text:
Sheet Music Covers for the Gotham-Attucks Company, ca. 1905–1911
Text by Dorothy Berry
Feb 1, 2024

We are all unfortunately immersed in the visual legacy of Blackface minstrelsy. Caricatures that mutated Black men into creatures, women into mockeries — offensive ornamentation designed to highlight a lascivious, criminalized otherness. One of the key ways these racist imaginaries seeped into the Western subconscious was through the proliferation of print material, and particularly through the covers of sheet music brought home to play around the parlor piano. These images appeared on music written by both Black and white artists, as the standard of presentation. And yet, beginning in 1905, one star-studded song-publishing company would push the aesthetic limits of how Black popular music was shown to the public.
Throughout the mid-to-late-nineteenth century, popular music traveled from stage to page via publications featuring songs written and performed by white performers who blackened their faces with burnt cork to transform into living racial stereotypes. The covers of these publications often featured cartoonish drawings of these racist figures, and as the century moved onward, photographs of the performers in and out of Blackface, illustrating the depth of their transformation. By the early twentieth century, the genre had reached a bizarre space. African Americans were allowed to perform on the popular stage, but often only if they too painted themselves a shiny Black.
The path to self-determination on the musical stage came in fits and starts, with some broad-brush overviews attributing the major breakthrough to the 1921 music Shuffle Along. The first two decades of the twentieth century, however, were marked by conflicted attempts to balance a public demand for established ethnic characterization with the desire for authentic self-expression. A lesser-known attempt that encapsulates this incongruity is the 1905–1911 run of the Gotham-Attucks Co., a song-publishing company managed by some of the most famous Black writers and performers of the day.
In the August 12, 1905 issue of the controversial Black newspaper The Broad Ax, under the headline “News and Comment from our Yankee Metropolis”, the New York beat reporter covered the merger of two smaller music concerns and the opening of Gotham-Attucks in “elaborate and cleverly appointed headquarters” on 42 W 28th St. The article lists a who’s who of Black entertainment as taking leadership in the new company, with performing duo George Walker and Bert Williams as president and vice president, and with collaborators Earle Jones, R.C. McPherson (Cecil Mack), Alex Rogers, and Jesse Shippe as part of the team. Most, if not all, of these men would be household names to anyone interested in popular entertainment at the time.  All of them had written lyrics, music, or starred on the covers of sheet music published by other firms, and many were visually represented in racist manners, often out of their control.
The Broad Ax was unequivocally in favor of the enterprise upon its founding, writing:
The Gotham-Attucks are extremely fortunate in having published about 9 songs this summer that are really “hits” with the public. It is the first colored American music publishing house properly established and managed that is deserving of the name. Most all the compositions handled by the firm are the fruit and product of Negro Brain and creation.
Sylvester Russel, one of the more acerbic Black critics of the day, had a harsher view on the firm, publishing a satirical poem referencing a Black business convention in an issue of the Indianapolis Freeman published on the same August Saturday:
The Gotham-Attucks music houseWill probably be seen there,As business men exhibitorsOf coon songs and hot air.
Russel’s critique was directly commenting on the incongruity described at the outset. While Gotham-Attucks was run by Black creatives, much of the lyrical content was still clearly in the legacy of blackface minstrelsy. The writers may have only been able to subtly push the status quo, but the artistic design was a radical shift. Sheet music for popular songs by and about African Americans, up to that point, had trafficked in stereotypical images and racial grotesques. Gotham-Attucks publications featured modern colorways, art deco detailing, and flattering, naturalistic illustrations of Black people. In some of the boldest covers, there are illustrations of an (apparently) white woman representing the song’s subject, accompanied by a photo of the famed Black performers. This inverted a long-standing practice of featuring photographs of white performers in formal dress paired with Blackface, racial caricatures to both assure the purchasing audience that white performers were behind the minstrel mask, and to impress them with the transformation. Though Gotham-Attucks was short-lived, their decisive visual designs were part of a larger push towards Black creative life defined on its own terms.
Marked by a striking logo — featuring the Pyramids of Giza, bookended by four-leaf clovers — the company’s published sheet music has a distinctive look. Though information on the specific designers and illustrators has not yet been discovered, the creative direction is clear. “Nobody” and “(That’s Why They Call Me) Shine” became classics of the American Songbook and their covers feature enduring designs. Inspired by Arts and Crafts styles, they exhibit rich colors and modernist floral elements with nothing verging on the cartoonish. Pieces like “Bon Bon Buddy” and “Malinda (Come Down to Me)” reveal the particular tightrope that Gotham-Attucks walked with popular taste. Though the use of stereotypical dialect is lessened in the music itself, both songs are closely tied to traditional minstrel themes, and both have illustrative elements — like a banjo-playing man serenading his beau, or cherubic Black babies — that had commonly been exaggerated for “humorous” racist intent in many other publications. There is a beauty in these Gotham-Attucks publications that can feel designed directly for a new, Black audience wanting to see versions of themselves in popular music — or, at least, wanting to own the latest popular songs and not feel ashamed to have them out on the piano stand.

author: Dorothy Berr


text:
As Loud as a Mouse: Mickey’s Sonic Debut in Steamboat Willie (1928)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jan 24, 2024

When Steamboat Willie premiered in the autumn of 1928, marking Mickey Mouse’s public debut, rivers were on the American mind. Show Boat had hit Broadway the previous Christmas, its racially integrated cast creating wake as they cruised the Mississippi on Cotton Blossom. That same year, the river’s waters surged to a high-water mark during one of the most destructive floods in US history. From the trauma came comedic release. In the summer of 1928, Buster Keaton commandeered a paddle steamer for Steamboat Bill, Jr., leading to his most infamous stunt. During a cyclone, a house makes to flatten Keaton, but he passes through a window and remains improbably upright — an image of resilience for all those devastated by recent disasters. And then, who next comes lazing down the river? A cartoon mouse in the employ of a villainous cat, ready to unleash a deluge of animated films upon the world.
Although it was not the first cartoon to use synchronized audio, Steamboat Willie was the first to exhibit this new technology to a widespread audience. Walt Disney and his chief animator Ub Iwerks needed something to distinguish their cartoons from competitors, after two previous Mickey Mouse shorts failed to find a distributor earlier that year. And they bet it all on sound. While Iwerks drew almost every frame himself using cel animation, Disney accomplished the sound design with the help of a dime store, scooping buckets, bells, and cans into his shopping cart. Spittoons littered their screening room floor, repurposed as gongs. When Steamboat Willie finally debuted at New York’s Colony Theatre, it was the soundscape — of the film, of the crowd — that caught critical attention. Variety called it “a peach of a synchronization job all the way”; Weekly Film Review noted that the movie kept “the audience laughing and chuckling from the moment the lead titles came on the screen, and it left them applauded”.
From the earliest frames, the film is alive with Cinephonic sound. The steamboat’s funnels blow scratchy o’s of smoke; its whistles honk and bark; and Mickey whistles too, the popular vaudeville song “Steamboat Bill”, while he spins a helm that clicks like a winch. It is sound that seems to grant animals their human qualities. The chaw of Peg-Leg Pete’s Star Plug tobacco and the subsequent slap of the spit smacking across his gob, Minnie’s nervous squeals at Podunk Landing before she is hauled aboard by her bloomers, a parrot teasing the mouse, both voiced by Walt himself, “Hope you don’t feel hurt, big boy!” — these spellbinding moments of synchronicity between eye and ear reveal the animism in animation. The extraction of voice from bodily forms serves as Steamboat Willie’s persistent theme. After a goat gobbles down Minnie’s ukulele, the animal becomes a music box, bleating out the tinny minstrel standard “Turkey in the Straw”. Mickey not only slaps a drum kit of saucepans, he also bullroarers a yowling cat, bagpipes a living duck, and approximates the legendary cat piano by plucking the tails of suckling piglets. It’s all very funny, yet also seems to repurpose a darker history for humor: the centuries of violence inflicted upon beings thought to be voiceless, speechless, dumb. Despite the outlandish premise, it starts to make sense why a forthcoming film adapts Steamboat Willie into a horror flick. “Steamboat Willie has brought joy to generations”, claims the director’s press release,“but beneath that cheerful exterior lies a potential for pure, unhinged terror”.
How can it be that Mickey Mouse will find his way into not one but two terrifying (and possibly terrible) movies in 2024? Well, the mouse finally escaped its owners’ trap: Steamboat Willie entered the public domain at last on January 1, 2024. To appreciate the monumental nature of this one needs to understand a little about The Walt Disney Company’s relationship to, and perverse effect on, copyright law in the United States — and how symbolic Mickey has become in the fight to preserve the public domain. The story takes a significant turn in 1998 with the passing of the Copyright Term Extension Act, which basically did what it says on the tin: extended copyrights for many thousands of works that otherwise would have entered the US public domain, including Steamboat Willie (and also Plane Crazy). While Disney wasn’t the only lobbyist for this bill, it was certainly one of the most prominent, and its involvement earned the legislation a derisory moniker: “The Mickey Mouse Protection Act”.
The effect of this Act (and previous extending Acts, also involving Disney) has been devastating to the enlargement of the US public domain, locking up an enormous number of works for many decades, but . . . all things must pass, and so too the copyright on Steamboat Willie. What does this mean? In a simple sense, one can now use the film as one wishes (in the US, at least). And this copyright expiry also applies to the characters of Mickey and Minnie who star in the film, but with two important caveats: first, it’s only these particular versions of Minnie and Mickey (e.g. long arms, gloveless), later iterations are still under copyright; and second, Disney still has the trademark, so you cannot reuse this material in a way which implies an affiliation with the company.
For a more in-depth look at the issues involved here (including why aspects of the later Mickey iterations might also be fine to reuse), we highly recommend this great post by Jennifer Jenkins from the Center for the Study of the Public Domain and also this Twitter thread by Cory Doctorow.

