text:
The Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century (1825)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Oct 23, 2018

Before we're even passed the title page of this manual on astrology and the occult, we encounter an instance of the dark arts at work — this second edition has been cunningly labelled the “seventh” to make it look like a runaway success. Its mysterious author “Raphael” cobbled the book together out of articles from The Straggling Astrologer, a pioneering journal of astrology which the previous year he had edited into an early grave. (The man behind the pen name was the Bristol-born writer Robert Cross Smith. He had probably chosen the pseudonym in reference to the archangel Raphael who is associated with Mercury, messenger of the Gods.)
Although not everything Raphael touched turned to publishing gold, he was a key figure in the nineteenth-century revival of astrology — a discipline which having lost its scientific credibility by 1700 had been in seemingly terminal decline. From 1826 to his death in 1832, Raphael edited a successful almanac, The Prophetic Messenger, which included the ephemeris — a chart of daily planetary positions. When issued as a separate volume, Raphael's Ephemeris became the standard text for British and American astrologers constructing horoscopes.
The Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century covers, in quite dramatic prose, a multitude of occult topics in ten chapters, or “circles”:
Circle 1 is on necromancy (communicating with the dead)
Circle 2 describes several historical disasters and the omens that foretold them
Circle 3 concerns raising spirits from the dead with magic charms and incantations
Circle 4 is a how-to guide to astrology
Circle 5 identifies some brilliant prophecies that have come true
Circle 6 astrologically explains the lives of several illustrious people
Circle 7 is about geomancy (telling the future from patterns of dots)
Circle 8 offers various charms and talismans (including one to fend off reptiles)
Circle 9 recounts stories of ghosts and other supernatural phenomena
Circle 10 houses material that doesn’t fit neatly in the other circles, including reflections on the Philosopher’s Stone and a method for making trees more fruitful: “The seeds of roses, with mustard-seed, and the foot of a weasel, tied together in something, and hung among the boughs or branches of a tree which bears but little fruit, will remedy the defect, and render the tree amazingly fruitful.”
In his introduction, Raphael contends that he believes very firmly in astrology, fairly firmly in geomancy, and not much in magic rites, charms, and incantations. (He only includes these last to satisfy “Those who delight in the terrific, and the horribly sublime.”) The book makes a range of arguments for the veracity of astrology, the most ingenious being that “the greatest rulers, and statesmen, and chiefs, of the present age” are part of a conspiracy. They all publically call astrology “incompatible with sense and reason, and everything else that is esteemed good” because they want to retain exclusive access to it — “a science alone capable of instructing them when to bring forward their measures with the most certain prospect of success…”
The book warns of dire consequences for those who would ignore celestial omens. Thus we learn that the balloonist Thomas Harris would not have fallen to his death in 1824 if he had only noticed “the planet Jupiter coming into the point of the Dragon’s tail in the ominous sign Cancer but a few hours preceding the ascent.” If this kind of argument fails to convince readers, especially those who have recently experienced misfortune, then it may offend them instead. A century and a half later, in his book Cosmos (1980), Carl Sagan would neatly voice his frustration at the field of enquiry Raphael had helped to revive:
In contemporary Western society, buying a magazine on astrology – at a newsstand, say – is easy; it is much harder to find one on astronomy. Virtually every newspaper in America has a daily column on astrology; there are hardly any that have even a weekly column on astronomy. There are ten times more astrologers in the United States than astronomers. At parties, when I meet people who do not know I am a scientist, I am sometimes asked, ‘Are you a Gemini?’ (chances of success, one in twelve) or ‘What sign are you?’ Much more rarely am I asked, ‘Have you heard that gold is made in supernova explosions?...’
Whatever your feelings on the beliefs at the heart of Raphael's book, we hope one thing everyone can agree on is the brilliance of the imagery it boasts. We've picked out some of our favourites and featured them below.


text:
Bon-Mots of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century (1897)

Jul 19, 2018

Both published in 1897, Bon-Mots of the Eighteenth Century and Bon-Mots of the Nineteenth Century, pretty much deliver what they promise — that is, a compilation of some of the best conversational witticisms of the two centuries. Examples from many famous and expected names adorn its pages — including Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, Oscar Wilde, and Lord Byron — but we are also introduced to more obscure though no less prolific sources, such as the actor Charles Bannister and the Irish politician John Philpot Curran. Although many of the bon-mots might not stand the test of time — so often firmly rooted in the language or the culture of the time as they are — some don't fair too badly today. Also don't miss the two introductions which each include entertaining examples of how various writers have defined "wit" (in Bon-Mots of the Eighteenth Century) and "humour" (in Bon-Mots of the Nineteenth Century). Look out also for the fun little "grotesques" that litter the pages of both volumes, by English artist Alice B. Woodward.
Bon-Mots of the Nineteenth Century, by Walter Jerrold; 1897; London : J. M. Dent.

source: public-domain-review

type: collection

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


text:
Albert Racinet’s L’Ornement Polychrome (1869–73)

Jul 5, 2018

Albert-Charles-Auguste Racinet (1825–1893), himself an accomplished artist, is best known today for publishing two major pictorial works on the history of design — Le costume historique and L'Ornement polychrome — while engraver and artistic director at the Parisian publisher Firmin Didot et Cie. Published in ten instalments between 1869 and 1873, the first iteration of L'Ornement polychrome (Colour ornament) is a visual record in 100 plates of the decorative arts from antiquity to the eighteenth century. The work was such a huge success that in 1885–7 Racinet brought out a second series, this time of 120 plates, and updated to include designs of the nineteenth century as well. The imagery presented in both series is drawn from a wide array of various mediums, including woodwork, metalwork, architecture, textiles, painting, and pottery, and from cultures all over the world.
Although based on past masterpieces of design, the fantastic reproductions in L'Ornement polychrome, carried out by a number of skilled commercial artists of the day, can be considered works of art in their own right. Indeed, for Racinet, the purpose of such a compilation of past design excellence was not only to celebrate the masters of the past but also to inspire an improvement of decorative arts in his own day and age.
The images featured here come from an excellent set of scans by RawPixel from their own 1888 edition of the first series. You can also leaf through the work in book form (again the first series) over at the New York Public Library.


text:
Early Experiments with X-Rays (1896)
Text by Adam Green
Oct 16, 2018

These exquisite photogravures are from one of the first series of X-rays ever produced, by Josef Maria Eder (1855–1944), a director of an institute for graphic processes, and Eduard Valenta (1857–1937), a photochemist, both from Austria. The portfolio, simply titled Versuche über Photographie mittelst der Röntgen'schen Strahlen (Experiments in Photography by means of X-Rays), contains a total of fifteen images: a mixture of positives and negatives, including, in addition to the skeletal forms of animals and human limbs, X-rays of carved cameos and an assortment of various materials such as metal, wood, glass, and meat. If the images are striking today they must have been doubly so when first published, only a few weeks after Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen made his discovery of X-rays public with his groundbreaking paper "On a New Kind of Ray". The impact of the invention was revolutionary, not just medically but also aesthetically. As The Met comments: “The careful compositions and shocking appearance of these ‘Experiments in Photography’ link them to the previous century’s tradition of natural-history illustration and point toward the experiments of New Vision photographers in the 1910s and 1920s.”

author: Adam Green


text:
The Triumphal Arch of Emperor Maximilian I (1515)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Sep 6, 2018

Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian commissioned this extraordinary, grandiose triumphal arch in around 1515 to glorify himself and his ancestors. Never a blueprint for a real arch, it was designed to decorate the walls of town halls and ducal palaces throughout the Empire. It was modelled on the arches of the emperors of ancient Rome and made by pressing a whopping 195 woodcuts onto 36 sheets of paper, to form a huge 3.57 by 2.95 metre composite print. Expressing the grandeur, nobility and (even if it does look a little top heavy) stability of the House of Hapsburg, it must be one of the most ornate propaganda posters in print history. The idea was to induce obedience in its central European audiences. As Neil MacGregor put it in Germany (2014), "it suggested (very economically) that at any moment the Emperor himself might arrive in triumph." For Maximilian, tessellated paper had several advantages to tessellated stone. It gave the artists involved access to an imaginative realm free of gravitational concerns. It was also cheaper and easier to disseminate — the first edition of the print ran to seven hundred copies. Most of its woodcuts were designed by Albrecht Dürer, from whom Maximilian commissioned two other gigantic self-glorifying composite prints, including a Triumphal Procession 54 metres in length. These prints are some of the earliest and finest examples of imperial propaganda, or “paper grandeur” as the art historian Hyatt Mayor has dubbed it.
The Triumphal Arch is both allegorical and specific. It features three gates devoted to (from left to right) Praise, Honour, and Nobility. Above the central gate of Honour a family tree reaches back as far as the mythical Francia, Sicambria and Troia. Atop the gates of Praise and Nobility are depictions of key events from Maximilian’s reign. These are flanked by a column of his ancestors on the right and busts of other emperors and kings on the left. The outermost towers on both sides depict Maximilian’s private life. It is clear from the different styles on show that Dürer subcontracted to his pupils the execution of most of the historical scenes, the family tree in the centre, and the left half of the ornamental framework.
The seven hundred prints of the first edition were intended for hand colouring but very few coloured examples survive. The British Museum has published a great scan of their monochrome copy (but as it is not openly licensed we've not featured it in this post). The image at the top of this post is a scan of a complete copy of a later 1799 edition belonging to The National Gallery of Art. Higher res scans of details of the first edition have been made available by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and we've featured a selection of those below.

author: Ned Pennant-Rea


text:
Ye Butcher, Ye Baker, Ye Candlestick-Maker (1908)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Sep 19, 2018

