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English Translation of Finland’s Epic Poem, The Kalevala (1898)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Mar 23, 2021

A divine maiden of the air descends to undifferentiated waters. She becomes pregnant from the wind and a duck lays an egg on her leg. Incubating, it grows too hot to touch. When she flinches, it falls, and the world, sun, and moon are formed from the shards. Then comes her son, Väinämöinen, who sows the forests. And things take a turn for the worse. He gets into a contest with a wiseman from the North, captures him in a mire. As a last resort, the defeated offers his sister’s hand in marriage. But Aino would rather drown than wed Väinämöinen. And from her mother’s tears come the rivers, come the birches, come the cuckoos, who still sing these songs of sorrow.
This is how the world begins in the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic poem, first published in the nineteenth century. Later in the text, there will be talking salmon, forest demons, wolves that stalk the deadlands, incest, suicide, and a mysterious artefact called the Sampo, forged by a legendary blacksmith, which acts like an anchor for the universe. After more than twenty-thousand lavish verses, the poem ends with modesty and apology: perhaps the singer droned on too long. And perhaps it was a wretched performance. If so, this could not be helped — he never had proper training. Maybe someone else will sing it better in the future.
Much like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Kalevala finds its roots in an oral tradition. During a period of famine and cholera in the early nineteenth century, the Finnish physician Elias Lönnrot travelled through Karelia, an ethnic region that now straddles the border of Finland and Russia. Here he heard folk singing, backed by an instrument called the kantele (a zither formed from pike bones in the Kalevala). Noticing common patterns and themes, Lönnrot began to transcribe the music, sorting the myths and lore intoned by local bards. The richness of this tradition almost defies description. Arhippa Perttunen (1769-1840), an important source for Lönnrot — who was supposedly undefeated in village song competitions — remembered fishing trips in his childhood as impromptu concerts that explained the cosmos. “They often sang all night hand in hand by the fire, and the same song was never sung twice”.
Here the history of Finland’s national poem becomes indistinguishable from the kind of myth-making it contains. Was Lönnrot unearthing the fragments of a single, scattered story? Or imposing cohesion where there was previously none? According to some, the physician pieced back together the fractured narrative, as if mending a bone, which had been shattered across the tongues of rural singers. “There was no problem of personal style”, writes the British translator Keith Bosley, “the ancient poetry which is now called Kalevala poetry has a single style transcending not only individual talent but even region and century”. Others, like the Finnish historian Timo Vihavainen, offer a more skeptical genealogy: “Finnish folklorists arrived at the conclusion that Kalevala had not been born in any particular part of Finland but on Elias Lönnrot’s writing table”.
The impact of the Kalevala has been outsized, at home and abroad. Ending with an invocation of “the rising folk of Suomi” (the country’s name in Finnish), Lönnrot’s poem helped invent and recover the mythology of a people who had been under Swedish rule since the twelfth century and absorbed into the Russian Empire in 1809. Inspiring a revival of the Finnish language among educated, wealthy citizens, the Kalevala had a curiously democratizing effect, as the burgeoning interest in Finnish required crossing class lines to obtain linguistic proficiency. Beyond Fennoscandia, the Kalevala offered a blueprint for national becoming. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow based The Song of Hiawatha, his troublesome attempt to craft America’s “first” epic, on the meter of the Kalevala — a rhythm known as trochaic tetrameter, which sounds slightly stilted in English (and famously reserved by Shakespeare for fairy speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). It may come as no surprise, then, that J. R. R. Tolkien’s elvish was also inspired by the poem and its language. “It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before”, he wrote in a letter to the poet W.H. Auden.
After eleven song-collecting field trips, Lönrott published a version of the Kalevala in 1835 and a revised, expanded edition in 1849. The text led to an outpouring of paintings by Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931), Robert Wilhelm Ekman (1808-1873), and Joseph Alanen (1885-1920) — and continues to inspire contemporary Finnish artists such as Hannu Väisänen (b. 1951) and Sirpa Alalääkkölä (b. 1964). John Martin Crawford first translated the Kalevala into English in 1888, a project that arose from his desire “to lay before the English-speaking people the full treasury of epical beauty, folklore, and mythology”. Noting that Finnish is a language where “every word [is] connected with the powers and elements of nature”, his preface describes the “great care” taken “in rendering these finely shaded verbs”.
Read the text above and find below a selection of images from a dedicated Kalevala collection at the Finnish National Gallery, including works by Joseph Alanen and Akseli Gallen-Kallela. You can purchase a copy of Keith Bosley’s recent English translation here.


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Twenty-eight Years of Co-partnership at Guise (1908)
Text by Melissa McCarthy
Jan 7, 2021

In the foreground of the picture we see a woman occupied in preparing a cot. Let us make our bow to her as we pass. She is the senior employee of the Nursery, good Madame Roger, whose intimate friends call her affectionately the “universal mother.” Three generations of young “Familistèrians” have been cared for, fondled and washed by her clever hands.
We greet Madam Roger here on a tour of the Familistère, or “Social Palace”, a large, multi-purpose housing complex built in the French town of Guise by the industrialist and social innovator Jean-Baptiste Godin (1817-1888). Godin and his works are the much-admired subjects of Twenty-eight Years of Co-partnership at Guise, the second edition of Aneurin Williams' English translation of Le Familistère illustré, resultats de vingt ans d'association, 1880-1900 by Dallet, Fabre and Prudhommeaux.
Williams was a Liberal politician, and his translation is introduced by his fellow Member of Parliament, the working class, trade unionist Thomas Burt, and published jointly by Garden City Press (of Letchworth, a “garden city” designed by social reformer Ebenezer Howard) and the Labour Co-partnership Association, an “educational, advisory, and propagandist body”. It's clear that Godin's activism piqued the interest of a certain, socialist-minded section of British politics. And deservedly so: a decade after the 1840 establishment of his cast-iron cooking stove business, Godin began developing the idea of “a co-operative association of labour, capital, and ability”. His reason, that
he wished to encourage, exalt, glorify labour. It is labour which makes the superiority of man over the brute ; it is labour which creates and multiplies wealth ; it is to labour that the greater part of that wealth should rightfully return.
Godin appears to have been remarkably, tangibly successful in these aims. By 1861 the first housing for workers was occupied, with more to follow. The full extent of the Familistère was a site of eighteen acres, containing the foundry itself; three large residential blocks for twelve hundred workers (who included women) and family members, arranged along galleries around a glass-roofed courtyard; a nursery and school; a theatre, garden allotments and cellars; a communal laundry and swimming pool; and the economats block housing shops offering near-cost-priced food. An article for Harper's Magazine in 1872 describes the site in detail, showing on the “General Plan” shops, fountains on every story, halls for general education, and a bakery, a café, and a casino.
Godin was not content to stop at construction; in 1880 he converted the community into a co-operative society, owned and directed by the workers who lived there. In all of this community-building, Godin was strongly influenced by other socialist and utopian thinkers of his era. He was a keen follower of Charles Fourier, with his plans for a phalanstery-dwelling, utopian community, and was also interested in the projects of the English educational reformer Robert Owen, who had followed improvements to his factory town at New Lanark, Scotland, with the establishment of an experimental community at New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825-7. Godin also invested (to the tune of a third of his fortune, states Williams) in Victor Considerant's short-lived colony of La Reunion, Texas, between 1855 and 1857. In the high-quality construction and the consideration of residents' needs, one might also compare the Familistère to British factory towns also built during the 1890s, such as the Cadbury family's Bournville or the Lever Brothers' Port Sunlight, although these projects had none of Godin's socialist ideals.
After fighting in the Franco-Prussian War and serving as a deputé during the 1870s, Godin died in 1888, but the community proved perhaps surprisingly durable. It was not until the 1950s that saucepan manufacturers Le Creuset bought out the foundry, and the co-operative association for La Familistère was only dissolved in 1968. The buildings themselves suffered some decay, but in 1991 were classified as a monument historique, and today the site is thriving, a renovated, tourist-friendly destination. One can still wander the gardens and read on Godin's mausoleum his carved exhortation, with which the admiring Williams closes Twenty-eight Years of Co-partnership at Guise,
Come to this tomb when you have need to be reminded that I founded the Familistère for brotherly association and partnership. ... Pardon the wrongs which others do to you. ... Be just towards all and you will serve as an example.

source: public-domain-review

author: Melissa McCarth

type: collection

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


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Ikom Folk Stories from Southern Nigeria (1913)
Text by Melissa McCarthy
Dec 8, 2020

In his introduction to Ikom Folk Stories from Southern Nigeria (1913) the British colonial administrator Elphinstone Dayrell explains his story-gathering modus operandi:
These folk stories have been told to me by natives of the various countries to which they relate in the Ikom district of Southern Nigeria. In all cases they have had to be translated by an interpreter, and frequently it has been found necessary to employ two. Some of the stories are very old and have been handed down from one generation to another, but it is most difficult, almost impossible, to judge with any degree of accuracy how old they really are.

