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Peking Opera Characters (ca. 1900)
Text by Hunter Dukes
May 16, 2023

Of the approximately 360 kinds of theater in China, Peking opera remains the most infamous. Originating in Shanghai rather than Beijing, the style is thought to have become formalized sometime between 1790 and 1860. And yet, the neatness of the English term “Peking opera” masks the historical difficulty of delineating its canon. As Joshua Goldstein observes, the artform has three Chinese names (jingju, jingxi, and pingju) and points to a patchwork genre that includes “several dozen melodic themes otherwise known collectively as pihuang”. Patronized by the Qing court in its infancy, Peking opera was performed by troupes that could include more than a hundred people, from stagehands and musicians to costumers and actors, in order to put on six to ten hours of scenes per day. Training schools sprang up across the nineteenth century, concentrated in Beijing, creating well-known stars and tabloid forums to discuss their lives in intimate detail. Merging song, dance, dialog, martial arts, and acrobatics, Peking opera, in David Rolston’s words, was “one of the most important ways that people in China for most of the last two centuries imagined the world.”
The colorful images below, courtesy of the MET, were painted by an unidentified artist sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. These portraits on silk each represent a particular character from one of nine plays. Like most operas of this style, the characters hail from diverse sources — literature, military history, and myth — but play stock parts. There are four basic roles in traditional Peking opera: sheng, dan, jing, and chou, each of which have numerous subtypes. Sheng and dan are male and female leads (historically both played by men), jing is a villain, and chou, the clown. As Mei Chun details, complex personas were to be avoided. “The flatness is deliberate. Flatness in characterization contributes to the effect of moral contrast while rounder characterization could lead to ambiguity and disorder.” The characters’ painted makeup, known as lianpu, tracks back to masks worn by dancers during the Tang dynasty, and is mainly used for jing and chou roles. The colors and expressions convey moral qualities that were easily legible to audiences of the opera.
Personifications of virtue and vice, these characters evolved alongside changes in Chinese society across time, representing, in various periods, the ideals of Confucian, Buddhist, nationalist, and even revolutionary beliefs. (Yangbanxi, or “revolutionary Peking operas”, were formed under the supervision of Jiang Qing during the Cultural Revolution.) Like various theatrical forms the world over, Peking operas allowed audiences to experience and imagine forms of being that were not always possible in daily life. At the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, dan actors specialized in either qingyi or huadan roles — the former obedient, virtuous, and pedigreed; the latter young, flirtatious, and bawdy. When Mei Lanfang rose to fame for his dan parts during the Republican era, he merged the two subtypes, writes Goldstein, presenting “curvaceous figures of elite women and goddesses, often in sexually charged scenarios”. In doing so, he displayed a kind of complex femininity that was rarely performed during the Qing dynasty. This was partially possible due to the safeguard of sex. “On the stage, the ideally virtuous and beautiful woman was, necessarily, a man.”


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Jean Baptiste Vérany’s Chromolithographs of Cephalopods (1851)
Text by Kevin Dann
Apr 27, 2023

The subtitle of Jean Baptiste Vérany’s Mollusques méditeranéens: observès, decrits, figurès et chromolithographies d'après le vivant promised something quite extraordinary for 1851: chromolithographs of living sea creatures. Since Aristotle’s pioneering accounts of the octopus, cuttlefish, and paper nautilus, great advances had been made in the knowledge of cephalopod anatomy and taxonomy, without parallel progress in understanding these enchanting animals’ ecology and life history. In this first volume of a projected two-volume work on the mollusk fauna of the Mediterranean, both Vérany’s lyrical descriptions and forty-one color plates attest to the veracity of his “d’après le vivant” claim.
Born in Nice, Vérany (1800–1865) was on a path to take over his father’s pharmacy when, after acting as local guide for University of Torino zoologist Franco Bonelli’s collecting expedition, he abandoned the drug trade in 1822. By 1834, Vérany was specializing in the study of cephalopods; though only five of the 144 plates in a natural history from this time were by Vérany, their fidelity to the living animals foreshadowed his later achievement. All five plates depicted the subtle, shifting shades of the chromatophores in cephalopod skin. One plate shows Eledon moschatus in six different dynamic expressions; another (Loligo vulgaris) includes two juveniles whose colors are much more muted than those of adults. It is no surprise that Vérany would eventually serve as assayer of gold and silver for Nice and Genoa. He had a connoisseur’s eye for color and patina.
In Mollusques méditeranéens, Vérany’s realizes his ambition — to accurately render “the suppleness of the flesh, the grace of the contours, the flexibility of the membranes, the transparency and the coloring”. During a moment of characteristically vivid description, he tells of his first encounter with the bright red umbrella squid, Histioteuthis Bonelliana, on the pebble beach at the mouth of Nice’s River Var. Having come upon a child who held a strange mutilated squid in his hands, he presented the animal to fishermen, promising “a good premium” to anyone who might bring him a similar one in better condition; shortly after, he was shown one hanging in their nets, and plunged it into a tub:
It was at this moment that I enjoyed the astonishing spectacle of the brilliant points whose forms so extraordinarily decorate the skin of this cephalopod; sometimes it was the brightness of the sapphire which dazzled me; sometimes it was the opaline of the topazes which made it more remarkable; other times these two rich colors confused their splendid rays. During the night, the opaline points projected a phosphorescent glare, making this mollusc one of the most brilliant productions of Nature.
After his death in 1865, Vérany was largely forgotten outside of Nice, even though Napoleon III decorated him with the Legion of Honor in 1864, to recognize both his scientific work and his founding of Nice's Muséum d'histoire naturelle. A few of Vérany’s cephalopods achieved great fame anonymously. Victor Hugo’s 1866 novel Les Travailleurs de la mer featured an ink drawing by Hugo that was copied from Vérany’s Octopus macropus. (While Vérany debunked the myths of the octopus’ monstrous nature, calling it “incapable of harm”, Hugo’s ferocious beast fuelled the modern terror of tentacles.) In 1878, the Wards Natural Science Company featured Léopold and Rudolf Blaschka’s glass models of cephalopods; many of their sketches for these sculptures were Vérany knockoffs. When Ernst Haeckel published a classically symmetrical plate of cephalopods in his Kunstformen der Natur (1902), three of the five species were copied without attribution from Vérany’s plates (8, 21, and 38). Indeed, it had been Vérany himself who introduced Haeckel to the cephalopods in 1856, when the German naturalist visited Nice as a young zoology student.

source: public-domain-review

author: Kevin Dann

type: collection

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


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Shy Guy (1947)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Apr 18, 2023

Before loners, stoners, slackers, geeks, and nerds became recognized misfits of American high-school cinema, there was Phil (played by a young Dick York), the shrinking violet of Shy Guy (1947). The first of many “personal guidance” or “mental hygiene” shorts produced by Coronet Instructional Media between the 1940s and 80s, Shy Guy was designed to be screened in the classroom — the environment where our protagonist falters. Recently enrolled in a new school after moving from Morristown, Phil is having trouble fitting in. “In class it’s not so bad”, says our narrator, “but when school’s out and the others go off to enjoy themselves, well, if you’re what they call a shy guy, that’s when you really feel it.”
We meet the shy guy from behind, looking through the window of a local drugstore, as soda jerks serve malts and cokes to booths of smiling, well-adjusted teens. “You’re on the outside looking in”, we are told, “there’s a barrier and you don’t know how to begin breaking it down.” It’s an affecting opening: all the loneliness and distance of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, painted five years earlier, driven home by the camera angle and our narrator’s second-person address. If Phil is a shy guy, we are even more so — placed at a double remove from the object of his voyeuristic longing.
Dad will help. We cut to home, where Phil is soldering a transmitter and microphone in the basement. He can’t figure out how to wire in the oscillator. “I know I have to connect it to the amplifier, but where? It just doesn’t fit in!” Well son, begins his father, “maybe school is like your radio. This oscillator will do its work well, but you still have to fit it in, so it can work with all the other parts”.
There’s nothing subtle about the social message. Yet it’s a surprisingly explicit cybernetic conception of American society in the early days of economic acceleration. Phil doesn’t need to actualize or individuate, he just needs to wire himself into the right circuitry. As Zoë Druick writes, in a paper on postwar education, “cybernetics was championed after the war as an apolitical universal model for technological civilization . . . educational and documentary media in particular are genres in strategic positions to operationalize social visions.” For real-life shy guys, films like these could supposedly decrease social latency. Watching a cinematic version of a self-help text, we glimpse the aspirational role of educational media at this time, how, using literature’s age-old tricks of empathy and identification, it sought to correct behavior and achieve a specific societal vision.
Shyness, then, is not merely a personal inconvenience. It was a detrimental bug in the civilization-building machine. During her study of shyness, power, and intimacy in the United States after World War II, Patricia A. McDaniel reminds us that “emotions are social experiences, or processes, rather than visceral sensations that happen to our unwitting bodies”. In mid-century America, shyness became a familiar topic in self-help manuals pitched at white middle-class men. Not only was overcoming timidity essential for establishing a productive heterosexual relationship, it also translated directly into the booming white collar labor market. Instead of doing business with “timid, lukewarm Caspar Milquetoast”, as one text labeled the shy guy type, customers preferred to shake hands with people like Chick Gallagher, the popular boy at Phil’s high school. “Echoing the advice given to young girls to be discreet in advertising their interest in a particular boy”, writes McDaniel, “self-help authors argued that the key to appealing to others in the business world was to show just the right amount of self-restrained interest in them.”
And this is exactly how Phil comes to win friends and a romantic interest: he learns to “listen” and “think about the other guy”. Taking the advice of his pocket-square-suited father, who himself “had quite a time making friends in a new office where everybody else knew each other”, the shy guy begins to reverse engineer popularity: “pick out the most popular boys and girls in school and keep an eye on them”. But Mean Girls this is not. He soon learns that women like Jane Davenport are beloved because they attune to others. Unlike his hobbyist audio equipment, she successfully completes the feedback loop of communication and amplifies social signals. “She’s listening! Hearing about Helen’s collection of menus. And liking it! That makes her kingpin with Helen.” Returning to the drugstore, we cheer as Phil gets hailed over to a booth by Chick, enfolded into a masculine acoustic order because the women will not stop conversing noisily about shopping: “We men need some support to run down this girly chatter”. Phil gets invited to tomorrow night’s mixer, locking eyes across the drugstore with Mary Lou whose face dissolves in a blur transition. At the mixer, students finish a sing-along to the minstrel song “Oh! Susana” — a detail that perhaps reveals who is allowed to fit so seamlessly into this vision of middle-class America — and Phil hears the boys asking Beezy Barnes about radios. Beezy hesitates: the communicative circuit is momentarily broken. And Phil bravely fits himself into the gap. “They know he’s alive now”, the narrator says, “and strangely enough, he’s just discovered that they’re alive.”

