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Owen Jones’ Examples of Chinese Ornament (1867)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Nov 21, 2012

In The Grammar of Ornament (1856), his highly influential sourcebook that defined decoration as a universal human impulse, the architect Owen Jones had nothing kind to say about Chinese art and ornament. This diatribe catches the present-day reader slightly off-guard, coming as it does after a series of surprisingly cosmopolitan claims: claims that Moorish ornamentation achieved a level of perfection that Christian artisans would only begin to approximate centuries later; that Mexican decoration leaves a viewer “astonished” by its “high state” of execution; that in all of Indian art, “we find nothing that has been added without purpose, nor that could be removed without disadvantage.” When Jones reaches China, however, he immediately lapses into a cultural chauvinism born from ignorance, making claims that the millennia of civilizations in the region have been “totally unimaginative”, “wholly devoid of either architectural design or ornament”, and that the Chinese ceramics tradition is surpassed by “the rude water-bottles of porous clay which the untutored Arabian potter fashions daily on the banks of the Nile, assisted only by the instincts of his gentle race.”
What then led Jones to write an entire book on Chinese ornament a decade later? Well, it turns out he was wrong, and he admits as much . . . in a way. “I was led, from my then knowledge, to express the opinion that the Chinese had not the power of dealing with conventional ornamental form: but it now appears that there has been a period in which a School of Art existed in China of a very important kind.” He describes how the Second Opium War and Taiping Rebellion — waged between the publication of his two books — led to “the destruction and sacking of many public buildings” and a sudden influx of “truly magnificent works” to private collections in Europe and to the holdings of the National Collection at South Kensington (now the V&A). Spoils, in other words: such as the estimated million objects looted by British and French troops during October 1860 from the Yuanmingyuan palace complex that was subsequently razed in Beijing. Despite his reversal in taste, Jones’ first loves remain palpable in Examples of Chinese Ornament. During a grand tour of Europe and North Africa in his youth, he developed his interest in geometry and polychrome patterning while gazing up, awestruck, at the Alhambra in Andalusia, Spain. Finding a similar level of complexity in Chinese ornament, he suspects that the entire tradition derives from a “foreign origin”: “There is of course, in all these works, something essentially Chinese in the mode of rendering the idea, but the original idea is evidently Mohammedan.”
Below you can browse a selection of chromolithograph patterns from Jones’ book of examples. The plates are reproductions of ornamentation found on painted vases, cloisonné enamel incense burners, lacquer boxes, and many more objects. Unfortunately, the descriptions given by Jones are far from scholarly: he provided no means of linking a pattern back to its museum holding; made no attempt to date or locate where the object came from; and to an almost comical degree, he found the need to note, again and again, how these Chinese designs seem derivative of Persian and Indian motifs. Kate Hill has helped fill in some of the blanks here. The chromolithographs feature patterns from falangcai vessels with Daoguang marks, Qianlong-era vases, and Yongzheng bowls. Instead of offering a comprehensive view of Chinese ornament, Jones seems to have suppressed decorative schemes and flattened designs that did not fit with the principles outlined in his earlier Grammar.
Despite these shortcomings, Examples of Chinese Ornament continues to prove of interest for its depth of captured color, ornamental complexity, and influence on European chinoiserie. In her 2001 artwork Identity — a porcelain vase that purposefully resembles Chinese ceramics made for export to Europe — Hong Kong–born artist Sin-ying Ho reproduced patterns compiled by Jones. “Each motif is several times removed from its origin”, writes Alex Burchmore, “blurring authenticity and fabrication while resisting identification with a ‘pure’ cultural essence.” Perhaps this is the best way to view the plates below: designs that must be viewed through the eyes of an English architect, marveling at the foreign influence he sees in possibly looted treasures, trying to imagine what China might be.


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Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus (1897)

Dec 21, 2012

In 1897, Dr. Philip O'Hanlon, a coroner's assistant on Manhattan's Upper West Side, was asked a question by his then eight-year-old daughter, Virginia, which many a parent has been asked before: whether Santa Claus really exists. O'Hanlon deferred. He suggested Virginia wrote asking the question to one of New York's most prominent newspapers at the time, The Sun, assuring her that "If you see it in The Sun, it's so."
Dear Editor: I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, 'If you see it in The Sun it's so.' Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?
The response to Virginia's letter by one of the paper's editors, Francis Pharcellus Church, remains the most reprinted editorial ever to run in any newspaper in the English language and found itself the subject of books, a film and television series. In his response Church goes beyond a simple "yes of course" to explore the philosophical issues behind Virginia's request to tell her "the truth" and in the process  lampoon a certain skepticism which he had found rife in American society since the suffering of the Civil War. His message in short - there is a reality beyond the visible.
VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

source: public-domain-review

type: collection

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


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Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964)

Dec 18, 2012

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is a 1964 science fiction film that regularly appears on lists of the worst films ever made. It is regularly featured in the "bottom 100" list on the Internet Movie Database, and was featured in an episode of the 1986 syndicated series, the Canned Film Festival. It was directed by Nicholas Webster, and it stars John Call as Santa Claus. It also includes an 8-year-old Pia Zadora playing the role of one of the Martian children. The film took on newfound fame in the 1990s after being featured on an episode of the comedy series Mystery Science Theater 3000. It became a holiday staple on the Comedy Central cable channel in the years following its 1991 premiere. It has since found new life again in the 2000s having been riffed by Cinematic Titanic. The movie was also featured on the current run of "Elvira's Movie Macabre." The plot? In a bid to make disgruntled Martian children happier, Martians kidnap Santa from Earth...  (Wikipedia)


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A Pictorial History of Santa Claus

Dec 13, 2012

Contrary to what many believe, Santa Claus as we know him today - sleigh riding, gift-giving, rotund and white bearded with his distinctive red suit trimmed with white fur - was not the creation of the Coca Cola Company. Although their Christmas advertising campaigns of the 1930s and 40s were key to popularising the image, Santa can be seen in his modern form decades before Coca Cola's illustrator Haddon Sundblom got to work. Prior to settling on his famed red garb and jolly bearded countenance, throughout the latter half of the 19th century, Santa morphed through a variety of different looks. From the description given in Clement Moore's A Visit from St Nicholas in 1822, through the vision of artist Thomas Nast, and later Norman Rockwell, Mr Claus gradually shed his various guises and became the jolly red-suited Santa we know today. Below we've put together a little pictorial guide showing his evolvement through the ages.
13TH CENTURY
The name Santa Claus has his roots in the informal Dutch name for St. Nicholas, Sinterklaas (an abbreviation of Sint Nikolaas). St. Nicholas was a historic 4th-century Greek saint (from an area now in modern day Turkey) who had a reputation for secret gift-giving, such as putting coins in the shoes left out for him. He was also famous for presenting the three impoverished daughters of a pious Christian with dowries so that they would not have to become prostitutes.
Being the patron saint of children St. Nicholas has long been associated with giving gifts to children. The parallels to the modern day Santa Claus don't end there. In his Dutch form of Sinterklaas he was imagined to carry a staff, ride above the rooftops (on a huge white horse) and have mischievous helpers who listened at chimneys to find out whether children were being bad or good. These features all also link him to the legend of Odin, a god who was worshipped among the Germanic peoples in North and Western Europe prior to Christianization.
Although in Europe the feast of St. Nicholas, typically on the 6th December, was very popular throughout the middle ages, after the reformation in the 16th century the celebration died out in most Protestant countries, apart from Holland where the celebration of Sinterklaas lived on.
17th CENTURY
Another important tributary to the image of Santa Claus was the phenomenon of Father Christmas - also known as Old Father Christmas, Sir Christmas, and Lord Christmas - a traditional figure in English folklore and identified  with the similarly bearded Old English god Woden. He typically represented the spirit of good cheer at Christmas, but was not associated with either children or the bringing of gifts.
The earliest English examples of the personification of Christmas are thought to be from a 15th century carol which refers to a "Sire Christmas". The picture above is from Josiah King's The Examination and Tryal of Father Christmas (1686), published shortly after Christmas was reinstated as a holy day in England after being banned in post Civil War England as a symbol of "Catholic superstition and godless self-indulgence.”
1810
Although the east coast of America was full of Dutch settlers, it was not until the early 19th century that the figure of "Sinterklaas" would make his way properly across the Atlantic and so give birth to the Americanised Santa Claus. Following the Revolutionary War the already heavily Dutch influenced New York City (formerly of course named New Amsterdam) saw a new surge of interest in Dutch customs, and with them St. Nicholas. In 1804 John Pintard, an influential patriot and antiquarian, founded the New York Historical Society and promoted St. Nicholas as patron saint of both the society and city. On December 6th 1810 the society hosted its first St. Nicholas anniversary dinner and Pintard commissioned the artist Alexander Anderson to draw an image of the saint to be handed out at the dinner. In Anderson's portrayal he was still shown as a religious figure, but now he was also clearly depositing gifts in fireside stockings and is associated with rewarding the goodness of children. While "St. Nicholas day" never quite took off in the way Pintard wanted, Anderson's image of "Sancte Claus" most certainly did.
A year before the New York Historical Society's feast the author Washington Irving had written about Santa in his satirical fiction Knickerbocker's History of New York, describing a jolly St. Nicholas character as opposed to the saintly bishop of yesteryear - one who flew in a reindeer pulled sleigh and delivered presents down chimneys. The next key step to securing the image of Santa Claus was the 1822 poem entitled A Visit from St. Nicholas written by Clement Moore, later better known as The Night Before Christmas. Moore drew upon Irving's description and Pintard's New Amsterdam tradition and added some more Odin-like elements from German and Norse legends to create the all-winking, sleigh-riding Saint and also the names for his flying reindeer.
1863
As time went by, more and more was added to the Santa Claus legend. The cartoonist Thomas Nast established the bounds for Santa Claus' current look with an initial illustration in an 1863 issue of Harper's Weekly, as part of a large illustration titled "A Christmas Furlough".
In later Nast drawings a home at the North Pole was added, as was the workshop for building toys and a large book filled with the names of children who had been naughty or nice.
1864
Although Nast had gotten the paraphernalia of reindeer, sleigh, etc down to a tee, the famous red suit was still yet to be set. Over the decades Santa would be depicted in a variety of colours such as blue, green and the yellow as pictured in this 1864 edition of Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas".
1868
In this 1868 advert for Sugar Plums we see the red of the jacket, but the hat is green and he appears to have no trousers on at all.
1881
In this later 1881 illustration by Thomas Nast named "Merry Old Santa" the modern Santa character really begins to take shape. Present is the jolly rotundity and the all important red of the suit.
1902
The Life and Adventures Of Santa Claus by author of The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, with its elaborations and much added detail went a long way to popularising the legend of Santa. However, in the cover to the first edition of Baum's book we see the red of his suit is still yet to be 'mandatory'.
In this cover for Puck illustrated by the Australian Frank A. Nankivell, we see perhaps for the first time a depcition of Santa which is indistinguishable from that of the present day.
1906
In this Canadian department store brochure from 1906 we see that Santa, with his black trimmed suit and bobble-less hat, was still able to deviate from his typical image.
1913
The illustrator Norman Rockwell, with his many depictions throughout the 1920s, was a key player in cementing Santa's modern look. Here is an early illustration of his from before the First World War.
1914
A Japanese illustration from 1914, showing the spread of the Santa legend had reached far wider than just Europe and America.
1918
Santa appears in classic form in this piece of U.S. WW1 propaganda.
1920
Pictured here are just two of Norman Rockwell's many Santa themed covers for the Saturday Evening Post. Like Sundblom's depictions for Coca Cola more than a decade later, these pictures of Rockwell's give a very physiologically human and naturalistic aspect to the character as opposed to the more cartoonish features which had gone before.
1930
Santa in Australia in 1930.
1942
In the U.S. Second World War poster below Santa takes a radical departure from the jolly red suit and dons the dour shades of war.