source: public-domain-review

author: Hunter Dukes

type: collection

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


text:
Clear Shadows (1867)
Text by Koto Sadamura
Jan 23, 2024

Silhouette portraits came into fashion in late-nineteenth-century Japan following their popularity in Europe and the United States. They were a form of party entertainment. Partygoers would take turns sitting behind a paper sliding door (shōji) while an entertainer captured their backlit silhouettes. A simple leisure activity soon gave way to more complex publications and commemorations. Clear Shadows (Kumanaki kage, 1867), for instance, is a compilation of silhouette portraits depicting members of the kyōga-awase club by the artist Ochiai Yoshiiku (1833–1904), which includes short biographies, picture riddles, and poems. Kyōga-awase (picture-matching for amusement) was played somewhat like Pictionary, where each person was given a subject to illustrate — and could draw anything but the subject itself. Points were awarded on the basis of cleverness.
As scholar Satō Satoru details, Clear Shadows was created to honor Hagetsutei Kasetsu, a young patron of the kyōga-awase club, who died three years earlier. The book features sixty-seven individuals, of which fifty-seven are men and ten are women, including seven young members who are aged ten to sixteen. The silhouettes are far from static: these figures prune flora, draw with a brush, wave fans, finger the beads of a Buddhist rosary, read, smoke, and drink. A cat steals the limelight in one image and shadow puppets enliven others.
This picture-matching club was formed in Edo (present-day Tokyo) and its members included ukiyo-e artists, popular authors, book publishers, and playwrights. Clear Shadows demonstrates that women and children were part of this social network of cultural activities in nineteenth-century Japan. The page spread below, for example, shows a female figure with the pseudonym “Satoyuki”’ on the right and a young man with the nom de plume “Doryū” on the left. According to their short biographies, Satoyuki is a daughter of a Jōruri chanter, a type of sung narrative with shamisen (the banjo-like, three-stringed instrument) accompaniment. As a young girl, she performed with her father and her precocious talent moved the audience to tears. Now she is reputed to have outstripped her teacher. Doryū is presented as a multi-talented person who is good at drawing and composing prose and verse — in particular, haikai (haiku) — as well as impersonating popular kabuki actors.
The images at the top right of each portrait are the club members’ respective riddle submissions. For this commemorative occasion, each participant was given a theme related to the meaning of one of the kanji characters in Kasetsu’s name (“wave”, “moon”, “flower”, or “snow”), which was then combined with one of the five elements (“wood”, “fire”, “earth”, “metal”, or “water”). It is not easy to interpret the images, but Satoyuki’s theme was “flower and metal” and Doryū’s “moon and wave [water]”. Others are even more cryptic: a woman soaking pieces of paper with writings on them in a washbasin is “wave and water”, a man nodding to sleep is “flower and metal”, as is a woman brandishing a sword with her foot raised.
Silhouette likenesses were particularly favored for memorial uses in nineteenth-century Japan. In the frontispiece of Clear Shadows, by the artist Shibata Zeshin (1807–1891), the deceased Kasetsu’s silhouette portrait is shown in a display alcove (tokonoma) with an incense burner and lotus flowers, suggesting a space to honor the departed. We also know that the image of a girl pseudonymized as Sekka (Tatsu) was later used for commemorative purposes, after she died two years on from the book’s publication. Her silhouette portrait is included in the memorial surimono album Mirror of Many Years (Ikuyo kagami, 1869), for example, and also painted inside the lid of the storage box for Journey around Hell and Paradise (Jigoku gokuraku meguri zu, 1869–1870, 1872), an important and moving album of paintings by Kawanabe Kyōsai. A further example of memorial silhouettes can be found in the poetry compilation entitled Moonlight (Katsura kage, 1872), which has twenty-eight silhouette portraits of people who attended a service for the memorial of a deceased child of Tsutagashi Bunkyō, a wealthy merchant in Osaka.
Clear Shadows was compiled by Kasetsu’s brother Kōkōsha Baigai, who was also a member of the kyōga-awase group — possibly with the support of their father, Tsuji Den’emon, an official at the shogunal silver mint (ginza). The volume was first issued as a private publication, but subsequently printed commercially by Hirookaya Kōsuke, a publisher who also appears in the book as “Usen” and who must have seen its wider appeal and economic potential.
The same year that Clear Shadows was published, Ochiai Yoshiiku produced another series of thirty-eight woodblock colour prints that preceded this memorial book, each featuring a silhouette profile image of a kabuki actor. The text included on one of the prints in the group offers a hint as to why silhouettes became a technology for memorializing the dead: “they indeed give the impression as though one is in the presence of these people.” The faddishness of silhouettes in Japan at this time reflected an increasing interest in verisimilitude, as was also found in contemporary Western media of visual representation such as oil painting, lithography, and photography. In the postscript of Clear Shadows, the popular writer Kanagaki Robun (1829–1894) observed: “Appearance is a deceptive skin. Silhouette shows the real bones [core structure of the person].” Silhouette images of this kind were entrusted to family members as truthful portraits and vivid reminders of their departed loved ones.
For a contemporaneous book of silhouette shadows made in England, and the truths that they can hold, see our post on C. H. Bennett’s Shadows (1856).

author: Koto Sadamura


text:
Tom Seidmann-Freud’s Book of Hare Stories (1924)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Mar 20, 2024

“Quite often in dreams it is the hare that shoots the sportsman.”—Sigmund Freud, “The Dream-Work”
Hares and rabbits have been known to serve as messengers between the conscious world and those deeper warrens of the mind. In Tom Seidmann-Freud’s 1924 Buch Der Hasengeschichten (Book of Hare Stories), folk and fairy tales are collected from across the globe, chosen for their leporine heroes. The stories are often comic and bleak; their anthropomorphic animals live in worlds darkened by adulthood. In a version of a Norwegian tale collected by Asbjørnsen and Moe, a recently married hare somersaults across a vale, recounting the reasons for his happiness. Soon after his wedding — to a woman with hairy teeth, who turned out to be a dragon — a fire broke out, reducing his home to ash . . . and his wife burned up too. In addition to fables from Inuit, Zulu, and Pomeranian oral traditions, there is a variant of the Br’er Rabbit “tar baby” story; a spin-off of Aesop’s “Hares and Frogs”, which opens with a bevy of bunnies who would rather kill themselves than live in fear; and an opaque Estonian aphorism about a hare who laughs so hard that its lips burst.
At the turn of the century, German children’s literature was stuck in a mire of repetition and pedantry. “We have the most glorious things, gleaming gold treasures and gems”, wrote the education reformer Heinrich Wolgast in The Misery of Our Children’s Literature (1896), “and we choose to adorn the spring of our people with dull junk.” Combining the stylistic traits of Art Nouveau, New Objectivity, and Expressionism, Tom Seidmann-Freud belonged to a crop of artists who began to make children’s literature into a primary artform, when it had so often been treated as a supplement to more “serious” endeavors. While the stories she collects in the Buch Der Hasengeschichten might be familiar, her illustrations are strikingly new and bizarre. Against a rich pastel pallet, humans and animals have wide-eyed expressions, as if warning the viewer against looking too closely. A standing man and hare hold each other suggestively; giraffes appear to embalm a corpse in yellow; and a scene that initially registers as cute — featuring two little girls and hares in a rainbow-lit landscape — starts to feel utterly unheimlich as the eyes linger on. One of the girls, in a salmon skirt, rides her hare toward a funhouse whose door is a sinister void. The other looks on from a house that should be, well, homey, but its proportions seem to shrink around her gesturing arm: is she pointing somewhere over the rainbow or begging for release?
Born in Vienna, Tom (née Martha) Seidmann-Freud (1892–1930) was the daughter of Maria Freud, Sigmund’s sister. Around the age of fifteen, she assumed the name Tom — preferring its masculine tone — and moved abroad to study art in London and Berlin, finally settling in Munich. Here, she befriended the scholar Gershom Scholem, who would remember her as: “an authentic bohemian”, who “lived on cigarettes, so to speak”. Expelled from Bavaria in 1920 due to her father’s Romanian citizenship, she returned to Berlin, where she created children’s books and founded the Peregrin publishing house — named after the Latin peregrinus, a Roman term for foreigner — with Jankew Seidmann, her soon-to-be husband. In one of only a handful of private letters that have survived, we can hear the excitement of this period in Tom’s own words: “Jakele is good and clever and I love him very much. In spring, all our sins will be forgiven. Which I really need!” It was through Peregrin that the Buch Der Hasengeschichten was released, along with 1923’s Die Fischreise (The Fish’s Journey), the story of a young boy who finds a golden realm beneath the waves, published shortly after her teenage brother drowned in the Mäckersee. She worked for a time with the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik to illustrate fairy tales in Hebrew — intended to stock Zionist schools in Palestine — and later turned to pedagogical texts. The quality of these primers and copybooks made Walter Benjamin poignantly suggest, during a glowing review in the Frankfurter Zeitung, that “where children play, a secret lies buried”.
As Seidmann-Freud entered her mid-thirties, her cousin Anna Freud reported that the artist’s natural “warmth and kindness” had waned, confiding in the psychoanalyst Max Eitingon that “[Tom] has had a certain tendency to suicide for a long time, and was once very close to it when she was young”. In 1930, Seidmann-Freud’s Magic Boat and Game Primer No. 1 were voted to be among the fifty most beautiful books published in Germany, but it was already too late. Bialik had agreed to invest in Ophir, a publishing house set up by Jankew, but left for Tel Aviv without honoring his contract. Crumbling under the pressures of bankruptcy as the Great Depression set in, Jankew hanged himself, and fearing that his wife would follow him into death, the Freuds committed Tom to a sanitorium, taking in her seven-year-old daughter, Angela. Sigmund was among the last to witness Tom alive, writing that “the sight of her is terrible”. She died by suicide in February, 1930, at the age of thirty-eight.


text:
My Body is a Temple Four-Story House: Analogical Diagram from Tobias Cohen’s Ma’aseh Tuviyah (1708)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jun 14, 2023

