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.

America’s Greatest Social Export: “We Shall Overcome” and the Importance of Guy Carawan

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 474

Thinking about (really) high explosives for yesterday’s post led me to the American export of arms. This in turn led me to consider the non-lethal aspects of American exports–specifically, great,
large-scale American contributions to
global society, and about what our greatest non-technical export might be. (So far as the tech side goes, the most
important of our exports over the last hundred years or so I would be, I guess,
the computer—it is basically an American innovation, Charles Babbage and Konrad
Zuse and a few others notwithstanding. I can’t imagine anything more superior;
on the other hand, something like “fast food” might be considered, though it is
ultimately an horrendous blight more than anything else, worldwide phenomenon
and moneymaker or not.)

My candidate for
this honor of Great American Export is a song: “We Shall Overcome”. It is a meme, really, understandable by anyone, anywhere; it meaning universally understood, and it power for gathering people together to fight for the common good is powerful and undeniable. It is a remarkable song, standing for the hope and dreams and accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement and the vision of Martin Luther King.

The other candidates that come to
mind don’t come close to the power, crushing visibility and instantly-attaining
recognition of WSO. Free enterprise has
been mentioned by lots of folks for this honor, but I honestly don’t see how it
is an American invention—the Brits and Austrians were all over the concept in
the mid 19^th century, so I’m not so sure it can apply. Perhaps these folks are talking about “virulent
capitalism”, which may be American, and which may again rank quite high on this
list, but not necessarily so proudly.
American Constitutionalism is another idea, as is the concept of image
and (Martin Amis’) the cool. Equally significant
is debt accumulation, which is as interesting as a rash, and the insidious
post-9/11 Fear, where all of our dreams’ life spans are color coded in segments
away from oblivion. Happier and more filling ideas are feminism
and women’s rights (American only in the last 5- or 75 years or so), which leads to the general appearance of Civil Rights, which gets us right back to where we started, with WSO. In doing a quick mental accounting, WSO trumps all-comers.

The song’s creation is credited to
the preacher and songwriter Charles Tindley (1851-1933), the son of a slave, who
wrote I Shall Over-Come in 1901. The song came to greater life in 1945 as a
result of a strike against the American Tobacco Company by the Tobacco Workers
Union. Lucille Simmons, who was a striker, began singing the song at the end of
the day’s striking activities—it came to the attention of the union’s
organizer, Zilphia Horton, who was also at the time the musical director (and
co-founder, with her husband Frank Horton) of the Highlander Folk School (of
Monteagle, Tennessee. Highlander was started
in the 1930’s as a place to instruct people how to organize and strike, and evolved
over time into an extraordinary place of learning (and which was also “stolen”
and seized by the U.S.
government in 1960, but that’s another story).
In the hands of Ms. Horton (who tragically died in 1956 at the age of
46) the song was introduced to Pete Seeger, who published it in Bulletin No. 3 (Sept., 1948), #8, in
1948 in People’s Songs. (Photo at above/right is of Guy Carawan and Cnadie Carawan.)

It would take another four years before the song made its first recorded
appearance. “We Shall Overcome” (changing the “will” to “shall” as in the
Seeger version) by Laura Duncan and the Jewish Youth Singers (Hootenany
records). In 1953 the song was critically
introduced to Frank Hamilton from Zilphia Horton, and from there to Hamilton’s friend and
south-swing travelling companion Guy Carawan. (Carawan is seen at left with MLK in 1962.)

It is in Carawan’s hands that the song , I think, received its most
important treatment. Carawan became the
music director at Highlander in 1959 and re-introduced the song there, the school
now being principally concerned with civil rights and student activism. What makes Carawan so supremely important is
that he traveled with the song and taught it to many groups of the important Student
Noviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); the members of these groups in turn
taught it to other groups, and so on and so on.
Carawan in fact taught the song at the initial meeting of SNCC in Raleigh in 1960, and has
been credited with his importance by Julian Bond, Pete Seeger and many
others. The song is now perhaps the most recognized modern creation in existence, and may very well hold more significance than any other song in recent memory. It is an anthem of belief, and of hope, and stands for what can be accomplished; it also stands for all of those who have given so much for their beliefs and for the betterment of society–a holy inspiration.
(Thanks to Jeff Donlan for pointing me to the Mahalia clip on Youtube.)

