnt in walking about. We the Ninevehs then came to the Heiva and said imatata, there are no people; after which we repaird home, the Heiva undressd and we went into the river and scrubbd one another till it was dark before the blacking would come off.
5th July 1769 - MR BANKS WITNESSES A YOUNG GIRL BEING TATTOOED
This morn I saw the operation of Tattowing the buttocks performd upon a girl of about 12 years old, it provd as I have always suspected a most painfull one. It was done with a large instrument about 2 inches long containing about 30 teeth, every stroke of this hundreds of which were made in a minute drew blood. The patient bore this for about ¼ of an hour with most stoical resolution; by that time however the pain began to operate too stron[g]ly to be peacably endurd, she began to complain and soon burst out into loud lamentations and would fain have persuaded the operator to cease; she was however held down by two women who sometimes scolded, sometimes beat, and at others coaxd her. I was setting in the adjacent house with Tomio for an hour, all which time it lasted and was not finishd when I went away tho very near. This was one side only of her buttocks for the other had been done some time before. The arches upon the loins upon which they value themselves much were not yet done, the doing of which they told causd more pain than what I had seen. About dinner time many of our freinds came, Oamo, Otheothea, Tuarua etc.


text:
The Hasheesh Eater (1857)
Text by Adam Green
Apr 9, 2013

The Hasheesh Eater: being passages from the life of a Pythagorean is an autobiographical book by the American novelist and journalist Fitz Hugh Ludlow in which he describes his altered states of consciousness and philosophical flights of fancy while using a cannabis extract. Many pages are given over to detailed and elaborate descriptions of the visions he underwent after ingesting the drug. He also curiously talks of the perils of severe addiction although such a thing is not normally associated with cannabis use (some put this down to an overactive wish to align himself with his hero Thomas De Quincey and his experience with opium). The book was very popular on its publication in 1857 and led to great interest in the drug it described. Not long after its publication, the Gunjah Wallah Co. in New York began advertising "Hasheesh Candy":
The Arabian "Gunjh" of Enchantment confectionized. — A most pleasurable and harmless stimulant. — Cures Nervousness, Weakness, Melancholy, &c. Inspires all classes with new life and energy. A complete mental and physical invigorator.
Cult figure Terence McKenna would describe Ludlow as beginning "a tradition of pharmo-picaresque literature that would find later practitioners in William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson.… Part genius, part madman, Ludlow lies halfway between Captain Ahab and P.T. Barnum, a kind of Mark Twain on hashish. There is a wonderful charm to his free-spirited, pseudoscientific openness as he makes his way into the shifting dunescapes of the world of hashish.” (Wikipedia)

author: Adam Green


text:
How I Killed the Tiger (1902)

May 15, 2013

How I killed the tiger; being an account of my encounter with a royal Bengal tiger, with an appendix containing some general information about India (1902) is a small book written by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Sheffield detailing his close brush with death by tiger. As the author explains in his introduction:
My main purpose in writing this little book, was to place in a permanent form a description of my wonderful preservation from death in a chance encounter with a Royal Bengal Tiger. My life had been adventurous up to that time. I had shot big game of various kinds. But this episode, so marvellous in itself, so important in its influence upon my after life and character, marks the close of my career as a hunter of big game.


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Bifurcated Girls: Vanity Fair Special Issue (1903)

Apr 26, 2013

Not the same Vanity Fair of current fame, this was a version published by The Commonwealth Publishing Company of New York City, incorporated in February 1902 but which went bankrupt in April 1904. "Vanity Fair" has been the title for at least 5 magazines, and as a phrase became popular through John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress where it was the name for Beelzebub's dominion, and later also as the title of William Thackeray's 1848 novel.
Dian Hansen in the first volume of her History of Men's Magazines (Taschen, 2004)  discusses the "Bifurcated Girls" special issue and argues that this particular incarnation of Vanity Fair can be seen as the origin of the American girlie magazine:
While France had a well-established men's magazine industry by 1900, America was just showing its ankles in 1903. A magazine called Vanity Fair (unrelated to the current incarnation) was the raciest thing around, and rooming house loozies the hotties of the time. In this New York, tabloid girls who drank like men might strip down to their petticoats and fall into bed together, exposing their corset cover and stockings to peeping male boarders. The famously loose morals of stage actresses made them popular subjects for these shenanigans, but the biggest thrill of all was bifurcation. "What?" one may well ask. Bifurcation, meaning "split in two", referred to the contours of a woman's legs revealed by her donning men's trousers. Bifurcation was a regular and very popular feature in Vanity Fair, it's popularity leading to Vanity Fair's Bifurcated Girls.
Although rather tame by modern standards, the sexual innuendo in this feature is rife. These 'risque' pictures of women in trousers are a strange precursor to a time when women would don trousers, not for men's titillation (as it seems here), but as a practical necessity when many took over 'men's jobs' during WW1 and WW2, and later simply because they wanted to.


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Böckler’s Pleasure Garden Plans (1664)

May 21, 2013

Selected illustrations from the German architect and engineer Georg Andreas Böckler's Architectura Curiosa Nova (1664). The book is mostly concerned with the theory of hydrodynamics, water pump systems and different designs for water fountains, but also contains this series of elaborate geometrical pleasure garden designs. It's not entirely clear whether they are projected plans or a record of what already existed (if anyone knows then please do let us know!).


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The Kawana Trio (1919)

May 10, 2013

A film by Hans A. Spanuth for the series "Spanuth's Original Vod-A-Vil Movies" filmed in Chicago. It shows the daring exploits of the the Kawana Trio, described in the opening credits as "Artistic Foot Jugglers".


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Illustrations from a Victorian book on Magic (1897)

Apr 17, 2013

Selected images from a massive late 19th century tome entitled simply Magic, subtitled Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, including Trick Photography, compiled and edited by Albert A. Hopkins. The book takes a thorough tour through the popular magic tricks and illusions of the day, including along the way many delightfully surreal diagrams and illustrations, the top pick of which we've included here - often especially great when seen out of context. Towards the end are some particularly great "decapitation" trick photographs.
See the book, with explanatory text and many more illustrations over in our post in the Texts collection.


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17th century Ethiopian manuscript: the miracles of the archangel Michael

May 9, 2013

A selection of folios from an illuminated manuscript of 17th century Ethiopia, produced during the cultural boom, especially in painting, brought about by the establishment of a permanent court at Gondar by the Solomonic emperor Fasilädäs (who reigned 1632-67). The nearly 50 full-page illuminations of this particular manuscript tell the story of the Archangel Michael who, under the patronage of Emperor Zär'a Ya'eqob, had became the most venerated of all archangels in Ethiopia. He is depicted undertaking a vast host of miracles and heroic feats including saving the faithful from the burning flames of hell, healing the sick and treading on Satan. The illustrations can also teach us about the Ethiopia of the time. According to The Walters Art Museum, "the minutely rendered textiles in these pictures suggest a connection with the fashions of the Gondarine court and indicate that the painters depicted their scriptural subjects using a visual language rooted in contemporary culture."


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A Closer Look at Richard Wagner’s Manuscripts
Text by Adam Green
May 22, 2013

Richard Wagner was one of the most influential and controversial composers ever to have lived. With his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art") - by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts — he revolutionised opera and gave birth to such masterpieces as Tristan und Isolde and the epic four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. If his music was sublime, his political views regarding "race" were far from it — in his writings he frequently expressed anti-semitic views (particularly in his racist tract Judaism in Music). The beauty of his music and the vileness of some of his political opinions (complicated by the fact that he was reported to have had life-long Jewish friends), make him a continuing source of intrigue and debate for scholars the world over.
In 2013, to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth, the British Library made available online its collection of Wagner manuscripts, mostly from early on in his career. The manuscripts come from the huge music-related manuscript collection of the great Austrian writer and music obsessive Stefan Zweig (whose writings, incidentally, passed into the public domain in 2013). Zweig acquired the Wagner manuscripts in 1937 while residing in England in exile from the Nazi regime. After his death in 1942 they went into the possession of his family who donated the collection to the British Library in 1986.
Taking advantage of the wonderfully high resolution versions presented on the British Library site, we present below a selection of magnified sections from the collection. To read more about the collection see the post in the British Library blog — and to see the collection itself visit the British Library Digitised Manuscripts  and search "Richard Wagner".


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Hands (1944)

Apr 8, 2013

A series of animated GIFs excerpted by Okkult Motion Pictures from Hands, an official war film by U.S. Army Signal Corps promoting total war mobilization, showing only human hands.
You can see the full film featured on The Public Domain Review here and also on the Internet Archive as part of the Prelinger Archives collection.
See more creations from Okkult Motion Pictures here in our Animated GIFs Collection.
Okkult Motion Pictures is the brainchild of Marco Calabrese and Alessandro Scali from Turin, Italy. With the Excerpts project, Okkult Motion Pictures aims to bring to light the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright moving images occulted in Internet archives, through a series of animated gifs. A digital archivalism project for the diffusion of open knowledge. Okkult Motion Pictures official website:   / Facebook  / Twitter
All Okkult animated GIFs published here under a CC-BY-SA license.