Although at first glance this little book could be mistaken for an eighteenth-century English chapbook, it was in fact published in New York in 1908 as a parody. It contains ballad-like poems on a range of olde professions, each one taking an amusing turn in its final few lines to consider the trade in the modern world — and in the process often taking a swipe at a whole host of contemporary "ills", including increased regulations, trade unions, and fake news in the media. Here's an example from "Ye Pirate" which lands close to our territory at the Public Domain Review:
“Ye pirate now stays safe ashore,
And authors rate him when
He robs ye good ship ‘Copyright'
Of thoughts of brighter men.”
Robert Seaver illustrated each poem with woodcuts, also in chapbook-style, and could possibly have conceived of the book because of the success of The Diverting History of John Gilpin which he had illustrated two years previously.


text:
Landscapes of the Western Front, 1914–1918
Text by Adam Green
Nov 8, 2018

One hundred years ago this year, after four years of unimaginable carnage, the first world war finally came to an end. In its wake the conflict left tens of millions dead, many more injured, and vast swathes of land decimated by an estimated 1.5 billion shells on the Western Front alone. The devastation was unprecedented and, thanks to advances in photography, so was its documentation. In addition to the amateur snaps captured by soldiers (despite most militaries forbidding it), and photographs taken for journalistic purposes, photography played a vital military role, specifically in the areas of reconnaissance both aerial and terrestrial. It is a collection of photographs belonging to the latter camp that we've chosen to focus on in this post. They were found in a collection housed at the Imperial War Museum titled "British Official Panoramas Of The Western Front 1914–1918" which contains thousands of battlefield panoramas, each made by piecing together anything from three to thirty regular sized photographs. To capture these photographs army photographers would have to have spent long periods with their head above the parapet - a view so dangerous it was only normally witnessed via the medium of a trench periscope or mirror. Once developed in mobile darkrooms and pieced together, the resulting panoramas could be studied and annotated with information about enemy positions and key locations relating to future operations.
Today, a century after their strategic function has passed, the photographs offer an unusual and haunting portrait of the front. Indeed, they carry an emotive quality seemingly enhanced by their utilitarian purpose. These are not images chosen to sell newspapers, for propaganda, framed and shot to pull heartstrings or elicit outrage. They rather come to us direct, raw, from the stark and naked reality of a war in deadly flow. Though despite this immediacy they seem oddly quiet, empty, mostly entirely devoid of human forms — the only corpse we can see being the land itself, battered, contaminated, whole forests destroyed. It is an emptiness which seems to speak at once of the void the war left in so many families back home, and of an odd sense of peace the other side of the shells — a peace which reigned once the armistice was signed, even if it would only last another couple of decades.
For more on the topic we recommend checking out The Battlefields of the First World War: The Unseen Panoramas of the Western Front (2005) by Peter Barton and a foreword by Richard Holmes. It includes many of the panoramas in the Imperial War Museum's collection along with "poignant personal photographs and the recollections of the soldiers caught in action in the battles shown". Also related is Simon Armitage's book Still (2016), a sequence of sixteen poems written in response to twenty-six panoramic photographs of Somme battlefields picked from the Imperial War Museum archives.


text:
The Tragedy of the Seas (1841)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Sep 11, 2018

What can convey a more exalted idea of human daring and fortitude, than the boldness with which man rushes forth to encounter the storms and waves of those two mighty elements, the air and ocean? What can speak louder in praise of human ingenuity, than the wonderful art by which he is enabled to boldly steer from the land until it fades in the horizon, and nothing is to be seen but the heavenly concave above and a watery waste around him ?
So asks Charles Ellms in the preface to The Tragedy of the Seas, a book which, as its title suggests, is dedicated to the times when such waterborne adventures go wrong — a colourful compendium of thirty-seven nautical catastrophes that took place in bodies of water around the world between 1803 and 1840. We read of ships wrecked on coral reefs, capsized in hurricanes, and reduced to cinders after lightning strikes. The celebrated French navigator De Blosseville sails on a voyage of discovery to the Arctic Ocean never to return. A steamer violently explodes on the Ohio River killing dozens. The most fatal involves 116  passengers succumbing to hunger and cold after the barque Mexico was stranded off Long Island in January 1837. There is enough pulsating action, compelling characterisation, and technical information in the book’s 432 pages to keep your average deckhand entertained for an entire Atlantic crossing.
The writer of the book, Charles Ellms, was a Boston stationer and author of three other popular adventure books including The Pirates Own Book (1837) and Robinson Crusoe’s Own Book (1842). In his introduction to The Tragedy of the Seas Ellms declares that “The Narratives that follow are plain, true, and unvarnished; and if the hand that guided the rudder in the hour of misfortune was prevented, by the physical elements, from steering a correct course, nothing has prevented truth, that moral magnet of the mind, from invariably guiding the survivor in his narration.” Some modern readers are less certain than Ellms about his magnetic relationship to truth. Boyd Childress, writing for Williams College, Connecticut, believes he was never shy of embellishment: “It is difficult to determine where accuracy ends and Ellms begins.”
Ellms maximises the drama in part by playing to nineteenth-century stereotypes of savagely violent indigenous peoples. We learn of two survivors of a whale ship wrecked off the Palau Islands being captured and “subjected to unheard-of Sufferings among the barbarous Inhabitants”. Another shipwreck off the coast of East Florida leads to the “MASSACRE OF THE OFFICERS AND PART OF THE CREW by the Seminole Indians.” There is more to the book however than fire and fury, blood and guts. The open ocean is a great stage for displays of fortitude and ingenuity too. An Englishman called James Brock looks certain to die when his yawl capsizes off Yarmouth but manages to swim fourteen bitterly cold miles to safety. The Frigate Pique is extricated by her sailors from a “PERILOUS SITUATION ON THE ROCKS OF LABRADOR, where she lost her Keel; and the Passage across the Atlantic, during which SHE LOST HER RUDDER, AND WAS STEERED FIFTEEN HUNDRED MILES WITHOUT ANY.” We learn of a posse of sailors who, after three days trapped in their cramped sleeping quarters in the mid-Atlantic, set themselves free by cutting through the deck itself. Perhaps most extraordinary is the tale of a stray Japanese vessel carried diagonally across the immensity of the Pacific Ocean until by chance it reached the Sandwich Island 11,000 miles and eleven and a half months later. “For the last three months,” Ellms relates “they had been without water: they had a large supply of rice, it being the principal part of the cargo; and they allayed their thirst by washing their mouths and soaking their bodies in salt water.”


text:
Spells Against the Evil Spirits of Babylonia (1903)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Oct 31, 2018

Whether thou art a ghost that hath come from the earth, or a phantom of night that hath no couch… or one that lieth dead in the desert… or a ghost unburied… or a hag-demon, or a ghoul, or a robber-sprite, or a weeping woman that hath died with a babe at the breast… Whatever thou be until thou art removed, until thou departest from the body of the man, thou shalt have no water to drink. Thou shalt not stretch forth thy hand… Into the house enter thou not. Through the fence break thou not...
So begins an incantation that started life on the lips of a Sumerian sorcerer six or seven millennia ago, before being penned into a clay tablet in the seventh century BC by an Assyrian scholar and then placed in the great library of his king, Ashurbanipal, at Nineveh. When the Babylonians sacked Nineveh in 612 BC, they consigned the library and its 30,000 tablets to the dust. In the 1840s it was excavated and the tablet was taken to the British Museum, where the scholar Reginald Campbell Thompson translated it, and forty-three similar incantations, into the first volume of The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia: Being Babylonian and Assyrian Incantations Against the Demons, Ghouls, Vampires, Hobgoblins, Ghosts, and Kindred Evil Spirits, Which Attack Mankind (1903).
To live in ancient Mesopotamia, the book suggests, was to contend with a frightening variety of supernatural adversaries. From the heavens, godlike devils descended to “ride on noxious winds, spreading storms and pestilence”. From the underworld, ravenous Ekimmu rose up, desperately dissatisfied with their diet of dust, mud, and insufficient libations from family members. They would approach a hapless traveller in a haunted place, fasten upon them and torment them until an exorcising priest intervened. The Utukku, also risen from the underworld, would lie in wait in the desert, mountains or graveyards, inflicting evil with a mere glance. The half demon, half human Alu were equally terrifying. Usually lacking mouth, limbs, or ears they hid away in dark corners, haunting ruins and deserted buildings and “slinking through the streets at night like pariah dogs”, before at any moment emerging to envelop you like a cloak. The Alu were also said, in a rather frightening embodiment of insomnia, to stand over the bed of a victim and threaten to pounce if they dared close their eyes, stealing away all hope of sleep.
The bulk of the book, after Thompson's lengthy but informative introduction, is composed of side-by-side transliterations of the "evil spirit" tablets and translations into English. Perfect for those whose cuneiform is a little rusty but wish to get involved in some warding away of evil spirits. Below we've featured some embeds of the book which open on the right pages so you can jump in directly to get a taste of the book's various spells.
Although the second volume of Thompson’s book describes some additional supernatural beings and protective incantations, its main focus is on purification rituals and defence against disease and illness — including a handy incantation against headaches. Both volumes have recently been republished as part of the Cambridge University Press Library Collection. If Assyria gets you going, a major new exhibition opens next month at the British Museum entitled “I am Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria” (8 November 2018 – 24 February 2019).


text:
Flatfish Camouflage Experiments (1911)
Text by Adam Green
Jul 11, 2018

This great series of photographs comes from a 1911 paper in the Journal of Experimental Zoology by American ichthyologist and zoologist Francis Bertody Sumner. The images were captured a year earlier at the Naples Zoological Station in Italy and back home at the U.S. fisheries Laboratory at Woods Hole, in a series of experiments in which Sumner puts a various types of flounder through their paces as regards camouflage ability. Placing them against bold and striking patterns (more than they'd experience in nature), Sumner photographed them at various states of adapting to their new backgrounds — and concluded that the fish with the most favourable adaptive qualities was a small species of flounder named Rhomboidichthys podas. Although the fact that the photographs are in black and white (a limitation of the time) might slightly impinge on their scientific usefulness, it does somewhat enhance their aesthetic qualities, at times lending them an almost pop art air.


text:
Anecdotes of Animals (1905)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Nov 20, 2018