During his spell as District Commissioner in the period preceding 1914, when the British pulled together the north and south of Nigeria into one colony, Dayrell pursued his interest in the culture, history, and folktales of the Igbo people of the south-eastern regions, near the Niger Delta. It was the Igbo (the children and grandchildren of those interviewed by Dayrell), who suffered a genocide of an estimated 1 to 3 million people during the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s — a war with its bloody roots firmly planted in the 1914 amalgamation enforced by Dayrell and his fellow colonialists.
The tales in Ikom Folk Stories were gathered during 1910 and 1911, from a range of informants, each of whom Dayrell credits. There is a photograph of “Chief Indoma of Inkum, son of the powerful Chief Indoma, about whom several of the stories are told”, including one “Concerning the Human Sacrifices which took place” on his death.
Dayrell also adds notes which explain local detail, or which place events in historical context. Of “The Cunning Hare”, he explains, “This is one of their old stories, which they brought with them when they were driven south by the Awala tribe, and is still handed on from one generation to another.”
The stories mix this historical record with creation myths and animal fables. We are told of Inkang, who brought up a mushroom baby boy; of dispute between the spider and the grasshopper; of a heroic tortoise. There is even one, final tale from the singing and dancing girl Ennenni, on the topic of the first meeting between the penis and the vagina, that Dayrell considers so “unfit for publication” that he presents it in Latin.
The inclusion of such an X-rated story, albeit obscured under the veil of Latin, in addition to the emphasis given to identifying the storytellers and the more immediate history of the Ikom region, speaks of the context within which Dayrell’s volume was published — part of a series of “Occasional Papers” put out by the Royal Anthropological Society. Three years earlier Dayrell published a much more commercially-minded collection, Folk Stories from Southern Nigeria, West Africa (1910), which eschews the anthropological and historical detail for a focus on more straight-up creation myths such as “Why the Sun and the Moon live in the Sky” and animal explanatory fables, like “Why the Flies Bother the Cows”. The stories included extend to the supernatural, such as in “The Disobedient Daughter who Married a Skull”, but they still retain a down-to-earth practicality, as in “Of the Pretty Stranger who Killed the King”, which offers the moral, “Never marry a stranger, no matter how pretty she may be”. The collection boasts an introduction by the Scottish folklore expert Andrew Lang, whose literary interests ranged over myth, history, religion, and psychical research. While Lang’s political interpretation of the British influence on Nigeria shows his era, he does make an interesting point about the relation of these tales to other traditions, comparing and contrasting with elements from Greek mythology, Zulu stories, French chanson, Celtic legend and many others.


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Samuel G. Szabó’s Rogues, A Study of Characters (1857)

Jan 12, 2021

Celebrity photography begins with Mathew Brady. His groundbreaking 1850 book of daguerreotypes, The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, presented portraits of twenty-four of “the most eminent citizens of the American Republic”, ranging from the Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing to the pro-slavery politician John C. Calhoun. The idea of the album was to present these men (and they were all men) as “representative” —  just as, in the 1860s, Brady’s war photography, in Walt Whitman’s words, would gather together portraits of “typical men…from opposing parties and convictions, representing in their varieties and oppositions after all a Common Country”.
Samuel G. Szabó’s book Rogues, A Study of Characters, published six years after Brady’s Gallery, aims for another kind of representativeness — not of the eminent, but of the infamous.
Indeed, Rogues is one of the first collections of mug shots made available to the general public. The term “rogues’ gallery” had been coined by Allan Pinkerton of the Pinkerton Detective Agency two years earlier, but Pinkerton circulated his collection of mug shots only among law enforcement agents; the concept of a “rogues’ gallery” didn’t enter common parlance until it was used in the introduction to New York City police chief Thomas Byrnes’ book Professional Criminals of America in 1886.
In Szabó’s Rogues, there is no introduction, no statement of purpose — only captions listing the lawbreaker’s name, alias, and offense: murderer, counterfeiter, cracksman, pickpocket, or (an interesting distinction) French pickpocket. Still, it’s hard not to see Szabó’s gallery, like those of Brady, Pinkerton, and Byrnes, as participating in the nineteenth-century mania for identifying “types”. As Simon A. Cole writes in Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification:
As soon as photography emerged as a method for recording the identities of known criminals, an irresistible temptation arose to use the same technology for something much more ambitious: to home in on the common physiognomic attributes of known criminals in order to have a picture of what criminals in general might look like and thus to identify criminals prospectively, even before they committed crimes.
It would be a mistake, though, to file away Szabó’s Rogues as just another example of early criminal identification. “One may speculate that Szabó made these portraits while working for, or with the cooperation of, the police”, the scholar Malcolm Daniel writes; yet Szabó signed the book as its “photographic artist”, and his subtitle (“a Study of Characters”) is not at all the same thing as a “study of the criminal character”. The men and women depicted by Szabó are individuals: some look menacing, some rakish, some simply miserable. Together, they provide a glimpse not only at the faces of mid-nineteenth century American lawbreakers, but at all the different ways mid-nineteenth century people sat, squinted, wore their hair, neckties, and hats.
Szabó himself is quite a mysterious character. Born in Hungary, he appears to have lived in the US only temporarily, from the early or mid-1850s until July 1861. During these years, he spent time in New Orleans, Cincinnati, Chicago, St Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. Where he lived when he made this album, no one knows.
You can scroll through our highlights below.


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Baron Munchausen’s Dream (1911)
Text by Melissa McCarthy
Feb 11, 2021

We've all done it: overindulged at dinner and suffered a night of “sweet visions and rambling nightmares”, where the Three Graces suddenly become crocodile-monsters who leap out of the mirror to pummel us, and the bedroom transforms into an idyllic grotto, only for exploding dragons to torment us, before we wake up in the most unsuitable places.
Or perhaps this is peculiar to Baron Munchausen, the hero of Georges Méliès' ten-minute film, made in 1911 (although it's uncertain whether it was released before 1943). Otherwise known as Les Hallucinations du baron de Münchausen, or Les Aventures de baron de Munchhausen, it's generally referred to in English as Baron Munchausen's Dream.
Inspired by the real-life eighteenth-century aristocrat of the same name, Münchhausen first appeared in fictional form in 1785, in an English work written by Rudolph Erich Raspe. Raspe kept his name off the covers, perhaps anticipating the real baron's fury at being associated with a character who quickly became a by-word for fabulous flights of far-flung fancy, with many wonderfully-illustrated versions of his adventures making it into print — examples here from 1860; 1867, illustrated by Doré; and 1895.
Méliès' Munchausen keeps the plot simple, but uses his customary range of cutting edge cinematic techniques — dissolves, substitution splices, pyrotechnics — to blaze a trail for subsequent twentieth-century versions. French filmmaker Émile Cohl, the Hungarian Josef von Báky (at the behest of Goebbels), the Czech Karel Zeman, and the American-British Terry Gillam are among those who have imagined the baron's exploits.
Viewers will recognize the distinctive style, and some of the props, from other Méliès' films, which can be found here. Meanwhile, we wish you sweet dreams.


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William Hogarth’s Satire on False Perspective (1754)
Text by Melissa McCarthy
Jan 6, 2021

William Hogarth’s Satire on False Perspective, engraved by Luke Sullivan, offers an Escher-like array of impossible lines and vanishing points: a man lights his pipe from a distant candle; a flock of sheep grow bigger as they recede round a corner; a foreground flag disappears behind a distant tree, and many more.
These multiple visual tricks are all jokes to convince the viewer of the necessity of reading and understanding Hogarth's friend Joshua Kirby's book, Dr. Brook Taylor's Method of Perspective Made Easy, Both in Theory and Practice for which Hogarth's image acted as frontispiece.
Kirby, an artist, was, as the title of his own work admits, strongly influenced by the earlier work of the mathematician Brook Taylor. Method of Perspective was instantly popular, with reprints and new editions, and Kirby followed it up with Perspectives in Architecture in 1761. Hogarth too was interested in the mathematical and optical aspects of art. Already famous as a writer, portrait painter, and satirical engraver, in 1753 he published his Analysis of Beauty, in which he plugs Kirby's forthcoming book by explaining that
The knowledge of perspective is no small help to the seeing objects truly, for which purpose Dr. Brook Taylor's Linear perspective made easy to those who are unacquainted with geometry, proposed to be publish'd soon by Mr. Kirby of Ipswich, may be of most service.
Perspective in art was, of course, not new; Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, and Chinese artists had all, to varying extents, used techniques to indicate that one element of an image should be thought of as distanced in space. But a formal exposition of a theory took time to emerge. Euclid discussed matters in his Optics, ca. 300 BC, and the scholar Alhazen advanced his ideas in the eleventh-century Opticae Thesaurus. By the Italian Renaissance, artists like Filippo Brunelleschi, Paulo Ucello, and Piero della Francesca were, in addition to producing masterful artworks with an understanding of perspective at their core, writing treatises on the central concepts: that objects appear smaller at a distance, and that parallel lines appear to meet at a vanishing point on a horizon.
While the content of Kirby's book takes a straightforward approach, explaining, with illustrations, just how perspective works, the frontispiece introduces Hogarth's characteristic mocking outlook towards the errors of the world. As he captions it, "Whoever makes a Design without the Knowledge of Perspective / will be liable to such Absurdities as are shewn in this Frontispiece".
Below, courtesy of Wikipedia, is a list of all the errors highlighted in Hogarth's print:
The man in the foreground's fishing rod's line passes behind that of the man behind him.The sign is moored to two buildings, one in front of the other, with beams that show no difference in depthThe sign is overlapped by two distant trees.The man climbing the hill is lighting his pipe with the candle of the woman leaning out of the upper story window.The crow perched on the tree is massive in comparison to it.The church appears to front onto the river. Both ends of the church are viewable at the same time.The left horizon on the water declines precipitously.The man in the boat under the bridge fires at the swan on the other side, which is impossible as he's aiming straight at the bridge abutments.The right-hand end of the arch above the boat meets the water further from the viewer than does the left-hand end.The two-story building, though viewed from below, shows the top of the roof. As does the church tower in the distance.The barrel closest to the foreground fisherman reveals both its top and bottom simultaneously.The tiles the foreground fisherman stands on have a vanishing point that converge towards the viewer.A tree is growing out of the top of the bridgeThe vanishing point for the near side of the first building transforms midway down the wall.The line of trees obscuring the sign are likely representative of how objects should decrease in scale as they move further away, but in this case reversed.The sheep on the left-hand side increase in scale as they get further away.The swan behind the boat is larger than the men manning the boat.The base of the tree on the far left is behind the tree to the right of it, but the canopy is in front of the tree to the right of it.The left-most barrel appears to be on lower ground than the other two, when they should be on level ground.The bottom swan is slightly smaller than the cow.The man with the pipe is taller than the trees.The tops and bottoms of the windows on the second building have different vanishing points.


