Author: JF Ptak

Bizarre & Naive Surreal Maps and Views: the North Pole

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 545

[Read last year’s post, 12 March 2008: Dr. Seuss and the 236 Words...]

These two maps were printed within a few weeks of one another in LIFE magazine in October/November 1943, which is unusual to my experience, as I haven’t seen too much in the way of unusual 20th century North Pole maps (especially as advertisements). The first is a placement for Winchester Arms, concentrating on the dependability of its ammunition, and assuring the readers of the magazine that if “your soldier” was carrying a Winchester carbine, or a Garand, or whatever Winchester product it was, “that you can be sure his ammunition is okay”. The map is pretty odd and completed in a projection unknown to me: it centers itself at the North Pole and includes cities in both the northern and southern hemispheres, which is an unusual thing to do on a single-hemispheric projection.

I know that Winchester was just trying to graphically present the notion that the ammo was suited to “global climates”, and did so using an impossible image; but, since it was wartime…

The second image could also slide into the History of the Future category, Seagram’s Whisky somehow aligning itself with trans-polar future flight. The airport in the ad’s image was at the North Pole, and was the layover/refueling point for the Chicago-Moscow run at some point in tomorrow. Those little horizontal yellow rectangles are actually windows, and in my original you can see dozens of heads in there, making this one big stinking plane. By my calculations, the plane was something like 1500′ wide, giving it a surface area of something like two square acres. In comparison, the Boeing 777 has a wingspan of about 200′ and a 4,600 square-foot wing surface, which means that five 777’s could be placed wing-tip-to-wing-tip along the visible part of this Seagram’s monster. (And I’m being generous.)

Then there’s the problem of the runway, which looks about 15,000 feet long–way more than enough for a 777, but nowhere near enough for this beast, unless of course there was some hidden sumpin’ sumpin’ that I don’t know about. Lastly, there are eleven aircraft on the ground at this North Pole airport, which more than filled it up. The terminal looks possibly more (relatively speaking) mammoth than the planes, and could undoubtedly provide rooms if not houses for everyone traveling around in these Big Berthas. Judging the building against the aircraft, it looks like it is 800 feet tall by 4500 feet by 6500 feet. I’m not sure how many Malls of America you could fold into this thing, but it would be a lot.

Now I’m not saying that something like this structure wouldn’t ever be built, because “ever” and “never” are big words; as a matter of fact, I would say that it was probable that something like this would come into existence so long as we here on Earth lasted long enough.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Future, History of the
Naively Surreal Bad Ideas: Marriage, Women, Satan and Fleshy Ribs

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Well. In this tortuously ripped 1907 poetic headbanger on blame and retribution and innocence–and somehow ultimately about capital punishment–are neural squeezings that I have never seen or heard before, which are so loftily bad, and so logically weak, as to make a grown man puddle-up in amazement. I don’t want to get too far into this thing, as the entire entertainment part of the work can stop right at the sub-title, because this little pamphlet is just tremendously bad, it transcends being about bad; it climbs out of badness into the so-bad-it-is-good department, and then slips instantly into the bad-good-bad-bad genre.

Listen:
Since woman has been made of a rib of man, and is the “pupil of man’s schooling”,

How then can woman obviate

the crimson flesh of shame;
when man becomes degenerate,
is woman then to blame?

For woman being part of man,
and should she cause an aching,
how can her sins be other than
the image of his making

It goes on from there, of course, but we really don’t need to follow. The answer, by the way, is “yes”.

When I first saw Rev. Posey Sr’s.1947 pamphlet I thought that it read “How to be Happy Through Marriage”. Oops. My mistake, though the title as it stands is infinitely more entertaining, what with the story being told in ten thrilling chapters (seeded over 28 sparse pages). In the final installment of these prescriptions for happiness in spite of it all, we are reminded that “Satan is God’s arch enemy”, and that “IF YOU WOULD BE HAPPY KEEP SATAN OFF YOUR SHIP” and “do all to the glory of god” and MARRY IN SEASON”. DO NOT marry a man for a “meal ticket”, or “to keep him from marrying someone else”, and DO NOT marry too soon or too late. And so on. [Caps in original.]

There’s much more sage advice sprinkled liberally around biblical verses, but I think you’ve already gotten enough of the flavor to appreciate the rest of the meal (food itself sometimes getting in the way of its promise).