This woodcut diagram, from Tobias Cohen’s Ma’aseh Tuviyah (1708), places the human body and house into analogy. Every organ in the man’s open torso is lettered; each letter matches with a room or architectural feature. The heart of the home can be found where “the master” resides: behind latticed windows, which are the lungs, on the top floor. The kitchen is the stomach, the site of early modern chemical processes that sound gastronomical, such as effervescence and fermentation. Toward the home’s egress, the digestive tract ends with plumbing — storage tanks and waterworks.
Born in Metz, Tobias Cohen (1652–1729) was the son of a rabbi-physician who fled from Narol, Poland, during the mass atrocities of the Khmelnytsky Uprising. He studied medicine in  Frankfurt an der Oder, as one of the first Jewish students admitted to the university, before transferring to a more welcoming preparatory school in Padua. Here Cohen fell under the influence and protection of Solomon Conegliano, whom he would later call “prince among philosophers and mighty among physicians”. After completing his degree in 1683, Cohen served as a physician to several sultans of the Ottoman Empire, in both Adrianople and Constantinople, retiring to Jerusalem in 1715. Scholars believe that Cohen completed Ma’aseh Tuviyah in 1700, but it was not published until 1708 in Venice, where it underwent additional print runs throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In David B. Ruderman’s estimation, Tobias Cohen’s encyclopedic work of medicine, theology, and other fields of knowledge is “the most influential early modern Hebrew textbook of the sciences”.
Explaining the diagram’s analogy does not quite reveal its function, which continues to generate debate. Some think that it served a mnemonic purpose, allowing students of medicine to place the organs in “memory rooms” — the kind famously detailed by Frances A. Yates. Others, such as Conrad H. Roth, find a common trope present here and in works stretching from John Donne and William Harvey back to Ecclesiastes and Vitruvius — of the body, not as a temple, but a structure of domestic life. Yet the good doctor Tobias Cohen seems to have had more cosmological intentions with his chart, which appears in a chapter titled “A New House”. Unlike medieval physicians, who often viewed the body as a microcosm of the universe, or classical scholars such as Plato, who structured the soul like a polis, Cohen proposes an alternative: man is a house in a walled city.
It is enough that he [man] be as one of the towers or houses among the dwellings of a walled city, as bars and gates, as I have shown you the pattern of the house and the pattern of its instruments, as the House of the Soul, for he has lower, second and a third stories, and an attic and roof above, and walls round about, and corners of the house.
Despite Cohen’s fluent knowledge of Latin and several other languages that would have helped his treatise reach a larger audience in Europe, he wrote in Hebrew, which, in David Ruderman’s words, encouraged “his coreligionists to believe that they still remained full-fledged participants in the exciting scientific culture emerging through the Continent.” Even in Hebrew, the author’s rich style made the work inaccessible to anyone who did not seriously engage in the academic study of medicine, shielding it from quacks and “the masses”.
During his preface, Cohen describes anti-semitism in bodily terms, responding to the gentiles “who vex us, raising their voices without restraint, speaking haughtily with arrogance and scorn, telling us that we have no mouth to respond, nor a forehead to raise our heads in matters of faith, and that our knowledge and ancient intelligence have been lost.” In this context, Etienne Lepicard draws our attention to how Cohen’s vision of the body offers a place of fortified refuge — as “one of the towers or houses among the dwellings of a walled city” — perhaps inspired by the supportive Jewish community he found in Padua after the discrimination of Frankfurt an der Oder.
For more on the Hebrew in Cohen’s diagram, you can browse Conrad H. Roth’s blog post, featuring a translation by Simon Holloway.


text:
The Comic Natural History of the Human Race (1851)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jun 20, 2023

“Transmigration is held to be very marvelous”, reports H. L. Stephens in The Comic Natural History of the Human Race. And while these “kaleideiscopical” experiences are often attributed to “Hindoos, and other far-off outsiders”, he sets out to prove that metempsychosis can occur closer to home in Philadelphia. Lampooning well-known local and national personalities of the mid-nineteenth century, Stephens and the lithographer Max Rosenthal transformed them into exotic hybrid caricatures: forty human heads mounted on bugs, fish, and bats.
Thomas Birch Florence, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, becomes The Florence Humming Bird (Trochilus politicus). Thanks to its popular vocalizations, the bird favors “the stump” as a habitat. Francis Martin Drexel — artist, banker, and father of the founder of Drexel University — reincarnates as a Gold Fish. You can find this species about the “shallow waters” of Wall Street: “we have caught him for you; now stare at him as you please—done in gold, gone, changed, transmuted perfectly, he did it himself—gold, gold—now he has turned into gold: stare at him.” The circus tycoon P. T. Barnum, self-proclaimed “Prince of Humbugs”, metamorphoses into a kind of Kafkaesque freakshow: his head growing out of a carapace with six candlewick legs. Here the Comic Natural History’s technique itself becomes a spoof of Barnum, whose fame was partially owed to his “Fee-jee Mermaid” — a hoax and monstrous cut-up of baboon, orangutan, and piscine parts.
While many creatures in this comic bestiary represent specific people, others appear to satirize broader nineteenth-century types. The authors claim that Audubon, for instance, overlooked the Jail Bird, a trickster that is “often taken by hand to be confined in a cage, under the vain hope that it may learn to change its tune”. In the wild, the bird can be found near a fence with shiny things in its beak. Jail Birds are often caught by the Stool Pigeon, who is “a spy of the police”, eavesdropping at “ins and outs, ups and downs, churchs, court houses, play houses, poor houses, jail houses, hot houses, beer houses, hose houses, &c. &c.”
The bird must be able to get on each particular “lay,” know all the “stalls”—be up to any “dodge,” ready for every “double,” apt at a “spot,” and “leary” at a “pull,” “shady” at a “blow,” and unerring at a “pipe,” “down upon a “plant,” certain as to the “swag,” know a “Thimble” from a “Peter” or “dummy,” and the “kickes clye” from the “pit,” and take a “tip” when “all’s right,” not always “lagg,” the crossman or put him in “quay.” Now a man to do all this must be “a bird.”
One of the most popular American comic illustrators in this period, when the genre was still emerging, Stephens published this volume in parts before assembling the lithographs as the book featured above. Additional humorists may have been involved with the text, as the index credits W. A. Stephens, Cornelius Matthews, Richard Vaux, and Thomas McKeon. Other supposed contributors were more likely H. L. Stephens himself, writing under pseudonyms such as “Ali Baba the Woodcutter”. The entries signed “C.” were the work of an actual ornithologist, John Cassin, who served as Vice President of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and died from arsenic poisoning after mishandling corpses. He wrote to Spencer F. Baird, the Smithsonian Institute’s first curator, in 1851 to advertise his comic endeavor: “Stephens and I are very busy getting up a lot of the greatest nonsense you ever saw.”
And there is, indeed, a great deal of nonsense. But the images themselves make use of a familiar set of sensical conventions. Imagining human heads on the bodies of animals has a long history: manticores and Zakariya al-Qazwini’s thirteenth-century hybrids are just a few of many precedents. Stephens’ illustrations rely upon a kind of correspondence between the qualities of individuals and their mirrors in the animal world — thus utilizing a logic closer to what’s at play in medieval bestiaries and antiquarian works of natural history than the pure imagination exhibited in, say, Edward Lear’s nonsense botany. In contrast to these images, the Comic Natural History’s prose is, at times, wonderfully innovative and seemingly outside of an obvious tradition. During a section on “The Little Dear”, an elkish satyr wearing tear-drop earrings and a crucifix, for example, our narrator gets lost in echolalia:
My dear is apt to become an abstraction; or like many titles, duke, baron, and others, signifying nothing, or only something that has been. So changeable is language. . . . The children are mamma’s dears, the young ladies are pretty dears,—and the ladies that are married are very distinctly their husbands dears, and those that are not married are quite as distinctly their own dears; and all of us have found out,—or if we have not, we will find out that many a thing in this world is by far too dear, and so —— Oh dear!—we are quite exhausted—that’s all.
North American natural history was, from some of its earliest incarnations, as much concerned with questions of national identity as it was attentive to the characteristics of flora and fauna on this newly colonized continent. Stephens’ comic natural history is no exception in the former regard. And perhaps that helps explain what is going on with all these “dears” and the cant of the Stool Pigeon above. Referencing great works of European and classical natural history throughout the book, Stephens and his contributors seek to assemble something homegrown and uniquely Philadelphian: “We have made the first effort in a species of Comic Literature, hitherto unknown in our city.” This new kind of comic literature requires a new idiom, the kind employed and referenced throughout the Comic Natural History. Americans have “a peculiarity of diction, as well in language, as in poetry and idiom and phrase, unlike the rest of mankind”, for the English language has been “outrageously corrupted” in the United States, creating “a new, or unknown tongue”. Embracing this unknown tongue, The Comic Natural History helped establish a habitat in which later species of American political cartoons could flourish.
Below you can find a selection of the lithographs that appear in The Comic Natural History of the Human Race, courtesy of the Met.


text:
A Distinct Phenomenon in Itself:
C. V. Raman’s Discovery of Why the Sea is Blue (1921)
Text by Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Jul 20, 2023