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The Universe as Pictured in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1915)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Mar 11, 2021

When we talk about fan fiction, we rarely think: “John Milton”. And yet, how better to approach his Paradise Lost (1667), which takes Satan (barely mentioned in the Bible) and makes this fallen arch-fiend into an ambivalent, epic hero? Structured on techniques and themes borrowed from Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and countless other texts and genres, Milton remixed classical and Renaissance forms to fashion the biblical universe into a setting for English literature’s (perhaps) greatest poem, one which Philip Pullman believes will [“n]ever be surpassed”.
And if Milton stoked fandom in turn, he had no keener admirer than William Fairfield Warren, an eclectic scholar and the first president of Boston University. By the time Warren wrote his last work, The Universe as Pictured in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1915), he had already made his name by claiming to have discovered the location of Eden. Warren’s Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole (1881), a study that “positively reeked with academic authority”, argued (across five-hundred, heavily-footnoted pages) that our lost Terrestrial Paradise was once catty-corner to Santa’s workshop.
In his final work, Warren turned his attention from Eden to Hell and became a cartographer of the poetic imagination. The pursuit makes counting pin-dancing angels sound like schoolhouse addition. Trying to deduce how Milton intended us to envision the “circumfluous waters calm, in wide / Crystalline ocean” — the poet’s elaboration on God’s creation of a firmament in Genesis — Warren writes that the “Avestan picture of the unitary water-circulation of the universe as the Iranians conceived it presents a most interesting parallel”. Why, but of course. One of the many pleasures in reading this book comes from the presumption of its subtitle: “for personal and class use”. Warren breezily dissects esoterica gleaned from Zoroastrian mysticism, the Sanskrit Rig Veda, and Homeric allusion, never pausing to question if his student-reader can follow.
And he grants Milton the same generous benefit of doubt. Finding an inconsistency between the number of ringing celestial spheres in “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (nine) and Paradise Lost (ten), the scholar explains that this point of discrepancy in Milton’s Ptolemaic cosmos is moot because “the music of the spheres was produced by the motion of the divinely attuned material spheres, and that the tenth was soundless because by nature immaterial.” Like the poet he admires, Warren will move earth and heaven in his quest for subtle harmonies.
Warren was not the first to map Milton’s “facile gates of Hell too slightly barred”. In an appendix to his study, the professor includes diagrams by David Masson, John Andrew Himes, Thomas N. Orchard, and other predecessors. Taken together, they offer whimsical schemata for how to best imagine the realms of chaos, night, and empyrean heaven. A frequent subject for visual artists (notably John Martin, “a Geordie ingénue with a chip on his shoulder”, who transposed Adam and Eve into the sublime settings of romanticism and swapped Milton’s republicanism for the revolutionary politics of his own time), Paradise Lost demands to be seen.
But Warren had something in mind beyond illustration. There is an ethical dimension to his form of reading. Describing how “[m]yopic interpreters of the Odyssey, possessed of no imagination, have for centuries tried to find Homer’s world within the narrow limits of Hellas and the Levant”, he believes that poor readers have not only “done violence” to poetry, but, as teachers, become “blind leaders of the blind”. There is a knowing irony here. Like Homer, Milton had lost his sight by the time he composed his epic. In order to regain an accurate vision of Paradise Lost, Warren thinks we need to learn to see anew.

author: Hunter Dukes


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Why Women Should Not Vote (1917)
Text by Melissa McCarthy
Oct 27, 2020

At the time of the 2016 US presidential election, stationery shops did a brisk trade in entirely blank books, with covers bearing such titles as The Wit and Wisdom of Donald Trump and Why Trump Deserves Trust, Respect and Admiration. A year later Michael J. Knowles topped the Amazon charts with his Reasons to Vote for Democrats, comprising 200 blank pages. It’s an old joke, as this precursor from 1880 shows, and this one from the same year. One of the finest examples of the genre, and at a welcome remove from the petty political-point-scoring mood of many others, is this tiny publication from circa 1917.
Despite its novelty angle, this little book from the National Woman Suffrage Publishing Company (the publishing arm of the National Woman Suffrage Association) was born from a very serious place: the struggle to gain women the right to vote in the United States. The N. W. S. A. published a range of agitprop, not just comedy items. Virginia Commonwealth University has a collection of texts from the New York-based organisation, including the Headquarters News Letter, an A-B-C of Organization, a guide to fundraising, and information brochures on the proposed changes to the Constitution. There are leaflets targeting specific audiences too: teachers, farmers’ wives, Catholics, Southern white women concerned about “the Negro Vote”. More general-audience books, such as Why Women Should Not Vote also found their way to specific targets. A copy was left on the desk of anti-women’s suffrage Rep. Sherman Berry who decried it as “another sample of … the detestable and cheap politics practiced in this State. Gentlemen, that little book carries no more weight with it than does the picketing of the White House in this time of crisis and peril to this nation and the heckling of our President....”
Two years on from the publication of the book (and presumably to Berry’s dismay) the legislative battle for women’s suffrage was won in 1919, with ratification of the 19th Amendment from the required number of states following in 1920: it was prohibited to deny citizens the right to vote on the basis of sex. It was a huge victory, but not the end of the struggle — many women were still, in practice, suppressed from voting. Fifty years earlier, the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 prohibited the denial of the right to vote on the basis of race or colour, but suppression of the Black vote continued via the back door through such things as literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses (in addition to more violent extralegal means). Such racist measures meant that, come ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, some 75% of Black women were still effectively disenfranchised, and they would continue to be so (along with many Black men) until the Civil Rights victories of the 1960s. (See Sharon Harley or Rosalyn Terborg-Penn for recent academic work on the contrasts and convergences of the women’s suffragette movement and that for racial equality.) Native American women too found themselves excluded from the enfranchisement of 1920 — an irony considering the huge influence that gender roles among the Iroquois acted upon N. W. S. A. co-founder Matilda Joslyn Gage. Although Native Americans were granted citizenship by an Act of Congress in 1924, state policies would not let them vote, and wouldn’t do so until 1957.
Of course, voting is just part of the picture as regards women’s struggle for full legal participation in society. It took more time, for example, to obtain the right to serve on a jury. And despite the 19th Amendment, and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th, women’s groups felt the need to keep up the pressure by proposing further, specific protections for women, in the form of the Equal Rights Amendment, which would recognize women’s equal rights to men under the law. First tabled in 1923, the E. R. A.’s history of ratifications and rescissions means that it is yet to be adopted. In law, as in real life, the struggle for full, unfettered suffrage remains like the novelty notebook: with pages still to be written.


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Temperance Stories and Sketches (1879)

Nov 19, 2020

The 1870s were a decade flooded with temperance literature in America. “Moral suasion” — the attempt to appeal to people through stories, arguments, and threats — was the usual strategy. Probably there is no better way to introduce Edward Carswell’s highly morally suasive Temperance Stories and Sketches — aimed at young readers and published in 1879 — than to quote its opening lines:
Let us suppose a case. Suppose that any of you, my young friends, were standing by the river Niagara, and you saw many people in the river dead and dying — men and women, girls and boys, and even little babies — how would you feel? And suppose you saw them come headlong over the awful cataract, some dashed upon the rocks, some being torn in the whirlpool or choked in the rapids, some trying with desperate energy to reach the shore, while others in despair floated down to death without even a struggle for life... Oh! You would cry, this is dreadful. Now, where do they get into the river? Can nothing be done to save them?
This intensity about the dangers of alcohol, tobacco, and gambling underlies the verse, the stories, and the illustrations that follow — all of them apparently created by Carswell. “Old Rye Makes a Speech” gives a very good idea of his usual approach:
I was made to be eaten,     And not to be drank;To be thrashed in a barn,     Not soaked in a tank.I come as a blessing     When put through a mill;As a blight and a curse     When run through a still.Make me up into loaves,     And your children are fed;But if into a drink,     I will starve them instead.
“The Bird’s Conundrum” follows a similar pattern. In it, a young girl asks why her pet bird was so rude to her cousin and uncle, only to have the bird tell her it was because they were drinking and smoking, which he found both physically and morally repugnant.
Some of the poems and prose in Temperance Stories and Sketches are quite a bit darker in tone. “The Four Seasons”, for example, illustrates the career of the intemperate man, from youth’s “cider or a mild cigar”, to middle age’s “wine, and card, or dice”, to winding up, as an old man, “a bloated wreck without a friend, / Who in a ditch or prison finds the end”.
Perhaps the most fascinating of Carswell’s pro-temperance inventions, however, are the so-called “Shadow Pictures”, which hide the shape of drunken figures (some oddly inviting in their peaceful slumber) amongst the branches, stumps, fences, and stones of various landscapes.  Also worth a mention are the “Hieroglyphic Rebuses”, which force the reader to decode them for yet more clarion calls to be clean, sober, charitable, and kind.
It’s questionable whether such cryptic exercises — or for that matter any of Carswell’s texts or images — were lastingly successful in dissuading people from overindulging in various vices. (Mark Twain — who once wrote that “intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance” — would have had his doubts.) But, as artefacts of a political movement and late-nineteenth-century American art, they continue to fascinate.


