JF Ptak Science Books

The Future of the Library, 1883--or, Paradise without Heaven

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[Image: work station for Vannevar Bush's visionary Memex machine, the grandfather of the intertubeweba nd hypertext. Source: http://etec.ctlt.ubc.ca/510wiki/Hypertext]

Many have considered books and paradise and the ways to a great library and the correct books to read (and not read).  Seneca was convinced of the efficacy of book on a shelf and their being much like a family, and Erasmus and others believing in books as libraries within themselves but without walls, and of course Borges and the infinity of books exceeding the size of the universe, perhaps having him come to the conclusion that hi sheaven would be a book.  Thee are jusst a few examples of many--very few of all o fthese writers looked into the future at the book and the library.  There was Kurt Lasswitz's 1901 novel The Universal Library (a source of inspiration for Borges' later work, The Library of Babel which was written in 1941); there was H.G. Wells' The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia and then the great Memex idea by the grandfather of the internet, Vannevar Bush, in As We May Think  which was published in The Atlantic in 1945. And of course Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and  Libraries of the Future by J.C.R. Licklider (1965) are also standouts.  Perhaps though the tandout in the practical and possible vision of teh future library was painted by Charles Cutter in 1883.

Electronic Beds, Odors, and Other Futuristic Grotesques, 1945

JF Ptak Science Books   (Expanding an ealier post #610 from 2010)

I am very attracted to the innocence and softly bizarre category of my store’s Naïve Surreal Collection, like this little pamphlet that came out New York in 1945.   The titles in this category are odd but still understandable, and the "what the ____!" response to the subtle ones isn't quite so high and the exclamation points not so many as in the cases of the Naive Surreal titles. 

Bizarre is just that, certainly not hiding behind any lesser or ambiguous title--it seems to be a parody of  small magazines and their advertising sponsors,  and copyrighted by the very far-reaching Hugo Gernsback, who in 1926 started the first magazine dedicated to the genre of science fiction (Amazing Stories) and for whom the World Science Fiction Society’s annual award for Science Fiction Achievement is named (the “Hugo”).  Gernsback evidently had a taste for cheeky parody, producing similar magazines to this called Quip, Forecast, Jolliers, Tame and Newspeep.

I guess that this was deeply weird for mass-production publication, and it was probably funny--now it is just weird, odd, and somewhat discomforting--a successful and intentional reach for being part of the Naive Surreal right from the start.

Experimental Visual License

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[Hugo Gernsback with his TV glasses, 1963]

The "Experimental Visual License" is a very nice turn-of-phrase, and it occurs in a technical and less poetic sense in this nteresting and nicely designed pamphlet from the earliest days of popular commentary on the new medium of television.  The ABC of Television was published in 1937 by the exceptional and extremely busy Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967, basically the inventor of the SciFi magazine) in his Short Wave & Television journal.

The pamphlet includes technical basics ("fundamentals of scanning", "mechanical systems", "Cathode ray emission", transmitter operation") as well as some popular and necessary information, like "when will we have television" and a list of television stations.  

Just for the record, this publication lists 25 active stations, including low wattage stations like W2XAX, the Atlantic Broadcasting Company, in NYC at 50 Watts--there were 9 broadcasters with 150 Watts or less of the 25 listed. There's also a list of nine other "discontinued" television stations ("experimental visual licenses and permits discontinued or expired"), which is where that phrase crackles into life.  

Tik-Tok of the Intertube // How Many Triangles are in the Web?

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Ted Nelson had a lot of ideas about computers, though not that many are remembered today, in spite of a bunch of them being pretty smart. (He coined the words "hypertext" and maybe "hyperlink", for example.)  In any event there's this little diagram of the possibilities of his "world wide network", which I think no doubt is one of the earliest "maps" of the yet-to-exist internet. 

[Picture source:  Ted Nelson, Dream Machines (1974) via Alex Wright, Glut, Mastering Information Through the Ages (2007), p 215.] 

It is also interesting to see that the frontis illustration for his book uses Tik-tok, a metal/machine character from a series of books by (Oz) L. Frank Baum, this one Tik-tok of Oz (1914).