[My wife, Patti Digh, and I traveled to interview Guy and Candie
Carawan a few days ago to talk to them about their lives in social
awareness and about the song “We Shall Overcome”. To read her article on this experience, visit her blog at 37days.com.]

Note on the WSO sheet music: the fine print reads as follows: (copyrighted) by “Horton,
Silphia; Frank Hamilton; Guy Carawan; and Pete Seeger.. “We Shall
Overcome.” Ludlow Music, Inc., 1963. Music Division, Library of Congress, Courtesy of
Ludlow Music, Inc.

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Fantastic Titles
Peasant Utopias and Dreamlands: Medieval Hopes to Big Rock Candy Mountain

JF Ptak Science Books LLC 476

The concept of terrestrial, not-Heaven-bound, un-restricted
non-religious happiness for working folks not viewed as an abomination by
Christian churches is a relatively new idea.
Fun for the rabbleous masses, stuff happening to the far west of the
east-entrenched Eden*
(as in the Steinbeck novel), was generally a no-go so far as institutions such
as the Catholic church was concerned.
Medieval geography of imaginary places where happiness dwells included
the Land of Cockaigne and the Isle of the Blest, places that represented both wish fulfillment and resentment at the
strictures of asceticism and dearth.

The peasantry existed in a state of semi-amicable slavery
under the thought- and emotional-control
of the aristocracy and the church, living in fear of their immortal souls
dancing in the ring of fire for thinking heathenous thoughts, or persecuted by
the legal entity for being too immodest.
“Fun” was a very expensive commodity, and was seen by The Church as
being too expensive and rare to share.
Fun represented a departure from the routine, an affront to the
teachings of scripture, a lessening of the control enjoyed by all ruling
classes. And so Medieval legends such as
the Land of Cockaigne, with its promises of unbridled eating and gluttony and
sexual liberty and disobedience was a direct charge against the established
distribution of power and wealth, and could not be tolerated. Fun was kept for someone else.

Cockaigne—of Middle French derivation, pays de cocaign,”Land
of Plenty”—was an imaginary
location and a dream, somewhere that was a total relief to the long grind of
the peasant life. It was a place “where the
houses were made of barley sugar and cakes, the streets were paved with pastry,
and the shops supplied goods for nothing” according to Specimens of Early
English Poets (1790), whose author, George Ellis, reprinted a 13^th
century French poem. In the Land of
Cockaigne “roasted pigs wander about with knives in their backs to make carving
easy, where grilled geese fly directly into one’s mouth, where cooked fish jump
out of the water and land at one’s feet…The weather is always mild, the wine
flows freely, sex is readily available, and all people enjoy eternal youth…”
according to Herman Pleij’s Dreaming of Cockaigne (2001). Another source determines that “you must eat your way through a mountain of
porridge to reach the land of Cockaigne

…where the
fences are made of sausages, the geese lie ready-grilled on the plates…”

Atlantis and El Dorado might’ve been fancy sounding places
to a lot of poor people, but Cockaigne must’ve sounded better by leaps and
bounds—no piles of gold, no great extravagances, just rewards of plenty to eat
and drink, and sleep, and some sex. All
of these promises existed so far beyond the pale of the Church that even
thinking about a crust’s-worth of such anti-biblical carnage would send you
straight to hell. Which sounds
terrifically strange to me now because the actions here, in Cockaigne, are
largely passive (though of course hedonistic), and aren’t vengeful, hurtful,
spiteful. It is mainly, well, lazy, full
of sleep-inducing foods. Bittersweet dreams like this formed for themselves a
basis of pure hate within the church, mainly because it was taken as a threat
to the core fundamentals of religions at the time. It should be said that many of the tellings
of this legend do have their fair share of anti-clerical runs, nun-hunting and
monk bashings. Oopsie!

