Author: JF Ptak

Suggesting Freud’s Suggested Suggestion, 1893

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 429

Hidden in plain but complex view of this title page for the Neurologisches Centralblatt is an early and important work by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, “Ueber den psychischen Mechanismus hysterischer Phaenomen”. Its a paper that establishes a Freudian dictum–based in the well-boiled ideas and work of Charcot–stating that it is not mental trauma that leads to the cause of hysterical symptoms, but the memory of it. “Hysterical patients suffer mainly from reminiscences.” Ernst Jones explains: “The trauma is not an evoking or precipitating factor, but rather, in its memory trace…resembles a foreign body that continues to irritate the mind”.

Honestly I don’t know why people think about Freud.

If for no other reason, this paper was important as it lead to a much more significant paper in Freud’s development of himself, Studien ueber Hysteria (1895).

The attraction for me was the complex presentation of the contents of this monthly journal–there’s a lot of data presented, it is not terribly reader-friendly, but it is still, well, pretty. To me, its art. Freud just kinda mucks it up.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Books–title pages, beautiful — Medicine, History of
Big Skies, Long Horizon: 42nd Street, 1861

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 428

This view of the northern reaches of Manhattan , published in Valentine’s
Manual in 1861, reveals a superior and clear view of the northern reaches of the island due north along 2nd Avenue at the 42nd Street intersection. An historian of The City could probably identify that precipitously-perched house at the corner of 42nd and 2nd–I can’t. My guess though is that from the looks of the ruining fence that 2nd avenue must’ve been widened and scraped away the house’s front yard. The view up 2nd is largely unobstructed and shows few people, though we do see a *girl* playing with a hoop and a strolling family (with, uncommonly, daddy holding the child’s hand…I guess that the mother’s hands were busy holding the parasol and shawl).

The census for 1860 shows that the population of Manhattan at
850,000. Given that today’s population is about twice that, where were
the rest of the 1860-people? As we can clearly see, they weren’t
uptown. Manhattan was pretty densely populated as a whole, but the
great majority of the population action was taking place below where we
would today consider midtown. If we take the left and right hand of 2nd
ave as the 19th and 22nd Wards (which were actually divided by 6th Ave,
but 2nd will do for these purpose), then there would be about 80,000
people living there, or about 9% or so of the entire population of the
city. These two wards also accounted for about 30% of the entire area
of the city below 86th street. So even though this scene looks pretty
pastoral, there were still a fair number of people living in those
low-rise stretches.

Another bit to consider is that the
island’s population then was fairly static–the people in Manhattan
were largely residents, whereas today the daytime population just about
doubles, which makes it the country’s most-commuted-to daytime city.
(Manhattan daily increase= 87% increase; Washington, D.C. 73.0%;
Boston 41.1%; Seattle 28.4%; Denver 28.0%; Portland, OR 23.0%; San
Francisco 21.7%; Charlotte, NC 21.2%; Houston 20.6%; Nashville
19.5%; Austin 19.4% )

All this said, I always have liked this image because it so odd, and naive, and lovely. Unexpected, I was thrilled to see the failing fence for this property, along with its curly stairs leading away from the sheer droop at what used to be the front steps of the house. To me these are just gorgeous details.

Here’s a shot (right) of 2nd ave looking south from 85th street, which may very well be the vanishing point of the 1861 image. Maybe. The photo below shows 2nd and 42nd from the Helmsley.

Finally, below, we see a view of 42nd Street from the Hudson.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Statistics–Fossil, Found, Odd, Forgotten
Our Kind of Reader, Post 2; WITH: Our Kind of Donlanesque* Tea Drinker

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

In my Livres qui Rient collection are a number of pretty unusual book images, including this lovely bit (from a 1910 or so issue of The Illustrated London News), the post-Victorian ultra-lux book-holder manufactured by Mr. J. Foots & Son of London. Actually I substituted the word “book” for “foot”, not that an entire-body portable sauna named a “Foot Bath” isn’t smirky enough, and, anyway, both have a double-“o” in the middle so they are nearly the same word, though not really). I love that this guy is absorbing whatever that pipe (watch out!) is sending his way with a flourish in his hair, a tight and tidy smile on his face, and one free hand which snakes up and out of the hot box to steady his book and turn a non-sweattied page.