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En Pleine Mer: The Underwater Landscapes of Eugen von Ransonnet-Villez
Text by Melissa McCarthy
Dec 1, 2020

In the late 1860s Jules Verne's fictional Captain Nemo cruised the ocean deep discovering new underwater worlds and creatures. In the same decade, the non-fictional Eugen von Ransonnet-Villez pursued his fascination with zoology by developing the technology to produce the first underwater pictures: seascapes drawn as he sat beneath the waves in his diving bell.
Ransonnet-Villez was born in 1838 into an aristocratic family in Vienna. Encouraged towards intellectual inquiry, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts at the precocious age of eleven, although he subsequently studied law. Employment from 1858 at the Imperial Ministry of Foreign Affairs allowed him to travel widely and pursue  his interests in zoology and art.
Following a visit to the Red Sea, Ransonnet-Villez brought out his first book, a volume of sumptuous and detailed lithographs of the seascape and the creatures. He based these on careful, boat-based observation. But during his next year's visit to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Ransonnet-Villez took the plunge and designed for himself a submersible diving bell, in which he could descend beneath the surface to observe the environment more closely.
Measuring three feet high by two and half wide and deep, this submersible, of sheet iron and inch-thick glass, had the user's legs sticking out of the bottom so that he could propel himself along the seabed at a depth of five meters or so. It was weighed down by cannonballs, and with air pumped in, the diving bell allowed him to descend for sessions of up to three hours. Jovanovic-Kruspel et al in 2017 point out that ”The sight of a dead dog floating on the surface nearby was a very welcome sight to Ransonnet as it proved to him that there were no sharks to be feared.”
Undisturbed, and drawing with a soft pencil on greenish-coloured, varnished paper, Ransonnet could use a tin box to send up to the surface his finished pictures, which he later painted over in oils: the first depictions of the seascape executed by an artist under the sea.
Four of these works are reproduced as lithographs (executed by Ransonnet-Villez himself) in his 1867 book Sketches of the Inhabitants, Animal Life and Vegetation in the Lowlands and High Mountains of Ceylon: As Well as of the Submarine Scenery near the Coast Taken from a Diving Bell, while the paintings themselves, and his correspondence, are mainly in the Natural History Museum Vienna, and in the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco.
Ransonnet-Villez moved on to experiments with colour photography, and with an underwater telescope or reverse periscope, alongside collection and careful observation of samples, for later images of Singapore and the Adriatic.
But his underwater images are the most gripping. Jovanovic et al praise them as “a mixture between romantic-lyric underwater-landscapes and super realistic observations of the inhabiting organisms” — a characteristic nineteenth-century intermingling of the aesthetic with the scientific. She also points out his direct influence on Hans Hass, the titan of twentieth-century underwater photography.
We might place Ransonnet-Villez in the naturalist tradition, following Philip Henry Gosse, whose The Aquarium of 1854 was a high-water mark in interest in observing marine ecology at close hand. But Ransonnet-Villez deserves special mention for his dedication to conveying the sight and feel of the ocean, his literal immersion in his subject. As he explained of his diving-bell drawing excursions, “one's normal sense of distance and size is completely lost. You soon realize that in the depths of the ocean you need not only learn how to move, but how to see and hear as well.”


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Kaspar Hauser’s Art (1828–1833)

Sep 30, 2020

Kaspar Hauser’s appearance in Nuremberg on May 26, 1828, remains an enigma. At first assumed to be a “wild boy” like Victor of Aveyron, Hauser later said he had been raised in a dark cell sleeping on a straw bed and eating nothing but rye bread brought to him by a mysterious man who taught him the rudiments of German. During his lifetime, Hauser was rumored to be of princely parentage — the victim of a complicated royal plot — though modern historians have almost universally agreed he was mentally ill and probably a hoaxster.
From 1828 until his death in 1833, Hauser was watched over by various guardians, during which time his story became more and more strange and violent. In October 1829, he claimed to have been cut with a blade by a hooded man who threatened him. In April 1830, he claimed to have accidentally shot himself. Finally, in December 1833, Hauser came home with a deep wound in his chest, claiming he had been stabbed by a stranger who delivered him a coded message. Three days later, he died. The doctors who examined Hauser’s body agreed that the wound may have been self-inflicted; those familiar with Hauser’s style of writing suggested he had written the coded message himself.
Today, most people have heard of Hauser. Fewer know Hauser was also a talented artist. “In fact”, James J. Conway writes at Strange Flowers, “the use of drawing and painting to ‘civilize’ the foundling constitutes an early example of art therapy”. The man who encouraged Hauser to draw was Friedrich Daumer, the Nuremberg schoolmaster and philosopher who gave Hauser a home from 1828 to 1829. He was intrigued by the strange mixture of “coarseness” and “culture” Hauser displayed, and was curious to see art Hauser could create, given instruction and materials.
Of the surviving artworks created by Hauser range from what appear to be pen-and-ink self-portraits (one apparently done in a trance state) to watercolour studies of fruit and flowers. The latter are extraordinarily precise and quite beautiful. There is also a drawing of coats of arms and another, more sophisticated, of the blade the hooded man of October 1829 used to attack him.
In 1832, the legal scholar and patron of Hauser (and critic of his treatment) Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach published Kaspar Hauser: Crimes Against a Man's Soul, the first book to explore the famous case (you can read it here translated into English by Earl Stanhope, another patron of Hauser, though both would end up doubting the boy's story). Amongst the glimpses of Hauser's character and daily existence offered up by Feuerbach, we hear of the young man's obsessive dedication to art making:
One of his favourite pursuits next to writing was drawing, for which he shewed as much capacity as perseverance. During several days he had proposed to himself the task of copying a lithographic portrait of the Burgomaster Binder. A large bundle of quarto sheets was entirely filled with these copies, which, in proportion as they were finished, were piled in long succession upon each other. I looked over them, and found that the first attempts were exactly like those of little children who think that they have drawn a face, when they have scrawled on a paper a figure intended to represent an oval, and in it a pair of round holes, with a few perpendicular and cross scratches. But in almost every one of the following attempts some progress was visible, so that these strokes gradually became more similar to a human countenance, and at last represented the original, imperfectly and coarsely, but still in such a manner that the resemblance could be recognized. I expressed to him my approbation of his last attempts, but he did not appear satisfied with them, and gave me to understand that he must still make many copies before one of them was quite like, and he would then give it to the Burgomaster.
Another passage describes Hauser’s love for images in general, expressed in a curious daily routine.
Kaspar's room was small, but clean and light, and from the window was seen an agreeable and extensive landscape. We found him bare footed, wearing only a shirt and a pair of old pantaloons. The sides of the room, as high as they could be reached, were adorned by him with coloured prints, which he had received as presents from his numerous visitors. Every morning they were fixed by him anew on the walls with his saliva, which was then adhesive like glue ;* and they were removed by him as soon as it was dusk, and laid together near him. (* This saliva was so much like glue, that in removing the prints, pieces of them remained sticking to the walls, or fragments of the plaster adhered to the prints.)


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Ancient Courses: Harold Fisk’s Meander Maps of the Mississippi River (1944)

Jul 21, 2020

These eye-catching maps, drawn by Harold Fisk — a geologist and cartographer working for the US Army Corps of Engineers — trace the ever-shifting banks of the Mississippi River from southern Illinois to southern Louisiana. Created to illustrate a rather dry government report on “the nature and origin of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River”, these cartographic marvels give even the untrained a very good sense of what the report calls the “stages in the development” and the present “behavior” of the river system. To put it in plainer English: Fisk dreamed up a captivating, colorful, visually succinct way of representing the Mississippi’s fluctuations through both space and time.
Technically speaking, all of these maps represent the lower Mississippi’s “meander belt” — the area of a valley bottom across which the river’s channel has shifted over the millennia. The meander belt of the Mississippi — which has the third largest watershed in the world — is immense. To represent all the water’s many shifts within this belt, Fisk hit on the brilliant idea of using overlapping colors. The current course of the river (current, that is, in 1944) is represented by a mighty blank, punctuated by islands, and crisscrossed by the serpentine green course of 1880, the salmon-pink course of 1820, and the light blue course of 1765. In addition to these relatively recent courses, one can see the color-coded traces of where the river flowed even earlier — a writhing palimpsest of meanders stretching back to prehistoric times.
To recreate the course of the river during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Fisk drew on three historical maps (including Lieutenant Ross' influential charting from 1765). For earlier, pre-map eras, Fisk relied on aerial photography and geological study of the terrain, creating a truly extraordinary picture of the Mississippi’s long, deep history.
The blogger Jason Kottke beautifully evokes how these maps visualize the river’s long history, representing
thousands of years of course changes compressed into a single image by a clever mapmaker with an artistic eye. Looking at them, you're invited to imagine the Mississippi as it was during the European exploration of the Americas in the 1500s, during the Cahokia civilization in the 1200s (when this city's population matched London's), when the first humans came upon the river more than 12,000 years ago, and even back to before humans, when mammoths, camels, dire wolves, and giant beavers roamed the land and gazed upon the river.
The changes the Mississippi’s course has undergone since 1765 are especially striking. Many of these are attributable to the work of European settlers: new courses dug, logjams cleared, floodgate systems installed. In the late nineteenth century, extreme deforestation led the river town of Kaskaskia, Illinois, to be flooded and permanently separated from the rest of the state that it had once served as capital. A river, however, as anyone who’s ever lived near one knows, always has a mind of its own. Floods and sudden changes of course (known as avulsions) have also played havoc on the land. Over the course of about twenty-four hours, in 1876, the Mississippi abandoned its old channel on one side of Reverie, Tennessee, and started running on the other, cutting the town off from its old state and connecting it to dry land in Arkansas.
All of these alterations, both human and nonhuman, can be seen in Fisk’s wonderfully detailed, wonderfully vibrant maps — further evidence that the Mississippi, as Mark Twain put it, is not at all “a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable”.