author: Hunter Dukes


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Blights of the Bookish: An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons (1768)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Mar 28, 2023

It was dangerous to be a man of letters in the eighteenth century. All that rumination; such single-minded concentration; countless hours hunched over the escritoire. “Some men are by nature insatiable in drinking wine, others are born cormorants of books”, wrote the Swiss physician Samuel-Auguste Tissot in An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons (1768). As with the reckless consumer of claret, an overindulgence in books could have devastating consequences for the mind and body.
Across his essay, Tissot offers hundreds of examples of men who read too much, studied too hard, and consumed knowledge to the point of madness. There is the young man who developed an allergy to reading: “if he read even a few pages, he was torn with convulsions of the muscles of the head and face, which assumed the appearance of ropes stretched very tight.” And the man whose laser focus effected hair removal: “his beard fell first, then his eye-lashes, then his eye-brows, then the hair on his head, and finally all the hairs of his body”. There is Nicolas Malebranche, who was gripped with “dreadful palpitations” upon looking into Descartes’ Treatise on Man, and an unnamed Parisian rhetorician, who “fainted away whilst he was perusing some of the sublime passages of Homer.” There is the blind Constantius Huygens, whose “immoderate studies so broke the force of his sensorium, that he thought his body was made of butter”. Huygens found himself very cold, shunning the fire “lest it should melt him”, and tragically ended his life by leaping into a well. And there “have been many instances of persons, who thought themselves metamorphosed into lanterns, and who complained of having lost their thighs.”  ※※Indexed under…ButterStudious man transformed into
What is the cause of these afflictions? The reason men “grow pale with poring over books”? Some of Tissot’s prescriptions are those that physicians still endorse to combat the ills of deskwork: frequent exercise, enough sleep, good ventilation, proper posture and hygiene, avoiding the “excesses of gluttony”. And others, while based on long outdated models of the mind, feel relevant in our era of “dopamine fasting” and “digital detoxes”. Much of Tissot’s essay treats the nerves like electrical wires carrying too much current, which become gradually calcified by literary amperage — a kind of downregulation of neurotransmitters avant la lettre. As such, it is not the physical act of reading, but the quality of reading material that poses a danger.
It is universally known that there are books composed without any strength of genius, which appear quite insipid and unaffecting to the reader, and only tire the eyes; but those that are composed with an exquisite force of ideas, and with an exact connexion of thought, elevate the soul, and fatigue it with the very pleasure, which, the more complete, lasting, and frequent it is, breaks the man the more.
Unlike later moral panics about the corrupting effects of fiction on female readers, here it is paradoxically the most praiseworthy material that produces the most lamentable results. Elsewhere, Tissot turns to humoral models of the nerves, where the “body is exhausted by too great an evacuation”. Suppose “the blood were to run copiously from a wound”, or “the gastric fluids were to be poured forth by the anus”, or “the breasts sucked too long”, or “a greater discharge of saliva made by spitting”, he writes. In all cases, “strength would decline, and the health be lost”. For studious men, an equivalent expenditure takes place in the brain: “a perpetual dissipation of the nervous fluid springs from the incessant action of the nerves”.
Tissot was not the only person concerned with longevity and the life of the mind in this period. Robert Priestly issued a 1798 treatise examining the conditions of “the sedentary” alongside “persons of fashion”. During the “Amusements of the Learned” section of his Curiosities of Literature (1791–1823), Isaac D’Israeli describes how a “continuity of labour deadens the soul”, and tells of various scholars’ methods for kicking back. Descartes kept a garden, Petavius twirled his chair for five minutes at the end of every second hour, and “Spinosa would mix with the family-party where he lodged, and join in the most trivial conversations, or unbend his mind by setting spiders to fight each other”. In the Georgian era, Chandler Robbins’ Remarks on the Disorders of Literary Men (1825) and George Hayward’s A Lecture on Some of the Diseases of a Literary Life (1833) picked up where Tissot left off, elaborating preventive measures and rehabilitating programs for those “who injure themselves by study”.
And yet, there are moments in Tissot’s essay that suggest a quieter agenda. Above all else, he seems concerned with solitude — not only as a precipitating condition of melancholy, but also as a threatening attitude of self-absorbed autonomy. He enjoins his reader to “be vigilant” toward the studious and “knock at their doors; rouse them from their lethargy; make them, whether they will or no, lay aside their studies”. As Christine Crockett Sharp writes, Tissot’s depiction of “the mental ravages one would experience by indulging in such solitary pursuits” was linked to a conception that it degraded a kind of biopolitical function: the ability “to make reasonable and moral decisions” and fulfill “gendered expectations regarding propagation and the success of eventual offspring”. Very little attention is paid to writing in An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons — it is the bookworm, absorbing all the world’s learning and fathering nothing productive, who most concerns Tissot. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that the figure of “the man of letters” appeared in the Swiss physician’s earlier work on Onanism (1766). “The masturbator, entirely devoted to his filthy meditations, is subject to the same disorders as the man of letters, who fixes his attention upon a single question”.


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Medieval Illustrations of Bonnacons
Text by Hunter Dukes
May 25, 2023

When it comes to self-defense, skunks and spitting cobras have nothing on the bonnacon. If threatened, it fled. While fleeing, it defecated. Violently. According to Pliny the Elder, the excrement voided the animal’s body with such explosive force that it could hit targets more than a football pitch away. Contact with its dung was said to burn like a kind of fire, scorching hunting dogs and anyone not equipped with protective gear. (There is some uncertainty whether the weapon was liquid or gaseous, super-heated or acidic.)
As with many mythical medieval creatures, the bonnacon was a composite: the head of a bull, the mane of a horse, and its horns were “bent inwards upon each other, as to be of no use for the purposes of combat”, writes Pliny. First described by Aristotle (as a possibly distinct animal called the bonasus), the bonnacon was resurrected in medieval bestiaries due to the influence of Pliny’s encyclopedic study of the ancient world. The Natural History locates the dungy bull in Paeonia — roughly today’s North Macedonia — but later writers elaborated its ethology, rehoming it in Asia.
The twelfth-century Aberdeen Bestiary, for instance, expanded the projectile’s devastation to an area of three acres and blamed the bonnacon’s “convoluted” horns for its upset stomach: “the protection which its forehead denies this monster is furnished by its bowels.” Other naturalists seemed to borrow the bonnacon’s properties when observing novel fauna: Polish onagers, as studied in the thirteenth-century by Gervase of Tilbury, guzzled water when threatened, expelling a blinding “deluge from their nostrils”; Bartholomaeus Anglicus described a nameless Bohemian beast in the eleventh century that “shoots at hunters or dogs coming too close to it . . . this water horribly removes hair from and scalds whatever it touches.”
While many creatures in medieval bestiaries are laden with Christian symbolism, the bonnacon’s appearance seems to be more like a gag — for both its victims and audience. Browsing the image’s gathered below, we might not know whether to laugh or duck. Hunters with ineffective shields gaze at the viewer, as if pleading for our assistance, while choking on stench. The bonnacon rarely seems in pain, more so disgusted at what he has been made to do, or taking visible pleasure in his pollution.


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Specimens of Fancy Turning (1869)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jun 21, 2023

This early photography book features thirty tipped-in albumen silver prints of geometric designs created on “the hand or foot lathe”. Resembling something between spirograph drawings and textbook diagrams of orbiting electrons, the figures were created using geometric, oval, and eccentric chucks and an elliptical cutting frame. Attributed to “an amateur” on its title page, the book is the work of Edward J. Woolsey (1803–1872), an heir of the mercantile Woolsey family and partner in the New York Patent Sugar Refinery. Along with his wife and first cousin Emily Aspinwall’s businessmen brothers, who built an improbable railway line in the early 1850s linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans across Panama, he invested in a well-known estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, and furnished it with eight miles of crisscrossed carriage roads.
The preface to Specimens of Fancy Turning explains how Woolsey made these images. Inspired by “an amateur friend”, whose “exquisite productions” were too delicate to be successfully photographed, these “coarser” designs were produced by first applying India ink to an enamelled card with a “flat camel's hair brush”. The card was then fastened to the face of a chuck with tacks or mucilage, whereby a spring tool “cut through the blackened surface of the card, exposing to view the white paper”. The cards were subsequently photographed. “They lack, however, the depth of black background, which cannot be equalled by the solutions of silver employed by the photographer.”
“Fancy” turning is an old artform, thought to originate in fifteenth-century Bavaria, with sustained discussions of the practice first appearing in Charles Plumier’s L’Art de Tourneur (1701). While we may be more familiar with lathes being used to shape staircase balusters and table legs, here an eccentric cutter can create both convex and concave objects from a variety of mediums. These patterns ornament the lids of wood and ivory boxes, bannister newels, and Fabergé eggs. The photographs in Woolsey’s book, on the other hand, focus on fancy turning when it is employed as a two-dimensional technique, as in the metalworks created by Rose engine lathes. There is little sense of depth — were it not for Woolsey's explanation, these designs would appear to be etched directly onto photographic paper. They simply celebrate the texture of light as it spirals out across a surface.
There was precedent in Woolsey’s time for seeking new uses and representational modes of ornamental turning. Due to the difficulty of producing (yet alone reproducing) such filigreed shapes — Holtazapffel’s Turning and Mechanical Manipulation (1884) offers dozens of pages describing precise configurations for the slide rest, mandrel, and chuck — patterns from geometric lathes were included on bank notes and postage stamps as a defense against counterfeiting. The particular lathe used in this process was invented by Asa Spencer, who introduced the machine into general use circa 1818. A British commenter the following year noted how the lathe’s “powers for producing variety are equalled only by the kaleidoscope; but for beautiful patterns it surpasses everything of the kind.”
And these Specimens of Fancy Turning are indeed kaleidoscopic. Perhaps we are drawn to them because they feel at once fundamental and accidental. Like the vortices dripped into existence by a leaky paint can swinging on a string, or the staggering shapes vibrated out of chaos onto Chladni plates, these geometrical figures seem to allow us to peer into certain formal properties of the world that recur at every scale of physical existence. For Woolsey, he hoped his book might “lead to an interminable prairie in the world of mechanical pursuit, where fresh beautiful figures can be brought to light by every one who indulges in the exploration.”


