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Jap Herron: A Novel written from the Ouija Board (1917)

Oct 29, 2013

Jap Herron was a novel written, supposedly, by a deceased Mark Twain from beyond the grave, dictated via the medium of a Ouija board. The scribe (faithfully taking down notes, or perhaps a little more than just that, depending on your view) was Emily Grant Hutchings, a woman who had actually corresponded with Twain 15 years earlier. In their exchange of letters he had given her advice and, interestingly, also marked one of her letters with the words: "Idiot! Must preserve". According to the lengthy introduction by Hutchings, "The Coming of Jap Herron", she and a woman named Lola Hays began receiving messages from Twain in 1915 when playing around with a Ouija board at a spiritualist meeting in St. Louis. Dallying with such occult techniques was not unusual for the time, and it seems receiving literary output from the great beyond was not so unusual either. The Jap Herron book came out at a time when the Ouija board communications of "Patience Worth" via St. Louis writer Pearl Curran, a friend of Hutchings (who was present during the first "communications" with Worth), was also capturing national attention. Indeed, as a New York Times article of the time remarks, Jap Herron was "the third novel in the last few months that has claimed the authorship of some dead and gone being who, unwilling to give up human activities, has appeared to find in the ouija board a material means of expression". This was, however, the most high profile author to be have been involved. Twain's daughter, Clara Clemens, took particular issue with the book, and she, along with the publishers Harper and Brothers, who for 17 years had owned the sole rights to Twain's works, went to court to halt the publication. In response, Hutchings and Hays, with the help of a certain Professor Hyslop, claimed that Clara's father (after more Ouija board activity) was "in a state of intellectual torture because of the difficulty he is having in getting his momentous work into print". The case, however, never went to trial as Hutchings eventually agreed to cease publication, and destroy any copies they could find, meaning surviving copies of the book are extremely rare.
Here is the aforementioned, subtly scathing, New York Times article on the book from 1917, the year it came out:
The ouija board seems to have come to stay as a competitor of the typewriter in the production of fiction. For this is the third novel in the last few months that has claimed the authorship of some dead and gone being who, unwilling to give up human activities, has appeared to find in the ouija board a material means of expression. This last story is unequivocal in its claim of origin. For those who are responsible for it appear to be convinced beyond doubt that no less a spirit than that of Mark Twain guided their hands as the story was spelled out on the board. Emily Grant Hutchings and Lola V. Hays are the sponsors of the tale. Mrs. Hays being the passive recipient whose hands upon the pointer were especially necessary. St. Louis is the scene of the exploit, as it is also of the literary labors of that ouija board that writes the "Patience Worth" stories. Emily Grant Hutchings, who writes the introductory account of how it all happened is from Hannibal, Mo., the home of Mark Twain's boyhood, and in her the alleged spirit of the author seems to have put much confidence. Her long description of how the story was written and of the many conversations they had with Mark Twain through the ouija board contains many quotations of his remarks that sometimes have a reminiscent flavor of the humorist's characteristic conversation.

The story itself, a long novelette, is scened in a Missouri town and tells how a lad born to poverty and shiftlessness, by the help of a fine-souled and high-minded man and woman, grew into a noble and useful manhood and helped to regenerate his town. There is evident a rather striking knowledge of the conditions of life and the peculiarities of character in a Missouri town, the dialect is true, and the picture has, in general, many features that will seem familiar to those who know their "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn." A country paper fills an important place in the tale, and there is constant proof of familiarity with the life and work of the editor of such a sheet. The humor impresses as a feeble attempt at imitation and, while there is now and then a strong sure touch of pathos or a swift and true revelation of human nature, the "sob stuff" that oozes through many of the scenes, and the overdrawn emotions are too much for credulity. If this is the best that "Mark Twain" can do by reaching across the barrier, the army of admirers that his works have won for him will all hope that he will hereafter respect that boundary.
Read Twain's own experience with the occult, from the living side this time, in his short piece about a seance he attended in 1866.


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Ernst Haeckel’s Radiolaria (1862)

Sep 19, 2013

According to Wikipedia Radiolaria are "protozoa of (diameter 0.1–0.2 mm) that produce intricate mineral skeletons, typically with a central capsule dividing the cell into the inner and outer portions of endoplasm and ectoplasm. They are found as zooplankton throughout the ocean, and their skeletal remains make up a large part of the cover of the ocean floor as siliceous ooze." In 1862 the German biologist, philosopher and artist Ernst Haeckel published an image laden monograph on these microscopic organisms, turning his eye and exquisite line to their intricate and varied forms.
In addition to creating beautiful art, Haeckel held and promoted disturbing theories on race and eugenics. You can read more about this darker side to Haeckel in Bernd Brunner's essay "Human Forms in Nature". Also read about Haeckel's role in one of science's great controversies in Nick Hopwood's "Copying Pictures, Evidencing Evolution".

source: public-domain-review

type: collection

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


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Animated GIFs: Fleischer’s Bubbles (1922)

Sep 24, 2013

A series of animated GIFs excerpted by Okkult Motion Pictures from Max Fleischer’s Bubbles, part of his Out of the Inkwell series, which also includes The Tantalizing Fly.
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Okkult Motion Pictures is the brainchild of Marco Calabrese and Alessandro Scali from Turin, Italy. With the Excerpts project, Okkult Motion Pictures aims to bring to light the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright moving images occulted in Internet archives, through a series of animated gifs. A digital archivalism project for the diffusion of open knowledge. Okkult Motion Pictures official website / Twitter
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All Okkult animated GIFs published here under a CC-BY-SA license.


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Tommy Burns knocking out Bill Squires (1907)

Oct 24, 2013

A Miles Brothers film of the legendary heavyweight prize boxing match between Bill Squires and Tommy Burns, played out at Ocean View, California, on  July 4th 1907. Weighing in at a measly 178 pounds, the 5'7" Canadian Burns was a 10-1 underdog against Australia's Bill Squires who was coming off a 20 consecutive knockout streak. To the shock of all present, this mismatch came to an unexpected end in the first round when Burns KO'd Squires in  one of the fastest knockouts in the history of boxing up to that point. The fight was labeled the "shortest and fiercest contest on record".
Burns would go on to secure a reputation for knocking out the biggest men in the sport. He wrote, in a book brought out in 1908, about how the face of boxing was changing, no longer being about brute strength but speed:
"In modern boxing speed is nearly everything, and I have always considered my success to be primarily due to the fact that lacrosse and hockey had taught me to be spry and smart on my feet before I ever thought of donning a pair of boxing gloves."


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Photographs of Auto Polo (ca. 1912)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Oct 3, 2013

Ah, polo, that sport of kings, where players race down the field atop horsepowered beasts. Behold their mallets and wheels, whirling throughout the chukka; inhale the earthy scent of mown grass, leather, and gasoline; listen to those bumping bodies, as the transmission’s planetary gearset reins in speed. You’re less likely to find this game played before Pimm’s-sipping crowds, however. It is auto polo — a short-lived sport thought to have been created as an advertising stunt to sell Ford Model Ts in 1911.
Invented, or at least popularized, by the Topeka car salesman Ralph “Pappy” Hankinson, auto polo quickly spread across the United States. Five thousand people supposedly attended the first round, played between the Red Devils and Gray Ghosts on an alfalfa field in Kansas. League matches popped up in the following years, and within a decade it was possible to spectate the sport at Madison Square Garden and Coney Island. Auto polo then went international. King George V enjoyed a match in England; French teams raced around the Place de la Concorde; and touring exhibitions introduced auto polo across continental Europe.
The rules resemble those of polo’s equine variety with a few key differences. Eight players were divided into four cars, each with a chauffeur and a malletman. Fields measured somewhere around 300 by 120 feet, and, without the need for grass, the sport could be played indoors, making for prime wintertime viewing. Unfortunately, referees had no choice but to officiate on foot, and their jobs resembled those of rodeo clowns facing down mechanical bulls. Instead of helmets, players were protected by primitive roll bars while hunting after a basketball. The sport led to other mechanical innovations too: cars were modded, stripped of doors and other superfluous comforts; dozens of how-tos were published for further kitting out your rig, such as with this fan-shaped brace “designed for protection when the car turns turtle”; and where we now might find hoods, or polycarbonate bumpers made to crumple on impact, many players attached iron guards to their chassis for fending off attacks.
Perhaps unsurprisingly — and despite the Alabama State Fair proclaiming the sport “a game with eternity” — auto polo began to peter out in the late 1920s due to the high risk of injury and sometimes death. (As the humorist Art Buchwald reported about the task of searching for experienced players to put on a match: “there are plenty of arms and legs, but [the organizer] had difficulty finding heads that went with him”.) With speeds reaching 40 miles per hour (64 km/h), matches frequently resembled proto–demolition derbies, driving costs up as drivers and their vehicles had to be frequently disentangled. A team in 1924, for example, counted 538 punctured tires, 66 fractured axles, 1564 bent wheels, 10 deformed engine blocks, and 6 totaled vehicles.
Below you can browse glass negatives of an auto-polo match played at Hilltop Park, New York, thought to have taken place in 1912, and two additional images from Coney Island. For those with the itch, we recommend the older (and enduring) sport of bicycle polo instead.

author: Hunter Dukes


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Reed Bontecou’s Portraits of Wounded Soldiers (1865)

Mar 8, 2016

These photographs of injured American Civil War soldiers were created by Reed B. Bontecou, a  New York surgeon who played a key role in documenting the very many casualties of the Civil War battlefields. Such photographs were used to verify the severity of the soldiers' injuries, and helped to determine the level of post-war pension payments. The images chosen here all depict injuries caused by bullet wounds, and each include an evocative red arrow drawn on by Bontecou tracing the trajectory of the offending projectile. Serving as a surgeon during the war and later as the chief of Harewood Hospital (where these pictured soldiers were treated), Bontecou later developed Bontecou’s Soldier's Packet for First Wound Dressing, a type of first aid package with antiseptic bandages which the soldiers could carry with them and use to treat their immediate injuries.