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Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus (1827)

Jun 10, 2020

In Horace Hayman Wilson's two-volume (and fusty-titled) Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus you'll find, in their first English translations, several major Sanskrit plays, including Shudraka’s Mṛcchakatika (The Toy Cart), Kalidasa’s Vikramōrvaśīyam (Vikrama and Ursavi, or the Hero and the Nymph), and Bhavabhuti’s Malamitmadhava (Málati and Mádhava, or the Stolen Marriage).
These plays were not all written in the same era, nor are they much alike in form or content. It’s the equivalent of an Anglophone drama anthology in which Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, and Samuel Beckett all rub shoulders. Or, rather, it’s the equivalent of such an anthology if we put aside the unignorably colonialist expression of Wilson’s intention “to secure the Hindu Theatre a place in English literature” — as though Hindu Theatre, like India as a whole, were to be absorbed, amoeba-like, into the English world. The book even sports a dedication to King George "patron of oriental literature" (whatever that may mean), and a stated purpose "to familiarise his British subjects with the manners and feelings of their fellow subjects in the East". On the face of it this may seem a genuine attempt at understanding and empathy, but carries with it a darker undertone — to familiarise so as to better control.
That said, Select Specimens remains an accessible introduction to a part of history still little known by Western readers. Wilson — the first Boden chair of Sanskrit at Oxford — provides plentiful information about the composition and cultural background of each of the dramas, which he translates with tremendous nineteenth-century fluency, making truly excellent use of every English idiom from “alas!” to “zounds!”. And he even includes short accounts of twenty-three other dramas (some of which have still not been translated into English).
Of the three modes of dramatic representation in Sanskrit — Nátya, Nritya, and Nritta — Wilson’s specimens are, he tells us, all of Nátya, “being defined to be gesticulation with language”, whereas the Nritya “is gesticulation without language, or pantomime; and the Nritta is simple dancing”.
Most of Wilson’s specimen dramas are love stories with byzantine plots. The Toy Cart — a fifth-century comedy about a love triangle involving a poor young Brahmin, a courtesan, and the vulgar courtier who interferes with their affair — is full of outrageous humor and melodrama that have made for several successful Western adaptations (including one by the French poet Gérard de Nerval). The fourth-century Vikrama and Ursavi, or the Hero and the Nymph is, as the subtitle suggests, also the story of a difficult love affair — this one between the king Pururavas and the celestial nymph Ursavi. (The Vikrama of the title does not refer to a character, as one might think, but means “valor”.) The eighth-century Málati and Mádhava, or the Stolen Marriage features perhaps the most outlandish plot, involving both sorcery and human sacrifice.


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William Wood’s The History and Antiquities of Eyam (1848)

Jun 24, 2020

The small English village of Eyam has popped up periodically in the news of the last few months, but the behavior of its inhabitants during a bubonic plague outbreak in 1665–1666 has long been remembered as an example of a community sacrificing for the greater good. When the plague reached the small Derbyshire town, carried from London (which was then in the grips of the Great Plague) in a box full of tailor’s cloth patterns, legend has it that the people of Eyam quickly and voluntarily decided to isolate themselves to keep the disease from spreading further through the north of England. Until the outbreak had passed in the fall of 1666 —by which point 259 of Eyam’s 330 residents had died — they maintained a self-imposed cordon sanitaire, preventing people from entering or leaving the village and thereby successfully containing the plague.
As has been pointed out by Patrick Wallis among others, there is no clear evidence the village of Eyam chose to quarantine itself:
None of the original sources... mentions the village choosing its own quarantine. They instead note the success of that isolation and the leadership it demanded. That is not surprising, from the perspective of the period. By the 1660s quarantine was a well-established public health technique, but it was something enforced by the state, not enacted by public-spirited communities — in part because, for some, the temptation to break out was always too strong.
Indeed, there appears to be evidence that at the outset of the outbreak some wealthier residents of Eyam fled, erecting new houses in neighbouring valleys, or had their children sent away (as did village leader Reverend Mompesson himself).
The romanticised story of Eyam’s self-isolation appears to have first been enshrined by the eighteenth-century poet and Eyam-resident Anna Seward and later reinforced by William Wood’s 1848 book The History and Antiquities of Eyam — with its “minute account of the great plague, which desolated that village in the year 1666”.
It was Wood, in keeping with the Victorian habit of championing the stoicism of strong leaders, who made saints of the Reverend Thomas Stanley and the Reverend William Mompesson — two clerics in Eyam whose “magnanimous conduct” (the decision to contain the plague within the village) he credited with “the salvation of the surrounding country”. And it was the popularity of Wood’s book that helped lead to the official recognition of the heroism of the townspeople with annual memorial services and plaques placed on house fronts, rather arbitrarily it seems, commemorating where the victims had once lived.
None of this suggests, of course, that the people of Eyam were unheroic or that they did not, under their own steam, take measures to prevent the plague from spreading. Wood’s The Histories and Antiquities of Eyam contains enough quotations from eyewitnesses to suggest that the townspeople acted bravely and that Stanley and Mompesson were compassionate leaders. “The condition of the place has been so sad”, Mompesson writes in a letter written not long after the plague had passed, “that I persuade myself it did exceed all history and example”.
But what one sees above all in Wood’s pages is the appeal of what are very likely myths, such as the ballad-like story of a girl called Emmot and her fiancé, “a youth named Rowland, who resided in Middleton Dale, about a mile south-east of Eyam” — and who had to stop visiting Emmot once Eyam closed itself off. As one might expect, Emmot is eventually stricken by the plague, though it’s many months before poor Rowland, who’s had to stay away from the village, learns of her death. “Rowland wept as he left the tenantless dwelling”, Wood writes; “his dreadful apprehensions were verified; and until death closed his eyes at a great age, he frequently dropped a tear to the memory of his once lovely Emmot”.
The idea that a small community would, inspired by its right-minded leaders, draw a circle around itself “marked by particular and well-known stones and hills; beyond which it was solemnly agreed that no one of the villagers should proceed, whether infected or not”, as Wood memorably describes the making of the cordon sanitaire, is powerful. Whether or not the cordon was self-generated, or imposed by outside forces — or, as seems most likely, a combination of the two — Eyam’s history speaks directly and saliently to our situation today.


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Old English Customs Extant at the Present Time (1896)

May 19, 2020

Some of the old English customs that Peter Hempson Ditchfield describes in this fascinating late Victorian book are still familiar today. Carols and plum pudding for Christmas, hot cross buns on Good Friday, the maypole on May Day remain familiar features, if not of common English experience, at least of nostalgic imagination. But many other customs will be completely unfamiliar to twenty-first-century readers. Ditchfield’s description of the Christmastime tradition of “the Claire” — practiced in Burghead, Elgin — would be thought of as magic realism if found in a contemporary novel:
The seamen... meet at the west end of the town, carrying an old barrel, which they proceed to saw in two. The lower half is then nailed to a long spoke of firewood, which serves as a handle. The half barrel is then filled with dry wood saturated with tar, and built up like a pyramid, leaving a hollow to receive a burning peat. Should the bearer stumble or fall, the consequences would be unlucky to the town and to himself. The Claire is thrown down the western side of the hill, and a scramble ensues for the burning brands, which bring good luck, and are carried home and carefully preserved till the following year as a safeguard against all manner of ills.
The book abounds with similarly intriguing snippets of local lore and tradition. On Valentine’s Day, in East Anglia, we learn “it is customary to leave small presents on the doorstep, to ring the bell violently, and then run away”. In Yorkshire, “it is customary after a death to send to the friends of the family a bag of biscuits, together with a card bearing the name of the deceased”. On the Isle of Man, “according to custom, the laws of the island are read publicly on the Tynwald Hill once every year in Manx and in English”.
Ritual violence, mischief, and penalty fees play a major role in old British customs. During harvest-time in certain parts of Scotland, anyone who visits the harvest field and does not pay “head money” is “lifted up by his or her ankles and armpits, and the lower part of his person is brought into violent contact with the ground”. Butchers “in some few places keep up the custom of serenading a newly married couple of their own trade with the ‘marrow bones and cleavers’” until they are paid a fee to depart. Some of the more violent customs are not at all charming, and one could not be happier to think they have passed from the earth — above all, perhaps, the ritual stoning of wrens on St. Stephen’s Day.
Most of the customs Ditchfield records are rural — from the “obscure nooks and corners of our native land”. But a few old traditions were still lingering on in turn-of-the-century English cities, such as the strange and remarkable municipal custom at Huntingdon, where “the whole of the freemen of the borough assemble in the market-place on the morning of September 15th.”
The skull of an ox, borne on two poles, is placed at the head of a procession composed of the freemen and their sons, a certain number of them bearing spades and sticks. Three cheers having been given, the procession moves out of the town, and proceeds to the nearest point of the borough boundary, where the skull is lowered. The procession then moves along the boundary-line of the borough, the skull being dragged along the line as if it were a plough. The boundary-holes are dug afresh, and a boy thrown into each hole and struck with a spade. At a particular point called Blackstone Leys refreshments are provided, and the boys compete for prizes. The skull is then raised aloft, and the procession returns to the market-place, and then disperses after three more cheers have been given.
Old English Customs Extant at the Present Time is a wonderful resource for learning about Britain’s bygone local practices. It’s also a useful book for learning about the roots of some of these practices, including those that have persisted. Who knew that those “hot cross buns” so many of us were taught to sing about as children had their origins in the Roman practice of dividing their “sacred cakes with lines intersecting each other at right angles”, which they then presented to the gods? When the inhabitants of Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire — a part of England crisscrossed by Roman roads — became Christians, they reinterpreted the old custom and adapted it to new purposes. And so it goes.