In September 1921, a largely unknown Indian scientist was returning from his first trip overseas where he had attended an international universities congress in Oxford. He had ample time as his ship, SS Narkunda, made its way to Bombay via the Suez Canal to consider more deeply a question that had begun to concern him ever since his first voyages shuttling between Calcutta and Rangoon as a young civil servant in British-ruled India: why is the sea blue?
In 1899, the English physicist Lord Rayleigh had breezily dismissed the matter. “The much admired dark blue of the deep sea has nothing to do with the colour of water”, he wrote, “but is simply the blue of the sky seen by reflection.” However, the Indian scientist begged to differ. Staring over the steamer’s rail at “the deeper waters of the Mediterranean and Red Seas”, C. V. Raman saw, with the aid of a special prism to eliminate reflected sky light, that the blue was more intrinsic.
In a short paper, which would later appear in Nature, penned even before stepping off the Narkunda in Bombay harbour, he wrote: “It was abundantly clear from the observations that the blue colour of the deep sea is a distinct phenomenon in itself, and not merely an effect due to reflected skylight. . . . the hue of the water is of such fullness and saturation that the bluest sky in comparison with it seems a dull grey.” Rayleigh had explained the blue of the sky using a formula to describe the scattering of sunlight by molecules in the air. In this process, the light preserves its wavelength or colour, with short-wavelength blue light scattered more effectively than other colours of longer wavelength. When he had completed further experiments in Calcutta, Raman confirmed that a similar effect pertained for light encountering water molecules, with the blue light scattered most effectively and other colours quickly absorbed, leading the sea to appear saturated by blue.
Raman’s almost painterly obsession with the nature of light and colour would lead to other discoveries, and in 1930 won him the early accolade of the Nobel Prize for Physics, the first time the prize had been awarded to a non-Western scientist.
Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born in 1888 into a middle-class Brahmin family in Tamil Nadu. Upon obtaining his master’s degree in physics from the University of Madras, but with limited opportunity for a career in research, he joined the financial branch of the Indian Civil Service, and was posted to Calcutta. He pursued his own investigations as far as he could using basic equipment, exploring the acoustics of sound waves and musical instruments, including the Indian ektara, sitar, and tanbur, ignored by Western scientists, as well as analogous wave phenomena in light, and especially the way light is scattered as it passes through different translucent media. This work led to his appointment as professor of physics at the University of Calcutta by the age of twenty-five.
In 1927, continued studies revealed that while most light retained its original wavelength when scattered, a small fraction of it produced a feeble glow at different wavelengths. The effect was very weak, and correspondingly hard to study. However, it would turn out to have huge implications. As the Associated Press of India reported:
The principal feature observed is that when matter is excited by light of one colour, the atoms contained in it emit light of two colours, one of which is different from the exciting colour and is lower down the spectrum. The astonishing thing is that the altered colour is quite independent of the nature of the substance used. . . . There is in addition a diffuse radiation spread over a considerable range of the spectrum.
Raman conservatively attempted to describe his discovery in terms of the wave theory of light, in analogy with some of his early work on acoustics and musical instruments. In fact, a proper explanation required quantum theory, with the changes in the scattered light’s wavelength being associated with changes in the quantum energy levels of the scattering molecules. Although Raman was no fan of quantum theory, what soon came to be known as the “Raman effect” turned out to provide important evidence for the quantum nature of light.
Raman’s curiosity was always stimulated by looking. His descriptions from his voyage aboard the Narkunda make that clear. His analysis of the colours of the sea takes into account the brightness of the day, the weather, the exact shape of the sea waves, and his own angles of observation. He observed light and colour with an artist’s unsparing eye, and often found a scientific question to be answered, whether it was to do with the twinkling of stars or the colours that arise when a sheet of steel is strongly heated.
It was only with the invention of the laser in 1960 that the Raman effect at last made the transition from laboratory curiosity to useful tool. Using this intense source of single-wavelength light, it was now possible to record spectra of the weak scattered light. Raman spectroscopy is today used in all forms of chemical analysis. It has proved especially valuable for analysing pigments and other materials in order to determine the authenticity or otherwise of works of art because it does not require the taking of a sample from the work, and some notable forgeries have been revealed in this way.
In 1930, Raman had been so confident he would win the Nobel Prize that he booked tickets for Sweden several months before the announcement was made. He was lucky: the award might have gone to two Soviet scientists who had made the same discovery. Raman later recalled the ceremony in Stockholm:
I, the only Indian, in my turban and closed coat, it dawned on me that I was really representing my people and my country. . . . Then I turned round and saw the British Union Jack under which I had been sitting and it was then that I realized that my poor country, India, did not even have a flag of her own.
Speaking on Indian radio shortly after receiving the prize, he offered his personal definition of science as “a fusion of man’s aesthetic and intellectual functions devoted to the representation of nature. It is therefore the highest form of creative art.”

author: Hugh Aldersey-Williams


text:
In the Mind of Marie: A Haunting Encounter in the Gardens of Versailles (1913)
Text by Sasha Archibald
Jun 6, 2023

In 1901, two British women just getting to know each other took a trip to Paris. The day they visited Versailles, things turned strange. They were wandering in the gardens, hoping to find Petit Trianon, a smaller palace that had been the home of Marie Antoinette, when they began to see unusual things: people in antiquated clothing, a man with dark, pitted skin, a breathless servant delivering an urgent message to a woman sketching on the ground. The atmosphere was strange too, heavy and unsettling. Things seemed flat and otherworldly; Moberly wrote later of feeling “an extraordinary depression” and a “dreamy, unnatural oppression”. In time, the women joined a tour group, and the feeling went away. Everything felt normal again. The whole incident couldn’t have lasted more than thirty minutes.
A week later, the women agreed that the Petit Trianon was probably haunted, and decided to separately write down what they remembered of their walk. When comparing notes, they found some conspicuous differences. Charlotte Moberly had seen a woman in plain sight right near the path, for instance, whereas her companion, Eleanor Jourdain, had no recollection of this person. Both found these discrepancies intriguing, and decided they were part of the queer uncanniness of the whole incident.
Jourdain and Moberly worked at the Oxford women’s college St. Hugh’s. At the time of the Paris visit, Moberly was fifty-five and headmistress; Jourdain, eighteen years younger, was her incoming assistant. It was a few months later, when Jourdain was researching her lesson on the French Revolution, that she discovered their visit to the gardens happened on the 109th anniversary of the Storming of the Tuileries Palace — the day that Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI had watched the slaughtering of their guards, and were imprisoned. Some Parisians, Jourdain learned, believed Versailles was haunted on this particular day.
This set their wheels turning, but it didn’t quite make sense. Jourdain and Moberly had not witnessed a violent takeover, but a prosaic afternoon. Then the two women, who had by now become quite close, had a creative epiphany: perhaps they hadn’t visited the actual events of August 10th, 1792, but the mindscape of Marie Antoinette on that day.
According to Jourdain and Moberly’s theory, as the Queen was on tenterhooks, awaiting execution, she naturally reflected back — as anyone in her position might do — to the first time she’d been told of a threat to the crown. That had happened three years previously, in 1789. Jourdain and Moberly found a description of this scene in a book written by a gardener’s wife, who was present. Antoinette had been sitting in her favorite grotto when a servant ran up to tell her there was a mob approaching the castle. This was precisely what Moberly and Jourdain had witnessed! “We had inadvertently entered within an act of the Queen’s memory”, the two concluded. No wonder they’d felt entrapped — they had been trapped: in the despondent mind of Marie Antoinette. It was time travel with a hairpin twist; they’d landed in the psyche of a woman in 1792 who was thinking about 1789.
Jourdain and Moberly were astonished when the Society for Psychical Research dismissed their story as lacking credibility. They resolved to marshal evidence, and spent the next nine years on elaborate, painstaking research. Through interviews, archival sleuthing, and repeated visits to France, they coaxed facts from the woodwork. The women “proved”, for instance, that the plow they’d noticed was from an earlier era; that a door they’d heard slam hadn’t been unlocked for at least a century; that Marie Antoinette’s personal bodyguards wore coats of the grayish green color they remembered; that her seamstress had made her a green silk bodice and semi-transparent white fichu exactly like they’d seen. Some far-off violin music was decisively identified as eighteenth-century light opera, and the incidental children were matched to the age and gender of the gardeners’ children. The women’s archival zeal brokered no limits. They tracked down records of payment for the clearing of dead leaves, the material composition of 1780s shoe buckles, and the gardeners’ method of eradicating invasive caterpillars.
In Moberly and Jourdain’s eyes, this crazy-quilt accretion of labyrinthian detail cemented their case. Thus armored, they decided to publish An Adventure (1911), an account of their experiences. The book was furnished with a timeline, appendices, copious footnotes, and even several archival maps, intended to prove that Moberly and Jourdain’s walking path was solely consistent with Versailles’ 1789 landscaping. An Adventure was very popular; 11,000 copies sold in the first two years, and it went through at least six subsequent editions.
The story doesn’t end there, however, because Jourdain and Moberly’ obsessive fixation had the curious effect of soliciting their readers’ own obsessive fixation. Terry Castle’s essay about the affair describes An Adventure as transmitting an “infection” — an infection that caused normal people to pore over minutiae for years on end, so as to take impassioned sides in what would seem to be a very low-stakes argument. Article after article, and even, unbelievably, book after book, debated whether Moberly and Jourdain were telling the truth. To subsequent editions of An Adventure the co-authors added yet more “proof”, which fanned the controversy instead of settling it.
The most salacious of the takedowns, according to Castle, was published by a former student of the pair: Lucille Iremonger’s 1957 The Ghosts of Versailles. (By this point, Moberly and Jourdain had been dead for two decades, but the debate raged on; the saga was the occasion of a London symposium a year later.) Iremonger dropped two bombshells. First, that the two women, contrary to what they publicly claimed, had had various other paranormal experiences. Iremonger alleged that Moberly had privately described many apparitions, including visions of medieval monks, the Roman Emperor Constantine wandering the Louvre, the spirit of her dead father as a dazzling white bird. Jourdain also had visions, though they were more paranoiac; in fact, she died of a heart attack after she convinced herself that her staff was plotting mutiny.
The other revelation was that the two women were lesbians. Iremonger alleged that their relationship was exactly like that of “husband and wife”, and detailed who was dominant in what respect, going so far as to speculate the dynamics of their affinity. Naturally, Iremonger brought up homosexuality to impugn the women’s credibility, but nowadays, the allegation reads differently. In a saga awash in detail, this detail bobs above the others.
What really happened? Here’s one version: two women of uncommon intelligence spent decades asserting the validity of their particular shared experience. They fought tooth and nail to prove that they saw what they saw, that it mattered, that it was real, and that they were credible. It was an argument about ghosts, but it might not have been about ghosts at all.

