text:
The False Young Man (1937)

Jul 2, 2019

In this recording — made at the Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County, Kentucky, by the legendary musicologist Alan Lomax — you can hear Abner Boggs sing a heartrending rendition of a song called “The False Young Man”.
Songs by this name — like the ballad printed on the broadside shown above — have been in circulation since at least the seventeenth century. But the roots of the song Boggs sings are more intimately tangled with the old Scottish ballad “Young Hunting” (AKA “Love Henry”). The ballad tells the story of a woman scorned by her lover who then stabs him in the heart and dumps his body in a river or well. Most versions also include a talking bird that torments the murderess or, in the most supernatural versions, brings her to justice. The song has had a long life, and has been covered in various versions by everyone from Bob Dylan to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
Like many ballads, “Young Hunting” fragmented over the years, becoming less and less story-oriented. By the nineteenth century, in both Scotland and Appalachian America (where the British settlers had brought their ballads with them), the long and bloody tale it told had splintered into a series of more impressionistic verses, morphing into, among other things, “The False Young Man”.
There are still plenty of lyrical variations on “The False Young Man” (also sometimes called “The False True Love” and “Bird in a Cage”). Sometimes the song is sung from the perspective of an observer who sees the two lovers meet and talk, and sometimes from the perspective of the jilted lover herself, who is no longer a murderess but simply a suffering soul, crying out against the untrustworthiness of men in general:
I never will believe what another man says,If his hair be yellow, black or brown,Unless he’s on some gallows treeSwearing he would like to come down.
In Boggs’s version, the traditional gender roles are reversed. Here it is a man lamenting the faithlessness of a woman. (The song should really be called “The False Young Woman”.) But all these scholarly quibbles seem beside the point the moment you hear Boggs’s voice. He belts out the tune with a broken-hearted vulnerability that’s both beautiful and poignant.


text:
Bob’s Electrical Theatre (1906)

May 29, 2019

A film by the pioneering Spanish film director and cinematographer Segundo Chomón. With his innovative use of early splice-based tricks and a penchant for optical illusions he is often compared to the slightly earlier Georges Méliès, and indeed has been dubbed “The Spanish Méliès” by some. Though the similarities are clear, Chomón departs from Méliès in his variety of subjects and his use of animation, an art form he played a key role in developing. The then relatively new technology of electricity was a particular fascination of Chomón's — its enigmatic qualities particularly apt for exploration via the medium of animation, allowing as it did the visibility of manual force to be lost amid the cuts to leave only objects moved by some mysterious means, i.e. electricity. In 1905, he created The Electrical Hotel, a short about an ultramodern hotel, in which he made luggage appear to be unpacking itself. The following year came Bob's Electrical Theatre (also referred to as Miniature Theatre) which sees puppets get up to various routines, including wrestling, fencing, and what appears to be a short bout of bum smacking. The version we are featuring here comes from a copy preserved and restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Of the film, Jerry Beck from the UCLA site comments:
Although this is one of the earliest stop-motion puppet films ever created, it is quite sophisticated and loaded with charm.... The lifelike use of puppet dolls here predates the work of Ladislas Starevitch (pioneering stop-motion puppeteer) and Willis O’Brien (The Lost World and King Kong).

source: public-domain-review

type: collection

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


text:
Through the First Antarctic Night (1900)

Jun 21, 2019

Memoirs of early Antarctic expeditions are, by necessity, meditations on disaster. Sea ice, frostbite, freezing winds, the compass-upsetting effects of the magnetic poles — everything in these frigid zones poses a threat to human life, and the threat is often carried out. The Worst Journey in the World (1922) by Apsley Cherry-Garrard — a surviving member of Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova expedition of 1910–1913 — is probably the most famous of these memoirs. The first, at least of the modern era of exploration, was Frederick A. Cook’s Through the First Antarctic Night, 1898–1899, a remarkable journal in which he recounts the highs and (many) lows of his experience as part of the Belgica expedition.
Often considered the first proper expedition of the so-called "Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration", it would set a precedent for hardship, endurance, and disaster in the exploration of such climes. Cook and his fellow explorers — including Roald Amundsen, who'd years later go on to beat Scott to first reach the South Pole — became the first to spend winter on Antarctica, when their ship became trapped in the ice for more than a year, from February 1898 to March 1899. For two months — from 17th May 1898 until 23rd July — they were plunged into a sunless world, an ordeal of great physical and mental toil wonderfully captured in the journal of Cook — the American-born anthropologist, surgeon, and leader of the expedition.
Although he was later the subject of controversy — accused of bogusly claiming, in 1906, to have scaled Mount McKinley, and, in 1908, to have been the first to reach the North Pole — in Through the First Antarctic Night Cook shows himself to be reasonably modest and a charming writer of prose. He is especially good at evoking the “soul-despairing” darkness of the polar night, which had never previously been experienced at that latitude. All around the ship, the freezing wind howls, the pack ice groans, and the snow blows wildly, pricking the skin like needles. Occasionally, when the weather is right, strange lights appear low in the sky:
Precisely at twelve o’clock a strange rectangular block of fire appeared in the east-south-east. Its size was that of a small tabular iceberg, but it had a dull crimson glow which made the scene at once weird and fascinating. Its base rested on the horizon and it seemed to rise, brighten, and move northerly. […] We watched this with considerable awe and amazement for ten minutes before we could determine its meaning. It passed through several stages of forms, finally it separated, and we discovered that it was the moon. It was in fact a sort of mirage of the moon, but the strange rectangular distortion, the fiery aspect, and its huge size, made a sight long to be remembered.
Darkness descends on the men in more ways than one. In June, the death of Emile Danco, the much-loved Belgian magnetician, whose heart troubles were exacerbated by exertion in the cold, casts the crew into a spell of despondency. Then, less than three weeks later, Cook writes: “We are playing cards and grinding the music-boxes, and trying in various ways to throw off the increasing gloom of the night; but something has happened which has added another cloud to the hell of blackness which enshrouds us.” The cat named Nansen, which one of the sailors brought with him from Europe, has died in agony, and for many days Cook can find nothing to note in his journal — there being “nothing to mark time or disturb the gloom of the long black monotony”.
Hope returns with the return of the sun. “In these dreadful wastes of perennial ice and snow, man feels the force of the superstitions of past ages,” says Cook, “and becomes willingly a worshipper of the eternal luminary." Every man aboard the Belgica chooses a spot from which to watch the colourful lights that brighten the greyish darkness surrounding them, rendering “the death-dealing depression of the night a thing of the past”. When at last the sea ice thaws, Cook’s party is able to sail north to Patagonia, where they frighten the natives with their drunken, sea-legged walks and their battered faces and clothes.
There is no shortage of gloom in Cook’s account, but there is also no shortage of excitement. The auroras and magic lights, the desolate sea and icescape, the occasional “visit of a penguin or seal” all punctuate the somnolent tedium “induced by the long night of months”. The penguins especially — the much-admired birds the men both hunt and play with — provide very welcome entertainment. Cook’s photographs of them, and above all the photographs titled “Penguin Interviews”, are among the many palpable pleasures of the book.


text:
Karl Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst (1928)
Text by Sam Dolbear
May 15, 2019

At the grand old age of 63, just four years before his death, Karl Blossfeldt produced his first photography book, the internationally best-selling Urformen der Kunst (later translated into English as Art Forms in Plants). The book's 120 plates display Blossfeldt's remarkable photographs of plants – varieties from Equisetum hyemale (Winter Horsetail) to Tellima grandiflora (Fringe cups) — all captured in extraordinary detail, as if under the microscope, frozen into new forms almost beyond recognition.
Born in 1865 in Germany’s Harz Mountains, Karl Blossfeldt lived a childhood in the open air. As a teenager he became an apprentice in a foundry making wrought iron grilles and gates, objects decorated with plant-motifs, before then moving to Berlin to study at the School of the Museum of Decorative Arts. In 1890, he moved to Rome to study under the decorative artist Moritz Meurer, where he created and photographed casts of botanical subjects, travelling as far as North Africa to collect specimens. From 1898, and for the next three decades, Blossfeldt taught design at Berlin's School of the Museum of Decorative Arts. It was here, using a homemade camera with custom magnifying lenses, that he first began to take his remarkable photographs, for the purpose of teaching his students about the patterns and designs found in natural forms. Through the technology of photography Blossfeldt was able to reveal to his students details difficult to see by the naked eye. As he wrote in a 1906 letter to the school's director:
Plants are a treasure trove of forms — one which is carelessly overlooked only because the scale of shapes fails to catch the eye and sometimes this makes the forms hard to identify. But that is precisely what these photographs are intended to do — to portray diminutive forms on a convenient scale and encourage students to pay them more attention.
In light of this mission to reveal overlooked beauty, it is perhaps fitting that Blossfeldt chose not to obtain his specimens from florists or botanical gardens, but rather from track sides and railway embankments, what he called “proletarian areas”. In this sense, the photographs also stand as strange memorials to long-forgotten patches of land. These plants, many weeds, originally "out of place", now find refuge within the corpus of photographic history, immortalised upon the page.
When the gallerist and collector Karl Nierendorf came across Blossfeldt’s vast collection of photographs, he sought to publish them —  Urformen der Kunst is the result. Though we know only a few hundred images today, largely selected by Nierendorf, it was thought that Blossfeldt had taken as many as 6000, many hung from the walls of his Berlin studio. In his introduction to the first edition, Nierendorf writes that Blossfeldt finds a “happy permeation” of three elements: nature, art, and technology. It is a common trope, oft-repeated in relation to Blossfeldt’s work. According to Hans Christian Adam, Blossfeldt strips nature down.
Blossfeldt might have used a fairly basic camera, but the results are startling. The plants become graphic, geometric. One cannot help but draw parallels between Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst and Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur, published a couple of decades prior. In both works, the distinction between nature and art blur. Both depict nature in such detail, with such magnitude, that it appears as almost artificial, as an artwork. Indeed, upon closer inspection it is revealed that Blossfeldt did in fact sometimes retouch his photographs to emphasise and enhance the beauty of the forms he sought to celebrate.
Blossfeldt’s work was quiet and unassuming, but it quickly aligned with the avant-gardes of Weimar Germany: from "New Vision" to "New Objectivity". It provided a counterpart in the natural world to what others had attempted to achieve in the excess of the modern city: from the work of August Sander to László Moholy-Nagy. The critic Walter Benjamin was one of the first to review Blossfeldt’s book, claiming his fellow German had discovered the "optical unconscious": that which was invisible to the naked eye, revealed retrospectively or technically through the apparatus of the camera. In this sense, Blossfeldt completes Goethe’s idea of the Urpflanze — a primordial plant that contains within itself an infinity of potential forms: when dogwood becomes a bishop’s staff, when horse-chestnut shoots become totem poles, and the curly stems of the fern become iron railings. It is an art of revelation — "new objectivities" of nature revealed through the camera.
Urformen der Kunst was the first of three photo books by Blossfeldt: four years later there came Wundergarten der Natur (1932), and posthumously Wunder in der Natur (1942). All of Blossfeldt's published photographs have been collected in the highly recommended 2014 book from Taschen, Karl Blossfeldt: The Complete Published Work.