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Indian Sign Talk (1893)
Text by Kevin Dann
May 10, 2023

Upon reading Lieutenant Colonel Garrick Mallery’s 1880 appeal for descriptions of “Indian Sign Talk”, Lewis Francis Hadley abandoned his philological research on Quapaw and Ponca languages (he was reputed to know twenty Native tongues) and applied himself to the mastery of the single silent language that he estimated was known by over 100,000 Native people. By 1890, he had moved to a cave near Anadarko, Oklahoma. His tent was crowded with a printing press and stacks of woodblocks, which he carved with a kitchen knife to illustrate the hand language of Plains Indians. From woodblocks, he moved on to electrotype prints of his gestural sketches, which he made into flash cards that could be used to teach the signs. By the time he published Indian Sign Talk (1893), Hadley had printed more than 100,000 cards, and missionary friends had produced another 27,000 cards expressly for teaching Christian scripture.
Indian Sign Talk begins with a vocabulary of over five hundred words which pair Hadley’s sketches of signs with telegraphic “equivalents” that spell out the thoughts behind the gestures. Noting that “the real genius of gesture language is grace, and ease”, Hadley shows how the language's syntax follows an economical set of grammatical rules: articles, conjunctions, and prepositions are omitted; adjectives follow nouns; verbs are always present tense. By surveying or practicing these sketches of things, events, and qualities, one feels an intuitive pantomimic impulse lying behind nearly every sign. For “bread”, pat imaginary dough between the hands; for “cat”, push the end of the nose upward with the ball of the right hand; for “cloud”, cast the eyes toward the sky, laying a flat hand above the head. Hadley occasionally gives lovely metaphorical extensions of these signs. The “cloud” gesture is used also for despondency: “One is sometimes . . . under a cloud, as it were.”
The multivocality of hand gestures emerges in Hadley’s brief commentaries: to sign “accost”, one holds the right hand aloft and rocks the wrist:
This may mean: Who are you?What tribe do you belong to?What are you doing?Where are you going?Or other inquiries, depending much upon circumstances at the time. One is often obliged to think well before answering this sign.
Crooking both index fingers and resting them on the sides of the head above the ears gives “cattle” and “horns”; turning the fingers outward means “buffalo”, by which he means bison — the sacred beast whose centrality to Plains culture actually birthed the gestural language. Hadley was among the first to recognize that the geographic extent of sign language coincided with the range of the American bison, whose nomadic habit brought hunters from all the Native nations of the Great Plains into perennial contact with each other. At its peak, Plains Sign Language stretched from what is now central Canada across the United States to northern Mexico, moving across hands between the Fraser River and the Rio Grande.
Born in 1829 into a Quaker family in Salem, Massachusetts, Hadley’s western travels initially brought him to live on boats – including one of his own design and construction – up and down the Arkansas River, whose course he spent two years charting. An early stenographer, his aptitude for rapid communication and mapping seemed to feed his passion for signs. Initially finding Indigenous customs “repugnant”, reported an Arkansas resident, Hadley later preferred to be called by his adopted name Ingonompashi (Long-Haired Sign Talker), and advocated practically “going native”, albeit for missionary ends: “If we try to reach the Indians’ tepee, and never go out of the white man’s road, we will never get there.” In an account of meeting Hadley during this period, a writer remembered him accidentally stirring cheese into a cup of tea, mistaking it for a sweetener he had not encountered in some time. “You see on the reservations we have only brown sugar”, he explained.
The second section of Indian Sign Talk gets to the heart of Hadley’s mission to teach the Christian gospel. Beginning first with a gestural rendering of “The Indians’ Little Star” (“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”) and “Wolf and White Man” — a satirical story he witnessed being signed in plain sight of those mocked — Hadley moves on to a suite of Biblical texts including the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, and Psalm 19. Some sense of how keenly Hadley desired that his book be put to use as a tool to convert Native Americans to Christianity comes from a section entitled “Receive Jesus Now”. Hadley’s subtitle claimed Indian signs to be an “Almost Universal Gesture Language”, which was exactly why it held so much appeal for him as a communicative bridge to his own deeply held universal language of Christian scripture. Hadley's later biography is unknown. A 1949 article in Chronicles of Oklahoma records that, after publishing Indian Sign Talk, the rest of his life and death “remains a mystery”.
Below you can browse a selection of the 268 octavo plates from Hadley’s Indian Sign Talk. And you can watch a 1930 documentary clip of the language being used on Wikipedia.


text:
Manhattan’s Last Arcadia: Estate Plans from the Index of American Design (1936)
Text by Kevin Dann
Apr 5, 2023

Scattered amongst the 18,257 watercolor, crayon, chalk, charcoal, and color pencil drawings of folk, decorative, and industrial art executed between 1936 and 1942 for the Index of American Design (IAD) are a handful of aerial views of handsome country estates, whose curvilinear drives meander through sweeping lawns, clumps of evergreen trees, and arabesque flowerbeds bordered by neatly cropped topiary and hedgerows. Some of the picturesque landscapes are punctuated with craggy bedrock knolls and steep escarpments. A few of the drawings include close-up views of fountains, gazebos, benches, and lawn ornaments. Mostly labeled “Blackwell’s Survey”, and occasionally bearing the date “1860”, these watercolors depict the semi-rural terrain of northern Manhattan just before it began to urbanize in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.
Assembled under the direction of muralist George Stonehill, the images of more than two-dozen country estates in upper Manhattan’s Audubon Park, Fort Washington, Carmansville, Tubby Hook, and Kings Bridge (now coalesced into the Washington Heights, Fort George, and Inwood neighborhoods) were exhibited in the summer of 1936 at the Arden Gallery on Park Avenue. The Index of American Design had been born but a few blocks away the previous summer when Ramona Javitz, artist and curator of the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection, and Ruth Reeves, a textile designer who frequently used the NYPL collection for design inspiration, conceived a project that would create a chronicle of American design to rival the Library’s massive Eurocentric archive.
Though historical American gardens had originally been one of the Index’s intended documentary subjects, this suite of drawings was one of the only projects in the vast IAD oeuvre to capture America’s most transient treasure, the landscape. The impetus came from art historian William Schack. As Head Research Worker of the IAD’s Historic Gardens Unit, he had stumbled upon a manuscript survey executed between 1860 and 1864 by engineer E. R. Blackwell, who had been tasked by New York City to lay out streets above 155th Street, the terminus of the city’s 1811 grid plan. Perhaps stunned to find such a well-preserved Arcadia so close to the heart of America’s premier metropolis, Blackwell had not only shown the estate buildings and grounds on the survey map, but drafted enlarged renderings on the back of the manuscript.
After reproducing the views in Blackwell’s renderings, seven IAD artists — influenced by the pioneering landscape architecture pattern books of Andrew Jackson Downing, Jacob Weidenmann, and their own prodigious imaginations — supplied color, shade, and texture far beyond the elements recorded by Blackwell. IAD artists were typically instructed to hew closely to documentary representation, and to resist the very creative interpretation that their renderings were meant to inspire in peers who might use the Index images for their own design endeavors. In these watercolors, however, the Victorian era estate landscape was given a distinctly modernist aesthetic; the artists’ renderings might have come straight from a contemporary issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.
The 1860s — when the Blackwell survey concluded and the breaking up of the upper Manhattan estates started in earnest — is considered the beginning of American landscape architecture as a formal profession and practice. A revised history of both landscape architecture and conservation in New York might reach back farther to the older estates depicted in the images gathered here, which Wall Street brokers and bankers, publishers, department store magnates, and real estate speculators fashioned in concert with their wives, children, and hired hands. The Audubon Homestead was built in 1842 by artist-naturalist John James Audubon and his wife Lucy, whose family nickname “Minnie” was given to the fourteen-acre farm they called “Minnie’s Land”. Growing up on the estate of his merchant and stockbroker father George Blake Grinnell, naturalist and Forest & Stream editor George Bird Grinnell took his earliest tutelage in natural history from their neighbor Lucy Audubon. The legendary Eliza Jumel, ex-wife of Aaron Burr, began gardening on the Jumel Estate in 1815, when laborers — very possibly enslaved — planted the “Bonaparte Cypresses” brought back from the Tuileries Garden by her wine merchant husband Stephen.
Like most of his well-heeled Fort Washington neighbors, New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett resisted the city’s encroaching urbanization initiative, certain that this landscape had a different destiny:
There is nothing in the suburbs of London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna or any city in Europe to compare with it. If it is kept out of the hands of jobbers and speculators, and allowed to grow up, as it is doing, under the direction of the proprietors, it will become in ten or fifteen years one of the most beautiful faubourgs of any city in the world, and infinitely a superior location for the fine residences of merchants and others to Fifth Avenue or the Central Park.
Less than a year after Bennett’s death in 1918, the executors of his estate auctioned off five hundred building lots; his graciously curving cinder-covered drives, ornate parterre, and other plantings soon vanished beneath macadam and modern “garden” apartment buildings.
The gallery below includes all of the Index of American Design renderings based on the Blackwell Survey. They are arranged roughly in geographical order — progressing northward from 155th Street to the island’s end at Spuyten Duyvil Creek.