It seems that the Foots expanded their horizon from Sweating Books to
their enormous, live-in Tea RV. The only thing missing is a motor (advertised though not evident),
but, since this fellow is English and of course a lover of tea, then as
long as his caffeine delivery system is laid out properly in front of
him and settled by a fine white linen, it really doesn’t matter if he
goes anywhere at all. Right, Jeff?

*(Donlanesque is an uncommon reference synonymically related to Lincolnesque.)

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Uncategorized
Where to Be and Where to Look Part 1: de Gaulle and FDR

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 425

Many years ago I went to the house of a man with books to sell. The
house was terrific, with a view of the Potomac and just outside the
district line–a hard thing to accomplish in housing in Washington.
The elderly gent’s house was open, airy and basically wallpapered with
large format, very big photographs. Many of the photographs I
recognized–and of those, many were iconic images. I said something
simpy like, “so I see that yo collect historic photographs.” “No, I
don’t” he said. In that moment I thought he was just being a wiseacre
with me, He quickly said, “I took them”.

Ho-ly Crap, I thought.

I honestly didn’t know what to say–I had seen so many of them in my life, and so often, that like a lot of things, these images were just there, part of the cultural landscape. And here was the man who took them. After I got over my shock and came to a sense or two, I interview hi a little. The man behind the camera’s name was Ed Clark.

Ed (1912-2000) was about 80 when I met him, and he was selling some books because he was getting ready to leave DC and head back home to Nashville. He was very quick with strong recall. I asked him about his ultra-famous photo of CPO Graham Jackson, preserved forever, who on 23 April 1945 in Warm Springs, Georgia, was playing Dvorak’s Going Home as Franklin Roosevelt’s casket was being taken to the train for a last ride to D.C. Jackson was at Warm Springs to perform for Roosevelt when the President died on the 23rd. I wondered about where the rest of the crowd was, and particularly, where the rest of the photographers were, at that moment After all, FDR was about the most famous man in the world, and perhaps the most important, when he died in the last stretch of WWII. Surely there must’ve been tons more photojournalist there to record the scene of FDR’s body being removed. “There were” Ed said. I asked him where they were. He explained that they behind him, which would’ve been in front of him, actually–he was at the rear of the crowd, with every other photographer pointing their cameras forwards, recording the movement of FDR’s body. Ed said that he turned around (“because that picture was already being made”)and found the rest of the crowd, the people who were already there at Warm Springs, watching from a respectful distance. And it was at that point that CPO Jackson started to play his accordion, the music being one of FDR’s favorite pieces. “They weren’t looking the wrong way”, Ed Clark said, “just not the right way”. And Ed made the photo that everyone else missed, because they’re faced the obvious.

This second picture captures both the moment and the photographers whop were missing it. The scene is of course General De Gaulle making his triumphant return to the liberated city of Paris, walking back into the city through the Arc de Triomphe on 25 August 1944. I am also completely certain that the picture was taken by another LIFE photographer (Ed Clark having worked their for years contributing many photo-stories and covers), Ralph Morse (my original doesn’t have any identification on the back, though it certainly looks like the others Morse made at that moment). Morse caught De Gaulle in mid stride at the half-way point through the Arc. And you can see the look of pain in the faces of the other scrambling photographers who must’ve been just coming to the realization that they were in the shot they had been desperately wanting to make since 1940. Their sinking feeling is pretty visceral.