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Nonsenseorship (1922)

Sep 8, 2020

In this “levititious literary escapade” — as publisher George P. Putnam describes his anthology — some of the wittiest writers of the Jazz Age lambaste the often nonsensically censorious atmosphere of prohibition-era America.
In short pieces of prose and verse, Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht, and Wallace Irwin (among others) protest the “prohibitions, inhibitions, and illegalities” in a nation then subject not only to Prohibition (which banned alcoholic beverages from 1920 until 1933) but also to the first rumblings of what would become the Motion Picture Production Code (which restricted depictions of sex in Hollywood movies from the 1920s until the 1960s) as well as other forms of censorship covering everything from radio broadcasts to “food... politics, baseball, diversion, [and] dress”. This list is borrowed from Hecht (1893–1964) — the legendary screenwriter responsible for Scarface, His Girl Friday, and other cinematic classics.
You will find no sympathy here for censors. “Their viewpoint is already amply set forth”, Putnam justly says: “Moreover, likely they would not be amusing.” Fortunately for us, most of the writers here remain amusing even a century later. The sheer absurdity of what was considered outrageous in the early 1920s struck them then as being just as absurd as it seems to us today. “The sight of a woman making baby clothes is not generally considered a vicious spectacle in many communities”, the journalist Heywood Broun writes with restrained frustration, “but it may not be shown on the screen in Pennsylvania by order of the state board of censors”. Ample proof, to Broun’s way of thinking, that a censor is a person who “believes he can hold back the mighty traffic of life with a tin whistle and a raised right hand”.
Dorothy Parker, in her wonderfully unrestrained poem, “Reformers: A Hymn of Hate”, gives us some idea of how rapidly the proscriptions of the 1920s set thinking people’s blood to boiling. She begins with the prohibitionists, who
can prove that the Johnstown flood,And the blizzard of 1888,And the destruction of PompeiiWere all due to alcohol.
But she soon moves on to the movie censors:
he motion picture is still in its infancy,—They are the boys who keep it there.If the film shows a party of clubmen tossing off ginger ale,Or a young bride dreaming over tiny garments,Or Douglas Fairbanks kissing Mary Pickford’s hand,They cut out the sceneAnd burn it in the public square.
And she saves no small amount of scorn for “the All-American Crabs”, “The Brave Little Band that is Against Everything” and are
forever signing petitionsUrging that cigarette-smokers should be deported, And that all places of amusement should be closed on SundaysAnd kept closed all week.They take everything personally;They go about shaking their heads,And sighing, “It’s all wrong, it’s all wrong”...
Some of the most interesting arguments here are made by the feminist journalist Ruth Hale in her short essay “The Woman’s Place,” which proposes that women have a great deal to teach men about “how to live under prohibitions and taboos”:
If the world outside the home is to become as circumscribed and paternalized as the world inside it, obviously all the advantage lies with those who have been living under nonsenseorship long enough to have learned to manage it.
Another feminist journalist, Helen Bullitt Lowry, points out — in her tribute to the “Uninhibited Flapper” — the paradoxical attractiveness of all prohibition, whether it concerns a word or an alcoholic drink. “Vice would die out from disuse”, she quips, “if the reformers did not advertise”.
Nonsenseorship is an enduringly entertaining volume, well worth browsing not only for its many quotable lines but for the charming illustrations by Ralph Barton.


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Herbert Geddes’ “Life in Japan” Collection: Hand-Coloured Glass Transparencies of the Meiji-Era

Oct 6, 2020

These glass-plate transparencies depicting life in Japan, likely the work of a number of photographers (names unknown), were collected in Yokohama during the years 1908–1918 by Herbert Geddes, a manager for a Canadian import-export company. According to the University of Victoria, where the plates are housed, such photographs (known as "Yokohama Photographs") were “sold to foreign tourists between about 1869 and 1912, before cameras and postcards were generally available”.
The subjects here range from what we would still associate with art aimed at tourists (temples, bridges, urban streets) to now less common images of labor (including silk factories, rice cultivation, and blacksmithing — not to mention the many women and girls carrying babies on their backs) — providing an intimate view into a largely bygone world.
Positive glass transparencies such as these were made directly from glass negatives (which were commonly used before the introduction of photographic film). As the photography historian Kim Timby writes, “When a glass negative was contact-printed to create a glass positive, none of the transparency and precision provided by the glass support were lost. No paper fibers absorbed solutions at any stage or left their trace during printing.” The resulting images were crystal clear, and could be projected through “magic lanterns” to allow people to experience photographs at an impressive scale. There was also something about the use of glass, so Timby writes, that appealed to a modern aesthetic: “It called to mind the exactness of lenses and prisms, the science of vision, the light and transparency of greenhouses, and the covered arcades and shop windows of modern urban life.”
As with photographic prints, glass transparencies were often hand-colored, a practice which during the Meiji Period (1868–1912) became more popular in Japan than it ever was in Europe or America. As photographs gradually replaced ukiyo-e prints on the marketplace, printmakers found themselves out of work — and so turned their skilled hands to coloring the competition.
The luminous effect of such coloring on glass, such as in Geddes' collection, are particularly stunning. The depth of field in some of the images, combined with the artists’ attentive shading and sense of tone, make it seem they could have been taken yesterday on color film.
Browse a selection from the collection, complete with captions, below.


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Joseph-Balthazar Sylvestre’s Alphabet Album (1843)

Sep 16, 2020

This “alphabet album”, a beautiful book of calligraphy and typographic engraving, was assembled by Joseph-Balthazar Silvestre (1791–1869), a paleographer, calligrapher, and miniaturist painter born in Avignon who later taught the sons of King Louis-Philippe I (1773–1850) how to form their letters.
Ranging from the old-fashioned to the modern, from the elegantly unreadable to the crystal clear, these alphabets are organized and labeled by century, country, and often library of origin, thereby providing the reader with a sense of how many different variations people have made on the simple shapes of Roman letters over the millennia.
Although presenting historical script up to Silvestre's modern-day of the 1840s, the casual viewer might be forgiven for thinking that Silvestre may have somehow plucked a couple of alphabets from the future as well. For those of us not well versed in the history of type, there's something oddly 20th-century about some of the forms — a reminder that type associated with particular eras is often "retrieved" from times past. Another highlight is a beautiful script entirely comprised of gnarled tree-forms, a medium given added salience in this volume given the sylvan name of its compiler.
Browse some of our favourites below, and please forgive the low resolution (which is the highest we could find).


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Charles Babbage’s Observations on Street Nuisances (1864)

Oct 1, 2020

Many people know that the English polymath Charles Babbage, with the assistance of Ada Lovelace, invented the first mechanical computer. Fewer people know how much he hated street noise, especially the music made by musicians in London:
It robs the industrious man of his time; it annoys the musical man by its intolerable badness; it irritates the invalid; deprives the patient, who at great inconvenience has visited London for the best medical advice, of that repose which, under such circumstances, is essential for his recovery, and it destroys the time and the energies of all the intellectual classes of society by its continual interruptions of their pursuits.
In a chapter excerpted from his autobiographical work The Life of a Philosopher, Babbage rails at length against the “instruments of torture permitted by the Government to be in daily and nightly use in the streets of London” — including “the human voice in various forms”.
What Babbage intends to be a call for legal reform sometimes reads more like a satirical text by Swift or Beckett:
The amount of interruption from street music, and from other occasional noises, varies with the nature and the habits of its victims. Those whose minds are entirely unoccupied receive it with satisfaction, as filling up the vacuum of time. Those whose thoughts are chiefly occupied with frivolous pursuits or with any other pursuits requiring but little attention from the reasoning or the reflective powers, readily attend to occasional street music. Those who possess an impaired bodily frame, and whose misery might be alleviated by good music at proper intervals, are absolutely driven to distraction by the vile and discordant music of the streets waking them, at all hours…
To illustrate the need for noise laws, Babbage tells a number of anecdotes. One involves an artist in the West End who, disturbed by the “continuous sound of music transmitted through the wall from his neighbour’s house”, orders his servant to hit the wall with a hammer repeatedly while he goes for an hour-long walk in the park. This retaliation leads to a temporary solution. The musical neighbor agrees to move his piano and drape it with blankets. However, his piano students don’t like playing on a “dumb piano” and abandon their professor, “who found it desirable to give up the house and retire to a more music-tolerating neighbourhood”.
Other anecdotes Babbage tells — about fatal carriage accidents caused by horses who’ve been startled by brass bands, about the distress caused to housebound invalids — are less amusing. In fact, Babbage’s sensitivity to “noise pollution” may be as prescient as his invention of an early computer. “Among environmental hazards to human health”, George Prochnik writes in a New York Times op-ed, “only air pollution causes more damage”.
Babbage’s tone is often hilarious. He himself acknowledges that not everyone shares his solemn dislike of street music. “I was once asked by an astute and sarcastic magistrate whether I seriously believed that a man’s brain would be injured by listening to an organ.” His reply? “Certainly not, for the obvious reason that no man having brain ever listened to street musicians.”
In this judgement, Babbage shows himself to have a good deal in common with his misophonic contemporary Schopenhauer, who writes in The World as Will:
Actually, I have for a long time been of the opinion that the quantity of noise anyone can comfortably endure is in inverse proportion to their mental powers, and can therefore be regarded as a rough measure of them. When I therefore hear dogs barking hour upon hour unrestrained in the courtyard of a house, I know what to think of the mental powers of the inhabitants. Whoever habitually slams doors rather than closing them by hand, or allows this happen in their house, is not merely ill-mannered, but a crude and obtuse person.
If you've interest in seeing the grey matter that got so enraged by street noise (and that imagined the first mechanical computer) then check out our post on images of Charles Babbage's brain.