author: Sasha Archibald


text:
Fraktur Folk Art (ca. 1750–1820)
Text by Sasha Archibald
Mar 30, 2023

The southeastern corner of what is now Pennsylvania was once home to entire towns of religious dissidents. All had been persecuted in Europe, and sought freedom in the colonies. There were clusters of Mennonites, Moravians, Lutherans, and various other German-Protestant sects, some obscure and eccentric. Residents of the Ephrata Cloister, for instance, practiced extreme calorie restriction, sleep deprivation, and celibacy. Another group followed the sixteenth-century teachings of Caspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig, a bearded, deaf ornithologist who split ways with Martin Luther over the meaning of the sacrament. These motley religious communities had significant theological differences, but shared a great deal as well — they were farmers who spoke German, prized religious tolerance, and practiced the same distinctive artform: fraktur.
Fraktur is named after the font — heavy, angular, old-timey — which is usually called “blackletter” in the United States. Fraktur was ubiquitous in eighteenth-century Germany, and it remained so long after other European countries switched to the more readable Roman. (Fraktur is now associated with the Nazis, who used it extensively in propaganda, going so far as to outfit government offices with Fraktur typewriters.) How did the name of a font become the name of an art form? Fraktur art existed at the edges of text, as a decorative accessory of writing. It embellished fraktur script. In Pennsylvania and beyond, baptismal records, land deeds, certificates of accomplishment, bookplates, birth registries, and sometimes valentines were lettered in German-language fraktur, and decorated with the hearts, vines, and tulips that came to be characteristic of fraktur art.
Fraktur has its origins in folk art traditions from Alsace, Switzerland, and the Rhineland, but in America it became more colorful, elaborate, and freehand, and far more apt to dominate the script it sought to embellish. The genre’s golden age was the period between 1790 and 1830 — a time when the American religious context was still strong, but the European influence less stultifying. The forms are highly stylized. Hearts, flowers, angels, and various birds are repeated over and over, to soothing effect. The palette favors bold primary colors, traditionally made of inks concocted from berries, iron oxide, and apple juice. The composition is orderly. The tidy leaves of the tidy vines are perfectly equidistant, and the flowers pared down to floral symbols. The goldfinch that appears in many fraktur images is drawn in such a specific way it’s still known by its German name: distelfink. Symmetry reigns, and when it doesn’t, the composition is otherwise balanced. One of the most common fraktur motifs is the “three-heart design” wherein a large heart is complemented by two smaller hearts on either side of its apex — in fraktur, even the most curvaceous of shapes assumes the rootedness of a square.
Fraktur scholars and aficionados can distinguish Ephrata Cloister fraktur from Schwenkfeld fraktur from Mennonite fraktur. They can also identify the work of certain artists by sight —whether by name, or, for those who left their work unsigned, by epithet: the Nine Hearts artist or the Stoney Creek artist. But to simply appreciate the form, no expertise is necessary. Fraktur is straightforward and earnest. There is no irony and no secret code. Its pleasures are the homey kind. To contemporary eyes, the imagery signals feminine domesticity, but it wasn’t always so. Nearly all fraktur artists were men, and the papers they embellished were civic and religious documents. It is true, however, that fraktur was designed for private, domestic pleasures. It was not an artform of display or exhibition, but of personal devotion. Some of the most beautiful examples of fraktur are bookplates, hidden most of the time.
Collectors and art historians have tried various ways of elevating Fraktur’s aesthetic status. One line of argument contends that the hearts and birds are all symbolic, such that each composition contains a decodable message. Others have tried to prove a direct lineage from medieval illumination. The evidence for either of these claims is so thin that the motivation behind them becomes suspect. Not all art need grasp toward grand significance to be enjoyed. A private pleasure, a small delight, a flourish both unnecessary and perfectly lovely is reason enough to look, and look again.


text:
Hokusai’s Illustrated Warrior Vanguard of Japan and China (1836)
Text by Koto Sadamura
Jul 19, 2023

Until the age of seventy, nothing I drew was worthy of notice. At seventy-three years, I was somewhat able to fathom the growth of plants and trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects and fish. —Katsushika Hokusai, One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, 1834
One year after this statement, seventy-six-year-old Hokusai drew a series of warrior images that included the figures above: Hirai Yasumasa (958–1036) subduing a monster spider, Tsuchigumo. Lines in the background trace the motion of the gigantic arachnid as it tumbles and its sickle-like legs flail in the air, emphasizing the movement and force in a way that resonates with the visual effects of modern manga. This image is dynamic; and yet it gives the impression of a perfectly paused still-frame — the monster’s eyes meeting our own — as the moment is immortalized.
This scene is part of a woodblock-printed book by Hokusai, titled Wakan ehon sakigake, which assembles images of famous Japanese and Chinese warriors, both historical and legendary. The Japanese term sakigake in the title signifies outstanding figures or leaders (Wakan means Japanese and Chinese, and ehon is a picture book). In the preface, Hokusai explains that the publisher Sūzanbō asked him to “fill three volumes with ‘wisdom’ [chi], ‘humanity’ [jin] and ‘bravery’ [yū], using examples of widely celebrated mighty heroes as reminders of military arts even in times of peace”. The second volume was published as Illustrated Stirrups of Musashi (Ehon Musashi abumi, 1836) and the third was advertised at the end of this sequel as Picture Book in the Katsushika-style (Ehon Katsushika-buri), but appears never to have been published. The block-ready drawings for the third, uncompleted volume were subsequently bound in a luxury album format that is now at the Met.
Following the passage quoted above from One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, Hokusai goes on to express his ultimate desire fully to master the art of the brush: “At one hundred and ten, every dot and every stroke will be as though alive”. Already in these images we witness that he was not too far from this achievement. No two dots or lines are the same. Each tiny leaf growing on the rocks and each textural mark on the ragged surface is animated, filling the picture with vibrating energy. Every single strand of hair is charged with life.
Such pictorial magic was the result of Hokusai’s masterful draughtsmanship and the skill of the highly accomplished woodblock cutters, Egawa Tomekichi and Sugita Kinsuke. We also witness the expertise of the printer who realized these sharp, well-articulated lines and the delicately-gradated texture of the monster spider. Egawa Tomekichi was designated personally by Hokusai as someone who could accurately transfer his brush lines onto woodblocks for printing.
The Hokusai scholar Nagata Seiji has pointed out that the time of this book’s production coincided with the most challenging period in the artist’s life. Made in the middle of the Tenpō era’s (1830–44) great famine, the images were produced while Hokusai was in the midst of financial difficulties due to family troubles. He left the capital city of Edo for a period and even used an assumed name. In one of his letters during this time, Hokusai wrote that improving his drawing and painting skills was the only pleasure that remained to him. These vigorous images of military tales do not hint at any physical decline due to his advanced age, nor emotional exhaustion from the personal hardships and poverty he experienced.
When he was seventy-five years old, Hokusai started to use another art name “Gakyō rōjin”, which can be translated as “old man crazy to paint”, combined with “Manji” (卍; the reverse swastika), an auspicious symbol used in Buddhism. These names help convey his never-ending ambition to master the arts of drawing and painting. It is with this burning ardor that Hokusai tackled his project of the late great warrior books.


text:
Denishawn Dance Film (ca. 1916)
Text by Hunter Dukes
May 30, 2023

“In a word, we dreamed about a school of life”, wrote Ruth St. Denis about founding, with her husband Ted Shawn, the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts. Filmed across two or three summers between 1915 and 1917, according to the New York Public Library, the three-minute silent picture above offers a glimpse into the early activities of their school, when it was housed at the Parkinson Estate on the corner of Sixth Street and St. Paul Avenue in Los Angeles, and, from 1917, at the Westlake School for Girls.
After a brief clip of guests arriving in formal dress to the Denishawn estate — perhaps attendees of a “supper dance” — we are met with a sustained scene of undress, as woman after woman emerges from a changing room, dispensing robes to a turbaned attendant and revealing their one-piece swimsuits with understated flourish. The bathing costumes were the school’s uniform. As Ruth St. Denis (1879–1968) describes in her autobiography, “We put bathing suits on them for working clothes, and turn them out into the sun. The release they felt from the circumscription of their ordinary lives filled the days with an artless charm and freedom.” Many of these students in the early days of Denishawn were local women, who paid $1 a day for classes, meals, and lectures. In a proto-Hollywood publicity stunt, Ted Shawn (1891–1972) was known to invite photographers to the grounds with the promise of bathing ladies, and seeded a rumor, reports Paul Scolieri, that “there was a heavy uptick in rental fees for the apartments in the building that faced the Denishawn property.”
Subsequent scenes show a typical day of training. St. Denis leads a seated arm movement, which cuts to students wearing pashminas and head-carrying pots. Shawn auditions a young girl on pointe, before retreating for the garden to thumb through a French costume book. St. Denis wields a peacock feather and pets its living source in a windy colonnade. (The bird was an anniversary gift from her husband; it later escaped, as Shawn did not yet believe that peacocks could fly.) Perhaps St. Denis is practicing The Legend of the Peacock, her long-running solo that had begun as an improvisation on what Jane Sherman describes as “the frustration of being imprisoned in bejeweled vanity”. The film concludes abruptly after the students take a well-earned swim, and two people, likely Shawn and St. Denis, sit down for tea. ※※Indexed under…DancePeacock
Describing his adolescent desires as “completely bisexual”, Shawn had met St. Denis two years earlier, when she invited him blindly for a cup of tea in her Upper West Side apartment. By this point, more than a decade older than Shawn, St. Denis was already a dancer of international renown. Trained in the Delsarte method, which aimed to systematize the expression of emotion through gesture, she became known for her orientalist performances — inspired by an image of the Egyptian goddess Isis that she had once seen on an advert for cigarettes in a Buffalo pharmacy. Shawn had been working at the Los Angeles City Water Department, studying and teaching physical expression in the evenings. Moving to California from Denver in 1912, he had arrived at the same moment that modern ragtime and silent films two-stepped onto the LA scene. His own Edison Company movie, Dances of the Ages (1913), allowed him to save $3000 and attend Bliss Carmen and Mary Perry King’s Uni-Trinian School of Personal Harmonizing and Self-Development, familiarizing the dancer with the Delsartian mode out of which St. Denis had crafted her style.
When the future partners met in her New York sitting room in 1914, it was not quite love at first sight. Shawn recorded his initial impression: “Barefoot, she walks like Helen of Troy; in high heels, Helen of Troy, New York”. St. Denis, in turn, saw before her a man burdened by sexual insecurity, wrestling with “all of the great problems and desires and perplexities of his own nature that were yet to come.” Tea became dinner, they chatted past midnight, and Shawn returned the next day to perform his Dagger Dance, about an Aztec warrior trying to avoid ritual sacrifice. They agreed to tour together, falling in love in Paducah, Kentucky. Shawn proposed; St. Denis declined. Weeks later, she wrote him a twenty-six-page letter, describing “an all around living, progressing, experimenting partnership — in which sex in its particular sphere is a part but not the whole — this is my sense of love + loyalty + fidelity — first of all a friend, then a lover.” Nine months after marrying, the Denishawn school was born.
In its early days, Denishawn was a complex mix of freedom, orientalism, and scientific racism. Ted Shawn viewed dance and eugenics as two methods for incubating idealism in the body. Ruth St. Denis agreed and they co-published articles with titles such as “Dancing Real Factor in Developing Strong and Virile Race of Men”. As Paul Scolieri writes in his recent biography of Shawn, the teacher “reasoned that his idealized white male body had the capacity to perfect the non-European, non-Christian dances he performed”. The school’s fetishism for North African, Indian, and East Asian imagery was, in part, an attempt to inhabit a kind of universal consciousness. In Dance We Must (1950), a volume of Shawn’s collected lectures, he reflects on the “universal language” of dance — how, during the famed Denishawn “Tour of the Orient” in 1925 and 1926, “the Orientals understood us, for we were human beings moving rhythmically and expressively in a manner which the Chinese, Japanese and Malays all understood and enjoyed.” Shawn also had a more-personal motive for his ethnic cosplay — his masculine representations of Eastern warriors and whirling dervishes helped separate his performances from the charge of homosexuality that hung over male dancers in this period.
Though some of its methods appear flawed to modern eyes, Denishawn’s later influence cannot be understated. Pioneers of modern dance such as Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman trained at the school. Countless film stars, including the Gish sisters, Louise Brooks, and Mabel Normand, studied movement with St. Denis and Shawn. The couple’s partnership in life and art crumbled after both spouses became involved with the same lover, but they never divorced. Describing his final duet with St. Denis before their separation in 1931, Shawn commented: “The two of us were going up and up and up, remembering all the love of the earth but still lovers of infinite distance and infinite space, and still always up, going up.”


