Author: JF Ptak

German Propaganda, 1929–a Call to Militarization

JF Ptka Science Books Post 1168

[One of a long series of posts on propaganda–enter this term in the search box at left to see the listing.]

In my “reading” of the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig) I found this full-page illustrative representation of data (11 April 1929), one of the earliest propoagandist pieces (to my mind) in that magazine, showing the state–and great height–of militaristic weakeness in Germany, one of the lowest points that it reached in the breathing space between the two wars. It was really a picture of nothingness, a mention of the lost possibilities, and also what needed to be done–it was an early call to attention, to arms, to the reconsider of the Paris agreement, of doing “something”. Four years later the rearming business would be kicking into action, six years and five months later, the Second World War would start in earnest.

“Abruestung? Aufruestung!” is the name of the article-ette (roughly shouting Disarmament? ARMAMENT!, or Disarm? ARM!), basically stating that enough was enough, and that now was the time to start the process of having a military again.

Every Germany (basically) would’ve known these facts, but seeing the representations of their zero-strength force of planes and tanks would’ve been an enormous blow. And it was intended to be so.

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German Design — History of the Future — Information, Quantitative Display of — Militaria — Technology, History of
A Shadow for a Mask–the Pivot Person in the Execuiton of the Lincoln Conspirators

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1166

On a hot 7 July, 1865, photographer Matthew Brady was the only photographer present at the old Washington Penitentiary to make images of the execution of the Lincoln assassination conspirators Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt and David Herold. All of these stories of the assassination are best told elsewhere–in many other elsewheres, a story that is legion–but I can’t seem to find anything about one special, particular person captured in two of the series of these photos.

If you look closely at the first photograph, there is a man leaning against a pole that is directly under the first condemned conspirator, Mary Surratt. That pole, a substantial 6x6x10′ or something like that, is the only thing that is holding the trapdoor closed on which Surratt stands. Actually, I think that two conspirators occupy one trapdoor–there is a second pole just to the right, another man standing nearby.

I guess the execution was at high noon. The shadows seem to be falling straight down, our man–standing just out of the reach of the shadow of the gallows–has his face obscured by the shadow of the brim of his cap. Like a mask.

What was that first man doing, exactly? He seems to be in a nonchalant attitude, given his position and circumstance, as well as the crowds and significance of the event. Why was he leaning on the pole? Was this just the last part of a long morning? Was the pole not terribly secure? Was he bored? Was he overcome?

He was surrounded on all sides, and he was hearing the boots-on-wood above him, the conversations in the preparations of the nooses, the shuffling of the shackled feet of the condemned, and perhaps the last words of the people waiting now for the last noose to be fitted over the last man. At that point, an order would be given, and our man–who was now positioned behind the gibbet–would simply push another long pole against the bottom of the supporting pole, dislodging it, and allowing the trapdoor to open, the conspirators dropping to their deaths with broken necks. Or I hope for their sake that their necks were broken–by the looks of the position of one of the nooses, its in a bad spot so far as assuring a quick death is concerned. Maybe the noose’s position was changed after this picture was made Maybe not. What did our man do after pushing the beam out of position? He would’ve been very close to the action, within a few feet.

I wonder what the trapdoor pole pushers do afterwards? What were their jobs? From the looks of the last picture, someone put the beams in order, placing them alongside the execution structured, tidied up.

Where did the man go? Since they were the few folks right at the base of the scaffold, right there where the mandrake were supposed to grow, did these men wind up with th job of cutting the bodies free from their ropes and burying them? Someone did it. I wonder what that someone thought as they returned home, or to the barracks, and st down to dinner. What did they see in their dinner plate?

This contemporary print of the scene gets little correct, though the chairs for the conspirators are about right. The scaffolding is much nicer than in the original, and the place looks certainly far less austere than the penitentiary. The awful thing here is the actual, physical manner of the hanging–the attitudes depicted here would have been even more bestial, the lack of a trapdoor suggesting that the were all dropped or raised a few inches and basically strangled to death. Also in the real scene of the execution there were four coffins for the condemned nearby–except that three of them were piled one on top of the other. I’m not sure why they were stacked. It seems to me that they were within the visual range of the conspirators.

The next contemporary print gets a little more of the reality of the scene correct, both mechanically and emotionally, and shows how our own character of interest did his job. The actual hanging part–the ropes and the nooses–is again wrong, suggesting strangling more than hanging.

The pictures raise far more questions to me than anything else, as witnessed by my personal record use of the question mark in this post. .