The Land of Cockaigne is
beautifully painted in 1567 by the peasant-dominated mind of Pieter Brueghel the Elder or Bruegel (c.1525 – September 9,
1569) the
fabulous Netherlandish
Renaissance
painter. (In many ways he discovered the common/peasant
in much the same way as Dickens discovered the working poor of London; of course Brueghel made his discovery
300 years earlier. He was also in his
way a Dickensian for detail: many of his
paintings are terrific mélanges of children’s games and folk tales, often
accurately identifying hundreds of objects of interest in a single work) He incorporates many of these legends in the
painting, in addition showing stewed geese flying into open mouths and a
house-roof made of meat pies.

The promise of eatable houses and lazy meals and sleeping
all day to produce evermore profits are many times bounded by rivers of red and
wine wines, of milk, and of honey.

These are concepts that have existed for hundreds of years
in different sorts of peasant paradises, not the least of which is the 20^th
century’s contribution of “Big Rock Candy Mountain”, a song composed by Harry
McClintock (1882-1957). In many ways this song contains the most simple, most
heartbreaking of the simple wishes of the American hobo of the Great Depression
era. The 26 (or so) wants are spectacular
in their smallnesses and simpleness (see below for full lyrics of the song):

(1) a land that’s fair and bright (2) handouts grow on
bushes (3)sleep out every night
(4) boxcars are all empty (5) the sun
shines every day (6) cigarette trees (7) lemonade springs (8) bluebird sings (9) all the cops have
wooden legs (10) bulldogs all have rubber teeth (11) hens lay soft boiled eggs (12)
farmer’s trees are full of fruit (13) barns are full of hay (14) ain’t no snow (15)
rain don’t fall (16) the wind don’t blow
(17) never change your socks (18)little streams of alcohol come a-trickling
down the rocks (19) brakemen have to tip their hats (20) railroad bulls are blind (21) lake of
stew and of whiskey (22) jails are made
of tin (you can walk right out again as soon as you are in) (23) no short
handled shovels, (24) no axes saws or
picks (25) you sleep all day (26) they hung the jerk that invented work.

These wishes are gathered together as follows:

Food: Cigarettes, lemonade, soft boiled eggs, fruit trees,
streams of alcohol, land of stew and whiskey

Geography: land fair
and bright, sleep out every night, sunshine, bluebirds, no snow, no rain, no
wind.

Social: handouts grow on bushes, cops have
wooden legs, bulldogs have rubber teeth, (railroad) brakemen (who would
normally throw hobos from the trains) have to tip their hats to the hobos;
railroad bulls (the railroad cops who would be um pro-active and brutal in
getting rid of the ‘hobo problem” from the trains); revolving door jails are made of tin; no axes, saws or picks; and finally, no short-handled
shovels.

Personal: sleeping all day, sleeping out at night, and not changing your socks. (Not even a whiff of carnal anything.)

And of course the hanging of the man who invented the whole
concept of work.

I think that in all of these simple dreams, the “short-handled
shovels” one is the most tremendous, and most heart-breaking. The short-handled shovel is a backbreaker,
made for working in stubborn, small holes or tight places. If you needed to use a shovel on something,
you’d want to use a long-handled one. Keep
in mind that the song didn’t call for no shovels—just a decent one that you
could work with humanely.

The song is beautiful and stands for a wide majority of
thought in the U.S.
in the troubled 1930’s. It is also in
many ways related to the classic peasant utopias and dreamlands—perhaps it is
just like Cockaigne, just removed 500 years.

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Is Dance Dangerous? The Naive Surreal Collection, Part 8.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 477
In the history of questions, this (“Is the dance dangerous?”) certainly must rank in the bottom tenth percentile. Or at least I hope it does. The question is the title of this small pamphlet, written by Porter Bailes (of the First Baptist Church of Tyler, Texas) in 1947, a work which is part of my Naive Surreal collection. “If it’s doubtful, it’s dirty” is the major maxim that floats it way through this work, and proceeds to attacks it subject of “the”dance on its unholy, immoral, unnatural, imprudent, prayer-defeating nature.

“Can any one stretch the imagination as to think of Jesus as being congenial and at ease in the atmosphere that the dance creates? No! Dancing is not to the glory of god. It never made anyone feel the nearness of god. It robs us of the desire to pray. A dancing foot and a praying knee are not found long on the same limb.”

