Author: JF Ptak

A Long, Low, Massive Circle: Circular Building, 1938

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This re-surfaced idea for a
mega-spa was very wide, very long and very low.
Karl Stoldeck and J. Goldmerstein—architects and planners in Berlin—published
a broad idea in 1928 called Thermenpalast (Thermal Palace, Spa Space, something
like that), and although it seemed to satisfy almost everyone, the idea was
consumed in the general economic malaise of the depression of 1929. It looks as though the idea had a little life
again in 1934, but there was a problem with fund raising. The idea came back again, broader, bigger,
and more defined, finding some idea-space in the Popular Science Monthly for
March, 1938.

The structure for health and
exercise was massive—as a matter of fact, it would’ve been the most massive
circular project in history. The
building had 6.5 acres under glass, which makes it 280k or so feet, giving the
building a diameter of 1,800 feet and a circumference of something just over a
mile. IT looks as though the ceiling
reached a maximum of 250’ or so; seeing that the dome would also be about 1200,
that presents a little engineering problem.
But no matter: it would never be
built, anyway, even with Nazi dollars from home.

The building was quite a feast
of the body—there was a mountainside panorama around the exterior wall,
illuminated from a series of light sources
from the ceiling. In diminishing concentric
circles: there was a mile-long running track, a promenade just inside that,
followed by a spectacular pool which looks to be 4000’ long and 100’ wide! Interior to the pool was a wide “beach”, a
restaurant, park and lounging area.

This was also a multi-floor
building, with gyms and restaurants and a long series of health baths. The entire spectacle would offer many
different climates depending on the needs of the clientele.

The cost: 6 million, U.S. A few years earlier the Empire State
building was built for $24,718,000. The
architectural firm Foster + Partners
released designs for a the largest building (“Crystal Island”) ever built:
2.5 million square meters (8.2 million feet, or 35 times bigger than
this 1938 idea), with a tower 1476 feet tall, all sort of circular, and to be
built in Moscow.

Had the thing been built in Berlin and started in
1938, it would’ve been about ready to bombed on the day of its completion.

Here’s an interesting read on water parks: Water, leisure and culture: European historical perspectives, Susan C. Anderson, Bruce H. Tabb, 2002.

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Architecture and Building — Cross-Sections — Future, History of the — Industrial & Technological art
Michelangelo v. Leonardo, Blake v. Newton: Famous Contraries Chess Set

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Some years ago I made a chess set whose pieces forced a
battle between mathematicians and physicists. The pieces were constructed with
a mélange of bric-a-br ac and junk, all with the same bases of dominoes. Each piece was an identifiable person from
the history of their respective fields. And
while the two divisions of science have become necessarily more porous over the
years, there remains no difference that there still is a difference between
math and physics. I brought this set with me when exhibiting my rare bookstore
stock at national meetings for the American Mathematical Society and the American Physical Society, and it
attracted a lot of attention—more so for the choice of who was what piece than
any game that was ever played on it. (The mathematicians were much more
ambitious in offering their opinions on the choices of mathematicians per
position.)   There are chess
sets of “contraries” on the mass production market, though it is usually
limited to Star Wars and Civil War figures—and there it is generally generic
figures for anything outside the King and Queen.

I was intending on doing a post today on the unpleasant
contrariness of Michelangelo and Leonardo. (These guys are two of a small
number of people who are instantly identifiable by one name only, though a very
popular and vastly oversold modern author chooses to use Leonardo’s second name
as the identifier, a distinctly minority position….like referring to Michelangelo
as Buonarotti of Florence.)   And then it struck me how interesting a
chess set would be made up of such opposed figures, happily or not squaring off
against one another on the 64s.

Finding the
contraries is not so simple. Skipping
past Leonardo/Michelangelo (I’ll get to them in a minute) I went to the most
famous of all contrarians in the world of science—Isaac Newton. (Is the “Isaac” really necessary?) During his
famously grumpy and combative lifetime Newton battled a night sky of most shining stars of
his day: Hooke and Leibniz being two of
the greatest of these figures. But I
think for this chess set I’d have Newton squared up against a man who wasn’t even
born during his lifetime—William Blake.
Blake was an impossible anti-Newtonian, making a career of being a
spectacular (and perhaps insane/manipulative) anti-rationalist, a weaver of smoke, playing with and
distorting images like a theramin player, using language to produce dichotomies
in even the most standard of sensate ideas.
Blake was the poster child for thing anti-tech, an anti-scientist out to
save the world from its scientific self,
the rationalist world set to destroy imagination, the “Antichrist
science” hell bent on destroying the soul of art and religion.

