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first-paper-to-link-co2-and-global-warming-by-eunice-foote-1856
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First Paper to Link CO2 and Global Warming, by Eunice Foote (1856)
Oct 3, 2019
In a series of experiments conducted in 1856, Eunice Newton Foote — a scientist and women's rights campaigner from Seneca Falls, New York — became the first person to discover that altering the proportion of carbon dioxide (then called "carbonic acid gas") in the atmosphere would change its temperature. This relationship between carbon dioxide and the earth's climate has since become one of the key principles of modern meteorology, the greenhouse effect, and climate science. However, no one acknowledged Foote was the first to make this discovery for more than a century, in large part because she was a woman.
Entirely because she was a woman, Foote was barred from reading the paper describing her findings at the 1856 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Albany, New York. Instead, Professor Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian had the honor of introducing her, announcing that science was “of no country and of no sex. The sphere of woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true.” Perhaps this was Henry’s attempt to shield Foote and her findings from sexist criticism or, worse, indifference. Unfortunately, “indifference” would be the best word to describe how her findings were received.
Not only was Foote not permitted to read her groundbreaking paper, she was passed over for publication in the Association’s annual Proceedings. “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of Sun’s Rays” was published in its entirety in The American Journal of Science (September 1856) — but even then it went unremarked.
The Irish physicist John Tyndall, who is still usually credited with founding climate science, three years later made a very similar though more detailed investigation into the effect of gases (and carbon dioxide in particular) on trapping the sun's heat, but he failed to cite Foote’s work. According to Roland Jackson, this was probably because he hadn’t read it. “Direct communication about science across the Atlantic was sparse in the 1850s,” Jackson writes, “and, as American scientific institutions carried relatively little weight in Europe, personal relationships were particularly important”.
It was unlikely that an amateur American woman scientist living in the environs of Albany during the mid-nineteenth century would have connections overseas. Indeed, Foote’s education was eccentric even for her era. In the words of John Perlin, who’s been campaigning for years now to reinstate Foote in the history of climate science:
While in her teens, Foote attended Troy Female Seminary, whose students were invited to attend science lectures at a school that later became Rensselaer Technological University. An ex-con named Amos Eaton, who had been sentenced to life in prison for fraud but was released after four years so he could pursue his life calling as an evangelist of scientific education, had started the university.
Eaton believed that men and women should have equal access to education in the sciences; definitely a wild idea back in the early nineteenth century. To fulfill his goal, he mentored a teacher at the Female Seminary, who established the first all- encompassing science curriculum for women, one that was equal to or better than any offered to men. Eaton also oversaw the construction of chemistry labs at both schools, the first in the world built solely for students. It was here where Eunice developed her experimental scientific skills.
Foote’s seminal experiment was ingeniously homemade. Using four thermometers, two glass cylinders, and an air pump, she isolated the component gases that make up the atmosphere and exposed them to the sun’s rays, both in sunlight and in shade. Measuring the change in their temperatures, she discovered that carbon dioxide and water vapor absorbed enough heat that this absorption could affect climate:
An atmosphere of [carbon dioxide] would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature…must have necessarily resulted.
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public-domain-review
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Oct 3, 2019
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collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:18.643449
|
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"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/first-paper-to-link-co2-and-global-warming-by-eunice-foote-1856/"
}
|
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john-o-westwoods-facsimiles-of-anglo-saxon-and-irish-manuscripts-1868
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John O. Westwood’s Facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon and Irish Manuscripts (1868)
Sep 4, 2019
John Obadiah Westwood (1805–1893) was a bona fide polymath. An archaeologist, entomologist, editor, artist, and art historian, he was a regular contributor to the Gardner’s Chronicle, a founder of the Entomological Society of London, and the author of books about everything from sessile-eyed crustaceans to the early sculptured stones of Wales.
Westwood’s fascination with Anglo-Saxon and Hiberno-Saxon illuminated manuscripts — created in Britain and Ireland between 500 and about 1066 CE — derived in part from a distinctly Victorian national pride. He is insistent in his introduction to Fac-similes of the Miniatures & Ornaments of Anglo-Saxon & Irish Manuscripts (1868) that by publishing these chromolithographic plates, he is giving readers access to “the first chapter of a History of the Fine Arts in this kingdom, extending from the Roman occupation of Great Britain to the Norman conquest.”
But Westwood also brought to these bright, dark age illustrations an entomologist’s intensity of attention. The lithographs, made by W. R. Tymms based on Westwood’s paintings, are intended to highlight a defining characteristic of these anonymous masterpieces:
the excessive elaboration of ornamental details, often exceedingly minute, but nevertheless frequently so arranged as to afford fine broad effects in a manner which might scarcely be supposed possible, and which often, indeed, seem to be the result of accident rather than of design.
It is precisely this “peculiarity”, Westwood adds, “which renders the study of the Manuscripts and other relics of the early Anglo-Saxon and Irish schools so interesting to the Art-student.” (Whether art students would be able to spare the price of £21 — around £1300 in today's money — is doubtful, though Westwood himself was at least hoping to make an affordable volume — “a humble rival of the grand but enormously expensive work of Count Bastard on the Miniatures and Ornaments of early French MSS.”)
The lithographs themselves reproduce details, and sometimes whole pages, from manuscripts held at museums, libraries, and churches all around the British Isles. These reproductions, in the words of Incunabula on Twitter, “did much to fix the visual appearance of manuscripts like the Book of Kells in the Victorian imagination”.
While the style of the Book of Kells has by now grown relatively familiar, the lithographs of the many lesser-known manuscripts reveal the astonishing variety of styles available to these artists, over a thousand years ago. Westwood’s reproductions show us not only the artists’ ornate Celtic knots and squiggles but also their bold use of color and inventive integration of images and letters. Consider the almost American Southwestern color scheme of the seventh-century Royal Manuscript VI’s illustration of the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke, the beautiful interplay of text, ornamentation, and human figures in the ninth-century St. Gall Manuscript, or the lithe trees on either side of the crucified Jesus in the eleventh-century Arundel Psalter. It’s easy to understand how these prints could capture — and continue to capture — people’s imaginations.
You can scroll through our highlights below.
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public-domain-review
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Sep 4, 2019
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:19.177248
|
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"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-o-westwoods-facsimiles-of-anglo-saxon-and-irish-manuscripts-1868/"
}
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the-unicorn-tapestries-1495-1505
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The Unicorn Tapestries (1495–1505)
Jul 23, 2019
Lavishly woven in fine wool and silk with silver and gilded threads, the seven wall hangings collectively known as “The Unicorn Tapestries” are certainly amongst the most spectacular surviving artworks of the late Middle Ages. They are also amongst the most enigmatic, in both meaning and origin. They appear to have been designed in Paris, produced in Brussels or Liège, and for centuries were owned by the La Rochefoucauld family before being purchased by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who donated them to The Met Cloisters in 1937. For a long time now, scholars have noted that the letters “A” and “E” are in several places woven into these pictures, but despite a string of theories — such as the debunked idea that Anne of Brittany commissioned them to celebrate her marriage — no one knows what these letters stand for.
The tapestries themselves tell a story, which is likewise mysterious. “The unicorn was a symbol of many things in the Middle Ages,” as Richard Preston writes, including Christianity, immortality, wisdom, love, and marriage. Add to this that every least element in the tapestries — from flora and fauna to clothes and gestures — had a particular medieval meaning, and it’s little wonder that their significance is unclear to us. Certainly, the unicorn is a proxy for Christ. But he is also an image of the lover brought down like a stag in the allegorical hunts evoked in medieval works like Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess and Gottfried von Straussburg’s Tristan and Isolde. He is both a creature of flesh and spirit, earthly longing and eternal life.
In the first tapestry, we see a group of noblemen and hunters leading their dogs into a lusciously forested landscape, represented by a millefleurs background. A page — apparently posted up in a tree (though to medieval eyes, he would have been understood to be standing in a grove) — is here to signal that the unicorn these men are hunting has been sighted.
The second tapestry gives us our first glimpse of the unicorn himself. He is, as Magaret B. Freeman (a former curator of the Cloisters) says, “extremely handsome — from the tip of his spiraled horn to his curly beard and exquisitely plumed tail.” All around the unicorn, the hunting party stands and talks, watching their quarry as he dips his purifying horn into the water that pours forth from a fountain into a stream. (It was, in the Middle Ages, considered unsportsmanlike for huntsmen to pursue their prey until it had begun to run.) The image is notable especially for its many animals — above all the pairs of goldfinches and pheasants perched on the lip of the fountain. So fine was the textile-makers’ art, it is possible to make out the male pheasant’s reflection in the water.
The third tapestry is the most gruesome. It shows the hunters plunging their pikes into the unicorn at full gallop, struggling to escape the men and dogs just as a stag would — by cooling off and obscuring his tracks in a stream.
In the fourth, the unicorn defends himself. He gores a greyhound with his horn and kicks at one of the huntsmen.
The two remaining fragments of the fifth tapestry reveal a surprising turn of events. A maiden has beguiled the unicorn, who is now so docile he doesn’t even seem to mind the dog licking at the wound on his back. However, the presence of one of the hunters blowing his horn does not bode well.
And indeed, in the sixth tapestry two separate scenes are depicted — the brutal killing of the unicorn (in the upper left-hand corner) and the transportation of the dead unicorn on a horse’s back (front and center). Here the unicorn’s wound is clearly Christ-like, and the expressions on the faces of those gathered round suggest they are at the very least ambivalent about the success of this hunt.
The seventh tapestry shows the unicorn alive and well, and entirely tamed. He is fenced in and chained to a tree, but the chain is less than secure and the fence is low. He has submitted to his captivity. The red stains on his flank, in the words of the Met’s catalog, “do not appear to be blood, as there are no visible wounds like those in the hunting series; rather, they represent juice dripping from bursting pomegranates” — a medieval symbol of marriage and fertility.
The Cloisters’ current curator posits this last tapestry “may have been created as a single image rather than part of the series.” But a former curator, Margaret B. Freeman thought like many others that it may have been the mystical conclusion of the series, in which the “unicorn, miraculously come to life again,” stands for both the risen Christ and the “lover-bridegroom, at last secured by his adored lady.”
Whatever their meaning, the Unicorn Tapestries are among the most impressive medieval artworks in existence. The work of several (if not several dozen) designers, painters, and weavers, their rich beauty startles us into attention even today.
Learn more about the tapestries in this great book from The Met, and also this fascinating article "The Fruits and Nuts of the Unicorn Tapestries".
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public-domain-review
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Jul 23, 2019
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collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:19.656589
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-unicorn-tapestries-1495-1505/"
}
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tlingit-myths-and-texts-1909
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Tlingit Myths and Texts (1909)
Oct 16, 2019
“No one knows just how the story of Raven really begins,” says Dekinā’k of the Box House people in Sitka, Alaska, “so each starts from the point where he does know it.” Could there be a more perfect way of introducing a creation myth than this?
The importance of Raven to the stories of the Tlingit — who settled in southeastern Alaska around 10,000 years ago — would be hard to overestimate. Raven is a culture hero and trickster (like Prometheus), a shape-shifter (like Proteus), but he is also the creator of the earth. Back when there was no light in the world because a rich old man on the Nass River kept it all to himself, Raven “thought over all kinds of plans for getting this light into the world and finally he hit on a good one.” The rich old man who kept all the light to himself had a daughter, whom Raven impregnated by transforming himself into a small piece of dirt in a drop of water, which she swallowed. When Raven was born a human boy, he cried incessantly until his grandfather, the rich old man, consented to let him have the three bags he so noisily desired. The first contained the stars and the second the moon, which he threw up into the sky. Taking the third bag (which contained the sun), the boy “uttered the raven cry, ‘Gā,’ and flew out through the smoke hole.” The old man, tricked out of his treasure, could only complain: “That old manuring raven has gotten all of my things.” Meanwhile, the world as we know it had begun.
Tlingit Myths and Texts is a report on Tlingit culture made for the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC in 1908. These reports are not always thrilling to read. Yet in this case the reporter — American ethnologist, folklorist, and linguist John Reed Swanton (1873–1958) — approached his task with such respect for the beauty of the tales told to him by the people he encountered in Sitka and Wrangell, Alaska, the book remains enlightening and delightful.