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Topsell’s History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents (1658)

Feb 25, 2016

Published in 1658, more than thirty years after his death, this book brings together Edward Topsell's The History of Four-footed Beasts (1607) and The History of Serpents (1608). Totalling more than 1000 pages, this epic treatise on zoology explores ancient and fantastic legends about existing animals, as well as those at the more mythic end of the spectrum, including the “Hydra” (with two claws, a curled serpent’s tail, and seven small mammalian heads), the “Lamia” (with a cat-like body and woman’s face and hair), and the “Mantichora” (with lion’s body and mane, a man’s face and hair, and a grotesquely smiling mouth). Topsell was not a naturalist himself (he in fact was a clergyman) and so relied heavily on the authority of others, in particular Konrad Gesner, the Swiss scholar who was also behind many of the brilliant illustrations which adorn the volume, and Thomas Moffett. On his utilising others for his work Topsell writes "I would not have the Reader,... imagine I have ... related all that is ever said of these Beasts, but only so much as is said by many". This approach leads him to repeat some wonderfully fantastic claims: elephants are said to worship the sun and the moon with their own rituals, apes are terrified of snails, and "...the horn of the unicorn ... doth wonderfully help against poyson". Although it is abound with such fanciful ideas, Topsell's work, as John Lienhard explains "was actually an early glimmer of modern science. For all its imperfection, it represents a vast collection of would-be observational data, and it even includes a rudimentary rule for sifting truth from supposition."


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The Cheese Mites or, Lilliputians in a London Restaurant (1901)

Feb 11, 2016

Directed by Walter R. Booth, this short is a wonderful example of early special effects, specifically the use of superimpositions, where the "Lilliputians" are filmed on an over-sized table-top set and then appear on screen alongside the normal-sized diner. The film features the same type of trick film as seen in J. Stuart Blackton's and Albert S. Smithtrick's Princess Nicotine which was made in 1909, eight years after the The Cheese Mites. The producer of this example of early British cinema, Robert W. Paul (1869-1943), was an instrument maker who became involved in film when he was requested to build a copy of Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope, an early device for viewing films. As Edison's invention was not patented in Britain, Paul went on to build his own version of it, as well as making his own films since Edison's films were the only ones viewable on the machine. The Cheese Mites is the twenty-third film Paul was involved in, his earliest films having been made in 1895 and shown at The Empire of India Exhibition in London the same year. The following year, in 1896, Paul managed to build the "Theatrograph", a device which enabled a film to be shown on a screen and so viewable by a larger audience. See also Paul and Booth teaming up on the excellent short Artistic Creation (1901).


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Sourire d’Avril (1906)

Apr 5, 2016

Sourire d'Avril, translating as "Smile of April", is a waltz composed by the French composer Maurice Depret (1863-1933). This recording from 1906 is by The Columbia Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble consisting of musicians from the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and later on the NBC Symphony, who performed music for the recordings of Columbia Records. A version of the song with French lyrics also exists.


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The Friendship Book of Anne Wagner (1795-1834)

Feb 3, 2016

Only three inches tall and five inches wide, featured here are select pages from a fascinating "friendship book" found in the Carl H. Pforzheimer collection of the New York Public Library. What is a friendship book? As Dr Lynley Anne Herbert relates in her post for us on a seventeenth-century specimen, it is a lot like an early version of social media, a place to record friendships and social connections:
Books of this kind grew out of university culture in Germany in the sixteenth century, but by the seventeenth century had become a form of social networking used by people of all professions and stages in life – the seventeenth-century Facebook.
Friends and family would, over a period of many years, contribute pages — often messages of love, encouragement, and admiration for the owner of the book, in addition to a variety of images. The particular friendship book featured here belonged to a woman from Lancashire named Anne Wagner. We don't know too much about Anne, but she is notable for being aunt to the poet Felicia Dorothea Browne, who herself has a number of childhood contributions to the album including some verse penned at just twelve years old, two years before she was to have her first poems published (and garner the, perhaps unwanted, interest of a certain Percy Bysshe Shelley). Among Felicia's contributions are also a few wonderful mixed-media collages, a technique which occurs on many pages of the book, often with a maritime bent (perhaps due to their proximity to the sea). It is a theme that adorns the cover too, the central emblem of which declares, beside an anchor and from the wash of blue watercolour waves, "Memorials of Friendship. Anne Wagner. 1795". Read more about the book here.


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Books and Bookmen (1886)

Mar 3, 2016

Best known for his work collecting folk and fairy tales, this is the Scottish writer Andrew Lang's treatise on all things bookish. As he states in the preface, the work is "the swan-song of a book-hunter. The author does not book-hunt any more: he leaves the sport to others, and with catalogues he lights a humble cigarette". The topics Lang reflects upon are wide-ranging: from "Literary Forgeries" to the "Bookmen at Rome"; from "Japanese Bogie-Books" to "Bibliomania in France". This is a book for bibliophiles written by a bibliophile.
An 1897 review in The Spectator called it an
amusing collection of essays, dealing chiefly with the love of books as books, or rather as things, a different passion, indeed, from the love of literature. They have a good deal less to do with each other than the body with the soul, or a man's coat with his character. And yet it is a fact that one does not get on quite well without the other. ... There is no doubt that many people, besides those who have a right to call themselves book-lovers, will find a great deal of amusement and information in Mr. Lang's agreeable book.


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D.O.A. (1950)

Feb 17, 2016

A film noir — starring Edmond O'Brien and Pamela Britton — about a man who has been poisoned and, with only a few days left to live, sets out to find his killer. Considered a classic of the genre, the film is now in the public domain in the U.S. due to an error related to the renewal of the copyright. It is noted for its distinctive cinematography, exemplified by the opening sequence,  a long tracking shot of the main character walking through the corridor of a police station to report his own murder. The director Rudolph Maté had an extensive background in cinematography, having worked on films in both Europe and Hollywood and been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography in five consecutive years in the 1940s.


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London a Hundred Years Hence (1857)

Feb 4, 2016

Accurately imagining what the world will be like one hundred years in the future is always going to be fraught with difficulties (see this attempt, and also this). The writer of this piece "London a Hundred Years Hence", which appeared in an 1857 edition of The Leisure Hour, certainly swayed a little off the mark when it comes to an imagining of 1957 London – sadly in being a little too utopian. In addition to the eradication of all poverty and crime, the author talks of a smoke-free city, and the "crystal waters" of the Thames, with fishes seen darting over the "the clear sand and white pebbles lying at the bottom". However, the vision is surprisingly accurate in other quarters. In addition to predicting the vast geographical expansion of the city in which "Kew and Hammersmith were London; Lewisham and Blackheath were London; Woolwich and Blackwall were London", it also gets it right with specifics, such as the building of Embankment (which would actually begin only five years after the piece was published): "instead of shelving shores of mud, I saw solid walls of granite, ... part paved for wheel-carriages, and part a gravelled promenade for the citizens". There is also a foreseeing of the shopping mall:
I beheld vast associative stores, the depositories of the skilled worker in every craft, where all that talent could invent or industry produce was displayed in magnificent abundance beneath one ample roof. One shop of this kind for each single branch of commerce sufficed for a large district, and the decreased expenditure in rent, fittings, and service, reduced the cost of management, and consequently the price of products ... The purchaser walked through long galleries, where, ranged in orderly array, glittered and gleamed the gold, the gems, the jewels of every clime.
The piece is really notable, however, for its anticipation (albeit a little too early for 1957) of internet shopping:
I observed that from each of these district shops innumerable electric wires branched off in all directions, communicating with several houses in the district to which it belonged. Thus, no sooner did a house-keeper stand in need of any article than she could despatch the order instantaneously along the wire, and receive the goods by the very first railway carriage that happened to pass the store. Thus, she saved her time, and she lost no money, because all chaffering and cheapening, and that fencing between buyer and seller, which was once deemed a pleasure, had been long voted a disgraceful, demoralizing nuisance, and was done away with.
And then also the connectivity across distances which the telephone, and then internet, would bring:
The electric wires ran along the fronts of the houses near the upper stories, crossing the streets at an elevation at which they were scarcely visible from below; and I noticed that the dwellings of friends, kindred, and intimates were thus banded together, not only throughout the whole vast city, but even far out into the provinces, and, in cases where the parties were wealthy, to the uttermost limits of the realm.
Read a full transcript of the article here.


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The American Woods

Feb 23, 2016

Below is a selection of pages from Romeyn Beck Hough's unique fourteen volume work The American Woods, a collection of more than 1000 paper-thin wood samples representing more than 350 varieties of North American tree. Between 1888 and 1913, Hough published a total of thirteen volumes of the work, but died in 1923 before being able to fulfil his epic fifteen volume plan. However, a final fourteenth volume was published in 1928 using his samples and field notes compiled by his daughter. Each specimen page of the work is dedicated to a single tree and consists of a cardboard plate into which three translucent slices have been placed, three variations of cross-section — transverse, radial, and tangential. The wafer-thin slivers — which would glow like a slide when held up to the light — were prepared using a slicing machine of Hough's own design and which he patented in 1886. In addition to the specimens Hough also provides information about the characteristics, growth habits, medicinal properties, and commercial possibilities of the tree. With some of the trees in the book now very rare the series now has an added value and, as Rebecca Onion from Slate’s The Vault comments, "stands as a memorial to the shape and extent of American forests at the end of the 19th century". The images below are from Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library who have digitised 274 of the pages, but you can also see the whole set on the Internet Archive.