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Lantern Slides of Norway (ca.1910)

Apr 29, 2013

A selection from a collection of early-20th-century lantern slides held at the Fylkesarkivet of Sogn og Fjordane, a county in the west of Norway. The slides are produced by at least two British photographers – professional photographer Samuel J. Beckett and amateur photographer P. Heywood Hadfield, who was a ship's surgeon employed by the Orient Steam Navigation Company. Hadfield produced several illustrated books from his travels, including With an Ocean Liner (Orient Co’s S.S. “Ophir”) through the Fiords of Norway. A Photographic Memento of a Fortnight’s Cruising, published in several editions by the London Stereoscopic & Photographic Co. Ltd in the early 1900s. Beckett also produced a book on Norway The Fjords and Folk of Norway, first published in 1915 by Methuen & Co. Ltd. Learn more about Lantern Slides here.


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James Mooney’s Ghost Dance Recordings (1894)

Apr 2, 2013

A series of recordings made by James Mooney in 1894 of different Native American Ghost Dance songs. According to the Library Of Congress notes that accompany the recordings, the performances are probably by Mooney himself and not by Native Americans. Mooney was an ethnographer and self-taught expert on American tribes through his own studies and his careful observation during long residences with different groups, specifically the Cherokee. He did major studies of Southeastern Indians, as well as those on the Great Plains. His most notable works were his ethnographic studies of the Ghost Dance after Sitting Bull's death in 1890, a widespread 19th-century religious movement among various Native American culture groups. According to the prophet Jack Wilson (Wovoka)'s teachings, proper practice of the dance would reunite the living with the spirits of the dead and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to native peoples throughout the region.


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Conversations with Lord Byron (1824)

May 23, 2013

On 17th May 1824, a month after Lord Byron died, his memoirs were burnt in the upstairs drawing room of a house on Albemarle Street, London. The manuscript pages of the memoirs had been entrusted by Byron to his literary executor Thomas Moore two years earlier with a mind that one day they would be published. But with Byron dead, Byron's publisher John Murray, thinking the pages' supposedly scandalous contents far too damaging to both the reputation and legacy of Byron himself and presumably also to the publisher who would publish them, ripped them up and placed them in the fire. In his book Journal of the conversations of Lord Byron noted during a residence with his lordship at Pisa, in the years 1821 and 1822  by Thomas Medwin, published that same year, the author endeavours to "lessen, if not remedy, the evil" of the burning of Byron's memoirs.


text:
The Accidents of Youth (1819)

Apr 15, 2013

Through a series of short stories and wonderful engravings, this book is aimed at keeping young people out of trouble and "calculated to improve [their] moral conduct". As the author declares in his/her brilliantly earnest preface addressed to the child reader of the book:
My Dear Children, The inexperience and thoughtlessness natural at your age exposes you to many dangers : I have therefore pointed out some of them in this book, which contains several instructive little histories, in which you will behold the misfortunes that arise from disobedience and want of thought. When your parents desire you not to climb upon the chairs, or touch the fire, or play with knives, or pins, it is not because they wish to prevent you amusing yourselves ; they are only anxious to keep you from harm. If you were allowed to do whatever you pleased, many accidents would happen through your own indiscretion : for instance, when climbing on the furniture you might fall, and break a leg or an arm; and might burn yourselves, by playing with fire ; or cut your fingers, by playing with knives ; or might swallow pins, in putting them into your mouth. Thus, you see you might often lame or kill yourselves, if your good mamma or papa did not guard most of your actions. Do not suppose, my dear children, that I wish to prevent your playing and taking proper exercise. On the contrary, I am very much amused by your games, though they are sometimes noisy; and I admire your harmless mirth. I wish you to be gay and to amuse yourselves at proper times ; but you should never be rash or disobedient. You can play very well without climbing up to the window, on the furniture, or other improper places. If you see guns, pistols, or other dangerous weapons, you should never touch them, as you may always find play-things more agreeable, and free from danger. Why should you play with a knife or with the fire? and why put things into your mouth, at the risk of poisoning yourselves? These things are forbidden you; and yet your amusement is the wish of your parents. They desire only to see you happy, and guard you against accidents which your own discretion would not avoid. If you are good children, you will pay attention to the advice of your friends, and receive it as a proof of their love.


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Traditional Italian song with Zampogna and Ciaramella (1920)

May 13, 2013

A Zampogna is an Italian bagpipe, and a Ciaramella is a small woodwind that plays the higher melody line over the Zampogna's drone. This combination is often used for traditional Christmas music, as in this circa 1920 recording of a "Novena Di Natale" by uncredited performers.


text:
Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions (1897)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Apr 17, 2013

When the high priest Aaron, older brother of Moses, cast down his staff before Pharaoh in the Old Testament, it suddenly became a serpent. According to Henry Ridgely Evans, who wrote the introduction to Albert A. Hopkins’ Magic (1897) — a massive handbook for amateur magicians and their scientific skeptics — this was a stage illusion, one still performed by contemporary dervishes in Cairo. Aaron’s rod, it turns out, was a serpent all along, “hypnotized to such an extent as to become perfectly stiff and rigid”, and, when thrown to the earth, it was resuscitated with “sundry mystic passes and strokes”. In their attempts to disenchant the mystical, Evans and Hopkins make the real world all the more extraordinary.
The subtitle of this book, “stage illusions and scientific diversions”, speaks to the remarkable exchange that took place between magic and science in the nineteenth century. Many of the tricks written up here first appeared in Scientific American and its French equivalent, La Nature. As Colin Williamson describes, these periodicals “featured regular articles on the demystification of magicians’ illusions alongside reviews of technological innovations in, for example, the automobile, railroad, and aeronautics industries.” And the exchange went both ways. In Magic, Hopkins is attentive to the new kinds of illusions made possible by advances in photography, moving pictures, automata, and fireworks. Eadweard Muybridge’s cabinet cards of horses in motion and Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographic gun are treated as a kind of trick photography, alike in kind to darkroom techniques for producing images of spirits and men shrunk to inhabit bottles. From the other side of things, the special effects of early motion pictures employed by Georges Méliès, Segundo Chomón, and other practitioners of “trick cinema” — superimposition, jump cuts, and such — were initially understood through the vocabulary of stage magic and frequently featured magicians on screen. Hopkins and Evans were writing in a period when film, photography, and other new technologies of representation were still conceptualized as instruments of wonder. Curiously, Magic ends on a discussion of the micromotoscope, a device for projecting subvisual scenes with magic lanterns. The final image in this illustration-rich tome is not of sword swallowing or legerdemain, but of red blood cells imaged at a scale where their miraculous feats become visible to human eyes.
Among the 550 pages of this encyclopedic history of magic, we find tricks that might be familiar to modern-day audiences: conjuring tricks (“The Disappearing Lady”, “The Appearing Lady”, “Decapitation”); optical tricks such as the infinity mirror or “mystic maze”; so-called “theater secrets” (“Siegfried’s Anvil”, “The Skirt Dance”); ventriloquism; and tips for eating fire. More unexpected are performances from the annals of illusion, such as the extended section on chapeaugraphy (the manipulation of hats). In one variation known as Tabarin — named after the “mountebank and quack-salver” who used to perform it on the quays of Paris in the early eighteenth century — a sombrero-like garment is bent rapidly into headwear of various styles. (A video of an 1898 performance is available here.)
More than a guidebook for aspiring wizards, Magic is also a veiled theory of religion. According to Henry Evans, whose introduction performs a kind of historiographical sleight of hand, spiritual miracles, paranormal experiences, and occult occurrences in ancient times point to a forgotten pre-history of modern stage magic. “Weeping and bleeding statues, temple doors that flew open with thunderous sound and apparently by supernatural means, and perpetual lamps that flamed forever in the tombs of holy men”, believes Evans, “were some of the thaumaturgic feats of the Pagan priests.” (Two hundred pages later, in Book II, Hopkins offers detailed schematics of “temple tricks” designed by the Ancient Greeks, discussing Heron of Alexander’s description of the Triumph of Bacchus, a mechanical shrine with self-moving figurines, and the dicaiometer, a jug that magically poured a perfect measure every time.) In the Middle Ages, continues Evans, the frequent reports of phantoms were a by-product of improvements in optics, for magicians with concave mirrors “were able to produce very fair ghost illusions to gull a susceptible public.” Witches burnt at the stake during the Enlightenment, he intimates, may have been magicians fully committed to their trade.
Below you can browse a selection of the extraordinary illustrations contained in this volume.

author: Hunter Dukes


text:
Radical Fashion from the Schembart Carnival (1590)

Apr 11, 2013

Illustrations from a 16th-century manuscript detailing the phenomenon of Nuremberg's Schembart Carnival, (literally "bearded-mask" carnival). Beginning in 1449, the event was popular throughout the 15th century but was ended in 1539 due to the complaints of an influential preacher named Osiander who objected to his effigy being paraded on a float, depicting him playing backgammon surrounded by fools and devils. According to legend, the carnival had its roots in a dance (a "Zämertanz") which the butchers of Nuremberg were given permission to hold by the Emperor as a reward for their loyalty amid a trade guild rebellion. Over the years the event took on a more subversive tone, evolving to let others take part with elaborate costumes displayed and large ships on runners, known as "Hells", which were paraded through the streets. After its end, many richly illustrated manuscripts (known as "Schembartbücher") were made detailing the carnival's 90-year existence.
We are unsure what the flaming "artichokes" are all about, if any one has a clue do let us know in the comments!
UPDATE solved - according to Christies: "They brandished lances and bunches of leaves - known as Lebensrute -- that concealed fireworks."