Raven is the chief protagonist in Tlingit Myths and Texts. Always on the move, always scheming, always stirring up trouble wherever he goes, Raven dives into a whale’s mouth and builds a fire; he travels to a town of ghosts, who rob him blind; he teaches a perpetual loser to be the Greatest Gambler in the World; he steals salmon from men and herring from gulls — then he flies away, crying Gā.
In addition to the many Raven tales, there are some wonderful origin stories. We learn, for example, how the killing of a giant clam in a little bay on the Tenakee inlet caused the place to smell horrible and allowed many things to grow there, how the seal people created killer whales out of wood and chalk, and how a cruel woman who burnt her mother-in-law with hot coals was transformed into the first screech owl. ※※Indexed under…OdourOrigin of life due to rotting clam's terrible
Metamorphoses abound in the Tlingit’s stories. One of the most terrifying of these is “The Woman Taken Away by the Frog People,” in which a girl is coaxed away from her village by a frog disguised as a handsome young man:
Pointing toward the lake he said, “My father’s house is right up there,” and the girl replied, “How fine it looks!” When they went up to it, it seemed as though a door was opened for them, but in reality the edge of the lake had been raised. They walked under. So many young people were there that she did not think of home again.
When eventually, after much effort, the people of the village liberate the girl from the frog people, she is listless and unable to eat. “After a while they hung her over a pole, and the black mud she had eaten when she was among the frogs came out of her, but, as soon as it was all out, she died.”
Although primarily a collection of tales whose origins predate the Tlingit’s first contact with Europeans (in the eighteenth century), Tlingit Myths and Texts also records the catastrophic results of this contact.
The very short tale that Swanton titles “How Protestant Christianity Was First Heard of at Sitka” is particularly haunting, because of all that it leaves unsaid. The teller of the tale — who is again Dekinā’k of the Box People — recounts how a man traveled south from Sitka and returned after two months:
When he came ashore he called all the people to a dance and told them that God (Deki’-anqā’wo, Distant-chief) had come down from heaven to help them. Then all the women made beadwork for their hair and ears. One evening, when they were through with that, they again began dancing. While the women danced they would fall flat on their backs. When this happened, in accordance with directions the man had received below, they brought up salt water, wet part of each woman’s blanket and flapped it against her breast to make her come to. This prevented the smallpox from having any effect upon her. They kept on dancing a whole year.
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public-domain-review
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Oct 16, 2019
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:20.123306
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/tlingit-myths-and-texts-1909/"
}
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fabres-book-of-insects-1921
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Fabre’s Book of Insects (1921)
Jul 4, 2019
In the first chapter of this condensed and beautifully illustrated English version of his ten-volume series on insects, Jean-Henri Fabre (1823–1915) introduces the reader to his workshop — which is to say his home — located on a pebbly expanse of land near the Provençal village of Sérignan du Comtat, “where hardly any plant but thyme can grow”. This might seem an unpromising setting for a naturalist, but for Fabre nothing could have been more suitable than this “happy hunting-ground of countless Bees and Wasps”.
Never have I seen so large a population of insects at a single spot. All the traders have made it their centre. Here come hunters of every kind of game, builders in clay, cotton-weavers, leaf-cutters, architects in pasteboard, plasterers mixing mortar, carpenters boring wood, miners digging underground galleries, workers in gold-beaters’ skin, and many more.
If you have already lost track of whether Fabre is talking about insects or people here, you are not alone. His ten-volume Souvenirs entomologiques, or Entomological Memoirs, made Fabre famous in France and abroad not only as a populariser but as a humaniser of insect life. He was respected as an ethologist (one who studies animal behaviour) by his fellow scientists: Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution Fabre would vociferously oppose, cited him as an “inimitable observer” in both The Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man. But he was beloved by readers and writers: Victor Hugo dubbed him the Homer of the Insect World.
Like Jacques Cousteau in the twentieth century, Fabre’s greatest accomplishment was perhaps to have brought out the beauty and drama in the lives of creatures that had hitherto been regarded with horror, if regarded at all. He turned his attention not just to bees, whose praises have of course been sung since the classical era, but to wasps, weevils, ants, glow-worms, caterpillars, and cicadas. He also sometimes wrote about wild flora and fauna, and in one rare chapter about his cats — all in prose characterized, a little like Cousteau’s, by a well-informed wonder at the natural world, appealing to both children and adults:
Few insects enjoy more fame than the Glow-worm, the curious little animal who celebrates the joy of life by lighting a lantern at its tail-end. We all know it, at least by name, even if we have not seen it roaming through the grass, like a spark fallen from the full moon. The Greeks of old called it the Bright-tailed, and modern science gives it the name Lampyris.
Fabre’s Book of Insects, however, is geared specifically toward children. The texts here have been taken from Alexander Teixeira de Mattos’s unabridged translations of the Entomological Memoirs and “retold” (abridged and significantly revised, if not outright bowdlerized) for a young readership by Mrs Rodolph Stawell — the author of, among other things, Fairies I Have Met.
The illustrations by E. J. Detmold (who also provided pictures for Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee and W. H. Hudson’s Birds in Town and Village) likewise emphasize the whimsy in Fabre’s accounts of our six-legged neighbours. The “Sacred Beetle” is shown working “in partnership with a friend”; the praying mantis is depicted in the middle of her deathly dance; and an Italian locust, with very long legs, appears to be enjoying herself enormously as she buries her eggs in the dirt. ※※Indexed under…BeetleSacred
You can find more of Detmold’s illustrations below, and discover all of Texeira de Mattos’s (unabridged) translations of Fabre’s Entomogical Memoirs here.
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public-domain-review
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Jul 4, 2019
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:21.087030
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"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/fabres-book-of-insects-1921/"
}
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werner-s-nomenclature-of-colours-1814
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Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1814)
Text by Sam Dolbear
Apr 2, 2019
Go to your local DIY store and the paints will no doubt carry strange names: Tawny Day Lily, Meadow Mist, Candied Yam, Marshmallow Bunny, to name but a few. As Daniel Harris points out in Cabinet magazine, paint names developed their own poetic style and, like a certain tradition of lyric poetry they make reference to nature to express mood or atmosphere. Likewise, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colour (first published in 1814) constructs a system or taxonomy for the classification of colour with reference to things in the natural world, (rather than to objects of everyday artifice, as with the work of Emily Noyes Vanderpoel). And though the goal is to primarily enable a scientific structure of identification, rather than evoke mood, the end product can't help but veer to the poetic.
The book is based on the work of the German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner who, in his 1774 book Treatise on the External Characters of Fossils (translated into English in 1805), developed a nomenclature of colours so as to offer a standard with which to describe the visual characteristics of minerals. Clearly taken by the idea, some three decades later the Scottish painter of flowers Patrick Syme amended and extended Werner's system. In addition to the mineral referent, for each of Werner's colours Syme added an example from the animal and vegetable kingdom, as well as providing an actual patch of colour on the page to accompany the words. While Werner found a suite of 79 tints enough for his geological purpose, now opened up to other realms of nature, Syme added 31 extra colours to bring the total to 110.
With Syme's new reference categories there's born a whole new world of relationships between disparate aspects of nature, encounters dictated solely by colour. For example, for "skimmed-milk white" we have the white of the human eyeballs (animal), the back of the petals of blue hepatica (vegetable), and common opal (mineral); for "lavender purple" we have "the light parts of spots of on the under wings of Peacock Butterfly" (animal), "dried lavender flowers" (vegetable), and "porcelain jasper" (mineral). Wonderfully odd monochrome tableaux are conjured: upon a crop of calamine a bed of straw in which sits a polar bear; or the style of an Orange Lily encrusted with Brazilian topaz and the eyes of the largest flesh fly.
Syme’s confidence in obscure references to the natural world came from an obsession with taxonomies at the time, a line developed from Carl Linnaeus to Charles Darwin (who made use of Werner’s Nomenclature on the Beagle). Such people often relied on a network of collectors and explorers, those obsessed with ordering and categorizing, pinning down butterflies and stuffing birds. In an age of mass digital reproduction, the pinning down of colour is perhaps as difficult as ever. It might be easier to turn to Pantone though, rather than Abraham Gottlob Werner.
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public-domain-review
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Apr 2, 2019
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Sam Dolbear
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collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:21.379183
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/werner-s-nomenclature-of-colours-1814/"
}
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the-notre-dame-cathedral-in-art-1460-1921
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The Notre-Dame Cathedral in Art (1460–1921)
Text by Adam Green
Apr 16, 2019
“Its architecture... possesses something so singular, so bold, and at the same time so delicate, that it has ever been esteemed one of the handsomest structures.” (From vol. 18 of the 1810 Encyclopaedia Londinensis)
"Notre-Dame Cathedral is the very soul of Paris but so much more—it is a touchstone for all that is the best about the world, and a monument to the highest aspirations of artistic achievement that transcends religion and time. It has survived so much—from the French Revolution to Nazi occupation—to watch its devastation is excruciating.” – Barbara Drake Boehm, Paul and Jill Ruddock, Senior Curator for The Met Cloisters.
Like many around the world, we were so sad and shocked to see the Notre-Dame burning — to witness such history in flames. But also relieved to learn now that so much was saved, including the main structure and many of its stunning stained-glass windows. We spent the day yesterday picking out highlights from the many centuries of artworks to feature the iconic building — from its illuminated punctuation of medieval skylines to grainy detailed studies at the birth of photography. We are presenting them here in rough chronological order, which we hope gives a sense of how this magnificent building — more than eight centuries old — has inspired and outlasted so many epochs and lives and, thanks to the dedication of another generation of craftspeople, will continue to do so.
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public-domain-review
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Apr 16, 2019
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Adam Green
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collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:21.915891
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-notre-dame-cathedral-in-art-1460-1921/"
}
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abide-with-me-1914
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Abide With Me (1914)
Text by Adam Green
Apr 30, 2019
As the RMS Titanic sank, and thousands met their death, it is said the ship’s band played Abide with Me, a hymn written some 65 years earlier by Reverend Henry Francis Lyte. If true it would be an appropriate soundtrack, not only for the poignant content of the lyrics, speaking as they do of life's end, but also because it was finished as Lyte himself was meeting death, not in the icy waters of the north Atlantic ocean but from tuberculosis whilst holidaying in France.
There's some debate about when exactly the hymn was first begun. Some accounts say it was written in 1847, shortly after Lyte delivered his final sermon, before setting out for a therapeutic holiday in Europe in an attempt to cure his, by then, acute tuberculosis; others that it was written a quarter of a century earlier, and only rediscovered in a drawer as Lyte was packing for his trip. Likely is that it was a mixture of the two, the hymn's beginnings found in the drawer and substantially reworked that night and as he made his way through France (trying to get to Italy, which he'd never reach). Sending home to his wife his final revisions for the hymn while passing through Avignon, he died in Nice just three weeks later, in the Hotel d’Angleterre, and was buried in the nearby English Cemetery.
There was on odd symmetry perhaps to Lyte passing away on the French Riviera and in the rooms of a hotel with such a name. For the last 23 years of his life he had lived and preached in Brixham, one of the three small towns that together make up a stretch of the southern English coast known as the "English Riviera". His home was Berry Head House, a former military hospital (now hotel) situated a short distance from the Napoleonic fortifications which dot the promontory (overlooking the waters where the HMS Bellephron anchored in 1815 on its way to delivering Napoleon to St Helena). Curiously, in another fact of strange association, in the same notebook containing Lyte's final revision for Abide with Me was found a poem addressed to the French government protesting against the repatriation of Napoleon’s remains.
Although it was originally written to its own tune, the hymn is now almost exclusively sung to "Eventide", a melody composed in 1861 in just ten minutes by the organist William Monk, during what his widow recalled as “a time of great sorrow". "Hand in hand", she wrote, "we were silently watching the glory of the setting sun (our daily habit) until the golden hue had faded… Then he took paper and pencilled the tune which has gone all over the world.”
In this form — Lyte's words to Monk's music — the hymn has since become one of the most popular in the world, commonly sung in the trenches of the First World War, and by Nurse Edith Cavell the night before the Germans shot her for aiding British soldiers in their escape from Belgium. Since 1927 it has been played at every FA Cup Final, and just ten days after the 9/11 attacks in New York it was memorably played by a Salvation Army band at Ground Zero.
Of the many versions recorded over the decades we are featuring one from 1914 sung by Olive Kline and Elsie Baker for Victor records.
