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Class of 2016

Dec 10, 2015

Pictured above is our top pick of those whose works will, on 1st January 2016, be entering the public domain in many countries around the world. Of the eleven featured, five will be entering the public domain in countries with a 'life plus 70 years' copyright term (e.g. most European Union members, Brazil, Israel, Nigeria, Russia, Turkey, etc.) and six in countries with a 'life plus 50 years' copyright term (e.g. Canada, New Zealand, and many countries in Asia and Africa) — those that died in the year 1945 and 1965 respectively. As always it's a sundry and diverse rabble who've assembled for our graduation photo - including two of the 20th century's most important political leaders, one of Modernism's greatest poets, two very influential but very different musicians, and one of the most revered architects of recent times.
Below is a little bit more about each of their lives (with each name linking through to their respective Wikipedia pages, from which each text has been based).
T. S. Eliot

(1888–1965)
Born in America, at the age of 25 Eliot emigrated to England where he made his name as one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century. Although also an essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, it is perhaps as a poet that he is best known, particular as the author of the groundbreaking poem The Waste Land, published in 1922. Other widely acclaimed poems include The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1945). He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry."
Le Corbusier

(1887–1965)
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier, was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now called modern architecture. His career spanned five decades, with his buildings constructed throughout Europe, India, and the Americas. Dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities, Le Corbusier was influential in urban planning, and was a founding member of the Congrès international d'architecture moderne (CIAM). As well as designing many buildings and urban spaces, Le Corbusier also wrote extensively on architecture and its future.
Paul Valéry

(1871–1945)
Valéry is best known as a poet, and he is sometimes considered to be the last of the French symbolists. On the night of 4 October 1892, during a heavy storm, he underwent an existential crisis, an event that made a huge impact on his writing career. Eventually, around 1898, he quit writing altogether, publishing not a word for nearly twenty years. In 1917, at the age of 46, he finally broke his 'great silence' with the publication of his obscure, but sublimely musical, masterpiece La Jeune Parque, a poem of 512 alexandrine lines in rhyming couplets. In addition to his poetry and fiction (drama and dialogues), his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events. Valéry was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in twelve different years.
Martin Buber
(1878–1965)
Martin Buber was an Austrian-born Israeli Jewish philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a form of existentialism centred on the distinction between the I–Thou relationship and the I–It relationship. Born in Vienna, Buber came from a family of observant Jews, but broke with Jewish custom to pursue secular studies in philosophy. In 1902, he became the editor of the weekly Die Welt, the central organ of the Zionist movement, although he later withdrew from organizational work in Zionism. In 1923, Buber wrote his famous essay on existence, Ich und Du (later translated into English as I and Thou), and in 1925, he began translating the Hebrew Bible into the German language.
Malcom X

(1925–1965)
Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little), and also known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, was an American Muslim minister and a human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of blacks, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans; detractors accused him of preaching racism and violence. He has been called one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history. His Autobiography of Malcolm X was, in 1998, named by Time as one of ten "required reading" nonfiction books.
Béla Bartók

(1881–1945)
The Hungarian composer and pianist Béla Viktor János Bartók is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century. As well as the creation of his own music, he was also an avid collector. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became ethnomusicology.
Käthe Kollwitz

(1867–1945)
Kollwitz was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition, and the tragedy of war, in the first half of the 20th century. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, and woodcut, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger, and conflict. Initially her work was grounded in Naturalism, and later took on Expressionistic qualities.
Otto Neurath

(1882–1945)
Otto Neurath was an Austrian philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist.  As founding director of the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna, Neurath created the Vienna Method, which later became known as Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education), a method of showing social, technological, biological and historical connections in pictorial form. The term Isotype was applied to the method around 1935, after its key practitioners, including Neurath, were forced to leave Vienna by the rise of Austrian fascism.
Blind Willie Johnson

(1897–1945)
"Blind" Willie Johnsonwas a gospel blues singer and guitarist. While the lyrics of his songs were usually religious, his music drew from both sacred and blues traditions. His unique sound is characterized by his slide guitar accompaniment and tenor voice, and his frequent use of a lower-register 'growl' or false bass voice. Johnson was not born blind. Although it is not certain how he lost his sight, his alleged widow Angeline Johnson told Samuel Charters that when Willie was seven his father beat his stepmother after catching her going out with another man, and that she, out of spite, blinded young Willie by throwing lye in his face. Johnson made 30 commercial recording studio record sides (29 songs) in five separate sessions for Columbia Records from 1927–1930. Fans of the West Wing may recognise his "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" from episode 13 of season 5, The Warfare of Genghis Khan.
Winston Churchill
(1874–1965)
Making his name as the United Kingdom's war-time leader from 1940 to 1945, Churchill is one of the 20th century's most famous political figures. As well as being a two-time prime minister of the UK (a second term was served 1951-1955), Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a historian, a writer, and an artist (chiefly in watercolours). Under the pen name "Winston S. Churchill" he published widely including a novel, two biographies, three volumes of memoirs, and several histories, and in 1953 won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the first person to be made an honorary citizen of the United States.
Lorraine Hansberry
(1930–1965)
The American playwright and writer Lorraine Vivian Hansberry — inspiration for Nina Simone's song "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" — was the first black woman to write a play performed on Broadway. Her best known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of Black Americans living under racial segregation in Chicago. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant and eventually provoking the Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, where she dealt with intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Much of her work during this time concerned the African struggle for liberation and their impact on the world. Hansberry has been identified as a lesbian, and sexual freedom is an important topic in several of her works. She died of cancer at the age of 34.
And a few others that didn't make it to the class photo....

Albert Schweitzer
W. Somerset Maugham
Emily Carr
Robert Desnos

Some people you think we've missed? Please let us know in the comments!
To learn more about Public Domain Day visit publicdomainday.org. For more names whose works will be going into the public domain in 2015 see the Wikipedia pages on 1945 and 1965 deaths (which you can fine-tune down to writers and artists), and also this dedicated page.
Wondering what will enter the public domain through copyright expiration in the U.S.? Like last year, and the year before...Nothing.
Wondering if "bad things happen to works when they enter the public domain"? Wonder no more.
(Learn more about the situation in the U.S. and why the public domain is important in this article in Huff Post Books and this from the Duke Law School's Centre for the Study of the Public Domain).


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Spectropia; or, Surprising Spectral Illusions (1865)

Oct 21, 2015

A book of Victorian hi-tech ghost conjuring which allows the reader to summon, as the sub-title proclaims, "ghosts everywhere and of any colour". Accompanying the set of wonderfully gaudy images, are directions on how to use them, and a more detailed scientific description about how the illusion works. Also included in the latter is a declaration of at least one motive behind the book:
One thing we hope in some measure to further in the following pages, is the extinction of the superstitious belief that apparitions are actual spirits, by showing some of the many ways in which our senses may be deceived, and that, in fact, no so-called ghost has ever appeared, without its being referable either to mental or physiological deception, or, in those instances where several persons have seen a spectre at the same time, to natural objects, as in the case mentioned by Dr. Abercrombie, in his work on "The Intellectual Powers:" — "A whole ship's company were thrown into the utmost consternation, by the apparition of a cook who had died a few days before. He was distinctly seen walking ahead of the ship, with a peculiar gait, by which he was distinguished when alive, from having one of his legs shorter than the other. On steering the ship toward the object, it was found to be a piece of floating wreck."
The book plays with an optical phenomenon known as "afterimage", in which the eye's photoreceptors (the rods and cones) adapt to overstimulation and lose sensitivity, and so retain the image when no longer focusing on it.
To see the spectres, it is only necessary to look steadily at the dot, or asterisk, which is to be found on each of the plates, for about a quarter of a minute, or while counting about twenty, the plate being well illuminated by either artificial or day light. Then turning the eyes to the ceiling, the wall, the sky, or better still to a white sheet hung on the wall of a darkened room (not totally dark), and looking rather steadily at any one point, the spectre will soon begin to make its appearance, increasing in intensity, and then gradually vanishing, to reappear and again vanish ; it will continue to do so several times in succession, each reappearance being fainter than the one preceding. Winking the eyes, or passing a finger rapidly to and fro before them, will frequently hasten the appearance of the spectre, especially if the plate has been strongly illuminated.
Regarding the aesthetic quality of the images, the author comments: "As an apology for the apparent disregard of taste and fine art in the plates, such figures are selected as best serve the purpose for which they are intended."

source: public-domain-review

type: collection

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


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Georg Bartisch’s Ophthalmodouleia (1583)

Nov 5, 2015

Images from Ophthalmodouleia: Das ist, Augendienst, the first Renaissance manuscript on ophthalmic disorders and eye surgery, published in 1583 by German physician Georg Bartisch (1535–1607), considered by many to be the "father of modern ophthalmology". The work contains a total of 92 woodcuts each depicting diseases of the eye - some using an overlay technique enabling the reader to “dissect” parts of the head or eye by lifting up a series of flaps. Accompanying the images is a detailed discussion of ocular diseases, surgical techniques, and instruments used, all written in Bartisch's native German rather than Latin, a highly unusual move for the time. Depsite his scientific calling, Bartisch was a superstitious man, believing that astrology, magic, and witchcraft played a significant part in the causes of disease (indeed, the fourth picture shown in the selection below depicts a "disease of the eye caused by witchcraft").


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Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1918)

Oct 27, 2015

A book of poetry by French writer Guillaume Apollinaire, noted for its use of "caligrams" in which typeface and arrangement of words on the page add to the meaning of the compositions. In this way, the collection can be seen as a contribution to the tradition of concrete or visual poetry. Considered as the forefather of Surrealism, Apollinaire described his work as follows:
The Calligrammes are an idealisation of free verse poetry and typographical precision in an era when typography is reaching a brilliant end to its career, at the dawn of the new means of reproduction that are the cinema and the phonograph. (Guillaume Apollinaire, in a letter to André Billy)
Subtitled "Poems of Peace and War 1913-1916", many of the poems deal with Apollinaire's wartime experience as both an artilleryman and infantry officer. He was badly hurt in 1916 with a shrapnel wound to his temple and it was during his recovery that he coined the word "sur-realism" in the programme notes for Jean Cocteau's and Erik Satie's ballet Parade. Although he made an eventual recovery the injury weakened him and Apollinaire became one of the many victims of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Published the year of his death, Calligrammes remains one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.