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The World Turned Upside Down (18th century)

Mar 28, 2013

A series of woodcuts from an 18th-century chapbook entitled The World Turned Upside Down or The Folly of Man, Exemplified in Twelve Comical Relations upon Uncommon Subjects. As well as the amusing woodcuts showing various reversals (many revolving around the inversion of animal and human relations) there is also included a poem on the topic. The chapbook is reproduced in the wonderful Chapbooks of the Eighteenth Century (1882) edited by John Ashton, which brings together hundreds of facsimiles of 18th century chapbooks upon a huge range of subjects.


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Texts in Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn
Text by Adam Green
Apr 23, 2013

At the time of his death in 2001 at the age of 57, the German writer W. G. Sebald was cited by many critics as a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was his book The Rings of Saturn, written in 1995 (translated into English in 1998), which went a long way to securing Sebald's reputation as a writer pioneering a new kind of literary fiction. The book is exemplary of his strange and unique style: the hybridity of genres, the blurring of fact and fiction, the indistinct black and white photographs, and his meditation on the destructive nature of history, the human lives affected, and the restorative power of art.
The book is, on one level, a walking tour through the English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, Sebald's adopted home (he'd taught literature at the UEA there since 1970). The reader moves with the melancholic narrator from town to town, village to village, but in the process - through an astonishing network of associations, tangents, and apparent coincidences - one is led all over the world, into many different times, and many different lives. A ride on a miniature railway at Somerleyton Hall leads to 19th century China and the Taiping Rebellion; a chance meeting with a gardener to the bombing raids of the Second World War; a T.V. documentary on Roger Casement to Joseph Conrad, the Congo and colonial genocide; a browse through the Southwold Sailors' Reading Room to a meditation on wartime statistics and the tragedies wrought by the two world wars. In and amongst these meandering connections recurring motifs of silk, obscuring mists, combustion and burning are woven throughout to create an intricately patterned whole.
Among the many lives of the past encountered is a myriad array of literary figures. Collected together in this post are the major (public domain) texts of which, and through which, Sebald speaks - accompanied by extracts in which the texts are mentioned. The list begins and ends with the great polymath Thomas Browne, an appropriate framing as the work of this 17th century Norfolk native has a presence which permeates the whole book. Indeed, in the way he effortlessly moves through different histories and voices, it is perhaps in Browne's concept of the 'Eternal Present' which Sebald can be seen to operate, in this mysterious community of the living and the dead.
(The works below are shown roughly in order of their appearance in the book. Where possible the English translations of the non-English works are featured, with links to originals given below. The Sebald quotes given are from the brilliant English translation by Michael Hulse, and page numbers from the 1999 paperback Harvill Press edition.)
Thomas Browne, Hydrotophia or Urne Buriall and Garden of Cyrus (1658)
The invisibility and intangibility of that which moves us remained an unfathomable mystery for Thomas Browne, too, who saw our world as no more than a shadow image of another one far beyond.  In his thinking and writing he therefore sought to look upon earthly existence, from the things that were closest to him to the spheres of the universe, with the eye of an outsider, one might even say of the creator.  His only means of achieving the sublime heights that this endeavor required was a parlous loftiness in his language.  In common with other English writers of the seventeenth century, Browne wrote out of the fullness of his erudition, deploying a vast repertoire of quotations and the names of authorities who had gone before, creating complex metaphors and analogies, and constructing labyrinthine sentences that sometimes extend over one or two pages, sentences that resemble processions or a funeral cortège in their sheer ceremonial lavishness.  It is true that, because of the immense weight of the impediments he is carrying, Browne’s writing can be held back by the force of gravitation, but when he does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiralling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air, even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation.  The greater the distance, the clearer the view: one sees the tiniest of details with the utmost clarity.  It is as if one were looking through a reversed opera glass and through a microscope at the same time.  And yet, says Browne, all knowledge is enveloped in darkness.  What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of the world.  We study the order of things, says Browne, but we cannot grasp their innermost essence. - (Pg.18/19)
Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, urne-buriall or, A discourse of the sepulchrall urnes lately found in Norfolk (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co, 1907).

Penguin Classics version of Browne's major works including  Hydrotophia or Urne Buriall and Garden of Cyrus

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857)
Gustave Flaubert was for her by far the finest of writers, and on many occasions she quoted long passages from the thousands of pages of his correspondence, never failing to astound me. Janine had taken an intense personal interest in the scruples which dogged Flaubert's writing, that fear of the false which, she said, sometimes kept him confined to his couch for weeks or months on end in the dread that he would never be able to write another word without compromising himself in the most grievous of ways. Moreover, Janine said, he was convinced that everything he had written hitherto consisted solely in a string of the most abysmal errors and lies, the consequences of which were immeasurable. Janine maintained that the source of Flaubert's scruples was to be found in the relentless spread of stupidity which he had observed everywhere, and which he believed had already invaded his own head. It was (so supposedly once he said) as if one was sinking into sand. This was probably the reason, she said, that sand possessed such significance in all of Flaubert's works. Sand conquered all. Time and again, said Janine, vast dust clouds drifted through Flaubert's dreams by day and by night, raised over the arid plains of the African continent and moving north across the Mediterranean and the Iberian peninsula till sooner or later they settled like ash from a fire on the Tuileries gardens, a suburb of Rouen or a country town in Normandy, penetrating into the tiniest crevices. In a grain of sand in the hem of Emma Bovary's winter gown, said Janine, Flaubert saw the whole of the Sahara. For him, every speck of dust weighed as heavy as the Atlas mountains. - (pg.8).
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: A Tale of Provincial Life (Chicago: Magee, 1904).

Volume 1 and volume 2 of the 1857 first edition in French housed at the Internet Archive.
A highly acclaimed new English translation by Adam Thorpe published by Vintage in 2011.

Brehm's Tierleben (1864-9)
...while on the one hand the study of Nature today aims to describe a system governed by immutable laws, on the other it delights in drawing our attention to creatures noteworthy for their bizarre physical form or behaviour. Even in Brehm's Tierleben, a popular nineteenth-century zoological compendium, pride of place is given to the crocodile and the kangaroo, the ant-eater and the armadillo, the seahorse and the pelican; and nowadays we are shown on the television screen a colony of penguins, say, standing motionless through the long dark winter of the Antarctic, with its icy storms, on their feet the eggs laid at a milder time of year. In programmes of this kind, which are called Nature Watch or Survival and are considered particularly educational, one is more likely to see some monster coupling at the bottom of Lake Baikal than an ordinary blackbird. - (pg.21)
The Animals of the World, Brehm's Life of Animals, translated from the 3rd German ed. as edited by Pechuel-Loesche and W. Haacke, and rev. and abridged by R. Schmidtlein (Chicago: A. N. Marquis, Chicago).

All volumes of the German original of Brehms Tierleben at the Internet Archive.

Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Simplicius Simplicissimus (1669)
Recently I realized that the imaginary beings listed alphabetically in [Borges' Libro de los seres imaginarios] include the creature Baldanders, whom Simplicius Simplicissimus encounters in the sixth book of Grimmelshausen’s narrative. There, Baldanders is first seen as a stone sculpture lying in a forest, resembling a Germanic hero of old and wearing a Roman soldier's tunic with a big Swabian bib. Baldanders claims to have come from Paradise, to have always been in Simplicius’s company, unbeknownst to him, and to be unable to quit his side until Simplicius shall have reverted to the clay he is made of. Then, before the very eyes of Simplicius, Baldanders changes into a scribe... and then into a mighty oak, a sow, a sausage, a piece of excrement, a field of clover, a white flower, a mulberry tree, and a silk carpet. - (pg.23)
Hans Jacob Christoph von Grimmelshausen, The Adventurous Simplicissimus, a translation by Goodrick (London: William Heinemann, 1912).

German version entitled Der Abenteurlicher Simplicius Simplicissimus at the Internet Archive (which includes the 6th book omitted in Goodrick's English version above).