text:
First Edition Pamphlet of Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?” (1852)
Text by Adam Green
Jul 4, 2020

The 4th of July Address, delivered in Corinthian Hall, by Frederick Douglass, is published on good paper, and makes a neat pamphlet of forty pages. The 'Address' may be had at this office, price ten cents, a single copy, or six dollars per hundred.
So ran an advertisement in Frederick Douglass' Paper (originally the North Star), a week after the famed abolitionist and orator had, on July 5th, 1852, stood before a packed Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, and delivered one of the most important speeches in the history of the United States. In addition to its masterful use of rhetoric and other oratory techniques since studied in classrooms throughout the US, the speech is memorable for casting a searing spotlight on the nation’s hypocrisy of celebrating liberation while also denying the liberty of millions through a vast and brutal regime of slavery. Upon finishing his speech to the six hundred or so mostly white abolitionists, Douglas was met with “a universal burst of applause” and seven hundred copies of the above-featured pamphlet were subscribed to on the spot.
While the pamphlet bears the rather stiff title Oration, Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester by Frederick Douglass, July 5th, 1852, Douglass’ anti-slavery speech is now known widely as "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?". This arresting appellation — which first appeared a few years later as title to an excerpt printed in Douglass' 1855 autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom — is a variation on the piercing question so central to the speech: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”
It's perhaps a shame that the question, in its repackaged form as a title, suffered the loss of that salient “your”. This simple possessive determiner carries a significance which runs to the very heart of Douglass' message — that this day celebrating liberty could never be for Douglass and his fellow Black Americans as long as slavery existed (“This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn”). As he goes on to powerfully reply:
I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
This critical stance toward the Fourth of July had long been shared by Black Americans  — a date to "mourn", not "rejoice" — and it was, in fact, the following day of the fifth that became important, at least for New Yorkers, celebrating as it did the full abolishment of slavery in their state in 1827. Legislators had in fact chosen the date of July 4 for the decree to take effect and with this choice likely had noble intentions — an attempt to foster some sense of now “shared” liberty perhaps — but the sad realities of persisting racial prejudice and violence would temper this idealistic and somewhat naive vision. As the New York Times notes, when debating how to celebrate the historic day Black New Yorkers worried, in addition to the hypocrisy inherent in the fourth, that a parade down Broadway on that date would be met with violence — “white revelers often attacked blacks on public holidays”.  And so the day after was chosen for the celebration and on July 5, 1827, four thousand Black New Yorkers marched along Broadway, and celebrations held as far away as Boston and Philadelphia. Holding celebrations on the fifth instead of the fourth became common among Black communities (amongst those that were not still enslaved, of course).  As Peter Osborne declared to the congregation at the New Haven African Church in Connecticut on July 5, 1832: “On account of the misfortune of our color, our fourth of July comes on the fifth; but I hope and trust that when the Declaration of Independence is fully executed, which declared that all men, without respect to person, were born free and equal, we may then have our fourth of July on the fourth.”
Douglass’ famous speech was, of course, also given on the fifth. Most sources agree that Douglass refused an invitation from the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society to speak on the fourth, and insisted on the fifth instead. A few other sources state that actually the whole celebration had been moved to the fifth due to the fourth falling on a Sunday (the “Lord’s Day”) — a reason given by the Society themselves in an announcement in Douglass' paper, though it is quite possible this excuse was after the fact and that they moved the whole day of celebrations to work around the prized speaker's wishes. (Some confusion may have also been sown by the existence of a letter dated June 26 in which Douglass states that he'd "secured Corinthian Hall for the morning of the 4th" — but an initial assumption it was from the year 1852 has since been questioned: Douglass was a frequent speaker at the Hall). Whatever the reason for this date of the fifth, it remains a powerful fact that one of the most important speeches on American freedom and liberty, centring on the meaning of the Fourth of July celebrations, was so subtly out of synch with that so hallowed date — a powerful metaphor for a freedom delayed.
Coming as it did in the wake of the controversial Fugitive Slave Act (which required citizens of free states to cooperate with returning escaped slaves), the debate stirred up by Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestseller Uncle Tom's Cabin (published just a few months before), and it being an election year, it seems Douglass was aware of the potential far-reaching impact of the Corinthian Hall event. A prolific speechwriter, Douglass appears to have poured extra effort into this one. Writing to the abolitionist Gerrit Smith two days later Douglass stated that the writing of the speech had “taken up much of my extra time for the last two or three weeks. You will readily think that the Speech ought to be good that has required so much time. Well, Some here think (it) was a good Speech.”
In writing the speech Douglass will have had in mind the printed version, and his words reaching beyond the room of abolitionists. In addition to the pamphlets that were printed and distributed, the oration was also published a few days later on July 9th in Frederick Douglass' Paper under the headline “The Celebration at Corinthian Hall”. Later that year, Douglass would go on to publish "The Heroic Slave" (as part of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society's anthology Autographs of Freedom), his first and only published work of fiction. Nine years later, the American Civil War would begin, and four years after that the eventual end of slavery in the US, or at least in its explicit chattel form — (for a fascinating study into how the institution of slavery in the US has been perpetuated beyond 1865, we highly recommend Ava DuVernay's 2016 documentary 13TH).
You can read a plain text transcript of Douglass' full speech at the Rochester University site here, in addition to his other writings. You can also browse a collection of Douglass' speeches (and correspondence) at the great Frederick Douglass Papers Digital Edition project.

author: Adam Green


text:
Of Chickens, Eggs, and Cannonballs: Roger Fenton’s Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855)
Text by Adam Green
Sep 1, 2020

This image, taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War in 1855, is one of the earliest photographic records of warfare. It's also widely considered one of the first "faked" photographs (in which the content has been manipulated with the aim of conveying a different reality as to that which took place).
Known as Valley of the Shadow of Death the photograph shows a desolate scene littered with cannonballs, some populating a ditch and some scattered along a stretch of road. It is an arresting image — somehow managing to evoke at once the heavy throes of mid-battle and the eery calm of a body-strewn aftermath. This famous image is, in fact, one of a pair — both taken by Fenton on the same day, from the same position, of the very same vista. The difference between them? The less famous version has no cannonballs on the road — they are all in the ditch instead.
To those so inclined, this spot-the-difference scenario presents an intriguing question — which photograph (if either) is of the scene Fenton actually encountered? Which one was taken first? Many have assumed that the cannonballs-on-road image is the second one, that Fenton staged the photograph by moving the cannonballs from their original place in the ditch onto the road for dramatic effect. The German art historian Ulrich Keller was one of the first to advance this theory, which Susan Sontag later accepted as gospel in her book Regarding the Pain of Others, where she writes:
Not surprisingly many of the canonical images of early war photography turn out to have been staged, or to have had their subjects tampered with. After reaching the much-shelled valley approaching Sebastopol in his horse-drawn darkroom, Fenton made two exposures from the same tripod position: in the first version of the celebrated photo he was to call “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”(despite the title it was not across this landscape that the Light Brigade made its doomed charge), the cannonballs are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before taking the second picture — the one that is always reproduced — he oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself.
After reading this passage, the relentlessly truth-loving documentary filmmaker Errol Morris became obsessed with determining whether it was indeed true that Fenton staged the picture — and in 2007 published his extensive explorations in an epic three-part New York Times piece called “Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?”. His conviction that “nothing is so obvious that it’s obvious” led him to interview several historians (including Keller), half of whom agreed that Fenton staged the photograph and half of whom thought the cannonballs on the road was how the scene presented itself, with the clear road photograph the result of soldiers later moving the cannonballs to recycle them for future battles.
Morris, still unsatisfied, then traveled to the exact spot in the Sevastopol, borrowed some cannonballs, and, after doing some staging of his own, tried to determine the chronology by studying the angle of light (all to no avail). Only with the eagle eyes of Dennis Purcell — an optical engineer who noticed that a group of five small rocks on the left slope were positioned in a lower position in the photograph with the cannonballs on the road — was Morris able to determine, seemingly beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Keller and Sontag were correct. Acknowledging it extremely unlikely that these five rocks — which Purcell nicknamed Fred, George, Oswald, Lionel, and Marmaduke — somehow moved up the hill, Morris and Purcell came to the conclusion that the rocks had moved down the hill (such is the way of gravity and rocks on a slope) and so this photograph showing the rocks in a lower position (the one with the cannonballs in the road) was taken second.  When Fenton and his assistant walked around the scene to stage the cannonballs in the road, they dislodged these rocks and they fell downwards. Thus the photograph was staged.
While Morris' investigations show that it's extremely likely Fenton staged the photograph by placing cannonballs in the road,  whether it was Fenton’s intention to actively “fool” viewers remains debatable. Did Fenton even have such a clearcut conception of what it would be to fool viewers? After all, by contemporary standards, it could be argued that almost every ostensibly documentary photograph taken in the 1850s was staged. The size and nature of Fenton’s photographic equipment meant he could only capture stationary objects, landscapes, and posed people. Indeed, for this reason and related safety concerns, Valley of the Shadow of Death wasn’t taken in the valley where the doomed Charge of the Light Brigade occurred but several miles away. (The title itself —a phrase from Psalm 23 used by British troops before being taken up by Tennyson — was subsequently imposed by the publisher and gallerist Thomas Agnew, who displayed Fenton’s photograph as part of a series entitled Panorama of the Plateau of Sebastopol in Eleven Parts.)
Fenton's Valley of the Shadow of Death was produced some eighty years before Robert Capa's Falling Soldier, at a time when, it could be argued, such staging was written into the very practicalities of the medium, a medium which in its early days was much closer to painting than it is now. Might what we see as inauthentic staging instead be seen as working within limitations to produce something actually more authentic, that reflected more truthfully the throes of battle in which Fenton and his over-sized equipment could not be fully immersed as could Capa? Or more simply, might Fenton have witnessed soldiers clearing the road of cannonballs and merely recreated it as he'd first encountered it? Are not all photographs in some way staged? All interesting questions.
For more on such things we highly recommend Morris' Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography (2011), which includes his New York Times piece on Fenton as well as a few other similar essays on other documentary photographs through history. You can also listen to Morris talking about his obsession with this photograph in an episode of Radiolab from 2012.