This book — first published in a slightly different format in 1901 — features a hundred real or real-ish tales of ingenious, loyal or otherwise extraordinary animals, each enlivened by a wonderful picture from British illustrator Percy J. Billinghurst.
We meet a role-reversing Russian bear who hugs a boy to its breast to keep him warm each night. An obliging dolphin who ferries a Roman boy across a lake every morning and back in the afternoon. A wise dog who guides a replacement newspaper delivery man along its unwell owner’s complicated round. The famously clever elephants star in eight anecdotes. One squirts bullying cobblers with a trunkful of dirty water. Another sacrifices itself to protect King Porus from Macedonian swordsmen. A third is rapturous with joy when reunited with its master after a dozen years of separation. Other animals are crueller, though still clever, such as a hen who captures and kills up to five mice a day to protect a hayrick, and a wild stork who four months after being attacked by a tame one returns with three friends to administer lethal retribution.
The celebration of the impressive feats of non-human animals has a long history, stretching back at least to Plutarch, who provided the Renaissance philosopher Montaigne with anecdotal material to argue for the superior intelligence of animals in his Apology for Raymond Sebond (1576). The brains of the beasts continue to enthral scientists today, as this excellent Economist essay “Animal Minds” suggests.


text:
1970: A Vision of the Coming Age (1870)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Jun 14, 2018

This intriguing (though somewhat saccharine) utopian poem is penned by John Collins, a Quaker from New Jersey who made his living as a lithographer, poet, and teacher. It tells of a dream in which the world is revealed one hundred years hence, the unnamed dreamer — travelling by airship from New Jersey to London, Paris, and Rome — witnessing societies transformed into Quakerly perfection. As with most future visions, 1970 is most of all a commentary on the time in which it was written, in this case 1870. Gone are advertising, cigarettes, booze, dance-halls, trashy novels: “No theatre belched out at midnight a throng / Inflamed with drugged wine and lascivious song.’” Gone is crime and deceit of every kind. Hotels no longer exist because strangers will put you up for free. There are no currencies, except silver and gold of unchanging value, so no inflation to worry about. God has taken the aggression out of lions, and transformed the climate into perpetual spring. Schoolchildren willingly help strangers, until they decide “to school we must haste / No longer the precious, short study-hours to waste.” One rather hopes these children will reappear later in the poem having turned sinister like the Midwich Cuckoos, but it never happens. Loving kindness abounds: “Such a sense of true happiness filled all the air, / It seemed more than the spirit of mortal could bear” (or perhaps the spirit of more cynical modern readers too).
In many ways 1970 can be seen as millenarian prophecy, which sees improving technology as part of God’s plan to redeem humankind. The narrator imagines edifying music broadcast to the masses along telegraph wires, in a cross between a Skype conference call and a YouTube stream: “A dozen performers, each one at his home, / In London, Pekin, Paris, Athens and Rome, / To give in New York, at mass concerts free, / Oratorios by telegraph under the sea.” Another passage foreshadows drone deliveries. A New Jerseyite asks a friend in Cuba to send them special ingredients for a party dessert, and “In half an hour came, propelled through the air, / The Fruits and the sweets packed with exquisite care.” When the narrator flies from England to France he notices a bridge linking the two countries beneath him; such a construction has been seriously considered this year. And you could interpret the vision of book reading in 1970 as a metaphor for the wonderful Internet Archive: “Here a library stood with its wide open door / The clerks and librarian needed no more / As the readers took works from their place on the shelves / And duly returned them uninjured themselves.”
For more historical visions of the future see here.


text:
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales, illustrated by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1921)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Mar 20, 2018

The Wonder-book for Boys and Girls (1851), along with its sequel The Tanglewood Tales (1852), were an attempt by the celebrated novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne — author of The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851) — to turn the Greek myths into something entertaining and edifying to young readers. It worked. The Wonder-book sold 4667 copies in its first two months. By comparison Moby Dick, which was published in the same month, sold less than 1800 copies in its first year. (Herman Melville had actually dedicated Moby Dick to Hawthorne — the intense friendship of the two writers has been brilliantly told by Philip Hoare in Leviathan, or the Whale [2008]).
In his preface to Tanglewood Tales, Hawthorne reveals the reservations he felt about adapting the Greek myths into child-friendly form. Knowing that many of the old legends are “hideous … melancholy … miserable … abhorrent to our Christianized moral sense” he had wondered “How were they to be purified? How was the blessed sunshine to be thrown into them?” The idea of whitewashing the Greek myths may put off some twenty-first-century readers. Thankfully the project was not a complete success. Plenty of darkness survives. So for example in the retelling of Theseus and the Minotaur we learn of Procrustes, a man who ensured his visitors had the right size bed in uncompromising fashion:
In his cavern he had a bed, on which, with great pretense of hospitality, he invited his guests to lie down; but, if they happened to be shorter than the bed, this wicked villain stretched them out by main force; or, if they were too tall, he lopped off their heads or feet, and laughed at what he had done, as an excellent joke.
The 1921 edition we are featuring here is greatly enhanced by its otherworldly illustrations, all of which we’ve placed below. They are the work of Chicago-based artist Virginia Frances Sterrett who was just 20 at the time. The previous year she had blessed Old French Fairy Tales (1920) with more of her graphic magic, which you can see here and also buy as prints in our online shop here. If you are looking to get a copy of the Tanglewood Tales on your bookshelves without breaking the bank then we recommend this 2017 edition from The Planet Books complete with reproductions of Sterrett's beautiful illustrations.


text:
Maps Showing California as an Island
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
May 15, 2018

If California were a country its economy would be the fifth largest in the world (just ahead of the UK). Yet the tech boom is not the starkest way California has ever stood apart from its neighbours. That would surely be the maps depicting it as an island, entire of itself. Below we have featured our pick of these glorious seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aberrations, from a collection of hundreds held at Stanford.
The intriguing story of how the maps came to be deserves a little mapping itself. In the 1530s Spanish explorers led by Hernán Cortés encountered the strip of land we now know as the Baja Peninsula. They mistook it for an island and called it California. Both the name and the notion of it being an island came straight from the pages of a novel — a very popular Spanish romance, Las Sergas de Esplandián [The Adventures of Esplandián] (1510), which described an imaginary realm ruled by Queen Califia:
Know, that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise; and it is peopled by black women, without any man among them, for they live in the manner of Amazons. They had beautiful and robust bodies, and were brave and very strong. Their island was the strongest of the World, with its steep cliffs and rocky shores. Their weapons were golden and so were the harnesses of the wild beasts that they were accustomed to taming so that they could be ridden, because there was no other metal in the island than gold.
In 1539, a Spanish expedition led by Francisco de Ulloa discovered that the Baja Peninsula was just that, a peninsula, firmly attached to the mainland. And for the next eighty years published maps reflected this correct view. Then, in 1622, European maps suddenly started showing California adrift, effectively extending the Gulf of California in its northwesterly direction until it meets the Pacific. This island view of California, resembling a floating carrot, was replicated again and again over the next century and a quarter. By 1747, Ferdinand VI of Spain had had enough. He issued a reasonably clear decree, “California is not an Island”. But the royal newsflash travelled slowly. California would appear as an island as late as 1865 on a map made in Japan (see very final image below).
What on earth had happened? How had such a large piece of America been wrenched free? The Spanish clergyman Antonio de la Acensión played a crucial role. Two decades after sailing along the West Coast in 1602–3, Acensión began arguing in letters and books that California was an (enormous) island. It seems he wanted to extend the Gulf of California a great deal further north and so invalidate Sir Francis Drake’s claim of "Nova Albion" for England (as Acensión's version would have had Drake landing on the island of California, rather than the mainland). Acensión's island view was believed by many in Europe. And in the early 1620s maps showing California as an island started appearing in Spain and Holland. The first English one appeared in 1625, next to an influential article about the search for the Northwest Passage. From there the error took flight, deceiving map makers and readers throughout the world for decades.
The fact that a number of explorers knew that California was not an island was not enough to nip the idea in the bud. Yet it would be a shame to think of the idea as simply an error, a cartographical crease which needed ironing out. Even though maps may be presented as accurate, they cannot escape their metaphorical nature. They reflect much more than physical geography. That California was mapped as an island for so long speaks to its separateness. The writer Rebecca Solnit, a student of the Stanford maps, has argued that, “An island is anything surrounded by difference.” The state contains around 2,000 plant species found nowhere else. Its borders comprise dizzying mountains, harsh deserts and immense ocean. It has been home to the Gold Rush, the psychedelic era, the silicon boom. In several ways then, California is an island.
In 2018, nearly 400 years after the Island of California first appeared on a map, tens of thousands of Californians are supporting “Calexit” – the secession of the Golden State from the United States. As far as we know, none has advocated digging a mighty trench along the state borders and flooding it with Pacific moat water. For the foreseeable future at least, California is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If you want to delve deeper into the story, there is an enjoyable chapter on it in Simon Garfield’s On the Map: Why the World Looks the Way it Does (2012). If you’d prefer to dive deeper still, we suggest The Island of California: A History of the Myth (1995) by Dora Beale Polk. Finally, if you’re just really into islands that are not actually islands, take a look at the improbable story of Sandy Island, which was only “undiscovered” in 2012.
Below you'll find featured our highlights from the wonderful Glen McLaughlin Collection of California as an Island, a collection of nearly 750 maps obtained by Mr. McLaughlin over nearly 40 years, which have all been digitised and made available under a public domain mark through Stanford University Libraries. The two maps shown above are both from the Library of Congress.


text:
Swedish House-Gymnastics (1913)