“Art is the tree of
life; Science is the tree of death” wrote Blake, and so he chose the
“Athesistic” Sir Isaac to stand for the
beast, depicting him in art as a naked geometer intent on subjugating the world
with a compass and a keen brain, reducing glory to quantification, the work of
Satan.. For most of my life I thought
that this image by Blake was celebrating Newton—I knew little of the poet/artist/poet, and
thought the painting a reverence. When I
understood Blake a little, I saw that
the image was intended as a mockery of Newton and the idea of science—this was an unusual
sensation, because absent the unspopken intention of the artist, you could still take the subject matter of
the artwork two ways.

Blake’s writing
leaves no doubt about where he stood on the issue, even though much of it (to
me) seems not terribly understandable due to its repeated and visceral
self-reference and private language (“Reason is the bound or outward
circumference of energy”, the “ratio of the things of Memory”:

The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man,
and when Separated from Imagination and enclosing in steel a Ratio Of the
Things Of Memory, It thence frames Laws & Moralities To Destroy
Imagination.

Science—embodied
here in Newtonian mechanics, there in Renaissance rediscovery of classical
perspective—was killing the “eternity of the imagination”.

I could well imagine
a “conversation” between the two men:
Blake saying Things, and Newton not able to find any space in his head for
them, answering in silence. OR perhaps
he would be vicious. God knows. Newton died in 1727 when Blake was still in
ueber-dimensional pre-pregnancy, waiting his turn to descend from the heavens,
which was not bound to happen for another thirty years.

In his otherwise
brilliant book, Art & Physics,
Leonard Shlain refers to Blake as a Cassandra, having the ability to see the
future but not being able to say or do anything about it. To think that Blake was “correct” in foreseeing the problems that technology would
bring to people’s lives leaves me baffled:
it is certain that people became more cog-nified with the advance of
technology, but it also allowed for the birth of “free time” for the masses,
giving them some soul and imagination that they would’ve have had if they were
in a flat field in Poland pulling potatoes out of the ground for 18 hours a
day. Perhaps Blake was just referring to
those lucky enough to wear clean white shirts and have a benefactor; perhaps
all of those Others didn’t exist in his many scheduled god/heaven visions he
had every day.   (I should point out that Blake published Songs of Innocence and of Experience:
Shewing the Two Contrary States of
the Human Soul in 1794, which was actually a varied republication of his
1789 Songs of Innocence with the
addition of the Songs of Experience. Blake exposes the duality of experience and
innocence, of their opposing nature in human existence, neither negating the
other, both trying to survive simultaneously.
His engraved poems really are striking and gigantically, unreservedly, ars-religico-veritas
of the highest Romantic order. And then some.)

Back to chess and
picking out the first pieces: : Blake
and Newton. I’d
have to give Newton the nod for Queen for the sheer enormity of his abilities. Blake gets a pawn’s position, the first piece
sacrificed.

Chess Contraries,
Piece Two: Michelangelo and Leonardo.

It is odd that even
though Michelangelo (1475-1564) and Leonardo (1452-1513) lived in the same city
(Florence) for several years that the only thing that developed between them in
the smallish societal/artist communities was a brew of mutual disdain.   Diplomatically speaking, the men did not
care for one another, though it seems that the junior of the two,
Michelangelo–who was a well-established rising star of 35 or so to the more
famous Leonardo, who was 55—possessed the young man’s temper and was more
outspoken in his dislike of Leonardo. It
does seem spectacular that the two greatest talents of the Renaissance could
live so close together for several years and have no working or collegiale
relationship, no exchange of ideas, nothing.

They did, however,
almost work together in the same (big) room, though that too never came to
fruition. Both men received a commission
from Piero Soderini to decorate the walls of the Council Hall of the Palazzo
Vecchio with massive (20×50’ !) paintings
of great Florentine military victories: Leonardo would paint the Battle
of Anghiari and Michelangelo the Battle of Cascina. Like much else in the careers of both of these men, the projects were unfinished–Michelangelo not even getting beyond the cartoon stage in preparation; Leonardo actually got paint on the wall,s but made an error in trying to quicken the slow drying time, and heated the wax undercoating enough to make the paint run down the wall and puddle on the floor. It is interesting that it would be Guiseppe Vasari–the man who wrote one of the earliest biographies of renaissance painters, and the creator of the Ufizzi Gallery, and a large talent in his own right–who would be brought in to produce one of the large paintings. It seems to some that Vasari, ironically, painted his own work over that of the started and probable masterpiece of Leonardo. (As a matter of fact, there is an art historian who thinks that some of the Leonardo might have survived under Vasari’s work; that story can be seen here.)