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Anatomical Illustrations from 15th-century England

Jan 5, 2016

Anatomical illustrations from an English medical treatise dating from the mid 15th century. Amongst the images — which show both the outer as well as the inner structure of the body — is the striking "wound man" illustration, depicting a man who has been stabbed, bitten, and wounded by arrows, as well as bludgeoned in the arm and head. Although the exact purpose of these "wound man" images — which appear in numerous other 15th and 16th-century works — is not known, they appear to be some attempt to communicate all the different injuries to which the body can be subjected, in some cases offering up accompanying treatments. The author of this particular treatise is unknown, though it is attributed to Pseudo-Galen, meaning that the inspiration for the work might have come by (or it is attempting to be passed off) as the work of the Greek physician Claudius Galenus, also known as Galen of Pergamon (AD 129 – c. 200/c. 216), who wrote extensively on medicine. The illustrations in this treatise, in addition to possessing a certain naive charm, are of interest as being the prototypes of those found in Johannes de Ketham's Fasciculus medicinae, first printed in 1491.


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Cossack Fairy Tales (1916)

Nov 12, 2015

Originally translated by British historian and linguist Robert Nisbet Bain in 1894, this collection of stories hail from an area known to us today as western Ukraine. In his introduction Bain describes the tales as being translated from “Ruthenian” (an exonymic lingonym for a language that would become Ukrainian) and gathered from three “chief collections” of folklore by Panteleimon Kulish, Ivan Rudchenko, and Mykhailo Drahomanov.
The tales featured include familiar characters and fairy tale tropes, such as a tale of a mysterious sack which grants food, a ram which gives gold, and a drum that summons henchmen who give people a good beating. This last tale can also be found in a version called "The Wishing-Table, the Gold-Ass, and the Cudgel in the Sack" by the brothers Grimm. In "The Story of little Tsar Novishny, the False sister, and the Faitful Beasts" and "The Vampire and St. Michael", the act of not crossing oneself before drinking or bathing in a stream or river leads to being possessed by the Devil, something we should all keep in mind.
This edition from 1916 is adorned with beautiful illustrations from Scottish artist Noel Laura Nisbet (who also illustrated a 1915 collection of Russian folktales, also translated by Bain.


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Phenomena Over and Under the Earth (1878)

Jan 26, 2016

This beautiful presentation, painted in gouache, of various atmospheric conditions is the work of a painter named Josef Gabriel Frey, from Weyer in Austria. We learn this from a tiny inscription in the bottom right of the work, which also tells us it was made in Frey's 88th year, six years before he died. Among the many natural phenomena on show is will-o'-the-wisp ("Ihrlichter"), a moonbow ("Mond Regenbogen"), and the Northern Lights ("Nordlicht"). The image with the lion labelled "Samuni" is slightly mysterious, but is most likely a reference to "Simoom" ("samūm" in Arabic, translating to "poison wind") — a strong, dry, dust-laden wind found blowing in parts of North Africa and the Middle East.


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Life, Crimes, and Confession of Bridget Durgan (1867)

Jan 14, 2016

"Throughout all the annals of crime, there has never been recorded a more revolting, wicked deed, than that for which the wretched perpetrator, Bridget Durgan, paid the forfeit of her life in the jail yard of New Brunswick, New Jersey, on August 30, 1867."
So begins the narrative of Bridget Durgan (1843-1867), an Irish domestic servant in the household of a Dr and Mrs Coriell in New Jersey in the 1860s. The booklet purports to be an account of her life, including Bridget's confession, and was published as a warning to others. How much of this narrative and confession is true is hard to say; the text also bears a resemblance to the broadsides which were sold at executions, containing information on the crimes and trials – and sometimes the added confessions of the accused.
The events began after Bridget Durgan was engaged in the Coriell household as a domestic servant, and her mistress, Mrs Coriell — described as "being possessed of the greatest beauty " and "a tender and noble heart", compared to Bridget who is a "demon girl" and "wicked creature" — decided to let Bridget go. It is not specified as to why she was dismissed other than that the mistress of the house had taken a dislike to her. Bridget, who according to her confession had harboured hate for one of her previous mistresses and had failed in her earlier attempts to kill the woman, now seized her chance. When Dr Coriell was called away to a patient one evening, Bridget stabbed Mrs Coriell and started a fire in an attempt to conceal the murder, later claiming that robbers had entered the house and murdered her mistress.
While in prison, many people came to see Bridget and tickets were also sold to attend her execution. One of the many visitors to her cell was the writer and women's activist Elizabeth Oakes Smith (1806-1893). Smith had written a series of articles promoting women's rights for the New York Tribune entitled "Woman and Her Needs" at the beginning of the 1850s, and her visit to Bridget also resulted in an article detailing their encounter. The account his far from flattering of Bridget. She compares parts of Bridget's appearance to that of various animals, as well as stating that her hands are "large, coarse, and somehow have a dangerous look, for hands, as well as faces, have expression." She also writes:
In the scale of human intelligence I find Bridget Durgan on the very lowest level. She has cunning and ability to conceal her real actions; and so have the fox, the panther, and many inferior animals, whose instincts are not more clearly defined than those of Bridget Durgan. [...] She is large in the base of the brain, and swells out over the ears, where destructiveness and secretiveness are located by phrenologists, while the whole region of intellect, ideality and moral sentiment is small. [...] The character of Bridget's face is sullen, and yet wears a mixed expression of anxiety, even to distress. The line of the mouth, as of the eyelids, is oblique. There is not one character of beauty, even in the lowest degree, about the girl; no one ray of sentiment, nothing genuine, hardly human, except a weak, sometimes a bitter, smile. The wonder is that any housekeeper should be willing to engage such a servant. I have an idea that this same girl was offered to me in an intelligence office in Brooklyn, and that I refused to even talk to one so repulsive in appearance.


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From India to the Planet Mars (1900)

Dec 2, 2015

This book details the experiences of Théodore Flournoy (1854-1920), professor of psychology at the University of Geneva, during the five years he spent attending the seances of Hélène Smith, a pseudonym for Catherine Müller (1861-1929). Smith was a medium who received spiritual messages through visual and auditory means as well as raps on the table from her spirit guide and protector named Leopold. Flournoy studied Smith and wrote of the different cycles she inhabited as she claimed to be the reincarnation of Simandini the daughter of an Arab sheik, the favourite wife of a Hindu prince, as well as a reincarnation of Marie Antoinette. She also claimed to have contact with people living on Mars and to be able to speak their language which she wrote down during her seances, as well as sketches of the landscape she witnessed (see image below).
February 16, 1896. – The idea of a special handwriting belonging to the planet Mars occurs for the first time to Hélène's astonishment in a Martian semi-trance.
August 22. – Hélène for the first time writes in Martian. After various non-Martian visions Mlle. Smith turns away from the window (it rained hard, and the sky was very gray), and exclaims 'Oh, look, it is all red! Is it already time to go to bed? M. Lemaître, are you there? Do you see how red it is? I see Astané, who is there in that red; I only see his head and the ends of his fingers; he has no robe, and here is the other (Esenale) with him. They both have some letters at the ends of their fingers on a bit of paper. Quick, give me some paper!' A blank sheet and the pocket-pen are handed to her, which latter she disdainfully throws down. She accepts an ordinary pencil, which she holds in her customary fashion, between her middle and index-finger, then writes from left to right the three first lines of Fig. 21, looking attentively towards the window at her fictitious model before tracing each letter, and adding certain oral notes, according to which there are some words which she sees written in black characters on the three papers — or, more correctly, on three white wands, a sort of narrow cylinder, somewhat flattened out — which Astané, Esenale, and a third personage whose name she does not know but whose description corresponds with that of Pouzé, hold in their right hands.


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How to use the Dial Telephone (1927)

Nov 18, 2015

A film by the American Telephone and Telegraph company, showing through both animation and live action how to use the rotary dial of the telephone. A woman shows how the numbers should be dialed and the mistakes that should be avoided, such as dialing before having picked up the receiver or not finishing the series of numbers properly.
The first telephones of the 1870s were arranged in pairs, meaning that one could only call up the person with the other telephone. With the invention of the telephone exchange, callers could be connected to other numbers and switched between lines. The first commercial telephone exchange in the United States opened in Connecticut in 1878. The video above shows the change to automatic switching, meaning that one could dial the number without having to go through the telephone exchange, although dialling number 8 does connect the caller to the information centre where a group of women are frenetically looking through telephone directories in order to find the telephone number needed.


