JF Ptak Science Books – A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

JF Ptak Science Books

A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

Contact johnfptak at gmail dot com

Unusual German WWI Book Reviews, 1936

JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5142

Earlier today I catalogued a small tri-folding World War I-related leaflet printed in 1936 and emblazoned Krieg!!! The cover is striking, partly because in addition to the graphics it also shows something being blown-up in real time, which was a pretty uncommon thing to make a photograph of in WWI. It turns out that this little six-page pamphlet was a collection of eight book reviews written by German military about the war. And it wound up being surprising—to me, at least—because most of the reviews seemed as evocative as the cover art.

A number of the reviews were surprising to me because, in some way, they seemed to be a little on the unglory of war and the suffering—not anything like Johnny Got His Gun, or All Quiet on the Western Front, but different and diffident enough to make an impression. For as short as this work is there’s a fair amount of discussion of the horrors of war as experienced and then shared by both sides.

For example, in a review for Verdun-Souville, by Hermann Thimmermann, we find the work described as “A factual report based on the notes of an officer from the Bavarian Infantry Regiment, the regiment that advanced the furthest against Verdun in the bitter struggle in 1916…he stumbles again over the shot-up field and through the corpse-staring gorges of the bulwark…and once again experiences the whole horror of these days. Barrage! Flamethrower! Gas! It was no longer a war – it was planned annihilation. Comradeship alone keeps the fighters in this hell upright and even blurs the relationship between enemy and enemy…Not only we Germans, but also the fighters from the other side will read this factual report with the same emotion. A book that has an infinite amount to say to the young generation from here and there, which should also be read in schools in Germany and France, because it has a power to reconcile people!”

Perhaps this was not unusual to post-WWI German renditions of the war, but to my experience it certainly seemed so, especially three years into Hitler’s Germany.

Here’s part of the review for Sowar eine Schlacht vor Verdun, by Franz von Epp, former commander of the Leibregiment: “What countless regiments and hundreds of thousands of those doomed to death had to experience and overcome in these months is poetically told in this book …This book will have to be counted among the most valuable poetic documents of the world war.”–Volkischer Beobachter And: “An excerpt from the battle that only a few were able to reproduce with such realism and such shocking urgency.” Der Lieber, Munich.

Of particular and unusual interest is a “lost patrol” story in the review for The Forgotten, by Adolf Treib: “Notes from a fellow combatant from the German campaign in Palestine in 1918. A patrol of 14 German soldiers missed the connection with their retreating battalion and made their way through Palestine on their own. Chased by Bedouins and shot at from ambush, robbed by fanatical natives and chased like wild animals, they and their guide withstand all suffering and hardships and refrain from giving themselves prisoner to the English. Half starved and dying of thirst, the German rearguard found them at the last minute.” and continuing: “From every line of this book speaks the high price song of the leader idea, which is powerfully anchored in the soldiers at the front…Shattering to read! German history will keep a loyal memory of these forgotten people.” – Völkische Beobachter

That said, there are some glories celebrated here, particularly for the book Jagd in Flanderns Himmel, which is mostly about German aviation, where Himmler and Goering shower the book with praise “I have seldom enjoyed reading a war book as much as this one. The hero song of the fighter squadron, whose last commander was our party comrade Goering, is another reminder to all of us that in the end, loyal and brave hearts always win” wrote Himmler. Goering heaps praise as well, concluding “Whoever reads this book with awe and proud emotion believes in eternal Germany”.

In any event, this is an interesting document, and I’ve reproduced it all, below, if you’d like to see it for yourself.

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World War I
An Odd Perspective Looking Through the RAF Wellington Bomber (1941)

JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5141

Here’s a short notice on an unusual perspective in the combined categories of cutaway diagrams and looking-straight-down: the (almost)-looking-straight-down bird’s-eye cutaway view! I rarely see these two categories combined…and as a matter of fact I cannot recall the last time I posted something like this. So here it is, direct from the March 1941 issue of Popular Mechanics, showing a very oblique view from above looking through the fore section of a British Wellington bomber:

There is an inset diagram of the sighting instrument, which I was a little surprised to see in a popular magazine published during the war.

[Note: if you click through on the image it becomes more clear in magnification.]

