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Class of 2018

Dec 19, 2017

Pictured above is our top pick of artists and writers whose works will, on 1st January 2018, enter the public domain in many countries around the world. Of the eleven featured, seven will be entering the public domain in countries with a "life plus 70 years" copyright term (e.g. most European Union members, Brazil, Israel, Nigeria, Russia, Turkey, etc.) and four in countries with a "life plus 50 years" copyright term (e.g. Canada, New Zealand, and many countries in Asia and Africa) — those that died in the year 1947 and 1967 respectively. As always it's a miscellaneous medley assembled for our graduation photo, including one of the chief figures of the Surrealist movement, Gertrude Stein's lover, the other Winston Churchill, a war poet, and a mystic, magician, and mountaineer once denounced as the “the wickedest man in the world”.
Below is a little bit more about each of their lives (with each name linking through to their respective Wikipedia pages, from which each text has been based).
Aleister Crowley
(1875–1947)
Aleister Crowley was an English occultist, ceremonial magician, poet, painter, novelist, and mountaineer. He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Æon of Horus in the early 20th century. After attending the University of Cambridge (where some biographers allege he was recruited as a British spy), in 1898 he joined the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where he was trained in ceremonial magic by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and Allan Bennett. Moving to Boleskine House by Loch Ness in Scotland, he went mountaineering in Mexico with Oscar Eckenstein, before studying Hindu and Buddhist practices in India. In 1904, while on his honeymoon in Cairo, Crowley claimed to have been contacted by a supernatural entity named Aiwass, who provided him with The Book of the Law, a sacred text that served as the basis for Thelema. Crowley gained widespread notoriety during his lifetime, being a recreational drug experimenter, bisexual and an individualist social critic. He was denounced in the popular press as "the wickedest man in the world" and a Satanist. Crowley has remained a highly influential figure over Western esotericism and the counter-culture, and continues to be considered a prophet in Thelema.
René Magritte
(1898–1967)
René François Ghislain Magritte was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for creating a number of witty and thought-provoking images which often depicted ordinary objects in an unusual context, and so challenging the observers' preconditioned perceptions of reality. His work was hugely influential, especially in pop, minimalist and conceptual art. Magritte described his paintings as "visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?'. It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable."
Siegfried Sassoon
(1886–1967)
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon was an English poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a jingoism-fuelled war. Sassoon became a focal point for dissent within the armed forces when he made a lone protest against the continuation of the war in his "Soldier's Declaration" of 1917, culminating in his admission to a military psychiatric hospital; this resulted in his forming a friendship with Wilfred Owen, who was greatly influenced by him. Sassoon later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the "Sherston trilogy".
Alice B. Toklas
(1877–1967)
Alice Babette Toklas was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century, and the life partner of American writer Gertrude Stein. Toklas met Stein in Paris on September 8, 1907, the day she arrived there from San Francisco after the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Together they hosted a salon in the home they shared that attracted expatriate American writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, Paul Bowles, Thornton Wilder, and Sherwood Anderson; and avant-garde painters, including Picasso, Matisse, and Braque. Acting as Stein's confidante, lover, cook, secretary, muse, editor, critic, and general organizer, Toklas remained a background figure, chiefly living in the shadow of Stein, until the publication by Stein of Toklas' "memoirs" in 1933 under the teasing title The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which went on to become Stein's best-selling book. In 1954 Toklas published a book of her own, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, which mixed reminiscences and recipes. The most famous recipe, contributed by her friend Brion Gysin, is for "Haschich Fudge", a mixture of fruit, nuts, spices, and "canibus sativa" [sic] or marijuana. Her name was later lent to the range of cannabis concoctions called "Alice B. Toklas brownies" (despite the fact that the "Haschich Fudge" recipe did not originate with Toklas, nor is there any record that she ever made it herself). In 1963 Toklas published her autobiography What Is Remembered, which ends abruptly with the death of Stein.
Pierre Bonnard
(1867–1947)
Pierre Bonnard was a French painter and printmaker, as well as a founding member of the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis. Bonnard preferred to work from memory, using drawings as a reference, and his paintings are often characterized by a dreamlike quality. The intimate domestic scenes, for which he is perhaps best known, often include his wife Marthe de Meligny. Bonnard has been described as "the most thoroughly idiosyncratic of all the great twentieth-century painters", and the unusual vantage points of his compositions rely less on traditional modes of pictorial structure than voluptuous color, poetic allusions and visual wit. Identified as a late practitioner of Impressionism in the early 20th century, Bonnard has since been recognized for his unique use of color and his complex imagery. "It's not just the colors that radiate in a Bonnard", writes Roberta Smith, "there’s also the heat of mixed emotions, rubbed into smoothness, shrouded in chromatic veils and intensified by unexpected spatial conundrums and by elusive, uneasy figures."
Winston Churchill
(1871–1947)
Winston Churchill was an American best-selling novelist of the early 20th century. He is nowadays overshadowed, even as a writer, by a certain cigar-toting British statesman of the same name, with whom he was acquainted, but not related. Their lives had some interesting parallels. They both gained their tertiary education at service colleges and briefly served (during the same period) as officers in their respective countries' armed forces (one was a naval, the other an army officer). Both Churchills were keen amateur painters, as well as writers. Both were also politicians; although here the comparison is far more tenuous: the British Churchill's political career being far more illustrious.
M. P. Shiel
(1865–1947)
Matthew Phipps Shiell – known as M. P. Shiel – was a prolific British writer of West Indian descent. His legal surname remained "Shiell" though he adopted the shorter version as a de facto pen name. He is remembered mostly for supernatural horror and scientific romances, and his work was published as serials, novels, and as short stories. The Purple Cloud (1901) remains his most famous and often reprinted novel. H. G. Wells lauded the novel as "brilliant" and H. P. Lovecraft later praised it as exemplary weird fiction, "delivered with a skill and artistry falling little short of actual majesty."
Jean Toomer
(1894–1967)
Jean Toomer was an African American poet and novelist commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance (though he actively resisted the association) and modernism. His first book Cane, published in 1923, is considered by many to be his most significant. He continued to write poetry, short stories and essays. After his second marriage in 1934, he moved from New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) and retired from public life. His papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.
P. D. Ouspensky
(1878–1947)
Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii (known in English as Peter D. Ouspensky), was a Russian mathematician and esotericist known for his expositions of the early work of the Greek-Armenian teacher of esoteric doctrine George Gurdjieff, whom he met in Moscow in 1915. He shared the (Gurdjieff) "system" for 25 years in England and the United States, having separated from Gurdjieff in 1924 personally, for reasons he explains in the last chapter of his book In Search of the Miraculous, which recounts what he learned from Gurdjieff during those years. Some, including his close pupil Rodney Collin, say that he finally gave up the system in 1947, just before his death, but his own recorded words on the subject ("A Record of Meetings", published posthumously) do not clearly endorse this judgement, nor does Ouspensky's emphasis on "you must make a new beginning" after confessing "I've left the system".
Anna Wickham
(1883–1947)
Anna Wickham was the pseudonym of Edith Alice Mary Harper, a British poet with strong Australian connections. She is remembered as a modernist figure and feminist writer, though one who did not command sustained critical attention in her lifetime. Her reputation has improved since her death and she is now regarded as an important early 20th-century writer. During the 1930s she was well known in literary London, and wrote a great deal of poetry (much of which was later lost in war damage); but found it harder to get published. She did have support from the somewhat louche quarter of John Gawsworth, who put out a Richards Press collection of her work in 1936. An extended autobiographical essay Prelude to a Spring Clean dates from 1935, the year in which she supported the just-married Dylan Thomas and Caitlin, and then quarrelled with them. She committed suicide during the winter of 1947.
Hans Fallada
(1893–1947)
Hans Fallada (born Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen) was a German writer whose better known novels include Little Man, What Now? (1932) and Every Man Dies Alone (1947). The latter — based on the true story of a German couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, who were executed for producing and distributing anti-Nazi material in Berlin during the war — was completed just before his death from a weakened heart after years of addiction to morphine, alcohol and other drugs. It was published by Penguin in 2010 under the title Alone in Berlin.

And a few others that didn't make it to the class photo....

Kathleen Scott
Riichi Yokomitsu
Che Guevara
John Masefield
Arthur Ransome

Some people you think we've missed? Please let us know in the comments!

To learn more about Public Domain Day visit publicdomainday.org. For more names whose works will be going into the public domain in 2018 see the Wikipedia pages on 1947 and 1967 deaths (which you can fine-tune down to writers and artists), and also this dedicated page.
Wondering what will enter the public domain through copyright expiration in the U.S.? Like last year, and the year before...Nothing (apart from unpublished works whose authors died in 1947).
Wondering if "bad things happen to works when they enter the public domain"? Wonder no more.
(Learn more about the situation in the U.S. and why the public domain is important in this article in Huff Post Books and this from the Duke Law School's Centre for the Study of the Public Domain).