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The Sea Monk (ca. 1845)

Mar 30, 2016

This ukiyo-e woodblock print, by the late Edo period artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861), illustrates a story involving the "Sea Monk" or Umibōzu, a spirit in Japanese folklore. The ocean dwelling spirit — so called because of his smooth monk-like round head — is said to capsize the ship of anyone who dares speak to it. The specific tale illustrated in Kuniyoshi's woodblock tells of a sailor Kawanaya Tokuzo who, despite it being considered unlucky in the world of seafaring, decides to go to sea on the last day of the year. A terrible storm breaks out, and the giant figure of the Umibōzu appears. Against the roar of the waves the apparition asks, "Name the most horrible thing you know!" Tokuzo yells in reply, "My profession is the most horrible thing I know!" The answer apparently satisfies the monster as he then disappears along with the storm.


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The Art of Hidden Faces: Anthropomorphic Landscapes

Mar 2, 2016

Although commonplace today, the landscape as a distinct category in painting only really began to establish itself in Western art during the Renaissance, a period in which natural views began to make their way to the fore of focus, no longer merely backgrounds to human figures. Perhaps an interesting quirk of this "transition" were the images which seemed to fuse the two: anthropomorphic landscapes. These images — particularly where landscapes are given the form of human heads — appear to be somewhat of a meme of the 17th century, with examples cropping up again and again, especially in Netherlandish painting. Below we've compiled a collection of such images available online (sadly not all of them openly licensed), with a big debt owed to a great post on JS Blog which provided a wonderful springboard for our findings.
One of the most popular versions of the anthropomorphic landscape is the depiction of a bearded man, horizontal in rocky profile. The beginnings of this can be traced back to an image created by the great 17th-century polymath Athanasius Kircher, featured in his Ars magna lucis et umbrae (1645/6). Kircher's design is said to have been inspired by a story related by Vitruvius about the 4th-century-BC architect Dinocrates' plan to sculpt into Mount Athos a colossal image of Alexander the Great, who would hold a small city in one hand and with the other pour a river into a sea by means of a gigantic pitcher. Kircher's more modest rendering — involving only a face rather than full body — was to be copied and riffed-upon many times over the next decades, including by Wenceslas Hollar, who in his rendition trims the "beard" and "hair" for a general smarter appearance.
With the following two images we depart a little from the profile aspect of Kircher's design. The engravings are by the German artist Johann Martin Will (1727-1806) who made many such images. The "Asia" one is part of a larger series in which each continent is represented as a face embedded into a landscape (see a very lo-res version of the Europa one here). Like Joos de Momper (coming up), Will also created a similar series for each of the seasons (see here).
There follow a few more examples of this horizontal face in the rock motif, including another by Johann Martin Will. The Herri met de Bles painting, which dates from around 1550, is the earliest example we can find of hiding a face in a landscape, predating Kircher's image by a whole century. The face is subtle, but it definitely there.
A little jump ahead in time with the next image, a demonstration of the anthropomorphic landscape's importance in the popular German Vexierbild (image puzzle) of the 19th century. This particular one is an advert for Dr. August König's Hamburger Tropfen, a medicine said to be effective against “all sicknesses of the stomach, liver, and abdomen". Titled "Das Picnic", the writing below reads "Wo ist der Mann, welcher stets Dr. August König's Hamburger Tropfen gebraucht?" (Where is the man who always needs Dr. August König's Hamburg Drops?).
The following three images, in which the "hidden face" is now upright, are from Joos de Momper's series anthropomorphising the four seasons (we can only find a fairly low-res one for Spring, see here). There is no exact date for these but they are thought to be from the early 17th century (Momper died in 1635), so would have predated Kircher's "bearded man" by a good decade at the very least.
The next two continue with the hidden head in an upright position, both using the anthropomorphic element to emphasise a certain "humanness": the first in illustration of our five senses; the second, which is an allegory of iconoclasm, in the idea perhaps of putting the human form before God.
The next picture is an illustration by Henry Holiday for Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. The face hidden in the darkness of the trees is thought by some to be based on Geheert's iconoclasm image above.
As well as landscapes, faces were often composed of buildings and combinations of other structures and figures. The next image shows a sketch — "An Allegory of Death" — attributed to that great master of the composite portrait Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526/7–1593). Following this is an image, very likely to be a direct adaptation of Arcimboldo's, found in Veridicus Christianus (1601), the very first Jesuit emblem book. The final image shows a popular motif, in the aforementioned German Vexierbild tradition, in which elements so full of life combine to create a memento mori image of a skull.


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The Explosion of the Spanish Flagship during the Battle of Gibraltar (ca. 1621)

Apr 12, 2016

Depicting what was probably the most decisive moment of the Battle of Gibraltar, this remarkable painting by Dutch artist Cornelius Claesz van Wieringen, is also an extraordinary attempt to capture the gruesome realities of an explosion. Figures are shown flung through the air from the force of the blast, some severed in two — a torso here, a pair of legs there — and the choppy seas are strewn with blood and bodies.
For a long time the piece was mistakenly attributed to Hendrick Vroom, under whom Van Wrieringen studied. In 1621, the Admiralty of Amsterdam commissioned a painting from Vroom of the battle, which they planned to present to Prince Maurits, the commander-in-chief of the Dutch army. Not happy with the extortionate sum demanded by Vroom, they turned to his pupil Van Wrieringen. Before he was given the commission Van Wrieringen had to paint a trial piece to see if he was up for the job, and it is thought that this is most likely to be this work. The authorities apparently were not too put off by the gore, as they ordered a modello of the composition, which now lives in a private Dutch collection.


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Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea (1760)

Mar 17, 2016

One of the first of the immensely popular 18th-century "it-narratives", Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea, by the Irish writer Charles Johnstone, tells the tale of a coin and the human intrigue to which it finds itself bearing witness. After a rather dramatic and wonderfully overwrought beginning in which we learn of the coin being bestowed with consciousness and dug from a Peruvian mine, the monetary narrator proceeds to dish the dirt on various celebrities of the time as it passes from hand to hand, being conveniently present for a variety of gossip-worthy conversations, romps, and scandals. Spending some time circulating among the streets and elite of London, the coin also finds itself in the courts of Lisbon and Vienna, and the front-lines of war in Germany (the Seven Years' War was raging at the time), Canada, and the Caribbean.
Upon publication in 1760 (see scan of first edition below), the book was a runaway success, being issued in five separate editions in its first three years alone. Capitalising on the demand, Johnstone brought out an expanded four-volume version in 1765, which like-wise was lapped up by the readers. On the back of Chrysal's success there came a slew of similar titles told from the perspective of inanimate objects, nearly always in the form of "The Adventures of a ....", including a black coat, a watch, a corkscrew, and a Hackney coach. Not everyone, however, was enamoured by this new sensation. An issue of the Critical Review from 1761, in the course of appraising The Adventures of A Rupee, writes:
This mode of making up a book, and styling it the Adventures of a Cat, a Dog, a Monkey, a Hackney-coach, a Louse, a Shilling, a Rupee, or — any thing else, is grown so fashionable now, that few months pass which do not bring one of them under our inspection. It is indeed a convenient method to writers of the inferior class, of emptying their common-place books, and throwing together all the farrago of public transactions, private characters, old and new stories, every thing, in short, which they can pick up, to afford a little temporary amusement to an idle reader. This is the utmost degree of merit which the best of them aspire to; and, small as it is, more than most of them ever arrive at.


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Le Centre de l’Amour (ca. 1687)

Feb 9, 2016

With its full title translating as "The centre of love: discovered through various emblems, gallant and facetious", this delightfully illustrated emblem book is an exploration of all corners of seventeenth-century courtship and love. The wonderful set of copper engravings are by Peter Rollos (active 1619-1639), and were previously published around 1630 in Berlin (see our highlights below). For this later Parisian edition — published "chez Cupidon" — a preface has been added and additional text in French.


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The Merry Cobler and His Musical Alphabet (ca. 1800)

Mar 10, 2016

This is a charming alphabet book, dating from around 1800, published by the Glasgow-based publishers J. Lumsden and Son. Established in 1783 by James Lumsden, the publishers were best known for their high quality printings of books for children and juveniles. This particular specimen follows a simple enough format: a little couplet for each letter with accompanying picture, though things do get a little strange come those troublesome letters "X" and "Z" (this is before the days of X-rays...). What the ancient Persian King known as Xerxes has to do with chickens, we are not entirely sure; and for "Z", instead of opting, perhaps, for a simple zebra, the book doesn't bother at all, offering us rather a somewhat sinister image of a dog taking "the Bull by the nose". Oddities arise even with more common letters, for example: "R is Romp,/ To swing, very willing", and "Y" is bizarrely represented by a "Ewe".