Denis Diderot, Voyage en Hollande (1798)
Diderot, in one of his travel journals, described Holland as the Egypt of Europe, where one might cross the fields in a boat and, as far as the eye could see, there would be scarcely anything to break the flooded surface of the plain. In that curious country, he wrote, the most modest rise gave one the loftiest sensation. And for Diderot there was nothing more satisfying to the human mind than the neat Dutch towns, with their straight, tree-lined canals, exemplary in every respect. Settlement succeeded settlement just as if they had been conjured up overnight by the hand of an artist in accordance with some carefully worked-out plan, wrote Diderot, and even in the heart of the largest of them one still felt one was out in the country. The Hague, at that time with a population of about forty thousand, he felt was the loveliset village on earth, and the road from the town to the strand at Schevenigen a promenade without equal. It was not easy to appreciate these observations as I walked along Parkstraat towards Scheveningen. - (pg.84)
Denis Diderot, Oeuvres inédites: Le neveu de Rameau. Voyage de Hollande (Paris: J. L. J. Brière, 1821).
Algernon Charles Swinburne, By the North Sea (1880)
Dunwich, with its towers and many thousand souls, has dissolved into water, sand and thin air. If you look out from the cliff-top across the sea towards where the town must have been, you can sense the immense power of emptiness. Perhaps it was for this reason that Dunwich became a place of pilgrimage for melancholy poets in the Victorian age. Algernon Charles Swinburne, for instance, went there on several occasions in the 1870s with his companion Theodore Watts-Dunton, whenever the excitement of London literary life threatened to overtax his nerves, which had been hypersensitive since his early childhood. He had achieved legendary fame as a young man, and many a time he had been sent into such impassioned paroxysms by the dazzling conversations on art in the Pre-Raphalite salons, or by the mental strain of composing his own verse and tragedies, overflowing with wonderful poetic bombast, that he could no longer control his own voice and limbs. After these quasi-epileptic fits he often lay prostrate for weeks, and soon, unfitted for general society, he could bear only the company of those who were close to him. Initially he spent the periods of convalescence at the family country estate, but later, ever more frequently, he went to the coast with the trusty Watts-Dunton. Rambles from Southwold to Dunwich, through the windblown fields of sedge, worked like a sedative upon him. A long poem entitled "By The North Sea" was his tribute to the gradual dissolution of life. Like ashes the low cliffs crumble and the banks drop down into the dust. - (pg.84)
The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne (London: Chatto & Windus, 1904).

2001 Penguin Classics collection of Swinburne poems titled Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon.
Read Julian Barnes' essay "An Unlikely Lunch" for The Public Domain Review about Guy Maupassant's eventful meeting with Swinburne on the Normandy coast.

Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in Englsh Verse (1859)
The only task FitzGerald finished and published in his lifetime was his marvellous rendering of the Rubaiyat of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam, with whom he felt a curiously close affinity acorss a distance of eight centuries. FitzGerald described the endless hours he spent translating this poem of two hundred and twenty-four lines as a colloquy with the dead man and an attempt to bring to us tidings of him. The English verses he devised for the purpose, which radiate with a pure, seemingly unselfconscious beauty, feign an anonymity that disdains even the least claim to authorship, and draw us, word by word, to an invisible point where the medieval orient and the fading occident can come together in a way never allowed them by the calamitous course of history. For in and out, above, about, below, / ’Tis nothing but magic Shadow-Show, / play’d in a Box Whose Candle is the Sun, / Round which the Phantom figures come and go. The Rubaiyat was published in 1859, and it was also in that year that William Browne, who probably meant more to FitzGerald than anyone else on earth, died a painful death from serious injuries sustained in a hunting accident. - (pg.200/1)
Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in English Verse (London: H. W. Bell, 1901).
François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe (1859)
It was in Rome in 1806 that he first felt the desire to search the depths of his soul. In 1811, Chateaubriand began this undertaking in earnest, and from that time onwards he devoted himself to his recollections whenever the circumstances of his at once glorious and painful life permitted. His personal feelings and thoughts unfolded against the background of the momentous upheavals of those years: the Revolution, the Reign of Terror, his own exile, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the Restoration and the July Monarchy all were part of this interminable play performed on the world's stage, a play which took its toll on the privileged observer no less than on the nameless masses... Within the overall context of the task of remembering, such colorful accounts of military spectacles and large-scale operations form what might be called the highlights of history which staggers blindly from one disaster to the next.  The chronicler, who was present at these events and is once more recalling what he witnessed, inscribes his experiences, in an act of self-mutilation, onto his own body.  In the writing, he becomes the martyred paradigm of the fate Providence has in store for us, and, though still alive, is already in the tomb that his memoirs represent. - (pg.200/1)
Memoirs of Chateaubriand, Vol 1 (London: Henry Colburn, 1848).

French versions of Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe at the Internet Archive.
The 1961 Robert Baldrick English translation <a href="The Memoirs of Chateaubriand.
HTML online and hyperlinked English version, translated by A.S. Kline.

Thomas Browne, Musaeum Clausum (1684)
Amongst the miscellaneous papers left by Sir Thomas Browne... there is also to found a catalogue of remarkable books, listing pictures, antiquities and sundry singular items that may have formed part of a collection put together by Browne but were more likely products of his imagination, the inventory of a treasure house that existed purely in his head and to which there is no access except through the letters on the page. - (pg.200/1)
Thomas Browne, Certain Miscellany Tracts (London: Henry Bonwick, 1684).

Read Claire Preston's excellent article "Lost Libraries" for The Public Domain Review, which explores Musaeum Clausum amid the wider context of a Renaissance preoccupation with lost intellectual treasures.


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Jelly Roll Morton (1927)

Apr 19, 2013

A compilation of Jelly Roll Morton's classic Chicago "Red Hot Peppers" sessions, recorded in 1926-27. Jelly Roll Morton - ragtime and early jazz pianist, bandleader and composer from New Orleans, Louisiana - started out his musical career playing brothels as a teenager, then toured the American South as part of a minstrel show, before settling in Chicago where he started to write songs. Widely recognized as a pivotal figure in early jazz, Morton is perhaps most notable as jazz's first arranger, proving that a genre rooted in improvisation could retain its essential spirit and characteristics when notated. In 1915, his composition "Jelly Roll Blues" became the first ever published jazz composition. Morton is also notable for naming and popularizing the "Spanish tinge" (habanera rhythm and tresillo), and for writing such standards as "Wolverine Blues", "Black Bottom Stomp", and "I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say", the latter a tribute to New Orleans personalities from the turn of the 19th century to 20th century. (Wikipedia)


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A Pack of Cavalier Playing Cards (1886)

Mar 26, 2013

A facsimile with explanations of a "very curious Pack of Cards" which used to belong to Lord Nelson and date from around 1660. The cards feature various satirical allusions to the politics of the time - namely the English Civil War and the following Interregnum - and, along with the explanations given, form (as the subtitle announces) "a complete political satire of the commonwealth".


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Sketches by Yoshitoshi (1882)

Mar 21, 2013

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892) is widely recognized as the last great master of Ukiyo-e, a type of Japanese woodblock printing (literally meaning "pictures of the floating world"). He is additionally regarded as one of the form's greatest innovators. His career spanned two eras – the last years of Edo period Japan, and the first years of modern Japan following the Meiji Restoration. This series of coloured woodblock prints was produced in 1882. (Wikipedia)


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Through the Eye to the Heart: Bible Symbols (1908 edition)

May 7, 2013

Frank Beard (1842–1905) led many lives before designing hieroglyphic bibles. A successful political cartoonist by the age of seventeen, he drew one of the most widely reproduced Civil War satires, and was hailed as “the father of the American cartoon” by the Los Angeles Times in 1895. Deaf since childhood, he became a sought-after raconteur, famous for delivering “chalk talks”, lectures illustrated by rapidly drawn visuals. Touring the nation, his “sparkling, genial discourse about the mysteries of picture-making” — as a contemporary brochure described the act — entranced audiences almost as much as his lightning-quick pen. As he aged, politics gave way to an interest in religious education, and his belief in the transparency of visual communication led him to illustrate bibles in a pictographic idiom.
Beard’s first foray into this artform was Picture Puzzles, or, How to Read the Bible by Symbols (1899), followed by the more traditionally illustrated One Hundred Sermon Pictures (1902), and several editions of the volume on display above, Bible Symbols (first published in 1904). He did not invent the hieroglyphic bible — rather, Bible Symbols numbers among the last of this type of book to achieve widespread popularity. According to Benjamin Lindquist, who has written the definitive article on Beard’s life, the earliest known specimen dates to 1687, produced in Augsburg, Germany. As Egyptomania increasingly preoccupied the American mind in the nineteenth century, hieroglyphic bibles became one of the most popular forms of religious literature. The texts and images in Bible Symbols work like a rebus, mixing icons and scripture to provide multimedia access to the word of God. There is an impulse toward the universal here — in a corrupt and fallen world, a new visual language might help recover what was lost when Babel crumbled — and a pedagogic aspect, too. Employed in this way, images become mnemonics, and slow down the eye to inspire deeper contemplation, richer access. Despite questing after timeless truths, Beard was also a fallible man of his era. A hieroglyph of Native Americans stands in for “barbarous people”; a tableau that seemingly connotes “belief” shows people of color crouching before a white missionary. Pictures, just like words, bear a trace of their creator.
For another use of the rebus technique in a different religious context, see our post on Buddhist sutras for the illiterate.