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A Collection of Fashionable English Words (1887)

Jan 23, 2018

These two Japanese woodcuts by Kamekichi Tsunajima, from a series titled "Ryūkō eigo zukushi" (A Collection of Fashionable English Words), show images of animals, activities and objects each with their Japanese and English names. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) some spelling mistakes have given rise to some interesting new activities such as "Refreshiug" and "Cuting Rice", and the "Gaot", "Hoise" and "Tea Po". The introduction of activities (including the very Zen-like "Looking Moon") give an interesting take on the often more object-orientated Western equivalents. Also worth noting the interesting additions of "Cross Child" rather than simply "Child" , and "Blank Book" rather than "Book".

source: public-domain-review

type: collection

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


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First English Edition of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays (1603)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Feb 28, 2018

In the late sixteenth century the philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) felt drawn to express himself in energetic, playful meditations which he called “essais” — meaning “trials” or “attempts”. Thus a new literary genre was born. Though work-shy school children might have reason to hate the father of the essay, others have savoured the artistry of his creations. “This talking of oneself,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “following one’s own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and circumference of the soul in its confusion, its variety, its imperfection — this art belonged to one man only: to Montaigne.”
At the age of thirty-eight, Montaigne retreated from the public sphere in Bordeaux to the family chateaux thirty miles inland. He carved quotes by his favourite authors into the wooden beams of his library, and poured much of the remaining twenty years of his life into his meditations. The resulting Essais (1580–88) interrogate a dizzying array of subjects: grief, friendship, coaches, drunkenness, impotence, smells, theology, education, war, animal intelligence, music, the New World, idleness, death, thumbs. Montaigne called his Essais:
A register of varied and changing occurrences, of ideas which are unresolved and, when needs be, contradictory, either because I myself have become different or because I grasp hold of different attributes or aspects of my subjects. So I may happen to contradict myself but, as Demades said, I never contradict truth.
Probably the most revolutionary thing about the Essais is their self-awareness. Other writers had interrogated themselves, such as Augustine in his Confessions (AD 397–400), but none with the acuteness or completeness of Montaigne:
If I speak diversely of myself, it is because I look diversely upon myself. . . . Shamefaced, bashful, insolent, chaste, luxurious, peevish, prattling, silent, fond, doting, labourious, nice, delicate, ingenious, slow, dull, froward, humorous, debonaire, wise, ignorant, false in words, true-speaking, both liberal, covetous, and prodigal. All these I perceive in some measure or other to be in mine, according as I stir or turn myself.
In 1603, the Italian linguist John Florio translated the Essais into poetic, wildly inventive, but nonetheless idiomatic Elizabethan prose. Now “done into English” the Essayes made a real splash in the minds of the reading public. William Shakespeare’s attention was caught by a passage in “Of the Cannibals” in which Montaigne describes the people of the New World:
[They] hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politic superiority; no use of service, of riches, or of poverty; no contracts, no successions, no dividences, no occupation but idle; no respect of kindred, but common; no apparel, but natural; no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corn, or metal...
Shakespeare fed this utopian description into the mouth of Gonzalo in The Tempest (1611). Daydreaming about what he would do if he were king of the island he and his friends have been shipwrecked on, Gonzalo says:
No kind of trafficWould I admit, no name of magistrate;Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,And use of service, none; contract, succession,Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;No occupation, all men idle, all;And women too—but innocent and pure;No sovereignty –(II .i.148–56)
Thousands more early modern English readers were influenced by Florio’s Montaigne. In the marginal notes of their copies of the Essayes you will find agreement and disagreement, offence, and enjoyment — but never boredom. As the clergyman Abiel Borft put it in his copy: “Montaign hath the Art above all men to keep his Reader from sleeping.”
If you’d like to read Montaigne in modern English we recommend The Complete Essays translated by M.A. Screech (Penguin, 1993). As well as providing the clearest access to the more conceptually challenging passages, the edition includes an excellent introduction and footnotes revealing Montaigne’s sources. For a highly enjoyable take on his life, thought, and reception we recommend Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010). Phillipe Desan has written a more academic biography, Montaigne: A Life (2017), which draws attention to the political player behind the solitary philosopher.

author: Ned Pennant-Rea


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Autographs for Freedom (1853)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Feb 20, 2018

Autographs for Freedom, published in 1853, is an anthology of literature designed to help “sweep away from this otherwise happy land, the great sin of SLAVERY.” It was put together by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society and includes the only published fiction of Frederick Douglass, who would go on to become the first black citizen to hold high rank in the US government. His “The Heroic Slave” is a work of historical fiction centering on Madison Washington, the man made famous in 1841 for leading a rebellion on the Creole, a slave ship en route to New Orleans from Virginia. Having taken control the rebels managed to redirect the Creole to Nassau in the Bahamas. Because it was a British colony, slavery had been outlawed there since 1833. Upon arrival in Nassau 128 of the 135 slaves aboard the Creole gained their freedom. It was the most successful revolt of enslaved people in US history.
The driving force behind the anthology was an Englishwoman named Julia Griffiths, a prominent member of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. She had first met Frederick Douglass in London in the mid 1840s. Douglass had escaped his life of captivity in 1838, at the age of twenty, fleeing Baltimore and reaching New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he worked as a labourer and evaded suspicion. In 1841, at an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket, he was invited to describe his experiences under slavery. His spontaneous remarks so stirred the audience that he was catapulted into a key player in the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. An orator and wordsmith of great power, he went on to write a classic memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). Upon its publication, fearing he would be recaptured because it mentioned the name of his former owner, Douglass left the US to tour the British Isles, give speeches, and build support for emancipation. It was there that he met and befriended Julia Griffiths. When Douglass returned to America he did so with enough funds to purchase his freedom and to set up an anti-slavery newspaper. In 1849, Griffiths sailed to Rochester, New York, to join Douglass. She supported his work and co-founded the influential Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, along with five other women.


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George Mayerle’s Eye Test Chart (ca. 1907)
Text by Adam Green
Dec 12, 2017

This fantastic eye chart — measuring 22 by 28 inches with a positive version on one side and negative on the other — is the work of German optometrist and American Optometric Association member George Mayerle, who was working in San Francisco at end of the nineteenth century, just when optometry was beginning to professionalise. The chart was a culmination of his many years of practice and, according to Mayerle, its distinctive international angle served also to reflect the diversity and immigration which lay at the heart of the city in which he worked. At the time it was advertised as “the only chart published that can be used by people of any nationality”. Stephen P. Rice, from the National Library of Medicine (who house this copy presented here), explains just how throughly thought through the different aspects of the chart were as regards the aim to be as inclusive as possible:
Running  through the middle of the chart, the seven vertical panels test for acuity of vision with characters in the Roman alphabet (for English, German, and other European readers) and  also in Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Hebrew. A panel in the center replaces the alphabetic characters with symbols for children and adults who were illiterate or who could not read any of the other writing systems offered. Directly above the center panel is a version of the radiant dial that tests for astigmatism. On either side of that are lines that test the muscular strength of the eyes. Finally, across the bottom, boxes test for color vision, a feature intended especially (according to one advertisement) for those working on railroads and steamboats.

author: Adam Green


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The Whims (1799) and The Follies (1815–23) of Francisco Goya
Text by Adam Green
Nov 28, 2017

At some point in late 1792 or early 1793, the great Spanish artist Francisco de Goya was struck by a severe and undiagnosed illness which left him deaf and disillusioned, and marked the beginning of his so-called "mid period" (1793–99) which saw his work became progressively darker and pessimistic. The crowning achievement of these troubled years was a set of eighty aquatinted etchings created between 1797 and 1798, and published in 1799 as Los caprichos (The Whims). Produced alongside more official commissions, the visionary prints depict what Goya described as "the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual". The criticisms of the eighteenth-century Spain in which he lived, and humanity in general, are far-ranging: the prevalence of superstition, the ignorance of the ruling class, marital strife, and the decline of rationality, all fall prey to Goya's acerbic satire and wit.
Some two decades later Goya would create a series titled Los disparates (The Follies), which like Los caprichos sought to condemn the foibles and follies of civilized society. Produced between 1815 and 1823, while Goya lived in his house on whose walls he painted the famous Black Paintings, the series was not published until 1864, nearly thirty years after his death, under the title Proverbios (Proverbs). Comprising twenty-two prints in total it would be Goya's last major series of prints, and is full of enigmatic and dream-like imagery thought to be connected to political issues of the day and traditional Spanish proverbs. Below we've selected some of our favourites from the two series, all sourced from the Rijksmuseum.


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Curiosities from the Museum of Giovanni Carafa (1778)
Text by Adam Green
Jan 31, 2018

These fantastic depictions of various Roman antiquities are sourced from Alcuni monumenti del Museo Carrafa (1778), a wonderful catalogue of objects once found in the private museum of 18th-century antiquities collector Giovanni Carafa, the Duke of Noja (now called Noicattaro, a town near Bari in southern Italy ). Born in 1715, Carafa studied grammar and literature but soon developed an interest in scientific subjects, mainly mathematics. Around 1738 he was appointed lecturer of Optics and Mathematics at the University of Naples, and there he continued to explore his interests in the natural sciences, especially geology and mineralogy. He soon began collecting archaeological and numismatic pieces concerning southern Italy and established a small museum (which would become part of the collection of Museo di Capodimonte in 1771). He is perhaps most famous today for having created a topographical map of the city of Naples and its neighbourhoods, the first of its kind.
For each image presented in his Alcuni monumenti del Museo Carrafa Carafa wrote a small commentary, telling the reader more about the objects they depict and his ideas on what they signify. We've used these summaries to do likewise for each of the images we've selected — and a massive grazie mille to Giorgia Coghi for her help in translating from the Italian into English.


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Drawings of Tetradons and Diodons (ca. 1838–42)

Mar 6, 2018

These wonderful drawings of balloonfish and pufferfish were made during, or shortly after, the United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842. Known as "U.S. Ex. Ex." for short, or the "Wilkes Expedition" after its commanding officer Charles Wilkes, the exploratory voyage traveled the Pacific Ocean and collected more than 60,000 plant and bird specimens and the seeds of 648 species. This sheer volume of data collected was of major importance to the growth of science in the United States, in particular the emerging field of oceanography. Accompanying the naval officers and the many scientists were two artists, Joseph Drayton and Alfred Agate, who are behind the images presented here, along with a man named John Richard who was hired upon the expedition's return to prepare the illustrative plates for the work on ichthyology. According to the Smithsonian Institution Archives, which house the works, this particular set of images didn't quite make the grade, however, as they were found in envelopes marked as "rejected" or "rejected for publication".