Apr 5, 2018

These wonderful photographs, which make such innovative use of multiple exposure, are from a 1913 German book titled Schwedische Haus-Gymnastik nach dem System P.H. Ling's by Theodor Bergquist, Director of the Swedish Gymnastic Institute in the Bavarian spa town of Bad Wörishofen. As the title tells us, this style of "Swedish house-gymnastics" demonstrated by Bergquist (and his mysterious female colleague) is based on a system developed by Pehr Henrik Ling (1776–1839), a pioneer in the teaching of physical education in Sweden. Inventor of various physical education apparatus including the box horse, wall bars, and beams, Ling is also credited with establishing calisthenics as a distinct discipline and is considered by some as the father of Swedish massage.


text:
Fore-Edge Book Paintings from the Boston Public Library
Text by Adam Green
Jun 7, 2018

A "fore-edge painting" is an illustration or design which appears on the "fore-edge" of a book (i.e. on the edge which is opened up, opposite to the spine). The history of such embellishments is thought to go back to the tenth century but it wasn't until the eighteenth century that the unusual practice really began to take off. The simplest form involved painting onto the fore-edge when the book was closed normally — hence the image appears by default — but a more advanced form involved a rather ingenious technique whereby the painting was applied to the page edges when the stack was fanned at a slight angle. This way the image is hidden from view when the book is closed normally. To hide any remnants of this secret image the exposed edge of the book, when closed normally, was gilded (or sometimes marbled). In his 1949 essay "On Fore-Edge Painting of Books" Kenneth Hobson came up with this rather nice metaphor to explain: "Imagine a flight of stairs, each step representing a leaf of the book. On the tread would be the painting and on the flat surface would be gold. A book painted and gilt in this way must be furled back before the picture can be seen."
Bookbinders, such as Edwards of Halifax, got even cleverer with variations of the technique, producing books with "double fore-edge paintings", where one image would be revealed when the book was fanned one way, and a second image revealed when fanned the other. "Triple fore-edge paintings" are where a third image is added instead of gilt or marbling. "Panoramic fore-edge paintings" utilise the top and bottom and edges to make continuous panoramic scenes. "Split double paintings" have two different illustrations, one on either side of the book's centre, meaning that when the book is laid open in the middle, each is seen on either side. Very rare and skilled variations of the art only reveal the image when the the pages of the book are pinched or tented in a certain way.
Most often the artwork would reflect the content of the book (as shown in the chess example above). Sometimes it would depict the owner (through a portrait or picture of their home). And occasionally it would be oddly incongruous, such as The Poetical Works of John Milton being adorned with a painting of the tomb of Thomas Gray.
One of the finest collections of fore-edge paintings is held at Boston Public Library, which you can see on their Flickr, and on a dedicated website, which includes an introductory essay by Anne C. Bromer of Bromer Booksellers, who along with her husband gifted this wonderful collection to the Boston Public Library. In this post we've featured our highlights from their collection.


text:
Häxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages (1922)

Apr 11, 2018

Referred to in English as The Witches or Witchcraft Through the Ages, Häxan is a Swedish-Danish film, a curious and groundbreaking mix of documentary and silent horror cinema, written and directed by Benjamin Christensen. Whereas most films of the period were literary adaptations, Christensen's take was unique, basing his film upon non-fiction works, mainly the Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th-century treatise on witchcraft he found in a Berlin bookshop, as well as a number of other manuals, illustrations and treatises on witches and witch-hunting (a lengthy bibliography was included in the original playbill at the film's premiere). On literary adaptations Christensen commented: "In principal [sic] I am against these adaptations... I seek to find the way forward to original films." Instead Häxan was envisaged, as stated in the opening credits, as a "presentation from a cultural and historical point of view in seven chapters of moving pictures". While the bulk of the film's format, with its dramatic scenes portrayed by actors (including Christensen himself in the role of the devil), would have been familiar enough to cinema-goers at the time (although shocking in content), the first chapter, lasting 13 minutes, is a different story. With its documentary style and scholarly tone — featuring a number of photographs of statuary, paintings, and woodcuts — it would have been entirely novel — a style of screened illustrated lecture which wouldn't become popular till many years later. Indeed, the film perhaps could make a decent claim to being the first ever documentary (an accolade normally reserved for Robert J. Flaherty's ethnographic study from 1922 titled Nanook of the North). Reportedly the most expensive film of the Swedish silent film era, Häxan was actually banned in the United States, and heavily censored in other countries. In 1968, an abbreviated version of the film was released. Titled Witchcraft Through the Ages, it featured an eclectic jazz score by Daniel Humair and dramatic narration by the wonderfully gravel-toned William S. Burroughs.


text:
Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death (1523–5)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Apr 17, 2018

The Dance of Death by the German artist Hans Holbein (1497–1543) is a great, grim triumph of Renaissance woodblock printing. In a series of action-packed scenes Death intrudes on the everyday lives of thirty-four people from various levels of society — from pope to physician to ploughman. Death gives each a special treatment: skewering a knight through the midriff with a lance; dragging a duchess by the feet out of her opulent bed; snapping a sailor’s mast in two. Death, the great leveller, lets no one escape. In fact it tends to treat the rich and powerful with extra force. As such the series is a forerunner to the satirical paintings and political cartoons of the eighteenth century and beyond. For example, Death sneaks up behind the judge, who is ignoring a poor man to help a rich one, and snaps his staff, the symbol of his power, in two. A chain around Death’s neck suggests he is taking revenge on corrupt judges on behalf of those they have wrongfully imprisoned. In contrast, Death seems to come to the aid of the poor ploughman, by driving his horses for him and releasing him from a life of toil; the glowing church in the background implies this old man is on his way to heaven.
Holbein drew the woodcuts between 1523 and 1525, while in his twenties and based in the Swiss town of Basel. It would be another decade before he established himself in England, where he painted his most enduring masterpiece The Ambassadors (1533), in which two wealthy, powerful and worldly young men stand above (and oblivious to) an anamorphic skull that signals the ultimate vanity of all that wealth, power and worldliness. In the 1520s, Holbein was busy trying to earn a living in Basel, painting murals and portraits, designing stained glass windows, and illustrating books. The year before he began The Dance, he had illustrated Martin Luther’s influential translation of the New Testament into German. So Holbein was working close to the heart of the accelerating movement for Church reform. It comes as little surprise, then, that Death reserves particularly grim treatment for members of the Catholic clergy. It drags off a fat abbot by his cassock, leads an abbess away by the habit as though she were an animal, and takes the form of two skeletons and two demons to see to the pope himself.
Holbein’s woodcuts were a highly original take on a medieval theme. Death had first been seen dancing in Europe in 1425, on a mural at the Paris Cemetery of the Holy Innocents. From there it had jigged its way across Europe, onto more walls (including two in Basel cemeteries) and book reproductions of them. In Holbein’s series no one is actually engaged in a dance with Death. This removes an element of comic catharsis found in the mutuality of earlier dances. Holbein’s more static figures respond to Death realistically. The old man is stoical. The panicked knight fights with all his useless might. The rich miser throws up his arms in a mix of outrage and terror. The peddler is almost too busy to even acknowledge his time has come.
Holbein’s achievement is the greater because of the miniature scale he was drawing in. Reproductions obscure just how tiny the wooden blocks were — no bigger than four postage stamps arranged in a rectangle. The blocks were cut by Hans Lützelburger, a frequent and highly skilled collaborator of Holbein’s. Lützelburger had cut forty-one blocks and had ten remaining when Death surprised him too. The blocks were then sold to creditors, and eventually printed and published for the first time in Lyons in 1538 as Les simulachres and historiees faces de la mort. Since the book's great success Holbein’s series has been consistently in print, inspiring writers and artists from Rubens in Flanders, to Millet in France, and Dickens in England. Penguin Classics recently published an excellent edition which includes much helpful historical context from Ulinka Rublack.


text:
Letters to Dead Authors (1886)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Apr 24, 2018

Letters to Dead Authors contains twenty-two letters written by Andrew Lang (1844–1912) to bards, poets, and novelists from Homer to Rabelais to Austen. An incredibly prolific writer from the Scottish Borders, Lang’s name can be found on 249 books and thousands of newspaper articles. As a literary critic he inspired love, fear, respect, and laughter. He was sometimes acerbic, sometimes reverential, and usually witty. There is more glowing praise in Letters to Dead Authors than scathing criticism. In fact he expresses a very, very high opinion of most of his correspondents. While this can verge on cloying, it can also be rather beautiful. For example, to Percy Bysshe Shelley he writes: "Watching the yellow bees in the ivy bloom, and the reflected pine forest in the water-pools, watching the sunset as it faded, and the dawn as it fired, and weaving all fair and fleeting things into a tissue where light and music were at one, that was the task of Shelley! ‘To ask you for anything human,’ you said, 'was like asking for a leg of mutton at a gin-shop.’”
To Homer: “It is because thou art so great, and men so little, that they misdoubt thee… They believe not that one human soul has known every art, and all the thoughts of women as of men, all lives of beasts on hill and plain, all the innocence of childhood, and its beautiful ways, all the delight of battle, the dread of ambush, the slow agony of siege, the storms and the calms of the sea. In thy soul, as in the soul of Zeus, is the whole world mirrored.”
To Edgar Allan Poe: "But to discuss your few and elaborate poems is a waste of time, so completely does your own brief definition of poetry, ‘the rhythmic creation of the beautiful,’ exhaust your theory, and so perfectly is the theory illustrated by the poems.”
If you’d like more Andrew Lang, there is an excellent piece on his life and work in The Scotsman. You can also check out our post on his bibliophilic gem, Books and Bookmen (1886). His crowning achievement remains the twelve colour fairy books (published 1889–1910) in which he and his wife, Nora Lang, collected, edited and translated 437 fairy stories from across Europe.


text:
The Philosophy of Beards (1854)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
May 8, 2018