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Texts in Mathias Enard’s Compass

Apr 26, 2017

I calmly listen to this distant melody, I look, from high up, at all these men, all these souls still walking around us: who was Liszt, who was Berlioz, who was Wagner and all the people they knew, Musset, Lamartine, Nerval, an immense network of texts, notes and images, clear, precise, a path visible by me alone that links old Hammer-Purgstall to a whole world of travellers, musicians, poets, that links Beethoven to Balzac, to James Morier, to Hofmannsthal, to Strauss, to Mahler, and to the sweet smoke of Istanbul and Tehran…
So reports Franz Ritter, the narrator of Mathias Enard’s latest novel Compass, ostensibly describing the imaginative vantage point given by his first taste of opium. He could, however, equally be describing Enard’s project throughout this extraordinary book, recently translated into English by Charlotte Mandell, and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK and New Directions in the US. Compass takes place over the course of one night, as the insomniac, and possibly mortally ill, musicologist Ritter reflects on the history of Orientalism. Or perhaps it would be better to say he refracts, taking the ideas and stories of writers and thinkers who came before him and organising them into new patterns. It is a tapestry of other texts, anecdotes, and pieces of music: many of which are today in the public domain. So, as we did previously with W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, we thought we’d share some of the original texts with you, next to Mathias Enard’s (that is to say, Franz Ritter’s) meditations on them.
If Compass has a thesis, it might be that the Orient is a co-constructed imaginative realm, one built by the "East" and "West" in tandem, and with boundaries, both psychological and geographical, which are ever-shifting and porous. Ritter’s stream-of-consciousness is steeped in the voices of people for whom the Orient truly meant something, and his mind often roams in a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century world revolutionized by the meeting of East and West: "this exoticism had meaning… over all of Europe the wind of alterity blows, all these great men use what comes to them from the Other to modify the Self, to bastardize it, for genius wants bastardy…" These literary echoes throughout Compass, then, are more than just name-dropping: they indicate that the cosmopolitan mind is teeming with cultural referents, permeable and open to influence from without. It is this cosmopolitanism which Enard celebrates.
Note: Franz Ritter is, as already noted, a musicologist, and Enard mentions many musicians whose work we haven’t linked to here, because most good recordings are still within copyright. But we would recommend these as a good soundtrack to your reading: Shahram Nazeri, Giuseppe Verdi, Gustav Mahler, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Pal Esterhazy, Arvo Part, Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz, August von Adelburg Abramovic, Karol Szymanowski, Felicien David, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann, Georges Bizet, Franz Schubert.
The works featured below are in the order in which they appear in the book. Where possible the English translations of the non-English works are featured, with links to originals given below. The dates in the subheadings refer to the first publication of the original text, or translation if that is the primary focus. The Enard quotes are from the English translation by Charlotte Mandell, and page numbers from the rather fetching edition from Fitzcarraldo Editions, which came out earlier this year.
The Work of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856)
…Hainfeld, the home of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, first great Austrian Orientalist, translator of the Thousand and One Nights and of Hafez’s Divan, historian of the Ottoman Empire, friend of Silvestre de Sacy and of anyone that the little band of Orientalists counted as members at the time, designated sole heir of a very aged Styrian aristocrat who had bequeathed him her title and this castle in 1835, the largest Wasserschloss in the region; Hammer-Purgstall, teacher of Friedrich Rückert, to whom he taught Persian in Vienna, and with whom he translated extracts from Rumi’s Divan-e Shams, a link between a forgotten château in Styria and the Kindertotenlieder, which joins Mahler to the poetry of Hafez and the Orientalists of the nineteenth century. (p. 36)
The History of the Assassins: Derived from Oriental Sources, by Joseph Hammer-Purgstall, translated by Oswald Charles Wood; 1835; London, Smith and Elder.
See other works by Joseph Hammer-Purgstall, in the original German and translations into other languages, here at the Internet Archive and at Project Gutenberg.
Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (1872)
Did you know that Hainfeld castle also houses monsters and wonders? Of course it’s the home of Hammer-Purgstall the Orientalist, but it’s also the place that inspired Sheridan Le Fanu to write his novel Carmilla, the first vampire story that would make British high society tremble, decades before Dracula… Sheridan Le Fanu spent an entire winter in Hainfeld, a few years before Hammer-Purgstall the Orientalist moved there; Carmilla is inspired by a true story, she says: Count Purgstall did indeed take in one of his orphan relatives named Carmilla, who immediately struck up a profound friendship with his daughter Laura, as if they had always known each other – very soon, they became intimate; they shared secrets and passions. Laura began to dream about fantastic animals that visited her at night, kissed her and caressed her; sometimes, in these dreams, they transformed into Carmilla, until finally Laura wondered if Carmilla was actually a man in disguise, which would explain her agitation. Laura fell ill with a wasting disease that no doctor managed to cure, until the Count heard tell of a similar case, a few miles away: several years before, a young woman died, two round holes in the upper part of her throat, victim of the vampire Millarca Karnstein. Carmilla is none other than the anagram and reincarnation of Millarca; she is the one sucking out Laura’s vitality – the Count would have to kill her and send her back to the grave by a terrifying ritual. (pp. 41 / 43)
"Carmilla" in Volume 3 of In a Glass Darkly,
by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu; 1872; London, R. Bentley.
See also Ebook and other formats at Project Gutenberg.
The Collection of Antiquities by Honoré de Balzac (1838)
…Balzac, who in theory felt passionate only about the French and their customs, writing a text on opium – one of his first published texts, at that. Balzac, the first French novelist to include a text in Arabic in one of his novels! Balzac the native of Tours who becomes friends with Hammer-Purgstall the great Austrian Orientalist, even dedicating one of his books to him, The Cabinet of Antiquities. (p. 98)
"The Collection of Antiquities" in The Jealousies of a Country Town, by Honoré de Balzac, translated by Ellen Marriage; 1899; Philadelphia, The Gebbie Publishing Co.
See also Ebook and other formats at Project Gutenberg.
Things Seen by Victor Hugo (1899)
Victor Hugo the Oriental relates the dying agony of Balzac in Things Seen: M. de Balzac was in his bed, he says, his head resting on a pile of pillows to which they had added red Damascus cushions borrowed from the bedroom sofa. His face was purple, almost black, leaning to the right, beard unshaven, hair grey and cut short, eyes open and staring. An unbearable odour emanated from the bed. Hugo lifted the blanket and took Balzac’s hand. It was covered in sweat. He squeezed it. Balzac did not respond to the pressure. An old woman – standing guard – and a male servant stood on either side of the bed. A candle was burning on a table behind the head of the bed, another on a commode near the door. A silver vase was placed on the bedside table. The man and the woman remained silent with a kind of terror, listening to the dying man groaning noisily, Mme Hanska had gone back to her room, no doubt because she couldn’t bear her husband’s death rattle, his agony: Hugo relates all sorts of horrors about the abscess on Balzac’s leg, which had been lanced a few days before. (p. 117)
Things Seen: Essays by Victor Hugo; Boston, Estes and Lauriat.
Original French version entitled Choses Vues at the Internet Archive and Wikisource.
Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope, as Related by Herself in Conversations with her Physician by Charles Lewis Meryon (1845).
Our camp was much more spartan than those of the explorers of old: they say that Lady Hester Stanhope, first queen of Tadmor, proud English adventuress with steely morals, whose wealth and health the Orient sucked away until her death in 1839 in a village in the Lebanese mountains, needed seven camels to carry her equipment, and that the tent where she received the emirs of the land was by far the most sumptuous in all of Syria; legend has it that, along with her chamber pot (the only indispensable accessory in the desert, she said), the niece of William Pitt transported a gala dinner to Palmyra, a royal dinner where the most refined china and place settings were taken out of the trunks, to the great surprise of the guests; all the sheikhs and emirs in the land were dazzled by Lady Hester Stanhope, they say. (pp. 166–167)
Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope, as Related by Herself in Conversations with her Physician, by Charles Lewis Meryon; 1846; London, Henry Colburn.
See also Volume Two and Volume Three at the Internet Archive.
The Thousand and One Nights, as translated into French by Joseph-Charles Mardrus (1904)
Mardrus translated the entirety of The Thousand and One Nights at sea; he grew up in Cairo, studied medicine in Beirut, Arabic was so to speak his native language, that’s the big advantage he has over us western-born Orientalists, all that time spent learning the language that he saved. The discovery of the Nights in Mardrus’ translation provoked a wave of adaptations, imitations, continuations of the masterpiece, just like fifty years earlier with Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales, Rückert’s poems or Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan. This time people thought it was the Orient itself that breathed its force, its eroticism, its exotic power directly into turn-of-the-century art; they loved the sensuality, the violence, the pleasure, the adventures, the monsters and djinns, they copied them, commented on them, multiplied them; they thought they could finally see, without any intermediary, the true face of the eternal and mysterious Orient: but in fact it’s the Orient of Mardrus, still a reflection, another Third-Orient… (p. 232)
Le Livre des milles nuits et une nuit, Vol. 15, translated by Joseph-Charles Mardrus; 1904; Paris, Librairie Charpentier et Fasquelle.
Featured above is the fifteenth and final volume of Mardrus' translation. See scans of the others here at the Internet Archive, though be warned they are courtesy of Google and so are a little lacking in quality, including whole missing portions of pages.
For a public domain translation in English we recommend that by Richard Burton.
The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer (1818)
Wagner read Schopenhauer’s The World As Will and Representation in September 1854, just when he was starting to imagine Tristan and Isolde. There is a chapter on love in The World As Will and Representation. Schopenhauer never loved anyone as much as his dog Atma, a Sanskritish dog with the name of the soul. They say that Schopenhauer named his dog as sole heir, I wonder if that’s true… I don’t much remember Schopenhauer’s theories on love any more. I think he separates love as illusion linked to sexual desire on the one hand and universal love, compassion, on the other. I wonder what Wagner made of it. There must be hundreds of pages written on Schopenhauer and Wagner and I haven’t read any. Sometimes life is hopeless. (p. 249)
The World as Will and Idea, by Arthur Schopenhauer; 1909; London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.
Ebook and other formats for the English translation at Project Gutenberg.
Original German versions at the Internet Archive.
Judaism in Music by Richard Wagner (1869)
Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, sworn enemies of Wagner, especially Meyerbeer, object of all Wagner’s hatred, a terrifying hatred… Wagner wasn’t without his contradictions: in his Judaism in Music, he insults Meyerbeer, the same Meyerbeer he had buttered up for years, the same Meyerbeer he dreamed of imitating, the same Meyerbeer who helped him put on Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman…Richard Wagner did not measure up to his work; he was hypocritical, like all anti-Semites. But Wagner is not stupid, hence he is operating in bad faith. He is aware that his statements are idiotic. It’s his hatred speaking. He is blinded by his hatred, as he will be by his wife Cosima Liszt during the re-publication of his pamphlet, this time under his own name, twenty years later. Wagner is a criminal. A criminal full of hate. (p. 296)
Judaism in Music, by Richard Wagner, translated by Edwin Evans; 1910; London, W. Reeves.
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translated by Edward Fitzgerald (1859)
Khayyam, propelled by Edward FitzGerald’s translation, invaded literary Europe; the forgotten mathematician from the province of Khorassan became a leading European poet in 1870. Sarah explained Omar Khayyam’s immense worldwide fame by the universal simplicity of the quatrain form, first of all, and then by the diversity of the corpus: by turns atheist/agnostic or Muslim/hedonist or contemplative lover/inveterate drunkard or mystical drinker, the scholar from Khorassan, as he appears in a thousand or so quatrains that are attributed to him, has something to please everyone… (pp. 409-410).
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in English verse by Edward Fitzgerald; 1901; London, H.W. Bell.