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The Music of Light: Emily Noyes Vanderpoel’s Colour Analysis Charts (1902)

Mar 15, 2016

Looking at times like some kind of strange fusion of De Stijl abstraction and Tetris, these wonderful color charts are taken from Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color, a book by the American artist Emily Noyes Vanderpoel (1842–1939). Following her ruminations on color theory, she presents 117 plates featuring color analysis of various crafted objects, such as Assyrian tiles, Persian rugs, and Egyptian mummy cases, but also things from the natural world, including a stone and butterfly.
Vanderpoel does not explain in detail how her analyses were created. Instead, she simply places an image of an antique rug next to its abstraction, stating (with a fair degree of optimism) that from this example the student “will see how these and the other plates have been made”. Throughout Color Problems, Vanderpoel employs similar rhetorical maneuvers, splitting language off from the knowledge accessible through visual perception. As John Ptak notes, she “sought not so much to analyze the components of color itself, but rather to quantify the overall interpretative effect of color on the imagination”. Recognizing that “color cannot be fully appreciated by any written description”, Vanderpoel decides to keep her text “as brief as possible” and let the “full and elaborate” plates speak for themselves. Nevertheless, her writing offers a spectrum of poetic and scientific insights into color, which she calls the music of light. There are discussions of Chevreul, Goethe, and Ruskin; diagrams of how light enters the retina’s cones and rods; and lovely second-hand anecdotes: young women in Algiers, we are told, embroider with boxes of butterflies beside them, so that “from their harmonious blending of colors they may gain fresh enthusiasm and inspiration for their work.”
Vanderpoel’s grids are best understood as relational fields. In her appendix, she defines her technique as “a systematic arrangement of colors in a geometrical design such that every variation and combination of hue, tint, and shade is in its proper place and in correct relation to all other hues, tints, and shades.” While it remains somewhat opaque what exactly she deems proper and correct, this “systematic arrangement of colors” not only anticipates later abstractions in the visual arts, but seems abreast of her modernist contemporaries’ experiments with relational systems. In a way, Vanderpoel did for light what Gertrude Stein would do for language twelve years later in Tender Buttons, which begins with a description that echoes Vanderpoel’s own: “an arrangement in a system to pointing”.
Vanderpoel ends her 122-page treatise by widening her focus on “harmony” from an artistic practice that happens on the easel to a way of being in the world:
No woman has a right to say she has no influence, conscious or unconscious, on the world around her. Does not much of the influence for good or ill come from a woman’s dress? It may be cheap, it may be plain, but it should be, and can be, in good taste and harmony with the character and position of the person who wears it, and knowledge of one’s own coloring and of that suited to it is one of the most important details.
Published when Vanderpoel was fifty-nine years old, Color Problems, as the subtitle implies, was aimed at the amateur colorist — not artists, but decorators, shop assistants, and gardeners: all who could improve their lives and crafts with attention to the complementary aspects of color. She believed that every gradation of light leads back to nature, and agreed with F. W. Moody that “There is hardly anything in nature that is not perfect in color. A dead sparrow would enable you to arrange the marquetrie of a cabinet with faultless harmony.” As in her discussion of feminine dress above, Vanderpoel sought to further democratize who was “bidden to go to nature for the abundant secrets she is ready to reveal”, asking that “workers” be sent to the same fount of inspiration that students in art and science seek out.
Although she wrote other critical works on art, such as American Lace & Lace-Makers (1924), Vanderpoel was, for a long time, better remembered for her artworks — she primarily worked with watercolors and oils, and held the position of vice president of the New York Watercolor Club — and for her historical writing, until a recent revival of interest in her color analyses. She was the first curator of the Litchfield Historical Society, writing a two-volume history on the town’s Female Academy, titled Chronicles of a Pioneer School. Out of print for more than a century, Color Problems was recently republished by The Circadian Press in a beautiful new edition (sadly sold out). Also check out this digital tool for generating Vanderpoelian analyses from your own images, and this related color bot, automated by Liza Daly, inspired by our original post on Color Problems.


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Six and a Half Magic Hours (1958)

Mar 16, 2016

6 1/2 Magic Hours is a Pan Am promotional film marketing transatlantic air travel at the dawn of the jet age. While at heart an advert for their "magical" service of a flight from New York to London in only 6.5 hours, we are also treated to a nice summary of jet travel history up to that point, the pinnacle of which was their Flight 1000. Thanks to the new jet planes, the public could travel in a faster and easier way as they enjoy the "attractively decorated" and air conditioned plane as well as the "gourmet" meal which bears no resemblance to the boxed meals we are now used to. The interior of the plane is also rather luxurious, with spacious powder rooms for the ladies and a lounge-like area where people can read, play games or have drinks, all whilst being offered a platter of hors d'oeuvres. The silky-toned voice-over declares that "travail has been taken out of travel" and that "Jet speeds will help to accomplish one of man's long-sought goals: an easy interchange of peoples throughout the world".


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Le Voyage Dans la Lune (1902)

Mar 1, 2016

Le Voyage Dans la Lune (Trip to the Moon, in English) is perhaps Georges Méliès' most famous film, and is considered to be the first science fiction film in cinematic history. The 12 minute film follows a group of astronomers who travel to the Moon in a cannon-propelled capsule, explore the Moon's surface, escape from an underground group of native moon inhabitants (known as Selenites), and return to Earth with one of them as captive. While at once a spoof of more serious science fiction, the film can also be seen as a comment on France's colonial exploits (it was at the time the world's second largest colonial power). Méliès himself plays, as was his wont, the main role of the wonderfully named Professor Barbenfouillis. When asked in 1930, Méliès cited Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon as the main influences for the film, but cinema historians have also mentioned the influence of Adolphe Dennery's stage adaption of Verne, and also H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon, a French translation of which was published only a few months before Méliès made the film. Jacques Offenbach's operetta Le voyage dans la lune  (an unauthorized parody of Verne's novels) and also the "A Trip to the Moon" attraction at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, have also been talked of as being possible inspiration.


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Self-Portrait by Ernst Mach (1886)

Feb 18, 2016

This unique self-portrait, also known as "view from the left eye", is the creation of Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, noted for his contributions to physics such as the Mach number (which relates an object's speed to the speed of sound) and the study of shock waves. The sketch appears in Mach's The Analysis of Sensations, first published in German in 1886 as Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen, and is used to illustrate his ideas about self-perception.
The considerations just advanced, expressed as they have been in an abstract form, will gain in strength and vividness if we consider the concrete facts from which they flow. Thus, I lie upon my sofa. If I close my right eye, the picture represented in the accompanying cut is presented to my left eye. In a frame formed by the ridge of my eyebrow, by my nose, and by my moustache, appears a part of my body, so far as visible, with its environment. My body differs from other human bodies beyond the fact that every intense motor idea is immediately expressed by a movement of it, and that, if it is touched, more striking changes are determined than if other bodies are touched by the circumstance, that it is only seen piecemeal, and, especially, is seen without a head. If I observe an element A within my field of vision, and investigate its connexion with another element B within the same field, I step out of the domain of physics into that of physiology or psychology, provided B, to use the apposite expression of a friend of mine made upon seeing this drawing, passes through my skin. Reflexions like that for the field of vision may be made with regard to the province of touch and the perceptual domains of the other senses.
He gives a little more information on the origins of the image in a footnote:
It was about 1870 that the idea of this drawing was suggested to me by an amusing chance. A certain Mr L., now long dead, whose many eccentricities were redeemed by his truly amiable character, compelled me to read one of C. F. Krause's writings, in which the following occurs:
"Problem : To carry out the self-inspection of the Ego.
Solution : It is carried out immediately."
In order to illustrate in a humorous manner this philosophical "much ado about nothing," and at the same time to shew how the self-inspection of the Ego could be really "carried out," I embarked on the above drawing. Mr L.'s society was most instructive and stimulating to me, owing to the naivety with which he gave utterance to philosophical notions that are apt to be carefully passed over in silence or involved in obscurity.
According to John Michael Krois the "Mr. L" in question is Mach's colleague at Prague University, Prof. Hermann von Leonhardi, son-in-law of the Kaul Christian Friedrich Krause mentioned. Krois also tells us that this original drawing sketched in 1870 in fact differed from the woodblock of 16 years later — the right arm  with pencil is absent, with a left arm instead brandishing a cigarette (which has found its way to the mouth in the 1886 image), and a steaming cup of Viennese coffee sits on a small table.


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Sketches in Bedlam (1823)

Feb 16, 2016

With the author given simply as "A Constant Observer", this book gathers together glimpses into the personalities and stories of more than 140 mental patients confined to the Bethlem Hospital in the early part of the nineteenth century. In The History of Bethlem (1997), Dr Jonathan Andrews notes that “Bethlem is not simply Europe’s oldest psychiatric establishment; it is the most famous — or, what for long amounted to the same thing, the most notorious”. Founded in 1247, the hospital's infamy ultimately resulted in the name of Bedlam, a phonological corruption of Bethlem, becoming synonymous with a scene or state of uproar and confusion. The author of this volume would no doubt disagree with such an association, praising as he does the hospital's "regularity, cleanliness, humanity, and skill". (One has the impression that this "constant observer" was perhaps involved in the administration in some way, and so somewhat biased).
The full title of the work is Sketches in Bedlam; or Characteristic Traits of Insanity, as Displayed in the Cases of One Hundred and Forty Patients of Both Sexes, Now, or Recently, Confined in New Bethlem, including Margaret Nicholson, James Hatfield, Patrick Walsh, Bannister Truelock, and Many Other Extraordinary Maniacs, Who Have Been Transferred from Old Bethlem. Included among those patients listed by name are three individuals tied to assassination attempts on King George III (1738-1820) and one participant in the mutiny aboard the HMS Hermione (1797), the bloodiest in British naval history.
In addition to those famous entries, there are also fascinating accounts of other lesser-known patients. While the sketch of Thomas Dowle, for example, describes very little about his condition, it is a fascinating moralistic tale about the dangers of practical jokes that conveys a great deal about psychiatry in the early nineteenth century:
No taint of insanity ever before appeared in any of his family. Sudden fright was the immediate cause of his derangement, and he now presents a deplorable example of the mischievous consequences of those practical jokes, so frequently played off for the momentary diversion of inconsiderate young people, upon their unsuspecting companions, and but too often productive of lamentable, even fatal, consequences. Numerous are the instances wherein dementation, and even death, have followed the too sudden excitement of the stronger passions.(p. 182)
Seeing that each entry is attached to a name may evoke the feeling of walking among tombstones with only tragic epitaphs, but in this each patient named is also humanised, often in a way greater than their treatment in the text or, indeed, the hospital, and what’s more it makes Sketches in Bedlam an incredibly rich starting point for further historical research.


