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The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream)
by Francesco Colonna was the greatest achievement by the greatest printer of
the Renaissance (Aldus Manutius in Venice), a
spectacular combination of story and type and design and illustration; an
imaginative, secular Humanist self-romance like no other printed to that
time.  ) See the entire text HERE.)

Hypnerotomachia means “the strife of love in a
dream”, and the reference to Poliphili refers to the narrator of the
story, Poliphilo, telling of the love affair between Polia and Poliphilo—the
master text of the whole story though is a description of ancient art and
architecture,  all told in a wonderful
”macaronic mélange” of Italian and Latin, and which were the “exact accounts” seen
in Poliphilo’s dreams about Polia.. It is a 
modernist book for being printed in the last year of the 15^th
century (1499), and stands for vitality and grace and superb design, and
according to George Painter was the Finnegan’s
Wake of the fifteenth century.  Painter
continues, and writing that “Gutenberg’s forty-two line Bible of 1455 and the Hypnerotomachia of 1499 confront one
another from opposite ends of the incunable period with equal and contrasting
pre-eminence.  The Gutenberg Bible is somberly and sternly German, Gothic, Christian
and mediaeval; the Hypnerotomachia is
radiantly and graciously Italian, classic, pagan and renascent. These are two
supreme masterpieces of the art of printing, and stand at the two poles of
human endeavor and desire! “(Cited by Alan Thomas, Fine Books, 1967, pp 71-4).

Martin Lowry in his The
World of Aldus Manututus  (Ithaca, New York, 1979) makes another
interesting statement on this masterpiece: “(Hypnerotomachia) was a linguistic and literary debauch, choked with
recondite imagery, erudite periphrases, and exotic verbiage: a work so bizarre
that many critics have felt a certain uneasiness at Aldus’ agreeing to print
it.”

It is truly an astonishing accomplishment, and its significance in the design of type and of the book really cannot be underestimated.  As E.P. Goldsmidt stated (in The Printed Book of the Renaissance, 1950, p. 52): “In the North an astonishing proportion of all Renaissance ornament and accessory design can clearly be proved to derive from Colonna…”

The book is summarized here and below:

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The fossil record is generally one of the richest and most
compelling histories of the development of life on earth, a far-reaching,
cumulative record of extraordinary importance. 
There are the other, occasional, fossils that stand only by themselves,
and seem to have almost no use in the current time, living almost entirely
within themselves. The following statics seem to fall into that category—they
seem to be only a tombstone for an era, providing nothing except to tell the story
of what happened, existing only for that purpose, with no compelling
utilization for anything outside understand a small piece of life for the year
the stats were gathered. 

The cause for this sentiment was found in a government
publication called Expense of Convicts of the United States  (Letter from the
Comptroller of the Treasury…), 1 February 1859).  The following comes in the first paragraph:

“I….report that 50 cents per months is allowed for rent of
prison for each prisoner in all the States and Territories uniformly.”

What this means is that the U.S. Treasury would pay 50 cents
to the state for keeping a federal prisoner. 
That is 50 cents per month, or about 1.7 cents per day. And that was
also for rent of the cell, exclusive of all else, each state furnishing the
government with the added cost, separately.

Evidently the only state in the country that prescribed an
exact amount for keeping a federal prisoner in a state institution was
Maryland, “which received 30 cents per day for all expenses, rent, board, medical attendance, clothing, bedding,
fuel, and etc” (italics in the original). 
The rest of the states and territories had diverging and different
expenses, from the southern district of New York at 25 cents a day for board,
and ranging up to about 50 cents per day in  Michigan. Vermont charged an extra 60 dollars a year, in addition to the 6 bucks that they would
get for the rent of a Vermont
cell, to keep a prisoner—all expenses included—for one year, or about 18 cents
per day, total. 