[Sources: photographs courtesy of the U.S. National Archives; prints, courtesy of the Stern Collection, U.S. Library of Congress.]

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Anticipation, History of — Militaria
Catechizing the Sky–Writing on the Stars

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1166

Working on the next installment of cosmological images [and also a continuation of the series on writing systems] I put together a series on naming the stars, ideas providing the mechanics for naming the celestial kingdom, applying an alphabet for relative discussions of the heavens. The most provocative of them all, I think, belonged to Guillaume Postel (1510-1581), a scholar who took flight in his imagination and who established a world system which for him created a harmony between all things that existed and the maker of the universe, and which basically was an attempt to move far past any identification system to a catechize the stars. Postel’s was a communication system between man and the beyond, not a coordinate system. He incised the stars in his vault of heaven with Hebrew letters which would be the keys to understanding all things–and at the basis of all of this was his conception of a world unified religion which incorporated Christian ideas and values and to which all other religions would transpire.

There were numerous other attempts to establish divine alphabets, though none so far as I know were inscribed directly on the stars intended to serve as a means of transferring information and insight. The extraordinarily accomplished (Renaissance man of the Renaissance, physician, astrologer, botanist, occultist, and general fill-in for whatever discipline needed help) Paracelsus’ Alphabet of the Magi also used Hebrew letters supplemented with magical alphabets for divination purposes, though not on the stars. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (an astrologer/magician/theologian/occultist, 1486-1535) in the early 16th century came close to the Postel idea with his Angelic Alphabet, though this was used to communicate with angels and again was not incised on the stars themselves. John Dee’s (a man of many and high accomplishments, a mathematician, occultist, astronomer, astrologer, alchemist and divine, 1527-1608) angelic alphabet was somewhat similar to Agrippa’s; his “Enochian” language used to communicate with angels.

Letters and numbers were of course used on stars but in general were used to identify the magnitude and position of stars in the constellations. Johann Bayer (1572-1625) applied Greek letters to stars according to their relative luminosity in his revolutionar Uranometia (published in 1603). John Flamsteed (1646-1719, and who was “The King’s Astronomical Observator” and the first British Astronomer Royal)would come a little later and use an arabic numeral and Greek letter system, which would give the relative luminosity as well as the star’s position from the western-most edge of its constellation.

But it was this image by Postel which is the most astonishing, really, attempting as it did to read the heavens and the works of God without ever having to actually see the Creator (a thing most impossible, as stated in Exodus 33:20).

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Astronomy — Iconography — Naming Things — Writing Systems
WWII Aircraft Cross Sections–Spitfire, Hurricane, Beaufighter, Lancaster (!) and Stirling.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1165

Here are some fabulous examples of technological cross sections from the collection here–this part concenrtrating on some of the British WWII aricraft. The drawings are just superb, and you can easily get lost in them, following the geogrpahy of engineering detail from one logical place to the next. All of these images were published in The Illustrated London News and appeared 1940-1943.

And the detail (sorry for that–the originals are much larger than the scanning bed would allow…)

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Aviation & flight — Cross-Sections — Militaria — Technology, History of
One Upmanship–a Brief on the History of Ladders

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1165

One morning Tim was rather full
His head felt heavy which made him shake
He fell off the ladder and he broke his skull
And they carried him home, his corpse to wake
Rolled him up in a nice, clean sheet
laid him out upon the bed
With a bottle of whiskey at his feet
And a barrel of porter at his head–Tim Finnegan’s Wake, ca. 1850’s.

The whole pursuit of ladders here today comes from looking at something described as a ladder but really isn’t one: Henry Moseley’s famous “ladder diagram” from a 1913 paper establishing the important Moseley’s Law (establishing the atomic number as a measurable experimental quantity). A more concrete ladder-like diagram is found (beginning about 1885) is the diagram used for displaying readouts from electrocardiograms. On the other hand, the ladder from which Tim Finnegan fell in the 19th century Irish ballad (from which Mr. Joyce drew his inspiration for his last book from 1939, dropping the possessive apostrophe) was a real ladder, but neot necessarily nuts-and-bolts real.

There are of course monster ladders–like the ones that reach 1300′ high inside transmission towers. There were long ladders that reached up the sides of massive funnels of ocean-going ships, and short ones leading to the cockpits of fighter planes. There’s a very short ladder that reached down only eight feet or so, but that one was on the side of the LEM of the Apollo 11, and the LEM was on the Moon, which may be our furthest-away ladder. There were other 19th century versions of far-away ladders–these belonged to some of the early aeronauts and their balloons, some of which held some very large passenger cabins, some of which had two storeys, complete with ladders.