The Pulpy Flying TubePunk of TomorrowLand

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2166

Following this blog's series on the History of Holes and the History of Dots will be a new series:  the History of Tubes, the first note of which is on the flying tubes of TomorrowWorld. Today's installment is a simple picture post:

[Source: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/07/17/science_fiction_science_fact.jpg] 

 
[Source: http://lh6.ggpht.com/_hVOW2U7K4-M/ST2rP9fpFfI/AAAAAAAAugY/u95RIMSHH9g/s1600/34754tutfgjdgdf.jpg] 
 

[Source:"http://androvillans.files.wordpress.com/2011/ 4/b2-astounding_science_fiction_1938071.jpg]

 

 

 

[Source: http://static.flickr.com/100/258214584_3ce3697ab2.jpg] 

 

[Source:http://static.flickr.com/59/188844208_60a18e94d7.jpg]

[Source:http://lh5.ggpht.com/abramsv/R4fcwUKUlTI/AAAAAAAADBI/Xu7s8ESZMyM/s1600/tow_1940summer.jpg]

 

A View of the Future in the Depression--the Movies, 1932

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It is interesting that  a reporting agency like Poor's Industry Service would have such a provocative cover illustration when reporting on the not-so-good economic news of 1932.

Poor's presented the city of the future as the standard banner for their report on the motion picture industry.  The city is massive, a portrait of concrete masses, especially seen in the dam or terminal in the immediate background, and also in the assembly of conical buildings at rear right.  Very impressive, especially considering it was the fourth year of the Depression. 

Their report on the film industry was crisp and fairly bitter, carrying on about risky behavior and out-and-out mismanagement, leading most of the studios into loses and the industry in general to a plunge in composite net earnings and common dividends--a poor year.  In any even I was interested in the illustration, which seems an unlikely place to find such a severely International Style vision of the future.

And the full cover:

Invasion Scare Nihilism vs. Proto-World-Dominating Socialism vs. Pretty, 1893

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post   History of the Future series

There's an awful lot in this nihilistic-pro-socialism revolutionary Sci-fi tale of invasion and Armageddon and deliverance from mega-capitalists than I will make room for here, where "here" is an 1893 tales depicting 1903--I really just wanted to point out the pretty pictures of flying machines. (For a full summary follow the link above to a Wiki article on the book; also do follow the link for a short biography of the author.)

The Similarity of a 16th c Cactus and a 19th c Futuristic NYC

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The future is everywhere and nowhere, hidden and obvious, localized and distant; and sometimes it is there when it really isn't, and vice versa.  This image of the future is the last of these descriptions, though perhaps not even that, because it is a peep at a peep into the future, a reference to a reference.

First, the cactus, seen here, from G.B. Ramusio's (1485-1557)  Navigationi et Viaggi, printed in Venice in 1565 (and finally in three volumes, links to which are below).  Ramusio was a geographer and largely a scholar/reader/armchair-traveler, who collected travel accounts of explorers and published them together--the first such effort of its kind. 

The second image works better if you squint somewhat while looking at the cactus--it comes from the great and slightly problematic Thomas Nast, the Harper's Weekly social/graphic warrior.  The image appeared in 1881, and depicts New York City in the near future, he result of newly-advanced building techniques, including the elevator (and importantly!) the elevator safety brake, which allowed the construction of buildings to great and fabulous heights.  Nast saw a little bit of overeager sky-scraping in it, and pictured variegated but probably dark future from the architectural commotion. 

I'm well aware of this being an enormous stretch, but I couldn't think of anything else to get these two images together on a single post.  (Original article here for the Nast.)

Notes:

Full text for the Ramusio volumes from the Internet Archives site:

• Volume I: Primo Volume delle Nauigationi et Viaggi
• Volume II: Secondo Volume delle Nauigationi et Viaggi
• Volume III: Terzo Volume delle Nauigationi et Viaggi

 

The Mile-High Half-Vertical-Airport, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2134 

 

[Source: Popular Mechanics, June 1935, p 891.]