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Plastic Reconstruction of the Face (1918)
Text by Adam Green
Jan 21, 2016

This 1918 silent film explores the Studio for Portrait Masks, the Paris workshop of American artist Anna Coleman Ladd (1878-1939). Ladd volunteered her skills as a classically trained sculptor to help design and construct detailed facial prosthetics and, in so doing, further advanced what is now known as Anaplastology. Also seen in this film is British sculptor Francis Derwent Wood (1871-1926) who founded the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department at the Third London General Hospital and was a pioneer in the use of metal masks, both lightweight and more durable than the then commonly used rubber masks.
Reference to the use of prosthetics dates back to pre-antiquity, and the first textbook on plastic surgery was published in the sixteenth century by the Italian surgeon Gaspare Tagliacozzi. Nonetheless, this film captures a particularly noteworthy time for both fields that resulted from the intersection of a number of recent medical advances and the overwhelming need to utilize those advances to aid the more than twenty million soldiers that were wounded during WWI.
While medical advances saved a great number of lives, advances in weaponry and trench warfare increased the number of injuries, particularly to the face and extremities. Not only were soldiers exposed to the elements (e.g., trench foot) but sources note that many failed to understand how dramatically the landscape of warfare had changed. For example, in speaking about the machine gun, Dr Fred Albee noted, “They seemed to think they could pop their heads up over a trench and move quickly enough to dodge the hail of bullets”. When the limits of plastic surgery were reached, while far from perfect, countless soldiers benefited from rehabilitative services like those shown.
You can read more over at the National Library of Medicine, where the film is housed, in Zoe Bellof's essay "Copper Masks and Faceless Men..."

author: Adam Green


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Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836)

Aug 27, 2015

In the prevailing anti-Catholic atmosphere of early-nineteenth-century America, and fresh after the Ursuline Convent riots of August 1834 in Massachusetts (in which a convent of the Roman Catholic Ursuline nuns burned down by the hands of a Protestant mob), the publication of Maria Monk's revelations of her time at the Hôtel-Dieu convent in Montreal became a sensation. With nuns forced to engage in sexual acts with priests and being locked in the cellar as a punishment for disobeying, the story had similarities to the popular Gothic novels of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Maria also tells of how any babies that were born as a result of these liaisons were immediately baptized, strangled, and buried under the convent. It was from this fate that she wanted to save her unborn child which led her to escape and consequently publish her exposé.
Although the preface claims the events and persons described to be real, after the initial sensation died down some began to question the veracity of Maria's tale. American journalist William L. Stone traveled to Montreal and visited the convent, later writing that the descriptions found in Maria's book bore no resemblance to the actual building. Tales of Maria's past seem to suggest that she had been confined by her mother in a house for fallen women from which she was expelled in 1835 due to her pregnancy. In October of the same year, a New York newspaper announced Maria's forthcoming book which was then published in January 1836. It is believed that the book was not written by Maria herself but either written down or indeed fabricated by one or more of the various clergymen that surrounded her during this time of publicity, such as Reverend William K. Hoyt and Reverend John Jay Slocum, in an attempt to make money through the sensational narrative. When or how she had come to meet these men and how much influence they had over her is unknown, as is the truth of the narrative found in her book or indeed anywhere else regarding Maria's life or character.
For a great list of various editions of the book and related material - including Maria's "sequel" and  an affidavit from Maria's mother) - see this great page from the University of Penn Library.


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Seeing London (1918)

Sep 24, 2015

A unique glimpse at London in 1918, some months before the end of World War I. The film shows some of the famous sights of the city, from Westminster to St Paul's Cathedral, from Clepotra's Needle to the Tower of London where military exercises are being held. The film was shot by the American traveler Elias Burton Holmes (1870–1958) who photographed and filmed his travels abroad, later holding lectures and screening the films to paying audiences. Other than providing unique early documentation of London's top sights, the film also shows a baseball match played between the US Army and US Navy where King George V is seen attending and greeting the players. The match was played at the Chelsea Football Ground on July 4th, the American Independence Day, and was attended by 18,000 spectators, including the King and Queen.


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The Art of Ornamental Orange Peeling (1910)

Oct 20, 2015

Images from an article about an unusual form of sculpture, found in a 1910 issue of American Homes and Gardens magazine.


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Illustrations from an Italian Book of Proverbs (1718)

Oct 1, 2015

Illustrations from an Italian book of proverbs made by the engraver and painter Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (1634–1718). The son of painter Agostino Mitelli (1609-1660), the younger Mitelli recreated paintings by famous artists and was also a prolific engraver whose work ranged from satirical to everyday scenes. The book, originally made in 1678, seems to have been a gift for Francesco Maria de' Medici, the Governor of Siena in Tuscany, while this edition from 1718 includes texts in both Italian and German.


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The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1838

Sep 22, 2015

First published in 1836 by the American Anti-Slavery Society, the American Anti-Slavery Almanac was an attempt to bring awareness about slavery to nineteenth-century America. This 1838 issue focused particularly on slavery in the South, with the often graphic images (see below) serving to show many Northerners the extent of the horrors for the first time. The almanac, which consists of the expected information and dates, also includes writings on the subject of slavery emphasising its un-Christian nature, noting the horrific treatment of the slaves as well as the injustice of children being separated from their families. Although the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves had passed in 1807, the slave trade did not end until after the Civil War. See more editions of the Almanac from other years here on the Internet Archive.


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Speculations of the Changes, Likely to be Discovered in the Earth and Moon, by Their Respective Inhabitants (ca. 1666)

Jul 30, 2015

In a letter published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the French astronomer Adrien Auzout describes how the Earth might seem to those living in the moon, observing how our landscape not only changes and varies because of the seasons but also because of the alterations to the landscape made by man. Auzout in turn has observed changes on the surface of the moon, writing:
This it is [...] which all Curious men, that have good Telescopes, ought well to attend; and I doubt not; but, if we had a very particular Map of the Moon, as I had designed to make one with a Topography, as it were, of all the considerable places therein, that We or our Posterity would find some changes in Her. And if the Mapps of the Moon of Hevelius, Divini, and Riccioli, are exact, I can say, that I have seen there some places considerable enough, where they put parts that are clear whereas I there see dark ones.


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Footage of the Twin Towers Being Built (1976)

Sep 10, 2015

A haunting glimpse into the construction of the Twin Towers in New York and their early use. The film is produced by Western Electric and, judging by its lack of sound, appears to be the raw footage for a short industrial film. Amid the course of the eerily silent scenes we see the site empty of buildings, the construction of the all too familiar girders, and panaromas of Manhattan flecked with scratches and dust.
At the time the towers were completed in the early 1970s, they were the tallest buildings in the world, with 1 World Trade Center being 1,368 feet (417 m) and 2 World Trade Center 1,362 feet (415 m). The lead architect for the project was Minoru Yamasaki (1912-1986) and construction began in August 1968. The towers were destroyed in the September 11 attacks of 2001 in which almost 3000 people lost their lives.


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Watercolours from a 16th-Century De Materia Medica

Sep 15, 2015

These wonderful full-page watercolour illustrations are from a 16th-century edition of Pedanius Dioscorides's work on herbal medicine, De Materia Medica. Dioscorides (ca. 40–90 AD), a Greek physician and botanist, is considered to be the father of pharmacology, with this five-volume book hailed as the forerunner of modern pharmacopoeias (books that record medicines along with their effects and directions for their use). His book was translated from the original Greek to Latin, Arabic, and Spanish, and continued to be in use with additions and commentaries written by various authors, one of them being the 16th-century Italian doctor Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501–1577). Describing one hundred new plants not included by Dioscorides, Mattioli's expansion of the book first appeared in Italian and was later translated into Latin, French, Czech, and German. These illustrations, found in Mattioli's version of the book, are dated between 1564–1584 and are the creation of the Italian artist and botanist Gherardo Cibo (1512–1600).
The images, in which the plants take centre stage before a landscaped backdrop, seem to bear an uncanny resemblance to the images found in Robert Thornton’s "Temple of Flora".


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Portraits of Ellis Island Immigrants

Sep 9, 2015

Between 1892 and 1954, Ellis Island served as an immigration inspection station for millions of immigrants arriving into the United States. The first immigrant to pass though the station was 17-year-old Annie Moore from Cork, Ireland, one of the 700 immigrants arriving on the opening day on January 1, 1892. The first and second class passengers were considered wealthy enough not to become a burden to the state and were examined onboard the ships while the poorer passengers were sent to the island where they underwent medical examinations and legal inspections. These images of people wearing their folk costumes were taken by amateur photographer Augustus Sherman who worked as the Chief Registry Clerk on Ellis Island from 1892 until 1925. The people in the photographs were most likely detainees who were waiting for money, travel tickets or someone to come and collect them from the island. In 1907, the photographs were published in National Geographic, and they were also hung on the walls of the lower Manhattan headquarters of the federal Immigration Service. In 2005, Aperture brought out a book of the photographs, containing 97 full-page portraits.
1907 was the busiest year for Ellis Island, with an all-time high of 11,747 immigrants arriving in April. Approved immigrants spent between three to five hours on the island where they underwent medical examinations and were asked questions regarding their occupation and the money they owned, it being preferable for them to have a starting sum when they arrived in the country. Two percent of the immigrants were denied admission on the grounds of suffering from contagious diseases or insanity, or alternatively by virtue of having a criminal background. In the 1920s, restrictions were placed on the percentage of immigrants arriving from various countries or ethnic backgrounds, as immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were seen as inferior to the earlier immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. The facilities later served as a detention and deportation processing station, and during the Second World War, German, Italian, and Japanese resident aliens were detained on the island.


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Hi-Res Images from the Apollo Missions

Oct 6, 2015

More than 8,400 super high-resolution images from the Apollo missions have been released onto Flickr, a huge upload which allows the general public to see the historic photographs at an unprecedented quality. The images were captured by the astronauts using an array of high-end Hasselblad cameras - a "medium format" camera which used film three to four times as large as a standard 35mm frame, hence the wonderful amount of detail.
The upload is the result of a heroic effort by Kipp Teague of the Project Apollo Archive, a site working in tandem with Eric Jones’ Apollo Lunar Surface Journal (which comprehensivley details every Apollo lunar mission). Talking to The Planetray Society Teague explains it came about:
Around 2004, Johnson Space Center began re-scanning the original Apollo Hasseelblad camera film magazines, and Eric Jones and I began obtaining TIFF (uncompressed, high-resolution) versions of these new scans on DVD. These images were processed for inclusion on our websites, including adjusting color and brightness levels, and reducing the images in size to about 1000 dpi (dots per inch) for the high-resolution versions.
After much demand from the public Teague decided to reprocess the entire set and upload them to Flickr, untouched by editing and at a huge 1800 dpi resolution. While most the missions are up on Flickr, there are currently no images from Apollos 7, 8, 9, 10, or 13. According to Teague they wil be added soon.
As a little taster of what awaits you in the archive we've selected some highlights, focusing on just the Apollo 11 mission, and we've included a few zoomed-in crops to show the detail. From the criss-cross of boot prints in the lunar dust, to Neil Armstrong's watery gaze after first landing, it is a remarkable record of a remarkable moment in human history. Being taken by employees of NASA all the original photos are in the public domain, as are these scans.