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Alexander Graham Bell’s Tetrahedral Kites (1903–9)
Text by Adam Green
Jun 19, 2017

Although best known for developing the practical telephone — for which he became the first, in 1876, to secure a US patent — the Scottish-born inventor Alexander Graham Bell is also noted for his work in aerodynamics, a rather more photogenic endeavour perhaps, as evidenced by the wonderful imagery documenting his experiments with tetrahedral kites. The series of photographs depict Bell and his colleagues demonstrating and testing out a number of different kite designs, all based upon the tetrahedral structure, to whose pyramid-shaped cells Bell was drawn as they could share joints and spars and so crucially lessen the weight-to-surface area ratio.
The juxtaposition of the era's expected array of suits and somewhat stilted poses, with the stark geometry of these complex abstract structures — which at times look as if born from some new mathematics of a future or alien civilisation — often lend the images a touch of the uncanny, almost anachronistic. This is particularly so in some of the offerings from the National Geographic, painting onto the photographs as they have to emphasise even more the crisp lines and geometric shapes of the unusual structures.
Bell began his experiments with tetrahedral box kites in 1898, eventually developing elaborate structures comprised of multiple compound tetrahedral kites covered in maroon silk, constructed with the aim of carrying a human through the air. Named Cygnet I, II, and III (for they took off from water) these enormous tetrahedral beings were flown both unmanned and manned during a five year period from 1907 until 1912.
The delightful images below have mainly been sourced from three places: Bell's own private journals, which meticulously log his progress not only with text but also with numerous photographs pasted into the pages (from 1903–104); a couple of articles (from 1903 and 1907) in the National Geographic Magazine; and the Bulletin of his Aerial Experiment Association, which he led from its beginning in 1907 until it disbanded in 1909.


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Photographs of Sea Stars (1917)
Text by Adam Green
May 24, 2017

These strangely alluring images are from a report by Ludwig Heinrich Philipp Döderlein (1855–1936), a German zoologist who specialized in sea stars, sea urchins, and crinoids. Although Döderlein is best known for his study of marine life in Japan, where he was one of the very first European naturalists to work, from 1879 to 1881, these starfish are actually from the waters around Indonesia, collected during the Siboga Expedition, 1899–1900. Taken upon a surface of black, the images seem to render the name of "starfish" / "sea star" all the more appropriate — almost as though the stars of a night sky, under a human gaze, have exploded enlarged into biological beings.


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The Maps of Matrakçı Nasuh, Ottoman Polymath

May 9, 2017

In addition to his important writings in the fields of both mathematics and history, the Bosnian-born polymath and all-round genius Matrakçı Nasuh is best known for his exquisite miniatures depicting various landscapes and urban centres of 16th-century Persia. The images can be found spread across his four historic volumes, with perhaps the most important being Fetihname-i Karabuğdan — now at the library of Istanbul University — which addresses Suleiman the Magnificent's Safavid War of 1532–1555. In the work Matrakçı Nasuh illustrates the cities encountered by the Ottoman army as they marched from Istanbul to Baghdad, then Tabriz (pictured above), and the return journey through Halab and Eskisehir.
The name Matrakçı was not, in fact, his name by birth but rather a nickname referring to his invention of a kind of military lawn game called matrak (a word which means "cudgel" or "mace", the main weapon at the heart of the game). The name stuck, and later would come to label its very own genre in Ottoman miniature art, the "Matrakçı style", describing works echoing his penchant for detail and precision of execution, perhaps nowhere better encapsulated than in the famous image of Istanbul from 1536, the last image featured below.


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Book of French Textile Samples (1863)

May 30, 2017

This delightful book features a collection of nineteenth-century textile samples — in the form of watercolour copies — from the Robert Maison company (about which we couldn't find too much, apart from the fact they were based in Paris). The scanned copy of the book presented here bears the marks of its years, not just in the notes and revisions left by a previous owner (or creator?), but also, on occasion, in more substantial though accidental changes to the designs. Over the decades some of the bolder patterns have imprinted themselves upon their lighter counterparts sat on the opposite page, the two becoming unintentionally combined to create a series of fine new designs.
Find below some of our highlights. For more design goodness from times gone by check out also  our posts on Shin-Bijutsukai, a Japanese design magazine from 1902, and Examples of Chinese Ornament from 1867.