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Bad Ideas — Impossible Books — Outsider Logic
Titles of The Sublime Mundane, 2: Salt and Wire

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Read last year’ March 11, 2008 entry “The X-Ray of the Imagination 2: Phrenology, Chinese Hell Scrolls, and the Beauty of the Thought Balloon”.

The covers of this book are too far apart. (A book review, in toto, by Ambrose Bierce)

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts. Charles Dickens

Following yesterday’s post on the Sublime Mundane are these pamphlets, which are as perfectly and invisibly mundane as can be, if we were judging them solely by their covers. What turns out to be the case, though, is that they are beautifully composed, very well written, and extremely informative. They are drop-dead serious.

The first is the International Salt Company’s Salesmans’ Manual for, yes, the selling of salt*. The 12-inch tall , 6-ring binder instructional has 13 sections and is 75 pages long and strong; not only that, but most of the text is cut in two, so that there are some intricate associations that can be built between the bottom part of sec 2 page 8 and the top half of sec 4 page 2 and so on. It is just brilliantly done,a work to be proud of! And of course it looks like absolutely nothing and less than that, or that you’re whacking a quarter-inch brad with a 12-pound hammer. Which may be the case, because the salesman who was familiar with all of these aspects of salt could put down just about anyone who got in between them and their salt sale.

Next are two 1945 versions of the unfortunately-named CRAPO Company’s product brochures, makers of steel conduits, and who were evidently part of the Indiana Steel and Wire Company (of Muncie). It turns out here, too, that these were packed with engineering data and construction practices for electrifying and improving electrical conditions in the great midwest. The catalogs were also deftly illustrated with elegant engineering drawings of their products. So: on the outside, seeming nothingness for one book and badly-named for the other; inside, they are state-of-the-art, well written and bountiful. They just look weird.

*I am in no way demeaning the importance of salt here–I just don’t want to deal with the whole overwhelming issue of its important history. Suffice to say that stuff hasn’t been much more important than salt over the last few thousand years.

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Impossible Books — Outsider Logic
Emerging Oddness in Durer: the first bookbag (?) and a lonely dot (for the History of Dots)

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It seems a little sinful to be looking so closely at the great Albrecht Durer for such trifles, but, well, my eye fell on these micro-notes, and won’t let them go. Using “emerging” as a verb, what comes floating up to me from the minor realm in the Michelfeldt Tapestry, a woodblock illustration completed across three sheets, is the middle figure in sheet three. He stands, a plumpy measure of a man, between two figures with balloon legends floating above them. The first figure is a priest or scholar whose ballooned sentiment translates to something like “Lord, we are listening to your oration, we crave to attend your school”; the second figure with balloon thoughts is much more interesting to me, this one reading “Everything that goes out now re-enters the source from which it flowed”, a good circular bit coming from the head of a man with starshine eyes. These two people deliver some pretty weighty observations, but I’m distracted more by the middle-man, who happens to be carrying a book in a sack. What’s the book doing in a silken purse? I must say I’ve never noticed a book in a bag in the renaissance before this–maybe they’re all over the place, but I’m guessing not, otherwise this guy wouldn’t’ve made such a strong impression on me.

Second is this woodcut of a witch riding a wolf (appearing in Ultricus Molitor’s Von den Unholden oder Hexen, printed in 1491)–it catches my attention not for the wonderfully flowing robe, or the fact that women riding anything at this point in the Renaissance* was not common, but the small dot right under the wolf. What is the dot doing there? Why not just leave the foreground a blank, like the sky? I don’t know why I’m so distracted by this thing, but I am. And while I’m at it, that landscape in the background is pretty unusual, too: what is that squiggly bit to the right of the witch?

*Witches riding animals, even in the further work of Durer, comes much more into play int he first quarter of the 16th century. See also the work of Aldorfer, Schauffelein, Grien and others.

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History of Dots — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Pre-modern Advanced Technologies and Looking at the History of the Future

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Future (Definition) That period of time in which our affairs prosper,
our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
Ambrose Bierce, Devil’s Dicitonary

“It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.” E.A. Poe

Looking “into” what the future might hold is a nasty business suited for hairshirts, geniuses and fools–except of course to say that there will be what would seem to us to be shock and awesome display that will wash over future generations like the shock of Darwin washing over those in the 1870’s.* Looking into the past of looking into the future is far more approachable but not necessarily “easy”. The major difficulty in finding the future amidst all the historical majors and minors is that given the optical distortions in the broadening of our depth of field to our WayBack Vision. It is harder to see things that are out-of-place to a given time given our familiarity with it.