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“Interruptions” performed by Tom Woottwell (1909)

Sep 17, 2015

A comedic song performed by the music hall performer Tom Woottwell (1865-1941). The lyrics for the song, as well as other well known numbers from the heydays of the music halls, can be found on this website.
The music halls started off with taverns and public houses holding performances in the 1830s where people could eat and drink while they listened to the songs being performed. It wasn't until 1852 that the first purposefully built music hall, The Canterbury Hall, opened with the seating capacity of 700 people. It became such a huge success that a bigger hall was built in the same spot with the new premises being able to house 1500 audience members. By 1875, there were 375 music halls in Greater London which were mostly frequented by the working class as members of the middle class frowned upon the entertainment (as well as the prostitutes who found their clients among the audience). The halls were also popular among wealthy young gentlemen who wanted to spend a fun night out.
The early performances focused on music, most often comedic songs about everyday life topics such as overdue rent, drink, and unfaithful spouses. There were female performers who dressed up as men and men who dressed as women, sometimes with the audience not knowing the true gender of the performer, while at other times women like Vesta Tilley and Hetty King became famous for dressing as soldiers, policemen, and priests. Interspersed with the music acts were the ventriloquists, the trapeze artists, jugglers, magicians, and others, and later on short films and newsreels also became part of the shows.


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Japanese Depictions of North Americans (1860s)

Aug 4, 2015

A selection of Yokohama-e (literally “Yokohama pictures”), a type of ukiyo-e Japanese woodblock print which focused on depicting the foreigners who flooded through Yokohama during the 1860s and 70s, in particular North Americans. Prints from various artists are shown below including two of the most profilic in this Yokohama-e form, Utagawa Yoshitora and Utagawa Yoshikazu.
Although the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch had engaged in regular trade with Japan during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Japan had limited its trade and contact with the West from 1639 onwards due to the persistent attempts by Europeans to convert the population to Catholicism and the western countries' habit of unfair trading practices. For the next two centuries, limited trade access was granted only to certain Dutch and Chinese ships with special charters.
The United States' interest in regaining contact with Japan during the nineteenth century sprung from the annexation of California, which created an American port in the Pacific, enabling trade with the newly opened ports of China, and also creating the need for coaling stations en route. The Treaty of Kanagawa was signed in March 1854, leading to the opening of two Japanese ports, as well as the establishing of an American consul in Japan. Although Kanagawa was meant to become the port for foreign trade and residency, it was located along the Tōkaidō, the main east-west road which the Japanese government didn't want foreigners to access. Instead, the small fishing village of Yokohama grew to become the base for foreign trade, opening in 1859. Through these Westerners who came to Yokohama, western fashion, photography, ice cream, rugby, and cricket were introduced to Japan.


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A Collection of Very Valuable and Scarce Pieces relating to the Last Plague in the Year 1665 (1721)

Aug 12, 2015

An "all you need to know" about the 1665 Great Plague of London, this book consists of a compendium of official regulations that were put in practice in order to prevent the plague from spreading, accounts of the symptoms and cures related to the disease, as well as tables of data relating to number of deaths by cause and location. The year 1665 saw the last in a series of plague epidemics that had begun at the end of the fifteenth century. During The Great Plague, between 75,000 and 100,000 Londoners lost their lives with a peak of 7165 deaths occuring during one week in September. While the wealthier citizens fled to the countryside, the poor were left to fend for themselves, leaving them little chance as the households in which the plague occurred were sealed off in order to prevent the disease from spreading. The infected homes were marked with a red cross on the door as well as the words "Lord have mercy on us". In an attempt to prevent the plague from spreading, public spaces, such as theatres, were closed and it is estimated that 40,000 dogs and 200,000 cats were put to death as a result of the mistaken belief that they were carriers of the disease.


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Queen Victoria’s Teenage Diaries (1912)

Aug 20, 2015

Queen Victoria (1819-1901) is one of the most famous monarchs of all time and her reign, lasting for 63 years and seven months, is now known as the Victorian era; a period of great industrial and scientific change as well as expansion of the British Empire. These excerpts from her diaries span from 1832, when Victoria was 13-years-old, to 1840, the same year that she married her cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha at the age of 20. Having just turned 18 in May 1837, she became queen the next month after the death of William IV. Covering her teenage years as well as the earlier parts of her reign, Victoria writes of subjects relating to her position as queen and the political climate of the times as well as more personal matters, such as her nervousness when giving speeches and her taking for her cousin Albert. Of her nervousness, she writes on Wednesday, 6th February 1839:
[...] I always felt nervous; and Lord M. [Melbourne] said that no one ever got over that, and that there were very few who didn't feel the same nervousness before making a Speech even if you had done it a 100 times [...].
Of her second meeting with Albert, on 11th October 1839, she writes:

At about 1/2 p. 10 dancing began. I danced 5 quadrilles; (1) with Ernest; (2) with dearest Albert, who dances so beautifully; (3) with Lord Alfred; (4) with Ernest; and (5) with dearest Albert again. [...] it is quite a pleasure to look at dearest Albert when he gallops and valses, he does it so beautifully, holds himself so well with that beautiful figure of his.
A few days later, on 15th October, Victoria proposed to Albert and they were married in February 1840. She wrote ecstatically of the day in her diary:
NEVER, NEVER spent such an evening!!! MY DEAREST DEAREST DEAR Albert ... his excessive love & affection gave me feelings of heavenly love & happiness I never could have hoped to have felt before! He clasped me in his arms, & we kissed each other again & again! His beauty, his sweetness & gentleness – really how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a Husband! ... to be called by names of tenderness, I have never yet heard used to me before – was bliss beyond belief! Oh! This was the happiest day of my life!


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Chart of the Inner Landscape (1886)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Aug 18, 2015

The Nei Jing Tu (Chart of the Inner Landscape) is a magnificent Taoist depiction of the human body as a microcosm of the universe, in which fundamental forces, ancient spirits and celestial bodies all have their place. The follower of the Tao (natural order) must gently try to bring themselves into closer harmony with it through meditation, breathing exercises, feng shui and other practices. Then the body may become as it is also figured in the chart — an alchemical furnace capable of producing the elixir of life. The chart is designed to help the Taoist “prolong longevity” and, the ultimate goal, “attain immortality and Buddhahood”.
It took on its current form in 1886 after a priest named Liu Chengying happened across the original in the library of a mountain temple, painted on an old silk scroll. In the colophon at the lower left of the chart, Liu describes the fascination he felt:
“...By chance, it was hanging on a wall. The painting was finely executed... I examined it for a long time and my comprehension grew. I began to realize that exhalation and inhalation, as well as expelling and ingesting, of the human body are the waxing and waning as well as the ebb and flow of the cosmos. If you can divine and gain insight into this, you will have progressed more than halfway into your inquiry of the great Way of the Golden Elixir. In truth, I did not dare not keep this [painting] to myself alone. Therefore I had it engraved on a printing plate for wider dissemination.”
The human figure in the chart faces left. At the top of its head, wrinkly brain tissue is represented by the nine craggy peaks of Mount Kunlun (heavenly abode of the immortals and source of the Yellow River). Its spinal cord is a meandering watercourse flowing out of the head. Divine water (qi of Yin) rushes down from the head to be met with fire (qi of Yang) rising up from the abdomen. With this equalisation achieved, where the four Yin-Yang symbols radiate, the elixir can finally be formed.
Some of the chart’s most wonderful details include: Laozi meditating in the forebrain; a twelve-storey pagoda standing in for the throat; a flaming spiral of a heart in which a boy strings together coins to form the Big Dipper (thought of as the centre of the cosmos); kidneys represented by a woman spinning her wheel (who also symbolises the star Vega); and intestines in the shape of a buffalo ploughing and planting the elixir (or herb) of life. Other organs appear only as text: “The spirit of the lungs is Brilliant Splendour”, “The spirit of the liver is Dragon Mist”, “The spirit of the spleen is Continuously Existing”.
The above version of the chart is a rubbing from the original stele (stone surface) engraved in 1886 at the behest of Liu Chengying. The stele can be found today encased in a wall of the Baiyun Guan (Abbey of the White Clouds) in Beijing. According to the East Asian Library at Berkeley, the ancient technique of rubbing (aka “inked squeezing”) appeared in China at the same time if not earlier than printing.

author: Ned Pennant-Rea


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Views of the Tesseract (1904)

Aug 13, 2015

A series of images from Charles Howard Hinton's The Fourth Dimension (1904), a book all about the "tesseract" - a four-dimensional analog of the cube, the tesseract being to the cube as the cube is to the square. Hinton, a British mathematician and science fiction writer, actually coined the term "tesseract" which appears for the first time in his book A New Era of Thought (1888). We are not going to pretend to have given the time to his book to understand fully the concept behind these diagrams, but they are a fascinating series of images all the same (particular the coloured frontispiece featured above), and offer a glimpse into the theory of four-dimensional space which would prove so important to the development of modern physics. Although Hinton's work was an important stepping stone in understanding four-dimensional space, the real breakthrough came in a 1908 paper by Hermann Minkowski, in which four-dimensional space was thought of in non-Euclidean terms, leading to the revolutionary concept of "spacetime".
Apart from his ideas and inventions — including a baseball cannon which fired the ball with the help of gunpowder — Hinton became notorious for having committed bigamy, marrying Mary Ellen Boole in 1880 and Maud Florence in 1883. The scandal subsequently forced him to leave Britain and he traveled to America with his first wife where he taught mathematics at Princeton University, later working for the University of Minnesota as well as the United States Patent Office.


