Author: JF Ptak

Polish Concentration Camps for Russians, 1920

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1255

The name of the concentration camp comes to us from the (Second) Boer War, when the British imprisoned the Boers in what had first been described as refugees camps, and then in 1900/01 termed “concentration camps”. They were hardly anything more than prisons, for men, women and children, entire families, communities. These were the people who had escaped the systematic and revolting scorched earth policy initiated by Field Marshall Kitchener (who was in command of events after 29 November 1900), where the Boers were simply hunted and killed, or if not killed, then imprisoned; farms were destroyed, towns torched, livestock killed. In general, the country of the Boers (all of whom were seen as guerrillas) was being taken and killed. The survivors of this onslaught were sent to the concentrations camps.

This more modern 1921 reference to a concentration camp comes to us from British Committee of the Russian red Cross Fund in Great Britain, First report, 1919-1921. This was a tough time for the people of Russia–the Soviet Union–who were on the beginning of a mostly long-arc downward. Just seven years past the beginning of World War I they were experiencing enormous “hardships” brought about by fighting the war, complicated by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the resulting civil wars. Then of course there was the end of the war, and the beginning fo the war with Poland in 1919/1920. And then another in a series of natural/mostly-unnatural famines in 1921. This particular famine–killing about 5 million people in this year–was brought about mostly by the Revolution and prodrazvyorstka–the practice of forcing peasant farmers into selling whatever “surplus” food they produced to the state at the state’s prices, and also by being forced to supply food to the Red Army and to urban areas. Add a drought to this mix, and it lead to absolute disaster for the peasantry

Russian Red Cross Fund wasn’t yet concerned with the Povolzhye Famine, not yet, addressing the plight of the country’s response to six long hard years of war, civil war and war again–a poor country made poorer and more miserable, this fund made some attempt at relieving at least a small burden of this impossible situation within the country.

What caught my eye was in the discussion of providing relief to the camps of Russian refugee expatriates, the report detailing some of those in Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia and Finland. And Poland. The Polish camp, however, was different, and described the attempt to send relief to the 140,000 in “the Concentration Camps”, and then describing another of 110,000 “Russians who have been interned according to the Riga Peace Terms, and that the Poles are quite unable to do anything for them”. (This pamphlet is available for purchase through our lbog bookstore.)

The reference took me by surprise–I knew a tiny bit about the Russia/Poland War at this time but hadn’t realized the extent of it, nor the extent of the Russian refugees in the country nor the amount of soldiers (and their families) within the concentration camps. These are not the extermination camps that would appear in Poland two decades later, but the conditions of the people in the camps led to the deaths of thousands.

Notes:

Kitchener (who full title without his bloody shoes on was Field Marshal The Rt. Hon. Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, KG, KP, GCB, OM, GCSI, GCMG, GCIE, ADC, PC) described his vision for ending the Second Boer War in the Parkenham’s history: his aim was to “flush out guerrillas in a series of systematic drives, organized like a sporting shoot, with success defined in a weekly ‘bag’ of killed, captured and wounded, and to sweep the country bare of everything that could give sustenance to the guerrillas, including women and children…. It was the clearance of civilians—uprooting a whole nation—that would come to dominate the last phase of the war.”

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Bad Ideas — History of the Future — Militaria — Social History
VIDEO: Smashnose Grindkiss of Lady Archaeology of 1950’s B-Movie Posters.

I posted something yesterday on this, but made a video of the whole thing (plus extras) this morning, with some decent music.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Women, History of
The Lady Archaeology of Smashnose B-Film Movie Posters.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1254

There was a certain something going on in the 1950’s with nova-express B-film ladys-in-trouble/bad girl/smashnose kissing movies that were made for $5,600 in three days with two days of quality control. The posters made for these beauties were a thing unto themselves, a self-contained and self-limiting genre, a found case of bizarro design and muted inelegancies.

