JF Ptak Science Books Post 1914
This is one of those images in search of a story, and as it turns out the story is actually pretty long and involved. The image is this fantastic lithograph from Valentine’s Manual of the City of New York (a sort of annual review/directory of the city that ran on-and-on from the 1850’s to the 1920’s), this one being from the 1868 edition.
It also is a very stark reminder about how we still deliver power and communication in the United States, still via insulated wires strung along cross beams on what are mostly dead trees–pretty much the way the business has been done for he last 160 year.s That the backbone of the American energy and communication grid is still transferred on wire/cable strung over the street and exposed to everything on cultivated and treated sticks from the forest is an irony that we live under every day, and that beginning with telegraph poles.
That said, I like this image because the pole n the picture is so curved. Perhaps it was the way the tree was; perhaps it was rendered that way when it was treated with creosote. I don’t know. But the folks at Valentines liked it, otherwise they could have ignored its crookedness or used another angle on depicting the Old Halfway House.
Judging from many other examples, it seems that the artists at Valentines had a taste for the subtle and obscure. There are plenty of cases of the depiction of the quietly uncommon, as with another unusual image, showing Church street looking north and showing a long line of telegraph poles, all of which are squarely behind the other so that only the initial pole is visible, though you can see the cross-beams and insulators of the others, the brace getting “lower” and “smaller” behind the first pole. It is just extremely uncommon (in my experience) to see a long line of anything depicted in this way.
The artists/lithographers at The Manual seemed to enjoy their work. For example, in the above image in addition to teh lined-up telegraph poles we have some other very uncommon small elements. No doubt the view was true–which was the intent of the book, to accurately portray the city–but the small elements were creative, quiet and incisive. Perhaps it is also just exactly what the artist saw when the view was made. For example, the woman
crossing the street us stepping up on the curb and raising her skirts slightly–it would’ve been easier to just have her standing there, as with the gentleman immediately in front of her, but for some (creative) reason she is shown in an unusual pose. Ditto the guy leaning against the building at right–he’s out of proportion with the other two figures, unless he was a giant, but he’s just, well, leaning there. He’s also standing next to a shutter, which is down and also leaning against the building. A peddler makes his/her way across the street in the background with a large cart. And the windows in the buildings are unequally decorated, with interior window dressings at different stages of being drawn and not, and with different treatment, and in different states of repair. In short, the image is really a snapshot.
I imagine that somewhere here in this country there could still original telegraph poles standing–the originals started out generally as chestnut, and then force treated with creosote, and were intended to stand for 50 to 100 years. Under favorable conditions in which they were just simply not replaced, it is conceivable that some could have lasted for 150 years.
[Source: E. Seton Valentine, Travels in Space, a History of Aerial Navigation, 1902. Here.]
Images of Hell do not often appear graphically depicted right on the title page of books, even though books speaking to Hell and warning us of its coming number in the hundreds of thousands, if not more, particularly if you interpret religion as the means for keeping people away from the ring of fire. Few people are shy about depicting Hell in general, though there evidently is some reluctance (or forbearance, or oversight) to showing it front-and-center on the title pages of books.
