JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 295

I’ve made several posts about Blank and Missing People and Empty Things which seem to me—having had long exposure to images over the last 30
years—to be quite unusual in the history of popular-published prints.
This may actually be a simple corollary to a wider category of Blank
Things, or Missing Things.  Like Dark Matter.  Or white, open, blank
spaces on early, honest, maps. (And this may be part of another larger
story on The  Spaces in Between, (a concept in German known as Zwischenraum), but that’s another story, identifying where the missing stuff might actually “be”.  Like the idea of “negative space”, or unused space, in, say, a Zen painting, or the sue of quiet in a musical composition–generally, it is a period of space or transition in thought, the distance between ideas….)

Since it really is so unusual to bump into these images I’ll just make a quick post on this one–it is simply (in a not-so-simple way) an illustration of a cow-blind from the wonderful and problematic masterpiece of Abraham Rees’ Encyclopedia, this print being completed in 1812.  I should point out that the hunters–who would level their muskets through the empty eye socket–are not hunting cows; I’m not aware of what they would be hunting, but I know that it wasn’t Bessie. So the image is really just a relatively mundane hunting tool, though pretty elaborate, set among other hunting tools–there is nothing mundane whatsoever about its presentation, though. 

(Detail above, and from the full sheet, below)