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Illustrations from a Chapbook on Robinson Crusoe (ca. 1800)

Dec 7, 2012

Illustrations from a chapbook entitled The Surprising Life and most Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of the City of York, Mariner (ca.1800) as featured in John Ashton's Chap-books of the Eighteenth Century (1882).


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Diary Days from Christmas Past

Dec 18, 2012

With December 25th fast approaching we have put together a little collection of entries for Christmas Day from an eclectic mix of different diaries spanning five centuries, from 1599 to 1918. Amid famed diarists such as the wife-beating Samuel Pepys, the distinctly non-festive John Adams, and the rhapsodic Thoreau, there are a sprinkling of daily jottings from relative unknowns - many speaking apart from loved ones, at war, sea or in foreign climes.
All diaries are housed at the Internet Archive - click the link below each extract to take you to the source.


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One World or None (1946)

Nov 23, 2012

A film from the Prelinger Archives showing the horrors of atomic warfare. Made only one year after the end of the Second World War, it is thought to be the first "atomic scare movie", a genre which would flourish in the U.S. throughout the next decade.


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Making a Living (1914)

Jan 11, 2013

Making a Living (1914) marked Charlie Chaplin's first ever film appearance. In the film he plays a lady-charming swindler, Edgar English, who runs afoul of the Keystone Kops. Chaplin strongly disliked the picture, but one review picked him out as "a comedian of the first water." Although his character wears a large moustache, top hat, and carries a cane, it was not until his next film, Kid Auto Races at Venice, that Chaplin would appear as his famous Tramp character with which he would thereon be identified. The music we hear over the film (added afterwards) is by Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers.


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Twelve Twelve Twelve

Dec 12, 2012

To celebrate the most auspicious occasion of it being the 12th day of the 12th month of the 12th year, i.e. 12/12/12, we've put together a little collection of twelve pictures of people in groups of twelve. Through a mix of paintings and photographs we travel all over the world, from Central Java in Indonesia to very northern Sweden, from south-eastern Russia to the palace of Archduke Leopold Salvador of Austria.
All images sourced from the very handy Wikimedia Commons category "Group portraits with 12 persons".


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The Nine Lives of a Cat (1860)

Jan 10, 2013

Beautifully illustrated (though perhaps not so well rhymed!) tale of the cat with nine lives. From the preface:
This tale of wonder is told for children; with which view, it has been carefully designed and very nicely printed. For some time past, it has arrived at the dignity of a popular Nursery Tale in the Author's family ; and it is hoped it will merit the same good fortune elsewhere. It will be worth while explaining, that the circle in each page is made to represent some object in connection with the story ; and, that as some of them have proved rather puzzling, to Juvenile admirers has been left the task of " finding them out."


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The First New Year (1885)

Dec 31, 2012

A short little poem meditating on the inevitable end of all things and the power of new beginnings. Little is known about the author George Warwick although he appears to also be the author of this poem on the theme of Christmas in a similar pamphlet series kept by the Library of Congress.


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Frank C. Stanley singing Auld Lang Syne (1910)

Dec 28, 2012

Frank C. Stanley performing Auld Lang Syne, the poem written by the Scotsman Robert Burns which is traditionally sung to celebrate the start of the New Year at the stroke of midnight. The song's Scots title may be translated into English literally as "old long since", or more idiomatically, "long long ago", "days gone by" or "old times". Consequently "For auld lang syne", as it appears in the first line of the chorus, might be loosely translated as "for (the sake of) old times". The lyrics of the poem were themselves heavily based on pre-existing verses. Robert Burns sent a copy of his song to the Scots Musical Museum with the remark, "The following song, an old song, of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript until I took it down from an old man." Some of the lyrics were indeed "collected" rather than composed by the poet; the ballad "Old Long Syne" printed in 1711 by James Watson shows considerable similarity in the first verse and the chorus to Burns' later poem, and is almost certainly derived from the same "old song". It is a fair supposition to attribute the rest of the poem to Burns himself. (Wikipedia)
Stanley also made a name for himself as a banjo player under his real name William Stanley Grinsted. This recording was made in the year of his death, 1910, only months before he died of pleurisy on 12 December at his home in Orange, New Jersey.


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Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse (1733)

Dec 21, 2012

Best known for his advancements in scientific thought Sir Isaac Newton was also big into his apocalyptic prophecy. Largely unknown and unpublished documents, evidently written by Isaac Newton, indicate that he believed the world could end in 2060 AD. (He also had many other possible dates e.g. 2034). Despite the dramatic nature of a prediction of the end of the world, Newton may not have been referring to the 2060 date as a destructive act resulting in the annihilation of the earth and its inhabitants, but rather one in which he believed the world was to be replaced with a new one based upon a transition to an era of divinely inspired peace. In Christian theology, this concept is often referred to as The Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the establishment of Paradise by The Kingdom of God on Earth. In his posthumously-published Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John, Newton expressed his belief that Bible prophecy would not be understood "until the time of the end", and that even then "none of the wicked shall understand". Referring to that as a future time ("the last age, the age of opening these things, be now approaching"), Newton also anticipated "the general preaching of the Gospel be approaching" and "the Gospel must first be preached in all nations before the great tribulation, and end of the world". (Wikipedia)
Some great extra reading on Newton's passion for Biblical prophecy and the date of 2060 AD can be found here on the isaac-newton.org website
Also see in HTML and text version here on the Internet Archive via Project Gutenberg.


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Omar Rabbi Elozor by Cantor Meyer Kanewsky and his choir (1919)

Dec 5, 2012

"Omar Rabbi Elozor" (In English: "Said Rabbi Eliezar"), performed by Cantor Meyer Kanewsky and his choir in 1919 for Edison Records. The lyrics are based on the last passage of Tractate Berakhot, from the Talmud, with a few repeats. The first line roughly translates as: "Said Rabbi Elazar, quoting Rabbi Chaninah, Scholars increase the levels of peace in the world".


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Decayed Daguerreotypes
Text by Adam Green
Jan 8, 2013

A selection of images from the Library of Congress found via the always excellent Ptak Science Books blog. The daguerreotype, invented by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in 1837, was the first commercially successful photographic process and was popular throughout the mid-19th century. Daguerreotype portraits were made by the model posing (often with head fixed in place with a clamp to keep it still the few minutes required) before an exposed light-sensitive silvered copper plate, which was then developed by mercury fumes and fixed with salts. This fixing however was far from permanent - like the people they captured the images too were subject to change and decay. They were extremely sensitive to scratches, dust, hair, etc, and particularly the rubbing of the glass cover if the glue holding it in place deteriorated. As well as rubbing, the glass itself can also deteriorate and bubbles of solvent explode upon the image. The daguerreotypes below are from the studio of Mathew Brady, one of the most celebrated 19th-century American photographers, best known for his portraits of celebrities and his documentation of the American Civil War which earned him the title of "father of photojournalism". The Library of Congress received the majority of the Brady daguerreotypes as a gift from the Army War College in 1920.

author: Adam Green


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Woodrow Wilson On Democratic Principles (1912)