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public-domain-review
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Apr 30, 2019
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Adam Green
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:22.454516
|
{
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"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/abide-with-me-1914/"
}
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the-book-of-dreams-and-ghosts-1897
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The Book of Dreams and Ghosts (1897)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Apr 10, 2019
Seventy eight weird happenings are contained in this volume, from a demon strangling Devonian farmers in 1682 to a poltergeist terrorising a contemporary Chinese couple. With it the author Andrew Lang continues his mission to imbue the modern mind with some of the mystery he feels an obsession with empiricism had squeezed out.
Lang was an astonishingly versatile writer of short stories, novels, histories, anthropology, literary criticism and, most famously, twelve books of fairy tales. Though he loved to lose himself in an outlandish mystery he had a naturally sceptical turn of mind. One moment he would be criticising eyewitness accounts of a haunting, the next modern scientists who dismiss such accounts out of hand. The preface to The Book of Dreams and Ghosts poses the fundamental question:
"Do you believe in ghosts?" One can only answer: "How do you define a ghost?" I do believe in hallucinations… But as to whether they are ever caused by psychical influences from the minds of others, alive or dead, not communicated through the ordinary channels of sense, my mind is in a balance of doubt.
As he explained in an earlier work, Books and Bookmen (1886), that mind was long ago primed to ponder such matters:
At the age of ten I had the tales of the ingenious Mr. Edgar Poe and of Charlotte Brontë "put into my hands" by a cousin who had served as a Bashi Bazouk [mercenary in the Ottoman army] and knew not the meaning of fear. But I did… Every night I expected to see a lady all in a white shroud stained with blood and clay stagger into my room, the victim of too rapid interment.
In 1894, Lang had written Cock Lane and Common-Sense, his book most centrally concerned with psychical research, exploring clairvoyance, death-wraiths, spectral lights, phantom hands, possession, trance, bilocation and out-of-body experience among other phenomena. But The Book of Dreams and Ghosts was perhaps more about entertainment than research. It recounts a variety of phantasmic experiences either in Lang’s own words or through direct quotation. He titles the stories in a tantalising, Poe-esque manner – “The Dream that Knocked at the Door”, “The Scar in the Moustache”, “The Hand of the Ghost that Bit” – and tops and tails them with commentarial glue.
There is something dreamlike about the way the narration jumps blithely between time and place, from a fin-de-siècle Norfolk country house, to 1700 BC Assyria, and on to the Scottish archipelago of St Kilda where cows share the visions of their clairvoyant milk-maids. There is a kind of order to the arrangement of the cases, however, as it advances “from the normal and familiar to the undeniably startling”. The committed reader may experience the book as a dream intensifying. Indeed what Lang says of dreaming could equally be said of reading:
In dreams, time and space are annihilated, and two severed lovers may be made happy. In dreams, amidst a grotesque confusion of things remembered and things forgot, we see the events of the past… we are present in places remote; we behold the absent; we converse with the dead, and we may even forecast the future… Now, the ghostly is nothing but the experience when awake of the every-night phenomena of dreaming.
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public-domain-review
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Apr 10, 2019
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Ned Pennant-Rea
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:22.920682
|
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edward-lears-nonsense-botany-1871-77
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Edward Lear’s Nonsense Botany (1871–77)
Jul 16, 2019
With his Nonsense Botany series the Victorian artist and writer Edward Lear turned his peculiar brand of verbal and visual invention to the world of plant taxonomy. A little over a century earlier the Swedish natural scientist Carl Linnaeus had laid the foundations for the binomial nomenclature system, in which a species is given a two-part name: the first part identifying the species' genus, the second part identifying the species within the genus. The system, with its usage of Latin grammatical forms, proves fertile ground for Lear's imagination. Originally the series was put out in three instalments — in Lear's nonsense collections of 1871, 1872, and 1877 — and all three featured in a posthumous collection published in 1888 from whose pages we have taken the following highlights.
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public-domain-review
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Jul 16, 2019
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:23.336036
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}
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august-strindberg-s-celestographs-1893-4
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August Strindberg’s Celestographs (1893–4)
Text by Sam Dolbear
Apr 24, 2019
In the village of Dornach in Austria, during the winter of 1893-4, the Swedish playwright August Strindberg laid out a series of photographic plates on the ground. Removing the "middle-man" of a camera (and even lens), using the light-sensitive plates directly, he was attempting to capture images of the night sky above. He named the technique "celestography", literally to record or write (-graph) the stars or sky (celesto-). At first glance, the images appear to have been successful: galaxies take shape, speckled with clouds and other astronomical and meteorological phenomena. As the plates developed, one can imagine Strindberg gazing upon them in wonder, wondering if he had truly managed to reveal something previously invisible to the naked eye or even the most up-to-date telescope: a form of celestial light hitherto unrecorded. It seems Strindberg believed this to be true, or at least very much wanted to believe. Right after the experiments were finished, according to Douglas Feuk writing in Cabinet, he sent a number to the famous astronomer (and writer) Camille Flammarion in Paris. Flammarion, however, rejected them and Strindberg never received a reply. The astronomer perhaps knew what they were: not "celestographs" at all, but "chemigrams"; images that resulted from chemicals mixing with photosensitive emulsions and other particles, such as drops of dirt and dust. At this point, the cosmos falls to the dirt of the earth, the sacred is profaned, the minutiae of the universe become confused with the largest of forms and vice versa. Interestingly, for Strindberg, the earthly cause of these cosmos-like images may not have necessarily indicated a failure as such, but rather affirmation of his mystic philosophy that “everything is created in analogies, the inferior with the superior”. As David Campany writes:
For Strindberg they were perhaps all these things at once, indivisibly: the infinite heavens and the earth, base material and the lofty representation, fact and wish. Worldly matter and the stars could resemble each other and be thought as part of the same whole. This certainly went well with Strindberg’s interest in the latest scientific accounts of the universe, which suggested a common origin of all the planets and stars.
This mystical interplay, and the role played by chance, also fed into his ideas on painting. Strindberg's approach to painting was based in a response to the materiality of the paint, letting forms emerge from his interaction with it. This is what he called “chance in artistic creation”, as expressed in his so-titled 1894 essay. This description of modernist painting seems it could equally be applied to the celestographs:
At first you see nothing but a chaos of colors; then it begins to look like something, it resembles — no, it does not look like anything. All of a sudden, a point detaches itself; like the nucleus of a cell, it grows, the colors are clustered around it, heaped; rays develop, shooting forth branches and twigs like ice crystals on the window panes… and the picture reveals itself to the viewer, who has assisted at the birth of the painting.
Even after Stringberg’s death, the celestograph plates continued to develop. As Feuk so elegantly puts it: “Thumbprints have left traces, and grease or ink stains on the back have in time wandered through the paper”. In his opinion, “this has not ruined, but rather perfected these images of night — sometimes with light veils of bluish precipitates, sometimes with rusty brown oxidized spots that could possibly be interstellar dust clouds or just ordinary earthly skies lit up from below”. Whereas a photograph freezes a moment in time, a fleeting configuration of light, these images live on, they perfect further an image of nature, if one not entirely intended by Strindberg. Nature here appears more mysterious, even more modern, than art itself.
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public-domain-review
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Apr 24, 2019
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Sam Dolbear
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:23.853780
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}
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the-language-of-flowers-an-alphabet-of-floral-emblems-1857
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The Language of Flowers: An Alphabet of Floral Emblems (1857)
Jun 26, 2019
The Victorian interest in botany went hand in hand with the Victorian interest in the “language of flowers”. At a time when many feelings were discouraged and repressed, flowers, whether sent singly or in complicated arrangements, communicated the incommunicable.
As we learn in this sumptuously illustrated Alphabet of Floral Emblems, the carnation represents fascination, the geranium gentility, and the dahlia instability. Some of the associations between feelings and flowers persist today. The rose, of course, represents love. But were you aware that a deep red rose represents “bashful shame”? Or that a gum cistus — or gum rockrose, as it’s more often called today — says to the recipient “I shall die to-morrow” (a line from the lovelorn ballad “Barbara Allen”)?
The book contains a kind of dual-language dictionary of flowers and their meanings, alphabetically arranged first by floral name and then by the emotion or message they convey. It also offers up a selection of poems — mostly by long-forgotten poets such as C. A. Fillebrown, Miss J. A. Fletcher, and John Kenyon — which supplement these more straightforward meanings and hint at the level of complexity the floral language can achieve. “For example”, says the writer of the book’s introduction:
if a flower be given reversed, it implies the opposite of that thought or sentiment which it is ordinarily understood to express: again, a rosebud from which the thorns have been removed, but which has still its leaves, conveys the sentiment, ‘I fear, but I hope,’—the thorns implying fear, as the leaves hope; remove the leaves and thorns, and then it signifies that ‘There may be neither hope nor fear’; while again, a single flower may be made emblematical of a variety of ideas; a rosebud that has been already used and deprived of its thorns, says, ‘There is much to hope,’ but stript of its leaves also, it tells, ‘There is everything to fear.’
Imagine how a simple walk in a garden might be transformed by this sensitivity to every flower’s every meaning. One can almost see how, not so long ago, the nosegay might “be made to take the place of more formal epistles”.
There were, of course, other books dedicated to the theme, with some variations on flower meanings but many remaining the same. The earliest we have found is this published in New York in 1834, which, alongside the flower meanings, offers up relevant couplets.
In 1858, just a year after the main book featured in the post came this The Illustrated Language of Flowers, compiled and edited by Mrs L. Burke.
And some decades later, in 1884, the illustrator Kate Greenaway published Language of Flowers.
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public-domain-review
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Jun 26, 2019
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:24.173674
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agnes-catlows-drops-of-water-1851
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Agnes Catlow’s Drops of Water (1851)
Jun 4, 2019
In the 1850s, the British were mad for microscopes. It was not the first time. Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, published in 1665, had been tremendously popular with readers, including Samuel Pepys, who once stayed up until two in the morning marvelling at the giant fleas and minuscule cells that the book revealed to him. The wealthy Pepys was in the unusual position of being able to afford a microscope of his own. In general, though, these devices remained out of reach for amateurs until the Victorian era, when enthusiasm for nonspecialist study of the natural world made microscopes, like stereoscopes, a regular feature in middle-class parlours. The unseen world first described in the seventeenth century could now be seen.
Agnes Catlow’s Drops of Water; Their Marvellous and Beautiful Inhabitants Displayed by The Microscope (1851), was published toward the beginning of miscroscopy’s second wave. Focusing on animalcules, or Infusoria (the “little animals” that infuse stagnant water, undetectable to the naked eye), Catlow acts as a friendly guide to any amateur in possession of a good microscope — an inexpensive instrument that not only provides entertainment “at all seasons of the year” but permits us to enter an ocular wonderland.
Indeed, Catlow in her preface seems to anticipate the tiny little door through which Alice, on the cusp of her adventures, longs to go:
My readers must fancy themselves spirits, capable of living in a medium different from our atmosphere, and so pass with me through a wonderful brazen tunnel, with crystal doors at the entrance. These doors are bright, circular and thick, of very peculiar construction, having taken much time and labour to bring to perfection. A spirit named Science opens them to all who seek her, and feel induced to enter her domains. At the end of the tunnel we find other portals, much smaller, and more carefully constructed, and two or three in number; when these are opened, we are in the new world spoken of. And now I see your astonishment; your minds are bewildered with the variety of new beings and forms you behold, all gliding and moving about without noise and at perfect ease.
Instead of the hookah-smoking Caterpillar and Cheshire Cat, however, the new beings in Catlow’s enchanted realm are varicoloured blobs with proboscises and “hairs in constant motion”. The accompanying lithographs, by A. Achilles, are captivating, but the real drama of the book lies in Catlow’s accounts of the animalcules, enlivened by a scientist’s precision and a storyteller’s knack for detail:
A great portion of the green matter found on stagnant water is formed by individuals of the genus Glenomorum; they cluster occasionally, and possess a single red eye, and a double hair-like proboscis.
The family Cryptomonadina is distinguished by the individuals having a lorica, or shell, which in some is found to be inexhaustible by fire.
Throughout Catlow is careful to emphasize the cheerful novelty of what can be seen in these “minute portions” of the Creator’s work. She calls herself an amateur and addresses herself to amateurs — most of whom she assumes to be children, new to science. Her intention is to keep things light. Yet, even acknowledging the beauty of her descriptions, there is more than a hint of the monstrous in the shifting, aqueous shapes of these invisible creatures.