author: Sam Dolbear


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Plants and Their Application to Ornament (1896)
Text by Adam Green
Apr 25, 2019

In addition to being one of the most in-demand graphic artists of the late nineteenth century, the Franco-Swiss decorative artist Eugène Grasset was also a teacher and theorist. After years of expounding his influential theories at various art and design schools of Paris, in 1896 he published his Plants and Their Application to Ornament, a wonderful pictorial summation of his key idea concerning the use of natural forms as the basis for developing decorative motifs.
From his introduction:
An artisan is above all one who has learnt the nature of the vehicle he works in. The next step in his education is the study of natural forms: the step after that is to study and understand the limitations imposed by art principles upon these natural forms when he comes to employ them pictorially or in ornamentation. The draughtsman who fails to apprehend the laws which tell him when to go forward and when to use restraint in representing the object as he sees it, is as great a blunderer as he who mis-draws a tree branch or the features and limbs of his model, or he who confuses his perspective. The art of drawing is not the art of observing forms and objects alone, it is not mere mimicry of these objects; it is the art of knowing how far and wherein, and with what just limitations, those forms and objects can be reproduced in a picture, or in a decorative work.
The book is structured around a visual analysis of twenty-four common plant forms. For each Grasset offers a naturalistic study (albeit in his pared down style) followed by two plates depicting progressively more abstracted adaptations of the plant's form in decorative designs, as well showing them in the context of their potential use, from stained glass to furniture to vases to lace. The stunning images were executed in colour lithography which required several runs through the printing press, one for each colour, to carefully build the final multicolor print. Although Grasset's name is in lights, the drawings and lithographs were actually executed by his students, including several by Maurice Pillard Verneuil (1869-1942), who himself went on to publish his own influential ornamental pattern books.
The debt owed to William Morris, who died the year Grasset published the work, is clear — but in Grasset's patterns we see an even further abstraction, an approach that would prove a huge influence on the emerging Art Nouveau movement of the time.
The images we are featuring in this post are from a scan at the Internet Archive (from Smithsonian Books) though be warned it is missing a few plates. A complete copy can be seen at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, but we are not featuring them here because they've sadly put restrictions on re-use.

author: Adam Green


text:
Bracelli’s Bizzarie di Varie Figure (1624)
Text by Adam Green
Apr 9, 2019

At first glance you may be forgiven for thinking these images to have sprung from some hitherto unknown corner of the Cubist movement, but these remarkably prescient etchings are in fact the creation of an artist working a whole three centuries earlier. In 1624, Giovanni Battista Bracelli — an Italian engraver and painter working in Florence — produced an extraordinary book of prints titled Bizzarie di Varie Figure (Oddities of various figures). Its forty-seven plates show a variety of human figures mainly interacting in pairs, their bodily forms composed of a range of objects, mostly abstract – cubes, interlocking rings, and squares — but also such things as rackets, screws, braided hair, and the natural forms of trees. Although the idea of aggregating human forms from other objects was not new — famously explored half a century earlier by fellow Italian Guiseppe Arcimboldo — in their experimentation with abstraction these sketches by Bracelli truly seems to break new ground, prefiguring a certain way of thinking about the human form that would not be explored again for many centuries later.
In addition to possible inspiration from Luca Cambiaso's block figures of the previous century, a major influence on Bracelli appears to have been Jacques Callot's Balli di Sfessania. Prepared in Bracelli's hometown of Florence and published in 1622, Callot's series of twenty-four etchings each depict a pair of posturing figures which, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "was an attempt to document not the commedia dell'arte, as was once thought, but rather a dance of the type generally known as the moresca (symbolizing the conflict between the Moors and the Christians) but known in Naples in its Maltese form as sfessania". In addition to the formal pairing of figures, Giovanni Battista Bracelli seems to have borrowed something of the performance angle too, but adding to the dancers and duelists with postures reminiscent of tumblers, acrobats, and contortionists.
Not a lot is known about Bracelli's life. Sometimes going by the name Brazzè, and also the nickname “il Bigio” ("The Gray One", apparently a reference to his penchant for gray clothes) he is recorded on the membership records of Florence's Academy of Drawing from 1619 to 1635. He studied with the painter Jacopo da Empoli (1551–1640), and most of Giovanni Battista Bracelli's other work is in a similar popular vain to his master's (nothing like the Bizzarie di Varie Figure) — though he did produce an amusing alphabet composed of human forms. For more info on his life and Bizzarie di Varie Figure we highly recommend this essay by Sue Welsh Reed.
The images featured in this post are from the US National Gallery of Art, and are digitisations of a copy held by the Rosenwald Collection, which you can also see over at the Library of Congress.


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Optics Illustrations from the Physics Textbooks of Amédée Guillemin (1868/1882)

Jul 9, 2019

Exploring various aspects of the science of optics, these illustrations were all featured in the French science writer Amédée Guillemin’s popular textbook Les phénomènes de la physique (1868) and later reprinted in his five-volume magnum opus, Le monde physique (1882) (of which you can see a condensed 1877 English version here).
Many of the prints are the work of the Parisian intaglio printer and engraver René Henri Digeon. Some of the more psychedelic-looking illustrations by Digeon are based on images made by the physicist J. Silbermann showing how light waves look when they pass through various objects, ranging from a bird’s feather (plate VI in Les phénomènes de la physique) to crystals mounted and turned in tourmaline tongs (plate VIII in Les phénomènes de la physique and plate VII in Le monde physique).
These images — along with one executed by M. Rapine (based on a painting by Alexandre-Blaise Desgoffe), showing the effects of light on a soap bubble — were used to explain the phenomenon of birefringence, or double refraction: the colourful results of light waves moving through material at unequal speeds. And their subjects were not chosen haphazardly. Newton was famously interested in the iridescence of soap bubbles. His observations of their refractive capacities helped him develop the undulatory theory of light. But he was no stranger to feathers either. In the Opticks (1704), he noted with wonder that, “by looking on the Sun through a Feather or black Ribband held close to the Eye, several Rain-bows will appear.”


text:
X is for...
Text by Adam Green
Jun 12, 2019

In 1895, the physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered x-rays, a groundbreaking moment in medical history that would lead to myriad improvements to people's health. Perhaps one overlooked benefit though was in relation to mental health, specifically of those tasked with making alphabet books. What did they do before X-rays? Xylophones, which have also been a popular choice through the twentieth century to today, are mysteriously absent in older works. Perhaps explained by the fact that, although around for millennia, the instrument didn't gain popularity in the West (with the name of "xylophone") until the early twentieth century. So to what solutions did our industrious publishers turn?
As we see below, in addition to drawing on names — be it historical figures, plants, or animals, all mostly of a Greek bent (X being there much more common) — there's also some more inventive approaches. And some wonderfully lazy ones too.
Xerxes, Xantippe, and more...
As a figure of note, you might hope it would be your epic deeds accomplished that would lead to your name being uttered by students for millennia to come — not for the coincidence of the tricky letter with which your name began. But so it was for the Persian king Xerxes, who in the field of nineteenth-century alphabet books achieved what he could never quite achieve in fifth-century BC Athens, that is, domination. Though there was perhaps some small solace in that he was likely the very first historical figure of which many a child would learn.
Xanthippe, the supposedly "fiery" wife of Socrates also gets a good look in, often shown in a rage pouring a chamber pot over her husband's head, which — according to legend – the philosopher accepted with a simple “After thunder comes the rain”.
Other historical figures too can be seen to rise through the ranks of their lesser initialed contemporaries. Here it is Pope Sixtus II (also spelt Xystus, which comes from the Greek word for "polished").
Here it is a historical horse, which judging from its military context, most likely refers to the steed Hector rode in the Trojan War, though it might also refer to one of Achilles' two horses, or the Xanthus that was one of the Mares of Diomedes.
Xany
We are not sure of the exact history of this figure known as Xany, but he seems to be associated with foolishness — perhaps a convenient mis-spelling of the more common "zany" (which itself refers to "Zanni", a character type of Commedia dell'arte best known as a trickster).
The Natural World
Of course, the more Greek-orientated names of plants and animals were an option too — here we see Xanthium and Xylon (burdock and cotton), and Xiphias (swordfish).
As long as it is in there somewhere...
If not at the beginning then as long as there was an X in there somewhere that also seemed to be OK. All the better if it was in the form of "Ex" and so actually sounded out the letter itself.
The conveniently named XX ale makes a few appearances too. No-one's totally sure from where this unusual name stems, but possibly it was originally more akin to a crucifix and marked on the barrels by the monks to indicate that — swearing on oath — the batch was sound. It may also just simply have been an indicator of strength.
A picture says a 1000 words (and the letter X)
Though it often meant a total methodical departure from how every other letter was approached, the distinctive shape of the X could also provide fertile ground for the struggling yet inventive alphabet creator.
In this wonderfully erudite alphabet book, it's X as a symbol for "kiss" (curiously rendered as "ks.§§", as though the word unaltered would be too salacious for the page). ※※Indexed under…KissX as a symbol for
The anonymous group approach
Perhaps the worry regarding X spread to the letters around it. Many books resorted to giving up on the whole last section of the alphabet, transforming these letters into a nameless gang.
Or X is for... X (or just nothing at all)
Some publishers just seemed to give up altogether, opting for a more meta approach —  making X simply stand for... X.
In this example, the despair is palpable. They've simply refused to offer up any word beginning with X, instead using the space to comment on the difficulty.
And this one is perhaps the best of all. They've just missed it out entirely.