I don’t mean to set out for pure contraries (like Ovid’s question
of water and fire–cunctarum contraria semina rerum, Fasti, IV, 783, f–the
yin and yang, and other entities combative at all points. The question here is
for entertaining contraries at some interesting points—that’s good enough. All aspects needn’t be the mutually exclusive
of the other such that if one is true the other must be false. There’s room enough for neither-true-nor-false,
at least for this game, a wide-open Wittgensteinian arbitrary contrary.

It might be interesting to have a look at Vasari’s estimation of Leonardo and Michelangelo; I’ve reprinted the first tow paragraphs for each from Vasari below.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Contraries
Blank and Missing Things: a Map of Missing People of Central Europe and Russia, 1881

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The History of Blank, Missing and Empty Things (Thread, #45)

“Heaven and earth were one form…. (then they were separated
from one another…)”

In ancient times the representation of the gods and beliefs
was handed from one writer or storyteller to the next, on and on, changes here
and deletions there, for many generations.
This practice was possible (necessary?) because there really wasn’t a
solitary scripture to follow (as in the Koran or the Bible) and no priestly
class to guard and cherish a particular strong story line in all of its barbed
details.

There are of course bits that have survived intact for
millennia. One of these is this fragment
from one of Euripides’ lost plays (only 20% or so are complete), The Wise Melanippe, and begins a
statement of cosmogony that states the creation of all things. The separation of heaven and earth has always
stuck with me, because this separation begins with Euripides with the creation
of the world seems to continue on its way with mini-separations of all things
over the course of time—like the cosmological world-bearing turtles—all the way
down. I’m not sure how or who exactly
did this heaven-rending, or to what force it owed its being: evidently the Presocratics tended to
depersonalize the actions of the gods and grant their actions to natural
forces, so the issue with the heaven-separation business may well have been a
motive force rather than a god. Anyway
it’s the tearing apart, the removal, the separation phenomena that got my
attention to begin with, and one which has stayed with me, though I’m sure that
Euripides didn’t have that sort of violent rending in mind while describing the
birth of the earth.

And so it is with this map* showing the concentrations of the
Jewish people in Europe in the late 19^th
century. Between the time of the publication of this map—1881—and the beginning
of the Nazi regime in Germany
in 1933, there were many persecutions and Pogroms and deportations of the
Jewish people. Nothing prepared anyone
for the concentration camps and the systematic extermination of that people
between 1935 and 1945. What this map
shows is the distribution of the Jewish people (by percentage of the total
population) before they were eviscerated:
the difference between this map in 1881 and the map of 1945 would be completely
different. The Jews were gone: killed.
Some deported. Others
escaped. But they were basically torn
from Europe in the cruelest manner so that in
almost every case the only indicators of their existence were shadows.

There are large-scale maps of this sort of evidence for
other groups of people in their pre-Euripidean tearing from
their home: maps showing the locations of Indian tribes
in North America (pre-Columbian, 17^th
century, 19^th century, they’re all telling pretty much the same
devastating story) is one good example of a slender category. There aren’t maps for the mass extermination
by starvation created by Joe Stalin, or the millions murdered by Pol Pot or Mao. There are of course more small-scale,
localized maps depicting the results of forced relocations or devastating war
or drought or hunger or floods. But few,
I think, take such a compelling x-ray of a people’s past on a continental scales
such as this.

*”Die Verbreitung der Juden in Mitteleurope” found in Richard Andree’s , Volkskunde der Juden…, Verlag von Velhagen & Klefirg in Bielfeld und Leipzig: 1881.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking
A Note on Forgetfulness: London, the City of the Lost (Things)

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In the panoply of play upon the
title of this post are many variations. For example, book and movie titles which could fill the space in the
category of “City of Lost _____” are Children, Dragon Lace, Souls, Soles, Angels,
Heaven, Books, Dream and Men. Filling in
“The Lost City of _______” are Atlantis, Chernobyl, El
Dorado, Nan Madol,
Abad, Bethsaida, Geraptiku, Trellech, Dvaraka and Uganit. For “Lost Cities of ____” that were never
really ever found, and which existed in the imagination and on the printed page
would include Metropolis, Wonderland, Utopia, Narnia, Fredonia, Eden,
Yuknapatawpha (County), Oz, Lilliput, Middle Earth (etc.), Slobbovia, Dune and
Hell.