Sep 7, 2017

Recorded on September 24th 1912, "Democratic Principles" (track 2 in the player above) was one of a series of six recordings made by Wilson in the run up to the 1912 presidential election — the other recordings were "On the Third Party, "On The Trusts, "To the Farmers" (track 1 above), "On Labor", and "On the Tariff". According to Woodrow Wilson and the Press, the process was not a pleasant one for Wilson. Josephus Daniels — whom, with a little help from Mrs Wilson, persuaded a reluctant Wilson to do it — recalled how Wilson "went at it as though he was going to the stake.... He spoke into the machine and made the records and when he came out he said he felt as though he had been offered up. He acted as if Mrs Wilson and I were his worst enemies and persecutors." (280) Despite his reticence, the recording would go on to be a great success for Wilson, and no doubt helped him in his eventual victory come polling day. Below a transcript of "On Democratic Principles".
We stand in the presence of an awakened nation impatient of partisan make-believe. The nation has awakened to a sense of neglected ideals and neglected duties to a consciousness that the rank and file of her people find life very hard to sustain. That her young men find opportunity embarrassed and that her older men find business difficult to renew and maintain because of circumstances of privilege and private advantage which have interlaced their subtle threads throughout almost every part of the framework of our present law. She has awakened to the knowledge that she has lost certain cherished liberties and wasted priceless resources which she had solemnly undertaken to hold in trust for posterity and for all mankind, and to the conviction that she stands confronted with an occasion for constructive statesmanship such as has not arisen since the great days in which our government was set up. There never was a time when impatience and suspicion were more keenly aroused by private powers selfishly employed, when jealously of everything concealed or touched with any purpose not linked with the general good or inconsistent with it, more sharply or immediately displayed itself. Nor is the country ever more susceptible to unselfish appeals or to the high arguments of sincere justice; these are the unmistakable symptoms of an awakening. There is the more need for wise counsel because the people are so ready to heed counsel, if it be given honestly and in their interests. It is in the broad light of this new day that we stand face to face with great questions of right and of justice, questions of national development, of the development of character and of the standards of action, no less than of a better business system--more free, more equitable, more open to ordinary men, practicable to live under, tolerable to work under--or a better fiscal system whose taxes shall not come out of the pockets of the many because of the pockets of the few, and within whose intricacies special privilege may not so easily find cover. What is there to do? There are two great things to do. One is to set up the rule of justice and of rights in such matters as the tariff, the correction of the trusts and the prevention of monopoly, the adaptation of our banking and currency laws to the very beauties of which our people must put them, the treatment of those who do the daily labor in our factories and mines and throughout all of our great industrial and commercial undertakings as they should be treated in a civilized politic, and the political life of the people of the Philippines for whom we hold governmental power in trust for their service, not our own. The other thing, the additional duty, is the great task of protecting our people and our resources, and of keeping open to the whole people the doors of opportunity to which they must, generation by generation, pass if they are to make conquests of their fortunes in health, in freedom, in peace and in contentment. In the performance of this second great duty, we are face to face with questions of conservation and of development, questions of forests and water powers, and mines and waterways, and the building of an adequate merchant marine, of the opening of every highway and facility, and the setting up of every safeguard needed by a great industrious expanding nation.


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The First Shape Book: Little Red Riding Hood (1863)
Text by Adam Green
Sep 20, 2017

The first mass-produced book to deviate from a rectilinear format, at least in the United States, is thought to be this 1863 edition of Red Riding Hood, cut into the shape of the protagonist herself with the troublesome wolf curled at her feet. Produced by the Boston-based publisher Louis Prang, this is the first in their "Doll Series", a set of five "die-cut" books, known also as shape books — the other titles being Robinson Crusoe, Goody Two-Shoes (also written by Red Riding Hood author Lydia Very), Cinderella, and King Winter. An 1868 Prang catalogue would later claim that such "books in the shape of a regular paper Doll... originated with us". It would seem the claim could also extend to die cut books in general, as we can't find anything sooner, but do let us know in the comments if you have further light to shed on this! Such books are, of course, still popular in children's publishing today, though the die cutting is not now limited to mere outlines, as evidenced in a beautiful 2014 version of the same Little Red Riding Hood story. The die cut has also been employed in the non-juvenile sphere as well, a recent example being Jonathan Safran Foer's ambitious Tree of Codes.
As for this particular rendition of Charles Perrault's classic tale, the text and design is by Lydia Very (1823-1901), sister of Transcendentalist poet Jones Very. The gruesome ending of the original — which sees Little Red Riding Hood being gobbled up as well as her grandmother — is avoided here, the gore giving way to the less bloody aims of the morality tale, and the lesson that one should not disobey one's mother.


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William Sharp’s Chromolithographs of The Great Water Lily (1854)

Aug 2, 2017

These six magnificent colour lithographs are to be found in Victoria Regia, or, The Great Water Lily of America: With a Brief Account of its Discovery and Introduction into Cultivation (1854), a work by amateur botanist John Fisk Allen which documents his attempts to propagate the Amazon's Victoria regia (now called Victoria amazonica) in the more northerly climes of his hometown of Salem, Massachusetts. The wonderfully lavish plates accompanying the slim volume are the work of the British-born printer William Sharp, who is credited with creating the very first chromolithograph on American soil — a portrait of Reverend F. W. P. Greenwood. These images produced for John Fisk Allen's book are, according to Christies, the "very first colour-printed lithographs produced in America". Why they are ignoring the Greenwood portrait, we are not quite sure: it could be that they mean a first in the context of large scale colour printing, as opposed to a one off; or perhaps it is a reflection that some believe it likely that the Greenwood portrait was actually a lithotint with colours printed from a single rather than the multiple stones normally associated with chromolithography. In any case, with their bold and stunning depth of colours, these water lily images by Sharp stand out as some of the finest examples of chromolithography, an art which at the time was only in its infancy.


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The History of Ink: Including its Etymology, Chemistry, and Bibliography (1860)
Text by Adam Green
Jul 19, 2017

This delightful little book — the creation of Thaddeus Davids and Co, one of the largest ink manufacturers of its day — is a wonderful example of form matching content. Not only is the main body text in a kind of a cursive type that points to many hours of labour with pen and ink pot, but the pages are also adorned — in the titles, headers, initials, etc. — with a multitude of typefaces that combine to boast of the sheer variety of their subject's history. As the subtitle indicates, the book comes at ink from a number of different angles, and is full of surprises, including a page (see below) — before the plates at the end — listing different inks ("Blackwood's Black", "Harrison's Columbian", etc.), each written out in that respective brand, and exposed to sun and rain for five months to test their staying power. Needless to say that "Davids and Co Limpid Writing Fluid" stands out amid the competition. The extensive plates at the end are also a delight, providing writing samples from the "oldest Hieratic writing extant — about the 15th century B. C." to "Wellington, April 21, 1834". We are also treated to three pages detailing how more than fifty different languages say the word "ink".


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Micromégas by Voltaire (1752)
Text by Adam Green
Jul 11, 2017

This short work by Voltaire — which tells of a visit to Earth by Micromégas, an inhabitant of a distant planet which circles the star Sirius, and his companion hailing from Saturn — remains a seminal work of early science-fiction. The planet from which Micromégas has come is huge, almost 22 million times greater in circumference than that of the Earth, and Micromégas himself (whose name means "Smallbig") is sized to match, coming in at a modest 120,000 feet (37 km) tall. Micromégas is travelling the Universe after running into a spot of bother on his home planet — embroiled in a controversy which had him banished from the court for 800 years (to give a sense of scale, the lifespan of a Sirian is around 10.5 million years). His crime? Heresy, for writing a scientific treatise on the insects of his planet (which, at 100 feet long, are too small to be seen by ordinary microscopes). During his interstellar jaunt he lands upon Saturn, and befriends the secretary of the Academy, a relative "dwarf" (only 6000 ft high) compared to Micromégas. After an entertaining comparison of their two planets, they decide to travel onward together to Earth. At first they don't believe the minuscule beings they are seeing can possibly be big enough to be intelligent, but soon are listening to them speak with the help of a special hearing tube fashioned from fingernail clippings. Picking up the language quickly the two giant aliens begin to converse with the humans and discover them to be more intelligent than first thought. They learn of many philosophers, from Aristotle to Locke, including Aquinas' theory that the universe was made solely for mankind, to which they "nearly fell over with that inextinguishable laughter which, according to Homer, is shared with the gods." The story ends with the Sirian pledging to write a book for the humans that will explain "the point of everything". When the volume is presented to the Academy of Science in Paris, the secretary opens the book only to see "nothing but blank pages".


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The Model Book of Calligraphy (1561–1596)
Text by Adam Green
Nov 7, 2017

Pages from a remarkable book entitled Mira calligraphiae monumenta (The Model Book of Calligraphy), the result of a collaboration across many decades between a master scribe, the Croatian-born Georg Bocskay, and Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel. In the early 1560s, while secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, Bocksay produced his Model Book of Calligraphy, showing off the wonderful range of writing style in his repertoire. Some 30 years later (and 15 years after the death of Bocskay), Ferdinand’s grandson, who had inherited the book, commissioned Hoefnagel to add his delightful illustrations of flowers, fruits, and insects. It would prove to be, as The Getty, who now own the manuscript, comment, “one of the most unusual collaborations between scribe and painter in the history of manuscript illumination”. In addition to the amendments to Bocksay's pages shown here, Hoefnagel also added an elaborately illustrated section on constructing the letters of the alphabet which we featured on the site a while back.


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Destination Earth (1956)
Text by Adam Green
Jul 26, 2017

Produced at the height of the Cold War, and made at the behest of the American Petroleum Institute (still the biggest lobby for the U.S. oil and gas industry), this great little promotional film from John Sutherland Studios champions not only the wonders of oil as might be expected, but also free-market capitalism. The surprisingly humorous cartoon tells the story of how the suspiciously Stalin-like leader of Mars, named Ogg, sends a rather calamity-prone citizen to Earth to find a better power source for his poorly-running "state limousine". The exploring Martian, of course, lands in the United States and soon discovers the many and myriad delights of petroleum, and that, in contrast to his home planet, competition between companies is rife. His take-home lesson (and one drilled into the viewer on numerous occasions) is that "competing for the customer's dollar" is key to the success of the oil industry and, of course, the thriving country as a whole. Delivering the news to Ogg back on Mars, the leader replies defiantly that "competition is downright un-Martian", but the ordinary Martians are not to be deterred and soon rise up to overthrow Ogg and set up a thriving oil industry (and capitalist culture) of their own — the short ending with the slogan "destination unlimited" writ proudly across the screen.