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Images from The Champion Text Book on Embalming (1897)

Apr 7, 2016

Below are a series of images demonstrating the process of embalming, from The Champion Text Book on Embalming, published in 1897 and written by Eliab Myers, M.D. and F. A. Sullivan, "Lecturers and Demonstrators in the Champion College of Embalming". The Champion Company was founded in 1878 in Springfield, Ohio, and is still in the same business today. After a first section detailing each part of the human body, accompanied by illustrative plates, the book goes into a brief history of embalming itself, from the Ancient Egyptians to the work of Frederik Ruysch. We then proceed into the details of the embalming process itself, including how to remove the blood, gasses, and liquids from the corpse and how to deal with the effects of various diseases that may be found within. The grainy photographs of the procedures pepper this section, many reminiscent — with the sombre figures huddled around splayed out corpses — of the painted anatomy scenes of the Early Modern period.


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Thomas Edison Tells a Joke about a Liver (1906)

Jan 28, 2016

The great inventor Thomas Edison tells a joke about a very healthy liver, recorded on his Edison Blue Amberol cylinder.


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The Postures of the Mouth (1846)

Mar 24, 2016

Diagrams from A System of Elocution, with Special Reference to Gesture, to the Treatment of Stammering, and Defective Articulation (1846) by Andrew Comstock. From the chapter entitled "The Postures of the Mouth":
An accurate knowledge of the positions which the organs of articulation should assume in the formation of the several elements of vocal language, is very important to those who would speak with ease and elegance. To aid the reader still further in the acquisition of this knowledge, he is furnished with the various postures of the mouth, required in uttering the elements energetically, and singly.
Comstock was hugely influential in the burgeoning science of elocution in mid-nineteenth-century America. A physician and professor of elocution at the Vocal and Polyglot Gymnasium in Philadelphia, he invented his own phonetic alphabet to improve the speech of his pupils, an alphabet which was also used to transcribe documents, including the New Testament.


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Sun Dials and Roses of Yesterday (1902)

Mar 29, 2016

Written by historian and author Alice Morse Earle (1851-1911), this wonderfully eclectic treatise on the sundial is a reminder of how much possibility lays within the wilderness of the blank page. Each chapter begins with inhabited initials and each chapter’s contents encourage readers to consider verse from poets such as Rossetti and Dickinson, photographs of sundials and horologists, and sketches and diagrams that demonstrate no particular affinity for a given style, perspective, or even alignment on the page. In fact, the concept behind the entire work represents a philosophical exercise or associative mashup. As Earle comments in the introduction:
The union of the subject of Roses with that of sun-dials has not been through any relation of one to the other, but simply a placing together of two ‘garden delights’—to use Bacon’s term,—and with somewhat of the thought that as a dial standing alone in a garden was a bit bare without flowers, so it was likewise in a book.
The book brings to the fore small sociological details, anecdotes, and domestic subject matter characteristic of other works by Alice Morse Earle.  Other books of hers include China Collecting in America (1892), Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (1896), Child Life in Colonial Days (1899), and Old Time Gardens (1901), the last of which immediately preceded this work and contained a chapter on sundials that — according to the author — led readers to solicit a book length treatment.


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Rainbow-coloured Beasts from 15th-Century Book of Hours

Jan 9, 2014

A selection of wonderful little illustrations found in a Book of Hours attributed to an artist of the Ghent-Bruges school and dating from the late 15th century. In the pages without full borders the margins have been decorated with an array of different images depicting flowers, birds, jewellery, animals, household utensils and these superb rainbow-coloured 'grotesques'.


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The Tibetan Book of Proportions

Mar 11, 2014

An eighteenth-century pattern book consisting of 36 ink drawings showing precise iconometric guidelines for depicting the Buddha and Bodhisattva figures. Written in Newari script with Tibetan numerals, the book was apparently produced in Nepal for use in Tibet. The concept of the 'ideal image' of the Buddha emerged during the Golden Age of Gupta rule, from the 4th to 6th century. As well as the proportions, other aspects of the depiction - such as number of teeth, colour of eyes, direction of hairs - became very important. The V&A have produced a good guide to the iconography of the Buddha, including the 32 Lakshanas or special bodily features.


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The Chinese Fairy Book (1921)

Nov 28, 2013

A book compiling seventy-four traditional Chinese folk takes, making, as the translator notes, "probably the most comprehensive and varied collection of oriental fairy tales ever made available for American readers". The tales are split up into the following sections: Nursery Fairy Tales, Legends of the Gods, Tales of Saints and Magicians, Nature and Animal Tales, Ghost Stories, Historic Fairy Tales, and Literary Fairy Tales.


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The British Library’s “Mechanical Curator” million

Dec 19, 2013

Last week the ever-incredible British Library announced that they were gifting more than 1 million images to the world, uploaded to Flickr Commons under the public domain mark, meaning complete freedom of re-use. The range and breadth of images is phenomenal. As they say in their post announcing the release the "images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of". Each image was extracted from its respective home (books making up a total of 65,000 already digitised volumes) by a program known as the 'Mechanical Curator', a creation of the British Library Labs project. A crowdsourcing application is being launched in the new year (likely using tools developed by our very own Open Knowledge Foundation!) to help describe what the images portray - and the British Library is also putting out a general plea for people to innovate new ways to navigate, find and display this incredible array of images. (Email BL Labs here).
Although, of course, it will one day be wonderful to be able to sort and filter these images into themes, categories, etc., there is something also fantastic about the serendipitous grouping and combinations which occur in this ginormous randomised pool, the way these images float divorced from their context, and so are able to strike up new relationships with those they happen to be sat next to in the 10,000 and more pages of the Flickr Commons interface. It's the potential of these new visual relationships which we'd be very interested at The Public Domain Review in working on in the future, and which we have started to play with in a small way in the series of images posted below.
Where does one even start when trying to put together a small selection of images from a possible million? We decided to start in the middle - quite literally - jumping to page 5100 of 10200 in the Flickr interface. We looked through more than 5000 images, still only a measly 0.5% of the total collection, and these are some of the highlights of what we found.
(NB: Each image is linked through to its Flickr Commons page where you can find more info and other images from the same book).


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The Flying Lighthouse of Barfleur

Feb 2, 2014

Animated GIF created by Alex Pickup from a photograph of the Barfleur Lighthouse in Normandy, from Volume 5 of Les travaux publics de la France. Find the original from SMU University here at Flickr: the Commons.
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All animated GIFs by Alex Pickup published here under a CC-BY-SA license.


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The Hermit; or, The Unparalleled Sufferings, and Surprising Adventures, of Philip Quarll (1814)

Mar 6, 2014

A story thought to be by Peter Longueville - writing under the pseudonym of Edward Dorrington - about Philip Quarll, a Crusoe-style castaway, who spends 50 years alone on an uninhabited island island of monkeys and pomegranate fields far off the coast of Mexico. When eventually he is eventually found in 1715 by the narrator Edward Dorrington - an 18th-century trader from Bristol, England - Quarll refuses to leave his island, carefully explaining to his would-be rescuer that he would not dream of leaving the place he now considered home. In the course of his 50 years Quarll had become the self-appointed king of ""his country', and at the time of Dorrington's arrival, was accompanied everywhere he went by a loyal monkey as a sidekick. At his idyllic home with thatched roof the white-haired Quarll laid on a dinner for his unexpected guest - of soup, meat and fish - all served in shining plates of seashells. Later, Dorrington remarks that the meal surpassed anything he had ever eaten in his native England. Quarll explains to his somewhat bemused visitors: ""I was shipwrecked, thanks to my Maker, and was cast away. Were I made emperor of the universe, I would not be concerned with the world again, nor would you require me, did you but know the happiness I enjoy out of it."" Quarll then handed Dorrington his ""memorial"" - a tidy bundle of rolled parchment diaries - from which this story is told.
Originally published in 1727, the story was hugely popular in 18th century England, going through 11 editions alone between 1759 and 1783, and between 1780 and 1788 published as a serial in The Novelist's Magazine. It no doubt fooled many a reader into believing in it's veracity, as it did The Public Domain Review when first stumbled across!


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Specimens of Chromatic Wood Type and Borders (1874)

Dec 4, 2013

Some select pages from the exquisite Specimens of Chromatic Wood Type, Borders, Etc. (1874), a specimen book produced by the William H. Page wood type company. Chromatic types, which were made to print in two or more colours, were first produced as wood type by Edwin Allen, and shown by George Nesbitt in his 1841 Fourth Specimen of Machinery Cut Wood Type. It is William H Page's book, however, that is considered to be the highpoint of chromatic wood type production.
As well as providing over 100 pages of brilliantly coloured type, the book can also be seen, at times, to act as some sort of accidental experimental poetry volume, with such strange snippets as "Geographical excursion knives home" and "Numerous stolen mind" adorning its pages. One wonders whether the decisions about what words to feature and in what order were entirely arbitrary. Thanks to the wonderful Bibliodyssey blog where we came across the book: visit the post there for more info on the book and a great list of related links.


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Twelve Years a Slave (1859)

Jan 14, 2014

The memoir by Solomon Northup upon which the recent critically acclaimed feature film, Twelve Years a Slave (2013) directed by Steve McQueen, was based. The narrative tells the harrowing true story of Northup, who was born free in New York state but kidnapped in Washington, D.C., sold into slavery and kept in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana. In the account Northup provides details (invaluable now to historians) of slave markets and what daily life was like on the major sugar and cotton plantations of Louisiana. Released in 1853, just a year after Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel about slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the book sold 30,000 copies in it's first year and was considered a bestseller. It was published in several editions throughout the 19th century but then fell into obscurity for nearly 100 years, until it's re-discovery by two Louisiana historians in the 1960s, leading to a historically annotated version published by LSU Press in 1968.