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16th-Century Pattern Book for Scribes

Aug 26, 2015

This scribal pattern book - dated to around 1510 from Swabia, Germany - was made by Gregorius Bock and is addressed to his cousin Heinrich Lercher Wyss who was the official scribe of the duchy of Württemberg, most likely put together with the purpose of aiding Wyss in the refining of his art. The first part includes alphabets in various scripts with the second part presenting some decorative initials. Some of the styles found in the book include gothic textura, round gothic, round humanistic, as well as the unusual inclusion of letters and texts from Greek and Hebrew script. Bock may himself have been a monk in the Benedictine monastery of Ochsenhausen in whose library the manuscript was found.


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At the Moving Picture Ball (1920)

Aug 25, 2015

A time capsule in the form of a song - with music by Joseph H. Santly and words by Howard Johnson, At the Moving Picture Ball names some of the great silent era actors of the time. The song, sung here by Maurice Burkhart in 1920, describes a party where all the actors mingle and dance together, with familiar names such as Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks counted among the celebrities. Others include Wallace Reid, a silent era film star who was noted for his good looks, and Theda Bara, who was nicknamed The Vamp and was one of the early sex symbols of cinema.


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Erotic Cameos from Antiquity (ca. 1771)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Oct 8, 2015

In 1775, when the Marquis de Sade travelled to Italy at the age of thirty-five, he had yet to write his libertine Justine or the unfinished torture-orgy nightmare that is 120 Days of Sodom. Still, at this time, angling after a respectable career in letters, despite an increasingly marred reputation, Sade’s trip led him to confront what James A. Steintrager describes as “the most complete and preserved material culture of the ancient Roman lifeworld”, a world that appeared, at least on the surface, to be “radically other than Christian modernity, including — or most especially — with regard to religion and sexuality”.
In this same period and place, Pierre-François Hugues d'Hancarville — a French art historian and self-styled “baron” — was helping the British diplomat Sir William Hamilton acquire various antiquities, including over seven hundred vases, as well as more risqué objects. D’Hancarville met up with Sade in Florence, showing him plans for the Duomo’s cupola before Brunelleschi’s construction. The marquis and baron shared other affinities beyond an interest in cathedral architecture: Sade was in Italy on the run, sentenced to death in France for feeding poisonous aphrodisiac pastilles to prostitutes, among other awful crimes; d’Hancarville, in and out of debt and jail, was, in Catharine Arnold’s description, “a professional pornographer who had absolutely nothing to lose”.
Not long after meeting Sade, the art historian fell into further trouble over publishing a run of pornographic volumes entitled Monumens de la vie privée des douze Césars (1780), Monumens du culte secret des dames romaines (1784), and the two-volume work featured here, Veneres uti observantur in gemmis antiquis (Venuses observed on ancient gemstones). Depicting erotic figures and themes carved on Roman cameos, which the author mainly dates after the rule of Augustus and Tiberius, this third work proved popular in both the original French and 1785 English translation. (It also seems to have been accompanied by a volume titled Priapi uti observantur in gemmis antiquis, not available in digitized form.) The book has remained influential: the classicist Richard Payne Knight, inspired by d’Hancarville’s subject matter and daring, published An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus in 1786, whose frontispiece is an unruly pile of wax organs. Phallicist Hargrave Jennings looked to d’Hancarville while composing his ten-volume “Phallic Series”, although he questioned whether such a “serious” man could “express himself, as he seems to do, with the lightness of the writer of the preface and notes”.
These notes and preface offer somewhat arch glosses of the explicit images that follow. An early engraving of seven erect penises menacingly circling a snail has a simple explanation: many gastropods are simultaneous hermaphrodites and thus symbolize lust. Why, later, does flaccid genitalia have chicken feet sprouting from its testicles? Because it reveals how “vigilance” is not one of the cock’s strongest qualities. And a woman pleasuring a man with her left hand? It speaks to the “complaisance” that Livia Drusilla had for her husband Augustus. Elsewhere, d’Hancarville lets interpretative difficulty get softened by translation. Regarding an image of a shepherd in sexual congress with his flock, he quotes Virgil’s Eclogues: “Novimus, et qui te transversa tuentibus hircis” — a line that, in its expanded form, reads: “Think twice before you utter these complaints again a man. I know who was with you while the goats looked askance.” D’Hancarville concludes his preface by explaining why the images are so small: at such a size they are nearer to the originals and, perhaps more importantly, they “would have still been more indecent had they been otherwise”.
Below you can browse selections of the engraved and hand-colored plates from Veneres uti observantur in gemmis antiquis, courtesy of The Getty.

author: Hunter Dukes


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The First Circus (1921)

Oct 13, 2015

A strange instance of two films having been catalogued together as one, both made by German American puppeteer and illustrator Tony Sarg (1880-1942). The first untitled film is a critique of the Prohibition era in America during the 1920s, when the selling, producing, and transporting of alcohol was illegal. The cartoon begins with Charles Darwin writing The Descent of Man, joking that he simultaneously "unknowingly discovered the original Prohibition Agent" as two monkeys find a bottle of alcohol and drink its contents, only to end up crying when a bigger monkey finds the bottle and takes it away from them.
The second film then goes on to a completely different theme, that of The First Circus, showing a caveman and cavewoman performing with a dinosaur and snake who are used as a trampoline for acrobatic tricks and as a tightrope respectively, with a caveman and his family gleefully watching the performance. However, the dinosaur (who seems to possess a snake's tongue) tickles the female audience member's foot with disastrous consequences...


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Gynecological Gymnastics from Outer Space (1895)
Text by Adam Green
Sep 23, 2015

A set of rather uncanny diagrams from Die Heilgymnastik in der Gynaekologie: und die mechanische Behandlung von Erkrankungen des Uterus und seiner Adnexe nach Thure Brandt (1895), translated from German as "The physiotherapy in gynecology and the mechanical treatment of diseases of the uterus and its appendages by Thure Brandt". As the title implies the gynecological exercises are based on those invented by the Swedish obstetrician and gynecologist, Thure Brandt (1819-1895). Brandt began treating women in 1861, combining massage, stretching, and general exercise as a form of treating gynecological conditions. After his methods were examined in Jena by German gynecologists in 1886, they became widely used in Europe. The images in this particular text are eye-catching today less for the gynecological technique they depict but more the bizarre similarity between the rakishly thin figures employed in demonstrating the exercises (no doubt an attempt to de-sexualise the images) and the figure of the so-called "Grey Alien" -  thin body, huge head, large eyes - which wouldn't hit popular consciousness for another 65 years.


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Caw! Caw! or The Chronicle of Crows (ca. 1848)

Sep 8, 2015

A rather sad tale, told in rhyme, of a group of crows who lose some of their family members due to a farmer who decides to rid himself of the birds. The title page of the book only gives the author's initials as R. M., and the illustrator as J.B. We've little information on the author, but the illustrations are most likely the work of the Scottish artist Jemima Blackburn (1823-1909). Jemima, also known as Mrs Hugh Blackburn, was a friend of the Victorian artist Sir Edwin Landseer who was known for his paintings of animals and who admired Blackburn's talents. She became particularly known for her bird illustrations and in the 1860s published Birds Drawn from Nature which received much praise. Her work was said to be second only to Thomas Bewick's (1753-1828) engravings in A History of British Birds, published in two volumes in 1797 and 1804.


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Stop Driving Us Crazy! (1959)

Aug 15, 2015

A strange driver's education film combining religion and sci-fi in the form of Rusty, a Martian who comes to Earth to explore the planet because his own is running out of oxygen. Rusty has heard of Earth where people are good Christians and believe in God but finds that they do not treat each other as respectfully or lovingly as one would expect, instead witnessing reckless driving which endangers the lives of others. Although the film is about road safety, citing the number of accidents and casualties that occur as results of car crashes, there is clearly another agenda at play, one which makes sense when you see that the film was produced by The General Board of Temperance of the Methodist Church.


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19th-Century Album of Ottoman Fashion

Sep 3, 2015

These watercolour illustrations made in the early nineteenth century are from an album presented, in 1867, to the Russian heir to the throne Alexander Alexandrovich Romanov (later Alexander III of Russia). The album seems to have been a gift from someone called Grigoriy Sharopenko and the pictures are most likely copies of earlier illustrations. The drawings show clothes and ceremonial dress from the Ottoman Empire, with the most noticeable features being the various headdresses as well as the extensive layering of garments. The combination of different textiles and manner of layering was a way of distinguishing not only gender but class, religion, and clans, and the aim was to combine in such a way that each individual layer could still be seen.
In addition to drawings, actual garments arrived in Europe through merchants, soldiers, and diplomats, and although the most common meeting place between Europeans and the Ottomans was the battlefield, the theatre and opera became a common site where these elaborate outfits were seen. The alterations made by Westerners showed not just the features which were most attractive to Europeans but also what was considered particularly "Eastern". This also translated to costumes worn at balls and masquerades, the turban becoming particularly popular in  the early nineteenth century.


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Mimes by Marcel Schwob (1901)

May 22, 2014

An English translation of a collection of twenty short "prose-songs" (as the Foreword declares them), from the French writer Marcel Schwob (1867-1905). These surreal, hallucinatory little sketches - Schwob's unique take on 3rd century BCE Greek poet Herodas' then-newly discovered mimes - first appeared in L’Écho de Paris in serialised form from July 19th 1891 to June 7th 1892. A key figure of the late 19th-century French symbolist movement, Schwob's best known work is perhaps The Book of Monelle - "an assemblage of fairy tales, nihilist philosophy, and aphorisms tightly woven into a tapestry of deep emotional suffering" - which is considered by many to have been the unofficial bible of the French Symbolist movement. Although not widely known today, Schwob's influence on the literary landscape of the 20th century was huge, not only in relation to the surrealist movement which would flourish in the decades following his death but also beyond, to such authors as William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, and Roberto Bolaño.
This particular English edition presented here was published by the influential American publisher Thomas Bird Mosher and translated into English by his first wife, Ellie Dresser, by then divorced from Mosher and known as Aimee Lenalie.