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Unidentified Floating Object: Edo Images of Utsuro-bune
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jun 8, 2023

Sometime in the early months of 1803, an alien ship came ashore on the coast of Japan. Fishermen thought it was one of their own and rowed out to tow this object bobbing in the waves. It was not. The vessel looked like a cauldron, rice pot, or pod — its bottom was forged from some kind of heavy metal; the top seemed to be rosewood, lacquered and inset with latticed glass. On the beach, villagers marveled at the advanced engineering, and peering through the opaque windows, they noticed something writhing. Just then, a panel flung open on the hull and out stepped a being that looked almost human. . . Or so the various sources tell us, with varying levels of contradiction.
This utsuro-bune (hollow or vacant ship) appears in at least twelve literary sources from the late Edo period. The most notable, perhaps, is Toen shōsetsu (1825) by Bakin Takizawa (Kyokutei) — a fourteen-volume collection of gossip and gathered tales. We find a series of perplexing details in the eleventh volume of this work, during an account titled Utsuro-bune no Banjyo (A Foreign Woman in a Hollow Vessel). The alien ship, measuring about five meters in diameter, was discovered on a beach in the Hitachi Province. Its adolescent inhabitant was incomparably beautiful. Her red hair had white highlights; some speculated it was made of fur. She wore a dress crafted from a strange material, which the local women rather liked, for it could be kept tight on the top and loose near her ankles. She grasped a wooden box firmly and refused to let it go. From evidence gathered in the vessel, her species seemed to drink water and subsist on mince and cake. She spoke no Japanese.
On the beach, they fantasized that she was a foreign princess fleeing an unhappy marriage. This would explain the box — for some believed it contained a dead lover’s severed head — and the alien writing system inscribed on the vessel, which made them assume she was “a British, Bengali, or American princess”. (The reproductions of these symbols, such as in the rightward column of the image above, make us wonder otherwise.) In a cruel and slightly comic resolution, the villagers decide to send the alien back to where it came from. Not out of fear or hatred, but frugality. In Shoichi Kamon’s translation: ※※Indexed under…Writingon alien vessel
If information about this incident is relayed to the lord of the territory, we may be ordered to inspect this woman and the boat, which would be a costly endeavor. Since there is a precedent that this kind of boat should be cast back out to sea, we had better put her inside the boat and send it away. From a humanitarian viewpoint, this treatment is too cruel for her. However, this treatment would be her destiny.
The account in Toen shōsetsu ends with a curious bit of editorializing. The tale is signed by Kinrei, thought to be a pseudonym of Okitsugu Takizawa, but concludes with a postscript by his father, Bakin. He recalls reading an account of Japanese travelers in Russia, who witnessed women using white hair powder for formal dress. He thus relays that “she may have been a woman who lived in a Russian dependency. More detailed study on this is required.”
Was a Russian, American, or Bengali woman really cast back into the sea two hundred years ago? Or is this simply a tall tale? Were it not for a resemblance between utsuro-bune and the UFOs nicknamed “flying saucers” in the mid-twentieth century, these images might have taken their place firmly alongside the other Edo ghosts and monsters. Yet ufologists are hesitant to let the supposed facts decay into fiction or castaway narratives. In The Mystery of Utsuro-Bune (2019), for instance, Shoichi Kamon believes it is “not unreasonable” to think that this event actually happened, and hopes that the story “may possibly be a key to solving the mystery of modern UFOs”.
For those seeking an earthy explanation, we might look to the period in which the stories appeared. In his down-to-business analysis of the incident, “Did a Close Encounter of the Third Kind Occur on a Japanese Beach in 1803” (2000), Kazuo Tanaka discusses utsuro-fune: a genre of folktale that feigns to remember the Ur-scene of Japanese immigration — when people arrived to the archipelago in dugouts and small seafaring vessels — in order to boost the political legitimacy of a family’s rule. “The typical story of the folklore is that an ancestor of a family was a foreign noblewoman who crossed the sea by boat”. Folklorist Kunio Yanagita, who extensively studied utsuro-fune myths, believed they are governed by a law — legend becomes history. These stories were embellished over time, and the sea-crossing vessels morphed into the ornate watercrafts through cultural amnesia.
Couple this genre with the Edo period’s isolationism from international exchange — remembering that foreign ships entered Japanese waters with increasing frequency at the turn of the nineteenth century — and perhaps we end up with something like the utsuro-bune tales, in which the anxiety and excitement of an ethnic other appropriate the literary form historically used to shore up national identity. In a variant of the story, illustrated below, an empty ship washes up on the beach, its surface and interior almost entirely black. Shoichi Kamon points out that Western ships coming into contact with the Japanese coast at this time were called Kuro-fune (black ships), due to their waterproofing by tar.


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Season’s Bleatings: Finnish Photographs of the Nuuttipukki (1928)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Nov 28, 2023

A goat thing lurks behind the barn. There are horns and an empty skull, but its fleece looks thieved from a sheep. Where you might expect a tail, there’s only a truss of twigs — a sauna vihta, made for whipping flesh. It appears to be wearing boots. This is nuuttipukki, and he has come to slurp your booze and feast on scraps. You must let him in.
“Good Tuomas brought Christmas”, a Finnish saying tells us, “and bad Nuutti took it away”. Appearing in written sources from the mid-nineteenth century, and suspected to originate much earlier, nuuttipukki (aka nuutipukki, knuutipukki, knuuttipukki, or knuutinpukki) appears on Saint Knut’s Day, January 13, the end of the Christmas season in Finland. Once possibly part of a fertility rite associated with the harvest festival Kekri — in which shamans donned bovid horns — this seasonal goat became Christianized in the Santa Clause–like figure of joulupukki, literally “Christmas goat”, part of a wider Yule tradition in northern Europe.
Nuuttipukit, on the other hand, have shades of Krampus: they do not bring presents to children, but roam together in flocks, knocking on doors and grazing on beer and leftover casseroles. In earlier times, these goats were eligible, single men, but remained anonymous, so as not to attract the attention of the dead. Although their costumes and behavior could be frightening, it was considered bad luck to turn away a knocking nuutti. They wore birchbark or leather masks, and draped themselves in skins, coats, or straw, sometimes brandishing swords.
Since kegs ran low after Christmas, nuuttipukit often drank the thick, cloudy dregs at a barrel’s bottom, and became associated with yeast. Havoc ensued if a goat’s thirst went unslaked. According to legend, after exiting a house, they occasionally wrote receipts on its walls, notes to future goat boys that a debt had been paid. A version of the tradition lives on in southwestern Finland, especially the region of Satakunta, and the Åland Islands, although the drunk and randy goat bachelors have been replaced by children, and the pantry-raiding by song and pantomime. Finland’s Nordic neighbors have their own goaty tendencies: Norwegians have been known to don disguises and go julebukking; and Swedish citizens of Gävle erect an annual goat effigy that makes The Wicker Man seem almost run of the mill.
The photographs of nuuttipukit collected below were taken in 1928 near the town of Lunkaa in the municipality of Tammela by Toivo Kakoranta, a Finnish folklorist, intelligence officer, and magazine editor, who helped preserve regional stories and dialects in the tradition of Elias Lönnrot. Along with these images, you can enjoy a cheery holiday song collected near Heinola in 1914:
I fed the Nuutti, I gave the Nuutti drinkI put the Nuutti in the corner to sleep.The Nuutti slept in its filth, sinking into its rags.That over there . . .if something is lying over there then I am probably naughty,if I come round to yours.
Special thanks to Emma Vehviläinen.


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Divide and Concur: A Radical Plan for Peace in Europe (1920)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Nov 2, 2023