Unfortunately I don’t have the stats of how many federal
prisoner there were in 1859, so I don’t know how much of a percentage of the
budget was occupied by prison expenses. 
But what I do know is that even with tossing around the CPI with
multiplier effects and so on the figures translate in no way to keeping a
person in prison today.   The cost of
housing someone in prison per year is around $35,000 a year, or $100 or so a
day.  Adjusting the 1860 dollar via CPI
for 2009 makes that dollar worth about 25 dollars today, which would be a
doubling and a doubling again of keeping someone in prison. 

I’m not so sure that those figures tell us much about what
we pay, today. 

Next, I was having a breeze through The Prison System of the United States by S.J. Barrows
(Commissioner of Prisons for the U.S.) which was published in Washington  in 1900.  One particularly interesting
section was the publication’s solitary statistical table, “Appendix A”, which
detailed the crimes of the 625 men incarcerated in the state of Michigan  in 1900.  Well over half of all those in prison were
there for larceny and burglary, while about 12% were in the big house for
violent crimes.  (Evidently 95% of this
number were literate and 70% could “cipher” (that is, produce basic arithmetical
skills)).  The total crime list (such as
it was) includes the following:

Capital crimes (murder in the first and second degree) and
manslaughter, along with murderous assault comprised about 1% of the total
prison population.  Other violent crimes
included assault with intent to do great bodily harm, rape, attempted rape,
rape and assault composed another 3%. Further assaults were classified under
(a) with intent to do great harm;  and
then as assault on a female under 14 years; and on a female under 16 years  There were also the sexual assaults:  taking indecent liberties with female; with
male child;  unlawful and carnal
knowledge of a young child;   inducing female to enter house of ill fame.  These last two categories included about 5%
of the prisoners.  Set aside form these
were the crimes of adultery, abduction, incest and sodomy, which included
another 3%.  So it seems that the violent
offenders in prison in  Michigan 
in 1900 totaled out at 12% or so. 

Burglary and larceny were the  largest categories, being subdivided into (a)
burglary accompanied by actual assault; (b) larceny; (c) larceny from a
dwelling;  (d) larceny from a shop in daytime; (e) attempting larceny from
the person; (f) entering a church in daytime to steal; (g) breaking and
entering a store in daytime;   (h) breaking and entering a store in
nighttime;(I)  breaking and entering a
dwelling in daytime; (j)  breaking and
entering a dwelling;  (k) breaking and
entering a railroad car.

Then there were a few largely vacant offenses:  Resisting an officer; Uttering and publishing
a forged note, breaking out of prison, perjury, arson, false pretense, and
malicious destruction of personal property, all combing for less than 2% of the
jailed population.

The vast majority of prisoners in Michigan were imprisoned for non-violent
crimes.  The federal fathers, in the
meantime, recognized that people in prison shouldn’t be idle while paying their
debts to society, and should fill their time with work that would occupy the
prisoner and bring some income into the prison system:

“The moment we apply to the convict a
different system of economics because he is in prison we go astray. When we
subject to analysis the plans proposed for abolishing the competition of
convict labor we find them based on false principles or expecting results not
to be realized. The wiser way for the peace of society and the interest of the
State is to place prison industries on the same ground as free industries, and
defend that. It is also said in opposition to the contract system that
contractors do not pay as much for the labor of convicts as free laborers
command.”

In 2005 the federal offenses for which people are incarcerated include: Drug
Offenses 59.6%; Robbery 9.8%;  Property
Offenses 5.5%;  Extortion, Fraud, Bribery
6.8% ; Violent Offenses 2.7% ; Firearms, Explosives, Arson 8.6% ; White Collar
1.0%; Immigration 2.8%;  Courts or
Corrections 0.8%;  National Security
0.1%;  Continuing Criminal Enterprise
0.8%;  Miscellaneous 1.5% .  54% of prisoner in state custody for the same
time were incarcerated for violent crimes, with drug offenses coming in at 20%
and property crimes at 19%.  The racial
breakdown of prisoners in the U.S. is another tragedy: of the prison population
in toto of 2.3 million in 2008 there
were 4,777 black male inmates per 100,000 black males held in state and federal
prisons and local jails, compared to 1,760 Hispanic male inmates per 100,000
Hispanic males and 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white males—that means
that the black incarceration rate was double and then double and then
half-doubled again that of whites.  What
this also means is that there were more blacks in jail cells than in college
dorm rooms in 2008.