Then of course there are the
cities that were and weren’t any longer (though some did come back but without
its original inhabitants: the annihilated Jewish ghettos of Europe, Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Nanging are just a few that come to mind. New Orleans seems to be in a different category, partially destroyed
by benign neglect and arrogant stupidity at the very highest reaches of the federal
government (and resting in the one man, now thankfully lost).

It would be fun to write a history
of forgetfulness with its companion volume on The Lost., but that has been
accomplished a number of times, already (see below*).

My post is not an attack upon London or its imaginary lost souls–it really is about lost
things. The images come from a fabulous article from the Illustrated London News of 5 March 1938 called “Forgetfulness by Tons and Thousands; How London, the Absent Minded Keeps Lost Property Offices Busy”. Evidently, in the old days when London Transport were superb, there was a very well orchestrated and detail-orientated staff that collected the lost things of the day found in the Tube, tram depots, buses and lorries; they were gathered and brought to the London Passenger Transport Board at Baker Street, where all of the items were meticulously cataloged and stored, kept for a half year (?!), all registered with the Lost Property Office. Add so aside from the pinch-faced Aubrey Beardsley-fingered man handling the sailboat, and the Floyd the Barber lookalike celebrating the fowl, and the low-belted quizicum inspecting the nether garments, and the slick-haired man inexplicably opening all o the thousands of closed umbrellas, are the following statistical bits on Lost Things Identified for the Year 1937: 49,9999 pairs of gloves; 19,978 single gloves; 33, 361 pieces of clothing; 25,489 attache cases; 24,600 books; 24, 158 pieces of “undefined property in parcels”; 5,805 spectacles; 5,278 keys; 4,005 pipes; and 2307 different pieces of foodstuffs. All this was just part of a grand total of 348,477 lost things for one year.

I think it would be fabulous if there was some lost room there at the old Lost Property Office, a place waiting to be rediscovered after the room itself had been lost for the last 71 years. If I had to chose I’d certainly would shout for Mr. Beardsley-fingers–he is,after all, pictured in the beautifully named “Oddments Department”, admiring the “beautiful complexity of forgetfulness” stored there. Perhaps that room would be filled antique story lines, lost-items-found that were of such an unusual origin that the professionals used to dealing with such things found these to be unclassifiable, tossing them all into a I’ll-Deal-With-it-Later locale. The material seems like a lock looking for a treasure.

*Philip Grove’s The Imaginary
Voyage in Prose Fiction (1941); Pierre Versins’ Encyclopèdie de
l’Utopie, des Voyages extraordinaires et de la Science-Fiction (1972); Alberto Manguel
and Gianni Guadalupi. The Dictionary of Imaginary Places
(1980, 1987, 1999)

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Histories of Smallness
History of Lines: Human Queues, Fascist Italy

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In my imaginary History of Lines there is a subsection for
humans-in-line(s). In the history of the
world, the fourth and fifth decades of the twentieth century—the 1930’s and ‘40’s—were
big ones for human lines. Big does not imply
good, because as we all know lots of humans lined up for all manner of
unspeakable nastiness during this time and well more than 100 million didn’t
make it out alive (considering all of the wars, purges, revolutions and
stupidity).

The lines here are a little more benign, though with
shriveled overtones of corrected respect.

Oppressive obedience in a well-designed environment is still
like dressing your ear-infected 14-year-old St. Bernard/Jack Russell (?!) mixed
breed in baby booties—its just not right, and these images attest to this simpy comparison. All of these photographs
come from a delightful manufacturer’s catalog for linoleum products (Il
Linoleim nelle Costruzioni Scolastiche), which was printed in Umbria in 1935.

I’ll undoubtedly write a post on this stylistic
beauty later on, but suffice to say for right now that it really is a lovely
thing. If only we could forget the
Mussolini part. Now I’m no fan,
necessarily, of linoleum, but if I had
to live on a linoleum island far removed from civilization and I had to choose
a design for my world, I would choose the designs from this catalog, without
hesitation. They’re spare, well-proportioned, beautifully design utilitarian designs;
they are also very shiney and cold with a dispirited order, but so it
goes. The catalog seems to speak for its
times, the inspired design bowing to the weighty needs of the flatulent state.

Even though the people (mainly child people) are in very
structured environments, they still look as though they really don’t believe in
whatever it was was happening.

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Perception
A History of Dots: Images of the Unbelievable, 1944

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The History of Dots, Part 12

This is a detail from an unintentionally
astonishing photograph made in 1944—the last line of its caption forming the
basis of the title of this post. (“Click on the dots below for photos from the
Album depicting events which took place at those points.”)