And also:

“There are many fine people who dance. They are fine not because they dance, but in spite of the dance.”

And:

“The dance does not involve any moral requirements. The more lewd the people are, the more proficient they may become. The gestures of the dance demand lewdness.”

Lastly: “the tine of the dance makes it dangerous. Its hours are unearthly and abnormal”

And lastly last: ” The position of the dance make it dangerous. For two normal people to place their bodies in the close personal contact that the modern dance demands and not have impure thoughts and unholy emotions stirred, would be very unnatural. In truth, it is against all the known laws of human nature.”

This is last just for my examples: there are 20 pages of this. It is remarkable that, in this highly restrictive and judgmental work, the paper is allowed to bend.

And not to be outdone, the author tells us that 97% of professional gamblers “attribute their habit to the practice of playing cards at home”. “The risk is too great, young people” Pastor Bailes tells us, “for you to start gambling–even at home”. He began to warm to this subject but I guess was saving this subject for later.

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Alaska Calls: the Comma King Heads for the Hills. Naive Surreal Collection, Part 9.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 478
So. I really couldn’t tell what was going to happen in this pamphlet, a fine example from my Naive Surreal collection. Unfortunately, it is a bit of only a lonely hearts tale, in spite of the monumentally-odd cover of the southern girl with hairy legs and a hobo switch and no shoes and a bare midriff in the wilds of Alaska. The only thing that the text has going for it in the oddness department–with the exception of being badly written–is the enormous,use,of,the,comma. I don’t know what the record is for the badly-employed use of the comma might be, but, well, this little story must be making quite a run for it. In the dedication, for example, which is ten lines and 100 words long, there are 18 commas. More follow. Many more.

The cover must stand on its own–and it does.

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Institutionalized Racism and the Sale of Toys and Music and Frivolities

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 479

Leafing my way through a reprint of the Peck & Snyder Out & Indoor Sports and Pastimes Catalog for 1888, looking for baseball equipment and giant bagatelles, I found this stunning advertisement. I knew of the tragic and long history of this form of “entertainment”, as does everyone, but I must say I never considered the costume end of it. And here it was.

The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, appeared as an American invention in the 1830’s–much more so by the early 1840’s. It depicted blacks in only the worst possible ways, as shiftless, lazy, buffoonish, stupid, flawed in almost every way, an idiotic race with a musical advantage, relayed in predictable units, accompanied by a developing genre of American music. The ad here is for the accoutrement of the performers, layers of red rouge and carbon to build on white faces one of the lowest forms of racial archetypes that this country has produced.

The astonishing thing is that it is just a simple ad in the middle of
the page of the middle of a catalog for entertainment and sports
bits–nothing special at all, nothing remarkable to distinguish this
gaping hole of morality from the games and exercise equipment that
surrounds it. And that’s the deep horror of stuff like this, this sort
of stereotyping that was so lethal and filled with hate, and not making
a ripple in the awareness of anyone’s sense of correctness: the
creation of this racial image was so complete that even its most base
element could appear as an insignificant trifle in a sporting catalog.

Even more extraordinary is this ad that appears just a few dozen pages
later. “The Enchanted Negro’s Head” was a prop in a magic trick that
involved drawing a knife across the neck of the black head. “The
performer takes a small knife and says he will cut the head off”–I can
imagine the sort of conversation between performer and audience before
his action is undertaken, getting the audience ready to kill the “Negro
Head”. It would not have been pretty. And that’s not all–once you were done with the “trick” part of cutting off the head, it “(could) be fixed to the top of a walking stick or umbrella….(to) form a great curiosity”.

These characterizations appeared in uncountable forms in virtually every aspect of social life in this country, finding its insidious way even into something as seemingly innocent as a magic trick. It is the very vast smallness of this racism that make it so terrifically convincing and lethal. Looking at something like this makes me feel the enormous weight of the all that went into the attempted assassination of this race.

**My friend Joy Holland–chief of the Brooklyn Room at the Brooklyn Public Library at the Grand Army Plaza in the heart of Brooklyn USA–recently started a wonderful history blog at the library called Brooklynology. A recent post there talks about a minstrel-related find in their ephemera collection–it is quite interesting; take a look.