Thomas Gowing felt the mighty yet fragile English Beard to be threatened with extinction by an invasive foreign species, the Razor. So he set out to defend the furry face mammal in every conceivable way. The resulting lecture was received so enthusiastically by a bushy audience in Ipswich that it was soon turned into The Philosophy of Beards (1854) — the first book entirely devoted to this subject.
It is Gowing’s ardent belief that the bearded are better looking, better morally and better historically than the shaven. To call him a huge fan of the suburbs of the chin would be an understatement. “It is impossible” he writes “to view a series of bearded portraits . . . without feeling that they possess dignity, gravity, freedom, vigour, and completeness.” By contrast, the clean-cut look always leaves him with “a sense of artificial conventional bareness”. Gowing’s apology for the beard makes frequent appeals to nature, some of them amusingly far-fetched: “Nature leaves nothing but what is beautiful uncovered, and the masculine chin is seldom sightly, because it was designed to be covered, while the chins of women are generally beautiful.” Sometimes his argument transforms from a shield for the beard into a swipe at the chin: “There is scarcely indeed a more naturally disgusting object than a beardless old man (compared by the Turks to a ‘plucked pigeon’)”.
Gowing was writing at a time when physiognomy — the art of reading a person’s character in their facial features — was still popular in Europe and America. So it is no surprise to learn that “the absence of Beard is usually a sign of physical and moral weakness”. Gowing also takes aim at the notion that beards are unhealthy. Far from being unhygienic because of their propensity to trap feculent particles, “the beards of foreign smiths and masons filter plaster dust and metal from the air, protecting the lungs.”
In the last section, Gowing gambols through the ancient and modern past, attaching a beard or lack thereof to thousands of years of heroism and cowardice, honour and deceit. Viewing history through the prism of the beard makes things nice and simple: “The bold Barons outbearded King John, and Magna Charta was the result,” … “Henry the 7th shaved himself and fleeced his people”. Napoleon I only allowed men in his empire to have an “imperial”, an upturned triangle of a beard, as a way of letting them know “that they were to have the smallest possible share in the empire”.
At the end of his apology, Gowing issues further rebuttals of the key objections he has heard levelled against the chin curtain. It is not fair to call the beard unclean, he claims, as it takes even longer to shave it than clean it. And anyway, “the process of combing and brushing the Beard, instead of being tedious, uncertain, and often painful, like shaving, confers a positively delightful sensation, similar to that which one may imagine a cat to experience [when stroked].” Finally, he dismisses as “a foul libel” the idea that ladies don’t fancy a beard. He declares, presumably without much survey data to hand, that “Ladies, by their very nature, like everything manly, and cannot fail to be charmed by a fine flow of curling comeliness.”
By now it will be obvious that The Philosophy of Beards is of its time and place. But while the book may be male-centric, macho-centric, Anglo-centric, and chin-centric it is also very eccentric and more than a little tongue-in-(hairy-)cheek. We have not been able to find a portrait of Thomas Gowing, but there is every reason to believe that when he wrote his book, hiding behind the thick carpet around his mouth, there sat a pair of smirking lips.


text:
Ernst Haeckel’s Jellyfish
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
May 31, 2018

The German biologist Ernst Haeckel was fascinated by medusae, the umbrella-shaped animals commonly called jellyfish. For Haeckel, whose imagination was shaped in the Romantic era, medusae expressed the exuberant yet fragile beauty of Nature. And in their ethereal forms he glimpsed a reflection of his great love Anna Sethe, who died tragically at the age of twenty-nine.
Haeckel had been engaged to Anna for four years when, in 1862, he became associate professor of zoology at the University of Jena. The job gave the adoring pair the economic security they needed to finally marry. In the same year, Haeckel published a book on radiolaria (microscopic plankton) which he furnished with stunning illustrations. In Jena, the newlyweds lived together in bliss for eighteen months. Then, on the day he was supposed to celebrate his thirtieth birthday and receive an award for his radiolaria book, Anna died suddenly, probably of a burst appendix. Haeckel became mad with grief. A partial delirium kept him in bed for eight days. A month later he wrote to a friend, “I am dead on the inside already and dead for everything. Life, nature, science have no appeal for me. How slowly the hours pass.”
Haeckel travelled to the Mediterranean town of Nice to attempt a recovery from his suicidal malaise. One day he took a walk and saw a medusa in a rock pool: “I enjoyed several happy hours watching the play of her tentacles which hang like blond hair-ornaments from the rim of the delicate umbrella-cap and which with the softest movement would roll up into thick short spirals.” He made a sketch and named the species Mitrocoma Annae [Anna’s headband].
The grace and beauty of the medusa soothed Haeckel’s grief and contributed to what would be a lifelong fascination with medusae. In The Tragic Sense of Life, Professor Robert J. Richard describes the profound impact of Anna’s death on him:
Through this acid mist, Haeckel resolved to devote himself single-mindedly to a cause that might transcend individual fragility. He would incessantly push the Darwinian ideal and oppose it to those who refused to look at life, to look at death, face on . . . After a period of recovery, Haeckel abandoned himself to an orgy of unrelenting work that yielded, after eighteen-hour days over twelve months, a mountainous two-volume monograph that laid out his fundamental ideas about evolution and morphology.
As part of his efforts to demonstrate that all living things are interconnected through evolution, he produced monographs on Siphonophorae (1869–88), Calcareous Sponges (1872), Arabian Corals (1876) and Medusae (1879–81). A year after completing the medusae book, a mighty two-volume work describing 600 species, Haeckel had a house built in Jena. He named it Villa Medusa and decorated the ceilings with frescoes of medusae that would later appear as lithographs in his classic book Art Forms in Nature (1899–1904). When one day a colleague showed him a new medusa species that he found even more beautiful than Mitrocoma Annae, he had to name it after his first wife too. He called it Desmonema annasethe and produced a sketch that the lithographer Adolf Giltsch would turn into arguably the most famous plate in Art Forms (see first image featured below).
If you would like to see more of Haeckel’s mesmerising jellyfish, he published a two-part monograph dedicated to them full of wonderful imagery: those in part one's System of Medusae published in 1879 can be seen here, and those in part two, published in 1881, from reports of the British Challenger expedition (1873–76), can be seen here. Some decades later, in 1904, many medusae pictures (often based on Haeckel's earlier monograph images) were turned into stunning lithographs by Adolf Giltsch and published in the immensely popular Art Forms of Nature (see Prestel's 2008 edition here).
In addition to creating beautiful art, Haeckel held and promoted disturbing theories on race and eugenics. You can read more about this darker side to Haeckel in Bernd Brunner's essay "Human Forms in Nature". Also read about Haeckel's role in one of science's great controversies in Nick Hopwood's "Copying Pictures, Evidencing Evolution".


text:
Mnemonic Alphabet of Jacobus Publicius (1482)
Text by Adam Green
May 9, 2018

Jacobus Publicius was a fifteenth-century rhetorician and physician who is remembered today for being the author of the first ars memoriae (or ars memorativa), a work dedicated to techniques concerning the organisation and improving of memory. Publicius' ideas were gathered in a book called Ars Oratoria. Ars Epistolandi. Ars Memorativa published in 1482, which included this wonderful illustrated alphabet featured here. Each letter of the alphabet is paired with an object (in some case more than one) which echoes its shape. A is associated with a folding ladder, B with a mandolin, C with a horseshoe, and so on. Publicius' book proved very popular and influenced many subsequent scholars concerned with memory, including the English polymath Robert Fludd, who came up with his own mnemonic alphabet.
We are featuring the original 1482 edition here (see source link below), but you can also see a copy of the slightly expanded second edition (with additional imagery) at the Wolfenbütteler Digitale Bibliothek. For some further reading on the subject we recommend The Book of Memory (2008) by Mary Carruthers.


text:
The Sky: A Film Lesson in “Nature Study” (1928)

May 24, 2018

Although it begins with a blinding sun winking through the clouds, this short educational film is focused on what can be seen in the night sky, including a look at constellations, using a telescope, the mountains of the moon (including some wonderful graphics), the planets, and ending on a closer look at the sun with which we began. Part of a series — of which we've also featured the great "Growing Things" instalment here.


text:
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Adventures in Scandinavia
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
May 30, 2018

In 1795 the radical philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft journeyed to Scandinavia with her infant daughter in search of stolen treasure. In letters home she mused on diverse topics from the sublime scenery to the bloody turn the French Revolution had taken. Four months later she returned to London and put together this travelogue of her adventures — an extraordinary work full of impressions and reflections that demonstrate Wollstonecraft’s hallmark freedom of mind.
She had always admired the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the favourite philosopher of the leaders of the Revolution, but unlike Rousseau she believed that women should be properly educated, that they were entitled to the same political rights as men, and that they should articulate their points of view — as she brilliantly did in A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman (1792). “Let the practice of every duty” she wrote, “be subordinate to the grand one of improving our minds...”
In the same year that treatise was published she left London for Paris, where the Jacobin Terror was about to begin. Though she never lamented the passing of the monarchy, she was horrified at the savagery of the guillotine. Moving in a bohemian circle of radicals, she met Gilbert Imlay, a debonair American revolutionary soldier and commercial adventurer. By the summer of 1793 she was pregnant.
When Britain went to war with the Jacobin government, British nationals in France started getting locked up. To prevent this, Imlay registered her as his wife at the American embassy, then left on business. Sensing the relationship slipping away, she travelled to London to be with him. Imlay though did not want to invite her and their infant daughter into his life. Distraught, Wollstonecraft swallowed a suicidal dose of laudanum but survived.
A Norwegian captain had stolen some valuable silver cargo from one of Imlay’s ships. So, with great brazenness, Imlay asked Wollstonecraft to travel to Scandinavia, find out what had happened to the treasure, and seek compensation. She agreed — how much for love and how much for adventure is not known — and set off with her daughter and a maid. For the next four months, she bargained with officials, made risky sea voyages, absorbed sublime landscapes, fed wild strawberries to her daughter, and observed society through a critical eye: “The situation of the servants in every respect, particularly that of the women, shews how far the Swedes are from having a just conception of rational equality…”
When she returned to London she discovered that Imlay was living with a new woman, an actress. At this news she went to Putney Bridge and threw herself into the Thames. Two watermen dragged her unconscious from the river and found a doctor who managed to revive her. A few weeks later she retrieved the letters she had written to Imlay from Scandinavia and fused them with her journals to create Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). The book, which perhaps deserved a more exciting title, moved seamlessly from adventure story, to investigation of the self in nature, to reflection on the French Revolution:
An ardent affection for the human race makes enthusiastic characters eager to produce alteration in laws and governments prematurely. To render them useful and permanent, they must be the growth of each particular soil, and the gradual fruit of the ripening understanding of the nation, matured by time, not forced by an unnatural fermentation.
Contemporary readers enjoyed the descriptions of remote nature affecting a sensitive, perceptive mind. A young Robert Southey, the future poet laureate, wrote excitedly to his brother, “Have you ever met with Mary Wollstonecroft’s [sic] letters from Sweden and Norway? She has made me in love with a cold climate, and frost and snow, with a northern moonlight.” The book contains some wonderful  descriptive passages. One is said to have been an inspiration for the sacred river in Coleridge’s "Kubla Khan". It depicts her impressions of a great waterfall outside Fredrikstad in Norway:
My soul was hurried by the falls into a new train of reflections. The impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrent from the dark cavities which mocked the exploring eye, produced an equal activity in my mind: my thoughts darted from earth to heaven, and I asked myself why I was chained to life and its misery? Still the tumultuous emotions this sublime object excited, were pleasurable; and, viewing it, my soul rose, with renewed dignity, above its cares—grasping at immortality—it seemed as impossible to stop the current of my thoughts, as of the always varying, still the same, torrent before me—I stretched out my hand to eternity, bounding over the dark speck of life to come.
The radical English philosopher William Godwin decided: “If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.” In London, Godwin and Wollstonecraft began a love affair. Within a year she was pregnant and, despite their notorious aversion to marriage, they decided to wed. “I think you the most extraordinary married pair in existence,” a friend commented. Wollstonecraft then gave birth to a daughter, the future Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818). She died shortly afterwards, aged thirty-eight.