It is the ultimate insult to consider these dots to be dots–though to some analytical eyes this is all they were; in extreme and unutterable cases, this is what they remain.

As you scroll down through
these four images their origin becomes clear.

This photograph was one of a series made on 31 May
1944 by the 60 Photo-reconnaissance Squadron of the
South African Air Force under the direction of the U.S. Army Air Force–the purpose being to identify Nazi bombing targets, the principle object in this case being the
IG Farben complex near the border town of Auschwitz.

The base data reveals that sorties were flown and
photographs made and presented from missions of 4 April, 31 May , 26 June, 25
August, 14 September, 21 December (1944) and 14 January and 15 February 1945. (See
HERE for the rest of the photographs.) The
images were evidently captured as a result of the standard method of filming:
taking pictures several minutes before and after reaching the target area to
ensure that the primary objective is actually photographed; some of the sorties
were executed to find the target, and others enabled to survey the damage done
to the target (and to also see how quickly the targets were reconstructed). The
“side” result is a record of the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps, the
significance of which seems to have escaped notice at the time, although the
camp of Auschwitz III was indeed labeled as a “Concentration Camp” in the original.

IG
(“Interessengemeinschaft”, standing for “Association of Common Interests”) Farben
was a massive business concern composed of BASF, Bayer, Hoechst and other
German pharmaceutical and chemical companies,
whose main political benefactor was the NSDAP and whose roots go back to
the very formation of real Nazi power in 1932.
The basis for this mutual interest was principally the production of
synthetic fuel and chemicals, but as the time pressed on that capacity expanded
to many other roles essential for the functioning of the German military and
the basis of Nazi power. It is not
possible to understate the importance of Farben to the production of the Nazi
state and the waging of the war.

After 20 years of back and forth historians have come to the
conclusion that major industries/industrialist such as Farben didn’t actually
“back” Hitler in the early days (1932/3/4) per se—that is to say that large
amounts of capital didn’t flow into the NSDAP bank accounts from Big Money
sources, though they (the every large majority) certainly did acquiesce to the
social programs of Hitler. Business in
general certainly did well under the Nazi regime before 1938. The giant bonuses for both the government and
business/industry came after the attacks and conquests beginning gin 1938—it
was at that time that these businesses rolled into the cities of the conquered
land and took the tools of industry, the raw material and any else of value to
expand themselves and to also help support the war effort. The utilizeable means of production did not
limit itself to goods: the captured
population was also put to work as slave laborers and worse. And this is where Farben really makes its
pact with the devil, as it was far and away the worst offender of putting
humanity into its industrial oil can, making expendable people all together more
so, using them as another piece of machinery; the prisoners were worked and
starved to death, and once they no longer provided some sort of value to Farben
(and etc.), they were sent to be eliminated at the extermination centers.

These workers were generally “sold” by the SS to private companies, though
officially it was known as a “fee”. This practice broadened as the war grew on and
the labor supply o these companies was drawn off by the army; by 1944 there
were in fact millions of foreign workers doing labor in Germany itself, with
companies like Volkswagen, Daimler-Benz, Krupp and Siemens taking solemn and
completely lecherous advantage of the captured slave labor pool.

Back to the photograph:
these “dots” were the humans who were the expendable slave worker units
who were burned up like an old rag once their utility had been maximized. The official reason for this mission was to
locate the Farben synthetic rubber works and petroleum plants, some 2k from the
Auschwitz compound.
One of the last images shows the destruction to the camps by the Nazis who
were trying to hide what had been going on there as they prepared for the inevitable arrival
of the Soviets (who would arrive two weeks later).

The arrows and annotations in these versions are the result of a reinterpretation of the images in 1978 by two photographic image analysts/interpreters at the DIA and did not appear of course n the originals of 1944. The arrows pointing at the “dots” were actually long lines of prisoners; there were arrows pointing to a rather long train heading off from a complex of tracks; there was the enormous barracks evidently housing a very large population within a town center; and there was the production of a fair amount of smoke from a not-small building. It is a mystery why these images–one of which actually had Birkenau labeled as a concentration camp–didn’t produce a military reaction by the Allies, the question producing its own considerable amount of interpretation and study. remember now these annotations were made in 1978.) The photo does show how nestled the camps were in the town and in the
busy countryside; the main entrance to the camp was (and is today)
located on a busy street. The walls around the compounds remind me of
the walls around the Warsaw Ghetto–if you needed not to see the obvious, you wouldn’t. Except at the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps there was also the smell…. Revisionist Holocaust deniers have actually employed these images to their own evil ends, using a feeble analysis to support the notion that the Allies didn’t act on the camps because the extermination and liquidation end of it didn’t exist. This would be the extreme (gamma ray) end of the spectrum of interpretation, and an ultra-violent, criminal and instantly disposable way of reading history. In Part II of this post I’ll have a look at some of the positions.