text:
Erbario: a 15th-century Herbal from Northern Italy

May 12, 2020

This wonderful 15th-century herbal hails from northern Italy (mostly likely the Veneto) and contains a few different kinds of illustration styles, evidence of a series of augmentations to the manuscript made across several generations. It started life out in the early fifteenth century as a set of around seventy highly stylised paintings of plants, whose patterns, human faces, and other fantastical elements broadly follow medieval conventions (in particular the Pseudo-Apuleius herbal tradition). Sometime later in the century, as Karen M. Reeds writes “the bound manuscript of 100 folios was, in effect, interleaved”:
watercolors of still more plants were painted on many of the versos and on both sides of the folios previously left blank. At the same time, labels and some herbal texts in Italian, written mostly in sepia ink, were added. In technique, in descriptive detail, and choice of colors, these watercolor illustrations contrast strongly with the Pseudo-Apuleius figures on the facing rectos...

Among this second set is a subset of markedly more naturalistic images, perhaps painted directly from specimens, or at least very good drawings. Finally, at the very end of the manuscript is a “nature print” of a single leaf labeled Salvia salvaticha, with the handwriting of its note indicating it was done by this same person behind the second set of additions (see final image below).
It’s the original set — with its anthropomorphised vegetation and dragon-shaped roots — which we’ve been mostly drawn to in our highlights below, but you can have a look at the original on the Penn Libraries site (Ms. LJS 419) to get a sense of the full range of interleaved styles in this remarkable manuscript.


text:
Sadakichi Hartmann’s Conversations with Walt Whitman (1895)

Oct 21, 2020

In 1873, when he was fifty-three years old, Walt Whitman suffered a stroke that left him partly paralyzed. Within months, he moved from Washington, DC, where he’d been living since the Civil War, to his brother’s house in Camden, New Jersey. This was the house where Whitman would receive Oscar Wilde, during Wilde’s tour of America, and where he would first get to know the American painter Thomas Eakins, who both painted and photographed the poet in his final years.
In 1884, Whitman moved less than a mile away to his own home on Mickle Street in Camden, where he would live until his death eight years later. Although bedridden for most of his time on Mickle Street, he continued to revise Leaves of Grass until the end (publishing the last edition of his lifetime in 1889 and working on another even on his deathbed) and to receive visitors, including Eakins; Horace Traubel, author of the nine-volume Boswellian biography Walt Whitman in Camden); and Sadakichi Hartmann, author of the lesser-known, much shorter biographical recollection Conversations with Whitman, which are touchingly dedicated to “Artist Thomas Eakins, of Philadelphia, as an Admirer of Walt Whitman, in his own Native Independence, Simplicity and Force, without Crankiness and Subserviency.”
Hartmann led a truly extraordinary life. He was born in 1867 to a Japanese mother and a German father on the artificial island of Dejima (originally built in 1634 to house Portuguese traders who were legally barred from setting foot in Japan). After a childhood spent mostly in Germany, he moved with his family to Philadelphia in 1882, at age fourteen, and paid his first visit to Whitman only two years later, crossing the bridge over the Delaware River from Philadelphia to Camden on “a disagreeable day” with “snow lying on the ground, and though it was thawing, the wind felt cold as it sped through the streets and rattled at the shutters”. Hartmann continues:
An old man with a long grey beard, flowing over his open shirt front — the first thing I actually saw of Whitman was his naked breast — half opened the door and looked out.    SADAKICHI: “I would like to see Walt Whitman.”    WHITMAN: “That’s my name. And you are a Japanese boy, are you not?” (Except very small boys the only person I met in those years who recognized my nationality at the first glance.)    SADAKICHI: “My father is a German, but my mother was a Japanese and I was born in Japan.”    WHITMAN: “H’m — Come in.”
And so Hartmann does, all the while taking in the details the “small and humbled two windowed little parlor” which was “a varitable [sic] sea of newspapers, books, magazines, circulars, rejected manuscripts, etc.” and noting the “healthy manliness” of Whitman’s face. Conversations with Whitman is full of such striking details — and full, of course, of Whitman’s memorable way of talking. The earnestness of the young Hartmann brings out Whitman’s boldest optimism. He says such things as: “Americans are allowed to be different. The theory of our government is to give to every man the freedom of his activity — to work, study, electrify” and (this while “frying several eggs” on the stovetop in preparation for a meal that also involves California claret and lobster):
“The American nation is not much at present, but will be some day the most glorious one on earth. At first the cooking must be done, the table set, before one can sit down to a square meal. We are now tuning the instruments, afterwards comes the music.”
In the touching final encounter between the dying Whitman and Hartmann, who has brought his wife to meet him, they talk about more ordinary things. When Whitman’s midday meal is carried in, Hartmann says they had better go. “I hope you will soon feel better”. To which Whitman replies, optimistically as ever: “It is clouded now, possibly, it’ll pass by”.
Whitman was among the first, but far from the last, famous men with whom Hartmann came into contact. He would later befriend Stéphane Mallarmé, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Ezra Pound. He would write for Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work, compose a two-volume History of American Art, and be crowned King of the Bohemians of Greenwich Village by the eccentric impresario Guido Bruno. He also penned some of the earliest English-language haiku, put on the first “symphony of smells” (a performance consisting entirely of perfumes) in San Francisco in 1919, and had a minor role as a magician in the swashbuckler film The Thief of Bagdad (1925).
Narrowly avoiding being incarcerated during the mass internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, Hartmann lived the last years of his life in southern California and died while visiting one of his daughters in St. Petersburg, Florida. His legacy may have faded, but he remains a fascinating figure, best remembered for his avant-garde attitudes and, as Luc Sante puts it in Low Life, his “prescient theoretical writings on photography”.


text:
Filippo Buonanni’s Harmonic Cabinet (1722)
Text by Melissa McCarthy
Oct 13, 2020

The German polymath and Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher had a lifelong fascination with sound and devoted two books to the subject: Musurgia Universalis (1650), on the theoretical (and theological) aspects, and Phonurgia Nova (1673), on the science of acoustics and its practical applications. It's no surprise then to learn that his famed museum at Rome's Collegio Romano boasted— in addition to “vomiting statues”, ghost-conjuring mirrors, and other curious wonders — a vast and diverse collection of musical instruments.
Much of what we know of Kircher's museum today is thanks to his student and fellow Jesuit priest Filippo Buonanni (1638-1725), who succeeded Kircher as both Professor of Mathematics and, upon Kircher's death, as chief custodian of the museum for which he produced an epic and exhaustive, near-800-page catalogue in 1709. Following in his master's footsteps, Buonanni too held a dizzying array of interests and specialisms including numismatics, microscopy, spontaneous generation, Chinese laquer, seashells (on which he produced the first monograph), and also, like Kircher, music.
Inspired by the collection of instruments in Kircher's wunderkammer, and intrigued by the stories behind them, in 1722 Buonanni published his Gabinetto Armonico pieno d’istromenti sonori (or Harmonic cabinet full of sonorous instruments), an attempt to catalogue, for the first time, the musical instruments of the world.  While there's a short and often illuminating text for each instrument it is the 152 engraved plates — executed by Flemish artist and publisher Arnold van Westerhout — which really steal the show. The featured instruments are divided into three sections —  wind, string, and percussion — and preceded by thirteen brief discussions of other musical categories, including: military, funeral, used in sacrifices, and, intriguingly, as used at sea: not sirens, but chantying sailors. While some of the instruments gathered in Buonanni's book are as simple as the bee-keeper banging his tub, or the clacking of shoes against the floor, some are highly crafted, technical machines; the great organ at Palazzo Verospi requires a fold-out page to show it all. We are also treated to what might be considered more incidental instruments, for example, the bell about a bound criminal's neck and the sound of a soldier's sword being struck.
Some of the instruments in their settings seem outlandish; you’ll notice Pan and cherubs among the musicians. Well might they look fantastical, for, as Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson explain in their essay ”Cat Pianos, Sound-Houses, and Other Imaginary Musical Instruments”, such instruments as the “Tubo Cochleato” did not yet exist; the Gabinetto lists both actually existing and projected instruments; ones that had been, or should one day be, constructed.
As much anthropological as it is encyclopaedic, the book shows not just instruments, but their musicians, too — even women —and as such it fits into the popular tradition of travel writing and catalogues of foreign peoples. In addition to the folk and antiquity traditions of Buonanni's Europe, the Gabinetto covers instruments and musicians from Africa, Asia, and the Americas, often accompanied by details of ethnographic encounters. Readers of sixteenth-century explorers such as John White and Theodore de Bry might find the “Tromba della Florida” familiar, with its depiction of the clothing, hairstyle, and landscape of the musician. Making sense and clarity out of music, peoples, and the world, Buonanni’s Gabinetto can be seen as itself an instrument of harmonious understanding.
You can browse our highlights of the engravings below, and also see them in context in a complete scan of the book here.