In the history of Mile High Things I doubt there are many entries for airports--or half-airports.  This if not highly questionable structure inverted the horizontal concept of airport into something else, or at least changed the take-off into quite something different while leaving the landing strips the same. (This is the "half-vertical" part of the title to this post; "half-vertical" doesn't mean "horizontal", though I like that idea.) The new method of getting a plane into the air was straightforwardly breathtaking:  haul the plane up one mile in an elevator and drop it through one of the "launching chutes". After everything is said and done, this is one idea that really didn't need to be three-dimensional.

There was a ride something like this on Coney Island that was very popular for years, a parachute ride where folks were hoisted skyward in a seat on a parachute and then dropped--a much better idea than this mile-high monster.

Here are a few other examples of Mile-High/Long Bits that are posts in this blog:

 

• Out-Eiffeling Eiffel  (above)
• Mile high pile of wood
• A 17 mile x 1 mile flying column planes
• 40 Miles of Warships

 

A Chicken in Every Pot, and a Car in Every Living Room

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Herbert Hoover--perhaps a better classical scholar than president--famously promised "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage".  Well, in this example of thrift and austerity, we see a summer cottage offered for sale for $375.00 (disassembled plus freight), with room for a car, and even for a family.  A small family. 

Which is a detail from:

Ecclesiasticism and the History of the Future

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2128  

There are different types of mystery as any quick look at Medieval legacies will tell you.  Some are mysterious mysteries never meant to be understood outside of obliqueness given their allegorically ambiguity, and some are just, well, different, but answerable. 

The history of the future lends itself a little to the Ecclesiastical (or first) sort of mystery as just described--sometimes, anyway.  Sometimes looking at an imagined future drawn years ago for a period of time that has already passed may lend itself to some fair-game comedy.  But getting things "right" as a futurist/illustrator may be quite beyond the point, as with the example above, drawn by Jim Powers.

Being furiously correct was not the point Powers was trying to achieve.  TO me he was drawing to a certain deep sight, presenting an allegory of possibility, trying to excite some interest in speculation in someone by elements of what he was drawing, not in the overall image.

In the alphabet of 'RAMAS, perhaps the most famous of them all is futurama, which (real or imagined) is part of the continuum of motoramas version of raceoram's spaceorama.  It was in this envelope of futurama that Jim Powers worked his mysteries in a series of images for Life in the Year 2000, laboring away at insight in the mid-1950's.  Surely he could0 not have believed in these rocket-stuffed ultra-streamlined mega-finned interplanetary autos would come into being in five decades, but I'm pretty sure that he believed that somewhere in the details of his work were useful bits/ideas for someone else.  Surely he did not think that the overall vision was more significant than the sum of all of his very interesting parts. 

Futurology: a 1916 Report on the 1950 Death of American Cities

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2098   History of the Future series  

 

"If a city can be unmade, it will not stay so."

That's the hopeful outcome in the opening paragraph of this urbano-centric tale.

In the piece of speculative fiction, "The Man who Unmade Cities" by George Holmes (found in Illustrated World, May 1916), a Mr. John Watterson becomes the ultra-Ford of aviation.  Watterson introduces massive reform in airplane design and production such that the new machines are available to, well, everyone--instead of selling thousands of the new planes, millions are sold.

The story begins with Watterson in childhood, developing his flying interests and, by 1950, andhe becomes a world-beater, and destroyer of cities.  The plane allows people to fly off, leaving the cities in swarms, and "within three years the motorcar was on its way to oblivion".

The revolutionary planes were "flimsy-looking", "dwarfish contraptions", "spindle-shanked", and so light "that a man could carry it" and "sold for a song of one's own singing", and were collapsable, carry-able, and capable of reaching speeds of 70mph.

And at the outset of this triumph "the great city was killed; John Watterson was triumphant".

But the article, reporting from somewhere in the near-future, reported that the city would return, benefiting from the need for closer stores, and the want for a walk, and the plummeting prices of evacuated city spaces--people were drawn back into the city in much the same way they were drawn out to the suburbs.