[Reading list in the continued reading section, below]

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Uncategorized
The Finnegan’s Wake of the 15th Century

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Since I had a go at early illustration earlier today in this blog I thought to write something about a book that is probably one of the most beautifully printed books not only of the Renaissance but of all time. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream) by Francesco Colonna was the greatest achievement by the greatest printer of the Renaissance (Aldus Manutius in Venice), a spectacular combination of story and type and design and illustration; an imaginative, secular Humanist self-romance like no other printed to that time. ) See the entire text HERE.)

Hypnerotomachia means “the strife of love in a dream”, and the reference to Poliphili refers to the narrator of the story, Poliphilo, telling of the love affair between Polia and Poliphilo—the master text of the whole story though is a description of ancient art and architecture, all told in a wonderful ”macaronic mélange” of Italian and Latin, and which were the “exact accounts” seen in Poliphilo’s dreams about Polia.. It is a modernist book for being printed in the last year of the 15^th century (1499), and stands for vitality and grace and superb design, and according to George Painter was the Finnegan’s Wake of the fifteenth century. Painter continues, and writing that “Gutenberg’s forty-two line Bible of 1455 and the Hypnerotomachia of 1499 confront one another from opposite ends of the incunable period with equal and contrasting pre-eminence. The Gutenberg Bible is somberly and sternly German, Gothic, Christian and mediaeval; the Hypnerotomachia is radiantly and graciously Italian, classic, pagan and renascent. These are two supreme masterpieces of the art of printing, and stand at the two poles of human endeavor and desire! “(Cited by Alan Thomas, Fine Books, 1967, pp 71-4).

Martin Lowry in his The World of Aldus Manututus (Ithaca, New York, 1979) makes another interesting statement on this masterpiece: “(Hypnerotomachia) was a linguistic and literary debauch, choked with recondite imagery, erudite periphrases, and exotic verbiage: a work so bizarre that many critics have felt a certain uneasiness at Aldus’ agreeing to print it.”

It is truly an astonishing accomplishment, and its significance in the design of type and of the book really cannot be underestimated. As E.P. Goldsmidt stated (in The Printed Book of the Renaissance, 1950, p. 52): “In the North an astonishing proportion of all Renaissance ornament and accessory design can clearly be proved to derive from Colonna…”

The book is summarized here and below:

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Art History
Blank, Empty and Missing Things #44: Missing Detail in Illustrations

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The History of Blank, Empty & Missing Things #44

In America
and Europe for much of the 19^thcentury
books with illustrations received their color by the labor of small-handed
women and older children. For popular,
inexpensive and widely distributed books engravings and woodcuts were often
given their color by an assembly line process:
one person applying the red, another the blue, the third the green, and
so on, until image was completed. This
was a fairly quick process—more than five colors was rare—and once done the
sheets were left to dry before being sent off to be cut, folded, sewn, trimmed
and bound. The colorists wouldn’t really
survive past the 1880’s or so, being replaced by machines and different sorts
of coloring processes—the last book to be published for the mass market being
the 1896 edition of Johnson’s Cyclopedia.

This sort of distribution of artistic labor was not new to
the 19^th century by any means.
Guilds dictating the strict observance of a painting’s preparation—making
the canvas or preparing the wood, gathering the ingredients for making colors, making
the colors, and so on—stretches back at least 600 years.

I’m wondering about this because of an illustration that I
found of extremely uneven accomplishment.
It occurs in Quintus Curtius Rufus
The Life of Alexander the Great (“translated by several Gentlemen in the University of Cambridge”) and printed for Gilbert
Cownly in 1687. (I can never let it pass that this is the year that modern
science really began, with the publication of Newton’s Principia…
.) The engraving is the book’s
frontispiece, and shows Alexander on horseback.

Of course there’s no real portrait of Alexander, though his “likeness”
appears on coins from that period. But
the face in the engraving just doesn’t match up to the quality of the rest of
the image. The horse is a little nicer
than standard for the period, and there’s a fair amount of detail in the
background.