text:
The Egg Dance: From Peasant Village to Political Caricature
Text by Adam Green
Mar 29, 2018

The egg dance was a traditional Easter game involving the laying down of eggs on the ground and dancing among them whilst trying to break as few as possible. Another variation (depicted in many of the images featured here) involved tipping an egg from a bowl, and then trying to flip the bowl over on top of it, all with only using one's feet and staying within a chalk circle drawn on the ground. Although, as shown in many of its depictions in art, the pastime is associated with peasant villages of the 16th and 17th century, one of the earliest references to egg-dancing relates to the marriage of Margaret of Austria and Philibert of Savoy on Easter Monday in 1498. The event was described in an 1895 issue of American Magazine:
Then the great egg dance, the special dance of the season, began. A hundred eggs were scattered over a level space covered with sand, and a young couple, taking hands, began the dance. If they finished without breaking an egg they were betrothed, and not even an obdurate parent could oppose the marriage.
After three couples had failed, midst the laughter and shouts of derision of the on-lookers, Philibert of Savoy, bending on his knee before Marguerite, begged her consent to try the dance with him. The admiring crowd of retainers shouted in approval, "Savoy and Austria!" When the dance was ended and no eggs were broken the enthusiasm was unbounded.
In his The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Joseph Strutt describes how an "indication of such a performance occurs in an old comedy, entitled The longer thou livest, the more Foole thou art, by William Wager in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, where we meet with these lines: Upon my one foote pretely I can hoppe./ And daunce it trimley about an egge." He then goes onto describe a more elaborate performance he saw in Sadler's Wells in the 1770s.
This performance was common enough about thirty years back and was well received at Sadler's Wells; where I saw it exhibited, not by simply hopping round a single egg, but in a manner that much increased the difficulty. A number of eggs, I do not precisely recollect how many, but I believe about twelve or fourteen, were placed at certain distances marked upon the stage; the dancer, taking his stand, was blind-folded, and a hornpipe being played in the orchestra, he went through all the paces and figures of the dance, passing backwards and forwards between the eggs without touching them.
This blindfolded version of the egg dance features in Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795). Wilhelm buys Mignon from a band of travelling performers after he sees her being beaten for refusing to do the egg dance, and to thank him for saving her from captivity she performs her egg dance for him (a scene depicted in John Collier's painting shown below). According to some scholars Goethe's mention gave birth to the phrase "einen wahren Eiertanz aufführen" (to perform a true egg dance) which refers to moving carefully in a difficult situation. This particularly association of the egg dance with navigating danger was expressed time and time again in political cartoons of the 19th-century: various political figures, from Bismarck to Disraeli, precariously trying to make there way about a floor strewn with potential upsets.


text:
Allegorical Maps of Love, Courtship, and Matrimony
Text by Adam Green
Jun 20, 2018

As mapmakers began to get a better and better sense of the earth's geography, some of the more playful amongst them, as well as some new to the art, turned their attentions to charting more ambiguous lands — creating maps that depicted ideas as places and the machinations of the mind and heart as a journey. While allegorical maps have been around for centuries, if not millennia,  it wasn't until the eighteenth and nineteenth century that the phenomenon really took off, with some of the most wonderful examples being those dedicated to charting the highs and lows of love, courtship, and marriage. This particular focus of the allegorical map can trace its origins to the Carte de tendre, conceived by Madeleine de Scudéry for inclusion in her novel Clélie (1654-61) and engraved by François Chauveau. Here one can travel, by following the river of Inclination, from the town of Nouvelle Amitié (New Friendship) in the south to the town of Tendre (Love) in the north — that is if one can avoid the various pitfalls and obstacles which line the route, including the strangely inviting Lac D'Indiference (Lake of Indifference).
Many imitations and variations of the map followed, mainly focusing on the idea of courtly love, but these soon gave way to more libertine sentiments — a turn from the realm of love and friendship to a more overt focus on matrimony along with all the sexual themes this implied. The first of the so-called "matrimonial maps" could arguably be Thomas Sayer's A Map or Chart of the Road of Love, and Harbour of Marriage, published in 1748. Here, east of Knave's Land and north of Land of Desire, we find Cuckold's Shire, off its coast Cuckoldom Bay and Henpecked Sands, leading on to the double danger of Rocks of Jealousy and Whirlpool of Adultery.
Some twenty years later, in 1772, the prominent English poet, essayist, and literary critic Anna Laetitia Barbauld published her brilliant A New Map of the Land of Matrimony, Drawn From the Latest Surveys created to accompany her poem "To Mr. Barbauld, with a Map of the Land of Matrimony" (1772). The following description comes from Kathryn Ready's fascinating 2016 article on the map:
Barbauld's 'New Map' gives prominence not only to the vicissitudes of courtship but also to the negative outcomes of marriage. It depicts the Land of Matrimony and its associated island of Divorce surrounded by the Ocean of Love, and a number of smaller land masses, including Friesland and Coquet and Prude Islands to the northwest, and the Enchanted Islands to the southwest.
From there a proliferation of variations on the format ensued, each home to a host of novel toponyms, including such gems as Divorce Island, Country of Single Men, Land of Spinsters, Mountains of Delay (Inhabited by Lawyers), Squabble Marsh, and Port Hymen (there's also a Temple of Hymen).


text:
The Diverting History of John Gilpin: Shewing how he Went Further than he Intended, and Came Safe Home Again (1782)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Mar 27, 2018

The Diverting History of John Gilpin is a humorous ballad written by the English poet and hymnist William Cowper (1731–1800). It owes its existence to Lady Austen. One autumn afternoon in 1782 she noticed her friend William sinking into a depression. To raise his spirits she told him a story she had loved as a child, about the hilarious misadventures of a linen draper called John Gilpin. Cowper was cheered to the point that he turned the tale into a ballad, which became the most popular poem of the 1780s (to the point where pirate copies were being sold across England, together with biographies and toys of Gilpin).
The ballad begins with the draper heading and out of London to celebrate his twentieth wedding anniversary at the Bell in Edmonton. He rides a borrowed horse, while his wife, her sister, and the children are in a chaise and pair. Almost immediately poor Gilpin loses control of his horse, which speeds away with him, dislodging his hat and wig, and smashing the bottles of red wine hung over its side. It careers through Islington, leaves Edmonton and the Bell in its wake, before reaching Ware, its home, ten miles further on. At this point a “braying ass” gives it a fright and it turns and gallops all the way back to London, where the farce and Gilpin can finally terminate.
Cowper was 61 when he composed the ballad. Thirty years previously, during a serious depression, he had tried to take his own life: by swallowing a fatal dose of laudanum, drowning himself, stabbing himself with his pen knife (the blade broke), and hanging himself with a garter (it snapped just as he lost consciousness). From these depths of despair Cowper found solace and strength in composing Christian poems and hymns. One of these gave English the phrase “God moves in a mysterious way” — something true both of William Cowper and the man he immortalised, old John Gilpin.
Here we are featuring a 1906 edition of The Diverting History, published in the United States. The brilliantly comic woodcuts by Robert Seaver mimic those found in the eighteenth-century chapbooks in which many early readers encountered the ballad, in pirated form.


text:
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Strange Stories
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
May 22, 2018