The most famous of all ladders is probably Jacob’s ladder, an account of the patriarch’s dream of entering Heaven as found in Book of Genesis (28:11–19). On the other hand, the image painted by Sandro Botticelli, led the other way, south, deep south, to Hell. William Blake chose to represent another more beneficent ladder, again leading the aspirant to Heaven. And speaking of painters, the elder Brueghel included ladders in minor appearances in a number of his paintings (like “Big Fish Eat Little Fish”, and Hunters in the Snow”).

William Shakespeare wrote of a gentleman’s knowledge of rope ladders, which of course could be found all over masted ships throughout history–and indeed the ladder stretches all the way back in human history, reaching back to cave paintings that dat from the 11th century BCE.

There are plenty of metaphorical ladders like “climbing the corporate ladder”, or hope for glory and success and victory in simple Chutes and Ladders. And then of course, what better way to end a short look at ladders than with lovely lovely Ludwig (the other one):

“My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.” –Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.54

Moseley’s Ladder:

Botticelli’s Hell:

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Information, Quantitative Display of
The Speed of History–a Note on Change in Aviation, 1905-1915

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1163

Being at the airport yesterday to watch the glorious EAA B-17f take off and land (and to see our 7- year-old climb through it and the Blackhawk that suddenly appeared) put me in mind of the extraordinary advances in flying in the earliest history of heavier-than-air flight. I picked up a volume of The Illustrated London News for 1909 to check out the popular reporting of the aeroplane and as usual got a very sharp reminder of how fast everything happened in the 1905-1915 period.

In the earliest stages of the development of heavier-than-air flight (powered and not, 1848-1906) there were major innovations and essential experiments from a dozen countries: England, the U.S., Poland, France, South Africa, Russia, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, Romania, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Even with all o f this directed work, the methods weren’t necessarily made public or when so were not well distributed, with many of the aviation/engineers working in obscurity and without contact with their peers. (Examples of the major players in the history of heavier-than-air early flight include John Stringfellow, England, 1848; George Cayley, England, 1853; Matias Perez, Cuba, 1856; Jean-Marie Le Bris, France, 1856; Jan Wnek, Poland, 1866; Goodman Household, South Africa, 1871; Félix du Temple de la Croix, France, 1874; Victor Tatin, France, 1874; John Joseph Montgomery, US, 1883; Alexander Feodorovich Mozhaiski, Russia, 1884; Clément Ader, France,1890; Otto Lilienthal, Germany, 1891; Lawrence Hargrave, Australia, 1894; Hiram Stevens Maxim, United Kingdom, 1894; Shivkar Bapuji Talpade, India, 1895; Samuel Pierpont Langley, US, 1896; Octave Chanute, US, 1896; Carl Rickard Nyberg, Sweden, 1897; Gustave Whitehead, US, 1899; Percy Pilcher, U.K. 1899; Augustus Moore Herring, US, 1899; Wilhelm Kress, 1901; Orville & Wilbur Wright, US, 1902; Richard Pearse, New Zealand, 1903; Karl Jatho, Germany, 1903; Orville & Wilbur Wright, US, December 17, 1903 (finally for the first recorded controlled, powered, sustained heavier than air flight); Orville & Wilbur Wright, US, 1904 (in the Wright II, making the first turn, and then later in September making the first circle); Horatio Phillips, UK, 1904; John Joseph Montgomery and Daniel Maloney, US 1905; Wilbur Wright, US, October 5, 1905 (circular flight of 24 miles in 39 minutes); Traian Vuia, Romania, 1906; Alberto Santos-Dumont, Brazil, 1906.)

By 1909 there were many dozens of different aircraft flying around, just about but not quite getting to the sophisticated stage. In just a few short years, by 1915, there would be an enormous increase in the capacity and numbers of airplanes –pushed along of course by the needs of war. Which is a little odd as some of te earliest fliers’ ideas and planes were rejected by the military establishment. The Wright fliers for example were not at first a welcomed idea to the U.S. Army (for numerous reasons, the Army saying “no” in 1905 but renewing their interest in 1907 and finally buying the plane in 1909) ; nor were the Brits interested in continuing funding for Samuel Cody (from Birdville, Texas) , pulling support for him just a few months after he had succeeded in flying the first British-built airplane in Great Britain (the British Army Aeroplane 1B). That of course would all change in just a few years with the guns of August.