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Steam-Powered Tooth Extraction on an Envelope (1894)
Text by Adam Green
Feb 17, 2018

This wonderful sketch of "teeth painlessly extracted by steam power" appears on an envelope addressed to a certain Dr J. Chapman of Totton, Southampton. As to whether he is the creator of the drawing also (or indeed someone in his household), the jury is out -- though the idea that the envelope made its way through the Victorian postal system so adorned is rather a nice thought. There seem to be arguments either way. Looking closely one can see that the ink from the drawing overlays the stamp in the left hand corner, which would imply it made its way onto the envelope after postage (if the late 19th-century mailing process was anything like today's), though mysteriously also part of the address (the "D" of Dr) appears to overlay the stamp. All quite confusing. Also, are there unnatural gaps between the "m" and "a" of "Chapman", and between the "c" and "o" of "Beaconsfield", where the pulley runs, and so implying the address was written around the drawing? Also, is the drawing signed "C. E. H." to the bottom left? If so, does that imply someone other than Chapman? Someone else in his house-hold? The sender of the letter? "Chapman's Envelope Handiwork"?
If an expert on Victorian postal systems, or indeed, a handwriting expert (are the address and caption to the drawing done by the same hand?), can help out all would love to your ideas in the comments. Likewise regarding who this Dr J. Chapman was. We tried to find out a bit more about him, but alas to no avail. There's an outside chance it could be physician and publisher John Chapman (1821–1894) famous for running the influential radical journal the Westminster Review (which provided an important platform for ideas on evolution), and whose assistant, was Mary Ann Evans (AKA George Eliot). It appears this Chapman did have one loose link to Southampton, in that he wrote to the Times in 1866 to describe his use of ice packs to treat cholera patients in the city.


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Images from German “Caterpillar Calendar” (1837)

Jan 16, 2018

These wonderful illustrations come from Chronologischer Raupenkalender, oder, Naturgeschichte der europäischen Raupen (1837), an entomological volume by Christian Friedrich Vogel outlining which caterpillars appear each month, as well as details on how to keep caterpillars and catch the butterflies into which they will transform. An added quirk of the book will be more immediately obvious to German speakers — Vogel means "bird", the caterpillar's main predator.


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Adeline Harris Sears’ Autographs Quilt (1856–ca.1863)
Text by Adam Green
Mar 1, 2018

In 1856, a seventeen-year-old girl from Rhode Island embarked on a unique and brilliant quiltmaking project. The girl's name was Adeline Harris and her project was to make a quilt incorporating hundreds of celebrity autographs. While signature quilts were nothing new, the contributions were typically sourced from within a small community, such as a church, and functioned to commemorate a single event, such as a birth or marriage — Adeline, however, had bigger ideas, her community as the notable figures of her day, her event the phenomenon of nineteenth-century celebrity. Although one might imagine Adeline dutifully lugging a quilt to all corners of the globe for the famous to adorn with their scrawl, her process was much more ingenious (and practical). She sent a small diamond of white silk in the post with an explanation of her project and a request that they send it back to her signed. The returned and now autographed fragments were then worked into the quilt as the "top" planes in a wonderful trompe l'oeil tumbling block design. The response she got to her unusual request was nothing short of phenomenal — she ended up incorporating 360 signed pieces in total, including those from such luminaries as Jacob Grimm, Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Abraham Lincoln (one of eight American presidents represented). According to her grand-daughter the Lincoln signature was, due to a family connection, actually acquired in person, and Adeline was meant to have even danced with Lincoln at his inauguration ball. Many of the pieces included a short message in addition to the signature. The diamond from the poet and editor N. P. Willis includes the following (suggestive?) rhyme: "Dream what thou willst / beneath this quilt, / My blessing still is — Yours."
One of the people Adeline contacted in 1864 was Sarah Hale, editor of Godey's Lady's Book, who, as well as providing her signature, also promptly wrote up "the very beautiful idea" in her magazine. Hale explains how it is not only the signed pieces which tell a story:
Each autograph is written, with common black ink, on a diamond shaped piece of white silk (placed over a diagram of white paper and basted at the edges), each piece the centre of a group of colored diamonds, formed in many instances, from "storied" fragments of dresses which were worn in the olden days of our country. For instance, there are pieces of a pink satin dress which flaunted at one of President Washington's dinner parties; with other relics of those rich silks and stiff brocades so fashionable in the last century.
And, as Hale explains in her later Manners, Happy Homes and Good Society All the Year Round (1868), there was meaning in their arrangement too:
Then comes the intellectual part, the taste to assort colors and to make the appearance what it ought to be, where so many hundreds of shades are to be matched and suited to each other. After that we rise to the moral, when human deeds are to live in names, the consideration of the celebrities, who are to be placed each, the centre of his or her own circle! To do this well requires a knowledge of books and life, and an instinctive sense of the fitness of things, so as to assign each name its suitable place in this galaxy of stars or diamonds.
As for the process, conservator Elena Philips explains that, after examining the seams along the quilt top, it can be seen that "first she stitched the individual diamonds into blocks, then connected the blocks into columns, and finally seamed the columns together across the entire width. In total, she cut and stitched 1,840 individual silk pieces to create the quilt... [and used] more than one hundred and fifty different silk fabrics."
This is just one example from the Metropolitan Museum's superb collection of 151 American quilts and coverlets, more about which you can read in curator Amelia Peck's American Quilts and Coverlets in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2009). We are also selling a print of the "autograph quilt" in our online shop (though be aware that the signatures will likely be too small to be legible!).


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The “Salad Oil Style” of Jan Toorop
Text by Adam Green
Nov 21, 2017

In 1894, the Nederlandse Olie Fabriek (The Dutch Oil Company) commissioned a poster to advertise their "salad oil" — so iconic did the resulting artwork become, with its stylised swathes of dress and hair, that it lent the Dutch Art Nouveau its moniker, the "salad oil style". The artist behind the image, and the man at the heart of the influential movement it came to represent, was Jan Toorop (1858–1928). Born on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies, Toorop settled in the Netherlands at the age of eleven. After studying art at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, he’d spend his time between The Hague, Brussels, England (where his wife was from), and, after 1890, the Dutch seaside town of Katwijk aan Zee. It was during this time that he developed his distinctive style: highly stylised figures, embedded in complex curvilinear designs, with his dynamic line showing influence from his Javanese roots. While perhaps most famous for turning these techniques to his exquisite poster designs, Toorop also produced a substantial body of work far removed from the anodyne demands of the advertising industry, beautiful but haunting works dealing with darker subjects such as loss of faith and death.


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Omega: The Last Days of the World (1894)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Jan 25, 2018

A great green comet made of lethal carbon monoxide is hurtling towards the Earth. Cue apocalyptic panic. So far so Hollywood disaster movie. But the similarity between Camille Flammarion's novel Omega (1894) and the film Armageddon (1998) — in which Bruce Willis destroys himself to destroy a comet before it destroys the Earth — ends at comets. The one in Omega misses the Earth by itself, albeit by a narrow, spectacular margin. It’s only then that the narrative heart of the novel begins to pump in earnest. Suddenly we shoot forward to the 100th century AD, when evolution has refined the human senses and supplied two new ones, an electric and a psychic, “by which communication at a distance is possible”. Several more million years pass, and as the Sun cools the Earth begins to freeze over. The last surviving humans, Omegar and Eva, accept that they are soon to die. But before they do so a spirit whisks them off to Jupiter, where they find the rest of humanity living in cleansed and purified form. This might seem like a natural end to a novel centrally concerned with the transmigration and final destination of human souls. Yet Flammarion refuses to stop there. In the last pages of the book the whole solar system dies, followed by the cosmos itself, making way for new universes: “And these universes passed away in their turn. But infinite space remained, peopled with worlds, and stars, and souls, and suns; and time went on forever. For there can be neither end nor beginning.”
Flammarion was a very popular and influential author — a kind of Carl Sagan of his day, capable of both scientific rigour and mystical flamboyance, sometimes on the same page. Adam Roberts, in his The History of Science Fiction (2016), referred to him as “The major figure of 19th-century mystical science fiction”. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells both owe debts to him. A year after Omega appeared in English, Wells published The Time Machine (1895) which imagines the Earth’s last inhabitant, thirty million years hence, to be a monstrous crab moving slowly along a desolate beach, as the universe freezes towards its final moment. Flammarion, though, was not primarily a writer. He was better known as an astronomer, who observed unusual stellar phenomena — particularly novae — first as a student at the Paris Observatoire, and later at his own observatory just south of the capital. He also made several aerial voyages over Paris, at a time when ballooning was still a risky business, to gather meteorological data (and perhaps to get even closer to the super-earthly realms that so preoccupied him).
Featured here is the first English translation of Omega, published by The Cosmopolitan Publishing Company (New York) in 1894. In 1999, it was brought back into print by Bison Books, complete with an introduction by Robert Silverberg and all the moody, wonderful illustrations of the original (a selection of which we've featured below).


text:
Cryptography: or the History, Principles, and Practice of Cipher-Writing (1898)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Feb 14, 2018