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Autumn: Saviour, Breathe an Evening Blessing (1912)

Nov 8, 2017

Rendition by the Trinity Choir of James Edmeston's 1820 hymn "Saviour, Breathe an Evening Blessing", which somehow, on its journey to disc, ended up being enigmatically appended with the title "Autumn". The composer is listed as being Louis Van Esch, about whom we couldn't find any information. An architect by profession, Edmeston was best known for his prolific hymn writing — the total number of which was said to total more than 2000, one written every Sunday.
"Savior, Breathe an Evening Blessing"by James Edmeston

Savior, breathe an evening blessingEre repose our spirits seal,Sin and want we come confessing;Thou canst save, and Thou canst heal.

Though destruction walk around us,Though the arrows past us fly,Angel guards from Thee surround us;We are safe if Thou art nigh.

Though the night be dark and dreary,Darkness cannot hide from Thee;<brThou art He who, never weary,Watcheth where Thy people be.

Should swift death this night o'ertake usAnd our couch become our tomb,May the morn in heaven awake us,Clad in light and deathless bloom.


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On the Disposition of Iron in Variegated Strata (1868)
Text by Adam Green
Oct 24, 2017

These excellent images depicting "ferruginous variation" are from the publication of a paper, "On the Disposition of Iron in Variegated Strata", delivered by the botanist and geologist George Maw to the Geological Society on April 22nd 1868. Maw begins: "Of those secondary changes which have modified the original chemical and physical constitution of rocks none seem to have more largely affected their aspect than the recombinations and rearrangements of iron". The piece is heavily illustrated throughout but it is the wonderful series of coloured plates which stand out: their diverse combinations of colour and form, at times, as though microscopic magnifications from a biology textbook, and at others, as if some kind of geological precursor to the 50s experiments of Abstract Expressionism.


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Park Conscious (1938)

Sep 14, 2017

"Parks are a call to the people to rest and play in family groups, a cure which has been seriously advocated for most of our social difficulties", so teaches this understated rallying cry from the US Department of the Interior to get "Park Conscious". Focusing on the parks of Minnesota, the film is notable for its emphasis on the mental well-being that parks can bring, as places where "nature can work her magic of mental and physical healing". Its an emphasis that perhaps makes sense once the timing of the piece is considered, coming as it does amidst the recession of 1937–1938, a downturn which itself came after already nearly a decade of hardship known as the Great Depression.


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Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1880)
Text by Adam Green
Nov 14, 2017

This is the first English translation of Pu Songling's collection of classical Chinese stories, a book comprising near five hundred "marvel tales", including magical pear trees, thimble-sized babies, ghostly cities, and  mean spirited daughters-in-law being turned into pigs. Although Pu was believed to have completed the majority of the tales by 1670, the collection did not get published until 1740 (some years after the his death). Despite a lively cast of ghosts, foxes, immortals, and demons, Pu's stories mainly focus on the everyday life of commoners, with the supernatural elements used to illustrate his subterranean criticism of how the ordinary people of his country suffered at the hands of an unfair society. Depending on your sensibilities, this late nineteenth-century translation from English diplomat and sinologist Herbert Giles could be seen to suffer from the conditions of its creation, i.e. a climate of Victorian-era prudishness. John Minford and Tong Man, translators of a more recent edition from Penguin, describe how Giles chose not to translate "anything connected with sex, procreation, blood, sometimes indeed the human body in any of its aspects" — where fox spirits might attempt to engage in sexual acts with humans, Giles has them chatting over a cup of tea instead.


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The Victrola Book of the Opera (1913)

Aug 23, 2017

First published in 1912, this is the second edition of what would, by 1976, become a series of thirteen separate, and ever-expanding, versions of The Victrola Book of the Opera, a wonderfully illustrated tome detailing every operatic record released by Victor records. As the Library of Congress explains:
The Victrola (or Victor) Book of the Opera was an ingenious strategy to promote sales of Victor label discs of opera excerpts. For 75 cents, record buyers could learn the plots and production histories of the most popular operas of the day, enjoy illustrations of favorite singers in costumes, and most importantly, have in hand a list of Victor records, with catalog numbers, of excerpts from each opera. Early editions of the Book of the Opera were compiled by Samuel Holland Rous, the editor of Victor sales catalogs. Rous began his career with the company as a tenor vocalist on many early recordings, billed as “S. H. Dudley.”
And from Rous' own mouth courtesy of the foreword to the original 1912 edition:
During the recent season several hundred performances of grand opera, at an estimated cost of millions of dollars, were given in the United States. This great outlay for dramatic music alone would not have been possible had it not been for the increased interest aroused in opera by the widespread distribution by the Victor during the past ten years of hundreds of thousands of grand opera records, at varying prices… For every person who cannot attend the opera there are a hundred who cannot. However, many thousands of lovers of the opera in the latter class have discovered what a satisfactory substitute the Victor is, for it brings the actual voices of the great singers to the home, with the added advantage that the artist will repeat the favorite aria as many times as may be wished, while at the opera one must usually be content with a single hearing…
When you've done browsing through the above, we highly recommend taking a visit to the Library of Congress site where they've a wonderful interactive digital facsimile of the 1919 edition, including  the opportunity to listen to nearly every recording listed in the book.


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Music in the Margins: The Funeral of Reynard the Fox (13th century)

Jul 13, 2017

This motley crew of anthropomorphic animals can be found adorning the lower margins of a finely illuminated "book of hours" produced in late thirteenth-century England and now residing in the collection of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. Appearing throughout a section relaying the crucification of Christ, these horn-tooting, cymbal-beating, bier-bearing creatures are attending the funeral of Reynard the Fox.
Thought to have originated in Lorraine folklore, the tale of the trickster fox Reynard soon made its way into a literary cycle of allegorical Dutch, English, French and German fables, getting its most extensive treatment via the pen of Pierre de Saint-Cloud in his Le Roman de Renart, ca. 1170. Written mainly during the Middle Ages by a multitude of authors, the Reynard stories often acted as parodies of medieval literature staples (e.g. courtly romances), as well as satire commenting on political and religious institutions. Reynard's funeral appears in many of the tales: his enemies gathering to deliver weepy, over-the-top elegies full of insincere piety, only to then come a cropper as Reynard leaps alive from the bier and wreaks his revenge.
These Reynard stories were so popular that the the old French word for "fox" (goupil from the Latin vulpecula) actually ended up stepping aside in favour of "renard" still used today.


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“Dialogue Between Frederick Ruysch and His Mummies” by Giacomo Leopardi (1827)
Text by Adam Green
Aug 1, 2017

This is an English translation (published in an 1882 collection) of a short 1827 piece by the great Italian writer Giacomo Leopardi. In it he uses the macabre creations of the seventeenth-century Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch — who created remarkable "still life" displays using the preserved organs and skeletons of the dead — to reflect upon the mysteries of death. Leopardi has the piece open with Ruysch's "mummies", having come alive at night, singing in chorus. An awoken Ruysch watches through a crack in the door and, after overcoming his initial fears, ends up asking one of them for a brief description of what they felt when they were at death’s door. They assure him that dying is like falling asleep, like a dissolving of consciousness, and not at all painful. They declare that death, the fate of all living things, has brought them peace. For them, life is but a memory, and although they are not happy, at least they are free of old sorrows and fears.


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Illustrations from the Lights of Canopus (1847)
Text by Adam Green
Oct 24, 2017

The Anvār-i Suhaylī or Lights of Canopus — commonly known as the Fables of Bidpai in the West — is a Persian version of an ancient Indian collection of animal fables called the Panchatantra. The tales follow the Persian physician Burzuyah on a mission to India, where he finds a book of stories collected from the animals who live there. Much like in the Arabian Nights (which actually uses several of the Panchatantra stories), the fables are inter-woven as the characters of one story recount the next, with up to three or four degrees of narrative embedding. Many of the fables offer insightful glimpses into human behaviour, and emphasise the power of teamwork and loyalty: one passage describes how a hunter catches a group of pigeons in a net, only for them to be saved by a mouse who gnaws through the rope. The version celebrated in this post hails from nineteenth-century Iran and is particularly notable for its exquisite illustrations — scenes of tortoise-riding monkeys, bird battles, conversing mice, delicate purple mountains — 123 in total. The artist behind the images is not mentioned, but the creator of the equally elegant nasta’liq style writing which they serve, is named by The Walters Art Museum (who hold the manuscript) as one Mīrzā Raḥīm.


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Kusakabe Kimbei’s Photographs of Late 19th-Century Japan

Aug 15, 2017

In 1881, after working for many years with the European photographers Felice Beato and Baron Raimund von Stillfried as a photographic colourist and assistant, the Japanese photographer Kusakabe Kimbei finally opened his own workshop in the Benten-dōri quarter of Yokohama. He’d soon establish himself as one of the most respected and successful Japanese photographers of his generation, opening another studio in Yokohama’s Honmachi quarter in 1889, and also a branch in the Ginza quarter of Tokyo. The selection here is from the collection held by The Getty in Los Angeles, focusing mostly on work from the early part of Kimbei’s career.