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public-domain-review
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Jun 4, 2019
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:24.691808
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"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/agnes-catlows-drops-of-water-1851/"
}
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the-false-young-man-1937
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The False Young Man (1937)
Jul 2, 2019
In this recording — made at the Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County, Kentucky, by the legendary musicologist Alan Lomax — you can hear Abner Boggs sing a heartrending rendition of a song called “The False Young Man”.
Songs by this name — like the ballad printed on the broadside shown above — have been in circulation since at least the seventeenth century. But the roots of the song Boggs sings are more intimately tangled with the old Scottish ballad “Young Hunting” (AKA “Love Henry”). The ballad tells the story of a woman scorned by her lover who then stabs him in the heart and dumps his body in a river or well. Most versions also include a talking bird that torments the murderess or, in the most supernatural versions, brings her to justice. The song has had a long life, and has been covered in various versions by everyone from Bob Dylan to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
Like many ballads, “Young Hunting” fragmented over the years, becoming less and less story-oriented. By the nineteenth century, in both Scotland and Appalachian America (where the British settlers had brought their ballads with them), the long and bloody tale it told had splintered into a series of more impressionistic verses, morphing into, among other things, “The False Young Man”.
There are still plenty of lyrical variations on “The False Young Man” (also sometimes called “The False True Love” and “Bird in a Cage”). Sometimes the song is sung from the perspective of an observer who sees the two lovers meet and talk, and sometimes from the perspective of the jilted lover herself, who is no longer a murderess but simply a suffering soul, crying out against the untrustworthiness of men in general:
I never will believe what another man says,If his hair be yellow, black or brown,Unless he’s on some gallows treeSwearing he would like to come down.
In Boggs’s version, the traditional gender roles are reversed. Here it is a man lamenting the faithlessness of a woman. (The song should really be called “The False Young Woman”.) But all these scholarly quibbles seem beside the point the moment you hear Boggs’s voice. He belts out the tune with a broken-hearted vulnerability that’s both beautiful and poignant.
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public-domain-review
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Jul 2, 2019
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:25.123249
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"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-false-young-man-1937/"
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bob-s-electrical-theatre-1906
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Bob’s Electrical Theatre (1906)
May 29, 2019
A film by the pioneering Spanish film director and cinematographer Segundo Chomón. With his innovative use of early splice-based tricks and a penchant for optical illusions he is often compared to the slightly earlier Georges Méliès, and indeed has been dubbed “The Spanish Méliès” by some. Though the similarities are clear, Chomón departs from Méliès in his variety of subjects and his use of animation, an art form he played a key role in developing. The then relatively new technology of electricity was a particular fascination of Chomón's — its enigmatic qualities particularly apt for exploration via the medium of animation, allowing as it did the visibility of manual force to be lost amid the cuts to leave only objects moved by some mysterious means, i.e. electricity. In 1905, he created The Electrical Hotel, a short about an ultramodern hotel, in which he made luggage appear to be unpacking itself. The following year came Bob's Electrical Theatre (also referred to as Miniature Theatre) which sees puppets get up to various routines, including wrestling, fencing, and what appears to be a short bout of bum smacking. The version we are featuring here comes from a copy preserved and restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Of the film, Jerry Beck from the UCLA site comments:
Although this is one of the earliest stop-motion puppet films ever created, it is quite sophisticated and loaded with charm.... The lifelike use of puppet dolls here predates the work of Ladislas Starevitch (pioneering stop-motion puppeteer) and Willis O’Brien (The Lost World and King Kong).
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public-domain-review
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May 29, 2019
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:25.448553
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through-the-first-antarctic-night-1900
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Through the First Antarctic Night (1900)
Jun 21, 2019
Memoirs of early Antarctic expeditions are, by necessity, meditations on disaster. Sea ice, frostbite, freezing winds, the compass-upsetting effects of the magnetic poles — everything in these frigid zones poses a threat to human life, and the threat is often carried out. The Worst Journey in the World (1922) by Apsley Cherry-Garrard — a surviving member of Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova expedition of 1910–1913 — is probably the most famous of these memoirs. The first, at least of the modern era of exploration, was Frederick A. Cook’s Through the First Antarctic Night, 1898–1899, a remarkable journal in which he recounts the highs and (many) lows of his experience as part of the Belgica expedition.
Often considered the first proper expedition of the so-called "Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration", it would set a precedent for hardship, endurance, and disaster in the exploration of such climes. Cook and his fellow explorers — including Roald Amundsen, who'd years later go on to beat Scott to first reach the South Pole — became the first to spend winter on Antarctica, when their ship became trapped in the ice for more than a year, from February 1898 to March 1899. For two months — from 17th May 1898 until 23rd July — they were plunged into a sunless world, an ordeal of great physical and mental toil wonderfully captured in the journal of Cook — the American-born anthropologist, surgeon, and leader of the expedition.
Although he was later the subject of controversy — accused of bogusly claiming, in 1906, to have scaled Mount McKinley, and, in 1908, to have been the first to reach the North Pole — in Through the First Antarctic Night Cook shows himself to be reasonably modest and a charming writer of prose. He is especially good at evoking the “soul-despairing” darkness of the polar night, which had never previously been experienced at that latitude. All around the ship, the freezing wind howls, the pack ice groans, and the snow blows wildly, pricking the skin like needles. Occasionally, when the weather is right, strange lights appear low in the sky:
Precisely at twelve o’clock a strange rectangular block of fire appeared in the east-south-east. Its size was that of a small tabular iceberg, but it had a dull crimson glow which made the scene at once weird and fascinating. Its base rested on the horizon and it seemed to rise, brighten, and move northerly. […] We watched this with considerable awe and amazement for ten minutes before we could determine its meaning. It passed through several stages of forms, finally it separated, and we discovered that it was the moon. It was in fact a sort of mirage of the moon, but the strange rectangular distortion, the fiery aspect, and its huge size, made a sight long to be remembered.
Darkness descends on the men in more ways than one. In June, the death of Emile Danco, the much-loved Belgian magnetician, whose heart troubles were exacerbated by exertion in the cold, casts the crew into a spell of despondency. Then, less than three weeks later, Cook writes: “We are playing cards and grinding the music-boxes, and trying in various ways to throw off the increasing gloom of the night; but something has happened which has added another cloud to the hell of blackness which enshrouds us.” The cat named Nansen, which one of the sailors brought with him from Europe, has died in agony, and for many days Cook can find nothing to note in his journal — there being “nothing to mark time or disturb the gloom of the long black monotony”.
Hope returns with the return of the sun. “In these dreadful wastes of perennial ice and snow, man feels the force of the superstitions of past ages,” says Cook, “and becomes willingly a worshipper of the eternal luminary." Every man aboard the Belgica chooses a spot from which to watch the colourful lights that brighten the greyish darkness surrounding them, rendering “the death-dealing depression of the night a thing of the past”. When at last the sea ice thaws, Cook’s party is able to sail north to Patagonia, where they frighten the natives with their drunken, sea-legged walks and their battered faces and clothes.
There is no shortage of gloom in Cook’s account, but there is also no shortage of excitement. The auroras and magic lights, the desolate sea and icescape, the occasional “visit of a penguin or seal” all punctuate the somnolent tedium “induced by the long night of months”. The penguins especially — the much-admired birds the men both hunt and play with — provide very welcome entertainment. Cook’s photographs of them, and above all the photographs titled “Penguin Interviews”, are among the many palpable pleasures of the book.
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public-domain-review
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Jun 21, 2019
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:25.773032
|
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karl-blossfeldt-s-urformen-der-kunst-1928
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Karl Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst (1928)
Text by Sam Dolbear
May 15, 2019
At the grand old age of 63, just four years before his death, Karl Blossfeldt produced his first photography book, the internationally best-selling Urformen der Kunst (later translated into English as Art Forms in Plants). The book's 120 plates display Blossfeldt's remarkable photographs of plants – varieties from Equisetum hyemale (Winter Horsetail) to Tellima grandiflora (Fringe cups) — all captured in extraordinary detail, as if under the microscope, frozen into new forms almost beyond recognition.
Born in 1865 in Germany’s Harz Mountains, Karl Blossfeldt lived a childhood in the open air. As a teenager he became an apprentice in a foundry making wrought iron grilles and gates, objects decorated with plant-motifs, before then moving to Berlin to study at the School of the Museum of Decorative Arts. In 1890, he moved to Rome to study under the decorative artist Moritz Meurer, where he created and photographed casts of botanical subjects, travelling as far as North Africa to collect specimens. From 1898, and for the next three decades, Blossfeldt taught design at Berlin's School of the Museum of Decorative Arts. It was here, using a homemade camera with custom magnifying lenses, that he first began to take his remarkable photographs, for the purpose of teaching his students about the patterns and designs found in natural forms. Through the technology of photography Blossfeldt was able to reveal to his students details difficult to see by the naked eye. As he wrote in a 1906 letter to the school's director:
Plants are a treasure trove of forms — one which is carelessly overlooked only because the scale of shapes fails to catch the eye and sometimes this makes the forms hard to identify. But that is precisely what these photographs are intended to do — to portray diminutive forms on a convenient scale and encourage students to pay them more attention.
In light of this mission to reveal overlooked beauty, it is perhaps fitting that Blossfeldt chose not to obtain his specimens from florists or botanical gardens, but rather from track sides and railway embankments, what he called “proletarian areas”. In this sense, the photographs also stand as strange memorials to long-forgotten patches of land. These plants, many weeds, originally "out of place", now find refuge within the corpus of photographic history, immortalised upon the page.
When the gallerist and collector Karl Nierendorf came across Blossfeldt’s vast collection of photographs, he sought to publish them — Urformen der Kunst is the result. Though we know only a few hundred images today, largely selected by Nierendorf, it was thought that Blossfeldt had taken as many as 6000, many hung from the walls of his Berlin studio. In his introduction to the first edition, Nierendorf writes that Blossfeldt finds a “happy permeation” of three elements: nature, art, and technology. It is a common trope, oft-repeated in relation to Blossfeldt’s work. According to Hans Christian Adam, Blossfeldt strips nature down.
Blossfeldt might have used a fairly basic camera, but the results are startling. The plants become graphic, geometric. One cannot help but draw parallels between Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst and Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur, published a couple of decades prior. In both works, the distinction between nature and art blur. Both depict nature in such detail, with such magnitude, that it appears as almost artificial, as an artwork. Indeed, upon closer inspection it is revealed that Blossfeldt did in fact sometimes retouch his photographs to emphasise and enhance the beauty of the forms he sought to celebrate.
Blossfeldt’s work was quiet and unassuming, but it quickly aligned with the avant-gardes of Weimar Germany: from "New Vision" to "New Objectivity". It provided a counterpart in the natural world to what others had attempted to achieve in the excess of the modern city: from the work of August Sander to László Moholy-Nagy. The critic Walter Benjamin was one of the first to review Blossfeldt’s book, claiming his fellow German had discovered the "optical unconscious": that which was invisible to the naked eye, revealed retrospectively or technically through the apparatus of the camera. In this sense, Blossfeldt completes Goethe’s idea of the Urpflanze — a primordial plant that contains within itself an infinity of potential forms: when dogwood becomes a bishop’s staff, when horse-chestnut shoots become totem poles, and the curly stems of the fern become iron railings. It is an art of revelation — "new objectivities" of nature revealed through the camera.
Urformen der Kunst was the first of three photo books by Blossfeldt: four years later there came Wundergarten der Natur (1932), and posthumously Wunder in der Natur (1942). All of Blossfeldt's published photographs have been collected in the highly recommended 2014 book from Taschen, Karl Blossfeldt: The Complete Published Work.
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public-domain-review
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May 15, 2019
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Sam Dolbear
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:26.261225
|
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plants-and-their-application-to-ornament-1896
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Plants and Their Application to Ornament (1896)
Text by Adam Green
Apr 25, 2019
In addition to being one of the most in-demand graphic artists of the late nineteenth century, the Franco-Swiss decorative artist Eugène Grasset was also a teacher and theorist. After years of expounding his influential theories at various art and design schools of Paris, in 1896 he published his Plants and Their Application to Ornament, a wonderful pictorial summation of his key idea concerning the use of natural forms as the basis for developing decorative motifs.