Frederick Edward Hulme (1841–1909) was an artist, naturalist and antiquarian who loved to write books. He did so on flowers, butterflies, moths, Christian art, heraldry, flags, proverbs, and folklore. In 1898 he bent his pen towards Cryptography, an exploration of covert communication through history. “That which is secret and mysterious,” he wrote, “calling for acute intelligence to penetrate its meaning, has always exercised a great fascination on the human mind.” And none more so than Hulme’s. The book is full of enthusiastic attempts to find the value in ancient cipher systems, though these often come to nothing: “One finds over and over again things commended by various writers that entirely break down when brought to the vital test of actual experiment.”
Like all good cryptanalysts (and historians) Hulme stands at an acutely critical angle to his subject. He puts to the sword a number of seemingly valuable techniques, such as inventing special characters: “If we recognise that a certain form is the symbol of a certain letter, we soon learn to recognise this form when we see it, and its shape is a matter that is absolutely indifferent to us.” He shows us that simple substitution ciphers can be cracked with a bit of patient analysis. The commonest letter in an encrypted message, for example, is very probably “e” in disguise.
Hulme gives short shrift to the substitution cipher created by Elizabethan polymath Francis Bacon (1561–1626), which replaces each letter of the alphabet with five others. He condemns it both for how easy it is to decipher and how long it takes to use. In Bacon’s cipher, the word “cryptogram” resembles a baby's babble:
AAABABAAAABABBAABBBABAABAABBABAABBABAAAAAAAAAABABB
Nevertheless, Hulme praises Bacon’s three essential principles of a good cipher: facility in execution; difficulty in solution; and clearness from suspicion. (He doesn’t bother himself with the Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship, which was then at its apogee, after the recent publication of Sir Francis Bacon's Cipher Story (1893–95) by Orville Ward Owen.)
Though they aren’t strictly ciphers, Hulme does have a lot of time for "concealing text". He finds that letters written with the juice of oranges and onions “or almost any sharp things” can be made to appear by the warmth of a fire as if by magic. And letters of vinegar become visible by gently rubbing soot into them. The strangest mode of concealment is also the slowest: “One plan gravely commended was to shave a slave’s head, and then to write upon it any message one might wish to send. When the hair was sufficiently grown to conceal the matter, the man was dispatched to the person with whom it was desired to communicate, and he in turn shaved the victim and read off the message.”
The Greek slave in this story is not the only person who has suffered in the interests of covert communication. Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), the Benedictine monk who wrote the first really elaborate treatise on cryptography, “was accused of dabbling in the black art and holding converse with demons. He was therefore brought to trial for these magical incantations, and had a very narrow escape of being burnt.” Another early modern figure was not so fortunate: “The correspondence of King Charles was captured by the Roundheads at Naseby—a correspondence which Dr. John Wallis, a distinguished mathematician of those days, analysed and finally deciphered, and which ultimately cost the defeated monarch his head.”
The last pages of the book consider various modern ciphers: The grill; revolving grill; slip-card; Mirabeau; Newark; clock-hands; two-word. Hulme was worried that some of his Victorian readers would condemn his book as a facilitator of wrongdoing. Thus at the outset he contends that any powerful science may be co-opted for wicked ends: “From the researches of chemistry may be derived . . . the healing medicine . . . or the subtle potion of the secret poisoner.” And the last line of the book completes his apology. In time of peril, Hulme argues, a knowledge of cryptology “may save hundreds of lives, or avert catastrophe from the nation itself.” If he had lived long enough to know of Alan Turing and the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, he could have upped that figure to millions.


text:
On the Banks of the Old Raritan (1915)

Jan 4, 2018

This a 1915 recording of the Peerless Quartet, at the Columbia Studios, performing the alma mater of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (previously Rutgers College and Rutgers University). The original lyrics were hastily penned in 1873 in just two hours by Howard Newton Fuller, an 1874 graduate of Rutgers College, as a school hymn to be performed by the college's Glee Club that very night. The melody of the song is borrowed from a popular Scottish song, "On the Banks of the Old Dundee". According to a later interview with the Rutgers Alumni Monthly, Fuller stated he chose "On the Banks of the Old Dundee" as the song "immediately struck me that the air of that song had the right melody and the stirring and martial swing for an effective college song." An altered version of the song is sung at Rutgers University-Camden commencement ceremonies incorporating the lyrics "on the banks of the old Delaware" and references to Leaves of Grass by the poet Walt Whitman. (Wikipedia)
Lyrics (for this 1915 recording)
I.
My father sent me to old Rutgers,
And resolv'd that I should be a man;
And so I settled down,
In that noisy college town,
On the banks of the old Raritan.
(Chorus)
On the banks of the old Raritan, my boys,
where old Rutgers ever more shall stand,
For has she not stood since the time of the flood,
On the banks of the old Raritan.
II.
Her ardent spirit stirred and cheered me
From the day me college years began;
Gracious Alma Mater mine;
Learning's fair and honored shrine;
On the banks of the old Raritan.
(Chorus)
III.
Then sing aloud to Alma Mater,
And keep the scarlet in the van';
For with her motto high,
Rutgers' name shall never die,
On the banks of the old Raritan.
(Chorus)


text:
The Book of the Homeless (1916)

Jan 9, 2018

Edith Wharton is best known today for penning such popular novels as The House of Mirth (1905) and her Pulitzer Prize winning The Age of Innocence (1920). A lesser known fact about the eminent American author is the role she played in the war effort during World War I. A frequent traveller to Europe, after her marriage deteriorated she decided to move permanently to France, and when war broke out in 1914 she threw herself headlong into the French war effort, dismayed at the United States' lack of engagement. One of the first causes she undertook was the opening of a workroom for unemployed women, which soon flourished into a thriving sewing business.  When the Germans invaded Belgium in the autumn of 1914, Wharton helped to found the American Hostels for Refugees in Paris and later the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee, which helped to secure fleeing Belgians shelter, meals, clothes, and eventually employment. The following year Wharton used her literary contacts to begin to put together The Book of the Homeless, a compendium of essays, art, poetry, and musical scores whose profits were used to fund civilians displaced by World War I. The roster of contributors is highly impressive — with fifty-seven original works from such high-profile celebrities as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Jean Cocteau, Thomas Hardy, Auguste Rodin, William Butler Yeats, Claude Monet, and Igor Stravinsky. It also boasts an introduction by none other than Theodore Roosevelt in which he praises the efforts of his friend Wharton and urges his fellow Americans to support the war. Wharton also writes a preface in which she describes the process by which the book came to be:
Then the thought of this Book occurred to me. I appealed to my friends who write and paint and compose, and they to other friends of theirs, writers, painters, composers, statesmen and dramatic artists; and so the Book gradually built itself up, page by page and picture by picture. You will see from the names of the builders what a gallant piece of architecture it is, what delightful pictures hang on its walls, and what noble music echoes through them. But what I should have liked to show is the readiness, the kindliness, the eagerness, with which all the collaborators, from first to last, have lent a hand to the building. Perhaps you will guess it for yourselves when you read their names and see the beauty and variety of what they have given. So I efface myself from the threshold and ask you to walk in.
In addition to the 2000 trade copies produced, according to the Huntington Library blog, "a special keepsake edition was printed on French handmade paper in a limited printing of 175 copies, each signed by Updike [the publisher] and housed in a slipcase that also encompasses a portfolio of reproductions of the art works."


text:
A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1788)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Jan 18, 2018

Thirty years after Dr Johnson published his great Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Francis Grose put out A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), a compendium of slang Johnson had deemed unfit for his learned tome. Grose was not one for library work. He preferred to do his lexicography in the sordid heart of after-hours London. Supported by his trusty assistant Tom Cocking, he cruised the watering holes of Covent Garden and the East End, eating, boozing, and listening. He took pleasure in hearing his name punningly connected to his rotund frame. And he produced a book brimming with Falstaffian life.
In Vulgar Tongues (2016), Max Décharné called Grose's dictionary, “A declaration in favour of free speech, and a gauntlet thrown down against official censorship, moralists and the easily offended.” While a good deal of the slang has survived into the present day — to screw is to copulate; to kick the bucket is to die — much would likely have been lost had Grose not recorded it. Some of the more obscure metaphors include a butcher’s dog, meaning someone who “lies by the beef without touching it; a simile often applicable to married men”; to box the Jesuit, meaning “to masturbate; a crime, it is said, much practised by the reverend fathers of that society”; and to polish meaning to be in jail, in the sense of “polishing the king’s iron with one’s eyebrows, by looking through the iron grated windows”. Given this was the era of William Hogarth’s famous print Gin Lane (1751), it’s not surprising to find the dictionary soaked through with colourful epithets for the juniper-based liquor: blue ruin, cobblers punch, frog's wine, heart's ease, moonshine, strip me naked. The Grose dictionary also contains hundreds of great insults, like bottle-headed, meaning void of wit, something you can’t say about its author.
Other choice entries include:

Betwattled — to be surprised, confounded, out of one’s senses
Blind cupid — the backside
Bone box — the mouth
Brother of the quill — an author
Cackling farts — eggs< ※※Indexed under…EggSlang for
Captain queernabs — shabby ill-dressed fellow
Chimping merry — exhilarated with liquor
Comfortable importance — a wife
Dicked in the nob — silly, crazed
Dog booby — an awkward lout
Duke of limbs — a tall, awkward, ill-made fellow
Eternity box — a coffin
Head rails — teeth< ※※Indexed under…TeethSlang for
Hickey — tipsy, hiccupping
Irish apricots — potatoes
Jolly nob — the head. “I'll lump your jolly nob for you”: I'll give you a knock on the head.
Knowledge box — another term for the head.
Kittle pitchering — to disrupt the flow of a "troublesome teller of long stories" by constantly questioning and contradicting unimportant details, especially at the start (best done in tandem with others)
Knight of the trenches — a great eater
Just-ass — a punning name for a justice [judge]
Paw paw tricks — forbidden tricks; from the French pas pas
Penny wise and pound foolish — saving in small matters, and extravagant in great
Sugar stick — the virile member
Tallywags / Whirligigs — testicles
Whipt Syllabub — a flimsy, frothy discourse
Whipster — a sharp or subtle fellow


text:
The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel (1565)
Text by Adam Green
Mar 15, 2018