Seeing this plan (above) for Samuel Cody’s flight from London to Manchester would’ve been a breathtaking achievement, had he made it. The event had the trappings of An Enormous Situation, with smoke bombs and 450′-long white cloths to show him the way. As particularly thrilling as this event was in 1909 it would be overshadowed in short order. In perspective, it was only six years earlier that the Wrights engaged in the first powered heavier than air flight.

In 1903 the Wrights flew 121 feet; in just six years, Louis Bleriot would fly across the English Channel (on 25 July 1909); six years later Alcock and Brown would make the first transatlantic flight. In 1911 Cal Rodger (11 De3cember1911) made the first American transconteintal flight (completed over the course of 50 days, with 3 days 10 hours in actual flying time). 11 Years later Jimmy Doolittle flew from Florida to California in just 21 (with one stop for refueling); the next year would see the record for transcontinental flight broken with a nonstop effort of 26 hours; in 1930 the time would go down to 12 hours and by 1945 the time was an extraordinary 5 hours 17 minutes. (The retiring Blackbird flew the length of the country in 1990 in 64 minutes.)

The next image showing the altitude records for aviation in 1909 is just as phenomenal. The record at this point still stood with the Wrights at 585 feet, less than double the height of St. Paul’s. It was a huge achievement, the other contenders coming to within hundreds of feet of their accomplishment but not quite doing enough to become the new world record holders,. Ion just the next year improvements in the quality of aircraft and engines and control made it possible fo r Louis Paulhan to achieve 3,018 feet in January 1910,   Walter Brookins top climb to a record of 4,603 feet (7 July 1910), and Ralph Johnsonte to 8,471 on 20 October 1910. . It must have bene a shocking development to have seen aeronautics to advance so quickly, breaking the old altitude record by a more than an order of magnitude in one year. The speed record is a more difficult matter, but after recording speed records in the 30/40mp range in the 1903-1909 period, it broke to 66 mph 1910, 134 mph in 1914 and over 300 mph by 1928. The difference in aviation in those 25 years is similar to that between the computing now and that of 1985 (and certainly 1979).

I’m just saying that it is good to remember the enormity of change that took place in that early period of 1906-1919 or thereabouts–they were simply revolutionary developments that must’ve appeared to the folks of those times.

Notes:

Cody was one of the most colorful figures in the history of early aviation in the U.K. Born in 1867 and self-styled after Colonel William F. Cody, he was an inate adventurer and experiential bon vivant, who loved what he did and made sure that everyone else knew it, if nothing else. All that aside, he was a significant figure, important in the development of flight in England, and he died young for his pursuit. He appeared in the LA Times of 14 September 1907 (page 14) saying that the future of war would be in the air, and that the airship would “effect commerce as well as war”.

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Aviation & flight — Technology, History of
Note on the History of Eating: the Quiet Magnificence of the Soda Fountain

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1162

In the U.S. perhaps there have been few things of soft luzury so reachable to so many than the soda fountain. For a small fraction of a daily persistence-existence income, a person could go into one of these restaurants and enjoy a cup of coffee and a donut. Not only that, the soda fountain was approachable to younger people, including teenagers–perhaps the first time in this country when children and adults could indpendently visit a social place (that did not include organized religion) for paid entertainment, a sure sign if any indicating the growth of a real middle class, realish dispersal of capital* and a real sense of leisrure time.

For a while in the 30’s and 40’s and 50’s the soda fountain occupied what might have been a real keystone position in the panoply of American entertainment. It seemed to be everywhere, in every city and town, in reality and in the imagination–it made a big appearance in literature and art and in the movies, a staple of average in the average American’s life.

Of course there were taverns and saloons and wayside inns and restaurants, but these institutions were different, more removed from the population of “everyone” that the soda fountain drew on, and in. Even the idea of the “leisure time” that it took to enjoy such a place, a place in public that involved consuming products for money, an entertainment, was still sort of new. For example the idea of travel for the sake of leisure and entertainment was virtually unknown in the U.S. in he 18th century, and only started somewhat in the 1830’s/40’s, but even then under the guise of movement for hygiene or health benefits, taking the water (as in spas and hot baths, hyrdotherapy) and–a little later on–the airs. Vacation as we know it today would have still be almost entirely unfamiliar to Americans at the late 19th century and even into the early ‘teens of the twentieth. Mass production and inventions like the automoble (and a decent income) really gave birth to the idea of leisure time, which would’ve preceded the soda fountain by a decade or two.