E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) was a Prussian lawyer, artist, composer and pioneering writer of horror stories. These tales, with their mysterious atmospheres and weird happenings, influenced writers such as Poe, Stevenson, Kafka and Freud. Hoffman's best-known story today is “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King”, giving rise as it did to the famous ballet set to Tchaikovsky’s score.
Hoffmann practised law in order to support his ideal artistic life. His first ambition had been to paint but he soon fell in love with music (even changing one of his middle names to Amadeus in homage to Mozart). He devised several operas but by his thirties realised he would never be an exceptional composer and so took to writing fiction instead. His short, frightening stories — populated by maniacs, spectres and automata — were immensely popular. The protagonists often have split personalities – model citizens by day, murderers and thieves by night — and in them can be sensed the conflict between necessary bureaucratic lives and the wild flights of fancy possible in art.
Most of the tales in the collection of translations we are featuring, Hoffmann’s Strange Stories, first appeared in German in Nachtstücke [Night Pieces] published in 1816. Its most famous story concerns the Sandman, a benevolent character from European folklore who sprinkles magic sand into people’s eyes to help them get to sleep and to bring on good dreams (hence the sleepy dust in the corner of your eyes in the morning). In his telling, “Coppelius, the Sandman”, Hoffmann realises the dark potential lurking inside this friendly figure. Coppelius visits children who won’t go to sleep at night and throws handfuls of sand into their eyes, until they pop out. The wicked thief then flies to his iron nest on the Moon where his beaked children can feast on the bloody hoard.
In his classic essay “The Uncanny” Freud argued that this story was an example of the fear of castration. He quoted from it at length and wrote, “I would advise opponents of the psychoanalytical outlook against referring precisely to Hoffmann's story The Sandman in order to support the view that the fear for one's eyes is completely unrelated to the castration complex.”
Our favourite modern edition is The Sandman, translated by Christopher Moncrieff and published by Alma Classics, which includes Freud’s essay as an appendix. If you’d like to read a collection of his short stories, we recommend Tales of Hoffmann published by Penguin Classics.


text:
The Sexual Life of our Time in its Relations to Modern Civilization ([1906] 1909)
Text by Adam Green
Jun 27, 2018

In this mammoth and encyclopaedic survey of sexual knowledge, first published in German in 1906, the physician Iwan Bloch explores topics ranging from spiritual love to wild love, traditional marriage to foot fetish, erotic painting to morning erection. A quick glance at the subject index at the back of the book gives a taste for the breadth of topics covered.

Altar of monogamy, human sacrifices on
Baldness, fetichism for
Beard: its small importance as a sexual lure
Emissions seminal
Ennoblement of our amatory life
Fornicatory dolls
Homosexuality, need for the enlightenment of the general public regarding
Lips, their relation to the genital organs
Opportunity for bestial intercourse more frequent in the country than in towns
Powders lethal to the spermatozoa
Speech: its relation to love
Succubi
Sweets, fondness for, in relation to sexuality
Testicles, in relation to the brain
Tom-cat, fornicatory act with
Typical marriages, one hundred
Wig-collectors

Sex is seen as much as a cultural and sociological phenomenon as a medical one. Applying this theory Bloch includes a chapter on pornographic literature and art, and another on free love that draws on Goethe, Shelley and the Swedish feminist Ellen Key. For Bloch, sexual love has the power to bring together the lower animal and the higher spiritual parts of human nature, and he is optimistic about the future of this process:
Love regarded … in its inner nature, as a sexual impulse most perfectly and completely infused with a spiritual content … will stand forth ever purer and more promotive of happiness, like a mirror of marvellous clearness, wherein is reflected a peculiar and accurate picture of the successive epochs of civilization.
A book titled The Sexual Life of Our Time was always going to cause a stir in Edwardian England. The 1909 translation featured here begins with a note from the publishers that the sale of the book shall be “limited to members of the legal and medical professions.” (One wonders how many early readers asked a lawyer or doctor friend to pass them a copy.) The attempt to control the readership must be in part down to Bloch’s fearless critique of conventional morality. He reserves his most stinging words for the banning of sex outside of marriage, a convention which he calls "the true cancer of our sexual life, the sole cause of the increasing diffusion of prostitution, of wild sexual promiscuity, and of venereal diseases".
As may be inferred by now, Bloch is a very big advocate of free love, which to him means “sexual union based upon intimate love, personal harmony, and spiritual affinity, entered on by the free resolve of both parties.” As for what kind of sex free lovers should embark on, Bloch is pretty open-minded. Like Freud he believes that supposedly deviant sexual inclinations and behaviours are actually pretty common, and seldom pathological. A crucial example is homosexuality, which Bloch points out “occurs in perfectly healthy individuals quite independently of degeneration and of civilization; and is diffused throughout the whole world.” This was a brave statement to make in an era when the persecution of homosexuals was normal practice.
Not much has been written about Bloch in English but we do know that he was trained as a dermatologist and based in Berlin. The range of literary references in The Sexual Life makes it plain that his radical turn of mind owes a lot to many hours spent in the Royal Library of Berlin. Under the pseudonym Eugène Dühren, Bloch also wrote an 1899 biography of the Marquis de Sade and was the first to publish Sade’s hugely controversial and often banned 120 Days of Sodom (1904), a book described by Sade himself as “the most impure tale ever written since the world began”.
Bloch’s literary endeavours did not impede his scientific output. Along with some other Berlin-based doctors, he formed the first ever medical society for sexology research, and in 1914 he began publishing the Journal of Sexology, which would collect and publish many important studies over the following two decades. He also published three volumes of the Handbook of Sexology in its Entirety Presented in Separate Studies (1912–25) but that ambitious project was nixed by Bloch’s untimely death at the age of 50.


text:
Scrapbook of Hand-Coloured Juvenile Woodcut Emblems

Jul 5, 2018

Books focused on the moral education of young people, particularly via the use of emblems, were all the rage in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (see for example The Blossoms of Morality and The Accidents of Youth). The pages of the unique book featured here, from the Special Collections department of the UCLA Library, have had pasted onto them a collection of cut out emblems featured in such juvenile literature. There are thirty eight woodcut emblems in total, some crudely hand-colored, and judging from the limited variety of designs, only sourced from one or two books. Subjects include "folly of drunkenness", "the danger of misspending time", and "upon a little girl's playing with a painted baby".


text:
The Book of Exposition: A Collection of 15th-Century Erotica from the Middle East (1900)

Apr 10, 2018

A decade or so after the famed Orientalist Richard Burton translated Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi’s The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight (1886),  an anonymous translator became the first to critically assess and introduce for Anglophone audiences another of the Middle East’s more controversial and enigmatic texts — Kitab al-Izah Fi'ilm al-Nikah b-it-Tamam w-al-Kamal, or The Book of Exposition — a collection of fifteenth-century erotica.  Despite there being much dispute over the authorship of the work, from both Western and Middle Eastern scholars over the centuries, The Book of Exposition is nowadays credited to a fifteenth-century Egyptian polymath called Jalal ad’Din al-Suyuti (1445-1505). Although perhaps best known for his co-authorship of Tafsir al-Jalalayn (Tafsir of the Two Jalals), a classical Sunni exegesis of the Quran,  al-Suyuti was also a prolific erotologist, writing at least twenty-three treatises on various aspects of the sexual arts.
The two dozen stories he presents in The Book of Exposition are an exploration of promiscuity and sexual taboos under the societal constraints of the Arab-Islamic world. In “The Strange Transformation that Befell a Certain Believer’s Prickle” a man is granted a “Night of Power” in which he is given three wishes to be fulfilled by Allah. Upon learning of the gift his wife insists that he asks for his “instrument” to be lengthened. The wish is granted but when faced with a penis now “as straight as a column which would neither display suppleness, nor show itself capable of the power of elasticity and movement, nor of rest”, his wife is not pleased and threatens divorce. The man uses his second wish to ask Allah to reverse his condition, a wish again granted in extremity — the man’s “prizzle” is now near completely effaced. The third and final wish is used to return him to normal.  Other stories like “The Pious Woman and What Happened to Her From Behind” are rather unambiguous in their content. The offerings vary in length, from a few sentences to a few pages, but all clearly stem from a sexually liberated mind and one (be warned) not devoid of misogynistic tendencies.
Although first translated into English in 1886 by erotica enthusiast Charles Carrington, who rendered the title as Marriage-Love and Woman amongst the Arabs, it was the 1900 English edition published by Maison d’Editions Scientifiques, in a run of just three hundred copies, that first sought to critically assess and place the work in its historical and literary context. In addition to an extensive foreword by the translator — whose name is given only as “An English Bohemian” — the edition also includes an expansive section entitled “Excurses”, which offers up appendices of other short erotica, notes, and observations, including an essay by Richard Burton on pederasty (featured also in his 1885 translation of Arabian Nights).
In his opening essay and commentary, An English Bohemian sets out to dispel Victorian attitudes to sexuality through the idolisation of the Oriental — setting up “Oriental Sexuology” as a mystical alternative for aspiring libertines/hedonists. He doesn’t just limit himself to the Orient in his examination of sexuality. He offers an insight into the sexual customs of other lands he claims to have travelled and researched extensively as a former practitioner of medicine: from Loango to the Aztecs, Paraguay to Samoa, Europe to Arabia. Despite his intentions, we perhaps end up learning more about Western attitudes to sex than the those of the non-European cultures he examines. His assertions, in their elevation of Orient over the Occident, appear to be motivated more by a desire to rebel against the prevailing establishment of his own culture than offering a nuanced picture of a foreign culture's attitudes to sex.
(Many thanks to Sherif Dhaimish who brought our attention to the book and upon whose text the above is based).


text:
Utagawa Hiroshige: Last Great Master of Ukiyo-e

Apr 25, 2018

Considered the last great master of the ukiyo-e genre ("pictures of the floating world"), the Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) was a hugely influential figure, not only in his homeland but also on Western painting. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, as a part of the trend in “Japonism”, European artists such as Monet, Whistler, and Cézanne, looked to Hiroshige’s work for inspiration, and a certain Vincent van Gogh was known to paint copies of his prints.
Hiroshige was born in 1797 to a samurai family in Edo (modern Tokyo). After his parents died, around the age of fourteen, Hiroshige began to take up painting and studied for several years under the artist Toyohiro. During this period he produced many works reflecting traditional ukiyo-e themes such as women and actors, but upon Toyohiro's death in 1828 he underwent a pronounced shift toward the landscapes for which he is best known today, as well as bird and flower images. His most famous series include Famous Views of the Eastern Capital (1831), The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (1833–1834), The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō (1834–1842) and Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (1852–1858).
In 1856, around the age of 60, Hiroshige "retired from the world", becoming a Buddhist monk. Two years later he passed away (during the great Edo cholera epidemic, though it's not known if this was the cause of death) and was buried in a Zen temple in Asakusa. Just before his passing, he wrote the following poem:
I leave my brush in the EastAnd set forth on my journey.I shall see the famous places in the Western Land.