In 1565, twelve years after the death of François Rabelais (1494-1553) — the French Renaissance author best known for his satirical masterpiece The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, the bawdy tale of two giants, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel — the Parisian bookseller and publisher Richard Breton brought out Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel (The drolatic dreams of Pantagruel). The slim volume, save a short preface from Breton, is made up entirely of images — 120 woodcuts depicting a series of fantastically bizarre and grotesque figures, reminiscent of some of the more inventive and twisted creations of Brueghel or Bosch.
"The great familiarity I had with the late François Rabelais," Breton writes in the preface, "has moved and even compelled me to bring to light the last of his work, the drolatic dreams of the very excellent and wonderful Patagruel". Despite the claims (echoed too in the book's subtitle), the book's wonderful images are very unlikely to be the work of Rabelais himself — the attribution probably a clever marketing ploy by Breton. Indeed, that this attribution to Rabelais is a ruse might also explain the unusual lack of text beyond the preface, the intimidating task of imitating the comic master's distinctive literary style perhaps one step too far for Breton. The creator of the prints is now widely thought to be François Desprez, a French engraver and illustrator behind two other sets of imaginative designs, similar in style — Recueil de la diuersité des habits (A Collection of Diverse Costumes) and Recueil des effigies des roys de France (A Collection of Pictures of the Kings of France) — both published through Breton in 1567.
The highlights we present below are from an 1869 reproduction printed by Louis Perrin of Lyon, which includes a new and extensive introduction offering some ideas on the symbolism of the figures (mockery of Pope Julius II is rife). You can see the 1565 original here on BnF's Gallica platform (but be aware it has restrictions on re-use, hence why we are not featuring the images here). For more on the book and its images we recommend reading the excellent post featured on the Poemas del río Wang blog, which, among other illuminating insights, also includes an English translation of Breton's preface and ruminations upon the adjective "drolatique". As for an English translation of Rabelais' The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel we recommend M. A. Screech's 2006 translation for Penguin Classics.


text:
Kittens and Cats: A First Reader (1911) — Cats and Captions before the Internet Age
Text by Adam Green
Dec 6, 2017

Before LOLCat, Grumpy Cat, Longcat, Nyan Cat, before all the famed kitties of the internet age, before the modern computer was but a glint in Mother Turing's eye, there were the felines featured in Kittens and Cats: A First Reader (1911). If this delightful, yet also slightly creepy, book is anything to go by then taking photos of cats and brandishing them with an amusing caption was far from being a phenomenon born with the internet. Within its pages we meet "Queen Cat", "Dunce Cat", "Party Cat", and perhaps our favourite "Hero Cat", amongst others. The book is attributed to the American children's author Eulalie Osgood Grover, who weaves about the pictures the tale of the Queen's party and all the kitty characters attending. As for the photographs themselves, the book states them to be courtesy of the Rotograph Company, a popular postcard manufacturers, which implies they are almost certainly an early example of the work of Harry Whittier Frees, their staff animal photographer. A few years later Frees would become associated with a whole host of similar pictures under his own name, with the publication in 1915 of his The Little Folks of Animal Land, which was followed by the publication of a number of further such collections until he ended his own life in 1953. How did Frees get his cats to pose for such photographs, even more remarkable before the days of super quick shutter speeds? Although he denied the use of dead or taxidermied animals, and insisted only humane methods were used, one can't help but wonder if this is really true, especially in the case of his later work which involved more elaborate tableaus than displayed in this book.


text:
Napoleon’s “Englich” Lessons
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Mar 14, 2018

Napoleon had had a rollercoaster eighteen months. First he had been forced to abdicate as Emperor of France and exiled to the island of Elba. Then he had managed to escape, march on Paris, and retake the throne. Finally a crushing loss at Waterloo had led to exile once again, this time to a far more remote island called Saint Helena. The watery walls of his new South Atlantic prison were at least a thousand miles thick in every direction.
The British had agreed to provide Le Petit Caporal with plentiful wine, meat, and musical instruments, but he could not have what he most craved — family, power, Europe. To make matters worse, he had virtually nothing to read. Newspapers were banned, and those he did manage to get his hands on were nearly all in English. That was the main reason why, on January 16, 1816, three months after landing on the island, he decided to learn the language of his captors. For the following three months he studied nearly every afternoon. The daily labour produced a mixed bag of verbal fruit; a sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet taste of his time on the island where he would end his days, six years later, aged 51.
Far more than rote learning conjugations, declensions, and articles, Napoleon enjoyed scribbling his thoughts in French and then translating them into English. The results were often wistful:
When will you be wiseNever as long as j should be in this isleBut j shall become wise after having passed the lineWhen j shall land in France j shall be very content…
My wife shall come near to me, my son shall be great and strong if he will be able to trink a bottle of wine at dinner j shall [toast] with him… / The women believe they [are] ever prety / The time has not wings / When you shall come, you shall see that j have ever loved you.
His English teacher was Count Emmanuel de Las Cases, an historian and loyal supporter who had been allowed to voyage with him to Saint Helena. The Count would later turn their fifteen months of conversations into a publishing sensation, Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (1822–23). The book recorded Napoleon’s day-to-day life on the island, his sentiments on religion and philosophy, his argument that the ideals of the French Revolution had lived on in the empire. It would be printed and reprinted throughout the century, and do much to turn the perception of Napoleon from a dictator into a liberator — a slayer of tyrannical dynasties more than a founder of his own. It is also the primary window through which we can view the development of Napoleon’s English.
According to Count Las Cases, his pupil “had an extraordinary intelligence but a very bad memory: this latter particularly upset him.” As a result, Napoleon grasped English grammar with an impressive ease but vocabulary with a painful slowness.
When it came to speaking English, the Count relates, “The pupil wished only to recognise [French] pronunciation.” Perhaps the former emperor could not bear to do his vanquishers the honour of speaking their language their way. Perhaps his approach to English mirrored his general approach to foreign territory — he liked to make it his own:
Even in his own language, [he] had a way of garbling proper nouns; as for foreign words, he pronounced them just as he pleased. Once they left his mouth, whatever way he had pronounced them, they remained forever that, because he had, once and for all, lodged them in his head in that way.
Out of this situation arose a completely new language, Las Cases tells us, only comprehensible to pupil and teacher. Betsy Balcomb, a teenaged resident of the island, agreed: “The Emperor’s English, of which he spoke a few words, was the oddest in the world.” But Napoleon stuck at his language-learning. Las Cases suggests that he devoted up to five hours every afternoon to it, “sometimes with an application that was entirely admirable, sometimes with visible dislike.” Through this effort he achieved his goal of reading the newspapers. And he “could, more or less, have made himself understood in writing.”
We can judge that last claim for ourselves. Because Napoleon was an insomniac, he used to write English letters in the middle of the night, for Las Cases to correct the next day. In one that survives, dated 7 March, 1816, Napoleon calculates how far he has come towards proficiency and how much work he has left to get there:
Count lascases — Since sixt week j learn the Englich and j do not any progress. Six week do fourty and two day. If might have learn fivity word four day I could know it two thusands and two hundred. It is in the dictionary more of fourty thousand; even he could must twinty bout much of tems for know it our hundred and twenty week, which do more two yars. After this you shall agrée that to study one tongue is a great labour who it must do into the young aged.
Comprehensible? Maybe. Idiosyncratic? Certainly. Napoleon never stopped insisting on writing “j” (as in the French “je”) instead of “I”. Nonetheless his writerly confidence was growing. That same month he even played a joke on Las Cases in English. He anonymously sent to his teacher a review of one of his books, declaring it to be not without “somme fautes but you schal may corect them in the next edition.” Las Cases tells us (semi-plausibly) that he was completely taken in by his pupil's fraudulent review. And upon seeing the surprise and anger of his teacher, Napoleon began "splitting his sides laughing". But the teacher’s supposed anger soon softened: “I kept this letter safe: the happiness, the style and the circumstances make it more precious than any diploma which the Emperor could have given at the time of his power.” ※※Indexed under…Jokesby notable figures
Las Cases last mentions Napoleon’s English on April 15, 1816, when he had been studying the language for three months. His confidence had now improved to the point where over dinner he felt comfortable giving an impromptu summary, in English, of a story he had read in an illicitly obtained French newspaper, “full of curious, remarkable, romantic details, which greatly aroused our interest.” Napoleon so enjoyed the reaction of his audience that he began to laugh, “for his story had been but that, improvised so as to show us his progress in English, so he said.”
If you’d like to know more about Napoleon’s English lessons, Peter Hicks has written an excellent piece for Napoleon.org, which our account above draws on. For more on the emperor’s final exile, have a read of the last chapter of Andrew Roberts’ Napoleon the Great (2014). Or have a look at our Collections piece on Napoleon at St Helena (1855), a book derived from several firsthand accounts, including the one by Las Cases.


text:
The Dances of the Ages (1913)

Feb 2, 2018

This delightful short from Edison Manufacturing Co. features the dancers Norma Gould and Ted Shawn (with troupe in tow) performing a range of "historical" dances, not upon the stage but, via the magic of special effects, miniaturised upon a banqueting table top. Flanking either side of the table-sized stage are a bevy of beer drinking men — one of whom is meant to be an old dancing master — making merry to the beat of the dances before them.
In order of appearance:
Stone Age. Dance of Primitive Man
Egypt 1200 BC. Dance of the Priest of Ra
Greece 400 BC. The Bacchanalia
Orient 200 AD
England 1760. The Minuet
France 1850. The Carnival
America 1898. The Cakewalk
America 1913. Ragtime
Despite its look back through the ages (and being made more than a century ago) there is something oddly futuristic about the scene, as though at once also an accidental window into the future advances in holography. This special effect of miniaturisation, whereby some actors appear in miniature while others are normally sized, was a popular technique of early cinema (see also Princess Nicotine from 1909, and The Cheese Mites from 1901).
The short presented here is one of few dance-related films appearing on a compilation of footage belonging to the Denishawn Video Archive at the New York Public Library. Founded in 1915, the L.A.-based Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, was the brainchild of dancers (and married couple) Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn and became the first dance academy in the United States to produce a professional dance company.