(Neil R. Jones (1909-1988), a relatively obscure scifi writer, seems to be the first to introduce the concept of a history of the future in his Amazing Stories article of July 1930 called “The Jameson Satellite”. (It is interesting to note that at about the same time he also introduced the word “astronaut”, and, further into the decade introduced some of the first appearances of cyborg/robotic story characters.))

The idea of identifying these parts of future history is certainly easier when they identify themselves so, as seen in the caption of this wonderful you-are-there image of a person flying in an aeroplane over the Eiffel tower, and printed in the redoubtable Illustrated London News for 1909. The writer leaves himself plenty of wiggle room, though still firmly convinced that even though flying was still in its relative infancy in Europe, the time would certainly come when people would flit about it planes simply to see great wonders.

Images of at the edges of contemporary technical capabilities and whose skill hints at bigger things to come are trickier to see. Take for example the following engraving found in the Encyclpoedie methodique*, published in Paris from 1782 to 1830. This engraving depicts a ship of the line in an unusual perspective, best suited I think to show th eshape of the hulol, and looking to me extremely similar to a computer-generated graphic.

Also, the fantasitically articulated and probably unworkable set of metalic artificial limbs was another peep into the future–I think that the technology necessary for these limbs to be anything close to operational just escaped its manufacturer when they were designed in the 1760’s.

In any event the exercise of finding the future in contmeporary writings of the past is interesting and fruitful, and really does make you pay attention to your sense of history and what modern prejudices one brings to it.

*”We may expect that a series of shocks of the type of Darwinism will
be given to established opinions on all sorts of subjects. One cannot
suggest in detail what these shocks will be, but since the opinions on
which they will impinge are deep-seated and irrational, they will come
upon us and our descendants with the same air of presumption and
indecency with which the view that we are descended from monkeys came
to our grandfathers. ..
JBS Haldane, “Daedalus, or Science and the Future

** The L’Encyclopédie méthodique ou par ordre de matières par une société
de gens de lettres, de savants et d’artistes; précédée d’un Vocabulaire
universel, servant de Table pour tout l’Ouvrage, ornée des Portraits de
MM. Diderot et d’Alembert, premiers Éditeurs de l’Encyclopédie appeared in over 200 volumes, and was a version of the famous Diderot encyclopedia,m though expanded, and ordering its iformation according to subject area rather than alphabetically.

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Future, History of the — Perspective — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Technology, History of
Titles of the Sublime Mundane: the Empty Calories of the Over-Obvious

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Sometimes publications have absolutely no pretense, stating exactly what it is that sleeps between their covers. And sometimes these titles seem more like declarative broadsides or posters and not books at all, the “book part”, or any writing furthering the cover’s statement, being unnecessary. The first example here (and one which begs the response “yup!”), Saturn Has Rings, written in 1944 by Donald Lee Cyr (of El Centro), should’ve stopped at the end of the title of chapter one, “A Rose has Petals”. But no, it didn’t, and stretched itself over another fifty thin pages.

Frederick Blaine Humphrey’s Know Your Groceries (1931) takes an unexpected twist, spiraling into something called “biochesspathy”, “natural dianetics”, and somehow “applying the natural science of the Bible…to the philosophy of youth and health”.

The Book of Envelope Facts…yes. This is actually a lovely book, in its very special way, with 55 pages of non-stop facts and semi-useless information on envelopes. Chapter Two’s “Arousing Interest with Envelopes” competes wildly with Chapter Three “Attracting Attention with Envelopes” and Chapter Four’s “Creating Desire with Envelopes”. It is completed with eight pages of a glossary of envelope terms.

This last example, Alice Mills’ Notes on Reading Aloud, really doesn’t belong, because it is mainly on acting; but the title is so lovely I just couldn’t resist.