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Aviation & flight — World War II
Recovery to Normal Existence, 1960

JF Ptak Science Books (Expanding an earlier post #2499 from July 2015)

In the not-modest stream of thin paperback nuclear holocaust survival literature in the 1950’s and 1960’s appears this effort: LIVE, Three Plans for Survival in a Nuclear Attack. It was published by the Stanford Research Institute in 1960, and was part of nuclear health physics pioneer Lauriston Taylor’s donation to the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement, where I bought it some time ago when they were thinning out their stuff. It is an unusual publication to me for its illustrations, some of which are odd, and a few of which are positively semi-surreal when view out of context.

The pamphlet overall is fairly helpful, assuming that you had as much time to get yourself together in an impending attack, and that is a major assumption. But I’m sharing this tonight for some of those images–and the cover, which is an unusual design in itself, not the least of which is the heavily-borrowed part from LIFE Magazine.

So the first of the few that I’ll post here (above) is a detail from this illustrated graph, a march of the intellect and survival from being in a dark hole to a rather stiff return to normal existence:

Here’s another sobering bit, showing a progression of NOT-recovering to normal existence:

And of course the hole:

Which is a detail from:

And the cover, which has some blotchy Ralph Steadman-y elements:

And so, there are some of the major themes. I found the work unsettling in general for using mostly dark silhouettes for the people, that profile having been sort of established to represent dead folks.

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Atomic and Nuclear weapons — Bad Ideas
Hitler Youth Diary for Girls, 1937

JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5134

There’s a bookcase in the house that has a top shelf for small books, most of which I haven’t written about, though there is a clutch of them that have gotten some exposure here on the blog, with most of them being unused diaries, and most of those being Nazi-oriented. I’ve wondered about the people who would have sat down with those things blank-ish books, thinking about scheduling their time, or recording events, and then deciding not to. Maybe they didn’t want to be reminded of Nazi holidays and/or the birth of Hitler, or the right of duty and the proper way to respond to current events based on the policies of the NSDAP. The diaries are all pretty much like-new, and aren’t even all that old in the scheme of things, though their distance in time doesn’t match their distance in historical “space” (so to speak).

This diary was for German girls who were members of the Young Girls League (Jungmädelbund), which in the German stratification of Nazism was part of the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel), which in turn operated under the broader gender-divided organization of Hitler Youth.

It is difficult as a father of two daughters–one of whom is of the correct age to have been using this diary had circumstances been enormously different–and it is painful to imagine her looking through these pages, at the red-letter days and inspiration photographs, filling in the book and responding to these enormous and not necessarily subtle social pressures.

“Wir folgen!” states the cover of the diary, and it meant it. “We follow”.

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Bad Ideas — World War II
“Talking Photographs” (1878)
JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5135 (Updating and revising an earlier post from 2011)

There appeared in the wonderful pages of Nature (for 24 January 1878) a short but interesting technical communication from the probably/improbably-named Wordsworth Donisthorpe (1847-1914): “Talking Photographs”.¹ It is a letter to the editor, really, about an invention that is deeply related to the earliest stages of motion pictures–it was among the first papers that coupled sound with the moving images, appearing eleven years before the first successful demonstration of a motion picture (1889).

“…Donisthorpe was an English individualist anarchist and inventor, pioneer of cinematography and chess enthusiast…” (Photography News). He invented a language (“Uropa”), was an ardent Darwinist, maths wrangler Trinity 1882, non-practicing Barrister, political fringe-elementist, and helped to found the British Chess Association, among much else.

With his device called the “Kinesigraph” (patented with his cousin William Crofts who whose sister was married to Darwin’s son Francis) which was based somewhat on the wool-combing machines that their fathers helped to invent and improve, the pair stepped into the instant future of the motion picture.

As I said, Donisthorpe introduces a lot in this very short letter. He states:

“By combining the phonograph with the kinesigraph I will undertake not only to produce a talking picture of [Prime Minister] Mr. Gladstone which, with motionless lips and unchanged expression shall positively recite his latest anti-Turkish speech in his own voice and tone. Not only this, but the life-size photograph itself shall move and gesticulate precisely as he did when making the speech, the words and gestures corresponding as in real life.” He states further: “It is already possible, by ingenious optical contrivances, to throw stereoscopic photographs of people on screens in full view of an audience.” And then, taking advantage of the newly invented Edison phonograph, continues: “Add the talking phonograph² to counterfeit their voices and it would be difficult to carry the illusion of real presence much further.”