Perhaps being in the “wrong” place is just someone else’s perception until you prove them wrong. After all, there must be some right place right time, wrong place right time, right place wrong time, wrong place wrong time hierarchy, no?–that is, until you’re smart enough to realize that there’s no such thing as “wrong”.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Photography, history — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
The Bombing of Britain, 1942: Visual Display of Quantitative Data

JF Ptak Science Books Post 424

This chart, appearing in The Illustrated London News for 19 December 1942 is in part a righteous propaganda effort, a response to a criticism evidently boiling in the United States about a “failing” in the British effort to prosecute the war. Honestly, I was not aware of this sentiment being hosted in the U.S. in the winter of ’42. The text accompanying this chart explains that the misunderstanding of perception is partly due to British “reticence” concerning their achievements and “an [American] opinion based on ignorance of the true situation”.

This chart was actually a publication that was distributed “throughout the United States” to alter the public opinion there and to show “in tabular form something of the achievements–and sufferings–of Britain during three years of war. “Those cold figures barely hint at the three years of fighting sacrifice which the British people have devoted to smashing the Axis.”

There are some truly extraordinary figures here: for example, in September 1940 there were 4.2 million men (and no women) registered for national service; by September 1942 the number of men more than doubled, and there were 8.5 million women now registered. Unemployment sunk to 108k in Sept ’42 from 1 million in Sept ’39. War damage (which I’m guessing was in the London area) is listed at 20% of all houses (!?); war deaths from the Battle of Britain and the V-1 raids fell from 42k killed and 48k wounded in the year ending Aug ’41 to 2k killed and wounded in the year ending June ’42 (showing extreme hardship, sacrifice and progress).

Overall the rest of the stats speak for themselves, and I was a little surprised that the British government found it necessary to launch a propaganda effort in the U.S. a year after Pearl Harbor. Eleanor Roosevelt said just before this brochure was issued, Britain has given ten times what we have given, because people there know what it means to be without. There is much more equality of sacrifice in Britain than in this country”. The article finishes: “A more forceful propaganda directed from Britain to the United States and a few more Americans speaking their minds as Mrs. Roosevelt spoke hers, would go a long way–perhaps the whole way–towards removing a possible cause of misunderstanding between the two great nations”.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Information, Quantitative Display of — Militaria
A Woman Doctor Finds Her Name in Spite of it All, 1695

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 422

“Good wives and good plantations are the products of a good husband.”
–Benjamin Franklin 1736

“The best furniture in a house is an obedient wife” Thomas 1808

“A little house well filled, a little land well tilled, and a little wife well willed, are great riches ” John Ray 1683 [Most tidy this up by leaving off the last third of this famous little saying.]

The four anonymous/initialed authors on the title page of the first edition of The Complete Midwwife’s Practice (1659)…..claimed this book to be the first and best of its kind “since the birth of mankind” (!, chapter 4). That said, much of it was cribbed from the work of Louyse Bourgois (1564-1636), who had published (though not under her own name) her obstetric secrets earlier in the century. Bourgois was yet another in a long line of women who contributed to this science but whose identities were largely and obediently left to pervious memory among male authors—except in this case, where, in the fourth edition of this book, Bourgois was included in the longish-titled title page and actually has her engraved portrait included in the book. And thus some small level of payback it realized.

Recognizing the female’s importance in the writing of this book or not, the text of The Complete Midwife is still strongly constructiviist in maintaining the woman’s lesser role in most aspects of reproduction, as well as many aspects outside the biological realm.

For example, we find this state-of-the-art nugget:

This of course was nothing to raise an eyebrow over in the late 17th century–it was the state of medical knowledge seasoned with strong doses of female subjugation and slavery.

The authors of this book were revealed by the fourth edition, and one of them comes from the long line of highly questionable obstetricians and medical monsters, the Chamberlain family.
(I touched on them briefly here.) The family invented the forceps and kept the invention–which although simple was a huge aid in childbirth–secret, a utility controlled by them alone, completely in the dark, for more than 100 years. Their secretivenesses protected the family fortune and future at a cost of untold numbers of difficult deliveries and, I’m sure, 100,000+ women and children lost in childbirth difficulties who could’ve been saved otherwise had the forceps been publicized and shared. But this was not their lot, and nt their responsibility, nor their evident moral obligation…

But this jealous protection of their intellectual rights seeped out
in other ways too, as in this very book, where this Chamerlain
complained against one of his very own co-authors (the famous Nicholas
Culpepper), who adopted a more popular approach to medicine, arguing
for printing medical texts int he vernacular. Perhaps this failing was
genetic.