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Bad Ideas — Iconography — Mythology — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
The Car as the Dominating “Life” Form in the U.S.: Finding Places to Rest the Populating Automobile, 1930

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 481

If I was an alien (of the outer-space variety) looking at the United
States, I’d find it difficult not to assume
that the biological units scurrying around the place were not put there to
service the automobile. Cars get born,
then put on display, then selected and driven to their new home. They get washed, and fed, and sometimes have
their own places to sleep at night in their very own structure with their
caretakers housed nearby. They get taken
out for airs in the morning and evening, resting while the humans labor all day
to make enough money for their care and maintenance and feeding. In the evening, they get brought back home
and allowed to rest further. They
respond directly to inputs only and give no unsolicited response: sort of like cats. Fantastically large allowances are made for
cars, humans going so far as to remove life- and atmospheric-sustaining biological
units such as trees and good dirt so that the car can be taken virtually
anywhere in the country on a path made specifically for them. These pathways, which are padded and smooth,
have ancillary bits attached to them so that the humans may walk beside them—houses
and such are all connected to these paths to more easily enable the people to
have access and maintain the car. And,
at the end of the day, humans breathe in the very excrement and excretia
produced by the cars. Placed under a
microscope, the whole thing might resemble a biological unit, the cars being
its very blood, everything else present to contain and move it.

These images from the Illustriete Zeitung (Leipzig, issue
4484, pp 239-240) for November 1930 speak to the exact issue of how to care for
the now ever-present automobile.
Entitled “Wie Bringe Ich Meinen Kraftwagen Unter?”, the short article
(by the engineer Botho von Romer of Munchen) addresses the need of what to do
with cars at bedtime—where do we put them?
One answer was this spectacular carpark (“Garagenhof”) high rise—seventeen
floors of parking (with two more underground), serviced by a variety of
elevators, pointing out that varieties of this structure already existed in Chicago and New York

There was also the possibility of vast masses of sunken
garages, their entrance way screwed into the earth leading to tunnels and
networked warehouses where the cars could be safely deposited and removed from
city streets. There were also these two
versions of the simple above-ground garages and parking lots: the apartment block gives over the entire
interior area to individual parking and garages (doing away with any
greenspace), while the massive semi-cloverleaf design is made for nothing else
in mind than to park the cars in the four semi-centers.

By 1930 the production of the automobile had been revolutionized
to such an extent that virtually anyone with a job and less than five kids
could actually afford a car. It is
interesting to note that at the average price of say 30 cents a gallon for
gasoline (in the U.S.A.)
that folks 80 years ago were paying pretty more per gallon (adjusted via CPI)
than we are paying now at $1.87/gallon (in my mountain city at the far end of
the pipeline).

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Bad Ideas — Future, History of the — Industrial & Technological art — Technology, History of
Material Things Out-of-Context: the Statue of Liberty in Paris, 1884

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 482

“The colossal statue of Liberty, which is to be placed as a pharos in New York Bay, is at last finished.” So leads this front-page story of the Scientific American for May 10, 1884 (published in its Supplement section #413). The image reminds me of many that I have seen over the years of familiar objects being found in unfamiliar places. In this case, the statue loomed over the warehouses as it was assembled in the courtyard of Gaget et Gauthier, rue de Chazelles, Paris, prior to its shipment to the United States. (It was shipped in 350 pieces and packed away in 315 crates, bouncing its way to America in the French frigate Isere.) The arm of the statue made an appearance all on its own at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, and then rested at Madison Square in NYC until joined by the rest of the body in 1886. The head of the statue was also separately exhibited in Paris until 1885.

Out-of-context is interesting and dissonant and anything but normal; and anything-but-“normal” is good, seconding the claim of Mme. Curie that “dissymmetry causes phenomena”, which means that something happens that is not part of the ordinary, and that in turn means that something new can be discovered.

There are some interesting and purposeful collections of instituted disturbances like this: for example, there’s the red Couch Project, a continuation of a photographic odyssey of a large red couch that has been moved many thousands of miles across the world, finding itself in situations entirely unexpected of a piece of furniture. Then too there is Philippe Halsman’s The Jump Book (1959), in which he simply asked (famous) people to “jump”.