text:
The Joys of Young Werther (1775)
Text by Sam Dolbear
May 7, 2019

The publication of J. W. Goethe’s short epistolary tale of teenage angst and suicide The Sorrows of Young Werther caused shockwaves upon its publication in 1774. Shortly after its release so-called "Werther Fever" broke out over Europe. In addition to the emergence of a range of Werther merchandise — prints, porcelain, and even perfume — young men began to imitate Werther, their new hero of youthful disaffection and nihilistic abandon. They'd dress in his garb of yellow trousers and blue jacket, wander through forests in melancholic fashion, and even sadly go so far as to, like Werther, end their own lives. Within the first few weeks of publication, numerous incidents of suicide were recorded, some of the departed found reportedly clutching copies of the book. A moral panic ensued and the book took on a pathological quality: some seeing Goethe's tale not just as a well-crafted expression of Weltschmerz (an almost untranslatable pain or weariness with the world; what Søren Kierkegaard called “sickness until death”) but also its cause. Subsequently the term Werther-Effekt has emerged to refer more generally to the phenomenon of copycat suicides. ※※Indexed under…Yellowtrousers of melancholy
The book also inspired an industry in publishing, with a vast corpus of poems, operas, novels and commentaries from Heinrich von Kleist’s Der Neue (glücklichere) Werther (1811) to Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar (1939). Even the English novelist William Thackeray wrote a poem in parody, in which Werther “sighed and pined and ogled, | And his passion boiled and bubbled, | Till he blew his silly brains out, | And no more was by it troubled.” Charlotte, his unrequited love, having seen his body, goes on doing nothing but preparing dinner: bread and butter.
Emblematic of this Werther obsession in the literary world was The Joys of Young Werther, published only a year after Goethe’s novel, by the German bookseller Friedrich Nicolai. The book imagines a conversation between two figures: Hans, who represents the youth seduced by Werther, and Martin, who encapsulates the sensible adult, weary of the fashion for Werther’s Weltschmerz. Hans describes the power of Goethe’s novel in the very opening lines of the text: “The devil take the book The Sorrows of Young Werther.... It pierces you to your very marrow, making all your veins swell and your brain flash.” Martin seeks to convince Hans to relinquish this particular pact with the devil, through the promise of hope. At this point, the dialogue breaks off and Nicolai’s parodic re-writing of the novel starts up.
Nicolai has Werther’s pistol loaded not with a bullet but with “a bladder filled with blood, blood from a chicken that I was supposed to eat for dinner with Lotte this evening”. When the "bullet" lands on Werther’s head, the chicken’s bladder bursts, to indicate his dramatic demise. Werther survives, able to live another day. As per a Hollywood ending, Lotte and Werther go on to marry and they buy a house. Despite adversity (including their wealthy neighbour building a theme park next to their house), they integrate back into society, prosper, and live happily ever after. Nicolai’s tale jumps between parody and moralism, where his faith in a pastoral bliss holds totally redemptive power:
After about sixteen years, their hard work and thriftiness had made them prosperous. Werther was now able to give up his onerous work, and so he purchased a little smallholding that lay on the side of a hill, dotted with high elms and ancient oaks. It had only a tiny house, but there were fertile fields and a garden surrounding the house in which, beneath tall trees, there was a well, cut twenty steps deep into the rock, just as Werther loved it. Here he sat himself down and once again relished the simple harmless delight of a man who serves at table a head of cabbage that he himself has grown, and in that same moment enjoys not only the cabbage itself, but also all the good days, the fine morning on which he planted it, the beautiful evenings on which he watered it and took pleasure in its continued growth, all at once. For in the cabbage fields Lotte grew vegetables and roots that filled their respectable country table. The orchard was Werther’s responsibility, and the children planted flowerbeds full of tulips and fair anemones.
This literary affair does not end here though. In 1775, the same year as Nicolai’s takedown, Goethe composed a small poem in an attempt to ridicule his parodist. In the poem, Nicolai stands next to Werther’s grave and defecates on it: “He sat down, as it wouldn’t keep | On the grave, and left his little heap | Benignly his muck he contemplated | Went his ways much alleviated | And musing to himself did say: | “Poor fellow! A life spent amiss! | I’m sorry he had passed away. | If only he’d learned to shit like this | He’d be alive today!” Goethe’s friend, Schiller, also hits back. In 1797 he published a poem that depicts Nicolai as a stork, unable to eat the food offered to him, unable to comprehend abstract thought. The rift lasted a long time.  Goethe penned other attacks, including even giving Nicolai a small cameo in Faust as a "Proktophantasmist" — a neologism by Goethe which combines the Greek word for anus (proktus) with phantom (Nicolai began to be plagued by ghostly apparitions, and cured himself by applying leeches on his backside). Goethe’s responses perhaps proves that he was the master not just of tragedy, nor of comedy, but the amalgamation of the two. In line with Charlie Chaplin’s dictum so many years later: “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot”.
See an English translation (not public domain) here by Margaret Hiley. And read an English version of Goethe's original Sorrows of Young Werther, here in a 1902 translation by R. D. Boylan, and in a more modern translation here.


text:
Jan van Kessel’s Signature of Caterpillars and Snakes (1657)
Text by Adam Green
May 28, 2019

As far as artist signatures go, Jan van Kessel's seventeenth-century painting in which he spells out his own name with caterpillars and snakes must be up there with the best of them. Although it could be seen as a somewhat self-aggrandising move to make one's own name the subject of a painting (albeit one measuring only 15 x 20cm) the fact it is formed from such "lowly" creatures — the subject to which he dedicated much of his painting career — lends it a certain humility. In addition — given there survives from the following year a complete set of seventeen plates which includes a similar signature panel — it is highly likely that this was not intended as a stand-alone piece but rather as simply the signature aspect of a much larger set. The idiosyncratic signature also found its way into one of his most famous series, The Four Parts of the World. In the central panel of the Europe section it appears as a painting within a painting — though in a slightly different arrangement, with the name spelt "Jan" instead of the earlier "Joan", and sporting a later date of 1664.
Van Kessel was a highly regarded painter based in Antwerp and from a prominent family of artists — Jan Brueghel the Elder was his grandfather and Jan Brueghel the Younger his uncle. In addition to the study of insects, to which his signature nods, he was also known for his floral still lifes and multi-part allegorical works. His son Ferdinand painted in a very similar vein, including his own version of The Four Parts of the World series in which, in the central Europe panel, he'd worked in his very own entomological signature.


text:
John Locke’s Method for Common-Place Books (1685)
Text by Sam Dolbear
May 8, 2019

Popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a "commonplace book" was a notebook used to gather quotes and excerpts from one's literary wanderings — a kind of personalized encyclopedia of quotations. In "A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet" from 1721, Jonathan Swift remarked that a commonplace book is something that “a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that great wits have short memories”. The English physician and philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) was all too aware of the grip of amnesia and the shortness of memory. In his seminal Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) he wrote of his rival Blaise Pascal, who he named as the “prodigy of parts”, who “forgot nothing of what he had done, read, or thought.” Locke, in reaction, attempted to simulate Pascal’s "hyperthymesia", not in the mind, but upon the page: through the construction of a system of "commonplacing", as a form of what Swift called “supplemental memory”.
Locke's method built on a long tradition of commonplace note taking, most famously John Milton’s from the middle of the century. Locke was one of the first to formalise a method though. Developed over 25 years of personal note-taking, it was formalised in his publication of Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueils (1685), later translated into English as New Method of Organizing Common Place Books (1706) and published posthumously. His technique of "commonplacing" always began with a stack of white, empty sheets bound together into a single volume. At the front he placed an index of two pages, which listed every letter of the Latin alphabet in one column next to each vowel (though only for the combinations that were possible, hence just "Q.u").
From this index, Locke unfolds his method:
When I meet with any thing, that I think fit to put into my common-place-book, I first find a proper head. Suppose for example that the head be EPISTOLA. I look unto the index for the first letter and the following vowel which in this instance are E. i. If in the space marked E. i. there is any number that directs me to the page designed for words that begin with an E and whose first vowel after the initial letter is I, I must then write under the word Epistola in that page what I have to remark.
The ingenious utilisation of the second vowel allowed Locke, and those that followed his method, to systematically organise and be able to locate a great range topics in the limited space of the double page index (as opposed to simply arranging alphabetically). The large array of words encapsulated by an initial letter and vowel combination also meant, in the main notes area, less wastage of paper than a more traditional alphabet-based model might encourage (where each letter was preassigned a number of pages), and more structure than a purely chronological approach would offer.
In general, the commonplace book would result in a wonderfully tangled mixture of reading and writing, where disparate ideas could be fruitfully thrown together onto the same pages, fixed together only by a formal method (and of course similar word roots). According to the historian Robert Darnton, this led to a very particular structuring of knowledge: commonplace users "broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebook." It was a mixture of fragmented order and disorder that anticipated a particular form of scientific investigation and organisation of information. Locke’s humble two page method, in this sense, prefigures libraries filled with volumes of encyclopedias, from Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735) to Luke Howard's classification of clouds.
With the rise of printing technologies, common-place books reflected an anxiety with a deluge of new information still present today. John Locke was concerned with not just how to access it, but how to organise and recall it. In the age of the internet, as Steven Johnson writes, we are equally led into “common places”, where associations are constructed through happenstance (e.g. from a Google search); our job, he adds, is to sort that information out whilst also enabling connections to germinate.