text:
Punctuation Personified (1824)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Apr 27, 2023

Ev’ry lady in this landHas twenty nails upon each handFive & twenty on hands & feetAnd this is true without deceit.But when the stops were plac’d aright,The real sense was brought to light.
The child protagonist of Punctuation Personified: or, Pointing Made Easy (1824) reads aloud without pause. Robert “gabbled so fast” and “ran on with such speed” that “all meaning he lost”. That is, until Mr. Stops comes to his aid. With commas for feet and a colon torso, Mr. Stops walks with a curly-brace cane and sports a typographical dagger in his section-symbol belt. Even his hand is a manicule, his hat a caret.
Taking the child on a tour through punctuation, Mr. Stops introduces him to a cast of literal “characters”: there is Counsellor Comma, who knows “neither guile nor repentance” in his pursuit of “dividing short parts of a sentence”; Ensign Semicolon struts with militaristic pride, for “into two or more parts he’ll a sentence divide”; and The Exclamation Point is “struck with admiration”, his face “so long, and thin and pale”. Less common typographical marks get clustered into Arcimboldo-esque assemblages: a dash, circumflex, accent acute and grave, diereses, hyphen, and breve compose a rosy leafleteer, handing out fliers on punctuation to tentative children. And other personifications trade on iconic resemblances: ? is a “little crooked man” with a bent back and hat beneath his feet; ¶ carries a bindle and boards a boat toward distant shores, for the pilcrow announces something “distinct from what was read before”.
In addition to providing children with images for remembering the unnatural conventions of writing, Punctuation Personified offers guidelines for translating these marks back into spoken language. When reading aloud, count one for a comma, two after a semicolon, and four following a full stop. This hierarchy parrots the instructions given in Lindley Murray’s English Grammar (1795), a book that sold more than twenty million copies and remained influential throughout the nineteenth century. In this period, however, it was not uncommon for “pointing” to be supplemental — the work of printers, compositors, and correctors, who received manuscripts wholly lacking in spaces for breath. During Making a Point, David Crystal quotes John Smith’s Printer’s Grammar (1755), which illustrates the practice: “[some authors] point their Matter either very loosely or not at all: of which two evils, however, the last is the least; for in that case a Compositor has room left to point the Copy his own way.” This had a further unifying effect on punctuation and led to “a growing rapprochement between grammarians and printers”. And yet, the problem of individual usage remained. Realizing that the rules of punctuation were mystifying to children, authors of books like Punctuation Personified attempted to systematize the deployment of these signs from a young age.
Published by John Harris as part of the Novelties for the Nursery series, Punctuation Personified was one of several books in this era that visualized language for pedagogical ends. The Infant’s Grammar (1822) held a picnic party for the parts of speech; Osbourne’s Pictorial Alphabet (1835) vitalized the ABCs in classical scenes. And the tradition lives on: Barbara Cooper’s 2000s series of picture books introduces Alan Apostrophe, Christopher Comma, and Emma Exclamation Point. Charming as can be, the illustrations for Punctuation Personified seem to wink at a deeper wisdom: far from dead things, these silent symbols enliven writing, opening space for the entrance of breath and understanding.
Below you can browse the hand-colored engravings from Punctuation Personified. Mr. Stops would return in Madame Leinstein’s The Good Child’s Book of Stops, or, Punctuation in Verse (ca. 1825), which can be read at archive.org.


text:
Eyewitness Accounts of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake
Text by Sasha Archibald
May 23, 2023

The San Francisco Calamity by Earthquake and Fire (1906) was known in the publishing industry as an “instant disaster book”. This genre coalesced partly because there were so many disasters at the turn of the last century: the 1889 Johnstown Flood; the 1900 Galveston Hurricane; the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée; the 1903 Iroquois Theatre Fire; the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904; the 1904 burning of the steamboat General Slocum; and finally, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, which killed over 3,000 people and destroyed 80% of the city. All of these became topics of books that followed a certain pattern. A journalist was hastily dispatched to the scene, he furiously filed copy, the page count was fattened up with previously published odds and ends, and images were cut in, the more the better. Get the book to market before interest flits away.
The author of The San Francisco Calamity was Charles Morris, though he’s actually credited as editor, an elision that allowed publishers a freer rein on the book’s final components. Morris was a professional writer who published a great number of popular histories, as well as pseudonymous dime store novels. It’s not clear when he arrived in San Francisco from Philadelphia, nor when he finished his manuscript, but his publisher claimed it was a matter of weeks. If the book wasn’t the first account of the earthquake, it was certainly among the first.
The San Francisco Calamity justifies its length with a comparative survey of many other earthquakes, as well as a history of San Francisco, but the heart of the book is a small section that begins about fifty pages in, when Morris directly quotes his stunned interviewees. Their eyewitness accounts are sharp and disjointed, their experience not yet shorn of its surprise. Nothing has been smoothed or strategically forgotten. They describe a pageant of wretchedness, still unfolding.
The billboard advertising beer that was converted into a public message board, and crowded with death notices. Thieves cutting off fingers and biting off earlobes to seize the jewelry of the dead. Shelters made of fine lace curtains and table cloths. Injuries seeping blood, and thousands of people with nothing to wear aside from their pajamas. Some survivors never stopped shrieking and others went comatose. Some refused to be parted with their piano, or their sewing machine, or their canary, or their lover’s body. Garbage wagons toted corpses. The air was thick with the smell of gas and smoke, and dangling electrical wires shot off blue sparks.
Rich and poor, Chinese and white, were suddenly sleeping and eating side by side, to mutual bewilderment. (Between half and three-quarters of the population were made homeless.) There were shoot-to-kill orders for anyone caught looting, sometimes staged as public executions, and when a herd of cattle stampeded down a central street, passersby were gored and crushed. Water was so scarce that people lay on the ground to lap muddy puddles. As one man told Morris, “We are so drunken and dulled by horror that we take such stories calmly now. We are saturated.”
The backdrop to all of this were interminable percussive blasts of dynamite. As is well known, spontaneous fires began almost immediately following the earthquake. As is less known, authorities used dynamite as a fire-fighting technique. There was no water, and they thought fire would spread less readily across rubble. It wasn’t very effective, and the collateral consequences were tremendous, but no other solution was at hand, so authorities kept at it, blowing up larger and larger patches of the city: first, select buildings, then half a block, then an entire block, and eventually, twenty-two blocks of Van Ness Avenue — a mile and a half of “handsome and costly” Victorian homes that were mostly untouched by the quake. For the better part of ten days, explosions happened every few minutes, day and night, each one ratcheting the panic and exacerbating the unease.
Morris justifies his ambulance-chasing journalism in the preface. Time, he argues, will render everything into “one undecipherable mass of misery”. Getting the details while they’re fresh is important. Details make the historical record accurate, and they also solicit an appropriate measure of public sympathy. Morris’ intentions were probably not as lofty as he claims, but he’s right in the main: there is a colossal difference between knowing that there was a terrible earthquake in San Francisco in 1906, and knowing, say, that a woman gave birth in some scratchy shrubs, with no clothes or food or money or water, her house destroyed, blasts of dynamite sounding in the background.  ※※Indexed under…Timeand the loss of detail


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Photographs of the Los Angeles Alligator Farm (ca. 1907)
Text by Erica X Eisen
May 11, 2023

From 1907 until its relocation in 1953, the area of Lincoln Heights was home to what the Los Angeles Times dubbed “the city’s most exotic residents”: a thousand-strong collection of alligators that welcomed visitors every day of the year to see, pose with, and even ride them.
The brainchild of Francis Earnest and “Alligator” Joe Campbell, the Los Angeles Alligator Farm housed its namesake creatures — some five hundred years old, if the rather fanciful ad copy is to be believed — in a series of age-segregated pools to prevent them from devouring each other. Along with nearby attractions like the Cawston Ostrich Farm and the Selig Zoo, the Alligator Farm was a mainstay of another major LA claim to fame: Hollywood. Billy, a denizen of the park that reportedly weighed over two hundred pounds, proved particularly popular on studio lots because, as one journalist put it, “his jaws automatically opened when a chunk of meat dangled above his head just above the camera’s field of vision”. The farm became such a local staple that LA fraternities reportedly demanded that new pledges kidnap alligators as part of their hazing rituals.
Visitors — and their pets — could get alligator carriage rides or watch them rocket down slides; toddlers could have their picture taken with a crowd of hatchlings and even bring one home at the end of the day. Souvenirs sold by the park included postcards trafficking in “gator bait” imagery, a racist trope depicting Black children threatened by alligators that was common in American popular culture of the period.
The lack of regulations for the safety of captive animals, staff, or visitors allowed for a level of casual proximity with adult alligators that would be unthinkable today. One photo shows a group of young women enjoying a half-submerged picnic in a park enclosure complete with what the caption claims to be a birthday cake for one of the reptiles. A keeper stands to one side, club in hand, to make sure nothing goes awry. Perhaps another picture offers a clue to what kept the creatures in line: a clutch of babies emerge from their incubator, only to be greeted in life by the sight of an enormous alligator-skin purse.
Below you can browse photographs of the Los Angeles Alligator Farm courtesy of USC Libraries.

author: Erica X Eisen


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“Though Silent, I Speak”: A Book of Sundial Mottoes (1903)
Text by Sasha Archibald
Apr 25, 2023