*Lastly, I’ve included this in the “history of Memory” category because of the vast amount of memory that these inventions were able to store. Up to this point, before the introduction of the means to record sound and motion, people depended on static portrayals of these memories that were also subject to change and interpretation. With the phonograph and motion picture cameras continuous motion and audio sources are saved for as long as the media survives.

Notes:

DONISTHORP, Woodsworth. “Talking Photographs”, in Nature, volume 17, no. 13. 24 January 1878, page 243 in the complete weekly issue of pp 237-256.

What Mr. Donisthorpe is talking about in the pages of the Scientific American is really the back-door entry to an even bigger topic: the first announcement of Thomas Edison’s phonograph as it appeared on the back of the first page in the last issue for the year, 29 December 1877. “A Wonderful Invention–Speech Capable of Indefinite Repetition from Automatic records” was the article by Edward Johnson on the introduction of Thomas Edison’s phonograph. It is one and a half columns long, but contains a very compact 1500 words.
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History of Memory — Technology, History of
“To the Knights of all Nations” June, 1945.

JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5136

“La Victoire”¹ is a moving address from the archbishop of Reims, Louis-Augustin Marmottin, celebrating the end of the war, and was printed in June 1945. The monsignor in particular notes the sacrifices and millions of deaths of “knights of all nations” on the feast of St. Joan: “Knights of all skies, sailors of all oceans, soldiers of all battlefields…” in the fight against Hitler. He writes: “Chevaliers de tous les ciels, marins de tous les océans, soldats de tous les champs de batailles. Il faudrait les saluer tous, les héros de la Pologne et de la Belgique, de l’Alsace et des Ardennes, qui soutinrent le choc initial, terrible, ceux de Stalingrad, des plaines ukrainiennes et des monts du Caucase qui les premiers connurent la victoire, ceux de l’Egypte et de la Tunisie, ceux de l’Italie et de la Normandie et de la Provence, de l’Alsace encore et de l’Allemagne, et tant d’autres dont le sacrifice a fait notre salut”–(from page 4). [““Knights of all skies, sailors of all oceans, soldiers of all battlefields. We should salute them all, the heroes of Poland and Belgium, Alsace and the Ardennes, who sustained the initial, terrible shock, those of Stalingrad, the Ukrainian plains and the Caucasus mountains who were the first to achieve victory. , those of Egypt and Tunisia, those of Italy and Normandy and Provence, Alsace again and Germany, and so many others whose sacrifice made our salvation.”] It should be noted that the cathedral’s construction began in the 13^th century (followed by a complicated history of construction and renovation) and is the traditional site for the coronation of French kings, and also contains a statue to St. Jeanne d’Arc in full armor.

Notes:

1. MARMOTTIN, Louis-Augustin, Msgr. (1875-1960) “La Victoire. Cathedrale de Reims, 13 Mai 1945.” Printed in Reims (Imp. Du Nord Est), 1945. Original wrappers 7″x 5″, 6pp. Provenance: Library of Congress with their rubber stamp on rear wrapper. Condition: Good. The paper is somewhat browned and weakened and there are old folds here and there in the wrappers. Acceptable condition, overall. [Note: WorldCat states two years of publication—1945 and 1946—though this copy has a rubber stamped date at the foot of the title page stating “21 6 45”, or 21 June 1945.] WorldCat locates only THREE copies, all in France.

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World War II
The Loneliness of Linoleum and the Psycho-Weaponization of Polygons (1924)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Overall Post 5137

This is a pretty unassuming pamphlet, judging from outward appearances (see below)¹. It is an advertising promotional published in 1924 for Armstrong Cork Company of Lancaster (PA) pushing their extensive selection of linoleum flooring. (Linoleum, by the way, was created in the 1850s and was a constant source for durable and inexpensive floor covering for about 100 years…the first linoleum factory established in the U.S. was on Staten Island, NYC, with the company settled into a town they called Linoleumville, which was later renamed “Travis”. Anyway, I digress…) I’m drawing attention to the publication because of the illustrations, which are no doubt standard for the time and made to be complimentary, though they look a lot different from their intentions looking at them today–at least to me. There’s a LOT of distortion in the perspective, some of it from the camera angle and some of it, well, from the highly repetitious designs in the flooring, as you can see here:

As you can see below in the montage (larger images follow) the rooms seem to be distant, cool/cold, removed, surgical. Neat and clean, of course, but elegantly perfunctory. And then there’s the polygons, the advancing retreating squares and rectangles that number in the hundreds and thousands, and are headache-invoking. I can’t tell if these images would be more or less of what they are if the photos were in color. (Keep in mind some of those colors were bright red, bright yellow, shout-out-loud blue…)

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Lines, History of
The U-Boat Captain’s First-Person Account of Sinking the RMS Lusitania (1915)
JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5318

The sheets presented here¹ are very early photographs of the original war diaries of Captain Walter Schwieger, the captain of the German submarine SM U-20 who sank the RMS Lusitania in 1915.