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Bad Ideas — Impossible Books — Outsider Logic
The First Electric Calculator–Seiferheid’s Invention of 1818

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One of the most unexpected monuments–to me at least–in the history of modern computation is the fantastic electrical calculating machine that shows up in the vast, dense, and bibliographically complicated work by Georg Heinrich Seiferheid (1757-1818), Sammulung Electrischer Spielwerke fur junge..., published over the years 1791 to 1817. Mr. Seiferheid was an experimenter, innovator, inventor and writer, and wrapped up in one complicated ball, publishing his major and minor bits under the heading of this one large work over a period of least 16 years. And don’t let the title fool you: in the vein of Chandrasekhar’s Newton’s Principia for the Common Reader, there wasn’t all that much in these volumes by Seiferheid for kids, just like in the Chandrasekhar book, which redefined the phrase “Common Reader” way, way up. Even taking into account the level at which children were educated in the applied and natural sciences/philosophy, which demanded more from the 18th and 19th century kids than out grade school do now, Seiferheid’s work is obvious far removed from that. Perhaps it was because he had a large number of gadgety trinkets that hung through the work like plumb lines that the word junge was included–I really don’t know. The vastness of his reach though into all manner of mechanical and electrical objects is very impressive–Seiferheid evidently constructed electrically powered guns, clocks, and of course this fantastic calculating device. The calculator was much similar to the machine invented (although no
version of it survived) by Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635) in 1623, followed by that in 1643 of the
overwhelming Blaise Pascal (with the “Pascaline”) and then again in 1675 of
Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) who produced the “Stepped Reckoner”—the Seiferheid
machine was more complex, and of course, electric, a true and terrific innovation, creating for its maker the sobriquet of “grandfather” of the modern computer.

* I have found very little biographical data on this man; even the very reliable Poggendorff has only about 15 lines on him: he was born in Wurtemberg, was a professor of physics at the Gymnasium at Schwabisch Hall, and that’s about it for the personal data. He did write four other books in addition to this ten-volume magnum opus.

I am unsure of why this man is so little known to general readers.

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Computer Tech/History
Blank and Empty Things: Disembodied Celestial Hands and Arms, Part 3.

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This wonderful and dimly provocative image from Johann Siebacher’s Wasserstein der Weisen, oder chymisches Tractaetlein…. *, a curious alchemy book of obscured pubom Johann Ambrosius Siebmacher’lishing heritage, printed around 1660, is a sort of standard celestially-disembodied standard, though in this case the torch-holding hand may be coming through a trinitarian window/hole in the sky, straight from the body of the Der Herr Gott. Or perhaps not: perhaps this is an illustration of alchemical genius emerging from a Biblical interruption in the sky, igniting a heart-held philosopher’s stone fixed to a well-rooted sepulchre, the very tree of life. The religiously-robed folks are retreating into the deeper shadow without the sight of the gloriously-enlightened lump, plainly visible to the plain observer.

Or not. Siebacher uses an epigram at the end of his book calling the whole chymical art into question: “It is an easy matter to prepare gold in the furnace out of metals:
at times there is found a man to whom the secret is revealed. Why is not
every alchemist rich? The reason is that one thing is wanting which many
seek with anxious care. Common gold is not fixed, and, when brought to
the test of fire, quickly disappears and perishes. But he who knows the
tired gold, which at all times remains the same, and from which nothing
is lost, he is the possessor of the true Art, and may be called a good
and practical Sage and Chemist.” Rich in vision, and in spirit, with holes in the pockets.

*Johann Ambrosius Siebmacher.
Wasserstein
der Weysen, das ist, ein chymisch Tractätlein, darin der Weg gezeiget,
die Materia genennet, und der Process beschrieben wird, zu dem hohen geheymnuss
der Universal Tinctur zukommen, vor diesem niemalen gesehen. Darbey auch
zwey sehr nutzliche andere Büchlein der Gleichformigkeit und Concordantz
wegen angehenckt, nemlich, 1. Iohan von Mesung. 2. Via veritatis der einigen
Warheit…, Frankfurt, 1619, 1661, 1703, 1704, 1709, 1710, 1743, 1762.