text:
British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions (1880)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Jun 12, 2018

In British Goblins (1880) Wirt Sikes, the United States consul to Cardiff from 1876 to 1883, describes the mythology and legends of Wales, a land steeped in folklore. (Considering its geographic focus, why the book is not simply called Welsh Goblins remains a mystery.) The first section of the book concerns the fairies, which are known as “y Tylwyth Teg” in Welsh, meaning the fair folk or family. They come in five varieties: Ellyllon (elves), Coblynau (mine fairies), Bwbachod (household fairies), Gwragedd Annwn (underwater fairies), and Gwyllion (mountain fairies).
The Ellyllon are pigmy elves who haunt the groves and valleys. They dine on poisonous toadstools and fairy butter, which they extract from deep crevices in limestone rocks. Their hands are clad in the bells of the foxglove, the leaves of which are a powerful sedative. They are sometimes kindly, sometimes menacing and almost always mischievous. One variety of Ellyllon, the Ellylldan, will wait in boggy wetland and flash their fiery lures to lead travellers off the safe path, sometimes to their death.
The Coblynau populate the mines, quarries and underground regions of Wales. They are about half a metre tall, very ugly to look it, and generally good-natured. They will make a peculiar knocking or rapping sound to let miners know the whereabouts of a rich vein of ore. The word coblyn has the double meaning in Welsh of “knocker” and “sprite”. And, Wirt Sikes asks, “may it not be the original of ‘goblin’?”
The Bwbachod are friendly goblins who will help you out with chores at home or on the farm, like making butter, if you behave correctly. That means making a good fire last thing at night and leaving a bowl of cream out for the Bwbachod to drink. It also means drinking a good deal of ale yourself, for the Bwbachod hate teetotallers. There was once a Baptist preacher in Cardiganshire who was much fonder of prayers than of ale so a Bwbach took to pestering him while he prayed: jerking the stool from under him; jangling the fire-irons on the hearth; making the dogs howl; frightening the farm-boy into fits of screaming by grinning through the window. At last the Bwbach took on the exact aspect of the preacher and confronted him as he crossed a field. The preacher fainted in fright. When he eventually came to he packed up and left Cardiganshire never to return.
The Gwragedd Annwn are female fairies of the streams and lakes, particularly the isolated lakes of the high mountains, where they serve as “avenues of communication between this world and the lower one of annwn, the shadowy domain presided over by Gwyn ap Nudd, king of the fairies.”
The Gwyllion are also female fairies. They haunt the lonely roads of the Welsh mountains. Like the Ellylldan, they have a habit of luring travellers away from safety. In stormy weather they will sometimes knock on a door and ask for refuge by the fire. To refuse them is to risk great harm.
The fairies interact with non-human animals too. In the excellently titled subchapter Occult Intellectual Powers of Welsh Goats, we learn that those bearded ruminants possess secret intelligence and knowledge and are on very good terms with the fairies. Every Friday night the fairies comb their beards “to make them decent for Sunday.”
The second section of British Goblins departs fairyland and travels to the spirit world. Subchapters worth a dip include: Spectral Animals; The Gwyllgi or Dog of Darkness; The Stupid Medieval Devil in Wales; The Story of Haunted Margaret; The Corpse-Bird; and The Question of a Future Life.
Section three concerns “quaint old customs” and contains insights into such matters as: The Spiritual Potency of Buns; Marketing on Tombstones; The Puzzling Jug; Welsh Morality; and The Sin-Eater.
Section Four is all about “bells, wells, stones and dragons”. There you can discover: The Bell that committed Murder and was damned for it; The Gigantic Rock-tossers of Old; Obstacles in the way of Treasure-Seekers; Whence came the Red Dragon of Wales?; and The Goblins of Electricity.
Enjoy!


text:
First recording of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (1909)
Text by Adam Green
Apr 30, 2018

We don’t know for sure who created the popular African American spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, though we do know it came to popular attention by finding itself part of the repertoire of The Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s. One often cited source is Wallis Willis (known as “Uncle Wallace”), a Choctaw freedman in the old Indian Territory in what is now Choctaw County, in Oklahoma. According to the Library of Congress, in the mid nineteenth century, “Uncle Wallace” was rented out to a local school for Native American boys where he is said “to have entertained the boys by singing spirituals he composed, including ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’.” The school’s headmaster was apparently so taken by this spiritual that he noted it down and shared it, along with several other spirituals, with the Jubilee Singers when he heard them at a concert in New Jersey.” Another, more dramatic, origin story is also told:
John W. Work claimed that the spiritual “burst forth” from the anguished soul of Sarah Hannah Sheppard, the mother of Ella Sheppard of Fisk Jubilee Singer fame. Sarah gave birth to Ella on a Tennessee plantation in 1851. When she learned that her master intended to sell her to another plantation, thus separating her permanently from Ella, she resolutely set out for the Cumberland River, intent on drowning both herself and her daughter. She was stopped by an “old mammy” who cautioned Sarah to “let de chariot of de Lord swing low.” Reaching toward heaven, the wise woman pulled down an imaginary scroll and prophesied that the young child would one day stand before kings and queens. Sarah yielded to the old woman’s counsel, turned back, and allowed herself to be sold and taken to Mississippi. Ella did indeed perform before royalty. She eventually reunited with her mother and brought her to live with her in Nashville.
Whatever the truth to its beginnings, the lyrics are thought to be referencing the Bible story of Prophet Elijah’s being taken to heaven by a chariot, and also possibly the “Underground Railroad”, the freedom movement that helped black people escape from Southern slavery to the North and Canada.
Featured here is the first known recording of the song performed in December 1909 for Victor Studios by the Fisk University Jubilee Quartet (pictured above), a male foursome carrying on the legacy of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers of the 1870s.
The unaccompanied recording of the quartet showcased the talent of four Fiskites: John Wesley Work II (1st tenor), James Andrew Myers (2nd tenor), Alfred Garfield King (1st bass), and Noah Ryder (2nd bass). By the time of the 1909 recording session, Fisk University had earned a reputation as being the “music conservatory” for aspiring black artists, primarily due to the immense fame of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers, who toured in the interest of the university from 1871-1878.
The 1909 recording popularised the song hugely, helping it become one of the best known African American spirituals. Over the last century composers have arranged it for choral ensembles, concert soloists, jazz bands, concert bands, dance bands, and symphony orchestras, and it has been recorded countless times by popular musicians, from Paul Robeson to Johnny Cash, from Fats Waller to Eric Clapton. The song has also been adopted by England’s rugby fans who’ve sung its emotional strains at games for decades.


text:
The Bakemono Zukushi “Monster” Scroll (18th–19th century)

Jun 5, 2018

These wonderful images featured here are from a Japanese painted scroll known as the Bakemono zukushi. The artist and date is unknown, though its thought to hail from the Edo-period, sometime from the 18th or 19th century. Across it's length are depicted a ghoulish array of "yokai" from Japanese folklore. In his The Book of Yokai, Michael Dylan Foster describes a yokai as:
a weird or mysterious creature, a monster or fantastic being, a spirit or a sprite ... creatures of the borderlands, living on the edge of town, or in the mountains between villages, or in the eddies of a river running between two rice fields. They often appear at twilight, that gray time when the familiar seems strange and faces become indistinguishable. They haunt bridges and tunnels, entranceways and thresholds. They lurk at crossroads.
The class of yokai characterised by an ability to shapeshift, and that featured in this scroll, is the bakemono (or obake), a word literally meaning "changing thing" or "thing that changes". The founding father of minzokugaku (Japanese folklore studies), Yanagita Kuno (1875–1962), drew a distinction between yurei (ghosts) and bakemono: the former haunt people and are associated with the depth of night, whereas the latter haunt places and are seen by the dim light of dusk or dawn.
Amongst the bakemono monsters depicted in the scroll is the rokurokubi (ろくろくび), a long-necked woman whose name literally means "pulley neck". Whether shown with a completely detachable head (more common in Chinese versions), or with head upon the end of a long threadlike neck as shown here, the head of the rokurokubi has the ability to fly about independently of the body.  In his 1904 collection Kwaidan, Lafcadio Hearn provides the first extended discussion of this yokai in English, telling of a samurai-turned-travelling-priest who finds himself staying the night in a household of rokurokubi intent on eating their guest.
Yuki-onna ("snow woman" - 雪女) appears on snowy nights as a beautiful woman with long hair. Details vary from region to region — in some parts a sighting would mean your spirit being drawn from your body, in other parts she asks you to hold her baby. Explanations for her vary too, for some she is the spirit of the snow, for others the ghost of a woman who perished in the snow, or even as a moon princess expelled from the sky-world. Yuki-onna again appears in Hearn's Kwaidan, where she visits two woodcutters caught in a snowstorm, killing the older by blowing in his face, and promising to kill the younger if he ever tells of what happened (which, many years later, he does).
Kami-kiri ("hair cutter" - 髪切) is a yokai known for sneaking up on people and cutting off their hair. The phenomenon of people's hair being mysteriously chopped appeared in many urban legends, in the Edo period in particular. Sometimes the chop would be attributed to a "demon wind", but often to a creature doing the cutting, such as the kamikiri-mushi (a "hair cutting- insect", likely in reference to the praying mantis, with its scythelike front limbs, and named a very similar-sounding kamakiri in Japanese). In the Bakemono zukushi, it appears with a bird like face and huge pincer hand brandishing the severed crop.
Below we've featured our highlights from the scroll (see the whole thing complete here), the digitisation of which appears to have come from the International Research Center for Japanese Studies - Yokai Database. Many thanks to Pink Tentacle, from whom we've taken the image descriptions. If you want to learn more about yokai in general then do check out Michael Dylan Foster's fascinating The Book of Yokai.