From his introduction:
An artisan is above all one who has learnt the nature of the vehicle he works in. The next step in his education is the study of natural forms: the step after that is to study and understand the limitations imposed by art principles upon these natural forms when he comes to employ them pictorially or in ornamentation. The draughtsman who fails to apprehend the laws which tell him when to go forward and when to use restraint in representing the object as he sees it, is as great a blunderer as he who mis-draws a tree branch or the features and limbs of his model, or he who confuses his perspective. The art of drawing is not the art of observing forms and objects alone, it is not mere mimicry of these objects; it is the art of knowing how far and wherein, and with what just limitations, those forms and objects can be reproduced in a picture, or in a decorative work.
The book is structured around a visual analysis of twenty-four common plant forms. For each Grasset offers a naturalistic study (albeit in his pared down style) followed by two plates depicting progressively more abstracted adaptations of the plant's form in decorative designs, as well showing them in the context of their potential use, from stained glass to furniture to vases to lace. The stunning images were executed in colour lithography which required several runs through the printing press, one for each colour, to carefully build the final multicolor print. Although Grasset's name is in lights, the drawings and lithographs were actually executed by his students, including several by Maurice Pillard Verneuil (1869-1942), who himself went on to publish his own influential ornamental pattern books.
The debt owed to William Morris, who died the year Grasset published the work, is clear — but in Grasset's patterns we see an even further abstraction, an approach that would prove a huge influence on the emerging Art Nouveau movement of the time.
The images we are featuring in this post are from a scan at the Internet Archive (from Smithsonian Books) though be warned it is missing a few plates. A complete copy can be seen at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, but we are not featuring them here because they've sadly put restrictions on re-use.
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public-domain-review
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Apr 25, 2019
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Adam Green
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:26.728453
|
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"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/plants-and-their-application-to-ornament-1896/"
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bracelli-s-bizzarie-di-varie-figure-1624
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Bracelli’s Bizzarie di Varie Figure (1624)
Text by Adam Green
Apr 9, 2019
At first glance you may be forgiven for thinking these images to have sprung from some hitherto unknown corner of the Cubist movement, but these remarkably prescient etchings are in fact the creation of an artist working a whole three centuries earlier. In 1624, Giovanni Battista Bracelli — an Italian engraver and painter working in Florence — produced an extraordinary book of prints titled Bizzarie di Varie Figure (Oddities of various figures). Its forty-seven plates show a variety of human figures mainly interacting in pairs, their bodily forms composed of a range of objects, mostly abstract – cubes, interlocking rings, and squares — but also such things as rackets, screws, braided hair, and the natural forms of trees. Although the idea of aggregating human forms from other objects was not new — famously explored half a century earlier by fellow Italian Guiseppe Arcimboldo — in their experimentation with abstraction these sketches by Bracelli truly seems to break new ground, prefiguring a certain way of thinking about the human form that would not be explored again for many centuries later.
In addition to possible inspiration from Luca Cambiaso's block figures of the previous century, a major influence on Bracelli appears to have been Jacques Callot's Balli di Sfessania. Prepared in Bracelli's hometown of Florence and published in 1622, Callot's series of twenty-four etchings each depict a pair of posturing figures which, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "was an attempt to document not the commedia dell'arte, as was once thought, but rather a dance of the type generally known as the moresca (symbolizing the conflict between the Moors and the Christians) but known in Naples in its Maltese form as sfessania". In addition to the formal pairing of figures, Giovanni Battista Bracelli seems to have borrowed something of the performance angle too, but adding to the dancers and duelists with postures reminiscent of tumblers, acrobats, and contortionists.
Not a lot is known about Bracelli's life. Sometimes going by the name Brazzè, and also the nickname “il Bigio” ("The Gray One", apparently a reference to his penchant for gray clothes) he is recorded on the membership records of Florence's Academy of Drawing from 1619 to 1635. He studied with the painter Jacopo da Empoli (1551–1640), and most of Giovanni Battista Bracelli's other work is in a similar popular vain to his master's (nothing like the Bizzarie di Varie Figure) — though he did produce an amusing alphabet composed of human forms. For more info on his life and Bizzarie di Varie Figure we highly recommend this essay by Sue Welsh Reed.
The images featured in this post are from the US National Gallery of Art, and are digitisations of a copy held by the Rosenwald Collection, which you can also see over at the Library of Congress.
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public-domain-review
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Apr 9, 2019
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Adam Green
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:27.194048
|
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optics-illustrations-from-the-physics-textbooks-of-amedee-guillemin-1868-1882
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Optics Illustrations from the Physics Textbooks of Amédée Guillemin (1868/1882)
Jul 9, 2019
Exploring various aspects of the science of optics, these illustrations were all featured in the French science writer Amédée Guillemin’s popular textbook Les phénomènes de la physique (1868) and later reprinted in his five-volume magnum opus, Le monde physique (1882) (of which you can see a condensed 1877 English version here).
Many of the prints are the work of the Parisian intaglio printer and engraver René Henri Digeon. Some of the more psychedelic-looking illustrations by Digeon are based on images made by the physicist J. Silbermann showing how light waves look when they pass through various objects, ranging from a bird’s feather (plate VI in Les phénomènes de la physique) to crystals mounted and turned in tourmaline tongs (plate VIII in Les phénomènes de la physique and plate VII in Le monde physique).
These images — along with one executed by M. Rapine (based on a painting by Alexandre-Blaise Desgoffe), showing the effects of light on a soap bubble — were used to explain the phenomenon of birefringence, or double refraction: the colourful results of light waves moving through material at unequal speeds. And their subjects were not chosen haphazardly. Newton was famously interested in the iridescence of soap bubbles. His observations of their refractive capacities helped him develop the undulatory theory of light. But he was no stranger to feathers either. In the Opticks (1704), he noted with wonder that, “by looking on the Sun through a Feather or black Ribband held close to the Eye, several Rain-bows will appear.”
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public-domain-review
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Jul 9, 2019
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:27.881067
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{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/optics-illustrations-from-the-physics-textbooks-of-amedee-guillemin-1868-1882/"
}
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x-is-for
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X is for...
Text by Adam Green
Jun 12, 2019
In 1895, the physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered x-rays, a groundbreaking moment in medical history that would lead to myriad improvements to people's health. Perhaps one overlooked benefit though was in relation to mental health, specifically of those tasked with making alphabet books. What did they do before X-rays? Xylophones, which have also been a popular choice through the twentieth century to today, are mysteriously absent in older works. Perhaps explained by the fact that, although around for millennia, the instrument didn't gain popularity in the West (with the name of "xylophone") until the early twentieth century. So to what solutions did our industrious publishers turn?
As we see below, in addition to drawing on names — be it historical figures, plants, or animals, all mostly of a Greek bent (X being there much more common) — there's also some more inventive approaches. And some wonderfully lazy ones too.
Xerxes, Xantippe, and more...
As a figure of note, you might hope it would be your epic deeds accomplished that would lead to your name being uttered by students for millennia to come — not for the coincidence of the tricky letter with which your name began. But so it was for the Persian king Xerxes, who in the field of nineteenth-century alphabet books achieved what he could never quite achieve in fifth-century BC Athens, that is, domination. Though there was perhaps some small solace in that he was likely the very first historical figure of which many a child would learn.
Xanthippe, the supposedly "fiery" wife of Socrates also gets a good look in, often shown in a rage pouring a chamber pot over her husband's head, which — according to legend – the philosopher accepted with a simple “After thunder comes the rain”.
Other historical figures too can be seen to rise through the ranks of their lesser initialed contemporaries. Here it is Pope Sixtus II (also spelt Xystus, which comes from the Greek word for "polished").
Here it is a historical horse, which judging from its military context, most likely refers to the steed Hector rode in the Trojan War, though it might also refer to one of Achilles' two horses, or the Xanthus that was one of the Mares of Diomedes.
Xany
We are not sure of the exact history of this figure known as Xany, but he seems to be associated with foolishness — perhaps a convenient mis-spelling of the more common "zany" (which itself refers to "Zanni", a character type of Commedia dell'arte best known as a trickster).
The Natural World
Of course, the more Greek-orientated names of plants and animals were an option too — here we see Xanthium and Xylon (burdock and cotton), and Xiphias (swordfish).
As long as it is in there somewhere...
If not at the beginning then as long as there was an X in there somewhere that also seemed to be OK. All the better if it was in the form of "Ex" and so actually sounded out the letter itself.
The conveniently named XX ale makes a few appearances too. No-one's totally sure from where this unusual name stems, but possibly it was originally more akin to a crucifix and marked on the barrels by the monks to indicate that — swearing on oath — the batch was sound. It may also just simply have been an indicator of strength.
A picture says a 1000 words (and the letter X)
Though it often meant a total methodical departure from how every other letter was approached, the distinctive shape of the X could also provide fertile ground for the struggling yet inventive alphabet creator.
In this wonderfully erudite alphabet book, it's X as a symbol for "kiss" (curiously rendered as "ks.§§", as though the word unaltered would be too salacious for the page). ※※Indexed under…KissX as a symbol for
The anonymous group approach
Perhaps the worry regarding X spread to the letters around it. Many books resorted to giving up on the whole last section of the alphabet, transforming these letters into a nameless gang.
Or X is for... X (or just nothing at all)
Some publishers just seemed to give up altogether, opting for a more meta approach — making X simply stand for... X.
In this example, the despair is palpable. They've simply refused to offer up any word beginning with X, instead using the space to comment on the difficulty.
And this one is perhaps the best of all. They've just missed it out entirely.
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public-domain-review
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Jun 12, 2019
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Adam Green
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collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:28.406630
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/x-is-for/"
}
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the-joys-of-young-werther-1775
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The Joys of Young Werther (1775)
Text by Sam Dolbear
May 7, 2019
The publication of J. W. Goethe’s short epistolary tale of teenage angst and suicide The Sorrows of Young Werther caused shockwaves upon its publication in 1774. Shortly after its release so-called "Werther Fever" broke out over Europe. In addition to the emergence of a range of Werther merchandise — prints, porcelain, and even perfume — young men began to imitate Werther, their new hero of youthful disaffection and nihilistic abandon. They'd dress in his garb of yellow trousers and blue jacket, wander through forests in melancholic fashion, and even sadly go so far as to, like Werther, end their own lives. Within the first few weeks of publication, numerous incidents of suicide were recorded, some of the departed found reportedly clutching copies of the book. A moral panic ensued and the book took on a pathological quality: some seeing Goethe's tale not just as a well-crafted expression of Weltschmerz (an almost untranslatable pain or weariness with the world; what Søren Kierkegaard called “sickness until death”) but also its cause. Subsequently the term Werther-Effekt has emerged to refer more generally to the phenomenon of copycat suicides. ※※Indexed under…Yellowtrousers of melancholy
The book also inspired an industry in publishing, with a vast corpus of poems, operas, novels and commentaries from Heinrich von Kleist’s Der Neue (glücklichere) Werther (1811) to Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar (1939). Even the English novelist William Thackeray wrote a poem in parody, in which Werther “sighed and pined and ogled, | And his passion boiled and bubbled, | Till he blew his silly brains out, | And no more was by it troubled.” Charlotte, his unrequited love, having seen his body, goes on doing nothing but preparing dinner: bread and butter.
Emblematic of this Werther obsession in the literary world was The Joys of Young Werther, published only a year after Goethe’s novel, by the German bookseller Friedrich Nicolai. The book imagines a conversation between two figures: Hans, who represents the youth seduced by Werther, and Martin, who encapsulates the sensible adult, weary of the fashion for Werther’s Weltschmerz. Hans describes the power of Goethe’s novel in the very opening lines of the text: “The devil take the book The Sorrows of Young Werther.... It pierces you to your very marrow, making all your veins swell and your brain flash.” Martin seeks to convince Hans to relinquish this particular pact with the devil, through the promise of hope. At this point, the dialogue breaks off and Nicolai’s parodic re-writing of the novel starts up.