text:
Diagrams from Dr Alesha Sivartha’s Book of Life (1898)
Text by Adam Green
Nov 15, 2017

Titled The Book of Life: The Spiritual and Physical Constitution of Man, Dr Alesha Sivartha’s enigmatic 1898 work expounds his unique blend of blend of science, sociology, mysticism and religion, a spiritual teaching which apparently attracted the attention of Mark Twain among others. Sivartha was clearly a man bursting at the seams with an abundance of complex and esoteric ideas, and while in written form this might translate into somewhat dense and bamboozling prose, visually it gave birth to a series of superbly intricate and striking diagrams. Obsessed with the magical properties of the number 12, Sivartha, in each of his wonderful "brain maps”, breaks down the grey matter into twelve different sections, as well as turning his gaze to other parts of the body such as hands and the nervous system as a whole. The ideas these curious images express are difficult to sum up succinctly but broadly touch on the main tenants of theosophy. In the words of Sivartha himself:
The human race has been marching upward from the first ages of history. Under what law has that mighty procession of the ages taken place? Science and history both answer that man has advanced, step by step, from the ignorant and selfish rule of his lower brain organs uptoward the beneficent dominion of his higher faculties. The laws which have controlled that vast upward movement are still in force. They are fixed in the very constitution of man. And they are of supreme importance at the present time, for they determine what new institutions and what social changes are now required to meet that higher growth of man.
As for the author himself, not a lot is known for certain, other than Sivartha appears to be the pen-name for a Kansas doctor named Arthur E. Merton (1834?-1915?), who is listed as the author of an earlier 1876 version of The Book of Life. What little additional information out there seems to stem mainly from a website (which seems to share the same mesmerising sense of horror vacui as its subject!) run by his great-great grandson, which claims Sivartha/Merton to be the illegitimate son of the Indian scholar and activist Raja Ram Mohun Roy Bahadoor and an unknown English Unitarian woman who became romantically embroiled with the Raja during his tour of England.


text:
Russian Portraits (1921)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Feb 8, 2018

Clare Sheridan was an English sculptor and writer with friends in rare places. One such friend was Lev Kamenev, an original member of the Soviet Union's Politburo, whom Sheridan met in 1920 when Kamenev visited London as part of the first Soviet trade delegation to the city. Sheridan had modelled a bust of him and shown him around. She later wrote of their time together on Hampstead Heath: “We went on foot off a side road on to a rough sandy track, quite away from people and lights. On a bank I spread my white fur coat, and we sat there for an hour or more. It was very beautiful.”
Sheridan had not found her passion for sculpture until 1914, when she was 29. Grief stricken by the death of her infant daughter, she had modelled an angel to watch over the grave. The work was a solace. When her husband died on the Western Front the following year, Sheridan took a small studio in London and devoted herself to learning sculpture. Her first London exhibition was a great success and led to commissions from figures including HG Wells, Herbert Asquith, and Winston Churchill. The latter was in fact her first cousin. The pair were close. But when Sheridan had told Winston of her literary ambitions he had been worse than patronising. “Better” he wrote “to please and inspire the male sex.” Sheridan ignored him. Her career as a sculptor and journalist would eventually yield sixteen books.
By the time she met Kamenev in London, she was an established artist of independent means, but she had never been published. When Kamenev personally invited her to travel back with him to Russia to make busts of his fellow revolutionaries she seemed to jump at the chance. Perhaps she smelt a great story. Certainly she wanted adventure and to know the truth about the Bolsheviks — “these wild beasts who have been represented as ready to spring upon us and devour us!” Kamenev managed to secure her passage to Moscow, getting her a berth on the trade delegation’s boat to Stockholm, and from there the Estonian visa she needed to reach Russia. She would stay at the Kremlin for two months, producing excellent models of Trotsky, Lenin, and other Soviet bigwigs.
On leaving she turned her diaries into Russian Portraits (1921), a book which proved controversial on account of it humanising those “wild beasts” of the Kremlin. Part of the scandal was familial. Churchill was Secretary of State for War and had spent the last year pushing hard for the allies to fight against the Red Army in the Russian Civil War. Sheridan alluded to the controversy in her foreword:
There are people in England who are indignant at my doing Lenin and Trotsky. There were people in Moscow who were horrified because I had done Churchill . . . but as a portraitist I have nothing to do with politics; it is humanity that interests me, humanity with its force and its weakness, its ambitions and fears, its honesty and lack of scruples, its perfection and deformities.
In fact, Sheridan was deeply interested in politics. While at the Kremlin she had extensive conversations with the Soviets on their aims, legislation, and secret organisations. Nonetheless the book focuses predominantly on characterisation — distinctive features, juicy human details. She writes of Trotsky:
When he talks his face lights up and his eyes flash . . . Suddenly I had the thought of asking him to undo his collar for me. He unbuttoned his tunic and the shirt underneath, and laid bare a splendid neck and chest. I worked like a fury for half an hour which was all too short. I tried to convey into my clay some of his energy and vitality.
And of Lenin:
Never did I see anyone make so many faces. Lenin laughed and frowned, and looked thoughtful, sad, and humorous all in turn. His eyebrows twitched, sometimes they went right up, and then again they puckered together maliciously. I watched these expressions, waited, hesitated, and then made my selection with a frantic rush—it was his screwed-up look. Wonderful! No one else has such a look, it is his alone.
When she returned from Moscow, London society (including Winston) cold-shouldered her. So she crossed the Atlantic, to travel in the United States and Mexico. She spent some days with Charlie Chaplin and created a bust of him — the papers would go onto report widely rumours of an affair. From there her life produced many more twists, turns, and travel books including Across Europe with Satanella [the name of her motorbike] (1925), A Turkish Kaleidoscope (1926) and Arab Interlude (1936).  She died in 1970, and was buried beside Brede church in Sussex, south east England, where stands a memorial she carved out of a massive oak tree, for her son Dickie who had succumbed to appendicitis aged twenty-one, while travelling with her in Constantinople.


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Details from Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1908)

Feb 6, 2018

100 years ago today, on 6th February 1918, the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt passed away in Vienna after having suffered a stroke and pneumonia, one of the many millions of victims of the worldwide influenza epidemic that year. He left a rich body of artistic output that established him as one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement, and, today, as among the most well known artists in the history of art. His better known works hail from what is known as his "golden phase" — which saw him finally win favour with the critics (and also his bank manager). The period was so-called because of Klimt's frequent use in these years of gold-leaf in his compositions: and of these works perhaps none is more famous than The Kiss. Painted between 1907 and 1908, upon a perfectly square canvas (180 × 180 cm), the work depicts a couple locked in intimate embrace, their clothes and surrounding landscape exquisitely rendered in two dimensional pattern: the man in a smock of rectilinear shapes, the woman in a dress of softer floral forms, behind them a swathe of textured gold, and beneath a bed of colourful flowers. To celebrate the centenary of his death, we give to you a selection of close-ups from the painting.


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Engravings from Oliver Goldsmith’s History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1825)

Dec 27, 2012

"Beautiful and appropriate" engravings for Oliver Goldsmith's History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1825). Goldsmith (1730-1774) was an Anglo-Irish novelist, playwright and poet, who is best known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield, his pastoral poem The Deserted Village, and his plays The Good-Natur'd Man and She Stoops to Conquer. He is also thought to have written the classic children's tale The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, the source of the phrase "goody two-shoes". Along with Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson he was a founding member of "The Club" in 1764, a London dining club who would meet weekly bringing together the leading lights of the city's artist and literary scene.


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Scientific Amusements (1890)

Nov 26, 2012

Harry Houdini's copy of Scientific Amusements left by his estate to the Library of Congress in 1927. From the Preface:
Young people of both sexes, and persons of all ages who have leisure and a taste for that which is ingenious as well as instructive and amusing, may be commended to this remarkably interesting collection of experiments, nearly all of which can be readily performed by an unskilled person who will carefully follow out the directions given. It is surprising how near we are to the most fundamental principles of science when we perform some of the simplest operations.