Published in Vienna a year after Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles, Die Unionisierung Mitteleuropas! (The Unionization of Central Europe!) anticipated not only the Second World War but also the coming European Union. “Does anyone really seriously believe that the current peace agreements have put an end to the idea of revenge [Revancheidee] of individual tribes?” asked the anonymous author, who wrote this twenty-four-page pamphlet under the initials P. A. M. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empire had suffered the “death blow” (Todesstoß). The Habsburg dynasty, upon which the sun once never set, “disappeared from the throne overnight”. The Allies had won, but animosity and divisiveness were haunting Europe, festering away in fields scarred with trenches, bullet-pocked homes. If “world peace” was a possible horizon, it would have to be worked toward gradually, starting with economic and cultural unification.
According to P.A.M., war arose from nationalism, and nationalism could be overcome with a “Union”, consisting of a common flag, monetary system, time zone, postal service, and language. Upon forming the Union, Europe should immediately revise its school systems, allocating half of all teaching hours to Esperanto and the other half to a student’s mother tongue. After twenty-five years, there would be enough widespread command of Esperanto for it to serve as the language of the Union’s defense forces. After another twenty years, Esperanto was to become the language of politics. Eventually citizens will vote on whether their mother tongues are even needed anymore.
The most bizarre aspect of The Unionization of Central Europe! is P.A.M.’s proposed canton system, which almost makes the Berlin Conference and Sykes-Picot Agreement look like ethnically sensitive approaches to territory distribution in comparison. To visualize this system, P.A.M.’s pamphlet came with foldout maps: “The New Europe with Lasting Peace”, and a slightly smaller map proposing a unification of European colonies in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, “The Colonies of the Union.”
The center of the Union was to be Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral. From here, on the map, twenty-four cantons radiate out in all directions, named for their capital cities and overlaid with color that designates their residents’ ethnolinguistic identity: Roman, German, Slav, or Magyar. Kanton München runs from Vienna to the Bay of Biscay; Kanton Budapest fans out eastward to the Black Sea; Spain, Italy, the Nordics, and other nations outside of Central Europe were exempt from the plan. There are alternative arrangements, but P.A.M. assures his reader that he has chosen “the most advantageous and fair” division, which will instantly resolve the Balkan question and all other tensions.
In a kind of wonderful inversion of concerns, P.A.M. spends more time on the details — outlining, for instance, the design, denominations, and iconography of the Union’s currency — than he does explaining how, exactly, this might all work. Since most of Europe’s problems can be solved by cutting it up like an overshared pie, he turns instead toward future threats to the Union: the East. To prevent “cultural upheaval” and incursions by “Asian peoples”, soldiers would occupy a fifty-kilometer no man’s land, where, when not fending off invasion, they could freely farm and marry. The pamphlet’s politics run the gamut. “Gypsy” children will be placed under state protection, and if parents complain, they are to be “expelled from the Union forever”. Schools are to be placed in forests due to the aromatic air (würzigen Waldesluft); factories that emit heavy smoke or pollutive noise must be relocated away from the capital; and imperial colonies should be consolidated, for this is the only way the Union can obtain, at a good price, “the raw materials that it absolutely needs for processing and producing cultural products”.
The government of the Union is to be built on the tenets of consociationalist power sharing. At first, a Frenchman will be president, a Pole will serve as Minister of Agriculture, and a Hungarian will oversee transport and nutrition. Every three years, these departments are to be reallocated to a different canton. Swiss law is to rule the land, and citizens will be discouraged from marrying within their ethnic group. Every male must complete compulsory military service: two years of active duty — split into a year of state infrastructural labor and a year of military service — followed by eighteen years as a reservist. Land ownership will be capped at a thousand yokes (about 1400 acres, or 6000 square meters), and larger plots will be seized by the state. Wealthy individuals can opt out of the mandate for intermixed marriage, which was meant to encourage the dissolution of sociopolitical difference, but they must forfeit a significant percentage of their assets. While optional retirement begins at fifty-five, no one can work past sixty-five, as this creates youth unemployment, and those unfit for work will be provided for by the state. As everyone will have the ability to lead a life of “moderate prosperity” — due, in large part, to a massive network of colonies whose citizens reap none of the rewards offered to Central Europeans — “class struggle” and “the hatred of Capitalism” will naturally subside by itself. After a century, it is presumed that all divisions of nation and people will dissolve into a unified whole.
As if shielding himself from potential critics until the genius of his vision began to manifest in Europe, P.A.M. filed details about his true name and profession with a notary, which were only to be released to the public once four nations had considered his proposal. This presumably never happened as historians remain uncertain of the writer’s true identity. Given that the publication of this pamphlet and its cartographic enclosures involved one Otto Maas, some think the author is likely his son, P. A. Mass. Abstract, geometric solutions to land distribution rarely result in lasting peace, especially when imposed from afar. However flawed and idealistic his vision, the core tenet — peace — of P.A.M.’s desired future remains one worth aspiring toward:
To many a reader this work may appear as the result of over-excited imagination; someday, though late, the knowledge of truth will gain the upper hand, and perhaps many things which have been stimulated by me here will be realized. This would be the most beautiful reward of my quite selfless, long, and elaborate intellectual work.


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Ikkyū in Hell: Skeletons (1692)
Text by Erica X Eisen
Oct 31, 2023

“Ikkyū is my true heir, but his ways are wild”: these words, uttered by the fourteenth-century Zen master Kasō, may seem like something of an understatement to those acquainted with his chosen successor. Legends about Ikkyū abound to this day, making it difficult to separate truth from Tokugawa Period invention. The bastard son of Emperor Go-Komatsu, Ikkyū was sent to live at Ankoku-ji Temple when still a child and would soon gravitate toward the austerer strains of Buddhist thought. At twenty-one, grieving the death of his first great teacher, he paddled out to the center of Lake Biwa intending to drown himself but was stopped by the ghost of his mother. Years later, adrift in a boat on a different lake, he would hear the sound of a crow’s call and achieve enlightenment.
A man of iconoclastic extremes, Ikkyū adopted the pen name Mad Cloud (Kyōun), authored verses that smash scriptural references together with scatalogical content, and spurned the comforts of his home monastery’s main buildings for a hut he dubbed Blind Donkey Hermitage. He is perhaps most famous, however, for his unabashed love of wine and women. In artworks, Ikkyū is often depicted flanking the Hell Courtesan, Jigoku Dayū, whose name punningly references both the highest (dayū) and lowest (jigoku) rank of Edo Period sex workers, the latter of which is also the Japanese word for the demon realm. A legend recorded in Santo Kyōden’s All Records of Drunken Enlightenment of Our Country (Honchō Suibodai Zenden, 1809) relates how Jigoku Dayū began her path toward spiritual advancement after meeting Ikkyū in the brothel where she worked. Many prints of the two feature the monk with an incongruously serene smile pasted across his face as he lofts a skull above the lady’s head.
It is this fame for sinner-sainthood that, at least in the popular imagination, has eclipsed Ikkyū’s significant achievements as an artistic jack-of-all-trades: as a shakuhachi (bamboo flute) player, as a calligrapher, as a practitioner of ink painting, and as a writer. Many of these skills are brought to bear in his book Skeletons (Gaikotsu, ca. 1457), a mixture of poetry and prose that comes down to us in printed editions supposedly replicating a manuscript, now lost, by the monk’s own hand. The text describes a series of visions of animated skeletons that Ikkyū had when he visited an abandoned temple. The lively illustrations testify to their maker’s sardonic sense of humor: he images skeletons dancing, drumming, drinking sake, having sex. In the verse, too, we see glimpses of the monk’s trademark irreverence:
If a stoneCan be the mementoOf the dead,Then the tombstoneWould be better as a lavatory.
Ikkyū lived during the Muromachi Period, when close ties between the Ashikaga Shogunate and Kyōto’s temples resulted in a flush monastic class quite far from the ascetic ideal of the sangha to which Ikkyū cleaved. As many have pointed out, the monk’s life also coincided with a time of virtually constant conflict — including the devastating Ōnin War — that laid Kyoto to waste amid horrific scenes of violence and upheaval. For all that Skeletons’ titular apparitions frolic and cavort across the page, the dominant tone of the text is one of melancholy and somber contemplation. A number of its poems reference Mount Toribe, whose well-known cremation grounds outside the Kyoto city limits served as a memento mori for the capital’s residents each time they saw its ascending column of smoke. “When the breathing stops and the skin of the body is broken there is no more form, no higher and lower”, Ikkyū writes, cautioning readers about both the fleetingness of existence and the ultimately illusory nature of all things. A similar idea is expressed in certain versions of the Jigoku Dayū tale in which she witnesses Ikkyū dancing with a group of her fellow courtesans: when the group goes behind a screen, the lady is startled to see their solid bodies project ghastly skeletal shadows, as though their flesh had melted away in an instant to reveal a premonition of the death that awaits us all.
As time went on, Ikkyū would become increasingly disillusioned by the corruption and worldliness of monastic authorities. In this context, his famous eccentricities begin to take on a different feeling: better to spurn the pieties professed by hypocrites than to submit to the fossilized non-thought of convention. The nickname Mad Cloud was less a sincere self-appraisal, as the Japanese literature scholar Sonja Arntzen explains, than “a way of pointing out his supramundane sanity” amid an ailing establishment increasingly removed from the values it pretended to espouse. In 1447, despairing of the intrigue and backbiting at his home monastery, Ikkyū hiked up to a remote mountain retreat with the intention of starving himself to death. He was saved this time not by his dead mother but by a living cousin, a distant half-relation who had come to occupy the imperial Chrysanthemum Throne in the meantime. Legend has it that this cousin dispatched an emissary begging Ikkyū to desist for the sake of the soul of the nation — by which one might suppose, substituting body natural for body politic, that the emperor meant also for the sake of his own soul as well.

author: Erica X Eisen


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Behold the Nebulous Smear:
‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Sūfī’s Illustrated Book of Fixed Stars (ca. 1430)
Text by Brad Fox
Sep 21, 2023

In 349 AH (960–61 AD) the Persian astronomer ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Sūfī was visiting the court of Būyid caliph ‘Adud al-Dawlah in Isfahan. Shortly after his arrival, another learned gentleman known to be well-read in astronomical matters stopped by. When night fell, the caliph asked his two visitors to identify a star that should be visible above the eastern horizon.
When the other astronomer struggled to answer, al-Sūfī saw that his colleague may have memorized a few astral charts, but he had spent little time using them to read the night sky. He explained to the caliph that a calculation error in Ptolemy’s Almagest — a cosmological almanac that had been translated into Arabic the previous century — meant the stars had shifted from the positions plotted by the Alexandrian eight hundred years before. In order to read the stars now, you had to add twelve longitudinal degrees. There are leading scientists, al-Sūfī bemoaned, who have never confirmed the books they read with direct observation.
The caliph hired Al-Sūfī as his personal tutor and put him in charge of a new imperial observatory in Shiraz. Three years later al-Sūfī presented the caliph with the Kitāb al-Kawākib al-Thābitah Musawwar (Illustrated Book of Fixed Stars), an expansion on the Almagest that became the greatest astronomical work of its age. Portable and illustrated, it was not meant simply as a display of learning but as an aid in direct observation. Each constellation is represented twice: once reflecting how the starry forms would look to an observer looking down at a celestial globe, a second time reflecting how they appear while gazing up at the night sky.
Ptolemy’s Almagest contained tables identifying names and positions of over a thousand stars that could be seen with the naked eye. The Kitāb al-Kawākib al-Thābitah Musawwar lists several bodies not mentioned by Ptolemy and includes traditional Arabic names for certain constellations and stars. To Arab stargazers, for example, the six stars that form the head of Cetus (the Whale) are known as al-kaff al-jadhmā — “the mutilated hand”. The five in the central body are called al-na’āmāt — “the ostriches” — and the star on the tip of the tail is called al-difdi’ al-thānī: “the second frog”.
Meanwhile, in the area where Greeks found the constellation Andromeda, Arabs saw two fish. Al-Sūfī combined the images, so that the fish bisected Andromeda’s body. A star in one creature’s mouth, overlapping with Andromeda’s belt, is particularly large. In his accompanying notes al-Sūfī calls it, descriptively, al-latkhā al-sahābiya — “the nebulous smear”. This turns out to be the Andromeda galaxy, and al-Sūfī’s reference to it is the first ever written mention of a galaxy other than the Milky Way.
During the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 656 AH (1258 AD), a copy of the Illustrated Book of Fixed Stars was saved by astronomer Nasīr al-Dīn al Tūsī, who offered it to Hulagu Khan and convinced him to build an observatory. By the fifteenth century, this distressed volume found its way to the Timurid sultan Ulugh Bey in Samarkand, who commissioned a new version and, like al-Sūfī, became the greatest astronomer of his age.
The pages shown here are from Ulugh Bey’s manuscript, now held at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. Other versions can be found in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

author: Brad Fo


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Humanity 101: The Syllabus of Frankenstein's Monster
Text by Hunter Dukes
Nov 8, 2023