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The Civil War Sketches of Adolph Metzner (1861–64)
Text by Adam Green
Oct 24, 2017

From gilt-framed ambrotypes of glassy-eyed new recruits to grim and grainy shots of the muddy dead, the American Civil War was the first major conflict to leave behind an extensive photographic record. Apart from the stylised scenes of battle that found their way on to painted canvas, it is perhaps to these photographs that one might automatically tend if asked to think of the visual record of the war. However, in both the photographic record and the more official war art, as engaging as they can be, there does seem to be something important missing: the immediacy and intimacy of everyday life as a soldier. This is why the collection of sketches, drawings, and watercolours left to us by Adolph G. Metzner — during his three years of service with the 1st German, 32nd Regiment Indiana Infantry — are of such special value. We see the camps not through a haze of indistinct monotone, but instead enlivened with human colour. Battlefields are not softened by the many careful hours in the painter's studio, with their choreography and crafted composition, but instead carry a certain rawness of proximity. The gift of Metzner's collection can be seen most starkly in his portraits of people, especially when compared to their photographic counterparts. See, for example, the two images below. On the left, a photograph of Lieutenant Colonel Karl Friedrich Heinrich von Trebra, Union officer in the 32nd Indiana Regiment, and on the right, Metzner's caricature.
Another example with Private Jacob Labinsky, a compelling figure who crops up again and again in Metzner's work.
Of all the characters given life by Metzner it is this Labinsky (or Lawinsky) who stands out. Labelled by Metzner as “The Camp Comedian”, we see Labinsky as the humorous heart of camp life (see lead image above) -- even when fleeing in terror from Confederate bullets there seems to be the faintest touch of comedy to the scene (see below). We did a bit of digging and found that Labinsky served as a valet through many of the regiment’s campaigns, "but deserted while on detached service April 2, 1864", only to return four months later. He survived the war, and ended up with a wife and four children, and a 13-acre farm with some goats, cows, and a horse.
As for Metzner himself, he was actually born in a small village in southwestern Germany, in 1834, emigrating to the United States as a young man in 1856, where he established himself as a druggist in Louisville, Kentucky. Four months into the Civil War he traveled to Indianapolis to get involved with the German regiment and begun his remarkable visual diary almost immediately. As the war progressed, and more comrades fell, the tone of his output can be seen to shift — the humorous giving way to the sombre — with a definite turning point being the horrors of the Battle of Shiloh in April, 1862. Returning to Indianapolis in 1864 due to injury (he was shot in the leg), Metzner created at least one oil painting from his wartime sketches but did not continue in a professional capacity. Instead he partnered with Frank Erdelmeyer, his former Union Army commander, to open A. Metzner and Company, a local pharmacy, and then, eventually, a company dedicated to producing high quality enameled artistic tile and ceramic glazes.


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The Heart of Man; Either a Temple of God, or a Habitation of Satan; Represented in Ten Emblematical Figures (1851)

Jul 25, 2017

The following illustrations — which, in a wonderful marriage of word and image, plot out the life of the Christian soul — form the central strain in The Heart of Man: Either a Temple of God, or a Habitation of Satan: Represented in Ten Emblematical Figures, Calculated to Awaken and Promote a Christian Disposition (1851), an English edition of a German book published in 1812 in Berlin by the "divine" and philanthropist Johannes Gossner (1773-1858). Gossner's work was itself actually a repurposing of an older text, a Catholic emblem book first published in French and which Gossner claims came to him by way of a German version published in Wurzburg in 1732. Although in his introductory note to the reader, Gossner gives the title of this book as Geistlicher Sittenspiegel (Spiritual Mirror of Morality), Peter Daly in his The Emblem in Early Modern Europe (2014), believes the title to actually be Geistlicher Seelen-Spiegel, and the publication date to be 1733. As for the wonderful images, Daly believes them to be based either on an earlier series of twelve illustrations "probably dating from the 1680s, or on the equally popular book in France about 1730 with the title Miroir de l'Ame or Miroir Pecheur with engravings by P. Gallays". For some reason Gossner left out two images from this earlier series of twelve, "the last image showing the pious in paradise, as well as plate 5 with Christ sitting in the middle of the heart". David Morgan, in his The Forge of a Vision (2015), traces the influence of this particular genre of heart imagery back further to the Flemish illustrator Antoine Wierix's Cor Jesu amanti sacrum, published in 1595.


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The Concealed Erotic Paintings of Sommonte (19th Century)
Text by Adam Green
Jul 6, 2017

This wonderfully unique object, from the collection of Henry Wellcome, stands perhaps as something of an embodiment itself of the nineteenth century's complex attitudes to sex — at first glance exuding nothing but chasteness (cue images of covered-up piano legs, lewd ankles, etc.), but upon closer inspection revealing a much saucier substratum. And indeed, it is perhaps not entirely inappropriate that with this multi-layered painting the eye alone won't do: one must get up close and personal and use one's hands. Contrary to first impressions, the painting is actually made up of three wooden slats — two of which are painted on both sides, the third just on one — all slid into the frame in such a way as to show only the pink and white roses to the world. The other much naughtier scenes must be actively uncovered by those in the know. As for which paintings go where, it appears that the first slat (the roses recto, the Lubenzia/Libitina image verso) is attached to the top piece of frame, the removal of which reveals the second slat (the fruit recto and orgy scene verso), with the fornicating couple at the very back. Why the innocent-looking still life of fruit? Possibilities of symbolism aside, it is most likely simply to add another layer of security, should someone accidentally lift the first slat. About the artist — given only as "Sommonte" — not so much is known, but the object is thought to have been produced in Naples, Italy, at some point in the 1800s.


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Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1784)
Text by Adam Green
Oct 5, 2017

Known during his lifetime as "the extraordinary Negro", Ignatius Sancho (c.1729–1780) was the first known Black Briton to vote in a British election, and the first person of African descent known to be given an obituary in the British press. As the memoir which begins this third edition of his Letters tells us, Sancho was "born A. D. 1729, onboard a ship in the Slave trade, a few days after it had quitted the coast of Guinea for the Spanish West-Indies". After "a disease of the new climate put an early period to his mother's existence; and his father defeated by the miseries of slavery by an act of suicide", Ignatius, just two years old, was brought by his master to England, and given to the man's three maiden sisters who lived in Greenwich. The sisters were far from kind, and "the petulance of their disposition" bestowed upon little Ignatius his surname, "from a fancied resemblance to the Squire of Don Quixote". Sancho would escape the grip of the sisters, when, by chance, he met the Duke of Montagu who took a liking to his "native frankness of manner". Sancho took to visiting the Duke and Duchess regularly, where he was encouraged to read, and was also lent books from the Duke's personal library. At the age of 20, shortly after the Duke's death, Sancho fled the household of the sisters to become the butler at the Montagu household, where he worked for the next two years until her death.
Immersing himself in the world of literature and music (while also working as a valet for the Duke and Duchess' daughter and husband, and then later as a greengrocer), Sancho became well known in the literary and artistic circles of the day, becoming acquainted with the likes of Thomas Gainsborough (who painted his portrait), the actor David Garrick, and the novelist Laurence Sterne. It was his correspondence with the latter which helped secure him a reputation as a man of letters, and a symbol of the abolitionist movement. At the height of the debate about slavery, in 1766, Sancho wrote to Sterne encouraging the writer to lend his fame to help lobby for the abolition of the slave trade. "That subject, handled in your striking manner," wrote Sancho, "would ease the yoke (perhaps) of many – but if only one – Gracious God! – what a feast to a benevolent heart!". Sterne's reply became an integral part of 18th-century abolitionist literature.
There is a strange coincidence, Sancho, in the little events (as well as in the great ones) of this world: for I had been writing a tender tale of the sorrows of a friendless poor negro-girl, and my eyes had scarce done smarting with it, when your letter of recommendation in behalf of so many of her brethren and sisters, came to me—but why her brethren?—or your’s, Sancho! any more than mine? It is by the finest tints, and most insensible gradations, that nature descends from the fairest face about St. James’s,1 to the sootiest complexion in Africa: at which tint of these, is it, that the ties of blood are to cease? and how many shades must we descend lower still in the scale, ’ere mercy is to vanish with them?—but ’tis no uncommon thing, my good Sancho, for one half of the world to use the other half of it like brutes, & then endeavor to make ’em so."
In another letter, writing his friend's son who had expressed racist attitudes after a visit to India, Sancho wrote:
I am sorry to observe that the practice of your country (which as a resident I love – and for its freedom – and for the many blessings I enjoy in it – shall ever have my warmest wishes, prayers and blessings); I say it is with reluctance, that I must observe your country's conduct has been uniformly wicked in the East – West-Indies – and even on the coast of Guinea. The grand object of English navigators – indeed of all Christian navigators – is money – money – money – for which I do not pretend to blame them – Commerce was meant by the goodness of the Deity to diffuse the various goods of the earth into every part—to unite mankind in the blessed chains of brotherly love – society – and mutual dependence: the enlightened Christian should diffuse the riches of the Gospel of peace – with the commodities of his respective land – Commerce attended with strict honesty – and with Religion for its companion – would be a blessing to every shore it touched at. In Africa, the poor wretched natives blessed with the most fertile and luxuriant soil- are rendered so much the more miserable for what Providence meant as a blessing: the Christians' abominable traffic for slaves and the horrid cruelty and treachery of the petty Kings encouraged by their Christian customers who carry them strong liquors to enflame their national madness – and powder – and bad fire-arms – to furnish them with the hellish means of killing and kidnapping.
In addition to his many letters — the publication of which was an immediate bestseller — Sancho also published a book for the Princess Royal about his great passion, music, and two plays.


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Émile-Antoine Bayard’s Illustrations for Around the Moon by Jules Verne (1870)
Text by Adam Green
Oct 24, 2017

Readers of Jules Verne's early science-fiction classic From the Earth to the Moon (De la terre à la lune) — which left the Baltimore Gun Club's bullet-shaped projectile, along with its three passengers and dog, hurtling through space — had to wait a whole five years before learning the fate of its heroes. Not only were they rewarded for their patience by a fine continuation of the space adventure (which we won't spoil by describing here), but also with the addition of a superb series of wood engravings to illustrate the tale. The set of images — arguably the very first to depict space travel on a scientific basis — were the work of the French illustrators Émile-Antoine Bayard and Alphonse de Neuville, though its the former's contributions, which depict scenes involving space, which we've focused on for this post. Despite the brilliance and vision of these illustrations, it is for a wholly more terrestrial image for which Bayard is best known today — a sketch of the sad-eyed Cosette sweeping, which he completed for the original edition of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1865), and which for the last four decades or so, Tricolour-infused, has adorned playbills and theatre hoardings the world over in service of Claude-Michel Schönberg's hugely popular musical, "Les Mis".
PS: You'll perhaps notice that the scans featured below are not of the best quality. They are the best we could find online which have no restrictions on their re-use (a slightly better scan here at BnF but they sadly have restrictive re-use). If you've a copy of the work, and would be up for scanning it, please do get in touch!