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John Martin’s Illustrations of Paradise Lost (1827)

Jun 6, 2019

Paradise Lost (1667) tells the oldest story in the book. Blind as Homer and permanently exiled from political life after the Restoration of 1660, John Milton dictated an epic of the series of falls — of the angels, of Adam and Eve, of human language — that led to the corrupt and warlike world in which he lived. His declared intention was to “assert eternal providence / And justify the ways of God to men.” But as every reader of Paradise Lost can attest, Lucifer and the other fallen angels come out far more interesting than God, a peculiarity that prompted William Blake to claim that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”.
Illustrators of Paradise Lost have often drawn more from the poem’s infernal depths than its heavenly heights. Blake’s wild watercolors (painted in about 1807) delight in depicting the muscular immensity of Satan, spying on Adam and Eve and coaxing them to sin. Gustave Doré’s etchings (circa 1866) bask in the possibilities of inky darkness and pay special attention to the angels’ wings, which are swan-like as long as they are allied with heaven but turn bat-like the moment they fall.
In 1824, the English artist John Martin (1789–1854) was commissioned to offer up his own interpretation — producing a set of images that were originally sold to subscribers and then, in 1827, used to adorn a large two-volume edition of the poem. His mezzotint engravings, too, emphasize the devil and the darkness. Like Blake, he portrays the bodies of God, the angels, Adam and Eve as classically beautiful; like Doré, he uses light and shadow to point up the drama inherent in Milton’s scenes. But Martin, a radical romantic at heart, is especially excited by the drama of the scenery — whether the caverns and crags of hell or the English oaks and cumulonimbus clouds of Eden.
The genre of scenery ranges widely. In one engraving, we see Eve alone in a pastoral landscape crowded with trees, looking “into the clear / Smooth lake, that to me seemed another Skie” (See image 7). In another, we find God dividing light from darkness in a celestial swirl of eerie fluorescence, water, and mist (image 12). Early in the epic, we behold Satan holding court, as Laura Cumming puts it, “in what looks like a solo performance in the Albert Hall” (image 4). And, at the end, we wonder over Adam and Eve clad like the Flintstones, cast out of the Garden into an endless waste, which is apparently inhabited by dinosaurs (image 16).
Much in Martin’s landscapes is recognizably romantic. The mountainous clouds, enfolding foliage, and wrinkled ridges of rock are beautiful, but nonetheless familiar. What makes these illustrations of Milton enduringly fascinating are the traces of early industrial architecture evident, for example, in “The Bridge over Chaos” [15], which looks, in the words of the British Library catalogue, “almost like a sewer tunnel or mine-shaft,” perhaps reflecting “the fact that Martin was, at this time, designing schemes for improving towns with embankments and sewers, underground railways and glass shopping complexes.”
Read more about John Martin in our essay by Max Adams, "John Martin and the Theatre of Subversion".


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Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” (1843)

Jul 18, 2019

Edgar Allan Poe may be known for his tales of the supernatural, but he had a remarkably analytical, even mathematical mind. He was extremely wary of romantic ideas of literary inspiration, claiming that, in writing “The Raven”, the work “proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.” And he had no love at all for his more romantically minded colleagues. He thought Emerson “over-rated” and once insulted the poets Cornelius Mathews and William Ellery Channing with an algebraic pun: if Mathews was “ex ecrable,” he said, Channing was “x plus 1-ecrable”. ※※Indexed under…X (letter)as a humorous algebraic variable
Even a story as fanciful as “The Gold-Bug” originated in Poe’s obsession with logic. The plot is far-fetched: William Legrand, who has lost his family fortune, one day notices a golden beetle on the beach at Sullivan’s Island. He has his servant, Jupiter, wrap the bug up in a piece of parchment, on which he later discovers a coded message written in invisible ink, revealing the spot where Captain Kidd buried his treasure two centuries earlier. Once he has decoded this message, Legrand heads out with Jupiter — and their neighbour, who narrates the tale —to unearth the treasure, whose exact location he determines by ordering Jupiter to drop the bug through the left eye socket of a skull nailed to the end of a tree branch.
At this point the narrator, like the reader, is bewildered — “dying with impatience for a solution of this most extraordinary riddle”. But Legrand does not waste anyone’s time. He promptly gives a systematic explanation, several pages long, of how he discovered and decoded the secret message.
First, Legrand says, he determined the language of the message (English), before proceeding to ascertain the most and least frequently used characters. Since in English “the letter which most frequently occurs is e,” he substituted the most frequently used character in the coded message (8) with the letter e, then searched for a three-character combination ending in 8 (;48), which he guessed to represent “the” (the most common English word), and so on, until he had completely solved the centuries-old riddle — and become rich to boot.
Legrand is very much acting as Poe’s mouthpiece here. In fact, most of Legrand’s explanation is paraphrased from articles on cryptography Poe had published in Alexander’s Weekly Messenger a few years earlier. Inviting readers to send him coded messages where, “in place of alphabetical letters, any kind of marks are made use of at random,” Poe pledged to decode every message “forthwith — however unusual or arbitrary may be the characters employed.” This is precisely what Poe proceeded to do. Over the next months, he solved somewhere between thirty-six and one hundred cyphers in the interest of proving his assertion — which Legrand also makes in “The Gold-Bug” — that “human ingenuity cannot concoct a cypher which human ingenuity cannot resolve”.
In doing this, Poe was not trying (merely) to wow people with his genius for solving ciphers; he was also trying to make a case for the primacy of logic. In his essay “A Few Words on Secret Writing”, published in 1841 — after he had become a minor celebrity for his cryptographic prowess — he outlined not only the history of cryptography but also the rational methods by which one could decode almost any text.
Eventually, Poe was — as he wrote the poet John Tomlin — obliged to swear off ciphers:
The reason…will be readily understood. Much curiosity was excited throughout the country by my solutions of these ciphers, and a great number of persons felt a desire to test my powers individually — so that I was at one time absolutely overwhelmed; and this placed me in a dilemma; for I had either to devote my whole time to the solutions, or the correspondents would suppose me a mere boaster… You will hardly believe me when I tell you that I have lost, in time, which to me is money, more than a thousand dollars, in solving ciphers, with no other object in view than that just mentioned.
Poe left his newspaper readers, in December 1841, with two final cryptographs, which he credited to one Mr W. B. Tyler. As far as anyone can tell, no one was able to solve these cryptograms until the 1990s, when American literature professor Terence Whalen and Canadian software engineer Gil Broza finally cracked their codes.
Yet one question remains unanswered even today: Who was W. B. Tyler? Poe himself? Or the rare cryptographer who could out-cryptograph Poe? Arguments on either side abound, as seems appropriate. However logical Poe may have preferred to be, he was no stranger to mystery.


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The Beast of Gévaudan (1764–1767)

Jun 19, 2019

In the 1760s, nearly three hundred people were killed in a remote region of south-central France called the Gévaudan (today part of the département of Lozère). The killer was thought to be a huge animal, which came to be known simply as “the Beast”; but while the creature’s name remained simple, its reputation soon grew extremely complex. Not only was the Beast of Gévaudan said to prefer attacking women and children (and above all small girls), according to firsthand accounts published in the press it often “removed the victim’s head and drank all her blood”, leaving nothing behind but a pile of bones.
Illustrators had a field day representing the Beast, whose appearance was reported to be so monstrous it beggared belief. One poster, printed in 1764, described it as follows:
Reddish brown with dark ridged stripe down the back. Resembles wolf/hyena but big as a donkey. Long gaping jaw, six claws, pointy upright ears and supple furry tail — mobile like a cat’s and can knock you over. Cry: more like horse neighing than wolf howling.
Another print (see below), probably published the same year, bears the caption: “Picture of the monster desolating the Gévaudan, This Beast is the size of a young Bull, it likes to attack Women and Children, it drinks their Blood, cuts off their Heads, and carries them off.” A reward of twenty-seven hundred livres is promised to whoever brings the animal down.
The rampage of the Beast of Gévaudan was one of the first international news stories. First breaking in the Courrier of nearby Avignon, it was quickly taken up by the papers of Paris and from there spread abroad. A German print from September 1764 shows the Beast, looking more like a quadrupedal kangaroo than a wolf or hyena, attacking an improbably well-dressed man in a rather Teutonic-looking landscape.
Many artists emphasized the goriness of the Beast’s eviscerating attacks, as in this French illustration published by Mondhare in Paris.
Many also emphasized the Beast’s preference for feminine victims. In this engraving by the French printer M. Ray, which depicts the beast as a semi-erect reptilian lion, the text assures us that “There can no longer be any doubt regarding the appearance of the ferocious animal ravaging the Gévaudan”.
By the winter of 1764–1765, the attacks in the Gévaudan had created a national fervor, to the point that King Louis XV intervened, offering a reward equal to what most men would have earned in a year. Tens of thousands of hunters descended on the region. King Louis also deployed a dragoon captain, named Jean-Baptiste Duhamel, and a number of royal troops. Yet neither the swarms of hunters, nor Duhamel, nor the pair of professional wolf stalkers Louis eventually sent to replace Duhamel, were able to track down the animal responsible. It was not until September 1765 that François Antoine, Louis’ lieutenant of the hunt, shot the enormous “Wolf of Chazes”, which was stuffed and put on display in Versailles.
Although Antoine also killed the wolf’s similarly enormous mate and cub, the attacks continued. But by now the Royal Court had lost interest. The story had played itself out, and public attention had moved on to other matters. Luckily a local nobleman, the Marquis d’Apcher, organized another hunt, and in June 1767 the hunter Jean Chastel laid low the last of what had turned out to be the Beasts of the Gévaudan.
Supernatural explanations of the attacks of 1764 to 1767 continue to circulate. Even today, some believe they were the work of werewolves or meneurs de loups (magical “wolf whisperers”, or “leaders of wolves”, who can command wolves to do their bidding). But most historians now agree that the Gévaudan — a sparsely inhabited, extremely impoverished rural area — was, as Graham Robb puts it, “infested with wolves”.
You can read more about the Beast of Gévaudan in Jay M. Smith’s Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast and see more illustrations below.