Hiding in an unused structure connected to a cottage, Frankenstein’s monster becomes transfixed by the written word. Through a chink in the wall, he watches Felix read to his foreign lover and teach her how to speak his language, and piggybacks off of these lessons in language and letters. “I discovered that he uttered many of the same sounds when he read as when he talked. I conjectured, therefore, that he found on the paper signs for speech which he understood, and I ardently longed to comprehend these also”.
Soon after, while searching for his humanity or its lack, the monster stumbles across a “leathern portmanteau” containing three books: Milton’s Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Noble Lives of the Greeks and Romans, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. What happens next speaks to the “human” in humanistic education: these texts do not merely reflect the “human” condition, they mold their readers into subjects that can be accurately named as such. “I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books”, he says to Frankenstein. “They produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings, that sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection.” The devilish creature sees himself in Milton’s Satan, and the power struggle that arises between creator and creation, finds a vocabulary for his dejection in Goethe’s “despondency and gloom”, and transcends personal concerns through Plutarch’s focus on “the heroes of past ages”. All the while he asks himself the most profoundly human of questions: “Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?”
And yet, an autodidactic monster is no match for the dehumanizing judgements of society. His soul may look human — even more than human, thanks to his education — but his world will never let him be so. The creature’s reading spree ends with a reflexive moment of textuality: he finds Frankenstein’s journal in the pockets of a borrowed garment, essentially reading himself back into the early chapters of the novel in which he lives. Brought to life deep inside of multiple nested frame narratives, the monster becomes an allegory of writing itself — including the works by Goethe, Milton, and Plutarch enfolded into Shelley’s pages. Once words are birthed into the world, they live on in ways their creators can neither control nor fully imagine, and might indeed meet monstrous ends.
Below you will find Frankenstein’s creature’s reading list, complete with his thoughts and feelings about these texts.
In the Sorrows of Werter, besides the interest of its simple and affecting story, so many opinions are canvassed and so many lights thrown upon what had hitherto been to me obscure subjects that I found in it a never-ending source of speculation and astonishment. The gentle and domestic manners it described, combined with lofty sentiments and feelings, which had for their object something out of self, accorded well with my experience among my protectors and with the wants which were for ever alive in my own bosom. But I thought Werter himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined; his character contained no pretension, but it sank deep. The disquisitions upon death and suicide were calculated to fill me with wonder. I did not pretend to enter into the merits of the case, yet I inclined towards the opinions of the hero, whose extinction I wept, without precisely understanding it.
The volume of Plutarch’s Lives which I possessed contained the histories of the first founders of the ancient republics. This book had a far different effect upon me from the Sorrows of Werter. I learned from Werter’s imaginations despondency and gloom, but Plutarch taught me high thoughts; he elevated me above the wretched sphere of my own reflections, to admire and love the heroes of past ages. Many things I read surpassed my understanding and experience. I had a very confused knowledge of kingdoms, wide extents of country, mighty rivers, and boundless seas. But I was perfectly unacquainted with towns and large assemblages of men. The cottage of my protectors had been the only school in which I had studied human nature, but this book developed new and mightier scenes of action. I read of men concerned in public affairs, governing or massacring their species. I felt the greatest ardour for virtue rise within me, and abhorrence for vice, as far as I understood the signification of those terms, relative as they were, as I applied them, to pleasure and pain alone. Induced by these feelings, I was of course led to admire peaceable lawgivers, Numa, Solon, and Lycurgus, in preference to Romulus and Theseus. The patriarchal lives of my protectors caused these impressions to take a firm hold on my mind; perhaps, if my first introduction to humanity had been made by a young soldier, burning for glory and slaughter, I should have been imbued with different sensations.
But Paradise Lost excited different and far deeper emotions. I read it, as I had read the other volumes which had fallen into my hands, as a true history. It moved every feeling of wonder and awe that the picture of an omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting. I often referred the several situations, as their similarity struck me, to my own. Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature, but I was wretched, helpless, and alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.


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The Works of Mars (1671)
Text by Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Sep 7, 2023

It is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity. The construction of fortifications, for instance . . .—W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (2001)

What is the peculiar appeal of military architecture? Whether Norman castle or Cold War concrete, there is a kind of sublimity that belongs to defensive design. It stems obviously from the massive scale of construction, and from the luxury of uncompromised execution that generous defence budgets afford. But there is also pleasure to be taken in the unornamented purity of style of structures that have been built solely for practical ends.
These qualities are abundant in the work of the seventeenth-century French military engineer Allain Manesson Mallet. Born in Paris in 1630, Manesson studied mathematics before becoming a soldier (he added the name Mallet in tribute to his teacher). In 1663, he was posted to Alentejo as an army engineer in the service of the Portuguese king Alfonso VI, where he fortified chateaux, until the Treaty of Lisbon in 1668. He returned to France with an appointment as mathematics instructor at the court of Louis XIV.
He recorded his military ideas in a highly successful manual, The Works of Mars (i.e. “the art of war”) in 1671. A year later came German and Dutch editions (the source of the images above), even though France was by then at war with the Netherlands.
Manesson’s book encompassed theories of fortifications from their origins in designs developed in the sixteenth century by Michelangelo and the architect Vincenzo Scamozzi, including more recent innovations of French and Dutch engineers. He included numerous “star forts” with four, five, six, seven, and nine points or bastions, as well as less regular structures designed to protect whole cities such as Lisbon. The perimeters were designed to eliminate blind spots and allow for firing outward at all angles from positions protected against attacking fire. Manesson even included diagrams showing how to generate the optimum angles of the bastions from a pure circle using geometry alone.
The strongly geometric structures had emerged as a response to the introduction of gunpowder-operated firepower, and drifted slowly north from Italian city states to the trading cities of northern Europe. The symmetry was formative in the planning of “ideal cities”, where the need for defence might have dissipated, but the geometric style was retained for aesthetic reasons.
The success of The Works of Mars depended greatly on the many fine engravings it contained. These were the work of the Dutch artist Romeyn de Hooghe, who lived for a time in Paris before settling in Amsterdam. A caricaturist, satirist, propagandist, pornographer, and spy as well as an illustrator and engraver, de Hooghe was one of the most remarkable characters in the artistic ferment of the Dutch “Golden Age”. Clues to the full range of de Hooghe’s technique are present in the graphic sketches that fill the margins of the technical designs — here an action-packed exchange of pistol fire, there a rolling perspective of a field of battle.
De Hooghe was a political cartoonist first of all, “the virtuoso of patriotic imagery”, according to historian Simon Schama. In 1667, for example, he produced a comic strip–like record of the signing of the Treaty of Breda ending the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Later, he revived the 1600s tradition of so-called “atrocity prints”, the propagandist cartoons that had once been used to vilify the Spanish, to rouse hatred against the new French enemy. His drawings showed the French playing football with Dutch heads and children being burned alive. In one of his most dramatic engravings, a dyke is breaking, with enemy soldiers, peasants, and horses and carts all suddenly washed away (six hundred were drowned in the incident) while the star fort of Coevorden, which he had painstakingly drawn in geometrical accuracy for Manesson’s book, squats in the background, powerless against the force of natural events.
In Amsterdam, de Hooghe ran a large studio producing posters, portraits, and pamphlets as well as illustrations for books of stories by everyone from Boccaccio to la Fontaine. He set up one of the first satirical magazines in Europe. Never shy of controversy, he made everything from diagrams for a self-defence manual to prints celebrating the art of necromancy. His pornographic drawings, including a volume titled “The Wandering Whore” illustrating sexual positions, earned him a conviction for blasphemy and indecency.
The crowning of the Dutch Prince of Orange as William III of England in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 yielded a graphic commemoration by de Hooghe of the Catholic king James II being deposed. Later, working as a spy, he    exposed an Italian plan to destroy the dykes that protected Dutch cities from flooding. In 1706, he proclaimed the Dutch Republic the “freest and safest state” in the world   . When he died two years later, his widow burned his erotic art to avoid any further trouble with the authorities.
De Hooghe’s fine draughtsmanship disguised one thing, however. Impregnable though they might look, the star forts made for obvious targets, and were vulnerable to sustained onslaught or siege, with no means of regroup or escape for those pinned behind their walls. Long after the concept had been metaphorically breached, military engineers continued nevertheless to design ever more ambitious forts, entranced perhaps by the symbolic ideality of the structures so apparent in the plan view of drawings such as de Hooghe’s. They were rendered obsolete for good with the advent of more powerful artillery in the nineteenth century.
Their legacy today is a series of highly visitable historic sites scattered throughout European countries and their former colonial outposts: Palmanova and Lucca in Italy, Berwick-upon-Tweed and Tilbury in Britain, Almeida in Portugal, Copenhagen, Fort George in Nova Scotia, Fort William in Kolkata, Zamość in Poland, Naarden in the Netherlands, Ticonderoga in New York State to name a few. These, and of course works of art, such as de Hooghe’s, and the numerous treatises on defensive architecture by Manesson, Jean Errard, and others. As W. G. Sebald writes: “No one today, said Austerlitz, has the faintest idea of the boundless amount of theoretical writings on the building of fortifications . . .”