The face of the great
Alexander though is pretty bad, drawn in almost as an afterthought even though
he is the subject of the book. Maybe the
engraving’s elements were divided and distributed in the workshop to, say
someone good at horses doing the horse, another good at executing armor doing
that, and so on, until someone realized that no one was there to engrave the
face. And so perhaps it came to pass that Alex received this cheeky/jowly face with a single-muscled skinny neck. (I notice that none of the riders in the background have faces.) Maybe there was only one artist, and they just got tired or figured this face was good enough, and moved on to the next project; perhaps there was just one engraver who was late for dinner and did a too-fast job on the face. And maybe the face was just good enough, no matter who did or or how many people worked on it. I’ve seen this sort of uneven effort, this missing detail in a detailed work, many times over the years, and I’ve always wondered what the story was. And I guess I always will.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of
A Note on the History of Smiling

JF Ptak Science Books Post 630 Blog Bookstore

Where do exhausted 1951 smiles go?

I don’t know when the first illustrated advertisement appeared, and I don’t know when the first picture of a smiling human face was used in that in order to sell a product displayed in a mass market printed publication. My sense though is that the smiling, happy (and too-happy) face was first used in the first or second decade of the 20^th century, but that the general, templated use of the eagerly over-sized mega-toothed smile topped by wide-spirited painted eyeballs came into play in America right after the end of WWII. The enthusiastic smiled-upon objects seem to become more slight and mundane as time passes, coming to a point fairly early on of the mysterious basis for this happiness over such modest products. The smiles and happiness brought by these items was surely short-lived, the smile becoming a fossil, a relic, to simpler times and simpler consuming needs.

Breezing through a hand volume of LIFE magazine for 1951 finds many examples, and quickly too: how exciting can a bottle of 7Up possibly be? This entire family seems to be serenading the object of their collected desires, the father certainly being the most moved of the bunch. Baby has its own bottle and, of course, drum.

Is that Jerry Mathers smiling so contentedly at Mother brining in his hot water bottle? (The doggie is staring at something to Mother’s left, probably focused on some trainer threatening/rewarding it to make it seem interested in the hot water bottle, too. ) It is hard to image this item bringing a smile to anyone’s face, at least from this standpoint in the future. Its a simple rubber bag, brought to a simple room. In a weird and unexpected King of the Hill neighborhood sort of way, the whole scene seems very comforting. Maybe its the cowboy holster at the foot of the bed and the perfectly folded blanket that seals the deal.)

Pumps? This is actually half of an ad featuring a number of very accommodating couples allowing themselves to be happy while looking at women’s shoes. I can’t tell what is going on in the background, but in the foreground there are several of men infected with broad-beam smiles brought on by looking at a glass case filled with pumps. The glass “treasure chest” seems to be guarded by garishly-festooned black men, a sign of the un-lliberated LIFE magazine times.

This man seems overly exuberant with the pleasure brought him by his underwear, though he is at least alone while experiencing this private Underwear Emotion. (In many other ads by Jockey there’s a man & boy setting, each usually with big smiles, straddling things to show the comforts of their underthings, caught in what seems today to be pre-porny trash poses of extremely dubious ease…no one today would ever come close to publishing such a thing in today’s (legitimate) advert community.) So too for the woman who seems to match appreciation for her new engagement band with the fortitude of her bra–it isn’t exactly clear that the ad is celebrating uplifted pointy breasts with marriage proposals, but it doesn’t take too much of a leap to get there.

There was a time that the *something* that made us smile didn’t make us smile any longer. The smile is gone, gone to where smiles go once they’re no longer needed, replaced by thin-lipped satisfied need.There was a time in 1951 when advertisers thought their products to be so appealing that they used monumentally misplaced smiles to convince the buying population of the United States to purchase their product, expecting I guess to produce that photographed smile onto the face of every purchaser, or at least to image the smile in the consumers’ noggins. That smile didn’t last long—after all, we’re just talking about 7Up and underwear.

I wonder about the issue of the impossible smile of promised pleasures like these, and how it changed over the years. As a casual observer of millions (?) of these sorts of things over the years, my own general impression is that the smiles are era-dependent and semi-generational. Or not.

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Bad Ideas
1932 as an Annus Mirabilis

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 629 Blog Bookstore

My daughter Emma started a collection for my wife
Patti last year–for Mother’s Day—of books with dates as the main part of their
title. For example: Roger Crowley’s
1453, James Chace 1912, Andrew Brieford 1066, Charles Mann’s 1491, David
McCullogh’s 1776, and that elusive 1968 that I can never find. It is a wonderful idea, and probably
something that could be expanded as a real collection.