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Alphonse Bertillon’s Synoptic Table of Physiognomic Traits (ca. 1909)
Text by Adam Green
Oct 28, 2017

Alphonse Bertillon's Tableau synoptic des traits physionomiques was essentially a cheat sheet to help police clerks put into practice his pioneering method for classifying and archiving the images (and accompanying details) of repeat offenders, a system known as bertillonage. Beginning his career as a records clerk in the Parisian police department, Bertillon, the child of two statisticians and endowed with an obsessive love of order, soon became exasperated with the chaos of the files on offenders. The problem was particularly acute when it came to identifying offenders as repeat offenders (recidivists), given that the person in question could simply provide a false name. Before Bertillon, to find the files of the accused (or if there was even one already existing) the police would have to sift through the notorious "rogues' gallery", a disorganised mess of photographic portraits of past offenders, and hope for a visual match.
Bertillon's solution was to develop a rigorous system of classification, or "signalment", to help organise these photographs. This involved — in addition to taking simple measurements of the head, body, and extremities — breaking down the criminal's physiognomy into discrete and classifiable elements (the curl of ear, fold of brow, inclination of chin). What in other contexts might be the much loved (or reviled) expressions of a personality, in Bertillon's world become simply units of information. Taking a note of these, as well as individual markings such as scars or tattoos, and personality characteristics, Bertillon could produce a composite formula that could then be tied to a photographic portrait and name, all displayed on a single card, a portrait parlé (a speaking portrait). These cards were then systematically archived and cross-indexed, to make the task of linking a reticent offender with a possible criminal past, infinitely easier. Put into practise in 1883, the system was hugely effective and was soon adopted by police forces across the channel, before spreading throughout Europe and the Americas, (though without Bertillon's obsessive eye overseeing proceedings, its foreign adventures were not a complete success).
Key to the whole endeavour, of course, was the new exactitude of representation afforded by photography, though this was still an exactitude limited to a particular moment. Over time faces change, a fact which rendered Bertillon's system less than perfect. With the call for an identifier more fixed than the measurements of an inevitably changing face, and a system less complex, bertillonage was eventually, by the beginning of the 20th century, supplanted by the new kid on the forensic science block — fingerprinting.
The at once wonderful and somewhat terrifying image featured here, though rendered obsolete in a practical sense, stands today as a potent symbol for the new age of surveillance and "biopower" which it helped to usher in. As the Met Museum, where this copy of Bertillon's image is housed, comments, "although intended merely as a filing aide, this image of the human face in all its striations of repetition and difference renders surveillance as a terrifying manifestation of the modern sublime."


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Chladni Figures (1787)
Text by Adam Green
Aug 19, 2017

These wonderful diagrams are to be found in Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges (Discoveries in the Theory of Sound), a late 18th-century work by German physicist and musician Ernst Chladni (1756–1827), in which he details his experiments — for which he is sometimes labelled the "father of acoustics" — with vibrating plates and nodal patterns. More than a century earlier the English scientist Robert Hooke had run a violin bow along the edge of a flour-covered glass plate and observed strange patterns forming. These patterns were caused by "nodal lines", the still areas of an otherwise vibrating plate. Chladni perfected these initial experiments by Hooke (using mostly sand this time) and introduced them systematically in his 1787 book, providing a significant contribution to the understanding of acoustic phenomena and how musical instruments functioned. Such patterns are now commonly termed "Chladni figures".


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Hieroglyphic Journal of a Voyage to the Caribbean (1815)
Text by Adam Green
Sep 6, 2017

This unusual and delightfully ingenious book employs a series of "hieroglyphic" plates to frame an account of a trade voyage to Madeira and The West Indies undertaken in 1814. Plate 4, for example (see second picture below), displays the dates March 28th to April 15th in a calendar-like grid, for each day either a dot, to connote nothing of importance happened, or a little illustration summing up that day's events — in this case, the sighting of a tropical bird, a large mass of seaweed floating by, or the arrival of a storm. For a further explanation of these "emblematic figures" the author offers an "Explanatory Key", which reads ostensibly as a regular journal recounting highlights from the course of days, except rather than under the headings of dates, they relate directly to the pictures and are so numbered. According to its anonymous author, referred to only as "a young traveller", the plates came first, the motive for which was a "deficiency of time to note down my observances as they occurred". All in all it is a curious, but strangely compelling device — the note-taking aspect (albeit unusual given its pictorial nature) given emphasis over any kind of official after-the-event spinning of a narrative.


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Skeleton Leaves (1873)

Feb 5, 2013

A series of elaborate "skeleton leaf" arrangements, from the photographic studios of John P. Soule which stood on Washington Street in Boston from 1861 to 1882. As well as producing many pictures of Boston's buildings, notable events (such as the 1869 National Peace Jubilee and the great fire of 1872), carte-de-visite portraits etc., Soule also produced these so called "Skeleton Leaves". As well as comprising wreath shapes and crosses the leaves also served as elaborate frames for the portraits of individuals which were sometimes embedded within them. The process of drying out leaves in such a way was very popular at the time, with whole books being published that were devoted to the subject such as Phantom Flowers, a treatise on the art of producing skeleton leaves (1864).


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The Six Voyages of John Baptista Tavernier (1678)

Jan 18, 2013

To give it its full title - The six voyages of John Baptista Tavernier, a noble man of France now living, through Turky into Persia and the East-Indies, finished in the year 1670 giving an account of the state of those countries : illustrated with divers sculptures ; together with a new relation of the present Grand Seignor's seraglio, by the same author / made English by J.P. - is a remarkable account of travel through 17th century Asia. Tavernier (1605-1689) was a French diamond merchant, traveller and pioneer of diamond trade with India, who covered by his own account, 180,000 miles (290,000 km) over the course of forty years and six voyages. Though he is best known for the discovery and sale of the 118-carat (24 g) blue diamond that he subsequently sold to Louis XIV of France in 1668, (it was stolen in 1792 and re-emerged in London as The Hope Diamond), his writings show that he was a keen observer of his time as well as a remarkable cultural anthropologist. (Wikipedia)


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Design for Dreaming (1956)

Jan 21, 2013

Over the top 1950s "Populuxe" advertisement for General Motors, set at their 1956 Motors Motorama. A woman falls asleep and dreams of a glorious future of perfect products, including a variety of shiny futuristic dream cars and Frigidaire's fully automated "Kitchen of the Future." The star of the story is played by dancer and choreographer Tad Tadlock.
The film has over the years become a popular symbol of 50s consumerist culture and was featured extensively in the BBC documentary series Pandora's Box by Adam Curtis. It also appears in its entirety with an amusing "commentary" as a short feature in a fifth-season episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Some footage was also used in the music video for Peter Gabriel's 1987 single "In Your Eyes", Rush's 1989 music video for "Superconductor", a 1989 commercial for the Nintendo Game Boy game Super Mario Land, and a 1994 commercial for Power Macintosh. Part of the film, with dialogue, is played during the opening titles for The Hills Have Eyes. Some snippets (without dialogue) are played in the video watched by Michael Douglas during his physical in The Game and in the opening titles for The Stepford Wives. (Wikipedia)


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A Book on 17th Century Gardens (1908)

Mar 11, 2013

A compilation of 17th century essays on gardens by five authors: Sir William Temple, Abraham Cowley, Sir Thomas Browne, Andrew Marvell and John Evelyn. As Sieveking states in his introduction, the writings of these five "represent not only some of the best of Garden, but of English, Literature. It would not be easily possible to select five better names to represent either the literature or the lives of great Englishmen". The book features Thomas Browne's The Garden of Cyrus, his mystical vision of the interconnection of art, nature and the Universe via numerous symbols including the number five, the quincunx pattern, the figure X and Network pattern.


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Phrenology Diagrams from Vaught’s Practical Character Reader (1902)

Mar 19, 2013

Illustrations from Vaught's Practical Character Reader, a book on phrenology by L. A. Vaught published in 1902. As he confidently states in his Preface:
The purpose of this book is to acquaint all with the elements of human nature and enable them to read these elements in all men, women and children in all countries. At least fifty thousand careful examinations have been made to prove the truthfulness of the nature and location of these elements. More than a million observations have been made to confirm the examinations. Therefore, it is given the world to be depended upon. Taken in its entirety it is absolutely reliable. Its facts can be completely demonstrated by all who will take the unprejudiced pains to do so. It is ready for use. It is practical. Use it.
The theory that one can ascertain a person's character by the shape of their features is disturbing to say the least.
You can see the book in its entirety, including many more diagrams, over in our post in the Texts collection.