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Letters to My Sister of our Experiences on Our First Trip to Europe, 1913

Dec 29, 2013

A book of letters written by a young American girl named Lilian McCarron to her sister detailing a trip she made around Europe in the latter half of 1913. A year later and Europe would be plunged into the beginnings of the First World War which would last 4 years and claim the lives of more than 9 million soldiers and devastate the lands on which it was played out. A certain sense of dramatic irony permeates the diary entries now, in which she describes the "pleasant" and "charming" cities of France and Germany, knowing as we do the horrors that would come in the following years. McCarron spends a large proportion of the trip in Germany, and in particular Berlin, arriving there only a few days after a military airship (a Zeppelin, the kind which would be instrumental in WW1) had crashed killing many experienced German Navy personnel. Her trip also coincided with the Empress's birthday which saw much of the army on the streets, a sight which gave McCarron the impression that Berlin was a "city of militia",  an unintended allusion perhaps to the increasing militarisation of Germany that preceded the outbreak of the war.
For another account of travelling through Europe in 1913 see the book Travel Films: being pen pictures of Europe. In one part the author describes making "a delightful excursion into East and West Flanders where we have been able to dream of the medieval past in Ghent and Bruges, and see the frivolities of fashion in Ostend, the unrivalled queen of watering places."
See also A Pictorial History of 1913, an annual review of the year in images, oblivious of the changes to come.


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George Wither’s Emblem Book (1635)

Feb 13, 2014

The emblem book of English poet, pamphleteer, and satirist George Wither (1588 - 1667). Wither was employed by a London publisher called Henry Taunton to write English verses to expound the beautiful allegorical plates made by Gabriel Rollenhagen and Crispin van Passe more than 20 years earlier. Published in 1635, it coincided with the other most famous English book of emblems by Francis Quarles. Of Wither's mostly forgotten literary talents the Scottish author and poet George Gilfillan wrote that "Wither was a man of real genius, but seems to have been partially insane".


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The Funny Alphabet (ca.1850)

Jan 23, 2014

A delightful little alphabet book in which the letters are made up from acrobatically contorted bodies, and the accompanying text from often as equally contorted rhymes.


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A Relation of an Extraordinary Sleepy Person (ca.1698)

Feb 6, 2014

A Royal Society paper delivered by Dr William Oliver describing a bizarre case he encountered of a man who fell into a "profound sleep" from which no-one could wake him for a full month. After a month was up he awoke as if nothing had happened, put on his clothes, and "went about his business of husbandry as usual", but never spoke of the incident. Just under 2 years later he fell again into the strange spell of sleep, but this time for just under 4 months, until he again "awaked, put on his Cloaths, and walkt about the room, not knowing he had slept above a night". Another spell occurred roughly a year later to which our Dr Oliver attended. He tried to wake the man by pouring a "fiery spirit" down his nose by poking him with needles, and shouting in his ear, but nothing worked. Again the man awoke entirely of his own accord some months later oblivious as to what had happened to him.


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Portraits of Patients from Surrey County Asylum (ca.1855)

Feb 26, 2014

Photographic portraits taken by Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond of patients from Surrey County Asylum in England where he worked as a psychiatrist. Diamond was one of the very early practitioners of photography and certainly the first to systematically use it in the attempted treatment of mental illness. An advocate of the pseudo-science of physiognomy, in which the face was believed to be the mirror of the soul, Diamond proposed that through studying the faces of patients, physicians could identify and diagnose mental complaints. The faces of the patients were seen to represent 'types' of mental illness such as melancholia and delusional paranoia. As explained in an 1856 paper titled 'On the Application of Photography to the Physiognomy and Mental Phenomena of Insanity': "the Photographer catches in a moment the permanent cloud, or the passing storm or sunshine of the soul and thus enables the Metaphysician to witness and trace out the visible and the invisible in one important branch of his researches into the Philosophy of the human mind".


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Account of a Very Remarkable Young Musician (1769)

Dec 5, 2013

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of history's most famous composers, began showing his talents when he was just 3 years old. By the age of 6 he was touring with his father and elder sister, also a talented musician. It was the young Mozart however who wowed the audiences. After a concert at the court of the Prince-elector Maximilian III of Bavaria in Munich, and at the Imperial Court in Vienna and Prague, the Mozart family embarked on a 3 and half year concert tour around the courts of Munich, Mannheim, Paris, London, The Hague, again to Paris, and back home via Zurich, Donaueschingen, and Munich. While in London, an 8 year old Mozart proved a huge sensation. But with his child prodigy status came questions from a skeptical few. Was he really so young? Was he really that talented? One person eager to test the truth of these doubts was Daines Barrington, a lawyer, antiquary, naturalist and Friend of the Royal Society. In a few visits to the Mozart family lodgings in London Barrington was committed to testing "scientifically" whether this young Mozart was the real deal or not. Barrington's findings are laid out in the above report to the Royal Society. He brought a manuscript, never before seen by Mozart, which was composed with 5 parts with one part written in an Italian style Contralto clef. As soon as it was put before him on his desk the young Mozart played it perfectly, "in a most masterly manner" wrote Barrington, "as well as in the time and stile which corresponded with the intention of the composer". Further tests included improvising a love song, a "song of rage", and completing a series of difficult keyboard lessons. The young Mozart more than impressed and Barrington wrote that the boy’s musical gifts were "amazing and incredible almost as it may appear". Barrington also gives us a touching insight into the still child-like nature of the boy, when he reveals that a favourite cat was often given preference over playing the harpsichord.


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Stereoscopic Victorian Christmas GIFs

Dec 22, 2013

A series of animated GIFs made from christmas themed Victorian stereographs found in the Library of Congress. Big hat-tip to the Passion of Former days blog which posted about many of these stereographs and also to Slate Vault for first drawing our attention to their blog post.
See this series also on our Tumblr!
See more animated GIFs made from public domain material here in our Animated GIFs Collection.


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Scenes relating to the life of Charles IV, King of Spain (1788)

Jan 15, 2014

Woodcut print showing forty-eight numbered scenes relating to the life of Charles IV, King of Spain. In image number forty-one, a man in a balloon is waving a flag to commemorate Charles' accession as King of Spain and his entrance into Barcelona in 1788. He would reign for 20 years.


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The Monster (1903)

Jan 16, 2014

A 1903 film directed by French filmmaker Georges Méliès and, as is common with his films, starring the man himself. The story centres on the chaotic, and ultimately futile, attempt to bring a dead Egyptian Princess back to life. According to the Lubin Catolog:
An Egyptian prince has lost his beloved wife and he has sought a dervish who dwells at the base of the sphinx. The prince promises him a vast fortune if the dervish will only give him the opportunity of gazing once more upon the features of his wife. The dervish accepts the offer. He brings in from a neighboring tomb the receptacle containing the remains of the princess. He opens it and removes the skeleton, which he places upon the ground close beside him. Then, turning to the moon and raising his arms outstretched toward it, he invokes the moon to give back life to her who is no more.
The skeleton begins to move about, becomes animated, and arises. The dervish puts it upon a bench and covers it with a white linen; a masque conceals its ghostly face. At a second invocation the skeleton begins again to move, arises, and performs a weird dance. In performing its contortions it partly disappears in the ground. While performing its feats it increases gradually in size, its neck assuming enormous proportions, much to the horror of the prince, who fails to see in this grotesque character the wife whom he has lost. The dance ceases. The dervish throws a veil over the hideous creature. Then appear the real princess as she was when her husband possessed her. The prince darts forward to take her into his arms to give her a last kiss, but the dervish stops him, wraps the young lady in the veil and throws her into the arms of the prince. When he removes the veil he finds only the skeleton of his former wife. The vision has disappeared, and the princess has returned to dust. The dervish withdraws, and the prince pursues him with his threats and curses.


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Arent van Bolten’s Grotesques

Feb 11, 2014

Very little is known about the Dutch artist Arent van Bolten. We do know he was born at Zwolle ca. 1573 and was actually a silversmith by profession. His artistic output ranged from grotesque figures and monsters, to figural scenes from the Bible and mythology. Here is a selection of the former, held by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and produced sometime in the early 17th century.


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Selection from Wellcome Library’s release of 100k openly licensed images

Jan 20, 2014

This morning the Wellcome Library announced its release of 100,000 of its historical images under an open license (CC-BY - meaning they are free for any re-use provided that the Wellcome Library is credited). The range and quality of the images released is phenomenal. The collection covers more than a thousand years of imagery relating to the history of medicine, including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements - from medieval Persian anatomy to the satirical prints of Rowlandson and Gillray.
This move by the Wellcome is yet another recent example of a hugely respected institution releasing digitisations of its public domain content under an open license - with the last 6 months seeing The Getty and The British Library making similar moves. It's a really promising sign of a more general shift toward opening up public domain content that we've seen taking place in the cultural sector over the last couple of years. Wonderful stuff!
This selection from Wellcome's release that we've chosen below is from just the first 1% of the 100,000 images made available. Remember, all are published under an CC-BY license so, if re-using, you must credit the "Wellcome Library, London". Just click on the images below to see them on the Wellcome Images site where you can learn more about them and also download higher resolution versions.


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The Bouncer at the Blazing Rag (1902)

Feb 18, 2014

Introduced as "a concert hall scene by Len Spencer and Gilbert Gerard" this short comic sketch, although often hard to decipher, gives a great impression of goings on at a turn-of-the-century concert hall. Thought to be recorded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.