The posters look like their movie names: Juvenile Jungle, Betrayed Women, Girls in Prison, One Girl’s Confession, Dragstrip Girl, Girls on the Loose, Pick Up, Girls in the Night, Live Fast Die Young, Alimony Running Wild, Hot Rod Rumble, Running Wild, Blonde Bait, Captive Women, The Party Crashers and of course Lost, Lonely and Vicious.

Generally I think that folks see the big design and the colors, but lurking behind all of that are usually image-bits that sorta tell a part of the story of the film, but in a stubby, grubby way. So I decided to do a little archaeological dig into some of these and give those small images some life through magnification. Sometimes they’re surprising and look good big; sometimes they’re just badly design and goofy, and would look better smaller, very much smaller—dot-small. Here’s a few examples (I’ll show the detail first and then the larger, full image of the poster after):

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Detail

Full poster:

Full poster:

Detail

Full poster:

Detail:

Detail:

Full poster:

Detail

Detail

detail

Full poster, 1955.

Detail:

detail:

Detail:

detail:

Full poster, Betrayed Women, 1955:

Detail:

|Full poster, Juvenile Jungle, 1958

detail:

Full poster, Captive Women, 1952

Full poster,Captive Women, 1952

Detail:

Full poster, Lost, Lonely and Vicious, 1952:

Detail:

Detail, Party Crashers, 1958

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Women, History of
The Ghetto as a “Threat to Tax Values”–On Missing People

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1252 (Rapid Post)

Part of the series Blank, Empty and Missing Things

Fred Catlett’s Rehabilitation of Sub-Standard Housing Areas (1942) isn’t so much about “rehabilitation” of the houses themselves but to their neighborhoods and surrounding areas–the “inadequate” housing would be demolished, disappeared, replaced, to re-insure the valid tax basis of the larger area/neighborhood. Nothing is said about where the original people would go while their old neighborhoods were being razed or whether or not they would return to the new housing.

The vocabulary here isn’t so surprising in and of itself, but rather with teh overwhelming completeness of it. I’d suspect that at some point Mr. Catlett (“Member Federal Home Loan Bank Board”) would throw some sort of bone to the interests of the occupants of those substandard houses, some interest or emphasis to the people involved. And even though the pamphlet is only 12 pages long, maybe 5000 words, it was certainly long enough to share some concern or kindness to the occupants of those houses.

“Better housing projects break up slums but not until fine homes have decayed and been ruined and many thousands of dolalrs in loses have been suffered”writes the author. I understand that the man was protecting the material bases of his institution, but ot have the entire document be absent of any consideration to the people being houses I find remarkable. (The original pamphlet is available from our blog bookstore.)

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A Rare First-Hand Account of the Japanese WWII Surrender(s)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1253

After serving as public relations director for Madison Square Garden (1935-1942), T.L. Deglin wound up a Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army in a public relations capacity, finding himself a witness on 2 September 1945 to the Japanese surrender on the U.S.S. Missouri and at Baguio (in the Philippines). what follows below is his five-page (1750 word) description of those events. The report is an offset-printed production, so it did see some sort of distribution, but I can find no mention of it anywhere.

My copy came as part of a large group of material (known as “The Pamphlet Collection”) that I purchased of the Library of Congress some years ago–the one cohesive factor to the collection-without-a-purpose was that the material was by and large no located in other libraries. This may have been because of the great ephemeral nature of some of them, but the pamphlets saw very restricted play in the library circulation game.

[Content warning–there’s some very place/time/situation-specific derogatory language here.]

I reproduce the document in full, below. The original is also for sale at my blog bookstore.

Additionaly there is this U.S. Navy Department press relsease for announcing the surrender signing agreements, dated 28 August 1945. This actually comes from the estate of Adm. Grace Murray Hopper via a sale through the Friends of the Arlington Library (Virginia) many years ago.