He semi-seriously (probably not seriously at all) interpreted their efforts, fitting their jumps into what he saw as his subject’s personality. Peter Ustinov (shown here) tries hard to look as though he is not jumping, while Richard Nixon jumps a very careful, self-conscious and studious jump.

In any event, in spite of liking thee last two works immensely, I prefer the unintentional out-of-context molestation of required memory. (Though anything else that can get me to the not-normal stage of being is welcome.)

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Looking Straight-On at Things in Antique Prints, Part 2

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 483 (continuing Post 20)

In one of my earliest posts on this blog I wrote: I’ve always been intrigued by antiquarian images
that looked straight down, or up, at things–90 degree, perpendicular, real
straight-on stuff, giving a feel for depth (or height) and perspective.
Funny thing is that in the wide world of scientific images, they really don’t
show up very often.” Still rue. I really haven’t noticed that many straight-on images–perhaps the paucity of these things is as simple as them not being “as pretty” as other views. I have found another, today, showing the interior of the “spacious RAF” Vickers “Victoria” troop carrier aircraft for (January 5) 1929. It was indeed spacious for the time, and was one of the largest planes in the air.

The Vickers Victoria first flew in 1922—this 1929 monster
was powered by two 570hp engines which allowed it to cruise at a modest 110 mph,
taking it 11 minutes to climb to 4900 feet.
It had a crew of two and carried 22 troops—it looked as though it might
do more than that, but this was quite a load given the time and the altitude at
which the plane would function. As you
can see by the fellow standing in the foreground, it was a very tall plane—17 feet tall, with a 59’ long body on a massive 87’ wingspan (that made even more impressive
by the wings’ 2,178 square foot surface).

The view here is from the rear of the aircraft looking
straight forward, and I notice that the pilots didn’t have any backrest for
their seats. The interior, even though
fairly threadbare and essential, did have upholstered seats for the folding
chairs.

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Finding Hidden Images in Antique Prints: 18th Century Forensic Social X-Rays

JF Ptak Science Books Post 484

Even though I truly enjoy the intimate pathology of antique prints, finding “hidden” images within images within images, it seems as though I’ve only made 25 or so posts about them, and this in spite of thousands of such images to choose from. Posts like “Hidden Children: Found Art and Social Vignettes Inside Art“, “Revealing the Worlds Inside of Prints: Finding Hidden Human Geography in Old Prints” and “Finding Hidden Images in Antique Prints: 18th Century Forensic Social X-Rays” are good representatives of this genre.

Images hold selective secrets for different people of divergent interests. Sitting through a motion picture, for example, shows a series of still images flashed before us—in a single scene people bring to bear their own ways of experience and observation. A forensic pathologist will see things shown within their specialty different from someone with a chemical explosives background who will see a bomb differently from an ER doc who would respond to an emergency room differently from a bookseller who might notice in the scene that the paperback edition of a tree Grows in Brooklyn being read by an American G.I. in 1944 didn’t exist yet, and so on. A single image can hold a tremendous variety of depth and interpretation depending on the observers’ perspective.

Most of the time when I look at prints now in the antique map shop that I own (and now my only public venue now that the history of science bookshop has been alive solely online now for the last 6 years) I am looking at the extraneous “stuff” that is used as filler to the print’s purpose, and I find the uncommitted art just fascinating, sort of like “loose” unnecessary snapshots of common life, everyday life, of people walking by.

These two images are from a series of etchings done by S. Hooper in 1785 of ancient and semi-ancient ruins in Surry and Sussex. The first is of Bermondsey Abbey, Surry, a 12 th century English Benedictine monestary with precursors reaching back another 500 years. I’m pretty sure that it is the central archway(s) that are the remnants of the structure in this print,

with Renaissance-era occasional buildings sprouted up around it. I find the old shopkeeper’s window (i.e. “store”) at the right to be very interesting, someone selling their services or wares from a location that I would bet was hundreds of years old even by 1785. The shop would be ready for business by opening the shutters and flipping down the table/ledge. I wonder too about the woodworking on the second floor of this curious structure, placed in an unconventional diagonal. The shaded feature of the shawled woman selling her goods from a basket to what seems a well-dressed man is another curious addition.