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Anthropomorphic Maps of Europe at War (1870/1914)

Jan 29, 2014

Designed by the German-Jewish artist Walter Trier in 1914, this cartoon map shows the state of the world at the outbreak of World War I and the angst of the Central Powers. Austria-Hungary and Germany fight in a flanked position, using arms and legs to repel aggressors. Their forces are surrounded — Russia unlocks its jaws to consume Central Europe — and save for the “good will” in Switzerland, few kind things are said about the rest of the continent in the captions. The wide-eyed personification of Italy looks slightly hobbled by its cartographic boot; refusing to commit offensive troops, the country is labeled as a fickle friend: “faithful unto death — to the victor”. Montenegro and Serbia, allied with the Triple Entente, are, respectively, a “gang of rascals” and a “gang of pigs”. France “bravely retreats” while Spain “indulges in idleness”. With the world falling apart, everything looks good in Sicily for a moment — there is “volcanic soil”, but otherwise it’s “very quiet”. Published as a fundraising effort for the national Red Cross, 10% of the sales were directed to the humanitarian organization.
The map was published alongside an older cartoon, newly printed — an 1870 French woodcut by Paul Hadol, depicting the state of Europe during the Franco-Prussian War. In this earlier image, some things have changed, but the tenor remains recognizable. As Michael Wintle writes in Eurocentrism (2020), the tradition of these anthropomorphic maps “shows a degree of childish enmity between nation states, and indeed — in [their] humorous way — the potentiality for armed conflict because of adolescent egos.” France and Prussia bludgeon each other — the latter represented by the bloated body of Otto von Bismarck, his right hand on the Netherlands, poised to dominate all foes. Ignored by a distracted Europe, Russia eyes the West, and is described in German as “Knecht Ruprecht”, the manservant of Saint Nicholas, and a “croque-mitaine”, or bogeyman, in French — “a beggar trying for anything to fill his basket”. On the other hand, Turkey puffs a hookah while a cigarette-smoking Spanish lady reclines leisurely against Portugal, seemingly unbothered by the conflict. Britain is also feminized, and too consumed with keeping a tight lease on Ireland, rendered as a dog, to turn its focus eastward. At the bottom of the map, a bayoneted rifle is both sinister and sardonic, labeled “degrees of longitude”.
Born in Prague in 1890 and passing away in Ontario, Canada, in 1951, Walter Trier studied at the Royal Academy in Munich before moving to Berlin, where he would make his name as a children’s book illustrator. His final work published in mainland Europe was an illustrated edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1933). After the Nazi rise to power, Trier’s satire and Jewish heritage made him a marked man — stormtroopers showed up at the offices of the humor magazine Simplicissimus, warning him not to depict Hitler in a negative light. He emigrated to London soon after, where he worked for the humor magazine Lilliput, contributed more than eighty covers to the New Yorker, and played an important role in the war effort. In 1942, Trier wrote and designed a leaflet, Nazi-German in 22 Lessons, for the British Ministry of Information, which was airdropped by the Royal Air Force across his former homeland. Later in life, Walt Disney offered to employ him as an animator. Trier declined, refusing to work under a corporate sign.
For another 1870 satirical map with similar themes, see this map by Arnold Neumann.


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Edward Lear’s Walk on a Windy Day (1860)

Dec 12, 2013

An Edward Lear story concerning a man, referred to simply as E.L., taking the grave risk of going out for a walk on a windy day and living the consequences. These ten rare sketches are in a bound edition living in the Frederick R. Koch Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in Yale University.


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Fortunio Liceti’s Monsters (1665)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Nov 20, 2013

The etymology of “monster” connects it to words like demonstration and remonstrate. There is an ominous sense here, but also something revelatory. Monsters often serve as mirrors of the society they inhabit — cultural bodies that cast light on the instability of social and scientific categories. The selected “monsters” below come from the 1665 edition of Fortunio Liceti's De Monstris (originally published in 1616 without illustrations), which included more than seventy copies of copperplate engravings by the artist Giovanni Battista Bissoni. Although not the first work on the topic of deformities in nature, De Monstris was perhaps the most influential of the period. In its wake, there was a torrent of interest throughout Europe in so-called “monstrosities”: pygmies, supposed mermaids, deformed fetuses, and other natural marvels were put on display and widely discussed, becoming the circus sideshows of their time.
For Liceti (1577–1657), the monstrous was a matter of form and was classifiable into two major types: uniform and non-uniform. Uniform monsters inhabited multiple categories: deficient, those lacking limbs; excessive, such as polycephalic animals with multiple heads; anything that was both deficient and excessive could be deemed two-natured; if a child was born with fractured bones, it was unformed; and those with an excess of body hair were extraordinary. Non-uniform beings included intersex people, but also man-animal crosses produced from interspecies mingling, and human-demon hybrids. In the images below, congenital disorders mix freely with myth. Headless men (the storied Blemmyes of classical times) rub shoulders with conjoined twins. Scanning across this wondrous panoply of lifeforms, any sense of “normal” begins to feel outdated and maybe even irrelevant.
Breaking with previous treatments of the seemingly monstrous, Liceti did not treat these creatures as “portentous heavenly signs”, argues Touba Ghadessi, but rather “as living beings who expressed certain truths of nature”, whose “deformities elicited the most wonder and admiration” for life’s ability to adapt to adverse conditions. Liceti likened nature to an artist who, faced with some imperfection in the materials to be shaped, ingeniously creates another form still more admirable. “It is said that I see the convergence of both Nature and art”, he wrote, “because one or the other not being able to make what they want, they at least make what they can.”
The author’s preoccupation with matters of birth may have stemmed from his own fraught genesis. His mother went into labor at seven months during a violent sea voyage. When Liceti emerged into the world, he supposedly fit into the palm of her hand, surviving only because his father fashioned a primitive incubator from a repurposed oven. He went on to study medicine and philosophy in Bologna, hold a chair of logic in Pisa, and serve as the first professor of theoretical medicine in Padua until his death. He was known for prodigious writing, releasing a book almost every year of his career, ranging from histories of rings and engraved gems to scholarly treatises on the human soul.


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The Little Book of Love

Feb 14, 2014

A Valentine's gift to top all Valentine's gifts - the Petit Livre d’Amour (Little Book of Love) was an ornate bespoke book given by the 16th-century Lyon-born poet Pierre Salas to his then lover and future wife Marguerite Bullioud. It measures just 5 by 3.7 inches, hand-written by Salas with gold ink and beautifully illuminated by an artist identified as the "Master of the Chronique scandaleuseas". The work begins with a few pages of prose describing the relationship between the author and the woman he loves before then presenting the rest of the book, 12 "iconologues", a combination of prose and poetry on the left-hand page - including the initials M, for Marguerite and P, for Pierre, scattered about in various forms - and on the right-hand page a corresponding picture. Five of these relate to love, the others to more moral topics, but all turning away from a sickly-sweet tone, instead portraying a more realistic picture of love. Here below we've picked out some highlights from the book.


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Lewis Hine’s Composite Photographs of Child Labourers (1913)
Text by Adam Green
Jan 19, 2016

Between 1908 and 1911, the photographer and social reformer Lewis Hine travelled the U.S. for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) documenting child labor — in factories, textile mills, canneries, and coal mines — focusing in particular on the Carolina Piedmont. Amongst the hundreds of photographs he made in this time is this unique set of composite photographs of Southern cotton mill workers featured below. Each image was created by purposively rephotographing several workers upon the same photographic plate. The idea of overlaying portraits in this way was not without precedent. The technique was invented in 1880s by Sir Francis Galton who used multiple exposures to create an "average" portrait from many different faces. For Galton, the primary purpose of the method was so as to advance his views on human ideal types, and it could be argued that Hine used it in a similar way (albeit divorced from the somewhat suspect context of phrenology), to generalise his observations regarding the damaging physical effects of the back-breaking factory work on young bodies. However, the fact that Hine overlays faces of quite different physicality perhaps implies a subtler motive,  one perhaps more orientated around the haunting quality of the final image. The composites were never published in Hine's lifetime, although the portraits of the same children used in the process do appear in posters for the NCLC alongside such headlines as "Making Human Junk: Shall Industry Be Allowed To Put This Cost On Society?". In general, Hine's heart-rending images from his time with the NCLC — often the result of putting himself at great personal danger — helped to influence the change in several laws, including the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act of 1916.

author: Adam Green


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The Telephonoscope (1879)
Text by Adam Green
Nov 10, 2015

The cartoon above is from the pen of George du Maurier, printed in the Punch Almanack for 1879. Although titled "Edison's Telephonoscope" it is not, in fact, a creation of Thomas Edison's at all (either realised or proposed) but rather an imagining by Maurier of what the great inventor might come up with next: a machine which, for all intents and purposes, amounts to some kind of Victorian Zoom. A mother and father — the "Pater- and Materfamilias" — sit at home and converse with, while also viewing, their children at play across the other side of the world. The caption reads:
(Every evening, before going to bed, Pater and Materfamilias set up an electric camera obscura over their bedroom mantel-piece, and gladden their eyes with the sight of their Children at the Antipodes, and converse gaily with them through the wire.)
Paterfamilias (in Willow Place): “Beatrice, come closer, I want to whisper.” Beatrice (from Ceylon): “Yes, Papa dear.”Paterfamilias: Who is that charming young lady playing on Charlie’s side!Beatrix: “She’s just come over from England, Papa. I’ll introduce you as soon as the game’s over!” (n.p.)
It is a playful, but remarkably accurate, prediction of things to come. Although, the great Albert Robida had ten years earlier published an illustration depicting a man watching a "televised" performance of Faust from the comfort of his own home (see image below), this Maurier image seems to be the first to imagine a two-way communication, combining the remote viewing with the ability to converse. Although it seems to be the first published image, the idea as predates 1879 in the form of the "telectroscope". As Verity Hunt explains:
the concept of the device first appeared not long after the telephone was patented in 1876. Following speculative descriptions of a tele-visual device in publications including The New York Sun (1877) and Nature (1878), the term ‘telectroscope’ was used by the French scientist and publisher Louis Figuier in L'Année Scientifique et Industrielle in 1878 to popularise the invention, which he incorrectly interpreted as real and ascribed to Alexander Graham Bell. It was hoped it would ‘do for the eye what the telephone had done for the ear’ and provide a technologised system of long distance seeing.
More images followed Maurier's, including one from a set of trading cards entitled "In the Year 2000" (En L'an 2000) which were sold as souvenirs at the 1900 Paris Exposition (see image below). The particular card in question - entitled "Correspondance Cinema-Phono-Telegraphique" - shows an invention very similar to that pictured in Maurier's. Interestingly, at the same Paris show, a Russian scientist named Constantin Perskyi read a paper to the International Electrcity Congress in which he described a device called "Television", the first time the word had ever been used.