When thought needs a muse, it claims an evocative object. Long ago, love found hearts; secrets found keys; discovery found light; change found rivers. For many centuries this list would have had to include time finding sundials. Even the earliest sundials were inscribed with text, suggesting that a sundial was always both a way of telling time and a focal point for reflecting on its nature. Time has no voice, but sundial inscriptions pretend otherwise.
In 1737, Charles Leadbetter published an instructional book called Mechanick Dialling: or, the New Art of Shadows about how to build a sundial. He included a selection of three hundred mottos, of which, he suggested, builders should choose one as the finishing touch on their project. The mottos were a small part of Leadbetter’s book, but as sundials entered their twilight of obsolescence, the mottos took on a life of their own. Other sundial enthusiasts began assembling and publishing collections of inscriptions, and reprinting Leadbetter’s. The task had a poetic hook: What can we learn about time from a timekeeping device made obsolete by its passage?
Several books were ultimately published, among them Alfred H. Hyatt’s 1903 A Book of Sundial Mottoes. Hyatt selected sixty inscriptions, all drawn from Leadbetter, to which he added various quotes about sundials from famous writers, and his own ode-like introduction. It’s a small gift-type book, geared toward gardeners — sundials had by then become part of English country garden design.
The book is awash in nostalgia, but the mottos less so. Most are bracing and hawkish. “This Dial Says Die”, for instance, makes the reader sit up straight, as does “Either Learn or Go”. Others deliver solid, if terse, advice, for example: “Do Today’s Work Today” and “Learn to Value Your Time”.
A few are inscrutable, at least to this reader. “The Time Thou Killest Will in Time Kill Thee” might be a reference to harmful leisure habits, or it could darkly refer to all time, wherein time passed while living equals time killed. I was perplexed by “Opportunity has Locks in Front and is Bald Behind”, until my editors pointed out that the aphorism condenses a longer proverb, about Opportunity’s distinctive hairstyle. (“Opportunity has hair in front, behind she is bald; if you seize her by the forelock, you may hold her, but, if suffered to escape, not Jupiter himself can catch her again.”) Sundial advice is usually dispensed as generic wisdom, but occasionally the speaker reveals himself. One patriarch used his sundial to wag a finger at his progeny: “Remove Not the Ancient Landmark which Thy Father Hath Set Up.”
The eeriest sundial inscriptions are written in the first person, as if the sundial is ventriloquizing time itself. What sorts of things does time say? Mostly ominous, haunting things, what one might expect from a hooded ghost with a scythe, not a sundial in an English country garden: “Look Upon Me. Though Silent, I Speak. For the Happy and the Sad, I Mark the House Alike. I Warn as I Move. I Steal Upon You. I Wait for None.” And also, stop looking at this sundial and get on with your life: “Begone About Your Business.”


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The Department of Preparation: Thomas Smillie’s Photographic Survey of the Smithsonian (1890–1913)
Text by Erica X Eisen
Jul 12, 2023

When Thomas William Smillie (1843–1917) was designated “custodian” of the Smithsonian Institution’s photographic “specimens” in 1896 — a position we might now call curator of photography — it was the first such appointment at any museum in the United States, and perhaps in the world. Until his death, the Scottish-born chemist would dedicate his life to building and presenting the Smithsonian’s collections, whose far-flung gamut, as Merry Foresta described it, included such categories as “ethnological and archaeological, lithological, mineralogical, ornithological, metallurgical, and perhaps the most enticing category of all, miscellaneous.”
Though a scientist by training, Smillie did not confine his curatorial remit to technical illustrations. He worked with Alfred Stieglitz, for instance, to arrange the purchase of a group of important Pictorialist and Photo-Secessionist photos. In an annual report to the Smithsonian, Smillie stated his strong interest in amateur work, arguing that professional photography, being more bound by convention, often “affords less opportunity for originality and progress.”
Smillie’s CV is a constellation of firsts. As the first official photographer at the Smithsonian (appointed in 1870), he traveled to Wadesboro, North Carolina, to observe a total solar eclipse, using telescope-mounted cameras to capture a set of truly awe-inspiring shots: the delicate corona of the sun against the twin voids of space and the light-annihilating moon. Smillie also started the Smithsonian’s collection of photographic devices — paying $23 for daguerreotype equipment used by Samuel Morse — and his purchase of a selection from the 1896 Washington Salon is considered the earliest known acquisition of art photography by a museum. He was notable, too, for mentoring a number of prominent women photographers, such as Frances Benjamin Johnston, who would later become much in demand for her portrait work, and Louisa Bernie Gallaher, who became an expert in photomicrography at the Smithsonian but whose work has often been incorrectly contributed to Smillie until recent attempts to correct the record.
As well as accompanying scientific expeditions and curating the work of other photographers, Smillie also set out to document the extent of the Smithsonian’s holdings, from taxidermied animals to Marshallese navigation charts. The cyanotype format he chose for printing — which had the advantages of low cost and relative simplicity — gives his work a sea-soaked serenity and lends even the most prosaic objects a certain luxurious allure.
One of the most curious aspects of Smillie’s photographic survey of the Smithsonian is that it encompasses what would normally be the almost invisible accoutrements of museological storage and display: showcases, racks, shelves, chests with parts pulled out and piled up before paper backdrops into oddly modish assemblages. In one such image, a single drawer is positioned delicately on a clock-draped stool, looking for all the world like a pensive sitter. Smillie was also known for taking photographs of letters, documents, and books, whether to make a personal copy of useful information or to preserve an important object in case of damage or disaster. Indeed, in a curious sort of mise-en-abîme, Smillie even had a penchant for taking photographs of photographs (is that one of Smillie’s own eclipse pictures that catches the viewer’s attention at the bottom of a display case?). In these and other images, we see his broad view of the medium’s potential: an indispensable tool and a mode of creative expression whose historical antecedents and chemical underpinnings deserved careful study and preservation lest they be forgotten.


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“Those Disturbers of my Rest”: The First Treatise on Bedbugs (1730)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jun 28, 2023

Written by John Southall — the godfather of exterminators, known in his day as a “bug destroyer” — A Treatise of Buggs (1730) is the first scientific study of bedbugs. According to its author, this lousy presence was still novel in London, only “known to be in England above sixty years”. Its supposed source? The importation of foreign lumber (namely “Firr-Timber”) in the wake of the city’s Great Fire, which raged in 1666. Across this book, bug bites serve as proto–heat maps, pocking the skin of victims in proximity to imperial supply chains. “Not one Sea-Port in England is free; whereas in Inland-Towns, Buggs are hardly known.”
In order to defend against the invasion of bedbugs that “abound in all foreign Parts”, Southall seeks out a wiseman where the parasites spawn to learn his ways of combat. Our exterminator finds himself in a kind of colonial fever dream: sick in Kingston, Jamaica, he has “lost the Use of my Limbs” through “a Complication of the Country Distempers”. He meets an “uncommon Negro”, “one of the first Slaves brought into that Island” during Oliver Cromwell’s time. Observing Southall “often rub and scratch”, the nameless man “wonder’d [why] white Men should let them bite; they should do something to kill them, as he did.” The itchy Englishman is titillated: “this unexpected Expression excited in me a Curiosity to have farther Discourse with him”. When Southwall asks “how to destroy those Disturbers of my Rest”, the former slave trades him a “Calibash full of Liquor” in exchange for some tobacco and Spanish coin. Applying the liquor to his bedding, the author observes “vast Numbers . . . come out of their Holes, and die before my face.” Southall, it seems, has found his calling. He further trades the Jamaican some “English Beef, Pork, Biscuit, and Beer” for knowledge of the “Secret”. Curiously, the supposed cause of the British infestation — the importation of foreign resources — also becomes its potential cure. “Believing some of the Materials not to be had in Europe, I procured of him a quantity, and soon after returned to England.”
We never learn the ingredients of this pesticidal liquor, for A Treatise of Buggs is really an advertisement for Southall’s services. It ends with a price list: ten shillings for de-pestering a bedstead and adjacent furniture; six for a four-poster; and surcharges if the wainscotting needs clearing. And yet, before this, the treatise wanders into a different mode entirely, one inflected not by disgust, but rather coy wonder and begrudging awe.
He starts to breed bedbugs, admiring them under microscopes. “A Bugg’s Body is shaped and shelled, and the Shell as transparent and finely striped as the most beautiful amphibious Turtle”. For eighteen months, Southall mates a new pair of bugs every fortnight, recording their reactions to various foods. “Their beloved Foods are Blood, dry’d Paste, Size, Deal, Beach, Osier, and some other Woods, the Sap of which they suck”. They don’t care for oak, walnut, cedar, or mahogany. In temperament, bedbugs are “watchful and cunning”, “timorous of us”, but when fighting each other, they war “as eagerly as Dogs or Cocks”, waging internecine battles where both parties “have died on the Spot”. He becomes intimate with their sexual habits. “They are hot in Nature, generate often, and shoot their Spawn all at once, and then leave it”. And he uses their bites as a heuristic of his personal health: “I daily am bit when practicing and at work in my Business, destroying them; and as they never swell me but when out of order, from thence I infer, that not only myself, but all such who are among Buggs, and do not swell with their Bites, are certainly in good Habit of Body.” One section of Southall’s bugbook approaches something like nature writing as he attends to the shifting colors of his developing subjects. ※※Indexed under…Sexlives of bedbugs
Southall was writing in a period before the connotations of verminous insects had been fully entrenched within regimes of class, race, cleanliness, and abjection. As the eighteenth century progressed, argues Lisa T. Sarasohn, the bedbug became a “canary in the coal mine, indicating the changing attitudes towards body and environment that characterize modern society.” Prior to this shift, however, there was a markedly different sense of what a bedbug meant, a sense that shines through during sections of Southall’s treatise. In Samuel Pepys’ diaries, for instance, we find the cryptically joyous account of waking up and “finding our beds good, but lousy; which made us merry”. The bedbug made no distinction between hosts, and, like John Donne’s flea, swelled with “one blood made of two”, transgressing freely across the social striations that separated various kinds of bodies. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century, writes Sarasohn, Londoners “smelled an enemy that could threaten their social aspirations”.