The period of coverage for these leaves extends from 30 April 1915 to 13 May 1915, the attack on the Lusitania coming on 7 May (which receives 1.5 leaves of coverage), and delineates the action by the hour. The periods before and after the Lusitania attack are highly documentary, well written, and descriptive. The story of the Lusitania itself is forensic but not without some reserved excitement, including the decision of not launching a second torpedo for the sake of not sending through many hundreds of survivors already in the water.

A summary of the attack day—7 May—details that at 2:20p.m. Schwieger reports on tracking a possible target and then sees “four funnels” (“Schornsteine”), identifying the target as a large passenger steamer. Schwieger positions his boat and fires one torpedo “in the side close behind the bridge” followed by an “extraordinarily” large detonation, stopping the ship immediately and causing a severe listing. Schwieger then states that he sees “Lusitania” written in gold on the side of the ship.

And then, at the end of the description of the attack on the Lusitania, when the ship was foundering, Schwieger writes that he could’ve sent a second torpedo to absolutely finish the ship, but didn’t because he didn’t want to shoot through a sea with survivors. “I would not have been able to shoot a second torpedo in this crowd of people who were saving themselves.” (“Auch hätte ich einen zweiten Torpedo dies Gedränge von sich rettenden Menschen nicht schiessen können.” pg viii 3:25 pm.)

The Lusitania sunk in 18 minutes, with a loss of 1198 of the 1995 on board.

The U-20 was launched 1912 and grounded in November 1916 when her crew attempted to destroy her. Their efforts were not complete, and I assume that Schwieger’s war diary was retrieved by the Royal Navy at that time. Schwieger commanded another boat—he met his fate against a mine, the boat sunk and the crew killed in 1917.

The interpretation of the sinking of the Lusitania has been studied for a hundred years and the story is well known—it really isn’t necessary to repeat it here.

I do not know who made the annotations—they appear on the documents that were photographed and not the photos themselves. Perhaps this will be useful for someone.

Notes:

(LUSITANIA) Schwieger, Walter, Kommandant Kapitanlieutenant (1885-1917), U-20. Kriegstagebuch S.M.U.-Boot “U-20” fur die Zeit vom 30.IV bis 13.V.15. 9 leaves, image on one side only, early photographs of the diary pages (ca. 1920’s-1030’s?). A copy of photographic sheets of Schwieger’s diary appeared in a traveling show of “Eyewitness, American Originals from the National Archives”, and also appears in a catalog for the show.
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Technology, History of — World War I
“Cocaine, the Princess of Perdition” (1939)

JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5139

Elmer James Rollings’ The Silent Horror (1939) is a two-fisted introduction and appraisal of narcotics published in Wichita, Kansas by the Defender Press, 1939. (It also seems that this pamphlet is pretty rare–there are no copies of the work found in WorldCat.)

Rollings contributed at least four other narcotics-related works (“Your Girl or My Boy May be Next”, “Marijuana—the Weed of Woe”, “Junk, Junk Peddler and Junkers”, “Perils of the Poppy” and “I Saw Him Die”.) There were a few other short works non-drug-related, including something on cowboy songs and also a book on bible prophesy.