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Snowflakes: A Chapter From the Book of Nature (1863)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Dec 4, 2012

Snowflakes were not always emblematic of the unique. Israel Perkins Warren, a prominent American minister and author of Snowflakes: A Chapter from the Book of Nature (1863), offers a brief history of efforts to typologize frozen water crystals. In 1755, John Nettis published an account of his experiments, begun fifteen years prior, to observe “the wonderful Configurations of the smallest shining Particles of Snow”. He saw ninety-one varieties, many of which this “Oculist to the Republic of Middleburg” illustrated with needles and columns that resemble delicate leaves. In his 1820 Account of the Arctic Regions, Captain William Scoresby arrived on ninety-six varieties, which are diagrammed with lacey opacity on plates bookended by nautical charts and narwhals. Warren copies his own designs from these predecessors as well as the images of Cecilia Glaisher, one of the first women photographers, whose formal interest in ferns harmonized, perhaps, with her illustrations for explorations of snowflakes written by her husband. Unlike these other texts, Warren’s Snowflakes does not typologize, but instead serves chiefly to introduce “this interesting department of the Creator’s works” and elicit “those sentiments of admiration and reverence which his wonder-working power should inspire in every beholder”. The “treasures of the snow”, writes Warren, “are open to all who choose to explore them”.
Snowflakes begins with a short chapter on “snow structure”, the scientific pretense of which melts before the reader’s eyes. “Much attention has been given to the meteorological conditions of the atmosphere during the fall of snow”, Warren reports; “Nothing very definite, however, is discoverable in this respect.” The same applies to causal arguments about the marvelous geometry of flakes. “Of the hidden causes which originate these beautiful productions, nothing whatever is known. . . . even if [magnetic or electrical] theories were demonstrated, they would explain nothing.” There is no need for further understanding because the First Cause is clear:
Snow is formed in the higher regions of our atmosphere. It is the wild, raging water of the ocean, the gentle rill of the mountains, the beautiful lake, and the vilest pond on earth, all taxed and made to contribute at the bidding of their Lord to this department of his treasure-house. They send up their tribute in the finest particles of moisture ; the steady contribution coming up from all parts of the globe indiscriminately.
And yet, from the extracts of poetry and devotional prose that follow — including works by Eliza Cook, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia H. Scott, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hannah Flagg Gould, and dozens of other writers — rapturous theories of snowfall emerge. Organized thematically (“Purity”, “Grace”, “Beauty”, “Weakness”, etc.), Snowflakes posits, to take just one example, that water freezes along “the angle of sixty degrees*,* or some multiple of it” because flakes are like flocks: “the fleecy crystals, through spreading abroad each in its utmost individual liberty, being still retained within one ownership and belonging to one fold”.
In the early twentieth-century, Wilson Bentley’s microscopic photographs of snowflakes would popularize the idea that no two ice crystals are alike. Warren’s beautifully-illuminated volume, in its resistance to dissection, inadvertently swung closer to the present-day consensus. In 2013, researchers in Japan divided snowflakes into thirty-nine categories, further divisible by 121 subtypes. Flakes are indeed, it seems, of a flock.
Below you can browse a complete collection of the plates from Snowflakes.

author: Hunter Dukes


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Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost (1901)

Dec 10, 2012

Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost, directed by Walter R. Booth, is the oldest known film adaptation of Charles Dickens' 1843 novel A Christmas Carol - featuring the miserly Ebeneezer Scrooge confronted by Marley's ghost and given by visions of Christmas Past, Present and Future. The film, "although somewhat flat and stage-bound to modern eyes," according to Michael Brooke of BFI Screenonline, "was an ambitious undertaking at the time," as, "not only did it attempt to tell an 80 page story in five minutes, but it featured impressive trick effects, superimposing Marley's face over the door knocker and the scenes from his youth over a black curtain in Scrooge's bedroom." It was presented in 'Twelve Tableaux' or scenes and is thought to contain the first ever use of intertitles in a film. (Wikipedia)


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Prison diary of Michael Dougherty (1908)

Dec 6, 2012

The diary of Michael Dougherty, a young Irish soldier in the American Civil War, kept while imprisoned in various Confederate prison camps. As Dougherty notes, in 1863 “At 5 p.m. we were overpowered, cut off from the division and 127 of our regiment, among whom was your humble servant, were compelled to surrender.” For the next 23 months moving from camp to camp Dougherty kept his secret diary noting down his experiences of daily life. Of the 127 Union soldiers taken prisoner with him, he was the sole survivor, with nearly all of them perishing at the hands of commander Captain Wirz in the notorious Andersonville, Georgia prison. Dougherty's descriptions of the appalling conditions at Andersonville are amongst the most harrowing in the book.


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Class of 2013

Dec 11, 2012

Pictured above is our top pick of artists and writers whose works will, on 1st January 2013, be entering the public domain in those countries with a 'life plus 70 years' copyright term (e.g. most European Union members, Brazil, Israel, Nigeria, Russia, Turkey, etc.). An eclectic bunch have assembled for our graduation photo - including the two founding fathers of anthropology from different sides of the Atlantic, an Army officer turned "premature hippy", the painter of one of America's most iconic images, and a canonised Catholic saint who studied with Martin Heidegger. The unifying factor bringing them all together is that all died in the year of 1942, many sadly as a result, directly or indirectly, of the Second World War.
Below is a little bit more about each of their lives (with each name linking through to their respective Wikipedia pages, if you would like to find out more). In the new year, when their works shall enter the public domain, links to works shall be included as well.
BRUNO SCHULZ

Bruno Schulz (July 12th 1892 – November 19th 1942) was a Polish writer and artist most famous for his collection of short stories The Street of Crocodiles (1934) which centre on a merchant family from a small town in the Galician region. The book, with its inventive and unique use of metaphor, helped establish Schulz's reputation as one of the great Polish-language writers of the 20th century. He led a relatvively solitary life, teaching drawing in a Polish school in his hometown of Drohobych from 1924 to 1941. Following the Nazi invasion during the Second World War, being Jewish, Schulz was forced to live in a ghetto but for a while was protected by a Nazi Gestapo officer named Felix Landau who was an admirer of his artwork. During the last weeks of his life, Schulz painted a mural in Landau's home in Drohobych. Shortly after completing the work, Schulz was walking home through the "Aryan quarter" with a loaf of bread when he was shot and killed by another Gestapo officer, Karl Günther, a rival of Landau's. Subsequently, Schulz's mural was painted over and forgotten until its discovery by a German documentary film crew in 2001. At the time of his death Schulz was working on a novel called The Messiah which has subsequently been lost.
ROBERT MUSIL

Robert Musil (November 6th 1880 – April 15th 1942) was an Austrian writer whose huge tome of an unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities is generally considered to be one of the most important modernist novels. The story, set in Vienna on the eve of World War 1, deals with the moral and intellectual decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire through the eyes of the book's hero Ulrich, a former mathematician who has failed to engage with the world around him in such a manner that would allow him to possess 'qualities'. In 1932 Musil's contemporary Thomas Mann (who had set up the Robert Musil Society that same year), when asked to name an eminent contemporary novel, cited exclusively The Man Without Qualities. Despite this support from high literary circles Musil's work was far from gaining mass popular appeal in his lifetime. Indeed after his death from a stroke in 1942, incurred while he was on the run from the Nazis with his Jewish wife Martha, his work was largely forgotten in the German speaking world and it was not until the 1950s that it began to garner attention once more. The first translation of The Man Without Qualities in English was published in 1953, 1954 and 1960 - with an updated translation, included previously unpublished drafts, was published in 1995. More recently the philosophical aspect of his writing has come under the spotlight with the philosophy journal The Monist seeking submissions for a special issue on "The Philosophy of Robert Musil" to be published in January 2014.
FRANZ BOAS

Franz Boas (July 9th 1858 – December 21st 1942) was a German-American pioneer of modern anthropology and has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". With his emphasis on research first, followed later by generalizations, a methodology patterned after the natural sciences, Boas went against the British school of "armchair anthropologists" who tended to only do fieldwork to prove or disprove grand generalisations already made. In the early 20th century he would establish anthropology as a discipline in its own right, one orientated around two basic questions: "Why are the tribes and nations of the world different, and how have the present differences developed?" He was pivotal in moving the study of cultures away from racist assumptions surrounding forming a hierarchy of "civilizations" toward a more relativistic approach. In his 1963 book, Race: The History of an Idea in America, Thomas Gossett wrote that "It is possible that Boas did more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history." He died of a stroke at the Columbia University Faculty Club on December 21, 1942 in the arms of fellow anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
BRONISLAW MALINOWKSI
Bronisław Malinowski (April 7th 1884 – 16 May 1942), a Polish born British-naturalised citizen, was one of the most important anthropologists of the 20th-century. In 1910, at the age of 26 he moved to England to study exchange and economics at the London School of Economics, analysing patterns of exchange in aboriginal Australia through ethnographic documents. In 1914 he made an expedition to the South Pacific region but was forbidden to return to England as, after the outbreak of WW1, he was considered an enemy of the British commonwealth. The Australian government did, however, allow him to study the locals in Melanesia where he conducted research on the Trobriand people of Papua - the foundations for his groundbreaking ethnography Argonauts of the Western Pacific which he would write in after his return to England following the end of the war. Finally published in 1922 the work which established him as one of the most important anthropologists in Europe of that time. The ethnography described the complex institution of the Kula ring, and became foundational for subsequent theories of reciprocity and exchange. Like his American counterpart Franz Boas, Malinowksi is credited with being the first to bring anthropology "off the verandah", that is, experiencing the everyday life of his subjects along with them. Malinowski emphasized the importance of detailed participant observation and argued that anthropologists must have daily contact with their informants if they are to adequately record the "imponderabilia of everyday life" that are so important to understanding a different culture. He emphasised that the goal of the anthropologist, or ethnographer, is "to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world".
GRANT WOOD