I mention this because I was thinking about Big
Years, enormous years, the annus mirabilis. 1905 is the first date that springs
to mind in this category, but it is almost entirely dedicated to one
person—Einstein—and not that much miraculously else, though it can probably be
argued that those four papers in the Annalen were enough for enormous
contributions spread across four very big people. Einstein really did have that good a year.

I like the year (for the sciences, anyway) 1932.

It
isn’t thought of in the same way, say, as 1543, which was a great year for
things big and little. Nicolas Copernicus saw (finally, basically from
his deathbed) his “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium”
(On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) published in Nuremberg,
while the Brussels-born, brilliant and troubled Andreas Vesalius had Johannes Oporinus print his
revolutionary treatment of the human body “De humani corporis fabrica“ (On the Fabric of the Human Body).
Copernicus said the things that any thinking person was thinking about the
structure of the solar system and universe at large, while Vesalius conducted
his brave overthrow of the deeply ancient Galenic system of anatomy.

1932
isn’t 1666, either, though 1-sign-of-the-devil’s stupendous nature was related
in a way to that of 1543. 1666 saw a
great heavenly event—the naming of the comet known as Halley’s—and a horrendous
biological one, with the great plague of London,
which killed upwards of 100,000 people.
(It was a bad year overall for the city—the winter of 1665 was terrifically
cold and was followed by the plague. At
the tail end of the plague came the Great Fire of London [the diarist Samuel
Pepys referring to it as ‘a most horrid malicious bloody flame’]). It seems more like an annus horriblius more than
anything else. Except of course for Issac Newton, who had a very fine year this
year.

And
1932 wasn’t 1453 or 1066 or 1968 or 1776 or 1918 or 1945. Perhaps it is close to 1859, which saw the publication of what may be the most revolutionary work of the 19^th century
in Darwin’ On
the Origin of Species. Bunsen and Kirchhoff
added spectacular content when they figured out (with the aid of earlier work
by Fraunhoeffer and others) the internal constitution of the stars with a
telescope equipped with A spectroscope—truly an unthinkable breakthrough to
even a well-rounded mid-19^th century mind.

What happened in1932 was another sweeping array of
discoveries in the large and small. Carl
Anderson identified the positron while James Chadwick discovered the neutron
and the Joliot-Curies’ made their monumental discoveries in radiation (called “one of the most important
discoveries of the century… the consequences of the discovery of artificial
radioactivity are immense” from Segrè, From X-rays to Quarks, 198-199). Iwanenko described the neutron as a constituent
f the nucleus, while Heisenberg described the nucleus as composed of protons
and neutrons. Knoll and Ruska built the
electron microscope, allowing a vision of the interior parts of the interiors
of the smallest things, offering images almost as spectacularly new as Hooke’s
two centuries earlier. Looking up and
out, in the same year, Lev Landau postulated the existence of neutron stars
while Karl Jansky invented radio astronomy.
(Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler also had a big year this year.)*

It is tempting to include 16 months or so of 1925/6/7
in this list, if for no other reason than the people making the great innovations
were so very young–the term for these German physicists is Knabenphysik (boy
physics, boy physicists), and what they did was invent the new quantum
mechanics and change the face of physics. It all came about at the end of the era of the
old quantum theory (which comprised the years 1900-1925), and pretty much all
at the University of Goettingen. The 1925 players were Werner Heisenberg (age
23, with his PhD. under Sommerfeld), Paul Jordan (age 22 with his Ph.D. under
Born), Wolfgang Pauli (25, with his doctorate under Sommerfeld) and P. (aul)A.M.
Dirac (22, and who wrote the world’s first dissertation on quantum mechanics). The odd person out in this group though was
perhaps the strongest: Erwin Schroedinger was 37 in 1925, definitely the “Old
Man” of this set. On the other hand
there were three men of mountainous importance in physics who also made vast
contributions to the new physics, even though they were, um, more mature: Max Born (in his mid-forties), Niels Bohr
(about the same age) and Arnold Sommerfeld (who was 60 when he founded the
quantum mechanics of metals).

In any event, I like 1932. Next time we’ll look at another Big Year: 1948.

*Some of the books released in this year was also a bumper crop: Death in the Afternoon, Ernest
Hemingway; Light in August, William Faulkner;
1919, John Dos Passos; The
Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett; Tobacco Road,
Erskine Caldwell; Young Lonigan, James Farrell; Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder;
and Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

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Physics