author: Hugh Aldersey-Williams


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Your Flannelette Cure: Fire Tests with Textiles (1910)
Text by Sasha Archibald
Oct 19, 2023

Ballerinas on fire fascinated Victorians. It was an erotic, potent image, the subject of numerous prints: dewy, ethereal virgins licked by flames. But it was also a real thing, in that actual ballerinas caught fire on stage and died of horrific burns. In one such fire, for instance, in Philadelphia in 1861, a dancer’s tutu blazed, others rushed to help, and eight ballerinas burned to death, some in view of the audience. The charred remains of French ballerina Emma Livry’s costume are held in the collection of the Musée-bibliothèque de l'Opéra in Paris; the famous dancer lifted her tutu so that the tulle wouldn’t be smushed when she sat down to rest, and the tiny whoosh of air swelled a fatal gas lamp.
These deaths by fire grabbed headlines, but most others did not; it was shockingly commonplace for a woman to die because her clothing ignited. The problem was threefold. First, light was provided by flame. Second, fashions were so voluminous they couldn’t be closely controlled. And third, fabric. Some fabrics — lace, netting, gauze, tulle, muslin — were far more flammable than others. They ignited almost instantly, and burned fast and hot. Others, such as wool, were naturally fire-retardant. Women’s clothes were more often made of the former than the latter.
The number of fatalities increased in the last decade of the nineteenth century when a new fabric entered the market, flannelette. Flannelette was a poor woman’s flannel — a cotton calico that had been treated on one side with bladed rollers and brushes that abraded the surface, raising a kind of fiber fluff. Like its namesake, flannelette promised warmth, which was desirable on its own, but also thought to prevent illness. It was used extensively for undergarments, pajamas, and children’s clothes.
The fabric turned out to be extraordinarily flammable, “almost as dangerous, if touched with fire, as gunpowder”, wrote a contemporary observer. Like dry brush in a forest, the buttery nap accelerated fire, such that a spark at a nightgown’s hem could spread to the collar in fifteen seconds. As the deaths increased, Britain’s coroners began raising alarms. Some coroners went so far as to suggest that flannelette should be banned, which is when one of the largest manufacturers, Manchester’s Messrs Whipp Bros & Tod, finally took action.
The company hired chemists and fire scientists to determine if flannelette could possibly be made less flammable. It was a difficult ask. Existing fire retardants were unsuitable for clothing — they turned fabric dusty, flaky, or clammy. Messrs Whipp Bros & Tod needed something that wouldn’t affect the tactility, color, or smell of the flannelette, and was organic enough for skin contact. Most challenging of all, the retardant had to stay put through repeated washings. It wasn’t practical for the average flannelette consumer to dip the garment over and over, in a separate tub, at extra expense, with time for drying before and after.
The images above document just a tiny fraction of the ten thousand burning tests ultimately performed. The process was rigorous. Messrs Whipp Bros & Tod’s experiments controlled for weather, clothing size, number of washes, and the specific type of washing, whether by machine or hand, with elaborate specs for each. (The handwashing process, for instance, entailed fabric being: “rinsed in cold water, then washed and boiled in Field’s pure oil soap and Brunner Mond’s alkali, then rinsed once with warm water, rinsed twice with cold water, centrifuged, dried in moderate heat, ironed.”) Ignition by candle was compared to ignition by gas lamp.
The basic experiment, run over and over again, was to set fabric on fire, watch it burn for sixty seconds, and then document the percentage of total destruction. Messrs Whipp Bros & Tod ultimately concocted a product that did very well in these tests, well enough to earn approval from the British Fire Prevention Committee. A size large nightgown made of ordinary flannelette and washed and ironed 10 times was more than half in cinders after 60 seconds, whereas a size large nightgown made of the new treated flannelette, also washed and ironed 10 times, remained entirely intact even at 120 seconds. (The photos show a tiny swatch burned out of the hemline, and no other damage.) “Non-Flam Flannelette” hit the market in 1910, with hopes that it would replace flannelette entirely. Even more lifesaving was the switch from gas to electric light. There is always another way to skin a cat.

author: Sasha Archibald


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The “Madame B Album” (ca. 1870s)
Text by Sasha Archibald
Sep 6, 2023

The “Madame B Album” was not made for public viewing, though the artist spared no care on its design. The book is a leatherbound volume of some hundred photocollages. Victorians enjoyed their photos in myriad ways — trading, posing, and arranging, inscribing winking captions, customizing rings and lockets. Photocollage is part of this domestic feminine milieu, and yet separate from it; collagists treated the photo irreligiously, as raw material for artmaking, something to be used, and used up. There is no substantive distinction between nineteenth-century photocollage and collage as it is understood today.
Madame B’s primary practice was to paint elaborate, fantastical watercolor settings for photographic portraits of friends, family, and pets. She pastes photos in all sorts of whimsical places: on the tail feathers of a turkey, within the divots of a blue infinity chain, nestled in bouquets and lily pads. Men in suits form the eyespots of a butterfly’s wings, and women with muffs balance in a snow-speckled tree. Photos dangle from a bird’s beak and a horse’s yoke; seven are ensnared in a spider’s web.
Madame B’s meticulousness is almost maniacal, her touch as fine as one might expect from a miniaturist. On one exceedingly delicate collage, thousands of minute pale lines suggest crazing, the hairline webbing that appears when ceramic and glaze imperfectly bond. On another, jagged blush-colored striations indicate marble. Photos are encircled by ribbons and sticks, pine boughs and wrought iron, mica terrazzo, cattails. A picture of a grand building is draped by a curtain of chainmail, each link distinct.
As is true of so much art and craft produced by Victorian women, the album is unsigned; the Art Institute of Chicago acquired it without any idea of the maker. They assigned it its enigmatic title because the first page features an elaborate doorway monogrammed “B”.
Close inspection and curatorial sleuthing revealed that the artist knew French, and had also spent a great deal of time in Sweden and later, Italy. She was a skilled watercolorist and draftswoman, suggesting an aristocratic education. The various circles of acquaintance represented in the book’s cartes de visite were carefully layered: who might have possessed a photo of Sweden’s king, Italy’s queen, a Russian family surnamed Polovstov, a diplomat from Württemberg?
By educated guess, the name eventually attached to the “Madame B Album” was Marie-Blanche Hennelle Fournier, known as “Blanche” and married to a career diplomat, Hughes-Marie Henri Fournier. Blanche had a daughter, Pauline. She loved her husband, or at least suggested as much through the symbology of the flowers that adorn his photo. She lost interest in her album, and left many collages unfinished. Surely, she never imagined it acquired by a museum, and paged by strangers all over the world.


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Masters of the Ice: Charles Rabot’s Arctic Photographs (ca. 1881)
Text by Erica X Eisen
Jan 9, 2024

“They are so beautiful, so magnificent, those deathly solitudes, so strange in their fleeting finery of brilliant colors, that they always leave one with a burning desire to see them again”, Charles Rabot wrote in 1894 of the particular allure of boreal landscapes. Hardly had he returned from a trip to Greenland, as he put it in the preface to his travelogue of the Russian taiga, when “nostalgia for the countries of the north took me” and sent him off on another of the peregrinations that would mark his life. The opening of that book includes a portrait of the author that, while showing nothing of his physical appearance, captures the image of the intrepid explorer that he wished to convey to the world: knee-high leather boots, matching gloves, and face entirely obscured by a thick swaddling of mosquito netting to prevent him from being eaten alive by gnats.
A self-styled glaciologist, Rabot undertook four expeditions to the Arctic in his lifetime; when he wasn’t voyaging to polar climes, he was writing about them in his capacity as editor of the journal La géographie or advising the likes of the prince of Monaco on their own itineraries. His written accounts theatrically capture the difficulty of life in these harsh climates, as in a description of the struggles of providing medical care in rural Scandinavia:
Each doctor has under their purview a vast area, some as large as one of France’s departments. . . . The shortest trip is a tedious trek in the summer and a voyage of a few days in winter, beneath bursts of snow, in the icy darkness of the northern night. The life of a Norwegian doctor is a veritable study in devotion and sacrifice. Too often, alas! their aid is in vain; before the arrival of the doctor, the sick person has long since passed away. “We’re here for moral support,” one of these excellent men told me sadly.
In contrast to the melodramatic style of his writings, Rabot’s photographs of the North are characterized by an abiding sense of stillness. This comes through both in the staginess of his ethnographic photos of Sami communities and his landscapes, where wide-angle shots in soft semi-shades of black and white give the impression of an infinite and unchanging expanse. With their fuzzy light, with their areas of grayish blur, many of the latter photos appear almost to be frozen at the heart of a block of ice — or perhaps glimpsed through a glass darkly. If there are any people to be seen in these snow-pied expanses, they are tiny afterthoughts so overwhelmed by the whiteness around them that any individuating features are obliterated completely — to the extent that these figures seem less like the protagonists of the shots and more like another accidental void bitten into the negative by the frost. This is the push-pull logic presented by Rabot and other so-called explorers of the era: the landscape is unconquerable; I myself have conquered it.
Proficient in multiple Nordic languages, the French Rabot seemed to have a particular affinity for Norwegian culture and exerted considerable effort campaigning on behalf of that country’s territorial claim to what was then called Spitsbergen (modern-day Svalbard). As part of the so-called “Literature Lobby”, he edited, authored, and translated numerous articles advancing Norway’s cause, even going so far as to testify at the Paris Peace Conference regarding the matter. “No other nation compares with them in their geographical discoveries, the number and accuracy of their surveys, and the extent of their scientific results in this archipelago”, he argued in a piece that veers between geography and jingoism, later stating that “nearly all the expeditions that have visited this Arctic land have engaged Norwegians as ice masters.” Rabot also wrote in favor of Denmark’s colonization of Greenland, calling it a “philanthropic” project in which the sole aim of Danish authorities was “to better the situation of the natives and lift them bit by bit out of their condition as savages.”
While he could stirringly describe the destructive might of nature at such extreme latitudes, Rabot was also aware, over a century before our time, of the heavy toll that human interference was taking on the regions he studied. As Alexandre Simon-Ekeland points out, “Only one travel account [of Norway’s North Cape], written by Charles Rabot, overtly recommended in 1898 that all tourists participate in a whale hunt . . . urg[ing] them to do so fast before the whales disappeared from the region.” That Rabot’s response was not to call for a halt to the commercial activity laying waste to the environments he claimed to so love but to give advice on how best to watch them get sucked dry is a grim intimation of our current moment.