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The New York World’s Fair, 1939-40
Text by Adam Green
May 21, 2014

A remarkable series of amateur reels, amounting to more than 6 hours in total, covering the 1939–40 New York World's Fair which took place on a 1,216 acre area of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park and which saw over 44 million people in attendance. The exposition was themed on the "World of Tomorrow", a theme which makes it all the more fascinating viewing today, more than 75 years later. As the official pamphlet explains:
The eyes of the Fair are on the future — not in the sense of peering toward the unknown nor attempting to foretell the events of tomorrow and the shape of things to come, but in the sense of presenting a new and clearer view of today in preparation for tomorrow; a view of the forces and ideas that prevail as well as the machines. To its visitors the Fair will say: "Here are the materials, ideas, and forces at work in our world. These are the tools with which the World of Tomorrow must be made. They are all interesting and much effort has been expended to lay them before you in an interesting way. Familiarity with today is the best preparation for the future.
This particular footage, held by the Prelinger Archive, is remarkable for a variety of reasons. Firstly, for the insight it gives us to the physical reality of the fair. One stand out element is the huge number of acts and shows involving female nudity of some kind, though this may tell us as much about the tastes of the cameraman as about the surprisingly liberal (and sexist) attitudes of the time. Apparently after one particular topless show called "Living Magazine Covers", the NYPD made a sweep of the fair to tone down the sexual content of some of the girls shows, only to then label them as "art". Secondly, although cited as being taken by an "amateur", this was evidently a pretty serious hobby for the man behind the camera Philip Medicus. The six reels, most likely shot an a Magazine Cine-Kodak camera, in total run to just over 6 hours which would have amounted to more than 100,000 ft of the latest and rather expensive Kodachrome film. This is not taking into account anything left of the cutting room floor. It is likely to have taken weeks if not months to shoot. As the website 1939nyworldsfair.com tells us: "Very little is known about the photographer other than that he lived in New York City, was financially well off, and traveled extensively. He was also a prominent amateur photographer and a noted collector of swords."


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Tesseract (2013)

Jun 6, 2014

Animated GIF created by Bill Domonkos.

*
Photo: Sister Alice Smith, hands extended - Kravitt, Samuel, 1913-2000, photographer - Source: Library of Congress.
Ostrich, Eadweard Muybridge - Source: Wikimedia Commons
Glass Tesseract - Source: Wikimedia Commons
*
Bill Domonkos is an experimental filmmaker and video artist. His work combines computer animation, still photography, live footage and manipulated archive film footage. His work has been broadcast and shown internationally in cinemas, film festivals, galleries and museums.
All animated GIFs published here under a CC-BY-SA license.


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The Home Movies of Frank Richard Oastler

Mar 13, 2014

Frank Richard Oastler (1871-1936) was an American surgeon specialising in gynaecology by profession but also a keen amateur photographer, scholar, and authority on wildlife conservation and its interpretation to the public. According to the Beinecke Library site: "Dr. Oastler spent his summers exploring the mountains of the United States and Canadian West, traveling by pack train, photographing the landscapes, fauna, and flora he encountered. He brought home both still and motion pictures which he used in lectures to teach others about natural history and conservation. He was sought after as an authority on the American wilderness, is credited with being chiefly responsible for saving the trumpeter swan from extinction, and instituted the National Park Service's public education program. He advocated nature walks, museums, and nature lectures. He served as a member of the Advisory Board of the National Park Service and was a leader in the movement to create the Isle Royale National Park in Michigan."
The Frank Richard Oastler Collection, housed at Yale University, consists of his photographs, negatives, slides, and 204 black and white 16mm motion picture films documenting the Oastlers' Western trips and visits to other national parks, accompanied by various descriptive notes. The films were badly deteriorated but the Beinecke Library pursued extensive conservation of four of the films which have been digitized and made available through this site. The films record undated trips to Glacier National Park and to Yellowstone National Park, a trip down the Colorado River in 1925, and a trip to Alaska in 1927.


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Mister Fox (1870)

Apr 10, 2014

A short piece of juvenile literature about the hungry Mister Fox and his attempts to acquire dinner for his family - an endeavour which proves successful despite the attempts of the farmer and his wife to intervene - all illustrated in a series of delightful silhouettes. The book is part of Series 3 of the "Mother Goose Melodies" which saw other stories for children, including Cock Robin, Cinderella, and a collection of Little Ditties (which you can see here), all cast in similar rhymes and accompanied by silhouette illustrations.


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Living Lights: a Popular Account of Phosphorescent Animals and Vegetables (1887)

May 8, 2014

A beautifully illustrated book all about creatures endowed with the remarkable ability to produce and emit light: what we now call "bioluminescence". In addition to the exquisite illustrations (which seem to be from the hand of someone called "A.L. Clement"), the author Charles Frederick Holder gives us some wonderful anecdotes relating to these light-giving creatures, such as the following about an American gentleman's experience at a masquerade ball in South America:
The ball-room was the garden, a veritable fairy-land abounding in plants of the most novel and beautiful description, and upon the grass had been laid an extended platform for the dancers. It was moonlight when the festivities began, and no artificial lights were used ; yet at various intervals among the flowers soft gleams appeared, apparently for ornament. Among the first comers was a tall gentleman dressed in a style of several centuries ago, a most picturesque costume ; but what particularly attracted the attention of the American were the decorations of this gentleman and his companion. Around the broad-brimmed hat he wore a band of what appeared, from a distance, to be gems, that flashed like diamonds, presenting a magnificent appearance. The lady's costume was still more remarkable, being fairly ablaze with these brilliant scintillations. As the evening wore on, he was presented to these maskers, when he found that the light proceeded from innumerable luminous insects which had been secured by delicate wires, and fastened upon the hat and the lady's dress.※※Indexed under…FashionLuminous insect
On a side note the author, Charles Frederick Holder (1851–1915), in addition to his work in botany, was also hailed as the the inventor of big-game fishing, and in 1910 traveled with Frederick Russell Burnham to Mexico and uncovered Mayan artefacts, including the Esperanza Stone, a supposedly "paranormal relic".


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Punishment in the Afterlife: an Eastern Turki Manuscript

May 13, 2014

We came across these mysterious fragments of manuscript in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art digital collections which list them only as being from an "Unknown Manuscript", from the 19th century and as possibly originating from Turkestan. Keen to find out more we wrote to a few experts in Turkic languages and received some very helpful replies. Dr Helga Anetshofer from the University of Chicago and Dr David Brophy from the University of Sydney worked together to identify the language as being “Eastern Turki” (which is the dialect of the Tarim Basin from the late 19th and early 20th century, a precursor to modern Uyghur), and provided the following transliterations and translations which you see in the captions below each picture. The general theme seems to centre around the fate of sinners in the afterlife, with a number of gruesome punishments depicted, including snakes attached to ears for eavesdropping and having one's tongue pulled out through the neck for engaging in sexual relations during menstruation or the period after childbirth.
A huge thank you to Dr Helga Anetshofer and Dr David Brophy for their help, and if anyone else might be able to shed any more light on the images, or help with missing parts of the translation then please do get in touch.


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An Alphabet of Organic Type (ca.1650)

May 27, 2014

A series of stunning prints - titled Libellus Novus Elementorum Latinorum - designed by the Polish goldsmith Jan Christian Bierpfaff (1600-ca.1690) and engraved by fellow-countryman Jeremias Falck (1610–1677). According to BibliOdyssey blog, where we first learnt of the images, Bierpfaff worked as an apprentice at the Mackensen family of metalworkers in Cracow, a group "who introduced the Dutch auricular ('shell or ear-like') style of ornament into the Polish gold and silver workshops". We see the influence of this auricular style in Bierpfaff's letterforms but also the unmistakable baroque stylings of the grotesque. The result is wonderfully surreal, the writhing forms hovering somewhere between the monstrous and floral.


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Life and Death Contrasted (ca.1770)

May 7, 2014

A striking image from the British engraver and publisher Valentine Green, illustrating the idea that life, with all its frivolity and distractions (symbolised by the romance novel, parlour games, and high society lady in all her finery) is in fact - echoing the sentiment of Ecclesiastes (quoted on the obelisk) - nothing but "vanity", all lives as they do inevitably ending in death. The subtitle - "an essay on woman" - does, however, raise the question of whether Green is making a further comment on womanhood itself. See the second picture below for a different version, but this time using the figure of a man.


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A Treatise on Adulteration of Food and Culinary Poisons (1820)

Jun 18, 2014

From the 2008 Chinese milk-tainting scandal to last year's "Horsegate" in the UK, the adulteration of food has been in the news a fair bit recently - but, as this book is testament to, it's a far from recent phenomenon. This groundbreaking work - written in English by a German scientist named Frederik Accum who lived in London from 1793 to 1821 - marked the beginning of an awareness of need for food safety oversight. Accum was the first person to tackle the subject and to reach a wide audience through his activities. His book, controversial at the time, found a wide audience and sold well - a thousand copies in the first month - and a second edition (featured here) was published in the same year. Although popular, the book threatened established practices within the food processing industry and it earned him many enemies among London food manufactures - not least because Accum took the brave step of mentioning companies by name which had been caught carrying out the nefarious practises he details. Only a year after publication Accum left England after a lawsuit was brought against him, living out the rest of his life as a teacher at an industrial institution in Berlin. (Wikipedia)
Below is the rather eye-catching cover of the first edition, featuring a rectangular frame supporting a spider's web and surrounded by intertwined snakes. A spider lurks in the middle of the web over its prey, and a skull crowns the entire collection with a caption beneath it, taken from the Old Testament: "There is death in the pot", a phrase which makes it into the frontispiece to the second edition.


