JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 417

One of my interests over the years has been the found art in electrical lines on telephone poles.  But there’s really much more to appreciate in these simple utility structures than the stuff they support.  My friend and fellow Ashevillean Marty Weil, who among other things runs the wonderful and never-lacking-a-surprise Ephemera blogsite, says that “telephone poles are dripping with ephemera”, the extra, disposable stuff seemingly unrelated to their stated purpose. He’s right: climbing spikes, the beautiful antiquarian glass insulators, alpha-numeric identifying devices, unintended art leftovers from where things have been stapled/nailed/taped to them,  and of course the geometries of the electrical lines that connect them to us, and on and on.

This pamphlet, left, unimaginatively titled Property Marking Systems for Public Utilities (1938), is a near-goldmine for the stuff that hasn’t quite dripped off the poles.  As a matter of fact, it is a source for all of the material that is likely never to come off the poles until the poles come down. These are the basic elements from which all of that  numerical and alphabetical found art is made.