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Militaria — Perspective
Ships in the Skyline–Artistic Display of Quantitative Data

This wonderful display (appearing in The Illustrated London News for 26 March 1927, page 518) of quantitative data isn’t quite as whimsical as it appears in detail, though I can think of only a few (antiquarian) times that I have seen a ship made part of a cosmopolitan vertical cityscape. It is a great way of comparing two disparate, out-of-place equals, and certainly can get the idea of the size of something as stand-alone and solitary as a great ship to children (and adults, too) by comparing it to something as obvious as a tall building., This time its really just comparing the length of the SS Mauretania with the heights of some famous and notable buildings. (The Mauretania, 1906-1935, was a fabled, luxurious and fast ocean liner of the Cunard line; it was refitted for a resurgent oceanic service at about this time.) In the larger, expanded second image we see the Mauretania stacked up against (from left to right) the Washington Monument (555′), the Woolworth Building (792′), the Mauretania (790′), the Eiffel Tower (984′), the Larkin Building (proposed at 1208′), the Book Building (873′), the Koln Cathedral (512′) and the Statue of Liberty (305′). The Larkin Building (not the F.L. Wright structure of the same name) was a proposed super-tall of 110 floors for 330 W. 42nd Street that was proposed in 1926 and not canceled until 1930, and which would’ve been the tallest building in the world. (For an interesting site on the cancellation of tall buildings, see HERE.) In any event, this was a big ship–the largest in the world when it was launched as a matter of fact–and the drawing is wonderful. Upon closer inspection, there is a terrific amount of detail in the cross section of the ship.) (This original print is available at our blog bookstore.)

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Information, Quantitative Display of
The Compass of Music

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1252

This engraved plate from Abraham Rees’ Cyclopedia… is the wonderful invention of Alexandre Choron (1771-1834), and appeared (perhaps for the first time in an English press) in London in 1814. It is a concise and interesting display of the comparisons of the reach of instruments along the eight octaves, and is a very strong example of clear and useful graphical display of quantitative data.

The full subtitle: “Table of the Compass of Voices and Instruments, Shewing the Place Each Occupies in the Scale”. (The original print is also available for purchase through our blog bookstore.)

From Grove Music Online:

Choron, Alexandre(-Etienne)

(b Caen, 21 Oct 1771: d Paris, 29 June 1834). French writer on music, instructor, publisher and composer. While still a boy, he taught himself Hebrew and German and acquired a permanent interest in scientific experiment and a fascination for music theory and the techniques of composition. Although he reached the age of 16 before taking music lessons, he had already attained elementary skill on keyboard and other instruments. He greatly valued a friendship with Grétry which began in his 20th year and which suggests that he moved to Paris after his father’s death.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — mathematics, logic — Music
An Alphabet of Giants, Part 1.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1250

“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” Genesis 6:4-5 (KJV).

Our dog Blue is a giant Jack Russell Terrier–mix. He’s a Jack St. Bernard/Jack Russell–a St. Jack–and at 50+ pounds is either a Giant Jack or a mini St. Bernard. He behaves like the St. Bernard. One wonders about the mechanics of the thing–similar to Mr. Gulliver in Jonathan Swift’s A Voyage to Brodbingnag (1727), in which the hero (or anti-hero) though he is disgusted by the gigantic women of the place nevertheless seeks and accomplishes some sort of romantic union with the handmaidens of the giant queen. And this all puts me in the mind of giants–actually, I’d like to put together an Alphabet of Giants, with this being the beginning. And to start at the beginning is Athanasius Kircher–the incredible Kircher, who produced thousands of pages of excellent analysis and cutting-edge technical/physical thinking as well as hundreds of pages of highly imaginative scientificiana–and his generic giant, featured in Mundus Subterraneus in 1646.

Giants have certainly been around for a long time, though imaging that imagination is less ocmmmon early on in the history of the illustrated book.

There’s no lack of giants in ancient mythologies and legends–the Hindu Daitya, Mohamed’s depiction of a 100-foot-tall Adam, the Greek Antaeus (the children of Heaven and Earth, of Uranus and Gaea), the sleepy Encedladus, the Nephialim, and so on. One of the most glorious of the big people stories is the beautifully-named Gigantomachy, in which the gods of Olympus engage in an enormous confrontation with Chaos and Aleyoneus. The “good” (though not very) guys win.