Nonsense and the Fourth Dimension, 1899

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2059 
 

Gelett Burgess (1866-1951, a Boston high-ground MIT grad poet/critic/all-around lit figure who wrote a lot and created an important Little Magazine called The Lark) continued his work in humor and nonsense and future-vision with his The Lively City O'Ligg, a Cycle of Modern Fairy Tales for City Children,  in 1899.  There's a lot in this squarish book to suggest itself as a sort of farcical-absurdist tomorrow's retro-vision fiction--its only his second book, and not the work he is most famous for, and it was written for the amusement of kids, but really for kids of all ages, and very funny. (Full text here via Internet Archive and prettier edition here via Hathi Trust.)

And it has great illustrations. For example, the front cover artwork (for the edition here) suggests a dimension of space/landscape and how it changes as a moving body viewing that scene approaches the speed of light--this is Burgess' art, and it is amazingly prescient of the modern art that was fast approaching in the next decade or so, only Burgess' name isn't very commonly associated with the precursors of displaying the fourth dimension in art. [He is there, though with early associations with Stieglitz at 291 and Max Weber.  When I think of these early names it is generally of the more-obscure but very early W. Stringham in his "Regular Figures in n-Dimensional Space", published in 1880, followed by the great Jouffret in his geometries of four-space (published in the 1900-1905 or so), and then of course Charles Howard Hinton and the hyperspace philosophy of Claude Bragdon, followed by H.P. Manning's Geometry of Four Dimensions in 1914.  But in between Jouffret and Manning there is also the artwork of Picasso and Braque and Metzinger Gleizes and Le Fauccionier and Gris and Kupka and Duchamp, all of whom addressed this issue of space and time and the fourth dimensions in their work, seminal pieces all and created between 1909-1912.  Burgess himself came to the attention of the Stieglitz group by 1910 or so and was given an exhibition of his watercolors at 291 in 1911.)

The image illustrating the chapter three, "The Three Elevators" (above), just shows one of them bursting through the roof of an "immense building in the City of o'Ligg" "Twenty-seven stories high (!)". (At the time the world's tallest building wasn't in O'Ligg but in NYC: in 1890, it was the New York World Building, New York City (309 feet, from 16 to 26 stories, but that is another story; closer to the time of the Burgess book it was the Manhattan Life Insurance Building, again in New York City which was 18 stories and 348 feet high. So the Burgess building was a big one by world standards in 1899--and of course there would be no tall structures like this without steel framing, or elevators, or for that matter fool-proof elevator emergency brakes. In any event the elevator spikes through the roof of the o'Ligg building, looking for all the world like one of the aliens from Wells' War of the Worlds, which was published a year earlier than this book, in 1898. (I should say the appearance was suggested by the first edition of Wells' 1898 book, as it was not illustrated.)

Another surprising example of found-modern art occurs in the final chapter, "The Eccentric Loom", when loom No. 7--like the other machines and implements in these stories--has a mind of its own and produces "something queer", a "crazy design" producing an "insane tapestry".  The loom is "either crazy", or "it is a mighty clever machine; altogether too clever for me".  But the design as an intentional piece of art for 1899 is pretty extraordinary--and the underlying premise, that the machine might be producing the art on its own, is exceptional and early.                           

To put the artwork in a more machine-creative-context, here's teh Burgess image that starts off the "Insane Loom" chapter:

There's much more in the Burgess book to discuss, particularly in the anthropomorphization of objects, as in the chapters dealing with a sleepwalking house, the boldness of a balloon, the laziness of o'Ligg lampposts, a flying stable, runaway chairs, and the like¹. It is very enjoyable to watch Burgess breathe life into these objects, and give them personalities and lives.  But it is a true joy to see him present some of the objects as the "artist" and not just the tool, as we see here in the opening paragraph of the chapter "The Blind Camera":

"THERE were many Cameras living in the Ligg Photo- 
graphic Parlours, artists who looked down with scorn upon 
all other machines, not only upon the manufacturing 
or working members of the community, but upon such 
aristocrats as the Bicycles and Balloons as well. The 
musical instruments they recognized as artists, it is true, 
but it was the Cameras' opinion that most musical instru- 
ments were a bit mad. Even the Very Grand Pianos 
often got out of tune ; and, besides, they were all totally 
blind, from the Penny Whistles to the Church Organs. 
The Cameras themselves were deaf and dumb, but they 
never thought of that, as they had the best eyes of all 
the objects in the City o' Ligg, except the Telescopes, 
and the Telescopes didn't count ; they were not artists- 
they were merely elaborate tools."