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Images from the First Colour Publication on Fish (1754)

Apr 4, 2017

Originally published in 1719, with a second edition in 1754, Poissons, Ecrevisses et Crabes can lay claim to being the earliest known publication in colour on fish — in this case, celebrating those hailing from the waters of the East Indies. This wonderful book is the creation of Louis Renard — a publisher, bookseller, and spy for the British Crown (employed by Queen Anne, George I and George II). This latter role, which saw him help guarantee the Protestant succession to the throne by denying James Stuart supplies, was not particularly secret and it seems Renard used the fact to add some intrigue to his books. This work, for example, is actually dedicated to George I, and the title-page describes the publisher as "Louis Renard, Agent de Sa Majesté Britannique".
All in all, across the two volumes, the book contains 100 plates bearing 460 hand-coloured engravings — a total of 415 fishes, 41 crustaceans, two stick insects, a dugong and, in a final foldout, a solitary mermaid. The engravings were supposedly based on drawings from life by the artist Samuel Fallours (active 1703–20) which belonged to Baltazar Coyett, Governor of Ambon and Banda (1694–1706), and to Mr Van der Stael, Governor of the Molucca Islands. There is no main text as such, only that found in and amongst the images, which tends to be anecdotal, mainly focusing on recipes as opposed to science.
If the illustrations are breathtaking to us now, with all the hours of David Attenborough documentaries under our belts, one can only imagine the impact this would have had on a European audience of the eighteenth century, to which the exotic ocean life of the East would have been virtually unknown. Even for today's most learned pescatologist, however, many of the illustrations might give some cause for surprise. Produced in two volumes, the images in the first part tend to be fairly realistic, but many in the second stray somewhat into the realms of fantasy, despite Renard's ardent claims of authenticity. As Glasgow University Library explains, "many of the fish bear no similarity to any living creatures. Inaccuracies are found in the addition of small human faces, suns, moons and stars to the flanks of fishes and the carapaces of crabs. It would also seem that colours were applied in a rather arbitrary fashion."  It's the expressive faces and outlandish colours, in particular, which give so many of the fish a cartoon-like quality, almost as though cast portraits from some sassy ocean-based animation.
In 2010, Taschen published Samuel Fallours: Tropical Fishes of the East Indies, which features Samuel Fallours' original illustrations. See also a post about Renard's book on the Biodiversity Heritage Library blog.


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The Burning Stable (1896)

Apr 27, 2017

A remarkable short, seemingly of the "actuality" genre, showing a stable on fire with horses being rescued and humans fleeing. Apart from the fact that it comes from the Edison studio, and according to the LOC catalogue is produced by James H. White with William Heise on camera, very little is known about the film. Is it a real fire, as it appears to be? If so, how did the film crew get to the scene so quickly? At this time Edison Studios were in fierce competition with Biograph and were in the habit of ripping off the latter's films. A few months earlier Biograph released Stable on Fire (1896), supposedly pretty much identical in terms of content. Although fires and fire crews were very popular subjects at that time the coincidence seems strange. This, together with what appears to be a vaguely suspicious jump around the 22 second mark, and the highly suspicious presence of the camera at just the right moment, seems to point to it almost certainly being staged. If any one knows any better please do share your thoughts in the comments.


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Arcimboldo-esque Composite Portraits of Trades (ca. 1800)

Apr 18, 2017

Lovely aquatint print from the London-based publisher Samuel William Fores in which are depicted four composite portraits for the professions of florist, writer, musician, and barber — their features made up entirely from the tools of their trades. Such composite portraits, in which human figures are comprised completely of objects, were pioneered several centuries earlier by the 16th-century Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Although the metamorphosis didn't extend as far as the human body itself, a mention should also go to the following century's Nicolas de Larmessin and his series depicting tradesmen clad in outfits comprised of their related objects.
The title of "Hieroglyphics" is also worth a note. If, indeed, the print dates from around 1800, then it would place the image soon after the discovery in 1799 of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon's troops during their invasion of Egyptian — and so at a time when the idea of hieroglyphs would have been very much in the air. Still, the title seems strange in relation to our current understanding of the word as denoting a system of writing in which pictures are used instead of words. In the case of the above image, it as though the act of replacement itself is enough, be it a word or a swathe of face, it does not matter — the whole world seen as renderable in a landscape of objects.


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Growing Things: A Film Lesson in “Nature Study” (1928)

May 18, 2017

Gardening lessons from the late 1920s, centring on the cultivation of beans, including some wonderful time-lapse footage and inter-titles to match.


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The Wise Boys: or, The Entertaining Histories of Fred Forethought, Matt Merrythought, Luke Lovebook and Ben Bee (ca. 1842)

Mar 30, 2017

This collection of poetic stories — championing the exemplary boyhood behaviour of Fred, Matt, Luke, and Ben — is the work of the American poet Sarah Josepha Buell Hale. Like many female poets of her time Hale often turned her talents to penning verse for children, including, most famously, the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb" which was part of her 1830 collection Poems for Our Children.
As regards her output aimed at adults, in 1823 she published a collection of her poems The Genius of Oblivion, and four years later, a novel about slavery titled Northwood: Life North and South, making her one of the first novelists to broach the subject (as well as one of the first ever American woman authors). From 1837, for the next four decades, she was editor of the hugely influential Godey's Lady's Book, retiring aged 90 in 1877, the same year the lines of her "Mary Had a Little Lamb" became the first ever recorded speech after Thomas Edison spoke them into his newly invented phonograph. As well as many other novels and poetry collections, Hale can also lay claim, after a 17-year campaign including letters written to five Presidents, to being the person most responsible for making Thanksgiving a national holiday in the United States.
Hale wore black for most of her adult life as a sign of perpetual mourning for her firstborn son David who died aged seven. It is a sadness reflected in the history of the particular copy of The Wise Boys featured here, which bears on its front endpapers the following inscription: "This book was the property of William Turner Clarke younger brother of Amanda F. Todd. He died at the age of nine years".


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Public and Private Life of Animals (1877)

May 23, 2017

This collection of acerbic animal fables, originally published in 1842 as Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, boasts among its contributors some of the finest literary minds of mid 19th-century France, including Honoré de Balzac, George Sand, and the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel (under the pseudonym of P. J. Stahl). The book is also home to some of the finest work (some featured below) by the caricaturist J. J. Grandville, drawings in which we can see the satirical genius and inventiveness that would be unleashed in full glory just two years later with the publication of his wonderful Un autre monde.


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John McCormack - Recordings: 1911-1940

Mar 17, 2017

John McCormack (1884–1945) was an Irish tenor renowned for lending his superior diction and breath control to a whole range of operatic and popular song repertoires, including a number of traditional ballads from Ireland. Born in Athlone, County Westmeath, in 1884, McCormack's early musical studies came through his membership of Dublin's Pro-Cathedral Palestrina Choir, and in 1903 he won the prestigious Tenor Award at the annual festival Feis Ceoil. In March of the following year, McCormack became associated with a certain James Joyce, who had dreams of becoming a singer himself. In his biography of Joyce, Richard Ellmann states that "Joyce spent several evenings with him" practising, and the writer was convinced to enter the competition that year (he came third, the Irish Daily Independent stating that he "showed himself possessed of the finest quality voice of any of those competing”). You can read more about McCormack and Joyce's friendship here.


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The Flower of Battle: Italian Fighting Manual (ca. 1410)
Text by Adam Green
Jun 1, 2017

Much as a denizen of the 21st century might turn to YouTube demonstrations or tailored smartphone apps in order to learn or hone certain skills, so the autodidact of the Medieval and Renaissance period would have turned to how-to-guides such as this fine example from early 15th-century Italy — Il Fior di Battaglia (The Flower of Battle). From The Getty, where the one of the copies is held:
This manuscript by the greatest fencing-master of the late 1300s, Fiore Furlan dei Liberi da Premariacco, instructs the reader in the intricacies of combat. Lively illustrations of charging horses and armored knights accompany the text. Through words and pictures, the manuscript teaches a variety of fighting techniques including single combat on foot with sword, dagger, and ax, and also mounted combat in all its variations. Nicolò III d'Este, ruler of Ferrara, ordered at least three copies of this text, including this one. Nicolò's interest in such a manual was quite natural, since fighting played an important role in the education of young nobleman, and he himself was raising three sons.
As noted above there are a few different versions of this work, Wikipedia offering an impressively detailed account of each (as well as of the life of Fiore Furlan dei Liberi da Premariacco). Here's what it has to say about the code of gold crown and garter seen throughout.
The format of instruction is largely consistent across all copies of the treatise. Each section begins with a group of Masters (or Teachers), figures in golden crowns who each demonstrate a particular guard for use with their weapon. These are followed by a master called "Remedio" (remedy) who demonstrates a defensive technique against some basic attack (usually how to use one of the listed guards to defend), and then by his various Scholars (or Students), figures wearing golden garters on their legs who demonstrate iterations and variations of this remedy. After the scholars there is typically a master called "Contrario" (counter), wearing both crown and garter, who demonstrates how to counter the master's remedy (and those of his scholars), who is likewise sometimes followed by his own scholars in garters. In rare cases, a fourth type of master appears called "Contra-Contrario" (counter-counter), who likewise wears the crown and garter and demonstrates how to defeat the master's counter. Some sections feature multiple master remedies or master counters, while some have only one. There are also many cases in which an image in one manuscript will only feature a scholar's garter where the corresponding image in another also includes a master's crown. Depending on the instance, this may either be intentional or merely an error in the art.
Below are some selected highlights from the Getty's 80+ page version, including the lovely final page. Appearing after the last section on mounted combat, we are shown two horses, in a closing moment of calm, tethered quietly to a tree.
More detailed information on Fiore Furlan dei Liberi's work can be found here on this dedicated site, including an English translation of the text found in this Getty version.