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My Diary in a Chinese Farm (1894)

May 22, 2019

With her first novel, Flirts and Flirts (1868), which sharply criticised the socialisation of Victorian girls in relations to marriage, Alicia Bewick (later Alicia Little or "Mrs Archibald Little") began a prolific two decade literary career in London focused primarily on highlighting the plight of women. During this time she was also active politically in the feminist movement, penning pamphlets, lecturing, and campaigning around women's property rights suffrage. In 1886, she married Archibald Little, a merchant, scholar, and (later) travel writer who'd spent many years in China. The following year she moved with him to Chungking, an isolated city to the far west of the country. Impossibly hot in the summer, the couple had planned to build a holiday home in the cooler countryside, but the authorities blocked the idea after concern that the locals would not take kindly to foreigners. An idea was then hatched for the Littles to move onto a local farm by the Yangtse River for a few months, with the hope that it might get the locals used to their presence. While there Alicia kept a journal, later published as My Diary in a Chinese Farm (1894). In her introduction she explains her reasons for beginning the diary:
It was very hot in the daytime and all day long I was shut up in the one Farm house sittingroom, so I started a Diary for much the same reason probably, that I have often observed people do so on a Sea Voyage. They generally do not keep it up till the end, neither did I ; but I noted down every thing I could observe of interest, as long as 1 wrote in it, and here it is, recalling many simple pleasures and some painful days.
The book provides a wonderfully intimate and unique insight into rural Chinese life at the end of the nineteenth century — albeit from a European perspective. Amid the daily observations of domestic life are printed numerous photographs of the region taken by the Japanese photographer Ogawa Kazumasa whom she met in 1894 on a trip to Japan. As for Alicia, she remained in China until her husband's death in 1908, devoting much of her time to campaigning against foot binding, the Chinese custom of applying tight binding to the feet of young girls to modify the shape and size of their feet. Toes were often broken beforehand and it severely limited the physical (and therefore social) mobility of women. In 1898, she founded Tien Tsu Hui (The Natural Foot Society) and delivered a number of lectures in leading cities in China, Hong Kong, and Macau arguing against the practice, utilising the then new technology of x-ray to highlight the deformity of the feet caused by binding. Alicia continued to write novels and numerous non-fiction works including, in 1899, the epic 600-page tome Invisible China which was adorned with more than 100 of her own photographs and whose section on foot binding garnered much attention. The foot binding practice aside, she clearly had much love for China, calling it “one of the greatest nations the world has yet seen”.


text:
Philippine Folk Tales (1916)
Text by Adam Green
Mar 6, 2019

According to the American anthropologist Mabel Cook Cole, compiler of this volume, this collection of folk tales from the Philippines was the first of its kind, at least in the English language. There's a huge variety of stories presented, sourced from both the more traditional tribes, including the headhunters of the rugged mountain regions, and from those "Christianized natives" whose examples bear evidence of their European influence. Most of the stories are from the former, however, with many of these hailing from what are called the "first times", involving mischievous spirits, talking jars, and the antics of personified celestial beings, bickering suns and moons. There are also several origin and "pourqoi" stories, such as an explanations as to why dogs wag their tales (which apparently is to show that they are not that dog who lost a magic ring). Cole also includes what she calls "fables", many which share similarities with European stories, and which are "told to children or to while away the midday hours when people seek shaded spots to rest or stop on the trail to rest".
Here's a story from the Igorot, a headhunter tribe, about how the first head was taken.
One day the Moon, who was a woman named Kabigat, sat out in the yard making a large copper pot. The copper was still soft and pliable like clay, and the woman squatted on the ground with the heavy pot against her knees while she patted and shaped it. Now while she was working a son of Chal-chal, the Sun, came by and stopped to watch her mould the form. Against the inside of the jar she pressed a stone, while on the outside with a wooden paddle dripping with water she pounded and slapped until she had worked down the bulges and formed a smooth surface. The boy was greatly interested in seeing the jar grow larger, more beautiful, and smoother with each stroke, and he stood still for some time. Suddenly the Moon looked up and saw him watching her. Instantly she struck him with her paddle, cutting off his head. Now the Sun was not near, but he knew as soon as the Moon had cut off his son’s head. And hurrying to the spot, he put the boy’s head back on, and he was alive again. Then the Sun said to the Moon, “You cut off my son’s head, and because you did this ever after on the earth people will cut off each other’s heads.”
Cole spent four years amongst the traditional Philippines tribes along with her husband Fay-Cooper Cole who was an ethnologist for the Field Museum of Natural History and whose photographs of daily village life are dotted throughout the collection. The stories were apparently noted down first hand, from around campfires, visits to homes, and also as heard "chanted by the pagan priests in communion with the spirits".


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Characters and Caricaturas by William Hogarth (1743)
Text by Adam Green
Jan 8, 2019

Familiar to many will be that exasperating feeling that arises when accused of being that very thing you pride yourself on not being. It's a feeling the English artist William Hogarth evidently felt acutely when critics derided him for being a mere "caricature" artist. So moved was he by this ongoing slight, that he produced this 1743 print explaining the difference between characters and caricatures — which Hogarth saw as radically different — and demonstrating his style as being firmly aligned with the former. For Hogarth the comic character face, with its subtle exploration of an individual's human nature, was vastly superior to the gross formal exaggerations of the grotesque caricature.
He later had this to say about his motivations behind the print:
Being perpetually plagued, from the mistakes made among the illiterate, by the similitude in the sound of the words Character and Caricatura, I ten years ago endeavoured to explain the distinction by the above Print; and, as I was then publishing Marriage a la Mode, wherein were characters of high life, I introduced the great number of faces there delineated (none of which are exaggerated) varied at random, to prevent, if possible, personal application when the Prints should come out...
Along the bottom of the print, to the left, Hogarth has reproduced three character figures from the works of Raphael, a style with which he clearly identifies. To the right sit four caricatures: a head copied from Arthur Pond's Caricatures; heads from Annibale Carracci's Due Filosofi; and (perhaps rather unfairly) a Leonardo da Vinci grotesque reproduced from Têtes de Charactêres — and floating above the first and second of these caricatures a child-like cartoon, as if to emphasise the naivety of such a style. Above the strip, in a wonderfully overwhelming swarm of heads which take up the vast majority of the print, Hogarth has drawn over a hundred faces in a style much closer to the "characters" of Raphael.
At the very bottom he's provided a note on some helpful further reading: "For a farthar Explanation of the Difference Betwixt Character & Caricature See ye Preface to Joh. Andrews." Here he refers to his friend Henry Fielding's 1742 work Joseph Andrews, in which Fielding calls himself a "Comic Writer" and Hogarth a "Comic Painter" — both aligned with a sensitive realism associated with depicting character, as opposed to the crude distortion of caricatures (which Fielding aligns with the "burlesque").
He who should call the Ingenious Hogarth a Burlesque Painter, would, in my Opinion, do him very little Honour; for sure it is much easier, much less the Subject of Admiration, to paint a Man with a Nose, or any other Feature of a preposterous Size, or to expose him in some absurd or monstrous Attitude, than to express the Affections of Men on Canvas. It hath been thought a vast Commendation of a Painter, to say his Figures seem to breathe; but surely, it is a much greater and nobler Applause, that they appear to think.


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Ogawa Kazumasa’s Hand-Coloured Photographs of Flowers (1896)
Text by Adam Green
Mar 13, 2019

The stunning floral images featured here are the work of Ogawa Kazumasa, a Japanese photographer, printer, and publisher known for his pioneering work in photomechanical printing and photography in the Meiji era. Studying photography from the age of fifteen, Ogawa moved to Tokyo aged twenty to further his study and develop his English skills which he believed necessary to deepen his technical knowledge. After opening his own photography studio and working as an English interpreter for the Yokohama Police Department, Ogawa decided to travel to the United States to learn first hand the advance photographic techniques of the time. Having little money, Ogawa managed to get hired as a sailor on the USS Swatara and six months later landed in Washington. For the next two years, in Boston and Philadelphia, Ogawa studied printing techniques including the complicated collotype process with which he'd make his name on returning to Japan.
In 1884, Ogawa opened a photographic studio in Tokyo and in 1888 established a dry plate manufacturing company, and the following year, Japan's first collotype business, the "K. Ogawa printing factory". He also worked as an editor for various photography magazines, which he printed using the collotype printing process, and was a founding member of the Japan Photographic Society.
The exquisite hand-coloured flower collotypes shown here were featured in the 1896 book Some Japanese Flowers (of which you can buy a 2013 reprint here), and some were also featured the following year in Japan, Described and Illustrated by the Japanese (1897) edited by Francis Brinkley.