The second image is of Alderton Church, Suffolk, and the feature of itnerest here this time not so hidden at all, though it is incidental and it is sweetly odd. the ruins of the church are

adequately rendered, but the horse in the foreground is just beautifully done, far more so than required by its half-inch appearance in the full-size original. Also, the man approaching the grazing horse does so slightly hunched, with a hat outstretched (offering a treat inside?), and doing so I’d say in a kind, respectful manner, trying as he was to put a halter on the horse. It is just a lovely, quiet sub scene that is unnecessary to the architecture of the ruin but probably very necessary to the artist or etcher who wanted just a tiny flight of fancy now-and-again, and so placed something of artistic merit in a dead space of the print.

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The “Huh?” Department: Pig Graphs, Pig Checkers and Other Small Confusions. Naive Surreal Advertising Art

JF Ptak Science Books Post 485

“Always remember, a cat looks down on man, a dog looks up to man, but a pig will look man right in the eye and see his equal.”–W.S. Churchill

Well. Some things can just speak for themselves, as in the case(s) of these curious images brought to you by the graphic design folks working to push feed for Purina Company. There were still tens of millions of farmers in the U.S. when this pamphlet was printed in 1935, and most of these farms were quite small, and so the Purina Company was reaching out with a broad stroke, right down to the neighborhood guy with 6 pigs on a half acre. Of course what makes these images so appealing now is that they seem other-worldly, from a time that we have very little connection to even though it existed in the lifetimes of my parents. The images are discordant, off-centre, not-quite-right–which places them perfectly into my Naive Surreal category. The images are in their own accidental way quite surreal in that they look to be intentionally bizarre, when the opposite is true.

Nestled snuggly away though is this remarkable graph of pig value versus time–its interest has nothing to do with the data which I suspect was accurate and universally known to be so (at the time), but for the PIG MARKERS at the X/Y interface. That is something I’m sure I’ve never seen before, and I pay very close attention to the history of the display of quantitative data. It is a small jewel. a pearl among, well you know.

As for some of the other images and their pig-centeredness, I can only speculate. “Profit begins with the sow” is a solar porcine sunrise with little pig radiances. “Purina Sow and Pig Checkers” I thought at first and continue to wrongly think that the cube in the middle was a loaf of bread (complete with shadow!), beautifully confounding the image-heading dichotomy; but it isn’t. It is still a small magnificance of confusion, thank goodness.

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JF Ptak

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Bad Ideas — Fantastic Titles — Impossible Books
The Urgent Normalcy of Nuclear Weapons Training: 1966

JF Ptak Science Books Post 487

This folder, colored in the bright colors of New Mexico, contained a number of small pamphlets intended for the new-comers working in the filed of nuclear weapons construction and deployment. It is an “advanced” course, and I’m not so sure why. Most of the material in it was pretty elementary, which makes you atop and think some. Like, for example, what would the “elementary” course look like when these efforts stop just shy of being Classic Comics Illustrated? This was not a confidence-builder, this simple approach to getting to the end of the world, but then again it wasn’t intended to be so. There were a number of references to test observation, which was perhaps the most glaring oddity (with the exception of the overall ordinariness) in these pamphlets. There were perhaps tens of thousand of these military veterans who suffered unspeakable radiation sickness and were largely ignored and abandoned by the federal government. An excellent book on this topic was written by Robert del Tredicci, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb (the images from which can be found here.)

I’m posting a simple list of some of the first series of nuclear tests and their observers, as follows:

Timeline of Atomic Tests, 1945-1962

This data is taken from the Naval historical Center of the Department of the Navy (805 Kidder Breese SE, D.C., the Washington Navy Yard). Almost all of the data here is presented on the website for the NHC and re-arranged by me for easier use here. The research and thinking had already been done by the good people at Navy History.

1945-6. Project Trinity, 1945-1946. . Detonation of the world’s first nuclear device during July 1945, in New Mexico.Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: 1000.