Perhaps the worst of the panoply of wide ideas biologically inferiorizing (?) women belongs to Nicolas Hartsoeker (1626-1683) who discovered “animaclues” in sperm: whole, completely formed, “little men”, who would be implanted into the furnace of woman to cook and nature them until they could be born. This basically reduced woman to a piece of furniture–an oven–with all the great necessaries of reproduction performed by the man, a creation called the Homonculus completely generated by them, with woman needed only as the fertile soil to plant the whole thing in.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Medicine, History of
Shakespeare in America: Mother Goose, Jumbo and P.T. Barnum

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 421

Dedicated to David Robinson

There are some squinty-eyed connections between one of America’s greatest printer/publishers (Isaiah Thomas), William Shakespeare, Mother Goose, P.T. Barnum and Jumbo the elephant. There are clear connections at the two ends of these relationships, but what is the thin corpus callosum that completes this house in which the Mother Goose-Jumbo lineage happily live? (There’s a hint in there: “house”)

Isaiah Thomas was the first person to put Shakespeare into print in America. For some reason, the Bard had escaped publication on our lovely shores until 1786, when Thomas, an innovative and savvy businessman and reader, published (not for the first time) some of the Mother Goose stories (Mother Goose’s Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle: In Two Parts…*) and included, as a toss-in, hanging out in the back of the book, some of Shakespeare’s sonnets–the first time Shakespeare was printed in America. At the end of Mother Goose. It would take only a decade for all of Shakespeare’s work to be put out in a collected edition (in Philadelphia, by Samuel Johnson in 1796), but for some reason American appetite for this impossible talent was fed by British publishers, the keepers and controllers of The Memory.

The “house” in question here is Shakespeare’s own, and in folds nicely into the Jumbo part. The deal was that, somehow, the Bard’s Stratford residence was up for sale. It was Barnum’s (1810-1891) idea to purchase the place, cut in into little pieces and ship it across the ocean for display in his New York location, and then, perhaps, to cart it around the country. The British heart turned inside out and was instantly covered with marble crumpets at the breadth of the idea–the house was instantly removed from sale and declared a National Treasure, to be saved forever in England. Which seemed like a good idea when faced with the alternative–how it could’ve come to pass that Barnum could’ve gotten so far in the purchase plans and negotiations is a little beyond me. (I can see it now–Barnum moving the Bard’s house out in little bits, at night, to waiting wagons, just like the way the Colts were stolen from Baltimore, Johnny Unitas’ soul twisting slowly in the swirling, blizzardy wind of that night.)

Barnum’s brain** turned into an itchy scab, and the way he scratched it would be to buy Jumbo (1861-1885), the world’s largest elephant, from the London Zoo. The Brits were furious over this, too, but since we’re talking elephant and not Shakespeare, the annoyance passed, probably as soon as the fartacious Barnum lifted his foot from British soil. Poor Jumbo toured the country and wound up being squashed by a locomotive in Ontario, his skin going to the Natural History Museum in D.C. and his heart to Cornell. Barnum’s body simply went into a box and into the ground. Mother Goose’s body too wound up in the earth for a comfortable dirt nap. Shakespeare’s body isn’t in his tomb.

*Thomas, Isaiah, William Shakespeare, and Oliver Goldsmith. Mother Goose’s Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle: In Two Parts : Part I Contains the Most Celebrated Songs and Lullabies of the Good Old Nurses, Calculated to Amuse Children and to Excite Them to Sleep : Part II: Those of That Sweet Songster and Nurse of Wit and Humour, Master William Shakespeare : Embellished with Cuts, and Illustrated with Notes and Maxims, Historical, Philosophical, and Critical. Worcester (Massachusetts): Printed by Isaiah Thomas, and sold at his bookstore, 1786.