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Paterson’s Roads (1826 edition)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Jan 16, 2019

It is an attempt, as far as the nature of the work will allow, to Map the ground…
So declares Edward Mogg in the Preface to the final edition of Paterson’s Roads, possibly the closest thing the nineteenth century ever got to Sat Nav. The book — which ran to eighteen editions from 1771 to 1829 — is designed to guide the journeyer along the major roads of England and Wales, helping them not only to get from A to B but to appreciate the landmarks along the way. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the book is how very few maps it contains, giving a far from complete coverage of England and Wales. The vast majority of its huge amount of information is textual, and the book starts as it means to go on, with a densely informative index of roads and towns.
In these two and half lines above we learn that: the Yorkshire town of Abberford has a market on Mondays; the Direct Road route to it from London is described on page 228; the town is also mentioned among the Cross Roads on page 447; post-horses can be found at the Swann Inn; and London is 186 miles away.
The second part of the book describes, in 346 tall pages, the Direct Roads from London to the market and sea-port towns of England and Wales, embellished by accounts of tourist attractions small and great: “STONE HENGE. The true origin of this stupendous structure yet remains a matter of doubt... Seventeen huge stones are now standing... the appearance of the whole is singularly awful and surprising.” The third part of the book, also clocking in at over 300 pages, describes the Cross Roads which link together the towns up and down the country. Browsing its pages, which resemble a cross between Lonely Planet England, 100 Greatest Walks in Britain, and AZ Great Britain (without the maps!) you get the feeling of reading a book for someone who is hyperlexic but image-phobic, written by a caring friend.
There then follows another impressive index of the “country seats, places, prospects, antiquities, and remarkable objects," of the nation, referring readers to appropriate pages in the roads sections of the book. And finally there is a wonderful appendix, chock full of further informational delights, such as a town-by-town population table based on the 1821 census, and “the Heights of all the principal Hils and other remarkable Eminences in England and Wales”. If you dig deep enough, you can even discover when the Post Office packet boats leave Falmouth for Lisbon (every Friday).
On their travels the book encourages readers to cross bridges, spin turnstiles and traverse junctions, all whilst also navigating its 700 plus pages. The Advertisement suggests that it will be “convenient in the carriage of the pleasure tourist.” Bring to mind Google Street View on an iPhone, and you’ll never have a stronger sense of the relative nature of convenience.
As mentioned already, the book ran to eighteen editions, the first published in 1771 by British Army office Daniel Paterson and titled A New and Accurate Description of all the Direct and Principal Cross Roads (the fourth edition from 1778 is the earliest we could find on Internet Archive). When Edward Mogg edited the sixteenth edition in 1822 he thought the original author was dead. By 1826, when Mogg edited and published the final edition of this titanic book of roads, Daniel Paterson had indeed expired.

author: Ned Pennant-Rea


text:
Schneider Von Groot’s Christmas Dream (1885)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Dec 12, 2018

Born of the temperance movement, “Schneider Von Groot's Christmas Dream” dramatises the ills of drinking schnapps, through one man’s bloody battle with thousands of intoxicated demons.
It's Christmas Eve and old Von Groot is on the way home to his family. Laying down for a moment for a rest on a roadside bank, he pulls out his pipe and begins singing about the glories of boozing. He drifts off and finds himself in a new land where, so a little elf there explains, the law requires him to drink schnapps “such as Dutchmen for ages have used for night caps.” Finding out that it flows like rivers there and is free, Von Groot declares it the place for him. He will stay and “drink like a fish from the morning till night.”
All of a sudden two demons appear and crawl into his eyes and ears. Drunk and aggressive, they and their emerging accomplices try to tie him down with “wythes of the willow and fir”. He manages to kill thousands of these miniature foe, but eventually they have him held down securely. A saviour of a green elf appears, cuts the ropes and sets him free. The grateful Von Groot wonders aloud what has led to all this slaughter. A voice cries out “It’s schnapps, and the blackness of hell / All its murders, its crimes and its sorrows can tell.”
An angel now floats by in a golden car accompanied by a team of butterflies and whisks our hero off to the land of the elves, where he's presented with a golden goblet. He drinks the elixir within and awakens on the same bank by the road. It’s Christmas morning. Von Groot searches out some presents for his wife and children, returns home, and never touches the schnapps again.
We have been able to find out very little about the author of the poem, which was published in New York in 1885. The title page offers the pen-name “BROADBRIM”, which may be a reference to the hat worn by Quakers, a sect famously unimpressed by alcohol. The Internet Archive identifies him as George Warwick, author of two other Christmas and New Year-themed poems.


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The Art of Book Covers (1820–1914)
Text by Adam Green
Feb 12, 2019

Inspired by rising literacy rates and advancing technologies, the nineteenth century saw the book transform from a largely hand-made object to a mass-produced product. In this new context a book's cover took on added importance: it was no longer merely a functional protection for the pages but instead a key platform through which to communicate and sell the book. Prior to this covers had — bar a smattering of highly bespoke one-off creations (e.g. embroidered covers for personal libraries) — mostly been plain leather bound affairs. From the 1820s, with the rise of mechanical bookbinding, these leather covers of old gave way to new cloth coverings — known as publisher's bindings — which, in addition to being inexpensive, were now also printable. A wide variety of cover printing techniques were employed over the decades: from embossing to gilt to multi-colour lithography. An entirely new artistic space was opened up. It was one in which illustrators and designers thrived, producing a range of covers as eclectic in aesthetic approach as the myriad contents they fronted. From around the 1920s, the paper dust jacket — previously there to simply protect the publisher's binding — began to sport designs (and, of course, then paperbacks), but it was in the hundred years preceding, on these printed cloths, that book cover design first truly flourished.
In our selection below we've concentrated on publisher's bindings from this first century of the book cover (as we commonly understand it today, i.e. mass-produced designs). And we couldn't resist including also a few one-off / bespoke cover designs too. Enjoy!


text:
Hokusai’s Ghost Stories (ca. 1830)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Dec 11, 2018

Katsushika Hokusai’s wood block print of a gigantic wave frothing before Mount Fuji, which he made in his seventies, is so beloved and influential that the scholar Christine Guth has devoted a whole book to it. Less attention has been paid to the beguiling illustrations he crafted, also while in his seventies, for the series Hyaku Monogatari [One Hundred Ghost Stories] (ca. 1830). We aren’t sure why the project never reached its probable goal of a century of pictures but the five that were completed are a dark delight. In the prints Hokusai directs his attention away from the Japanese landscapes he was most famous for depicting, inwards towards a realm of vengeful ghosts and demonic cannibals.
The series is fruit of the tradition Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai [A Gathering of One Hundred Supernatural Tales], where Japanese friends would meet to share fantastically frightening tales from folklore and their own experience. Having lit a hundred candles, they would give their blood-curdling accounts, one by one, blowing out a candle after each, plunging themselves deeper into darkness. Upon the last candle going out, a spirit was said to appear.
The Mansion of the Plates (Sara-yashiki)
After the maid Okiku had accidentally broken one of a set of elegant Korean plates, her infuriated master bound her and threw her down a well, where she died in body but not spirit. In 1795, wells around Japan became infested with a species of worm covered in thin threads, which people believed to be a reincarnation of Okiku; the threads being the remnants of the fabric used to bind her. They named it “Okiku mushi” [the Okiku bug].
The Laughing Hannya (Warai-hannya)
This gleeful cannibal is an unholy union of two other monsters: a “hannya”, whose jealousy has turned her into a horned demon; and a “yamanba”, who dwells in the mountains living off the meat of kidnapped children.
Oiwa (Oiwa-san)
The young Oume falls in love with the married samurai Tamiya Iemon, and her friends try to get his wife Oiwa out of the picture with a gift of poisonous face cream. When Iemon abandons his newly disfigured wife, it sends her mad with grief. In her hysteria she runs and trips onto a sword, cursing Iemon with her dying breath — and then adopting various forms to haunt him, including a paper lantern.
Kohada Koheiji
Based on a real event, the cuckold and murder victim Kohada Koheiji returns from the dead to torment his cheating wife and lover. Here he grins over the top of the mosquito netting that surrounds the bed of his killers.
Obsession (Shûnen)
The snake here represents obsessive jealousy, an emotion thought to transcend death, and wraps itself around a Buddhist memorial tablet (traditionally placed on an altar at the home of the deceased). The bowl of water decorated with the swastika appears to be a good luck offering: though tainted by its association with National Socialism, the swastika has been an auspicious symbol for thousands of years in cultures from the Ukraine to the Aztec Empire.


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Photographs of (models of) the moon (1874)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Dec 6, 2018

At first glance these intricate depictions of the moon might seem like photographs from the Apollo space program of 1961–75. In fact they were captured a century earlier by an ingenious and wholly land-based Scottish astronomer. Peering through a self-made telescope, James Nasmyth sketched the moon’s scarred, cratered and mountainous surface. Aiming to “faithfully reproduce the lunar effects of light and shadow” he then built plaster models based on the drawings, and photographed these against black backgrounds in the full glare of the sun. As the technology for taking photographs directly through a telescope was still in its infancy, the drawing and modelling stages of the process were essential for attaining the moonly detail he wanted.
The book was very popular in its day, running to four editions, and remains well worth a read. It contains enjoyable speculation on “the peculiar conditions which would attend a sojourn on the lunar surface,” and a consideration of the many benefits the moon daily bestows upon us earthlings. Beyond helping sailors to navigate at night and “cleansing the shores of our seas and rivers through the agency of the tides”, the most interesting and indeed prescient idea Nasmyth posits concerns the “stupendous reservoir of power that the tidal waters constitute.” He suggests that this energy “may be invoked by-and-by, when we have begun to feel more acutely the consequences of our present prodigal use of the fuel that was stored up for us by bountiful nature ages upon ages ago.”
Beyond exploring lunar mechanics and topography, the book can also be seen as an exploration into photomechanical printing (with which it was one of the first books to be illustrated). Published at a time when many were searching for the perfect form of reproduction — a photograph that could be both ink printed (not depending on light) and consistent over time. The first three editions of the book include a variety of processes including, engraving, photogravure, heliotype, lithograph, chromolithograph, and four different variations of the woodburytype. It is likely that the first two editions, published simultaneously, were partly experiments into which reproduction method was best. This seems to have been deemed the woodburytype given that the third edition, published more than ten years later, is comprised entirely of woodburytypes.
You can read the entirety of the first edition, from which we have reproduced the images below, at the Internet Archive, or buy a 2013 reprint. See the second edition here, and the third edition with the woodburytypes here.  If your curiosity for 1870s lunar representations has been mightily piqued, consider launching yourself into Émile-Antoine Bayard’s wonderful illustrations for Jules Verne’s Around the Moon. And if you'd like a Nasmyth moon image on your wall then check out these three available in our online prints shop.
Finally, an intriguing point for all you conspiracy theorists out there who haven't yet noticed: the name of this man, who so studiously made convincing models of the lunar surface, is just one letter away from NASAMYTH.
Suspicious.