Perhaps our future Robot Overlords (a phrase taken from Mr. Eugene Krabs in 
Spongebob Squarepants) will one day in the future look backwards and find 
the beginning recognitions of the creative souls of machines in the work of 
Mr. Burgess.  

Electro-Punk Memory, 1929

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[Image source: the wonderful Frank Wu (sci-fi fanasy artist) website, here.]

This is the delightful and reaching cover art by the great Frank R. Paul for the October 1929 Science Wonder Stories, illustrating "Into the Subconscious" by Ray Avery Myers, a story of a physician/shrinkologist/physicist who concocts a way of reading into the memories of his subjects--long, deep, ancestral memories. The doc (Macey) is seated at right on the cover, somehow retrieving images from the patient--an idea that has had long legs, and seen famously in the end-all road movies,  Wim Wender's 1991 PunkNoir film, Until the End of the World. Or perhaps its  more future-driven than that, where each viewer is viewing the other's memories or dreams or visions, rather than their own, the images flickering to life onto the monitors, initiated by the simple proximity of another person...all memories available, nothing secret.

At least in the Wenders portrayal of the dream-end of this idea, there was precious little time for anything but dreams.

The Electronic Beds of Electronic Dreams, 1945

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2019   (expanding an earlier post)

I am very attracted to the innocence and softly bizarre category of my store’s Outsider Logic Collection, like this little pamphlet that was published in  New York in 1944.   The pamphlets in this category are odd but still understandable, and the "what the ____!" response to the subtle ones isn't quite so high and the exclamation points not so many as in the cases of the Outsider Logic titles.  Bizarre is different from that, certainly not hiding behind any lesser or ambiguous title--it stretches the category a bit as it is intended to be a parody of the more-popular magazines and their advertising sponsors, but it is really quite a bit different from a simple humous and pun-laden trip into dead-end future visions.  It was copyright by the very far-reaching Hugo Gernsback, who in 1926 started the first magazine dedicated to the genre of science fiction (Amazing Stories) and for whom the World Science Fiction Society’s annual award for Science Fiction Achievement is named (the “Hugo”).  Gernsback evidently had a taste for cheeky parody, producing similar magazines to this called Quip, Forecast, Jolliers, Tame and Newspeep--it seems though that Bizarre may have ultimately morphed into Forecast.

I guess that this was deeply weird for mass-production publication, and it was probably funny--now it is just weird, odd, and somewhat discomforting--a successful and intentional reach for being part of the Uninentional Outsider right from the start.

Most of the magazine is dedicated to imaginary electronic delights--analog electronics (though it is still fairly early to be having such dreams and using the word "electronics", as it was just barely two decades old at this point).  One of the oddest of these inventions of the near future was the Electronic Odoranalyzer, which was necessary for reasons I couldn't discern. (I'd like to assume that odors are calculated and calibrated and a scent is chosen specifically for them, or it.)  

The advertising was unusual as well:  there were hats you could potnetially purchase of weeping willow Platina fox tails; some hats had tanks (as with the Le Chapeau Tank hat, modeled for the magazine and "worn pugnaciously at a slant"), and other hats had simple canons (as with the French Mitrailsuese).  While wearing your tank hat you could also theoretically relax to your favorite tunes in style with a $125,000 radio--it was made for war profiteers who couldn't find banks enough to hold their cash and was billed as too expensive to steal.

Then there's the EBC--the Electronic Bed Company--with their magnificent new product, an invention "by the great sage of Hackensack" so spectacular  as to make ordinary sleeping obsolete.  The bed was an air-conditioned, self-washing, self-adjusting, self covering, fiberglass-cushioned, telephone-capable, air pillowed, air conditioned masterpiece that looked like it was about ready for anything but sleep, which I guess would make it revolutionary.