There’s actually about half-an-alphabet residing just within the Greek Titans (Atlas, Crius, Cronus, Coeus, Gaia, Hyperion, Iapetus, Mnemosyne, Oceanus, Phoebe, Prometheus, Rhea, Theia, Themis, Tethys), but I’d like to expand this if I can. A fuller, more diverse listing of giants and giant-groups follows: Anakim (Jewish mythology, references in the Old Testament), Argus Panoptes (Greek mythology), Bestla (Norse mythology), Cyclopes (Greek mythology), Daityas (Hindu mythology), Epimetheus (Greek mythology), Fachan (Celtic mythology), Gargantua and Pantagruel, Gigantes (Greek mythology), Gog and Magog (Jewish mythology), Goliath (Book of Samuel of the Bible), Hecatonchires (Greek mythology), Iovan Iorgovan (Romanian mythology), John Henry (American folklore), Jotuns (Norse mythology), Kaour (Celtic mythology), Menoetius (Greek mythology), Nimrod (Jewish mythology, OT), Oni (Japanese folklore), St Christopher (Roman Catholic saint),Talos (Greek mythology), Titans (Greek mythology–Atlas, Crius, Cronus, Coeus, Gaia, Hyperion, Iapetus, Mnemosyne, Oceanus, Phoebe, Prometheus, Rhea, Theia, Themis, Tethys), Zipacna (Mayan mythology).

For the most part I’ve stayed old with these images, except for the 50-Foot Woman, the Giants are generally not from the modern fantasy/sci fi gernre.

So, Part 1:

A. ALICE. John Tenniel’s Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

A. Arthur. King Arthur’s Giant.

B. Beanstalk Giant. Jack and the Beanstalk, John D. Batten

B. Bunyan, Paul. By Allen Lewis.

C. Cyclopes. By Ordilon Redon.

.

E. Ecclesia. “Ecclesia”, or the depiction of Church as the Bride of Christ is a representation of a woman giant, and is seen in Scivias, by St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179).

F. Fatna. The giants Fafner and Fasolt seize Freyja in Arthur Rackham‘s illustration of Richard Wagner‘s Der Ring des Nibelungen

G. Gargantua

G. Gigantomacy. By Perin del Vagas.

G. Goliath. Osmar Schindler’s David with Goliath.

K. The Kraken.

O. Oni (Japanese folklore.)

P. Pantegruel.

R. Rukh. “The Rukh which fed its young on elephants”, by E.J. Detmold. For The Second Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor from The Arabian Nights, 1924.

W. Woman, 50-Foot.

Women don’t often appear though as giants–at least until modern times.

Z. Zeus.

Zeus and three Gigantes, drawing based on the Zeus Pergamon Altar.

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Antique Circles–Astronomical Prints

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1248

Yes, the heavens are made of circles, somewhat, especially if you were observing a three-dimensional figure in two-space, where all spheres are circles. But here we’re making those observations the other way ’round. In any event, these are lovely images taken from a part of the history of astronomy images here in the bookstore–and I should say that they’re all available for purchase from the store as well. But in the meantime, click away–you’ll find that almost all are expandable and mine-able for design elements.

Armillary Sphere, 1784.

Distribution of the Nebulae, ca. 1860.

The Moon, ca. 1850.

The Solar System, 1804.

1855.

Jupiter, 1864.

Mars, 1864.

Full Moon, 1836.

Solar System, ca. 1820.

Solar System, 1823.

Solar System, 1808.

Dimension of the planets in comarison to the Sun, 1850.

the Moon, ca. 1810.

the Solar System, ca. 1825.

Partial eclipse of the Moon, ca. 1860.

Total eclipse of the Sun, ca. 1860.

Saturn, ca. 1870.