Nicolai has Werther’s pistol loaded not with a bullet but with “a bladder filled with blood, blood from a chicken that I was supposed to eat for dinner with Lotte this evening”. When the "bullet" lands on Werther’s head, the chicken’s bladder bursts, to indicate his dramatic demise. Werther survives, able to live another day. As per a Hollywood ending, Lotte and Werther go on to marry and they buy a house. Despite adversity (including their wealthy neighbour building a theme park next to their house), they integrate back into society, prosper, and live happily ever after. Nicolai’s tale jumps between parody and moralism, where his faith in a pastoral bliss holds totally redemptive power:
After about sixteen years, their hard work and thriftiness had made them prosperous. Werther was now able to give up his onerous work, and so he purchased a little smallholding that lay on the side of a hill, dotted with high elms and ancient oaks. It had only a tiny house, but there were fertile fields and a garden surrounding the house in which, beneath tall trees, there was a well, cut twenty steps deep into the rock, just as Werther loved it. Here he sat himself down and once again relished the simple harmless delight of a man who serves at table a head of cabbage that he himself has grown, and in that same moment enjoys not only the cabbage itself, but also all the good days, the fine morning on which he planted it, the beautiful evenings on which he watered it and took pleasure in its continued growth, all at once. For in the cabbage fields Lotte grew vegetables and roots that filled their respectable country table. The orchard was Werther’s responsibility, and the children planted flowerbeds full of tulips and fair anemones.
This literary affair does not end here though. In 1775, the same year as Nicolai’s takedown, Goethe composed a small poem in an attempt to ridicule his parodist. In the poem, Nicolai stands next to Werther’s grave and defecates on it: “He sat down, as it wouldn’t keep | On the grave, and left his little heap | Benignly his muck he contemplated | Went his ways much alleviated | And musing to himself did say: | “Poor fellow! A life spent amiss! | I’m sorry he had passed away. | If only he’d learned to shit like this | He’d be alive today!” Goethe’s friend, Schiller, also hits back. In 1797 he published a poem that depicts Nicolai as a stork, unable to eat the food offered to him, unable to comprehend abstract thought. The rift lasted a long time. Goethe penned other attacks, including even giving Nicolai a small cameo in Faust as a "Proktophantasmist" — a neologism by Goethe which combines the Greek word for anus (proktus) with phantom (Nicolai began to be plagued by ghostly apparitions, and cured himself by applying leeches on his backside). Goethe’s responses perhaps proves that he was the master not just of tragedy, nor of comedy, but the amalgamation of the two. In line with Charlie Chaplin’s dictum so many years later: “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot”.
See an English translation (not public domain) here by Margaret Hiley. And read an English version of Goethe's original Sorrows of Young Werther, here in a 1902 translation by R. D. Boylan, and in a more modern translation here.
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public-domain-review
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May 7, 2019
|
Sam Dolbear
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collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:28.908082
|
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|
jan-van-kessel-s-signature-of-caterpillars-and-snakes-1657
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Jan van Kessel’s Signature of Caterpillars and Snakes (1657)
Text by Adam Green
May 28, 2019
As far as artist signatures go, Jan van Kessel's seventeenth-century painting in which he spells out his own name with caterpillars and snakes must be up there with the best of them. Although it could be seen as a somewhat self-aggrandising move to make one's own name the subject of a painting (albeit one measuring only 15 x 20cm) the fact it is formed from such "lowly" creatures — the subject to which he dedicated much of his painting career — lends it a certain humility. In addition — given there survives from the following year a complete set of seventeen plates which includes a similar signature panel — it is highly likely that this was not intended as a stand-alone piece but rather as simply the signature aspect of a much larger set. The idiosyncratic signature also found its way into one of his most famous series, The Four Parts of the World. In the central panel of the Europe section it appears as a painting within a painting — though in a slightly different arrangement, with the name spelt "Jan" instead of the earlier "Joan", and sporting a later date of 1664.
Van Kessel was a highly regarded painter based in Antwerp and from a prominent family of artists — Jan Brueghel the Elder was his grandfather and Jan Brueghel the Younger his uncle. In addition to the study of insects, to which his signature nods, he was also known for his floral still lifes and multi-part allegorical works. His son Ferdinand painted in a very similar vein, including his own version of The Four Parts of the World series in which, in the central Europe panel, he'd worked in his very own entomological signature.
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public-domain-review
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May 28, 2019
|
Adam Green
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:29.375691
|
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john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685
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John Locke’s Method for Common-Place Books (1685)
Text by Sam Dolbear
May 8, 2019
Popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a "commonplace book" was a notebook used to gather quotes and excerpts from one's literary wanderings — a kind of personalized encyclopedia of quotations. In "A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet" from 1721, Jonathan Swift remarked that a commonplace book is something that “a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that great wits have short memories”. The English physician and philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) was all too aware of the grip of amnesia and the shortness of memory. In his seminal Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) he wrote of his rival Blaise Pascal, who he named as the “prodigy of parts”, who “forgot nothing of what he had done, read, or thought.” Locke, in reaction, attempted to simulate Pascal’s "hyperthymesia", not in the mind, but upon the page: through the construction of a system of "commonplacing", as a form of what Swift called “supplemental memory”.
Locke's method built on a long tradition of commonplace note taking, most famously John Milton’s from the middle of the century. Locke was one of the first to formalise a method though. Developed over 25 years of personal note-taking, it was formalised in his publication of Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueils (1685), later translated into English as New Method of Organizing Common Place Books (1706) and published posthumously. His technique of "commonplacing" always began with a stack of white, empty sheets bound together into a single volume. At the front he placed an index of two pages, which listed every letter of the Latin alphabet in one column next to each vowel (though only for the combinations that were possible, hence just "Q.u").
From this index, Locke unfolds his method:
When I meet with any thing, that I think fit to put into my common-place-book, I first find a proper head. Suppose for example that the head be EPISTOLA. I look unto the index for the first letter and the following vowel which in this instance are E. i. If in the space marked E. i. there is any number that directs me to the page designed for words that begin with an E and whose first vowel after the initial letter is I, I must then write under the word Epistola in that page what I have to remark.
The ingenious utilisation of the second vowel allowed Locke, and those that followed his method, to systematically organise and be able to locate a great range topics in the limited space of the double page index (as opposed to simply arranging alphabetically). The large array of words encapsulated by an initial letter and vowel combination also meant, in the main notes area, less wastage of paper than a more traditional alphabet-based model might encourage (where each letter was preassigned a number of pages), and more structure than a purely chronological approach would offer.
In general, the commonplace book would result in a wonderfully tangled mixture of reading and writing, where disparate ideas could be fruitfully thrown together onto the same pages, fixed together only by a formal method (and of course similar word roots). According to the historian Robert Darnton, this led to a very particular structuring of knowledge: commonplace users "broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebook." It was a mixture of fragmented order and disorder that anticipated a particular form of scientific investigation and organisation of information. Locke’s humble two page method, in this sense, prefigures libraries filled with volumes of encyclopedias, from Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735) to Luke Howard's classification of clouds.
With the rise of printing technologies, common-place books reflected an anxiety with a deluge of new information still present today. John Locke was concerned with not just how to access it, but how to organise and recall it. In the age of the internet, as Steven Johnson writes, we are equally led into “common places”, where associations are constructed through happenstance (e.g. from a Google search); our job, he adds, is to sort that information out whilst also enabling connections to germinate.
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public-domain-review
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May 8, 2019
|
Sam Dolbear
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:29.704748
|
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john-martin-s-illustrations-of-paradise-lost-1827
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John Martin’s Illustrations of Paradise Lost (1827)
Jun 6, 2019
Paradise Lost (1667) tells the oldest story in the book. Blind as Homer and permanently exiled from political life after the Restoration of 1660, John Milton dictated an epic of the series of falls — of the angels, of Adam and Eve, of human language — that led to the corrupt and warlike world in which he lived. His declared intention was to “assert eternal providence / And justify the ways of God to men.” But as every reader of Paradise Lost can attest, Lucifer and the other fallen angels come out far more interesting than God, a peculiarity that prompted William Blake to claim that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”.
Illustrators of Paradise Lost have often drawn more from the poem’s infernal depths than its heavenly heights. Blake’s wild watercolors (painted in about 1807) delight in depicting the muscular immensity of Satan, spying on Adam and Eve and coaxing them to sin. Gustave Doré’s etchings (circa 1866) bask in the possibilities of inky darkness and pay special attention to the angels’ wings, which are swan-like as long as they are allied with heaven but turn bat-like the moment they fall.
In 1824, the English artist John Martin (1789–1854) was commissioned to offer up his own interpretation — producing a set of images that were originally sold to subscribers and then, in 1827, used to adorn a large two-volume edition of the poem. His mezzotint engravings, too, emphasize the devil and the darkness. Like Blake, he portrays the bodies of God, the angels, Adam and Eve as classically beautiful; like Doré, he uses light and shadow to point up the drama inherent in Milton’s scenes. But Martin, a radical romantic at heart, is especially excited by the drama of the scenery — whether the caverns and crags of hell or the English oaks and cumulonimbus clouds of Eden.
The genre of scenery ranges widely. In one engraving, we see Eve alone in a pastoral landscape crowded with trees, looking “into the clear / Smooth lake, that to me seemed another Skie” (See image 7). In another, we find God dividing light from darkness in a celestial swirl of eerie fluorescence, water, and mist (image 12). Early in the epic, we behold Satan holding court, as Laura Cumming puts it, “in what looks like a solo performance in the Albert Hall” (image 4). And, at the end, we wonder over Adam and Eve clad like the Flintstones, cast out of the Garden into an endless waste, which is apparently inhabited by dinosaurs (image 16).
Much in Martin’s landscapes is recognizably romantic. The mountainous clouds, enfolding foliage, and wrinkled ridges of rock are beautiful, but nonetheless familiar. What makes these illustrations of Milton enduringly fascinating are the traces of early industrial architecture evident, for example, in “The Bridge over Chaos” [15], which looks, in the words of the British Library catalogue, “almost like a sewer tunnel or mine-shaft,” perhaps reflecting “the fact that Martin was, at this time, designing schemes for improving towns with embankments and sewers, underground railways and glass shopping complexes.”
Read more about John Martin in our essay by Max Adams, "John Martin and the Theatre of Subversion".
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public-domain-review
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Jun 6, 2019
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:30.145683
|
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|
|
edgar-allan-poes-the-gold-bug-1843
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Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” (1843)
Jul 18, 2019
Edgar Allan Poe may be known for his tales of the supernatural, but he had a remarkably analytical, even mathematical mind. He was extremely wary of romantic ideas of literary inspiration, claiming that, in writing “The Raven”, the work “proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.” And he had no love at all for his more romantically minded colleagues. He thought Emerson “over-rated” and once insulted the poets Cornelius Mathews and William Ellery Channing with an algebraic pun: if Mathews was “ex ecrable,” he said, Channing was “x plus 1-ecrable”. ※※Indexed under…X (letter)as a humorous algebraic variable
Even a story as fanciful as “The Gold-Bug” originated in Poe’s obsession with logic. The plot is far-fetched: William Legrand, who has lost his family fortune, one day notices a golden beetle on the beach at Sullivan’s Island. He has his servant, Jupiter, wrap the bug up in a piece of parchment, on which he later discovers a coded message written in invisible ink, revealing the spot where Captain Kidd buried his treasure two centuries earlier. Once he has decoded this message, Legrand heads out with Jupiter — and their neighbour, who narrates the tale —to unearth the treasure, whose exact location he determines by ordering Jupiter to drop the bug through the left eye socket of a skull nailed to the end of a tree branch.
At this point the narrator, like the reader, is bewildered — “dying with impatience for a solution of this most extraordinary riddle”. But Legrand does not waste anyone’s time. He promptly gives a systematic explanation, several pages long, of how he discovered and decoded the secret message.
First, Legrand says, he determined the language of the message (English), before proceeding to ascertain the most and least frequently used characters. Since in English “the letter which most frequently occurs is e,” he substituted the most frequently used character in the coded message (8) with the letter e, then searched for a three-character combination ending in 8 (;48), which he guessed to represent “the” (the most common English word), and so on, until he had completely solved the centuries-old riddle — and become rich to boot.
Legrand is very much acting as Poe’s mouthpiece here. In fact, most of Legrand’s explanation is paraphrased from articles on cryptography Poe had published in Alexander’s Weekly Messenger a few years earlier. Inviting readers to send him coded messages where, “in place of alphabetical letters, any kind of marks are made use of at random,” Poe pledged to decode every message “forthwith — however unusual or arbitrary may be the characters employed.” This is precisely what Poe proceeded to do. Over the next months, he solved somewhere between thirty-six and one hundred cyphers in the interest of proving his assertion — which Legrand also makes in “The Gold-Bug” — that “human ingenuity cannot concoct a cypher which human ingenuity cannot resolve”.