**Barnum’s first name was Phineas, as is the first name of Mr. Gage, a railroad worker who survived a spectacular accident in which a large metal tamper was exploded through his skull and brain, removing a frontal lobe. Maybe there is a connection, maybe not. (Sorry.)

An Estimate of the Number of Shakespeare’s Atoms in a Living Human Being
“It straightforward to determine the number of Shakespeare’s atoms that enter a person each day through breathing, drinking and eating. The result is almost 20 billion. That means that, even if one’s body were cleansed of the playwright’s atoms, it would only take about 10 days to return to “normal.” If you live to 75 years, some 500 trillion of his atoms enter you during your life. After we’ve lived a while, our direct knowledge of Shakespeare is rather substantial, which proves the statement that education is a lifelong endeavvor. The only reason why you have just 200 billion of his atoms in you is that you are also losing his atoms at virtually the same rate as you are gaining them, as the analysis on equilibrium in Part I above makes clear.”

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Perspective
Skinny IV: the American Empire 1940

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 420

This map of the American Empire, “a might nation on whose flag the sun never sets”, appeared in an odd little publication called US, a Presentation of Americanism, published in 1940 by the United States Flag Association. The author, Col. James A. Moss, was adjectively gifted, or affected, never having met one he didn’t like or couldn’t use. The pamphlet drips red, white and bluey drippings–on this map spread alone we see unimaginative and repetitious uses of the words “amazing”, “marvelous”, “unprecedented” and so on.

Yet for all of this multi-colored ink and trying adjectives, the Empire, or empire, as described by Moss really wasn’t so much, once you added up all the square miles. Actually, if you take away Alaska from this mix, all of this external property doesn’t add up to more than Texas; if you subtracted the very problematic size of the Philippines, these properties wouldn’t cover North Carolina*. Now so far as “empires” go, this isn’t much–they’re lovely places to land planes, though, or refuel ships (in earlier days)–but when the foreign conquests don’t add up to 5% of the general land mass, an “Empire” it isn’t. Perhaps if one of those flags was on Australia (sorry!), well, then, that would make a stiffer claim for the E-word (or I-word, actually, as in Imperium). Roman, Persian, Ottoman, British, Assyrian, Spanish, Byzantine, Median/Mongol, Athenian, Akkadian, Russian, Celestial--these are empires (whole alphabets of them), in power, land, influence. America could’ve really have been an empire in 1945 had it the stomach and hadn’t been exhausted of the whole idea of war–thank goodness it didn’t happen. Running amok and all. I’m happy to think of this Skinny Empire of the United States in 1940–Fat Empires generally are killers.

Some of the other Skinny Posts:

Skinny III: Skinny Water. An Extremely Thin Shower Apparatus, 1888.

Skinny II: Morals, Class Warfare & Letting Someone Else Pick up your Dropped Fork

Skinny (I) Tech–Swimming, Sitting and Smoking Thin (Really Thin)

*There are simple ways of determining this exactly–adding up columns of figures in the Statesman’s Yearbook will satisfy this need, but I think that my guess gets us to the point to within a comfortable margin.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Bad Ideas — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking
Ultimate Legal Hoax: Pilate’s Death Sentence of Christ and the Salamander Letter

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 419

One of the most remarkable literary frauds testing the published boundaries of religious merit was this remarkable publication, the death sentence for Jesus Christ by Pontius Pilate. Printed in Paris by Guillaume Juliene for Jean Stratius at Lyon, the Thresor admmorable, de la senstence prononceepar Ponce Pilate, contre notre Sauveur Jesus-Christ, (translated from Italian into French), was a work of great audacity if for nothing else than in its reach. (I’d like to restrict these comments on religious-mythological writings to the more-obvious and modern forgeries and hoaxes, and leave the question on the “authenticity” of other religious works like “divinely-inspired word-of-god transcriptions” for another time.) The book is about a parchment that was supposed to contain a rather touching, and naive account (in Hebrew) of Pilate’s death sentence of Christ, a document found in a successive, nesting marble containers which protected it from time’s enemies. As a matter of fact, the vignette illustration on the title page shows the parchment and the open containers as “proof” of the hoax’s merit. Another very nice, light touch was the remark that this work was translated from the Italian (and that from the Hebrew) edition; it is most likely that this is the original edition, beginning its fictional life as a third-generation translation, a claim adding to the document’s possible authenticity.