1757.

Comparative cosmologies, ca. 1760.

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Astronomy
Structure for Wide Thinking–Walter Gropius’ 1942 Design/Exercise Book

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1247

Walter Gropius (1883-1969, founder of the Bauhaus School and one of the principle builders of modern architecture) and Martin Wagner (1888-1957) were thinking of a new type of “town”, of a different sort of settlement for people, when they wrote this exercise instructional for their Harvard course. Housing as a townbuilding¹ problem, written during the war in 1942, was intended to be an exercise (or “problem”), a case to be studied by the students in the departments of landscape architecture and the graduate school of design at Harvard. The class opened with this rare² pamphlet as a basis for course work, given to the students on 2 Feb 1942, with the problem’s answers expected to be on Gropius desk five weeks later. Gropius and Martin put a tough, wide-ranging, landscape-changing question and expected answers in a very short period of time, though they definitely had a very structured plan and approach to dealing with massive implications of their exercise. The theory was outlined there in the paper, of course, and was expanded much more fully in class. And then there was this: a full page of datelines and expectations, a way of dealing with a large problem in logical chunks, adding up the answered bits, and then delivering a larger answer at the end and on time.

[The original work is available at our blog bookstore.]

I’m not an architecture or design historian, so much of this paper was a little lost on me–but I could definitely appreciate the way in which the great Gropius outlined the process of problem-thinking and solution for his students. This may be the part of this paper that I liked the most.

In “The Walter Gropius House Landscape: A Collaboration of Modernism and the Vernacular”³ (published in the Journal of Architectural Education, 1984, 57 (3), p. 39) Eric F. Kramer wrote:

“Sounding similar themes in a 1942 joint studio problem for landscape and architecture, Walter [Gropius] wrote of the inspiration of the vernacular landscape and of integrating with existing systems: ‘Such a landscape invites the artist planner to observe and preserve its variety of aspects, and to invent a settlement pattern that .ts into its natural beauty. Fortunately our forefathers have already traced out a settlement pattern that fits very well into the landscape.’ Gropius–the grand master builder and master teacher–set out the problem and the solution”.

There are of course major statements in city-building and human resettlement in this work, but for now, I’m still concentrated on the Bauhaus-founder’s outline for problem solving.

Notes

1. The full title: Housing as a townbuilding problem; a post-war housing problem for the students of the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, February-March, 1942.

And in that publication Gropius writes: “When we speak of ‘new townships’ we think of a new type of human settlement “, with a redefined vision of what a “town” means, using an idea of “reception basins” for spheres of cities as centers of culture, art and commerce “and our open country as furtherer if an industrialized agriculture and of forestry and recreation”. (page 21). And all of that to be manufactured along the lines of “planned super-highway systems, one branch of which is to go through New England region and will supposedly cut through the towns of Weston and Weyland”.–Gropius and Martin.

2. This copy was in the Office for Emergency Management; only six other copies have been found and these in excellent collections: MIT, Harvard Special Collections, Harvard College of Design, Cornell, Columbia and the NYPL (Special Collections). So the publication is pretty scarce, and given its method of printing and distribution, it looks like not many survived, though it is difficult to say how many were actually printed. In any event, few survived.

3. The abstract of this paper is helpful: “The Walter Gropius House Landscape A Collaboration of Modernism and the Vernacular”. “The Gropius house landscape is a potent physical manifestation of the design debates of its era. The landscape is an element of both mediation and integration forging a reciprocal and evenhanded relationship between architecture and site. Shaped by modern architectural sensibilities translated to the landscape and developed at a moment when landscape architecture was struggling to .nd a modernist inspiration and voice, it is an object lesson in the development of a modernist landscape architecture in America…”
“In these studio problems, Gropius consistently encouraged students to find new form in the functional requirements of modern times and yet to integrate with existing systems through an understanding of their own functionally driven evolution.”

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Author: JF Ptak

Choron, Alexandre(-Etienne)