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Scenes from Rip Van Winkle (1903)

Apr 12, 2017

Recording made for Colombia Records in which the legendary actor Joseph Jefferson plays the part of Rip Van Winkle, the role for which he had gained worldwide renown. Although this was not Jefferson's first venture into recording — he'd recorded for Berliner Gramophone Company in the previous decade — it was by far his most successful. If you'd like to add some visuals to the audio then check out Jefferson playing the part in the first film adaptation of Washington Irving’s short story in which a man awakes after a twenty-year long sleep to a huge white beard on his face and a much changed world.


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Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote (1867)

May 10, 2017

From whole multi-paragraph excerpts to single lines, this wonderful little book dedicates itself, as the title declares, to presenting the "wit and wisdom" to be found in Miguel de Cervantes' masterpiece Don Quixote. As the preface states, the translator and compiler of the book (a woman named Emma Thompson, or at least so a handwritten note on the title-page to this copy proclaims) very much situates the work in the apparently very Spanish penchant for proverbs. The book is not grouped into distinct sections, each addressing a particular theme, as one might expect publishers to insist on today. Instead, we are faced with an appropriately chaotic and meandering presentation of the unique mind of the "Knight of the Rueful Countenance" — one which offers up such enigmatic treats as "Gifts are good after Easter" and such sage advice as "The bow cannot remain always bent, and relaxation, both of body and mind, is indispensable to all."


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The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)

Apr 11, 2017

In August 1823, the writer James Hogg published a letter in the Edinburgh-based Blackwood’s Magazine (see below); the readers of the magazine would probably have known Hogg as a poet and novelist, but this strange letter would have been hard to place. Was it a genuine anecdote? Or a fiction? The letter was titled "A Scots Mummy" and in it, Hogg tells the story of a suicide that had happened a century earlier, seemingly assisted by the Devil himself, and the recent re-discovery of the body which seemed not to have decayed at all. Presented as a curiosity, which the author had not confirmed first-hand but believed was true, the story could have stood alone as a Gothic curio.
In fact, it was an ingenious piece of pre-publicity by a writer engaged in a metafictional game with his readers. The following year, Hogg anonymously published The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, in which the details of the story were retold, using the letter in the narrative. In the book, the letter is attributed to James Hogg, whose testimony is doubted by the supposed editor of Justified Sinner. This inserting of Hogg himself and the "real world" into the text, gives the supposed memoirs a tinge of authenticity, and is a classic postmodern gesture before the term had any meaning.
An early example of both crime writing and metafiction, Justified Sinner was sorely neglected for a century until the French writer André Gide got his hands on a copy and declared it a masterpiece. The plot still grips today. Two brothers grow up raised by different men: George becomes a nice, rounded young man untroubled by serious intellect, Robert grows into fiercely intelligent and fervently religious Calvinist. The two don’t meet in childhood, but attend the same university. Robert insists on following George around and tormenting him, until eventually George dies in mysterious circumstances. This section of the tale, narrated by the aforementioned "editor", is gothic and strange, but nevertheless holds true to reality. The second half of the book, presented as the "Private Memoirs and Confessions" of Robert, retells the same narrative but from the point of view of the zealous brother. He tells of falling under the influence of a shape-shifting being thought variously to be his doppelgänger, the Devil, and the Czar of Russia. The two halves taken together make up one of the most strikingly original novels in the English language.
As a sidenote, Hogg’s grandfather was supposedly the last man to be speaking terms with the fairies of the Border Country, and the Nobel prize winner Alice Munro is a direct descendent of him. Quite the family.


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What Became of the Slaves on a Georgia Plantation? (1863)

Mar 21, 2017

One of the richest Americans of the mid 19th-century was a man by the name of Pierce Mease Butler — grandson and heir to the colossal fortune of Major Pierce Butler, a United States Founding Father and amongst the largest slaveholders of his time. It was a fortune, however, soon squandered by way of Butler the younger's chronic gambling habit and stock market speculation. In 1856, a group of trustees was put in charge of his financial assets in an attempt to return him to solvency. After a few years selling off various properties, and unable to raise enough, they decided to sell the “movable property” — the slaves from his Georgia plantation. The sale of approximately 436 men, women, children, and infants took place over the course of two days at the Ten Broeck Race Course, two miles outside of Savannah, Georgia, on March 2nd and 3rd, 1859. It was the largest single slave auction in United States history, earning it the moniker of "The Great Slave Auction". Amongst the slaves and their descendants it also went by another, more evocative name, "The Weeping Time" — an allusion to the incessant rains that poured from start to finish, seen as heaven weeping, and also, no doubt, to the tears of the families ripped apart. Although the organisers said they'd not break up families, it soon proved a hollow promise. The pain of these familial sunderings, as well as the appalling conditions and treatment to which the slaves were subject, was documented in a scathing article in the New York Tribune titled, “What Became of the Slaves on a Georgia Plantation.” The work of Mortimer Thomson, a popular journalist of the time, writing under the pseudonym “Q. K. Philander Doesticks”, the piece was published as a stand alone pamphlet in 1863 (featured above). The subtitle "A Sequel to Mrs Kemble's Journal", refers to the book penned by Fanny Kemble, a noted British actress and wife to Pierce Mease Butler (though divorced by the time of the auction), who produced one of the most detailed accounts of a slave plantation in her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839.
As The Atlantic notes in an excellent article about the auction:
The event wasn't just notable because of the size of the auction. In 1859 the country was on the verge of a national bloodbath, and the historic threads that weave through the story of the Weeping Time are so far-reaching and remarkable, it's perplexing that more hasn't been written or remembered about this time.


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Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812)
Text by Adam Green
Jun 13, 2017

This poem, which imagines a future Britain in a state of ruin following the Napoleonic Wars, was received so viciously upon its publication as to effectively end prematurely the career of its creator Anna Laetitia Barbauld, one of the day's foremost female literary figures. Following her death in 1825, the subsequent damage done to her reputation contributed to her being largely forgotten by literary history, only to be "rediscovered" in the 1970s and 80s with the advent of feminist literary criticism. Her controversial poem somewhat presciently paints the picture of a Britain in decline, eclipsed by the rising might of America. She aligns this decline not only with an unhealthy obsession with commercial wealth but also directly with participation in the Napoleonic Wars, which at the time of writing Britain was on the verge of losing.
And think'st thou, Britain, still to sit at ease,An island Queen amidst thy subject seas,While the vext billows, in their distant roar,But soothe thy slumbers, and but kiss thy shore?To sport in wars, while danger keeps aloof,Thy grassy turf unbruised by hostile hoof?So sing thy flatterers; but, Britain, know,Thou who hast shared the guilt must share the woe.Nor distant is the hour; low murmurs spread,And whispered fears, creating what they dread;Ruin, as with an earthquake shock, is here (lines 39–49)
Though Barbauld titles her poem after the year in which it was written, it is her evocative and darkly satirical descriptions of Britain's imagined future, fallen and in ruin, which stand out most. In a way it can be seen as a larger meditation upon the passing of time and the inevitable fall of empires. She writes how England's "baseless wealth dissolves in air away,/ Like mists that melt before the morning ray", how "Reynolds [will] be what Raphael was before", and how "Time may tear the garland from her brow,/ And Europe sit in dust, as Asia now".


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Edward Curtis’ Photographs of Kwakwaka’wakw Ceremonial Dress and Masks (ca. 1914)

Mar 29, 2017

The Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw (or Kwakiutl) are an indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast, covering the territory of British Columbia on northern Vancouver Island and the adjoining mainland, and on islands around Johnstone Strait and Queen Charlotte Strait. United by the common language of Kwak'wala, the broad group can be divided into 13 nations, each with its own clan structure and distinct histories. According to Kwakwaka'wakw folklore their ancestors (‘na’mima) came to a given spot — by way of land, sea, or underground — in the form of ancestral animals that upon arrival shed their animal appearance and became human.
The first documented contact with Westerners was in 1792 during the expedition led by English officer Captain George Vancouver, and was soon followed by colonies of Europeans settling on Canada's West Coast. As was often the way, with settlers came disease and the Kwakwaka’wakw population dropped by up to 75% between 1830 and 1880. Their distinctive ideas about wealth — that status came not from how much you owned but how much you were able to give away — came to the particular attention of the US anthropologist Franz Boas, who wrote extensively on their elaborate gift-giving ceremonies known as "potlach". The ceremonial practice was also a particular target of Christian missionaries who saw it as a major obstacle to their "civilising" mission, and the Canadian government banned the practise in 1885 (although the act was soon amended, proving impossible to enforce).
The photographs of the ceremonial dress and masks of the Kwakwaka'wakw presented here are the creation of American photographer and ethnologist Edward Curtis (1868–1952), famous for his work with Native American people. Part of a project funded by banking magnate J.P. Morgan, these photographs are from the collection held at the Library of Congress, and contain many images not published in Curtis' enormous twenty-volume The North American Indian. In 2015, Taschen produced their epic 768-page The North American Indian: The Complete Portfolios, which gathers Curtis’ entire American Indian portfolio into one publication.