1946. Operation Crossroads. “2 detonations conducted by JTF-l during June-July 1946, at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands,Pacific Ocean.” At least 36,262 Navy and 550 Marine Corps personnel, as well as 251 ships, participated.Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: 36,262 Navy and 550 Marine Corps personnel, plus 251 ships.

1948. Operation Sandstone.. “3 detonations conducted by JTF-7 during April-May 1948, Enewetak Atoll, Marshall Islands.” Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: At least 7,759 Navy and 182 Marine Corps personnel participated.

1951. Operation Ranger: Shots Able, Baker, Easy, Baker-2, Fox, 25 January-6 February Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: “5 detonations conducted at the Nevada Proving Ground, involving at least 6 Navy and 1 Marine Corps personnel.”

1951 Operation Greenhouse. “4 detonations conducted by JTF-7 during April-May 1951, at Enewetak.” Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: At least 2,900 Navy and 80 Marine Corps personnel were involved.

1951. Operation Buster-Jangle. “7 detonations conducted from October-November 1951 at Nevada Proving Ground.” Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: involving at least 319 Navy and 188 Marine Corps personnel.

1952. Operation Tumbler-Snapper. “8 detonations conducted during April-June 1952 at Nevada Proving Ground.” Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: At least 556 Navy and 2,042 Marine Corps personnel participated.

1952. Operation Ivy. “2 detonations conducted by JTF-132 during October-November 1952, at Enewetak. One of the events, designated Mike, was the first thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb.” Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: At least 5,258 Navy and 178 Marine Corps personnel participated.

1953. Operation Upshot-Knothole. “11 detonations conducted during March-June 1953 at Nevada Proving Ground.” Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: At least 773 Navy and 2,275 Marine Corps personnel participated.

1954.Castle Series. “6 detonations conducted by Joint Task Force (JTF) 7 during March-May 1954, at Enewetak.” Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: At least 8,633 Navy and 303 Marine Corps personnel were involved.

1955. Operation Teapot. “14 detonations conducted during February-May 1955 at Nevada Test Site.” Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: At least 541 Navy and 2,305 Marine Corps personnel participated.

1955. Operation Wigwam. “A single deep underwater detonation conducted by JTF-7 during May 1955, in the Pacific Ocean, approximately 500 miles southwest of San Diego CA.” Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: At least 6,567 Navy and 110 Marine Corps personnel as well as 30 ships participated.

1956. Operation Redwing. “17 detonations conducted by JTF-7 during May-July 1956, at Bikin
and Enewetak.” Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: At least 5,654 Navy and 253 Marine Corps personnel were involved.

1957. Plumbbob Series. “24 detonations conducted during April-October 1957 at Nevada Test Site.” Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: At least 574 Navy and 2,148 Marine Corps personnel participated. Naval aircraft included 4 model ZSG-3 airships, an HSS-1 helicopter and fixed-wing aircraft.

1958. Operation Hardtack I. “35 detonations conducted by JTF-7 during April-August 1958, at Bikini
and Enewetak.” Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: At least 9,736 Navy and 219 Marine Corps personnel were involved.

1958. Operation Argus. “3 high-altitude detonations conducted by TF (Task Force).” 88 during August-September 1958. over South Atlantic Ocean.

1958. Operation Hardtack II. “19 detonations conducted during September-October 1958 at Nevada Test Site.” Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: At least 33 Navy and 2 Marine Corps personnel were involved.

1961. Projects Gnome and Sedan : The Plowshare Program “27 nuclear detonations conducted between 1961 and 1973 at Nevada Test Site, Colorado, and, New Mexico.” Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: At least 82 Navy and 1 Marine Corps personnel participated.

1962. Operation Dominic I. “36 detonations inc. Polaris and ASROC tests conducted by JTF- 8 during April-November 1962, in Johnson and Christian Island areas, and a single detonation 371 nautical miles southwest of San Diego CA.” Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: At least 18,163 Navy and 659 Marine Corps personnel participated.

1962. Operation Dominic II. Shots Little Feller II, Johnie Boy, Small Boy, Little Feller I “4 detonations during July 1962, at Nevada Test Site.” Witnesses, participants and human experimental subjects: At least 81 Navy and 89 Marine Corps personnel participated.

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JF Ptak

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Atomic and Nuclear weapons