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The Physiognomy of Hands (1917)

Jun 12, 2014

Pages 317 and 318 from a book titled Analyzing character, the new science of judging men: misfits in business, the home and social life (1917) by Katherine M. H. Blackford, M.D. and Arthur Newcomb. The book comes at the tail-end of a long tradition of physiognomy (which perhaps saw its peak in the mid 19th century), a pseudoscientific theory claiming that the outward appearance of a person can reveal essential aspects of their personality and character. Although perhaps not too controversial on the face of it (as it were), the theory has a darkness lingering due to its close links with "scientific racism".


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Arthur Coga’s Blood Transfusion (1667)

Apr 15, 2014

An account by Dr Edmund King given to The Royal Society of the first ever blood transfusion involving a human in England. Six months after he successfully completed a blood transfusion between two dogs, the experimental physician Richard Lower, with the help of Dr King, administered 9oz of sheep's blood into the body of Arthur Coga, a Divinity Student from Cambridge who subjected himself to the experiment in return for a Guinea. Lower describes Coga as "the subject of a harmless form of insanity", the perfect candidate for the experiment as it was just such a tempestuous nature which Lower and his colleagues hoped to calm by the introduction of the blood of a gentle lamb - in addition to the fact that he was well educated and so able to talk about his experiences (indeed, Coga, produced, in Latin, an account of his own experiences of the trial). When Coga himself was asked why blood from a sheep was used he replied, in Latin, “Sanguis ovis symbolicam quandam facultatem habet cum sanguine Christi, quia Christus est agnus Dei” (Sheep's blood has some symbolic power, like the blood of Christ, for Christ is the Lamb of God.) Despite a second transfusion and many attempts to show Coga had changed in character, it appeared that the experiment was a failure in this respect.
(A transcript below via Wikisource. You can also see the original handwritten manuscript of the account here at Wellcome Images)
An Account Of the Experiment of Transfusion, practised upon a Man in London.
This was perform'd, Novemb. 23. 1667. upon one Mr. Arthur Coga, at Arundel-house, in the presence of many considerable and intelligent persons, by the management of those two Learned Physicians and dextrous Anatomists Dr. Richard Lower, and Dr. Edmund King, the latter of whom communicated the Relation of it, as followeth.
The Experiment of Transfusion of Blood into an humane Vein was made by Us in this manner. Having prepared the Carotid Artery in at young Sheep, we inserted a Silver-Pipe into the Quills to let the Blood run through it into a Porringer, and in the space of almost a minute, about 12 ounces of the Sheeps bloud ran through the Pipe into the Porringer; which was somewhat to direct us in the quantity of Bloud now to be transfus'd into the Man. Which done, when we came to prepare the Vein in the Man's Arm, the Vein seem'd too small for that Pipe, which we intended to insert into it; so that we imployed another, about one third part less, at the little end. Then we made an incision in the Vein, after the method formerly publisht, Numb. 28; which method we observ'd without any other alteration, but in the shape of one of our Pipes; which we found more convenient for our purpose. And, having open'd the Vein in the Man's Arm, with as much ease as in the common way of Venæ-seetion, we let thence run out 6 or 7 ounces of Blood. Then we planted our silver Pipe into the said Incision, and inserted Quills between the two Pipes already advanced in the two subjects, to convey the Arterial bloud from the Sheep into the Vein of the Man. But this Blood was near a minute, before it had past through the Pipes and Quills into the Arm; and then it ran freely into the Man's Vein for the space of 2 minutes at least; so that we could feel a Pulse in the said Vein just beyond the end of the silver Pipe; though the Patient said, he did not feel the Blood hot, (as we reported of the subject in the French Experiment) which may very well be imputed to the length of the Pipes, through which the blood passed, losing thereby so much of its heat, as to come in a temper very agreeable to Venal Blood. And as to the quantity of Blood receiv'd into the Man's Vein, we judge, there was about 9 or 10 ounces: For, allowing this Pipe ⅓ less than that, through which 12 ounces pass'd in one minute before, we may very well suppose, it might in 2 minutes convey as much blood into the Vein, as the other did in the Porringer in one minute; granting withall, that the Blood did not run so vigorously the second minute, as it did the first, nor the third, as the second, &c. But, that the Blood did run all the time of those two minutes, we conclude from thence; First, because we felt a Pulse during that time. Secondly, because when upon the Man's saying, He thought, he had enough, we drew the Pipe out of his Vein, the Sheeps blood ran through it with a full stream; which it had not done, if there had been any (top before, in the space of those two minutes; the blood being so very apt to coagulate in the Pipes upon the least stop, especially the Pipes being so long as three Qulls.
The Man after this operation, as well as in it, found himself very well, and hath given in his own Narrative under his own hand, enlarging more upon the benefit, he thinks, he hath received by it, than we think fit to own as yet. He urg'd us to have the Experiment repeated upon him within 3 or 4 days after this; but it was thought advisable, to put it off somewhat longer. And the next time, we hope to be more exact, especially in Weighing the Emittent Animal before and after the Operation, to have a more just account of the quantity of Blood, it shall have lost.


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Women Painters of the World: from the time of Caterina Vigri to Rosa Bonheur (1905)

Mar 12, 2014

A heavily illustrated collection of essays, edited by British art critic Walter Shaw Sparrow, focusing on notable women painters from the 15th century to the beginning of the 20th. Of the eight essays only one is written by a woman, Helena Westermarck, a Finnish artist and women's historian active in the suffragette movement. From the rather lavish preface by Sparrow :
What is genius? Is it not both masculine and feminine? Are not some of its qualities instinct with manhood, while others delight us with the most winning graces of a perfect womanhood? Does not genius make its appeal as a single creative agent with a two-fold sex?
But if genius has its Mirandas and its Regans no less than its infinite types of men, ranging from Prospero and Ferdinand to Caliban and Trinculo, its union of the sexes does not remain always at peace within the sphere of art. Sometimes, in the genius of men, the female characteristics gain mastery over the male qualities; at other times the male attributes of woman's genius win empire and precedence over the female; and whenever these things happen, the works produced in art soon recede from the world's sympathies, losing all their first freshness. They may guide us, perhaps, as finger-posts in history, pointing the way to some movement of interest; but their first popularity as art is never renewed. Style is the man in the genius of men, style is the woman in the genius of the fair. No male artist, however gifted he may be, will ever be able to experience all the emotional life to which women are subject; and no woman of abilities, how much soever she may try, will be able to borrow from men anything so invaluable to art as her own intuition and the prescient tenderness and grace of her nursery-nature. Thus, then, the bisexuality of genius has limits in art, and those limits should be determined by a worker's sex.
As examples in art of complete womanliness, mention may be made of two exquisite portraits by Madame Le Brun, in which, whilst representing her little daughter and herself, the painter discloses the inner essence and the life of maternal love, and discloses them with a caressing playfulness of passion unattainable by men, and sometimes unappreciated by men. Here, indeed, we have the poetry of universal motherhood, common to the household hearts of good women the wide world over. Such pictures may not be the highest form of painting, but highest they are in their own realm of human emotion; and they recall to one's memory that truth in which Napoleon the Great ranked the gentler sex as the most potent of all creative artists. "The future destiny of children," said he, "is always the work of mothers."
But some persons may answer: "Yes, but the achievements of women painters have been second-rate. Where is there a woman artist equal to any man among the greatest masters?" Persons who do not think are constantly asking that question. The greatest geniuses were all hustled and moulded into shape by the greatest epochs of ambition in the lives of nations, just as the mountains of Switzerland were thrown up to their towering heights by tremendous forces underground; and, as the Alps do not repeat themselves, here and there, for the pleasure of tourists, so the greatest geniuses do not reappear for the pleasure of critics or of theorists. And this is not all. Why compare the differing genius of women and men? There is room in the garden of art for flowers of every[12] kind and for butterflies and birds of every species; and why should anyone complain because a daisy is not a rose, or because nightingales and thrushes, despite their family resemblance, have voices of their own, dissimilar in compass and in quality?
The present book, then, is a history of woman's garden in the art of painting, and its three hundred pictures show what she has grown in her garden during the last four centuries and a half.


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Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior of Africa (1858)

Jun 10, 2014

First published in 1799, Travels in the Interior of Africa is the Scottish explorer Mungo Park's account of his journey through Senegal and Mali to the central portion of the Niger River, the first time a Westerner is known to have reached such central regions. With the backing of Sir Joseph Banks, Park was employed (for £11 a month) to journey solo though unknown lands to seek out the legendary city of "Tambuctoo" and try and ascertain the course of, and if possible, termination point of the river Niger. Park's kit which greeted him upon arrival on the Gold coast was basic to say the least: two shotguns, two compasses, a sextant, a thermometer, a small medicine chest, a wide-brimmed hat, an umbrella and, bizarrely, a blue dress coat with brass buttons (four of which he'd later gift to a native woman for her kindness to him) and a silver-topped cane. 100 miles up the Gambia river, at an English outpost, Park spent five months preparing for the journey — which included learning the local language of Mandingo, and succumbing to a month-long bout of malarial fever (which probably ended up saving him later on). On 2nd December 1795, when the time came to eventually set out on his journey proper, he refused to travel with a local slave caravan — a decision thought to be symbolic — instead, setting out with just two servants and mule. The journey took him two years in total, including a four month stint imprisoned at the hands of a Moorish chief, and seven months in living the simple hut of a man who'd taken him in when he'd fallen ill. Park eventually returned to Scotland by way of Antigua on 22 December 1797. He had been thought dead, and his return home with news of the discovery of the Niger River evoked great public enthusiasm. An account of his journey was drawn up for the African Association by Bryan Edwards, and his own remarkably detailed, honest and compelling narrative appeared in 1799, instantly becoming a best-seller.
Park was to return for a second trip in 1805. This time he travelled much further down the river Niger (reaching, and travelling beyond Timbuktu) but eventually was to perish in its waters. After his canoe struck a rock, hostile spear-throwing natives forced Park and his crew to the river in which they drowned, all apart from a servant who lived to recount the story of the explorer's death. Such a fate was one Park seemed prepared for. In a letter to the head of the Colonial Office, dispatched on route, he wrote: "I shall set sail for the east with the fixed resolution to discover the termination of the Niger or perish in the attempt. Though all the Europeans who are with me should die, and though I were myself half dead, I would still persevere, and if I could not succeed in the object of my journey, I would at least die on the Niger."