I’m not sure that any amount of creative statistical mathemartistry could bring these figures to life for some sort of practical application in 2009, the present situation in the prisons being so immense and pervasive.  Numbers and assorted data from the past usually have the capacity to help us see where we are today; as I said earlier, I think that these fossils are simply that:  dead.

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John Wilkins’ construction of a new, theoretical language, a visual semantics of idea that was to be read and not spoken, a new international language to communicate thought, seems straight from the heart of the great Jorge Luis Borges.  And in fact, Wilkins does come from Borges, in a way–as part of a story Borges wrote in 1942, a fantastical semi-non-fictional account of Wilkins’ fabulous effort¹.

Wilkins was a 17th century figure with a sort-of 20th century idea, but even advanced to this point in time, and with actual mathematical and linguistic tools at his disposal, his work is still better as a sci-fi movie backdrop than anything else–not that there’s anything wrong with that.  The book of his in question, An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, was published in London in 1668, and was an very interesting, Aristotelian non-standard approach to construct a universally understood language composed of characters which were in a way axiomatic of a developing system of genera, a taxonomy of ideas, that were somehow, fantastically, capable of expressing the foundations and flights of human thinking. 

Borges’ presented Wilkins in a very Borgesian way in his  “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins“, mixing fact with creative fancy, exhibiting Real Character as though it was being re-discovered and studied by living academics. 

It reminds me somewhat of other massive buit not-quite-nowhere-near-there efforts by people like Oliver Byrne and his color-coded approach to Euclid (1847), J.H. Woodger with his Axomatic Methods in Biology (1937), and Clark Hull’s Principles of Behavior (1944). Fascinating ideas, constructed with big brains, but which ultimately produce a product which more deeply confuses and obscures the subject matter it set out to explain–and which don’t really work, anyway.  But they are beautiful things int heir own right–Byrne’s work in particular also happened to be one of the most beautiful books produced in the 19th century–assemblies of bits and pieces that are occasionally magnificent but whose final destination was of course The Twilight Zone.

They were in some way a Search for a Perfect Language (as in the work by Umberto Eco); they sought to step deeply outside themselves in an effort to grasp a higher knowledge, perhaps not much too unlike Isaac Newton and his  deep experimentation in alchemy, looking for the massive truths that were handed down to the few selected ancient ones.  They are beautiful things with a lot of very good thinking–they just weren’t right. 

Notes:

1.  “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins“, 1942, in which Borges presents an imaginary intellectual archaeologist assessing the work, comparing it in particular to the imaginary encyclopedia Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.

“He divided the universe into forty categories or genera, these being further subdivided into differences, which were subdivided into species. He assigned to each genus a monosyllable of two letters; to each difference, a consonant; to each species, a vowel. For example: de, which means an element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a part of the element fire, a flame. In a similar language invented by Letellier (1850) a means animal; ab, mammal; abo, carnivore; aboj, feline; aboje, cat; abi, herbivore; abiv, horse; etc. In the language of Bonifacio Sotos Ochando (1845) imaba means building; imaca, harem; imafe, hospital; imafo, pesthouse; imari, house; imaru, country house; imedo, post; imede, pillar; imego, floor; imela, ceiling; imogo, window; bire, bookbinder; birer, bookbinding. (This last list belongs to a book printed in Buenos Aires in 1886, the Curso de Lengua Universal, by Dr. Pedro Mata.)”–Jorge Luis Borges

Borges described Wilkins’ taxonomy as follows, dividing it into 14 categories (compared to the original Wilkins list of 40):

Those that belong to the emperor; Embalmed ones; Those that are trained; Suckling pigs; Mermaids; Fabulous ones; Stray dogs; Those that are included in this classification; Those that tremble as if they were mad; Innumerable ones; Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush; Et cetera; Those that have just broken the flower vase; Those that, at a distance, resemble flies.