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A Dictionary of Victorian Slang (1909)

Jan 29, 2013

Passing English of the Victorian Era was complied and written by James Redding Ware, the pseudonym of Andrew Forrester, the British writer who created one of the first female detectives in literary history in his book The Female Detective (1863). In this posthumously published volume Forrester turns his attention to the world of Victorian slang, in particular that found in the city of London. From the Preface:
HERE is a numerically weak collection of instances of 'Passing English'. It may be hoped that there are errors on every page, and also that no entry is 'quite too dull'. Thousands of words and phrases in existence in 1870 have drifted away, or changed their forms, or been absorbed, while as many have been added or are being added. 'Passing English' ripples from countless sources, forming a river of new language which has its tide and its ebb, while its current brings down new ideas and carries away those that have dribbled out of fashion. Not only is 'Passing English' general ; it is local ; often very seasonably local. Careless etymologists might hold that there are only four divisions of fugitive language in London west, east, north and south. But the variations are countless. Holborn knows little of Petty Italia behind Hatton Garden, and both these ignore Clerkenwell, which is equally foreign to Islington proper; in the South, Lambeth generally ignores the New Cut, and both look upon Southwark as linguistically out of bounds; while in Central London, Clare Market (disappearing with the nineteenth century) had, if it no longer has, a distinct fashion in words from its great and partially surviving rival through the centuries the world of Seven Dials, which is in St Giles's St James's being ractically in the next parish. In the East the confusion of languages is a world of ' variants ' there must be half-a-dozen of Anglo-Yiddish alone all, however, outgrown from the Hebrew stem. 'Passing English' belongs to all the classes, from the peerage class who have always adopted an imperfection in speech or frequency of phrase associated with the court, to the court of the lowest costermonger, who gives the fashion to his immediate entourage.
Some highlights include:

Got the Morbs - temporary melancholy
Mutton Shunter - the police
Batty-Fang - to thrash thoroughly
Doing the Bear - courting that involves hugging
Mafficking - getting rowdy in the streets
Orf Chump - no appetite
Poked Up - embarassed
Nanty Narking - great fun


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Adelina Patti singing “The Last Rose of Summer” (1905)

Jan 28, 2013

A recording from 1905 of one of the 19th century's most famous opera singers Adelina Patti singing "The Last Rose of Summer", a song based on the poem by Irish poet Thomas Moore. Although the sound quality isn't great and her voice is past its prime (she was 62 yrs old), through the dust and scratches we can hear glimpses of why Giuseppe Verdi, writing in 1877, described her as being perhaps the finest singer who had ever lived. Patti's piano accompanist for this recording and others she made at the time, Landon Ronald, recalls his experience working with her:
"When the little (gramophone) trumpet gave forth the beautiful tones, she went into ecstasies! She threw kisses into the trumpet and kept on saying, 'Ah! Mon Dieu! Maintenant je comprends pourquoi je suis Patti! Oh oui! Quelle voix! Quelle artiste! Je comprends tout!' [Ah! My Lord! Now I understand why I am Patti! Oh yes! What a voice! What an artist! I understand everything!] Her enthusiasm was so naïve and genuine that the fact that she was praising her own voice seemed to us all to be right and proper."
(Wikipedia)


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On the Writing of the Insane (1870)
Text by Hunter Dukes and Adam Green
Mar 12, 2013

G. Mackenzie Bacon (1835–1883) — alienist and superintendent of the Cambridgeshire asylum that would become Fulbourn Hospital — set out, in 1870, “to place before the reader a series of pictures of insane minds, painted by themselves”. While the gestures and speech patterns of the mentally ill had been commented on in the nineteenth century, Bacon believed that a lack of attention had been paid to their writing. To carry out his research, he resorts to a kind of layman’s analysis of semantics and graphology. Describing one sample of a man’s handwriting reproduced in the book, Bacon notes that its “incoherency of idea, broken purpose, and want of consequence in the words, is shown in the odd scrawl and fantastic figures. It gives a better picture of his mental state than any verbal description could.” Throughout his text, the doctor defaults on this same commonsense heuristic of sensibility, such as when he tries to demonstrate, through a series of letters written some months apart, that a patient’s correspondence evidences her successful convalescence: “The next letter shows a great improvement, but there is still some flightiness; and the last is quite sensible in tone”.
It makes sense that handwriting would appear on the dotted line between sanity and madness. In the nineteenth century, penmanship became an ennobling pedagogy — a way to cultivate beautiful souls in schoolchildren through florid scripts. Beginning with Platt Rogers Spencer (1800–1864), whose calligraphic style can still be spotted in Coca-Cola’s curlicue logo, handwriting was no longer merely about displaying one’s education or social status: “it became a process through which one learned key values”, notes Anne Trubek. The popular cursive “method” of A. N. Palmer (1860–1927) was used as a disciplinary mode of moral reform. “Penmanship training ranks among the most valuable aids in reforming ‘bad’ children”, he once wrote — and it is thanks, in large part, to Palmer that left-handed children, whom he considered “devious”, were long forced to right their ways in the United States. While handwriting analysis may have helped identify conditions associated with the degradation of fine-motor control, often its clinical use smacked of the punitive schoolteacher, such as when Bacon’s colleague Edward Charles Spitzka (1852–1914) deduced insanity from the overuse of punctuation: “in monomania the paper is covered with underlining marks, queries, exclamation points, dashes, and strange symbols”. Thankfully, handwriting was only diagnostic for Bacon — the doctor did not believe that disordered thinking could be cured by writing lines on a chalkboard.
Two of the most striking images in the book, the only printed in color, were created by a “respectable artisan of considerable intelligence” who suffered a prolonged “melancholy mood”. During his two years in the asylum, the unnamed man spent “much of his time writing — sometimes verses, at others long letters of the most rambling character, and in drawing extraordinary diagrams.” The two featured images were drawn on both sides of the same small sheet of paper, and the patient, “as though anxious, in the exuberance of his fancy, to make the fullest use of his opportunities, . . . filled up every morsel of the surface — to the very edge — not leaving an atom of margin.” The result is a kind of concrete poetry meets horror vacui, the words conforming to the contours of a figure of eight, or venn diagram, and all space teeming with text in various scripts and colors. Reading the frontispiece as a series of distinct and overlapping sets juxtaposes “FULBORN” — a spelling of the asylum’s location that perhaps summons “full born” — with “THE SUN KINGDOM”; at the union of the two circles is the phrase “DESPERATION DRIVEN TO THE VERGE”, which is bordered by “VACUITY”.
Bacon goes on to explain that the artisan, after leaving the asylum, went “to work at his trade, and, by steady application, succeeded in arriving at a certain degree of prosperity, but some two or three years later he began to write very strangely again”. After a visit from a medical specialist who tried to dissuade the unnamed man from writing this way, the former patient penned the following letter:
Dear Doctor,To write or not to write, that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to follow the visit of the great ‘Fulbourn’ with ‘chronic melancholy’ expressions of regret (withheld when he was here) that, as the Fates would have it, we were so little prepared to receive him, and to evince my humble desire to do honour to his visit. My Fulbourn star, but an instant seen, like a meteor's flash, a blank when gone. The dust of ages covering my little sanctum parlour room, the available drapery to greet the Doctor, stowed away through the midst of the regenerating (water and scrubbing - cleanliness next to godliness, political and spiritual) cleansing of a little world. The Great Physician walked, bedimmed by the ‘dark ages’ the long passage of Western Enterprise, leading to the curvatures of rising Eastern morn. The rounded configuration of Lunar (tics) garden's lives an o'ershadowment on Britannia's vortex . . .
Unfortunately, things ended sadly for the man. As Bacon recounts: “In the course of another year he had some domestic troubles, which upset him a good deal, and he ended by drowning himself one day in a public spot”.
Folded into On the Writing of the Insane is a soft critique of Victorian attitudes toward the variety of conditions once clustered under madness and insanity. “There is a popular notion that the insane are a very wily and cunning class”, he writes, “but those who live amongst the insane know well how little such notions are supported by facts.” In his suspicion of “the habit of regarding society as divided into two camps, the sane and insane, more or less opposed to one another”, Bacon almost anticipated Michel Foucault’s well-known theory of confinement, which describes how reason and rationality became the norms of European civility after the Enlightenment. By banishing unreasonable persons to asylums — or by exhibiting their irrationality as a spectacle meant to prove the inhuman, animal quality of madness — labor markets, property, and the legal sphere could be protected from potentially destabilizing modes of being. Bacon does not quite go this far, but, unlike some of his peers, he resists labeling “hysterical” women and those of “feeble mind” as insane: “The proper way to understand such cases is to think of them as victims of a permanent state, and not objects for pharmaceutical treatment”. A close reader of Bacon’s text will feel him groping toward a revelation that never comes, like when he observes that letters from “the poorer class” are “perhaps not so well marked [as sane]” when compared to his other examples.

author: Hunter Dukes and Adam Green


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The Heart in Art

Feb 14, 2013

A small selection of hearts through the history of art.


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Medical Imagery of the 15th Century

Mar 13, 2013

The following images are all taken from Tradition und Naturbeobachtung in den Illustrationen Medizinischer Handschriften und Frühdrucke vornehmlich des 15. Jahrhunderts (1907) by Karl Sudhoff - a book on the topic of medical illustrations in manuscripts and early printed books (primarily) of the 15th century. Included amongst the depictions are a few of the Zodiac Man (or homo signorum), a common figure in late medieval depictions of the body who had every part of his body linked with an astrological sign. See the book to learn from where each image has been sourced by Sudhoff, and if you speak German, to learn more about them.


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Vaught’s Practical Character Reader (1902)

Mar 19, 2013

A book on phrenology by L. A. Vaught published in 1902, jam-packed with strange theory and a whole host of  strange illustrations. As he confidently states in his Preface:

The purpose of this book is to acquaint all with the elements of human nature and enable them to read these elements in all men, women and children in all countries. At least fifty thousand careful examinations have been made to prove the truthfulness of the nature and location of these elements. More than a million observations have been made to confirm the examinations. Therefore, it is given the world to be depended upon. Taken in its entirety it is absolutely reliable. Its facts can be completely demonstrated by all who will take the unprejudiced pains to do so. It is ready for use. It is practical. Use it.

The theory that one can ascertain a person's character by the shape of their features is disturbing to say the least.
You can see a selection of the book's images over in our post in the Images collection.