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Leaving the Opera in the Year 2000

Jun 4, 2014

Le Sortie de l'opéra en l'an 2000 is a print from the late-19th century depicting a futuristic view of air travel over Paris as people leave the opera. Many types of aircraft are shown including flying buses, limousines and, what are presumably, police vehicles. On the latter are mounted strangely un-futuristic sword-carrying officers that wouldn't seem out of place on the Opera's stage itself. As far as the get-up of the normal opera-going folk, things don't seem to have progressed too radically, though many of the men seem to be sporting the same bizarre military-esque hat. To the left of the scene, amongst the flying vehicles, we can see a restaurant, which like the Opera building itself, is elevated to an enormous height above the vaguely discernible city below. In the distance we can make out the Eiffel Tower, which seems to have some enormous structure emerging from its top about which buzz more flying vehicles. One other interesting thing to note is that women can be seen driving their own aircraft.
The print is the creation of the French illustrator, etcher, lithographer, caricaturist, novelist, and all around futurologist, Albert Robida. Editor and publisher of La Caricature magazine for 12 years, Robida also wrote an an acclaimed trilogy of futuristic novels imagining what life would be like in the 20th century. He foretells many inventions in his writings, including  the "Téléphonoscope": a flat screen television display that delivered the latest news 24-hours a day, the latest plays, courses, and teleconferences.


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Mary and Gretel (1917)

Apr 9, 2014

A fairy brings two dolls to life, part of a short lived stop-motion puppet series by animator Howard S. Moss, adapted from a series of books entitled Motoys in Life published by Toyland Publishing Company. Origin of American animation 1900-1921 describes the film as "Alice in Wonderland meets the Garden of Eden... [a] surreal fable of a drunk rabbit, bowling dwarfs, and the two bewildered girls of the title."


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The Nitrous Oxide Experiments of Humphry Davy
Text by Adam Green
Mar 25, 2014

In 1799 Humphry Davy, the young English chemist and inventor and future president of the Royal Society, began a very radical bout of self experimentation to determine the effects of inhaling nitrous oxide, more commonly know as "Laughing Gas". With his assistant Dr Kinglake, he would heat crystals of ammonium nitrate, collect the gas released in a green oiled-silk bag, pass it through water vapour to remove impurities and then inhale it through a mouthpiece. The effects were superb. Of these first experiments he described giddiness, flushed cheeks, intense pleasure, and "sublime emotion connected with highly vivid ideas". The experiments quickly increased in frequency and also intensity. He began to take the gas outside of laboratory conditions, returning alone for solitary sessions in the dark, inhaling huge amounts, "occupied only by an ideal existence", and also after drinking in the evening - though he continued to be meticulous in his scientific records throughout. Later in the year he would construct an "air-tight breathing box" in which he would sit for hours inhaling enormous quantities of the gas and have even more intense experiences, on more than one occasion nearly dying. A few months after he started the experiments Davy began to allow others to partake, at first his patients but then also perfectly healthy subjects chosen from his circle of family and friends, including the heir to the Wedgwood pottery empire, the future compiler of Roget's thesaurus, and the poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He asked all the participants to write down their experiences, descriptions which ended up forming more than eighty incredibly entertaining pages in the his Researches, Chemical and Philosophical (1800) which we have featured here.


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Shtetl, My Destroyed Home: A Remembrance (1922)

Apr 17, 2014

A selection from a set of 30 lithographs by the Russian artist Issachar Ber Ryback, dating mostly from 1917 and published in a book by the Berlin-based "Farlag Shveln". The images depict scenes of Ryback's home village in Ukraine before it was destroyed in the pogroms following World War I, a fate which seems ominously echoed in the torturous angles and distortions of form in which he represents the daily activities of village life. After graduating from art school in Kiev in 1916, Ryback played a key role in the Yiddish avant-garde of the Soviet Union following the Russian Revolution. After his father was murdered by Petliura's soldiers in 1921, he fled to Germany, settling in Berlin where he became a member of the Novembergruppe and was involved in a number of important exhibitions. After a return trip to Russia, working on a set design for a Yiddish theatre and undertaking a prolonged journey through the Jewish "kolkhozes" of Ukraine and Crimea, he moved to Paris in 1926. Here he lived at the heart of the city's vibrant artistic life - including solo exhibitions at the Galerie aux Quatre Chemins (1928) and Galerie L’Art Contemporain (1929) - until his death in 1935.


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The Adventures of Cinderella (ca.1810)

May 29, 2014

A short and wonderfully illustrated version of the Cinderella tale most probably dating from the early 19th century (no date can be made out in the book itself). The rhymes often work best when said with in a Georgian cockney drawl, e.g. "born" and "gone".Strangely the last part of the tale seems rather rushed, maybe they ran out of room?


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Sartorial Foresight: Future Dictates of Fashion (1893)
Text by Adam Green
Apr 8, 2014

W. Cade Gall's delightful “Future Dictates of Fashion” — published in the June 1893 issue of The Strand magazine — is built on the premise that a book from a hundred years in the future (published in 1993) called The Past Dictates of Fashion has been inexplicably found in a library. The piece proceeds to divulge this mysterious book's contents — namely, a look back at the last century of fashion, which, of course, for the reader in 1893, would be looking forward across the next hundred years. In this imagined future, fashion has become a much respected science (studied in University from the 1950s onwards) and is seen to be “governed by immutable laws”.
The designs themselves have a somewhat unaccountable leaning toward the medieval, or as John Ptak astutely notes, “a weird alien/Buck Rogers/Dr. Seuss/Wizard of Oz quality”. If indeed this was a genuine attempt by the author Gall to imagine what the future of fashion might look like, it's fascinating to see how far off the mark he was (excluding perhaps the 60s and 70s), proving yet again how difficult it is to predict future aesthetics. It is also fascinating to see how little Gall imagines clothes changing across the decades (e.g. 1970 doesn't seem so different to 1920) and to see which aspects of his present he was unable to see beyond (e.g. the long length of women's skirts and the seemingly ubiquitous frill). As is often the case when we come into contact with historic attempts to predict a future which for us is now past, it is as if glimpsing into another possible world, a parallel universe that could have been (or which, perhaps, did indeed play out “somewhere”).


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Highlights from the 20,000+ maps made freely available online by New York Public Library

Mar 31, 2014

The New York Public Library have made available online, free from all restrictions, high resolution copies of more than 20,000 historic maps. Containing maps from the 16th through to the early 20th century, the collection focuses mainly on the United States, particularly New York, but also features maps from other countries. The images of Manhattan and surrounding boroughs offer a fascinating snapshot of the development of one of the most densely populated areas in the world. The maps can be viewed through the New York Public Library’s Digital Collections page, and downloaded, through the Map Warper - a wonderful project which aims to make historic maps viewable as overlays on modern maps. Here's our highlights from the collection, focusing on maps made of New York City.


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Recordings of Pygmy Music from the 1946 Ogooué-Congo Mission
Text by Thomas Henry
Mar 27, 2014

This is a series of recordings made in 1946 as part of the “Ogooué-Congo” mission, a French scientific expedition led by ethnologist Noël Ballif through Middle-Congo and Gabon with a purpose to discover and study the Pygmy peoples. During the trip, several hundred recordings of Pygmy music were made by ethnomusicologist Gilbert Rouget, audio engineer André Didier and filmmaker Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau for the “Musée de l’Homme” in Paris. In addition to 34 noncommercial 78 rpm records pressed by the museum following the mission, several sides were also released by Paris-based labels Pathé and La Boîte à Musique (BAM) as well as by Smithsonian Folkways. In this selection, you can listen to the three records published in 1948 on the BAM label as part of the set “Musiques Pygmées et Nègres d’Afrique Equatoriale Française”.
A guest post from Thomas Henry of the wonderful Ceints de Bakelite blog

author: homas Henr


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Tractatus de Herbis (ca.1440)

Apr 22, 2014

Selections from a beautifully illustrated 15th century version of the "Tractatus de Herbis", a book produced to help apothecaries and physicians from different linguistic backgrounds identify plants they used in their daily medical practice. No narrative text is present in this version, simply pictures and the names of each plant written in various languages - a technique which revolutionised botanical literature, allowing as it did for easier transcultural exchanges of scientific knowledge. This particular "Tractaus de Herbis", thought to date from around about 1440 AD and known as Sloane 4016 (its shelf-mark in the British Library), hails from the Lombardy region in the north of Italy and is a copy of a similar work by a figure called Manfredus, which itself was a version of the late 13th century codex known as Egerton 747. As Minta Colins writes in Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Traditions (University of Toronto Press, 2000), as opposed to these early versions, this sumptuously illustrated 15th century copy was most likely created with the wealthy book collector in mind rather than the physician, as "the primary scientific purpose had by then given way to the bibliophile's interest". Some of the delightful highlights of the selection given below include: a demon repelled; a trio of mouse, cat and human corpse; an animal engaging what seems to be a spot of self-castration; an aphrodisiac induced scene; and a man slyly urinating into a pot.


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The 25 Stages from Courtship to Marriage

Mar 20, 2014

A charming set of twenty-five hand-tinted stereographs showing the various stages from courting to marriage - focused mainly on a rumbled midnight tryst on the third date and the wedding itself which takes place in a rather luxuriant tropical setting. There is no date given on the cards, but they are most likely from the late 19th century. Unfortunately the eleventh card is missing from the uploaded set - perhaps a wedding night come early and the resulting card too saucy for public consumption? Perhaps. Though the couple most likely waited and the missing card is simply sat somewhere in the Harper Stereograph Collection of the Boston Public Library - we shall enquire - but for now, at least, the twenty-four stages from courtship to marriage.