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The Landlord's Game: Lizzie Magie and Monopoly's Anti-Capitalist Origins (1903)
Text by Sasha Archibald
Dec 21, 2023

There are few cases of creative and intellectual theft more egregious than the origins of the billion-dollar grossing Monopoly. The short version: a brilliant woman economist invented an anti-capitalist board game that was stolen by a lying, opportunistic man and repackaged as capitalist family fun.
In early 1933, Richard Brace Darrow went to a dinner party where he was taught a new game. He had such a good time, and waxed so enthusiastic, his hosts typed up the game’s rules and sent Darrow a copy. Then Darrow proceeded to draw his own version, on a circular piece of oilcloth. (The version he’d played at the dinner party had also been homemade — mass-produced board games were not yet an ordinary commodity.)
Darrow was a heater salesman who’d lost his job and times were lean. He decided to take his prototype and pitch the game to Parker Brothers. The rules were exactly the same as those his friends had shared, down to the misspelling of Marven Gardens as Marvin Gardens. Parker Brothers didn’t bite right away, but then they did, and Darrow became a millionaire.
Included in every new Monopoly box for decades was a story about how Darrow invented the game while tinkering around in his basement — a self-made man who saved himself from poverty through ingenuity and hard work. Darrow and Parker Brothers stuck to this story, even to the point of suppressing contradictory evidence. Parker Brothers bought up early homemade versions of Monopoly, presumably to have them destroyed, and somehow maneuvered their patent despite existing patents. Everyone in Darrow’s social circle knew the truth and some tried to say so. They were ignored.
Perhaps Darrow quelled his conscience by imagining the game had no inventor. In fact, with a bit of effort, he could have tracked her down. She was still alive, and still making games. As was later detailed, Darrow learned the game at the Todds’ house, and the Todds learned it from a friend, Eugene Raiford. Eugene learned it from his brother, Jesse. Jesse learned it from Ruth Hoskins, who taught at a Quaker School in Atlantic City. Ruth learned it in Indianapolis, from someone named Dan Laymen, who had played it in his frat house in college. The frat brothers who taught everyone else to play were Louis and Ferdinand Thun. They learned it from their sister, Wilma, who learned it from her husband Charles Muhlenberg. Charles learned the game from Thomas Wilson, who learned it in his college economics class, with the radical Wharton/UPenn economics professor Scott Nearing. (Nearing played the game with his students until he was fired, in 1915, for criticizing industrial capitalism.) The trail ends here, for Nearing learned the game directly from its remarkable inventor, Elizabeth Magie, or Lizzie, who filed a patent for it in 1903.
Lizzie Magie was a provocative, whip-smart nonconformist. Piqued about her dismal salary as a young working woman in the late nineteenth century, she caused a national furor by taking out an ad in a major magazine, describing herself as a “young woman American slave” for sale to the highest-bidding suitor. She filed many patents, not just on Monopoly (which she called The Landlord’s Game), but other games too, and also for a mechanical device that improved the ease of typing — all this at a time when the number of patents filed by women was miniscule, less than 1%. Born in 1866, Magie didn’t marry until she was forty-four, and had no children. She wrote poems, performed in dramatic theater, taught college-level courses in her home, corresponded with Upton Sinclair, and studied economic theory. Her father was close friends with Abraham Lincoln. Both father and daughter were devout followers of the teachings of economist Henry George, whose 1879 treatise Progress and Poverty made the case for a single tax, on land. Like her fellow Georgists, Magie believed that ownership of nature was not possible — the earth was not something that could be owned. Land could, however, be “rented”, thus comprising the single tax. Magie designed The Landlord’s Game to teach and proselytize the principles of Georgism.
At first Magie self-published her game, producing a small number of copies she sold to friends. A few years later, she found a publisher in the Economic Game Company, who helped The Landlord’s Game find an audience in “pockets of intellectuals along the eastern seaboard”, writes Mary Pilon, and in Scotland, where Magie debuted a version she called Brer Fox and Rabbit.
As the game’s popularity spread, bootlegs sprang up, including the version at the Todd’s dinner party. Monopoly changed in its telephone-like peregrinations. Most of the property names were altered, often in ways specific to the town in which the game was being played. Someone thought to group properties with colors, and the Quaker players, to make the game less raucous, eliminated both dice and the bidding that preceded a property purchase. Darrow hired a graphic artist to draw the now-iconic “Go” and various pictograms, and Magie herself kept fiddling, updating her patent with new properties and rules.
Most of these changes were superficial, but one was not. Magie’s original concept included two sets of rules representing the difference between a Georgist and capitalist economy. By one set, players tried to produce equity through a single land tax, such that wealth was evenly distributed and winning the game a collective achievement. By the other, players tried to build monopolies and fleece their opponents. As is obvious, Darrow favored set two. What Magie intended as a forecast of disaster became Monopoly’s sole objective.
In November 1935, George Parker visited Magie and finally offered to buy her patent. The offer wasn’t about restitution, but rather part of a corporate strategy to absorb games that threatened Monopoly’s monopoly: Easy Money, Finance, Inflation, and, of course, Magie’s Landlord’s Game. To sweeten the deal, Parker promised that his company would not only market The Landlord’s Game, but also develop two new games of Magie’s design. Magie agreed, and Parker Brothers did as promised, though without much oomph. The Landlord’s Game received little press, and Magie’s subsequent games, King’s Men and Bargain Day, fared poorly. Monopoly, on the other hand, went global.
Parker Brothers president Robert Barton later admitted, “Whether [Darrow] got it all from Magie Phillips, whether he got it from somewhere else, we didn’t know. And we cared very little.” Darrow glibly lied, Parker Brothers pretended ignorance, and the collusion worked perfectly for decades. After the umpteenth interview in which Darrow repeated Monopoly’s fake origin story, in 1964, one of his former dinner party friends wrote a letter to the show’s producer, WRCV-TV in Philadelphia. He described precisely where Darrow got the game, and noted the irritation of everyone involved. The letter writer concludes, “There is nothing to be gained by writing you this letter except, perhaps, to vent my feelings and point out . . . that everything in this world is not what it seems to be.”
This entire story would have been lost had Parker Brothers not decided to pursue legal action against a Berkeley economist, Ralph Anspach, who began marketing a game he called Anti-Monopoly in 1973. Parker Brothers (by then owned by General Mills) sent Anspach a frightening cease and desist letter. Anspach thought the grounds ridiculous: no one would ever confuse his scrappy Anti-Monopoly (originally christened “Bust the Trust”) with the global sensation Monopoly — so rather than ceasing and desisting, he began digging up the history of the game, to see if there were grounds to contest Parker Brothers’ copyright claim. Indeed, there were. When Anspach realized Parker Brothers was defending a patent built on a house of cards, he took the company to court. The role of Lizzie Magie was a happy research surprise. As for the flip flop at the center of the story — a homemade, anti-capitalist game created by a woman becomes a mass-produced uber-capitalist game that profits a man — that part wasn’t much of a surprise at all.


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Chromolithographs of Paper Lanterns (ca. 1880)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Nov 9, 2023

The chromolithographs collected below, from a late-nineteenth-century catalog published in Baden-Württemberg, advertise paper lanterns in the style of those still carried during St. Martin’s Day celebrations. They speak perhaps to the changing seasons, a last grasping after the green hills and grinning sun lost to summer memories. These lanterns were manufactured by the C. Riethmüller company, founded in 1855 by the eponymous bookseller, which continues to sell balloons, bunting, and other party goods. Originally the lanterns were shaped with scissors and colored by hand. An unexpected demand for the beautiful objects pushed Riethmüller toward industrial methods, and he soon launched a line of Japanese designs, with salesmen representing his goods in Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Austria. An 1886 trade magazine for papermakers recommended visiting the Kirchheim-unter-Teck factory to relax below its charming samples, and describes how the company once offered more than 150 varieties of lantern to a global network of clients. With expertise in pulp and printing, Riethmüller constructed the catalogs as elaborately colored demonstrations of industrial precision.
The modern-day St. Martin’s festival on November 11 — celebrated across Europe, but particularly present in German-speaking countries — once had “a pronounced secular character” and was, according to Martin W. Walsh, “a kind of ‘shadow’ Carnival ushering in, instead of ushering out the winter revelling season.” The parallel secular and sacred traditions are maintained to this day, as “Old Halloween” (before the Gregorian calendar, Saint Martin’s Day fell at the beginning of November) is both an important liturgical event and a nondenominational festival of light. Best known for feasts anchored by fatty geese and oxen, “Martelmas” in Britain was historically associated with heavy drinking and hearty revelry: “drinking deepe in tankards large, and bowles of / compasse wide”, as a 1555 text described the festival. Nowadays, especially in the Netherlands, Austria, and Germany, we associate St. Martin’s Day more with innocence and flame rather than the dim fug of a tavern. Lantern parades (Laternelaufen) are held in city streets, as children carry paper lanterns and sing songs to combat autumn’s gloam, strolling toward a bonfire where Glühwein is served to their chaperones. It is not known exactly how lanterns came to be associated with the saint. A figure of charity — famous for cutting his own cloak in two to warm the less fortunate — Martin of Tour’s gift-giving qualities perhaps extend to light itself, coruscating out of lanterns into insatiable darkness.