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Georges Méliès’ Temptation of St. Anthony (1898)

Mar 8, 2013

Georges Méliès' short retelling of the temptation of Saint Anthony (La tentation de Saint-Antoine), with the temptations taking the form of the unexpected and persistent appearance of various scantily clad women. Although not as technically epic as his earlier masterpieces it nonetheless marks an advance in terms of subject matter, being one of the earliest films to tackle an explicitly religious theme. In this respect, as Film Journal comments, "Méliès proves himself the ancestor of Cecil B. DeMille and Franco Zeffirelli, whose own religious epics offer a similar blend of the solemn and the kitschy".
The supernatural temptations reportedly faced by Saint Anthony during his sojourn in the Egyptian desert, have been an often-repeated subject in the history of art and literature. Colin Dickey's excellent article for The Public Domain Review explores how Gustave Flaubert spent nearly thirty years working on a surreal and largely ‘unreadable’ retelling of the story and how it was only in the dark and compelling illustrations of Odilon Redon, made years later, that Flaubert’s strangest work finally came to life. Read it here: https://publicdomainreview.org/2013/03/07/the-redemption-of-saint-anthony/


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Horse Drawn Fire Engines (1896)

Feb 8, 2013

Four horse drawn fire engines roar up a snow-covered Newark, New Jersey, street while spectators watch from the sidelines. Until the mid-19th century most fire engines were manoeuvred by men, but the introduction of horse-drawn fire engines considerably improved the response time to incidents. The first self-propelled steam engine was built in New York in 1841. It was the target of sabotage by firefighters and its use was discontinued, and motorised fire engines did not become commonplace until the early 20th century. (Wikipedia)


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Endless Amusement (1820)

Feb 19, 2013

As it states on the title page, a collection of "nearly 400 entertaining experiments in various branches of science, including acoustics, arithmetic, chemistry, electricity, hydraulics, hydrostatics, magnetism, mechanics, optics, wonders of the air pump, all the popular tricks and changes of the cards, &c., &c., &c. : to which is added, A complete system of pyrotechny, or, The art of making fireworks: the whole so clearly explained, as to be within the reach of the most limited capacity".


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Various Forms of Architecture (1636)

Feb 22, 2013

A selection of illustrations from Variae Architecturae Formae, a series of architectural studies after the works of Joanne Vredemanni Vriesio, also known in Dutch as Hans Vredeman de Vries (1527–c.1607). De Vries was a Dutch Renaissance architect, painter, and engineer. Studying Vitruvius and Sebastiano Serlio, (translated by his teacher Pieter Coecke van Aelst), he became an internationally known specialist in perspective and, as well as books on architecture, perspective and garden design, he became the city architect and fortification engineer for the city of Antwerp. The etchers of the images in the book are given as Jan and Lucas Van Doetecum, two brothers from Hollstein.(Wikipedia)


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Croatian Tales of Long Ago (1922)

Feb 7, 2013

A seminal collection of short stories by the acclaimed children's author Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić originally published in 1916 in Zagreb by the Matica Hrvatska publishing house. The collection is considered her masterpiece and it features a series of newly written fairy tales heavily inspired by motifs taken from ancient Slavic mythology of pre-Christian Croatia. Due to this way of combining original fantasy plots with folk mythology, Brlić-Mažuranić's writing style has been compared by literary critics to Hans Christian Andersen and J. R. R. Tolkien.  Indeed, the 1922 English translation by F.S. Copeland was published in London by George Allen & Unwin, the same company which would go onto publish Tolkien's The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogy. The illustrations in this 1922 edition are by Croatian artist Vladimir Kirin. (Wikipedia)


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The Vessels of Hermes - an Alchemical Album (ca.1700)

Jan 15, 2013

The contents of Box 14 from the Manly Palmer Hall Collection of Alchemical Manuscripts, a huge collection of esoteric works amassed by Manly Palmer Hall, a Canadian-born author and mystic, perhaps most famous for his The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928). Most of the material in the collection was acquired from Sotheby's auctioneers on a trip he made in the 1930s to England and France - bought very cheaply due to the economic conditions of the time. The material in Hall's collection dates from 1500 to 1825, and includes works from the likes of Jakob Böhme, Sigismond Bacstrom, Alessandro Cagliostro, George Ripley and Michael Maier. The creator of these particular watercolours featured below is unknown. A typewritten note in the back, in French, translates as follows:
ALCHEMICAL ALBUM - The Vessels of Hermes – quarto atlas containing five beautiful colour plates very artistically executed and with explanatory caption. Vol. half vellum.
The plates of this collection are the synthetic description of the great work. The first one represents the egg of Hermogenes and the three characters who hold it are salt, sulphur and mercury. The second is the king’s bath made with the blood of the innocents. The third is the sublimation by the eagles after putrefaction. The fourth is the Rebis still called the Androgynous. The fifth is the mercury of art symbolised by a heart surrounded by the crown of thorns in the centre of a cross, because the philosopher’s stone is the physical proof of the redemption by Jesus.


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Double Exposures

Feb 26, 2013

A compilation of double exposures, an accidental phenomenon no longer possible with digital cameras. As well as the unintentional displayed here (though the first picture is debatable, and the saxophonist too), it was a common practise to use double exposures to create what became known as "Spirit Photographs". One of the most prolific of the spirit photographers was a man named William Hope, whose startling images you can see in our post "The Spirit Photographs of William Hope".


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Emblems Ancient and Modern (1699)

Feb 13, 2013

Some believe that the tradition of personal badges (or “devices”) and emblems descends from antiquity, when militaristic signs were carried into war to instill terror in enemies and influence the outcome of battles. Daniel S. Russell discusses the “strange or prophetic dimension” that these symbols could mediate in medieval Europe, giving the example of Charles VI, who adopted the device of a crowned, winged deer after capturing a stag wearing a copper collar in the forest of Halatte, which was inscribed with mysterious, ungrammatical Latin: “Hoc Caesar me donavit” (Caesar has given me this”). Into the seventeenth century, these images mixed with heraldry and retained their talismanic properties, but gained newfound associations as reflections of the bearer’s intellect and wit. Here the “emblem” tradition — primarily used to convey moral lessons and lead the contemplating viewer toward spiritual clarity — splits from the wider uptake of “devices”, which were used as personal insignia, combining symbolic and textual elements meant to draw attention to the virtuous qualities of their bearer. Books that collected these devices and emblems could serve didactic purposes, such as Thomas Treter’s Symbolica vitae Christi meditatio (1612), where Tarot-adjacent imagery becomes a springboard toward spiritual contemplation, and later volumes focused on the moral education of youth. Or they could serve as source books for individuals in need of a decorative brand.
Devises et emblemes (1699) is a compendium of symbolic compositions both ancient and modern, with corresponding mottoes in German, Latin, French, and Italian. It is thought to have been created as a kind of pattern book for artists and artisans alike. Some highlights include a floating stone, a lion being suspended over an empty throne, and a levitating heart basking in the light of a personified sun. The significance is hardly apparent to today’s reader. A flying scorpion soaring amid stars indicates that it is “worse up there than down here”. An elephant with his trunk upraised symbolizes the pleasure of pure piety, but an elephant stepping on a snake signals that no one can escape punishment. There are nearly as many meanings for trees as there are species, depending on where the branches are placed, and whether they bear fruit or foliage. But it is a mistake to believe that these cryptic combinations of text and image were once widely legible. Puzzling over their meaning was the whole point. The eighteenth-century encyclopedist Johann Heinrich Zedler offered the following definition of emblems a few decades after Devises et Emblems appeared: “An emblem is a picture with an image and a few accompanying words, which contains a hidden message and leads to deeper reflection. The picture stimulates the body while the text stimulates the soul.”
This particular work is the pièce de resistance of Daniel de La Feuille (1640–1709), a French watchmaker’s apprentice who fled with his family to Amsterdam after facing religious persecution. Here he established himself as a publisher, goldsmith, cartographer, engraver, and art dealer. Aside from Devises et emblemes, his circa 1708 Atlas portatif, ou, le nouveau theatre de la guerre en Europe (Portable atlas, or, the new theater of war in Europe) proved popular, prompting further French, Dutch, and English editions. The Library of Congress has digitized a particularly remarkable page from this atlas, collaging fortifications, defensible terrain, and military technology — the kind of scene over which devices and emblems once held sway.
Below you will find a selection of nine pages from this elaborate book. For those that like their morning cuppa with a dash of ancient and modern symbolism, we offer mugs decorated with these devices and emblems.


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Pictorial Atlas to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (1892)

Jan 22, 2013

This Pictorial Atlas is a collection of over 225 illustrations depicting all the major representations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey as can be found in classical antiquity. They are arranged in order of each of the stories, which are in turn told in summary chapter by chapter, with accompanying description and commentary on each of the illustrations.


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Jehan Cousin’s Livre de Pourtraiture (1608)

Feb 11, 2013

Selected images from a 1608 edition of Livre de Pourtraiture by Jehan Cousin the Younger (ca. 1522–1595), son of of the famous painter and sculptor Jehan Cousin the Elder (ca. 1490-ca. 1560) who was often compared to his contemporary, Albrecht Dürer. Just before his death, Jehan the Elder published his noted work Livre de Perspective in 1560 in which he noted that his son would soon be publishing a companion entitled, Livre de Pourtraiture. While there have been some reports that an edition of Livre de Pourtraiture was fist printed in 1571 and again in 1589, no copies appear to exist. Instead, the most likely first printing of the work was 1595 in Paris by David Leclerc, with woodcuts engraved by Jean Leclerc, just after Jehan Cousin the Younger's death. The book is one of the most famous on the subject of artistic anatomy and was printed again and again into the late 17th century.


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Slovak Folk Songs (1928/30)

Feb 18, 2013

Adele Keshelak sings three pairs of traditional Rusyn folk songs from Slovakia, recorded in New York on January 30th 1930: Track 1 - "Rusadelina Fialocka" ("Forget me Not") and "D'Irava Mi Stricha Na Stajni" ("My Pet Horse Was Stolen"); Track 2 - "Na Dolini, V Hustom L' Is' I Na Dubi" ("In The Valley, In The Forest") and "D'Ivki, D'Ivki Hej D'Ivki Na Selo" ("Girls, Girls, to Maidenlane"); Track 3 - "Uz Singl'ujut Zakryvajut Kasarnu" ("They're Fitting Out The Barracks") and "Na Oktobra, Na Persoho" ("Joining The Army"). The accordion soloist is Pawel Ondricka. Michael Tokarick provides one of the introductory speaking voices on Track 3; below are two folk songs form his miner's band.
These two Slovak folk dances were recorded in Camden, New Jersey on May 11th 1928. "Minersville Polka" is named after Tokarick's hometown in the coal mining region of Pennsylvania. "Zelenim Hajecku" ("In The Green Fields") is a traditional folk tune.