It is not possible to leave remarks on religious forgeries/hoaxes without mentioning the talented and odious murdering forger Mark William Hofmann, the man who lead the most productive life of any American forger, and who late in his career was said to be attempting to fabricate the missing first 118 pages of the Book of Mormon. In addition to his very accomplished literary and political forgeries, Hofmann came upon an evil and brilliant idea–the devout Mormon would forge unseemly documents from the earliest periods of Mormon history and sell them to the Mormon Church, which was evidently very interested in obtaining such documents for its not-public archive. Hofmann’s plan was remarkable–at first blush the offending documents that he “tracked down” were donated to the Church. As the troublesome finds became more interesting (read “damaging”) he needed money (and lots of it) from Church officials to secure the documents from their “enemies”. Having established goodwill and a sort of loyalty, and being terribly gifted and of course deeply knowledgeable about early Mormon history, Hofmann (a sixth-generation Mormon) created his own market, his own clientele, and his own product. (The “product” being very well researched and radiocarbon dating-proof documents for which he also forged their own provenance (!); even though fairly elementary stuff it was very well constructed, and Hofmann’s forging ability was exceptionally high.) Outside the messing around with people’s belief system and committing major frauds all over the place and stealing millions of dollars, the biggest problem with Hofmann (perhaps some of you will remember his from the “Salamander Letter” of the mid 1984) was that in the course of doing business and protecting himself he bombed and killed two people in cold blood. He didn’t answer his own religion’s hushed call for “blood atonement” and was sentenced in his cowardly way to life imprisonment in the state of Utah, where he lives to this day.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Bad Ideas — Books–title pages, beautiful
An Artistic “First”–Recognizing the Book Illustrator for the First Time, 1597

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 418

In many disciplines generating a list of “firsts” in its fields and subfields is a relatively easy if not complex matter. Quickly established is the first time that a liquid propelled rocket is successfully launched, as is the first time that a left-handed blond New Yorker threw a night-time three hitter in the rain, and the first time a twin walking beam engine blew up, and the first attack of B troop of the 2nd Division of the 2nd U.S. Army (Patton’s Ghosts, by the way) attacked the Germans in Belgium in World War II. Not so, really, in the history of art. The first time a fork appears in a painting is sort of known, the first time a “part” appears in a man’s hair, the first time we see an untied shoe, and so on, are sort of findable. Or perhaps we know it–all of this is prefaced by whether or not some observer at some point in the misty past made an observation of it, or that the painting or artwork survived, so it is all a little contingent on something else being so. The first time an artist signed their name to their artwork? Sometime in the third or fourth decade of the 16th century–before that, the painting really was a group effort of craftsmen and artisans and guilds, producing the paints the canvas the stretchers and the like, the painter painting with all of their stuff. Different periods of art development start and end in gauzy periods (some less than others).

And in that long line of firsts and pseudo-firsts there are other sub-genres, a class to which this illustration belongs. Bartolommeo Platina’s Vitae

Romanoeum pontifcum…in epitomen redactae, printed in Liege by Henricus Hovius in 1597, is probably the first time that an artist’s name and illustrator of the same book is listed ion the title page, front and center. Before that? If the artist was referenced it was in the text (rarely) and more than likely, simply, in the bottom right or left corner of the engraved/woodcut image made from his work. The artist is J.B. de Glen, who contributed 239 woodcut portraits of popes and pope-iana to this work, and whose brother, Jan de glen, actually cut the blocks. And I must say, this illustration of Pope Anastasius I (as he “was” in 398) is remarkable in its own way, de Glen having a particular style, quite humanist, and not terribly bending to interpretive needs of beauty.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Art History