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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