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Mazes and Labyrinths (1922)
Text by Sam Dolbear
Feb 19, 2019

If we wish to outline an architecture which conforms to the structure of our soul […], it would have to be conceived in the image of the Labyrinth. – Friedrich Nietzsche, Dawn (1881)
William H. Matthews’ Mazes and Labyrinths, published in London in 1922, is itself labyrinthine: a vast and richly illustrated encyclopaedic portrait of these mysterious phenomena across time and space; from the Minotaur of Crete to the great cathedrals of Medieval France to the stately homes and spiritual nuclei of England.
Opening the book, one of the first things the reader finds is the dedication: to the author’s daughter Zeta whose “innocent prattlings on the summer sands of Sussex inspired its conception”. The preface reveals the nature of her prattle, a question as to “who made mazes first of all” . Towards the end of the book we are shown photographs of the beach mazes made for Zeta to explore, photographed before she'd discover them and make them "invisible".
So much is revealed in the book’s dedication: the allure of the maze, how it occupies a curious space between rationalism and mysticism that attracts the child and the adult alike. From the childhood of civilisation to the childhood of us all, the maze proves a mysterious presence, a thing to explore but also avoid. It's an ambivalence reflected in the varying roles they've played over the millennia: from the twists and turns of the medieval church maze meant to echo the spiritual journey, at its centre “heaven”, to the maze experienced as hell, an imprisonment and torture.
While flattered by her father’s dedication, in her later years Zeta herself attributes her father’s interest in mazes to his time in the First World War, the battlefields of which he left for in the year she was born.  Although she surmises the seed to be his learning of a destroyed church maze on the Arras Front, one can’t help wondering if his experience of the labyrinth-like trenches may have played a role too. Whatever the seed, he was clearly hooked and, according to Zeta, "within two and a half years of returning from France he had researched, written, printed and published this book". A remarkable feat considering its breadth of scope and depth of exploration — and that he was on somewhat unchartered territory, it being the first book dedicated to the subject.
As for Zeta’s question on the origins of these structures, her father is unable to offer a definitive answer. "The boundaries of knowledge are still misty and ill-defined", he writes in the conclusion, but for him this is a quality which only makes mazes all the more attractive, "a circumstance that only gives zest to the subject".


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The Fourth Dimension and the Bible (1922)
Text by Sam Dolbear
Mar 13, 2019

In many respects, the Victorian era — with its revelations of Darwin, dinosaurs, etc. — was not the simplest time to be a religiously-minded scientist: despair and doubt were rife. But towards the end of the nineteenth century, inspired by explorations into "unseen" phenomena such as x-rays and radioactivity, the positing of invisible worlds and higher dimensions began to offer some way to marry latest scientific developments with religious inclinations. At the forefront of this movement was the mathematician C. H. Hinton, the author of The Fourth Dimension (1904), a popular maths book based on concepts he had been developing since 1880 that sought to establish an additional spatial dimension to the three we know and love — visualised in the form of coloured hypercubes which he called “Tesseracts”.
Hinton's books were very popular and this notion of a higher dimension swept through not only scientific circles but also artistic, literary and, of course, religious and spiritual communities. People such as Rudolf Steiner and Charles Leadbeater ran with the spiritual angle offered which, in the case of Leadbeater's thought, included angels, demons, and departed spirits. All this sets the scene for this particularly extreme example of fourth dimension meets religion featured here, the mathematician William A. Granville's The Fourth Dimension and the Bible (1922). Where Hinton hinted, Granville goes full throttle explicit, seeking to explain the more mysterious aspects of the Bible through the rigours of pure mathematics, an ambitious endeavour which is, as he admits, "taking a voyage on practically unchartered seas".
Just as Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884) imagines a flat, two-dimensional universe in which our three-dimensional perceptual world is beyond comprehension, Granville wants us to leave room for another dimension, one beyond our mortal apprehension. This higher dimension is seen to be heaven, where God dwells, and all events here on earth simply three-dimensional manifestations of that higher heavenly aggregate. And it is this interaction between dimensions which can explain so many seemingly supernatural parts of the Bible (episodes which one imagines might challenge a rationally minded scientist). He writes that “a man (three-dimensional being) who has been translated from our space into a higher-dimensional space will remain invisible to earthly beings until he returns again to our space”. This has concrete instances: when Jesus twice escapes the threatening multitudes by disappearing, he does so into this alternative, imperceptible universe. Likewise, when Jesus enters the room of the disciples without using a door (John 20:19-23, 26-29), he did so mediated by the realm of the fourth dimension. For Granville too, celestial visitors (whether angels, archangels, prophets), all emerge from this fourth dimension, only to disappear again into that other realm. The concept of hell can also be thought in terms of mathematics, though it is (of course) referred to as a "lower dimension".
The mysterious workings of the Christian God has a long history of investigation through modern mathematics and science. In his posthumously published Daniel and the Apocalypse (1733) Sir Isaac Newton pioneered work on natural sciences as transposed onto theological commentaries. Slightly earlier, John Wilkins (1614–1672) in Mathematical Magick had attempted to use mechanical geometry to explain the wonders of the divine. Though the oscillation between empirical science and the theological is at times absurd, it can be understood to be motivated by a basic rationalism: that is, if theology was to avoid fanaticism, it must remain rooted in nature. If, as Emerson wrote, “Nature geometrizes” then, for Granville, so must God.


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The Library of the Future: A Vision of 1983 from 1883
Text by Sam Dolbear
Jan 30, 2019

Many visions of the future lie buried in the past. One such future was outlined by the American librarian Charles Ammi Cutter in his essay "The Buffalo Public Library in 1983", written a century before in 1883.
Cutter’s fantasy, at times dry and descriptive, is also wonderfully precise:
The [library], when complete, was to consist of two parts, the first a central store, 150 feet square, a compact mass of shelves and passageways, lighted from the ends, but neither from sides nor top; the second an outer rim of rooms 20 feet wide, lighted from the four streets. In front and rear the rim was to contain special libraries, reading-rooms, and work-rooms; on the sides, the art-galleries. The central portion was a gridiron of stacks, running from front to rear, each stack 2 feet wide, and separated from its neighbor by a passage of 3 feet. Horizontally, the stack was divided by floors into 8 stories, each 8 feet high, giving a little over 7 feet of shelf-room, the highest shelf being so low that no book was beyond the reach of the hand. Each reading-room, 16 feet high, corresponded to two stories of the stack, from which it was separated in winter by glass doors.
The imagined structure allows for a vast accumulation of books:
We have now room for over 500,000 volumes in connection with each of the four reading-rooms, or 4,000,000 for the whole building when completed.
If his vision for Buffalo Public Library might be considered fairly modest from a technological point of view, when casting his net a little wider to consider a future National Library, one which "can afford any luxury", things get a little more inventive.
[T]hey have an arrangement that brings your book from the shelf to your desk. You have only to touch the keys that correspond to the letters of the book-mark, adding the number of your desk, and the book is taken off the shelf by a pair of nippers and laid in a little car, which immediately finds its way to you. The whole thing is automatic and very ingenious...
But for Buffalo book delivery is a cheaper, simpler, and perhaps less noisy, affair.
... for my part I much prefer our pages with their smart uniforms and noiseless steps. They wear slippers, the passages are all covered with a noiseless and dustless covering, they go the length of the hall in a passage-way screened off from the desk-room so that they are seen only when they leave the stack to cross the hall towards any desk. As that is only 20 feet wide, the interruption to study is nothing.
Cutter’s fantasy might appear fairly mundane, born out of the fairly (stereo)typical neuroses of a librarian: in the prevention of all noise (through the wearing of slippers), the halting of the spread of illness (through good ventilation), and the disorder of the collection (through technological innovations).
In other utopian visions of the city, the library is often paramount. As Kavin Hayes has noted, in The Golden Bottle (1892) Ignatius Donnelly “imagined a reading room in every town hall, located at the center of each Utopian community, the remainder of the town being laid out in concentric circles. The utopian socialist Charles Fourier calculated that the library at the centre of his Phalanstère would amass 800,000 books with a natural encyclopaedia at its centre. In all of these accounts the library is a place where "civilisation" is preserved, displayed, and accessed. Other accounts highlight technological innovation as the heart of the utopian library. Edgar Chambless, for example, in Roadtown (1910), described “three underground railway lines situated one atop another with a single row of houses as long as the length of another railway located above ground. [...] Roadtown residents submitted their library requests by telephone, and a mechanical carrier rapidly delivered the requested books”. The city imitates the library and vice versa.
Far from a wild utopian dream, today Cutter’s library of the future appears basic: there will be books and there will be clean air and there will be good lighting. One wonders what Cutter might make of the library today, in which the most basic dream remains perhaps the most radical: for them to remain in our lives, free and open, clean and bright.