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Skating with Bror Myer (1921)

Dec 17, 2015

Delightful images from an illustrated guide to figure skating by Bror Myer, a Swedish champion in the art. Meyer felt the guide necessary as in "latter years the art of skating has made such rapid strides". On his use of photography, he continues:
To facilitate an easy interpretation of the text, as well as to show more clearly the various movements, I decided, after great consideration, to illustrate the work by means of photographs taken with a Cinematograph.


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The Key of Hell: an 18th-Century Manual on Black Magic

Oct 29, 2015

The Clavis Inferni ("The Key of Hell") by Cyprianus, is a late-18th-century book on black magic. Written in a mixture of Latin, Hebrew, and a cipher alphabet (namely that of Cornelius Agrippa's Transitus Fluvii or "Passing through the River" from the Third Book of Occult Philosophy written around 1510) the book has remained rather mysterious due to its unknown origin and context. It is said to be a textbook of the Black School at Wittenburg, a supposed school somewhere in Germany where one could learn the dark arts. As for the name of the author, it seems to have become a common name for people practicing magic. Benjamin Breen writes in The Appendix of how the existence throughout history of various magically-inclined Cyprianuses - from "a Dane [...] who was so evil that Satan cast him out of hell" to the Greek wizard St. Cyprian of Antioch (who later converted to Christianity) - led to the name becoming a popular pseudonym for "people at the edges of society who were trying to do real black magic".


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Portraits of Imprisoned Modoc Warriors (1873)

Nov 24, 2015

The photographs featured below of captured Modoc warriors were taken by Louis Herman Heller (1839-1929) during and after the The Modoc War. The war was fought between the Native American Modoc people and the United States Army between 1872-1873 and had its roots in the forced resettlement of the Native Americans. The Modoc fighting force was spearheaded by Kintpuash AKA "Captain Jack" (first to be featured below) and included 52 other warriors in a band of more than 150 Modoc people. After nearly a year of fighting the Modoc warriors were defeated and Jack and three warriors were executed for the murders of two peace commissioners, and two others were sentenced to life imprisonment. The remaining 153 Modoc of the band were held as prisoners of war until 1909.
Heller, a German-born qualified pharmacist and photographer who is believed to have emigrated to the United States in 1855, was the first photographer on the scene. However, his pictures are not as well known as those of Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) and do not feature any images of the battles fought. Heller's photographs were published in Harper's Weekly in June 1873 as engravings based on his photographs, giving the general public a view of the war. In an attempt to gain recognition over Muybridge, Heller sought to have his Modoc warrior portraits published, but once they were, the publisher Watkins was mistakenly credited as the photographer, leading to Heller falling into obscurity. Later, he sold his negatives of the Modoc captives to Watkins, but continued to work as a photographer in his own photographic studio.


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Colour Wheels, Charts, and Tables Through History

Nov 17, 2015

Featured below is a chronology of various attempts through the last four centuries to visually organise and make sense of colour. A wide variety of forms and methods are represented: from simple wheels to multi-layered pyramids, from scientific systems to those based on the hues of human emotion. Many of the images are directly, or indirectly, sourced from Sarah Lowengard's excellent The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe - published electronically on Gutenberg-e in 2006 - a highly recommended read if you're keen to find out more about the fascinating history of colour, and also background on many of the images below. Also check out Philip Ball's Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (2003) for a great look at how art, chemistry, and technology have interacted through the ages.


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Harry Kellar’s Show Posters

Oct 22, 2015

Harry Kellar (1849–1922) was an American magician of the late 19th and early 20th century, famous for his large stage shows during which he'd perform tricks such as the "The Levitation of Princess Karnac" and "Self Decapitation", in which his head seemed to float apart from his body. He was hugely popular in his time, inspiring the likes of Harry Houdini, and reportedly acting as a model for the bald-headed wizard in the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz published in 1900. To accompany his shows he produced a series of wonderful promotional posters, a selection of which are presented below.


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Alcohol and the Human Body (1949)

Dec 15, 2015

An educational film by Encyclopaedia Britannica Films showing the effects that alcohol has on the human body and brain as well as the dangers of alcoholism, "a potential menace to community safety as well as personal health". Contains some excellent silky-toned narration.


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Francis Bacon on Gardens (1902)

Jan 20, 2016

Featuring artwork by Lucien Pissarro, this is a beautiful art nouveau edition of an essay on gardens by the Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626). On the subject of gardens, Bacon writes that "it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment of the spirit of man; without which, buildings and places are but gross handyworks". He suggests that gardens should be planted so that there would always be something green no matter the season and proceeds to list his suggestions on plants which produce pleasing scents as well as what kind of fountains should be preferred. He also offers his thoughts on the topiary fad which would have been rife throughout the grander of European gardens at the time: "I, for my part, do not like images cut out in juniper or other garden stuff; they be for children. Little low hedges round, like welts, with some pretty pyramids, I like well."
A large part of the essay is taken up with Bacon's description of his ideal garden, and indeed he was himself a keen gardener and designer of gardens, having apparently masterminded a fairly elaborate one of his own at his home in Twickenham. Although a lovely edition, this 1902 book divorces the garden essay from its companion piece "Of Buildings", which Bacon intended to precede it.


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Manual Training — Play Problems (1917)

Jan 6, 2016

This charming DIY book from 1917 presents a manual training in what the author William S. Marten terms "constructive-play" (which is opposed to the "destructive-play" tendency). Various guides are presented so that children can make or build at home, covering such things as kaleidoscopes, spinning tops, and slingshots as well as birdhouses, rattlers, stilts, and miniature furniture made out of cigar boxes. Marten realised the instructions had to be simple enough for a child to understand them without the aid of an adult, and also that the tools and materials should be such as the child was used to or could easily access at home. He also gives a list of where useful materials can be collected, and each project has both photographs and illustrations showing how to build it.


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Robin Redbreast (1907)

Dec 21, 2015

The song “Robin Redbreast” — sometimes listed as “Robin red breast” and having the working title “Happyland” — was composed by Reginald De Koven (1859–1920) who is perhaps best known for the song “Oh Promise Me” (1887), which was later incorporated into his most popular comedic opera Robin Hood (1890). The tenor of the song belongs to John Scantlebury Macdonald (1871–1931), better known as Harry Macdonough. Macdonough was a prolific singer, performing on more than 200 phonographic recordings from 1898 to 1920. Joseph Belmont provides the bird song. He is listed as the whistler on countless tracks of the time period, providing bird songs for other tracks with Macdonough as well as other popular artists of the time such as Byron G. Harlan.


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NYPL Release 187k Public Domain Images in Hi-Res

Jan 12, 2016

Last week (5th January 2016) the New York Public Library announced the release of more than 187,000 digitisations of public domain works, all available for hi-res download completely free from restrictions. Accompanying the release is a vast improvement of their browsing interface, allowing you to sort through a myriad of options including, genre, time period, and topic. It is a true joy to use. Furthermore, "to encourage novel uses of our digital resources", they are running a new Remix Residency program which will be administered by the Library's digitisation and innovation team, NYPL Labs. As they state in the press release the residency is intended "for artists, information designers, software developers, data scientists, journalists, digital researchers, and others to make transformative and creative uses of digital collections and data,and the public domain assets in particular". A wonderful opportunity! They have got the ball rolling with a few projects of their own including this brilliant visualisation of all 187,000 items. All in all, it is an incredible new benchmark for how institutions should treat digitisations of public domain works: making sure they are free from restrictions, and inspiring re-use with a great interface and the encouragement of spin-off projects using the material.
Below we present our highlights from an afternoon's browsing — a selection which we hope shows the breadth and depth of the content released. Each image is linked through to it's source on NYPL's website.


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Cyanotypes of British Algae by Anna Atkins (1843)

Dec 2, 2015

Anna Atkins (1799-1871) was an English botanist and, some argue, the very first female photographer, most noted for using photography in her books on various plants. Having grown up with her father John George Children — a chemist, mineralogist, and not too successful zoologist — she was surrounded by science and also contributed to her father's work. Her engravings of shells can be found in her father's translated edition of Jean-Baptiste de Monet Lamarck’s Genera of Shells, published in 1823, but it is her work with cyanotypes that she is best known for. Through her father and her husband, Atkins came to know both William Henry Fox Talbot, a pioneer of early photography who invented a process of creating photographs on paper treated with salt and a solution of silver nitrate, and Sir John Herschel, the inventor of the cyanotype printing method. She became interested in the cyanotype process which produced images through so-called sun-printing. The object is placed on paper which has been treated with ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide, after which it is exposed to sunlight and then washed in water, leading to the uncovered areas of the paper turning a dark blue. The process, known as blueprinting, was later used to reproduce architectural and engineering drawings, but Atkins chose to use it for what is considered to be the first work with photographic illustrations, namely her Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843). Only 13 copies of the handwritten book are known to exist, some of which are in various stages of completion. Later, she would collaborate with another female botanist, Anne Dixon (1799–1864), in making two more books featuring cyanotypes: Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns (1853) and Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns (1854). Atkins became a member of the Botanical Society in London in 1839, one of the few scientific societies which was open to women.