Grant Wood (February 13th 1891 – February 12th 1942) was an American painter from Iowa best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest. His most famous work is American Gothic, considered by many to be one of the iconic images of the 20th century. The painting depicts a stern but calm man holding a pitchfork (modelled by Wood's dentist) and a younger woman, the man's spinster daughter (modelled by Wood's sister), stood in front of an unusual house - the classic wooden American farmhouse but with an arch-shaped window reminiscent of a more European Gothic architecture. The painting became popular after it won third prize at big competition at the Art Institute of Chicago. In the guise of many different interpretations the painting went on to capture the imagination of the American public, at the time going through the Great Depression.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Stefan Zweig (November 28th 1881 – February 22th 1942) was an Austrian writer who at the height of his literary career in the 1920s and 30s could lay claim to being one the most famous writers in the world - extremely popular in the USA, South America and Europe, though not so much in Britain. He mixed with the intelligentsia of his time, befriending Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, and being a particular favourite of the composer Richard Strauss, for he who's The Silent Woman he wrote the libretto. Zweig's style as a writer was simple and easy - his plaudits emphasising its humanity and grace, his critics (mostly in Britain) seeing it as effected and pedestrian. He is best known for his novellas such as, The Royal Game, Amok, Letter from an Unknown Woman); his novels such as, Beware of Pity, Confusion of Feelings, and the posthumously published The Post Office Girl and his biographies, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan, Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles and also posthumously published, Balzac. Being Jewish he spent the 30s in exile from the encroachment of the Nazi regime, first to England and then in 1940 to America, a flight which he recounts in his autobiographical The World of Yesterday. On February 23rd 1942 he and his wife were found dead of a barbiturate overdose in their house in the Brazilian city of Petrópolis, holding hands. In despair over the destruction of his beloved Europe he and his wife had taken their own lives. In a suicide note he wrote: "I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on Earth. I send greetings to all of my friends: May they live to see the dawn after this long night. I, who am most impatient, go before them."
EDITH STEIN
Edith Stein (October 12th 1891 – August 9th 1942) - also known as Saint Teresia Benedicta of the Cross, informally also known as Saint Edith Stein - was a German Roman Catholic philosopher and nun, regarded as a martyr and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. She was born into an observant Jewish family but by her teenage years was an atheist. At the age of 24, after receiving a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Göttingen with a dissertation under Edmund Husserl, On the Problem of Empathy, she worked as an assistant to Husserl alongside a certain Martin Heidegger. During her summer holidays in Bergzabern in 1921 Stein read the autobiography of the mystic St. Teresa of Ávila and she was subsequently converted to Roman Catholicsm. She became baptised in 1922 and gave up her assistantship with Husserl to teach at the Dominican nuns' schools school in Speyer from 1923 to 1931. While there, she translated Thomas Aquinas' De Veritate. In 1932 she became a lecturer at the Institute for Pedagogy at Münster, but antisemitic legislation passed by the Nazi government forced her to resign the post in 1933. She went to a monastery in Cologne where she wrote Finite and Eternal Being which tries to combine the philosophies of Aquinas and Husserl. To avoid the growing Nazi threat she was transferred to the Netherlands where she wrote The Science of the Cross: Studies on John of the Cross. In 1942, following a new decree to round up all previously spared converts from Judaism, Stein and her sister Rosa, also a convert, were captured and shipped to the Auschwitz concentration camp where they are presumed to have been gassed on August 9th 1942.
A.E.WAITE

Arthur Edward Waite (October 2nd 1857 – May 19th 1942) was a scholarly mystic who wrote extensively on occult and esoteric matters, and co-created the widely used Rider-Waite Tarot deck. He was a prolific author with many of his works being well received in academic circles. He wrote occult texts on subjects including divination, esotericism, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, and ceremonial magic, Kabbalism and alchemy; he also translated and reissued several important mystical and alchemical works. A number of his volumes remain in print, The Book of Ceremonial Magic (1911), The Holy Kabbalah (1929), A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (1921), and his edited translation of Eliphas Levi's Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual (1896). Waite is perhaps best known as the co-creator of the popular and widely used Rider-Waite Tarot deck and author of its companion volume, the Key to the Tarot, republished in expanded form the following year, 1911, as the Pictorial Key to the Tarot, a guide to Tarot reading.
FRANCIS YOUNGHUSBAND
Sir Francis Younghusband (May 31st 1863 – July 31st 1942) was a British Army officer, explorer, and spiritual writer. He is remembered chiefly for his travels in the Far East and Central Asia; especially the 1904 British expedition to Tibet, which he led, during which a massacre of Tibetans occurred. It was on the retreat from this disastrous mission while in the moutains that he had a mystical revelation which suffused him with "love for the whole world" and convinced him that "men at heart are divine." This conviction led him to regret his invasion of Tibet, and eventually, in 1936, to found the World Congress of Faiths (in imitation of the World Parliament of Religions). He went on to pen a number of fantasictally titled books including Mother World (in Travail for the Christ that is to be) (1924), and Life in the Stars: An Exposition of the View that on some Planets of some Stars exist Beings higher than Ourselves, and on one a World-Leader, the Supreme Embodiment of the Eternal Spirit which animates the Whole (1927). This last was particularly admired by Lord Baden-Powell, the Boy Scouts founder. Key concepts include what would come to be known as the Gaia hypothesis, pantheism, and a Christlike "world leader" living on the planet "Altair" (or "Stellair"), who radiates spiritual guidance by means of telepathy. Younghusband also played a key role in the first ascent of Mount Everest, being elected President of the Royal Geographical Society in 1919, and two years later became Chairman of the Mount Everest Committee which was set up to coordinate the initial 1921 British Reconnaissance Expedition to Mount Everest.
ERIC RAVILIOUS
Eric Ravilious (July 22nd 1903 – September 2nd 1942) was an English artist from the county of Sussex reknowned for his watercolours of the South Downs. Apart from a brief experimentation with oils in 1930 – inspired by the works of Johan Zoffany – Ravilious painted almost entirely in watercolour. He was especially inspired by the landscape of the South Downs around Beddingham. He frequently returned to Furlongs, the cottage of Peggy Angus, where some of his most famous works were carried out, such as Tea at Furlongs. As well as watercolours, Ravillous engraved more than four hundred illustrations and drew over forty lithographic designs for books and publications during his lifetime for large publishing houses such as Jonathan Cape, Lanston Corporation and smaller, less commercial publishers, such as the Golden Cockerel Press, the Curwen Press and the Cresset Press. His woodcut of two Victorian gentlemen playing cricket has appeared on the front cover of every edition of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack since 1938. In 1936 Ravilious was invited by Wedgwood to make designs for ceramics. His work for them included a commemorative mug to mark the coronation of Edward VIII, the "Boat Race" bowl and the "Garden" series of plates, in which each size of plate showed a diffferent plant. In 1940 Ravilious was appointed an official war artist, with the rank of Honorary Captain in the Royal Marines. During that year he painted at the Royal Naval Barracks at Chatham and Sheerness; sailed to Norway and the Arctic on board HMS Highlander, which was carrying out escort duties, and painted submarines at Gosport and coastal defences at Newlyn. In August of 1942 he was transferred to Iceland, where he was killed accompanying a Royal Air Force air sea rescue mission that failed to return to its base.
L.M. MONTGOMERY
Lucy Maud Montgomery (November 30th 1874 – April 24th 1942), called "Maud" by family and friends and publicly known as L. M. Montgomery, was a Canadian author best known for a series of novels beginning with Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908. The central character, Anne, an orphaned girl, made Montgomery famous in her lifetime and gave her an international following. Mark Twain said Montgomery’s Anne was “the dearest and most moving and delightful child since the immortal Alice". She went on to publish 20 novels (8 of which were in the Anne of Green Gables series) as well as more than 500 short stories, an autobiography, and a book of poetry. She was honoured by being the first female in Canada to be named a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in England and by being invested in the Order of the British Empire in 1935. After struggling with looking after her mentally ill husband for many years in their home "Journey's End" in Ontario, she died in 1942 in a suspected suicide.
And a few others that didn't make it to the class photo....

Flinders-Petrie
Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson (Xavier Mayne)
Dorothy Wall
Charles Henry Chomley
Caroline Frances Eleanor Spurgeon
Violet Hunt
Ernest Bramah
Roberto Arlt
Walter Sickert

To learn more about Public Domain Day visit publicdomainday.org. Here you can discover what celebratory events might be planned in your area and peruse an in-progress 'public domain in 2013' list.
For more names whose works will be going into the public domain in 2013 see the Wikipedia page on 1942 deaths and also a list being compiled here. Adrian Pohl has also put together this excellent list.
We also came across this great public domain advent calendar project (in French).


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A Christmas Sermon by Robert Louis Stevenson (1900)

Dec 21, 2012

A Christmas Sermon by Robert Louis Stevenson written while he convalesced from a lung ailment at Lake Sarnac in the winter of 1887. In the short text he meditates on the questions of death, morality and man's main task in life which he concludes is “To be honest, to be kind — to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence.” The piece was to be published in Scribner’s magazine the following December. This pamphlet edition is from 1900, published 6 years after Stevenson's death at the age of just 44.


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The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Dec 21, 2012

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are described by John of Patmos in his Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament. The chapter tells of a "'book', or 'scroll', in God's right hand that is sealed with seven seals". The Lamb of God, or Lion of Judah, (Jesus Christ) opens the first four of the seven seals, which summons forth four beings that ride out on white, red, black, and pale horses. Although some interpretations differ, in most accounts, the four riders are seen as symbolizing Conquest, War, Famine, and Death, respectively. The Christian apocalyptic vision is that the four horsemen are to set a divine apocalypse upon the world as harbingers of the Last Judgment.
The White Horse
I watched as the Lamb opened the first of the seven seals. Then I heard one of the four living creatures say in a voice like thunder, "Come and see!" I looked, and there before me was a white horse! Its rider held a bow, and he was given a crown, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest. (Revelation 6:1-2)
The Red Horse
When the Lamb opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, "Come and see!" Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make men slay each other. To him was given a large sword. (Revelation 6:3-4)
The Black Horse
When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, "Come and see!" I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, "A quart of wheat for a day's wages, and three quarts of barley for a day's wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!" (Revelation 6:5-6)
The Pale Horse
When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, "Come and see!" I looked and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine, and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth. (Revelation 6:7-8)
Wikipedia


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Plates from a History of the Carriby Islands (1666)

Nov 30, 2012

The 9 illustrative plates from The History of the Caribby-Islands: viz. Barbados, St Christophers, St Vincents, Martinico, Dominico, Barbouthos, Monserrat, Mevis, Antego, &c. in all XXVIII (1666), by Charles de Rochefort and translated by John Davies.