In doing this, Poe was not trying (merely) to wow people with his genius for solving ciphers; he was also trying to make a case for the primacy of logic. In his essay “A Few Words on Secret Writing”, published in 1841 — after he had become a minor celebrity for his cryptographic prowess — he outlined not only the history of cryptography but also the rational methods by which one could decode almost any text.
Eventually, Poe was — as he wrote the poet John Tomlin — obliged to swear off ciphers:
The reason…will be readily understood. Much curiosity was excited throughout the country by my solutions of these ciphers, and a great number of persons felt a desire to test my powers individually — so that I was at one time absolutely overwhelmed; and this placed me in a dilemma; for I had either to devote my whole time to the solutions, or the correspondents would suppose me a mere boaster… You will hardly believe me when I tell you that I have lost, in time, which to me is money, more than a thousand dollars, in solving ciphers, with no other object in view than that just mentioned.
Poe left his newspaper readers, in December 1841, with two final cryptographs, which he credited to one Mr W. B. Tyler. As far as anyone can tell, no one was able to solve these cryptograms until the 1990s, when American literature professor Terence Whalen and Canadian software engineer Gil Broza finally cracked their codes.
Yet one question remains unanswered even today: Who was W. B. Tyler? Poe himself? Or the rare cryptographer who could out-cryptograph Poe? Arguments on either side abound, as seems appropriate. However logical Poe may have preferred to be, he was no stranger to mystery.
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public-domain-review
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Jul 18, 2019
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:30.607280
|
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"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/edgar-allan-poes-the-gold-bug-1843/"
}
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the-beast-of-gevaudan-1764-1767
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The Beast of Gévaudan (1764–1767)
Jun 19, 2019
In the 1760s, nearly three hundred people were killed in a remote region of south-central France called the Gévaudan (today part of the département of Lozère). The killer was thought to be a huge animal, which came to be known simply as “the Beast”; but while the creature’s name remained simple, its reputation soon grew extremely complex. Not only was the Beast of Gévaudan said to prefer attacking women and children (and above all small girls), according to firsthand accounts published in the press it often “removed the victim’s head and drank all her blood”, leaving nothing behind but a pile of bones.
Illustrators had a field day representing the Beast, whose appearance was reported to be so monstrous it beggared belief. One poster, printed in 1764, described it as follows:
Reddish brown with dark ridged stripe down the back. Resembles wolf/hyena but big as a donkey. Long gaping jaw, six claws, pointy upright ears and supple furry tail — mobile like a cat’s and can knock you over. Cry: more like horse neighing than wolf howling.
Another print (see below), probably published the same year, bears the caption: “Picture of the monster desolating the Gévaudan, This Beast is the size of a young Bull, it likes to attack Women and Children, it drinks their Blood, cuts off their Heads, and carries them off.” A reward of twenty-seven hundred livres is promised to whoever brings the animal down.
The rampage of the Beast of Gévaudan was one of the first international news stories. First breaking in the Courrier of nearby Avignon, it was quickly taken up by the papers of Paris and from there spread abroad. A German print from September 1764 shows the Beast, looking more like a quadrupedal kangaroo than a wolf or hyena, attacking an improbably well-dressed man in a rather Teutonic-looking landscape.
Many artists emphasized the goriness of the Beast’s eviscerating attacks, as in this French illustration published by Mondhare in Paris.
Many also emphasized the Beast’s preference for feminine victims. In this engraving by the French printer M. Ray, which depicts the beast as a semi-erect reptilian lion, the text assures us that “There can no longer be any doubt regarding the appearance of the ferocious animal ravaging the Gévaudan”.
By the winter of 1764–1765, the attacks in the Gévaudan had created a national fervor, to the point that King Louis XV intervened, offering a reward equal to what most men would have earned in a year. Tens of thousands of hunters descended on the region. King Louis also deployed a dragoon captain, named Jean-Baptiste Duhamel, and a number of royal troops. Yet neither the swarms of hunters, nor Duhamel, nor the pair of professional wolf stalkers Louis eventually sent to replace Duhamel, were able to track down the animal responsible. It was not until September 1765 that François Antoine, Louis’ lieutenant of the hunt, shot the enormous “Wolf of Chazes”, which was stuffed and put on display in Versailles.
Although Antoine also killed the wolf’s similarly enormous mate and cub, the attacks continued. But by now the Royal Court had lost interest. The story had played itself out, and public attention had moved on to other matters. Luckily a local nobleman, the Marquis d’Apcher, organized another hunt, and in June 1767 the hunter Jean Chastel laid low the last of what had turned out to be the Beasts of the Gévaudan.
Supernatural explanations of the attacks of 1764 to 1767 continue to circulate. Even today, some believe they were the work of werewolves or meneurs de loups (magical “wolf whisperers”, or “leaders of wolves”, who can command wolves to do their bidding). But most historians now agree that the Gévaudan — a sparsely inhabited, extremely impoverished rural area — was, as Graham Robb puts it, “infested with wolves”.
You can read more about the Beast of Gévaudan in Jay M. Smith’s Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast and see more illustrations below.
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public-domain-review
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Jun 19, 2019
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:31.084661
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-beast-of-gevaudan-1764-1767/"
}
|
|
my-diary-in-a-chinese-farm-1894
|
My Diary in a Chinese Farm (1894)
May 22, 2019
With her first novel, Flirts and Flirts (1868), which sharply criticised the socialisation of Victorian girls in relations to marriage, Alicia Bewick (later Alicia Little or "Mrs Archibald Little") began a prolific two decade literary career in London focused primarily on highlighting the plight of women. During this time she was also active politically in the feminist movement, penning pamphlets, lecturing, and campaigning around women's property rights suffrage. In 1886, she married Archibald Little, a merchant, scholar, and (later) travel writer who'd spent many years in China. The following year she moved with him to Chungking, an isolated city to the far west of the country. Impossibly hot in the summer, the couple had planned to build a holiday home in the cooler countryside, but the authorities blocked the idea after concern that the locals would not take kindly to foreigners. An idea was then hatched for the Littles to move onto a local farm by the Yangtse River for a few months, with the hope that it might get the locals used to their presence. While there Alicia kept a journal, later published as My Diary in a Chinese Farm (1894). In her introduction she explains her reasons for beginning the diary:
It was very hot in the daytime and all day long I was shut up in the one Farm house sittingroom, so I started a Diary for much the same reason probably, that I have often observed people do so on a Sea Voyage. They generally do not keep it up till the end, neither did I ; but I noted down every thing I could observe of interest, as long as 1 wrote in it, and here it is, recalling many simple pleasures and some painful days.
The book provides a wonderfully intimate and unique insight into rural Chinese life at the end of the nineteenth century — albeit from a European perspective. Amid the daily observations of domestic life are printed numerous photographs of the region taken by the Japanese photographer Ogawa Kazumasa whom she met in 1894 on a trip to Japan. As for Alicia, she remained in China until her husband's death in 1908, devoting much of her time to campaigning against foot binding, the Chinese custom of applying tight binding to the feet of young girls to modify the shape and size of their feet. Toes were often broken beforehand and it severely limited the physical (and therefore social) mobility of women. In 1898, she founded Tien Tsu Hui (The Natural Foot Society) and delivered a number of lectures in leading cities in China, Hong Kong, and Macau arguing against the practice, utilising the then new technology of x-ray to highlight the deformity of the feet caused by binding. Alicia continued to write novels and numerous non-fiction works including, in 1899, the epic 600-page tome Invisible China which was adorned with more than 100 of her own photographs and whose section on foot binding garnered much attention. The foot binding practice aside, she clearly had much love for China, calling it “one of the greatest nations the world has yet seen”.
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public-domain-review
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May 22, 2019
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:31.566681
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/my-diary-in-a-chinese-farm-1894/"
}
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philippine-folk-tales-1916
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Philippine Folk Tales (1916)
Text by Adam Green
Mar 6, 2019
According to the American anthropologist Mabel Cook Cole, compiler of this volume, this collection of folk tales from the Philippines was the first of its kind, at least in the English language. There's a huge variety of stories presented, sourced from both the more traditional tribes, including the headhunters of the rugged mountain regions, and from those "Christianized natives" whose examples bear evidence of their European influence. Most of the stories are from the former, however, with many of these hailing from what are called the "first times", involving mischievous spirits, talking jars, and the antics of personified celestial beings, bickering suns and moons. There are also several origin and "pourqoi" stories, such as an explanations as to why dogs wag their tales (which apparently is to show that they are not that dog who lost a magic ring). Cole also includes what she calls "fables", many which share similarities with European stories, and which are "told to children or to while away the midday hours when people seek shaded spots to rest or stop on the trail to rest".
Here's a story from the Igorot, a headhunter tribe, about how the first head was taken.
One day the Moon, who was a woman named Kabigat, sat out in the yard making a large copper pot. The copper was still soft and pliable like clay, and the woman squatted on the ground with the heavy pot against her knees while she patted and shaped it. Now while she was working a son of Chal-chal, the Sun, came by and stopped to watch her mould the form. Against the inside of the jar she pressed a stone, while on the outside with a wooden paddle dripping with water she pounded and slapped until she had worked down the bulges and formed a smooth surface. The boy was greatly interested in seeing the jar grow larger, more beautiful, and smoother with each stroke, and he stood still for some time. Suddenly the Moon looked up and saw him watching her. Instantly she struck him with her paddle, cutting off his head. Now the Sun was not near, but he knew as soon as the Moon had cut off his son’s head. And hurrying to the spot, he put the boy’s head back on, and he was alive again. Then the Sun said to the Moon, “You cut off my son’s head, and because you did this ever after on the earth people will cut off each other’s heads.”
Cole spent four years amongst the traditional Philippines tribes along with her husband Fay-Cooper Cole who was an ethnologist for the Field Museum of Natural History and whose photographs of daily village life are dotted throughout the collection. The stories were apparently noted down first hand, from around campfires, visits to homes, and also as heard "chanted by the pagan priests in communion with the spirits".
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public-domain-review
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Mar 6, 2019
|
Adam Green
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:32.556406
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/philippine-folk-tales-1916/"
}
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characters-and-caricaturas-by-william-hogarth-1743
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Characters and Caricaturas by William Hogarth (1743)
Text by Adam Green
Jan 8, 2019
Familiar to many will be that exasperating feeling that arises when accused of being that very thing you pride yourself on not being. It's a feeling the English artist William Hogarth evidently felt acutely when critics derided him for being a mere "caricature" artist. So moved was he by this ongoing slight, that he produced this 1743 print explaining the difference between characters and caricatures — which Hogarth saw as radically different — and demonstrating his style as being firmly aligned with the former. For Hogarth the comic character face, with its subtle exploration of an individual's human nature, was vastly superior to the gross formal exaggerations of the grotesque caricature.
He later had this to say about his motivations behind the print:
Being perpetually plagued, from the mistakes made among the illiterate, by the similitude in the sound of the words Character and Caricatura, I ten years ago endeavoured to explain the distinction by the above Print; and, as I was then publishing Marriage a la Mode, wherein were characters of high life, I introduced the great number of faces there delineated (none of which are exaggerated) varied at random, to prevent, if possible, personal application when the Prints should come out...
Along the bottom of the print, to the left, Hogarth has reproduced three character figures from the works of Raphael, a style with which he clearly identifies. To the right sit four caricatures: a head copied from Arthur Pond's Caricatures; heads from Annibale Carracci's Due Filosofi; and (perhaps rather unfairly) a Leonardo da Vinci grotesque reproduced from Têtes de Charactêres — and floating above the first and second of these caricatures a child-like cartoon, as if to emphasise the naivety of such a style. Above the strip, in a wonderfully overwhelming swarm of heads which take up the vast majority of the print, Hogarth has drawn over a hundred faces in a style much closer to the "characters" of Raphael.
At the very bottom he's provided a note on some helpful further reading: "For a farthar Explanation of the Difference Betwixt Character & Caricature See ye Preface to Joh. Andrews." Here he refers to his friend Henry Fielding's 1742 work Joseph Andrews, in which Fielding calls himself a "Comic Writer" and Hogarth a "Comic Painter" — both aligned with a sensitive realism associated with depicting character, as opposed to the crude distortion of caricatures (which Fielding aligns with the "burlesque").