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C. P. Cranch’s Very Literal Illustrations of Emerson’s Nature (ca. 1837–39)
Text by Sasha Archibald
Apr 13, 2023

Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813–1892) is remembered for bringing levity to Transcendentalism. At the various gatherings that soldered the movement, the good-looking Cranch played the flute and guitar, loved to sing loudly, and pretended to talk to animals. “We have transcendental and aesthetic gatherings at a great rate”, he reported to his sister, “and they make me sing at them all. I have worn my Tyrolese yodlers almost to the bones . . . I am quite a singing lion.” Cranch was also quick with the pen, making witty sketches on the spot. His best party trick was to sketch satirical illustrations of sentences plucked from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature (1836) — a book that Cranch and his friends admiringly devoured. Emerson’s earthy, concrete analogies invited image-making.
It started one evening, when Cranch and a friend, the minister and publisher James Freeman Clarke, began illustrating various Emerson quotes by literalizing the author’s figurative language. The two men doodled and giggled, so much so that when the visit ended, they continued to exchange drawings in the mail. Cranch was the more skilled artist, and Clarke egged him on. Clarke collected some of the drawings into a scrapbook, titled Illustrations of the New Philosophy, and sent others round to friends — all people who revered Emerson and received the satire with its intended geniality. The sketches were passed among Transcendentalist-leaning social circles in New York and Boston to the point that Cranch bragged, “My drawings . . . permeate all houses, as water doth a sponge. Wherever I go I hear of them.” Clarke also sent a selection directly to Emerson, who received the caricatures not as an insult, but an overture of friendship. Emerson and Cranch soon became lifelong friends.

The sketches were cheeky, teasing, and toothless. They deflated Emersonian pretention, but were clearly the product of genuine delight — Cranch found Emerson’s language lively and fresh, and the drawings were his simpatico reply. One of the most popular depicted Emerson’s head perched atop a giant ridged melon, captioned with the Nature quotation, “I expand and live in the warm day, like corn and melons.” Others were similarly straightforward. When Emerson said in an address at Harvard, “Men in the world today are bugs”, Cranch drew a horde of upright insects, and when Emerson exclaimed “How they lash us with those tongues of theirs!” Cranch drew eight rope-like tongues and a cowering victim. Cranch’s illustration of “Few grown-up persons see the sun” is precisely what it says: a cluster of learned adults clueless to the radiance above. Even when the satire was more acerbic, it was a joke among friends. One such doodle, now lost, depicted Margaret Fuller driving the Transcendentalist carriage, reins in hand, with Emerson lounging in the back seat.
The best known of Cranch’s sketches is the “transparent eyeball” drawing. The version featured below shows an eyeball in a dinner jacket and top hat, his optic nerves forming a low ponytail. It was shrewd of Cranch to home in on this baffling phrase. Eyeballs perceive transparency, but aren’t themselves transparent, so what did Emerson mean? Context helps, a bit. “Transparent eyeball” appears near the end of Nature’s first chapter, when Emerson is trying to describe precisely why walking in the woods has a curative effect.  ※※Indexed under…EyeTransparent, dinner-jacket wearing
Standing on the bare ground,— my head bathed by the blithe air,— and uplifted into infinite space — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
Bodily dissolution is key to these enchanted moments, except the body can’t entirely dissolve, because one part of the body — the eyes — induces the dissolution. “I am nothing; I see all” is the operational tangle that leads Emerson to the paradoxical “transparent eyeball”. Cranch’s illustrative figure is appropriately at odds with itself. Its posture is debonair, and its hands seem to have melted away, but its large eyeball-head, with barely the suggestion of a lid, stares upward, rapt and transfixed, as if communing directly with the sun.

Some scholars have described these jottings as the pinnacle of Cranch’s life achievement. That’s a little harsh, but it’s true that Cranch’s cleverness never begat an illustrious career. He came from a prestigious, accomplished family that was deeply intertwined over three generations with that of President John Adams and his son, President John Quincy Adams. (John Adams and Cranch’s grandfather married two remarkable sisters, Mary and Abigail Adams; Christopher Pearse Cranch married John Quincy Adam’s sister.)
Cranch was less conventional than his father, grandfather, and brother, and less impelled to do things he didn’t like doing. The poet and abolitionist James Russell Lowell described his friend thus: blessed with “gifts enough for three—only his foolish fairy left the brass out when she brought her gifts to his cradle.” As a young man, Cranch entered the ministry, but spoke with too much diffidence to be a charismatic preacher. He was never ordained, and instead traveled, taking the pulpit for short stints in different cities. His burgeoning interest in Transcendentalism threatened what thin career prospects he had, and after his dear friend and fellow Transcendentalist John Sullivan Dwight was forced to resign the ministry, Cranch quit in solidarity, and burned his sermons.
With no training of any sort, he announced at age thirty that he would become a landscape painter. Unfortunately, his talent was middling. A “major mediocrity” is how he’s described by his biographer. Cranch’s unorthodox career left his wife and family of three children perpetually short on funds. They couldn’t afford to live in New York — where “greenbacks melt like snowflakes on hot griddles”, Cranch complained in 1863 — and so they settled for a decade in Paris. Cranch painted a great deal, but he also translated Virgil, published poems and reviews in The Dial and other magazines, and wrote two novels for children. He corresponded with many distinguished friends, and penned opera star Jenny Lind’s adieu to her American audiences. But nothing stuck. Few of his paintings sold, and his four books of poetry landed too quietly. One of them, ill-advisedly titled Satan, reportedly sold not a single copy.
Like many humorists, Cranch was privately melancholic, and his depressive stints deepened as he aged. A posthumous tribute in Harper’s Magazine bluntly noted that Cranch was often silent and withdrawn. Certainly he had cause: the strain of his financial struggles, his artistic mediocrity, the fact that his father was mortified by his association with the Transcendentalists; the premature death of two sons.
Cranch himself, however, said the “blues” were simply part of his character, and always had been. For relief, he looked to music, and also to Emerson. Cranch could recite pages of Nature aloud; the book reliably lifted his spirits for four decades. Thirty-five years after the satirist and his subject went huckleberry picking together on Walden Pond, Cranch sent Emerson a new landscape painting to thank him for a lifetime of solace. “I owe you for all that your works have been to me.”
Below you can browse a selection of Emersonian sketches from Illustrations of the New Philosophy (ca. 1837–39), the scrapbook assembled by James Freeman Clarke in Cranch’s name.


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Dentologia: A Poem on the Diseases of the Teeth (1833)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Apr 12, 2023

Dentologia begins seemingly far away from the world of teeth. Invoking Juno and Apollo, the first canto ruminates on how “angelic natures” are revealed “when purified from the stains of mortality”. We gradually realize that the “stains” in question have little to do with divinity or sin. The poet is talking about plaque.
The next five sections of this remarkable (and remarkably long) poem prove to be a crash course in dental hygiene and disease prevention — loosely tracking the stages of health from birth unto death. Canto Second is pediatric, concerned with the lifecycle of milk teeth: “Some struggling tooth, just bursting into day / Obtuse and vigorous, urges on its way”. Canto Third is a critique of luxury, laziness, and neglect: “If sloth or negligence the task forbear / Of making cleanliness a daily care”, then “insidious tartar comes / Incrusts the teeth and irritates the gums”. Canto Fourth is all about cavities and implants: the latter being fashioned from the “lordly elephant”, who, “in hoary pride”, toils “through successive ages to provide / The ivory tusk”. Finally, Canto Fifth begins with an apostrophe to health (“Gay, blushing Health!”), and develops into a discussion of how diseases of the mouth affect a body’s general condition. Brown’s poem closes on the image of a woman named Seraphina, a singer whose voice, once “so sweet, the labouring bees might stop to sip”, now only sounds “discordant notes”. Her “premature decay” is caused by a disease of her “dental pearls”. Seraphina’s prescription (and Dentologia’s general argument) can be distilled into four lines — a variation of the message delivered by today’s dentists and hygienists at every appointment’s end:
Let each successive day unfailing bringThe brush, the dentifrice, and, from the spring,The cleansing flood : — the labor will be small,And blooming health will soon reward it all.
Published in 1833, Dentologia was written by Solyman Brown, who helped found the first dental journal, society, and school in the United States. Known in his lifetime as “the poet laureate of dentistry”, Brown had sent a draft of Dentologia to Eleazar Parmly, another titan of American toothcare, who showed it to two gentlemen “distinguished for their fine taste in literature”. Overwhelmed by nameless critics’ positive response to the poem, Parmly wrote its preface and furnished the eighty pages of cantos with fifty more pages of erudite footnotes, crammed with citations to contemporary dentistry manuals.
Far from justifying or explaining Brown’s verse — which Nicholas Parsons calls “the most eccentric, and certain the most engaging, didactic poem in English” — these labyrinthine notes only multiply its bizarre charms. Footnoting a mouthy metaphor (“A shining panoply of orient pearls”), Parmly presents the reader with a wall of text:
The chief object of attention in artificial teeth is, that the substance be durable, and not liable to change color. Human teeth and those of small animals have been heretofore supposed to answer the best purpose, while teeth cut from those of the sea horse have ranked next in importance; but lately, they have been formed with great success from certain materials known to the manufacturers, and have been variously denominated, according to the taste of the artist — silicious pearl teeth — mineral teeth — porcelain teeth — incorruptible, and terro-metallic.
Parmly continues on like this for another half-page, informing his audience that the most successful method for installing an artificial tooth is by means of “a pivot to a sound fang”. Ironically, Dentologia is often at its most poetic — revitalizing worn language with associations anew — when Parmly loses himself in scholarly learning. “Tartar is an accumulation of acrimonious earth matter, round the necks of the teeth”, he states.
It is easy to laugh at Dentologia. The mouthfeel is all wrong. The poem’s forced iambic pentameter has the effect of a sadistic orthodontic device: every line is bent into uniformity for bending’s sake. And the unrelenting rhyming couplets fester humor in moments where gravity is requested. Frequently included in laughing-stock anthologies with titles such as Really Bad Ideas Throughout History, Brown and Parmly’s creation is usually praised only for elevating dentistry to a talking point — perhaps via ridicule — in an era when standards and accreditation were lax. And yet, as Ben Lerner intimates when discussing another nineteenth-century poet’s “radical failure”, there is something about Brown’s shortcomings that let us glimpse both the promise and impossibility of perfection. It’s an apt form for a poem about teeth. And it wasn’t Brown’s final attempt. Turning to blank verse, he went on to publish Dental Hygeia: A Poem on the Health and Preservation of the Teeth in 1838.