Or,

The Sophic Hydrolith; or Water Stone of the Wise, That is, a chymical work, in which the way is shewn, the matter named, and the process described;
namely, the method of obtaining the
universal tincture. Chapter
One: A BRIEF EXPOSITION OF THE WONDERFUL WATER STONE OF THE WISE, COMMONLY
CALLED THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Chemistry, history of — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Bad Titles Department: Huh? Confusing Nothingness, Making Stuff, and Radio Hair

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There is a constant and imaginary warfare going on among certain categories in this blog: mainly, its “bad ideas” vs. “outsider logic” vs. “impossible books”. The result is that I just give up and fold them all into each other so I don’t have to think about them at all. I also haven’t made many entries in these areas because, well, there’s just so many of them to deal with–but I can tell you that they would make a fantastic Mystery Books gallery show, especially if the viewers were made to supply their interpretation of what the written material was all about from their problematic, time-sucking covers and titles. And I can tell you that reading the content sometimes doesn’t help to understand the title or the cover art, the logic of investigation passing through it all like a stony Bushism (where you know that something was said, with words, but that’s about all).

Take for example Scorn Not That Which You Do Not Understand: the title begs you to do so as you read it, though it took me a few turns to actually understand what it was saying. The problem with the tiny pamphlet is that once you’ve read a few pages, you know a little less about the book before you knew it existed, which is a hard thing to do. (The writing goes downhill after the title.)

The Making of Things made me not want to know what was being made, and so I have not to this day opened it, though I judge from outside appearances that it was published around 1940 and is at least three pages long. The title is just so on-beyond simple that knowing what it actually refers to is bound to disappoint.

Station Hair, Hair and its Care, is a written radio broadcast from Station H-A-I-R (brought to you by George Elia of the Hair Culture Service of Milwaukee Wisconsin, and evidently with offices in the Lake Wobegon region near Overthere, Minnesota), taches us all how to have healthy, radiant and attractive hair good enough for radio. In the looks-made-for-radio genre, my own hair (or whatever it is) is definitely in the hair-made-for-radio department, so long as I get enough bootblack to color my scalp.

(This leads me to a semi-connected memory: does anyone remember a street person in Manhattan, midtown, who was a drummer, with gigantic painted-on jet black eyebrows and painted-on black hair? This wouild’ve been around 1970. He was heavy, short, and would walk around with drumsticks and play on whatever was available, announcing, if I recall correctly, the famous drummer that he was immitating. He had to have been a famous street performer….Ring a bell with anyone. Jeff?)

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Blank and Missing Things: Missing Horizons, Giant Women and Edouard Manet

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The Nine Foot Woman and the Nine Inch Man

Manipulating perspective in the post-re-discovery of
perspective world infrequently happened on purpose (except to accentuate
another aspect of perspective), and was usually the result of artist or artisan failure or naivety. A famous example is in Rene Descartes La Dioptrique (1673), in which this image of his compound
microscope was somehow confused with a telescope—probably the result of the
illustrator’s misunderstanding of the concept and a mistake in the proofing
period. This does sort of look like a
telescope, if viewed with your squinty-eye specs, at least in the hands of the illustrator—if the
microscope-and-man was pictured in this scale was really this large and
collecting THAT much light it would’ve fried the retina of the viewer and
whatever specimen was being looked at. If
the scope was that big then the man using it would’ve been about 9 inches tall. In any event, it was an accident (and one of
fairly high order)—the nine-foot-tall woman in Edouard Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur
l’Erbe (1863) was an entirely conscious decision, and one that helped initiate
the birth of Impressionism. Of course
there was a lot of other stuff going on in Manet’s mind beyond the giant woman—he
abandoned entirely the very accomplished and polite work that he had been doing
(trained by Thomas Coutre) celebrating his independence on his 27^th
birthday by burning all of his old work.

Le Dejeuner was a scandal when it was exhibited in 1863—Manet
painted what he wanted to, unbound by perspective, by color, by composition,
and on and on. The folks in the painting were not connected to anything,
really, and were unconnected to each other, no one paying any of the others any
mind, even when the women were naked.
Nothing seems to be going on—the people are just simply there. This is in itself was a disconnect from
previous practices, the vision in painting was about something, and was directed. Light seems to be coming from a number of
different places, and the shadows from the trees reflect this, simultaneously stretched
towards and away from the light sources.
The bathing woman in the background, or what used to be background, had
she been drawn using proper perspective, would’ve been about nine feet
tall. But what happens here is that
there is no foreground or background in this painting, just middle. It was this collection of abandonments, starting here in the Le Dejeuner in 1863, that ushered in the modern in art.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Perception — Perspective