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Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922)
Text by Sam Dolbear
Feb 27, 2019

A year after the Swiss psychiatrist Walter Morgenthaler published his 1921 monograph on the life and artwork of Adolf Wölfli (a schizophrenic patient in his care), Hans Prinzhorn published Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill), a landmark text in the history of thinking about mental illness and creativity. Prinzhorn's groundbreaking study, the first of its kind, gained much attention in avant-garde circles of the time, interesting artists such as Paul Klee, Max Ernst, and Jean Dubuffet. In the 1940s, the latter went on to coin the term Art Brut (Raw Art), which along with the related concept of Outsider Art, has continued to capture the public interest, to the point where it has today (some might say ironically) become a successful art marketing category in its own right.
Prinzhorn had a varied life. Born in Westphalia in 1886, he became a student of philosophy and art history, before studying music in London. After this he turned to medicine, training as a psychiatrist in 1919. It was at the Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic that he began his pioneering work, not only through observation of patients but through analysis of their art production. He built a collection too: over 5000 paintings, drawings, and carvings, sourced from artists in various asylums in and around Heidelberg, mostly from patients diagnosed with schizophrenia.
It was from this archive that Artistry of the Mentally Ill was constructed and Prinzhorn developed his theses. He identified six basic drives that give rise to image making: an expressive urge, the urge to play, an ornamental urge, an ordering tendency, a tendency to imitate, and the need for symbols. For Prinzhorn, image making is driven by our intense desire to leave traces:
When we cover a piece of paper with doodles, when a child arranges colourful pebbles on his mud pie, or when we plant flowers in our gardens, one quality is common to all of these quite different activities, namely the enrichment of the outer world by the addition of perceptual elements. Like the need for activity, it is a final, irreducible psychological fact – an urge in man not to be absorbed passively into his environment, but to impress on it traces of his existence beyond those of purposeful activity.
The book caused ripples when it was published, not just in medicine but in the art world too. It reflected a breakdown of high culture’s claim to "civilisation", exposing the misery and turmoil at the heart of modern life. Against the grain, the book granted voice to the previously marginalised: those incarcerated, those deemed insane, those suffering under poverty, those untrained, those in the wrong type of institution.
Looking back, there is something ominous to the study. Prinzhorn identified a style that was to be named, over a decade later with the rise of National Socialism in Germany, as "degenerate" (Entartete). Such works were seen as opposed to an "original type", to a mythical figure of Germanness, a normality of supposed strength, resolution, and health. Exhibitions, most notably in Munich in 1937, were set up to name and exhibit these "degenerate" works. Artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky were featured, alongside hundreds of others, even Prinzhorn’s patients. As the art historian Stephanie Barron has argued, “one quarter of the illustration pages in the [exhibition’s] guide featured reproductions of the work of these psychiatric patients, taken from the famous Prinzhorn Collection”. The insane and the avant-garde were here equated, both equally pathologized.  Millions of visitors flocked to the shows, and there followed the enforcement of policies of censorship, persecution, and oppression on a mass scale.
This is not the only story though. Prinzhorn’s huge archive of drawings and paintings remain testament to a spirit that still seeks to grant a voice to the voiceless. To look at these images is to allow these voices to speak again, for the vast range of human emotion and experience, otherwise forgotten and buried by history, to be heard. Yet, still, questions remain as to how Prinzhorn aquired the artworks in his collection — were they considered the property of the hospitals or artists? Were the artists consenting? Remunerated?
Below we’ve collected some highlights of the artworks presented in Artistry of the Mentally Ill: firstly a selection from the latter section of the book in which Prinzhorn delves into the lives and works of ten schizophrenic artists, and then, in a gallery at the very bottom of the post, a selection of the uncredited works featured in the book's first section (used to illustrate Prinzhorn’s theories).
For more works from the enormous Prinzhorn collection see this 1998 book Beyond Reason: Art and Psychosis Works From the Prinzhorn Collection and to read his Artistry of the Mentally Ill in English then see this 1972 translation
Karl Brendel
Karl Brendel was born in Turingian in 1870. A former bricklayer who had a leg amputated in 1902 after an accident, he had a history of hallucination, paranoia, and fanaticism. Between 1912 and 1913, he learnt to chew bread in order to create a material to construct models, later turning his energies to the wood carving.
August Klotz
August Klotz, born in 1864 in Swabia, painted according to an elaborate “colour alphabet” which allowed him to translate words into colours via a numerical key, which he used to constructed complex visual works.
Peter Moog
Peter Moog, born 1871, grew up in poverty in the Eifel country and struggled with alcoholism into adult life. He produced detailed work imbued with religiosity and once remarked to Prinzhorn that he finds “hundreds of facees in a floor mosaic or a speckled wall”.
August Neter
August Neter, born 1868 in Swabia, was prone to hallucinations. At school he experienced the apparition of 10,000 figures in half an hour, figures that remained in his memory into adulthood and became the subject of his drawings that Prinzhorn describes as “sober and precise”.
Johann Knüpfer
Johan Knüpfer, born 1866 in a village in the Oden forest, was committed to the asylum after six convictions of begging. His drawings reflect a complex relationship between words and images, sprinkled with religious themes and also birds, the language of whom Knüpfer thought he could understand.
Viktor Orth
Viktor Orth, born 1853 was from a noble family. In 1878 he became plagued with paranoia, shot himself on a train and was committed to the asylum. He kept to a fixed number of themes in his work: seascapes, figures, “catatonic drawings” and “ghosts”.
Hermann Beil
Hermann Beil, born in 1867 in Saxony to a family that was also committed to the asylum, suffered from manic-depressive episodes. He was known for his prolific and detailed drawing, scribbling on everything in sight, even toilet paper.
Heinrich Welz
Heinrich Welz, a lawyer born in 1883, once worked on a sociological text but became delusional, believing he could control the movement of the stars and converse with a mythical friend Greenleaf. During his stay in the asylum he developed a theory: that, if one connects all the places in Europe that were visited by Napoleon, a curve emerges that resembles the letter “N”.
Joseph Sell
Joseph Sell, born 1878, woke up “one day in 1907 [and] got out of bed, lit a candle, and acted so bizarrely that he was committed to the asylum”. He believed, through telepathy, that he could hear everything in the world in a single moment and his artwork developed a fantastical and futuristic style.
Franz Pohl
Franz Pohl, a locksmith born in 1864, showed paranoia but also signs of autism and schizophrenia. He dated all of his drawing meticulously, and his style jumped between the realistic and the fantastical. All the images, Prinzhorn consistently concedes, reflect significant technical abilities.


text:
Alice’s Adventures in Shorthand (1919)
Text by Sam Dolbear
Feb 5, 2019

Sir John Tenniel’s famous illustrations might be your only guide through this edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. His small engravings mark various moment in Alice’s adventure, small islands of illumination in a sea of otherwise obscure text: from when Alice drinks the potion to when she goes to tea with the Mad Hatter to the final court scene with the Queen of Hearts. Bar the running headers, the surrounding text will remain entirely opaque, that is, unless you are blessed enough to be able to decipher shorthand, here transcribed along the system of John Robert Gregg by his niece Georgie Gregg Gingell. First published in 1919, the book saw a second edition in 1931 which was refurbished with a newly updated system of Gregg shorthand published two years earlier.
Shorthand has a long history: used by (or to preserve the work of) everyone from Cicero to Luther to Shakespeare to Pepys. Gregg’s version of shorthand represented one of the systems vying for supremacy at the end of the nineteenth century. It was based, like most methods, on the principal of "phonography", where sound (phone–) is depicted in writing (–graphy). The purpose of shorthand was to condense the act of writing: to shorten and to quicken. At the end of the nineteenth century, at a moment of rapid development in bureaucratic and clerical structures, shorthand promised speed; a system where the hand could keep up with the pace of both thought and speech. Gregg developed not only his method but a publishing house too, the Gregg Publishing Company that spread across the English speaking world.
This utilitarian function of shorthand sits a little oddly perhaps with literature, given the novel or the poem is a form associated with a different realm: that of leisure. This didn't stop Gregg rendering great classics into his enigmatic script, from Hamlet to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Of all the works given the Gregg Publishing Company treatment it is Carroll's Alice in Wonderland that stands out for particular attention, it being a text that already plays with the tension between the written and the spoken, between sense and nonsense, and which seems, at its heart, to rile against the rationality and economy that underpins the shorthand project. Carroll had died in 1898, a decade after Gregg’s first publication of his phonographic system. One can only imagine that he would have approved of the transposition of his fantastical story into a new system of signs.


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The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man (1750)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Nov 28, 2018

The imaginary voyage, from which a hero returns made wise through extraordinary experience, is at least as old as Odysseus. But the major inspiration for this 1750 iteration is Gulliver’s Travels (1726), with which it shares elements of early sci-fi.
Our hero is Peter Wilkins, a Cornish man who takes to the sea to escape a complicated life, only to be captured by a French privateer and sold into slavery on the African coast. Upon escaping this newfound captivity, and successfully navigating a course through snapping crocodiles and lions, he steals a Portuguese ship and sets sail once again — this time ending up grounded on a rock. He survives for several months there à la Robinson Crusoe, before being sucked into a subterranean cavern toward the beautiful land of Graundevolet. He manages to find plentiful fruit and veg there, and even to make his own bread, but cannot alleviate his deep hunger for companionship.
Salvation comes in the form of a woman called Youwarkee, who happens to have the power of flight. The pair fall in love and journey to Nosmnbdsgrutt, the island home of the Glumms and Gawrys (flying men and women), where Wilkins wins an audience with the king. Amongst other things he manages to bring about the abolition of slavery through fine reasoning: “Would not the king have been a slave but for the accident of being begotten by one who was a king?” His new friends are a lens through which to contemplate the customs of his old English ones, as the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians were for Lemuel Gulliver. When Youwarkee dies, the melancholy and now aged Wilkins decides to attempt a return to England. The success of this final mission is tempered by his death upon landing at Plymouth.
The only English journal to mention the romance on its publication was the Monthly Review which declared it “a very strange performance indeed”. Though it was reprinted on the cheap in Dublin (1751), translated in France (1763), abridged in Germany (1767), and reissued in England (1783) it only rose to prominence in the nineteenth century when the likes of Coleridge, Shelley, and Southey appreciated its utopian bent; it even became the basis for a number of melodramas and pantos.
Until 1835 the main clue to the mystery of its authorship was the initials R. P. printed at the end of the dedication. In that year the sale of a set of manuscripts which had belonged to Dodsley, the book’s original publisher, revealed an agreement for the sale of the copyright. The author was now revealed to be one Robert Paltock, an attorney at Clement’s Inn, London. The fact that Paltock, a father to seven children, was in financial difficulties by 1748 may go a way to explaining his decision to turn romance writer.
Above we are featuring the first volume (and second here) of the 1884 facsimile of the 1750 first edition (the only not to be abridged), including the original six engravings by Louis Peter Boitard, which we’ve separately embedded below. They illustrate probably the most sci-fi element of the book, namely the “graundee”, a membrane that encases Gawrys and Glums and when unfurled allows them to float as in a boat or fly as if a bird. Wilkins declares it “the most amazing thing in the world to observe the large expansion of this graundee when open”, and his detailed description of it on pages 199–203 of Volume I repays a read.