Somehow, I can’t help but thinking about Henry James and the Soda Fountain. No doubt due to the remarkable Larry McMurtry’s Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, though what I’m thinking about is different, about what the brahmin James would’ve thought about the new development had he been around to see it. . Mostly this idea comes from James’ obervations on NYC after his return from being abroad for decades, seeing the city in the Gilded Age unseen for so many years, and thinking of it all in terms of being “wasteful”, putting him a in a funny category that would include folks like Thorstein Veblen and T.S. Eliot. Whereas I’m sure the later two (especially with Mr. Eliot) would see the development of such an affordable bit like the soda fountain as a Wasteland, I have a feeling that James would appreciate it as the small haven for new social activity that it was, if only he could have seen one (as he died in 1916). (I’m only slightly familiar with James, but this sentiment seems right to me, coming from the man who never wrote a bad sentence (or so Mr. McMurtry has sorta said). I think that he would have enjoyed its appearance. For others.)

All of this came about from reading a bit of the pamphlet (pictured above) the Fountain Operator’s Manual (1940), a lovely and crisply written how-to for folks interested in operating their own soda fountain (and the source for all of these images). It contains advice on set-up, menus, figuring cost of foods, the beast preparations for the least amont of expense, trreatment of customers, advertisemet, and the like. It couldn’t be edited out to anything finer than what it is–a simply refreshing, highly commendable job of writing. And through it all it builds such an anticipation of want, and paints such a glorious picture of life in a soda fountain, that I wish I could be in one, right now. Even if that “now” was 1940.

Notes

* I’m just talking about little “c” capital here; I don’t mean at all that there was a significant distribution of wealth from the top 1% or 5% or 10% to the other classes. Just that there was a middle class, and that there was such a new thing as bona fide leisure time that reached so far down that non- or semi-working kids could go out and pay for food at a restautrant alongside adults.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Architecture and Building
A Note on the History of Bad Chairs

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1161

There are all sorts of famous seats: seats of wisdom, of power, of lameness, of government, of discontent, of honor, of learning, of war; there’s the hot seat, the best and worst seats, a seat on the board, a seat on the bench, a seat at the bar; there are captain’s chairs, endowed chairs, and famous chairs (like architectural gems/mules of Mackintosh, Wright, Saarinen, van der Rohe, Eames, Gehry, LeCorbu) and famous seats (at the original Yankee stadium or a Roman coliseum).

There’s another side to this–the History of Bad Chairs. It is certainly easy to spot the grossly offensive examples–chairs for torture, the working chair of Adolf Hitler, the chairs Bluto used to clobber Popeye with, the terrible captain’s chair that belonged to Capt. Kirk, the offensive seating in Anthony Burgess’ Korova Milkbar in A Clockwork Orange, the final aspect of the condemned as they witnessed the bad aspect of St. Peter’s judgment chair, (and for the Red Sox fan, the chair into which Bucky Dent’s home run fell), and so on.   Then of course there’s the electric chair, the battleground of not only the philosophically opposed sides for its use, but its earlier fight as well when it was used as field fodder for the war between Thomas Edison and Nikolai Tesla for the adoption of their opposing electricity delivery systems.

But there’s a subcategory for the subcategory of the History of Chairs and the History of Bad Chairs– the unintentionally bad chair. Benjamin Rush–for all of his good work, for all of his American Founding Fathers heritage and background, for all of his wide humanitarian work–has committed an ignoble applicant to this category. Actually, his ranks among the leaders for unintended gruesomeness, a consequence of his attempt to do good, but just gone wrong.

Rush’s (1745-1813) name is on the Declaration of Independence, and he is also one of the founding fathers of American psychiatry. A medical doctor, his background is very deep in care and ethical treatment, a social liberal who was against slavery and capital punishment, and who was determined to improve the condition and treatment of the mentally ill. Unfortunately, in using the tools at hand and operating with a deep understanding of the contemporary knowledge of neurology and mental disorders, Rush sought to treat the severely deranged (or most institutionally uncorrectable) with his own creation–the tranquilizer chair. Once certain calming measures had been exhausted, Rush described how to retrain combative patients reeking in misbehavior and keep them from ruining their clothing, or harming the handlers, or ruining the furniture of their cell, introducing the use of his immobilizing chair. (There was an associated “mad shirt”, similar to what we know as a straight jacket, that was also invented and employed by Rush.)
His invention, ironically, was very high corporal punishment, what wound up being a torture device for what good it did and the cost it extracted from the person who was to sit in it.