The major chapters of The Silent Horror deal with the shades of narcotics: ‘Opium, the King of Dope’; ‘Crown Prince, Morphine’; ‘Cocaine, the Princess of Perdition’; ‘Marijuana, the Dutchess of Despair’; ‘the Dope Peddlers’; and ‘Addicts’.
Here’s an excerpt:
“An eighteen-year-old boy in a Midwestern city smoked two “reefers” and an hour later choked his sweetheart to death because she refused his shocking, lustful advances, born in a marijuana-crazed brain… A sixteen-year-old boy shot his mother and father to death with his father’s shotgun after smoking several “Mary Anns” given to him by a new friend whose acquaintance he made by chance. He could neither explain nor remember the killing when the effects of the drug had worn off and sobbed himself into hysterical grief when told of his crime. And so, on and on, runs the record of thievery, forgery, banditry, kidnapping, brutal murder, degeneracy, and rape, all chargeable to this paralyzer of conscience and inflamer of depravity — Marijuana! “

Here’s a detail of one of the photos–this one has a caption stating that 60 addicts were picked up in 60 minutes, though Mr. Rollings declined to say where this all took place:

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Books–Great Cover Art — Medicine, History of
Rare Document Announcing the Retrieval of Fallen Soldiers of the Bataan Death March (1945/6)
JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5140

This short announcement¹–a carbon copy of a press release from the US Army Forces Western Pacific, Public Relations Office–while only reaching 150 words or so, establishes a very compelling and passionate statement on a terribly cruel episode of the Pacific War in WWII—the recovery of bodies of souls lost in the Bataan Death March of 1942. General MacArthur evidently personally requested T/Sgt Abie (Abraham?) Adams accompany Graves Registration (“a little-talked of activity of the Quartermaster”) to aid “…in the mission of recovering, identifying, then burying in individual graves, the body of each American soldier killed”. Adams–“regarded as a ‘ghost’ by many of the Filipinos who saw soldiers flogged and bayoneted en route to prison camp”–has “the painful task of steering the Unit over the same path so they may locate temporary graves…”

In any event this is probably a unique item and may be of interest to those interested in the war in the Pacific, so I reproduce it here. (In brief searches I’ve not been able to find any mention of it online, nor of Sgt. Adams.)

I’m fairly certain that this is not necessary but here anyway is a quick summary of the event from Wikipedia: “The Bataan Death March …was the forcible transfer by the Imperial Japanese Army of 60,000–80,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war from Saysain Point, Bagac, Bataan and Mariveles to Camp O’Donnell, Capas, Tarlac, via San Fernando, Pampanga, where the prisoners were forced to march until they died. The transfer began on April 9, 1942, after the three-month Battle of Bataan in the Philippines during World War II. The total distance marched from Mariveles to San Fernando and from the Capas Train Station to Camp O’Donnell is variously reported by differing sources as between 60 and 69.6 miles (96.6 and 112.0 km). Differing sources also report widely differing prisoner of war casualties prior to reaching Camp O’Donnell: from 5,000 to 18,000 Filipino deaths and 500 to 650 American deaths during the march. The march was characterized by severe physical abuse and wanton killings.”–Wikipedia

Notes:

1. (Bataan Death March) Headquarters, United States Army Forces Western Pacific, Public Relations Office.

[Dateline] AFWESP HQ, Manila (Army Forces, Western Pacific). 11″X8.5″, single sheet, carbon copy from typed original. Undated, ca. 1945/6.

Provenance: Lt. David Katcher, correspondent/writer in the public relations office of the U.S. Army Headquarters of the Western Pacific (GHQ USAFPAC), working for U.S. Commissioner to the Philippines, Paul V. McNutt. Later Mr. Katcher would becoming founding editor of Physics Today
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Uncategorized
“Whether Slavery was Right or Wrong…” On the Future of the Freed Slaves in the U.S. (Nashville, 1867)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2528–expanded

De Bow’s Review in 1867–in the dire straights of the antebellum South, in the doom and despair of the just-finished war–lashed out like a wicked Alex Jones conspiratorial wingnut against the Northern states and anyone who comforted them. Published in Nashville, all I have of the magazine presently is this loose issue for November 1867, and in spite of the energetically positive view depicted on the cover of the magazine had little to do with what you found in the writing inside.

The leading article is an odd one, yelling about Great Britain manufacturing the cause of anti-slavery in the United States, which pretty much is made abundantly clear in the title, “Black Republicanism, the Dupe and Agent of British Policy in Respect to American Interests”. The “scheme of so-called Negro Emancipation…is a British Invention” crushing the U.S. which “suffered immeasurably” under the Abolition Program, “the fatal deadfall of the abolition trap“, all of which in the end will “crush the innards out of the “Black Republican Yankee”. It was the Brits according to the writer of this article who FORCED THE UNITED STATES TO ABOLISH SLAVERY” [caps in the original].

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Atlas of Dead Ideas — Social History