As we can see Rush also commented that the application of cold water and ice would be facilitated with the tranquilizing chair.

A practice that continued at least into the deep 19th century was the dunking chair, whose intent was to “shock” the misbehaving “patient” into docility or normalness. Here we see

some poor sot being drenched from above and also being hosed from the side prior to being dunked into a vat of cold water. No telling how long one might be submerged or how calm the waters must be from bubbly interruptions before being hauled out.

On par with these other instruments was the rotating chair, which was supposed in some way to confuse madness into something not-mad–that, or subdue an unruly patient, whichever came first.

Then there is the dentist-like chair used in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where the subject–Sam Lowry, accused of crimes against a mega-dystopic state–is tortured into a catatonic state, and in that thin wall between being conscious an dnot so lives in a utopian existence in his mind far from the reach of his captors.

There are of course all sorts of obvious, different chairs in which torture was committed upon people, but I really don’t need to picture them here, everyone knowing what they were, or are: spiked chairs, garroting chairs, spine compressors…you get the picture. Nasty, terrible chairs. Intentionally bad.

Notes:

In addition to the tranquilizing chair, Rush recommended a host of other approaches to controlling the “raving lunatic”. The founder of American psychiatry made the following suggestions:

–Place “noisy” patients into total darkness, (keeping “madmen” for 24 hours or more as required)

–Cold shower baths, slowly, for 20 minutes to four hours

–Solitude; keeping the patient alone, in teh dark, with no visits, no speech, nothing; an “indispensible necessary” to securing correct behavior.

–Bloodletting, with “the quantity of drained blood should be greater than any other organic disease” (page 189), and should “draw 20-40 ounces of blood unless fainting is induced”.

–“Low diet”, which was actually starvation, having the patient fast for one to three days, and then feeding “just” vegetables, “of the least nutrious value”.

–Freezing, in addition to cold shower baths, as in placing the patient in the middle of the night outside in freezing cold. Ice could also be used on the head, but not before the head is completely shaved, as the effect of hair on the brain and madness “we know not”.

–Blistering, which is not a known process to me, except that blisters be induced on the ankles rather than on the head or neck.

There was also treatment via purging, emetics, and the employment of small amounts of opium “to waste the excitability” and reduce fatigue to keep the patient awake.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Medicine, History of
Entombing St. Paul’s Cathedral with Masonry–Concretized Christo, 1909

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1160

The monumentality of the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude is beyond doubt interesting for at least their fantastic visual impact–the philosophical impact and the statement of the work, the ‘revelation through concealment”, on the other hand, is completely unappetizing. Generally I’m perfectly fine to see the works come and go, and, after a time, mostly the “go” part remains. It is appropriate that there is no permanent full-scale representative of their work. Cloud writers.

In continuing a series on this blog on the artistic representation of comparative data I found an image that rivals the work of the two/one wrapping artists–the entombment of St. Paul’s Cathedral (London) with 2.5 million tons of masonry.

The very striking image (from The Illustrated London News for 16 October 1909, page 545) was created to relate the massiveness of the newly-opened Admiralty Harbor (Dover) in 1909. The harbor was a remarkable creation, enclosing more area of open sea than had ever been done before–as we can see, the created harbor was bigger than Hyde Park). The artist, W.B. Robinson, gets the point of its size across very effectively with his six images–none more so than the St. Paul’s comparison. Its true that the “tomb” is open on two sides, but the monoliths could have easily been made half of their width (each being 72.5 feet thick, by 400 feet long, by 600 feet high) so that they could’ve completely encapsulated the building. (Its an interesting thought–to build something beautiful and enormous, and then completely encase the thing in an enormous block that revealed nothing of its contents. Like place the pyramids in a cube.)

Another remarkable image from this same series is the depiction of the weight of the harbor–a very tempting title for this post (“The Weight of a Harbor”) but the Christo one won out.

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Little Bizarredness: Bland Hyper-oddness in Published Works

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

These pamphlets are samples from a larger collection whose attention to the detail of boredom and blandness and relative inexplicability are extraordinary. The titles intact, it mostly doesn’t matter what the contents have to say for themselves–everything, really, is right there on the front page, the meaning best left to the imagination.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Impossible Books — Title Page Art, Beautiful