He who should call the Ingenious Hogarth a Burlesque Painter, would, in my Opinion, do him very little Honour; for sure it is much easier, much less the Subject of Admiration, to paint a Man with a Nose, or any other Feature of a preposterous Size, or to expose him in some absurd or monstrous Attitude, than to express the Affections of Men on Canvas. It hath been thought a vast Commendation of a Painter, to say his Figures seem to breathe; but surely, it is a much greater and nobler Applause, that they appear to think.
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public-domain-review
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Jan 8, 2019
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Adam Green
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collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:33.020916
|
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"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/characters-and-caricaturas-by-william-hogarth-1743/"
}
|
ogawa-kazumasa-s-hand-coloured-photographs-of-flowers-1896
|
Ogawa Kazumasa’s Hand-Coloured Photographs of Flowers (1896)
Text by Adam Green
Mar 13, 2019
The stunning floral images featured here are the work of Ogawa Kazumasa, a Japanese photographer, printer, and publisher known for his pioneering work in photomechanical printing and photography in the Meiji era. Studying photography from the age of fifteen, Ogawa moved to Tokyo aged twenty to further his study and develop his English skills which he believed necessary to deepen his technical knowledge. After opening his own photography studio and working as an English interpreter for the Yokohama Police Department, Ogawa decided to travel to the United States to learn first hand the advance photographic techniques of the time. Having little money, Ogawa managed to get hired as a sailor on the USS Swatara and six months later landed in Washington. For the next two years, in Boston and Philadelphia, Ogawa studied printing techniques including the complicated collotype process with which he'd make his name on returning to Japan.
In 1884, Ogawa opened a photographic studio in Tokyo and in 1888 established a dry plate manufacturing company, and the following year, Japan's first collotype business, the "K. Ogawa printing factory". He also worked as an editor for various photography magazines, which he printed using the collotype printing process, and was a founding member of the Japan Photographic Society.
The exquisite hand-coloured flower collotypes shown here were featured in the 1896 book Some Japanese Flowers (of which you can buy a 2013 reprint here), and some were also featured the following year in Japan, Described and Illustrated by the Japanese (1897) edited by Francis Brinkley.
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public-domain-review
|
Mar 13, 2019
|
Adam Green
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:33.467370
|
{
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"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/ogawa-kazumasa-s-hand-coloured-photographs-of-flowers-1896/"
}
|
paterson-s-roads-1826-edition
|
Paterson’s Roads (1826 edition)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Jan 16, 2019
It is an attempt, as far as the nature of the work will allow, to Map the ground…
So declares Edward Mogg in the Preface to the final edition of Paterson’s Roads, possibly the closest thing the nineteenth century ever got to Sat Nav. The book — which ran to eighteen editions from 1771 to 1829 — is designed to guide the journeyer along the major roads of England and Wales, helping them not only to get from A to B but to appreciate the landmarks along the way. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the book is how very few maps it contains, giving a far from complete coverage of England and Wales. The vast majority of its huge amount of information is textual, and the book starts as it means to go on, with a densely informative index of roads and towns.
In these two and half lines above we learn that: the Yorkshire town of Abberford has a market on Mondays; the Direct Road route to it from London is described on page 228; the town is also mentioned among the Cross Roads on page 447; post-horses can be found at the Swann Inn; and London is 186 miles away.
The second part of the book describes, in 346 tall pages, the Direct Roads from London to the market and sea-port towns of England and Wales, embellished by accounts of tourist attractions small and great: “STONE HENGE. The true origin of this stupendous structure yet remains a matter of doubt... Seventeen huge stones are now standing... the appearance of the whole is singularly awful and surprising.” The third part of the book, also clocking in at over 300 pages, describes the Cross Roads which link together the towns up and down the country. Browsing its pages, which resemble a cross between Lonely Planet England, 100 Greatest Walks in Britain, and AZ Great Britain (without the maps!) you get the feeling of reading a book for someone who is hyperlexic but image-phobic, written by a caring friend.
There then follows another impressive index of the “country seats, places, prospects, antiquities, and remarkable objects," of the nation, referring readers to appropriate pages in the roads sections of the book. And finally there is a wonderful appendix, chock full of further informational delights, such as a town-by-town population table based on the 1821 census, and “the Heights of all the principal Hils and other remarkable Eminences in England and Wales”. If you dig deep enough, you can even discover when the Post Office packet boats leave Falmouth for Lisbon (every Friday).
On their travels the book encourages readers to cross bridges, spin turnstiles and traverse junctions, all whilst also navigating its 700 plus pages. The Advertisement suggests that it will be “convenient in the carriage of the pleasure tourist.” Bring to mind Google Street View on an iPhone, and you’ll never have a stronger sense of the relative nature of convenience.
As mentioned already, the book ran to eighteen editions, the first published in 1771 by British Army office Daniel Paterson and titled A New and Accurate Description of all the Direct and Principal Cross Roads (the fourth edition from 1778 is the earliest we could find on Internet Archive). When Edward Mogg edited the sixteenth edition in 1822 he thought the original author was dead. By 1826, when Mogg edited and published the final edition of this titanic book of roads, Daniel Paterson had indeed expired.
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public-domain-review
|
Jan 16, 2019
|
Ned Pennant-Rea
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:33.905693
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/paterson-s-roads-1826-edition/"
}
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schneider-von-groot-s-christmas-dream-1885
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Schneider Von Groot’s Christmas Dream (1885)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Dec 12, 2018
Born of the temperance movement, “Schneider Von Groot's Christmas Dream” dramatises the ills of drinking schnapps, through one man’s bloody battle with thousands of intoxicated demons.
It's Christmas Eve and old Von Groot is on the way home to his family. Laying down for a moment for a rest on a roadside bank, he pulls out his pipe and begins singing about the glories of boozing. He drifts off and finds himself in a new land where, so a little elf there explains, the law requires him to drink schnapps “such as Dutchmen for ages have used for night caps.” Finding out that it flows like rivers there and is free, Von Groot declares it the place for him. He will stay and “drink like a fish from the morning till night.”
All of a sudden two demons appear and crawl into his eyes and ears. Drunk and aggressive, they and their emerging accomplices try to tie him down with “wythes of the willow and fir”. He manages to kill thousands of these miniature foe, but eventually they have him held down securely. A saviour of a green elf appears, cuts the ropes and sets him free. The grateful Von Groot wonders aloud what has led to all this slaughter. A voice cries out “It’s schnapps, and the blackness of hell / All its murders, its crimes and its sorrows can tell.”
An angel now floats by in a golden car accompanied by a team of butterflies and whisks our hero off to the land of the elves, where he's presented with a golden goblet. He drinks the elixir within and awakens on the same bank by the road. It’s Christmas morning. Von Groot searches out some presents for his wife and children, returns home, and never touches the schnapps again.
We have been able to find out very little about the author of the poem, which was published in New York in 1885. The title page offers the pen-name “BROADBRIM”, which may be a reference to the hat worn by Quakers, a sect famously unimpressed by alcohol. The Internet Archive identifies him as George Warwick, author of two other Christmas and New Year-themed poems.
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public-domain-review
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Dec 12, 2018
|
Ned Pennant-Rea
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:34.347571
|
{
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"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/schneider-von-groot-s-christmas-dream-1885/"
}
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the-art-of-book-covers-1820-1914
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The Art of Book Covers (1820–1914)
Text by Adam Green
Feb 12, 2019
Inspired by rising literacy rates and advancing technologies, the nineteenth century saw the book transform from a largely hand-made object to a mass-produced product. In this new context a book's cover took on added importance: it was no longer merely a functional protection for the pages but instead a key platform through which to communicate and sell the book. Prior to this covers had — bar a smattering of highly bespoke one-off creations (e.g. embroidered covers for personal libraries) — mostly been plain leather bound affairs. From the 1820s, with the rise of mechanical bookbinding, these leather covers of old gave way to new cloth coverings — known as publisher's bindings — which, in addition to being inexpensive, were now also printable. A wide variety of cover printing techniques were employed over the decades: from embossing to gilt to multi-colour lithography. An entirely new artistic space was opened up. It was one in which illustrators and designers thrived, producing a range of covers as eclectic in aesthetic approach as the myriad contents they fronted. From around the 1920s, the paper dust jacket — previously there to simply protect the publisher's binding — began to sport designs (and, of course, then paperbacks), but it was in the hundred years preceding, on these printed cloths, that book cover design first truly flourished.
In our selection below we've concentrated on publisher's bindings from this first century of the book cover (as we commonly understand it today, i.e. mass-produced designs). And we couldn't resist including also a few one-off / bespoke cover designs too. Enjoy!
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public-domain-review
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Feb 12, 2019
|
Adam Green
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:34.905245
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-art-of-book-covers-1820-1914/"
}
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hokusai-s-ghost-stories-ca-1830
|
Hokusai’s Ghost Stories (ca. 1830)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Dec 11, 2018
Katsushika Hokusai’s wood block print of a gigantic wave frothing before Mount Fuji, which he made in his seventies, is so beloved and influential that the scholar Christine Guth has devoted a whole book to it. Less attention has been paid to the beguiling illustrations he crafted, also while in his seventies, for the series Hyaku Monogatari [One Hundred Ghost Stories] (ca. 1830). We aren’t sure why the project never reached its probable goal of a century of pictures but the five that were completed are a dark delight. In the prints Hokusai directs his attention away from the Japanese landscapes he was most famous for depicting, inwards towards a realm of vengeful ghosts and demonic cannibals.
The series is fruit of the tradition Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai [A Gathering of One Hundred Supernatural Tales], where Japanese friends would meet to share fantastically frightening tales from folklore and their own experience. Having lit a hundred candles, they would give their blood-curdling accounts, one by one, blowing out a candle after each, plunging themselves deeper into darkness. Upon the last candle going out, a spirit was said to appear.
The Mansion of the Plates (Sara-yashiki)
After the maid Okiku had accidentally broken one of a set of elegant Korean plates, her infuriated master bound her and threw her down a well, where she died in body but not spirit. In 1795, wells around Japan became infested with a species of worm covered in thin threads, which people believed to be a reincarnation of Okiku; the threads being the remnants of the fabric used to bind her. They named it “Okiku mushi” [the Okiku bug].
The Laughing Hannya (Warai-hannya)
This gleeful cannibal is an unholy union of two other monsters: a “hannya”, whose jealousy has turned her into a horned demon; and a “yamanba”, who dwells in the mountains living off the meat of kidnapped children.
Oiwa (Oiwa-san)
The young Oume falls in love with the married samurai Tamiya Iemon, and her friends try to get his wife Oiwa out of the picture with a gift of poisonous face cream. When Iemon abandons his newly disfigured wife, it sends her mad with grief. In her hysteria she runs and trips onto a sword, cursing Iemon with her dying breath — and then adopting various forms to haunt him, including a paper lantern.
Kohada Koheiji
Based on a real event, the cuckold and murder victim Kohada Koheiji returns from the dead to torment his cheating wife and lover. Here he grins over the top of the mosquito netting that surrounds the bed of his killers.
Obsession (Shûnen)
The snake here represents obsessive jealousy, an emotion thought to transcend death, and wraps itself around a Buddhist memorial tablet (traditionally placed on an altar at the home of the deceased). The bowl of water decorated with the swastika appears to be a good luck offering: though tainted by its association with National Socialism, the swastika has been an auspicious symbol for thousands of years in cultures from the Ukraine to the Aztec Empire.
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public-domain-review
|
Dec 11, 2018
|
Ned Pennant-Rea
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:35.426074
|
{
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"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/hokusai-s-ghost-stories-ca-1830/"
}
|
photographs-of-models-of-the-moon-1874
|
Photographs of (models of) the moon (1874)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Dec 6, 2018
At first glance these intricate depictions of the moon might seem like photographs from the Apollo space program of 1961–75. In fact they were captured a century earlier by an ingenious and wholly land-based Scottish astronomer. Peering through a self-made telescope, James Nasmyth sketched the moon’s scarred, cratered and mountainous surface. Aiming to “faithfully reproduce the lunar effects of light and shadow” he then built plaster models based on the drawings, and photographed these against black backgrounds in the full glare of the sun. As the technology for taking photographs directly through a telescope was still in its infancy, the drawing and modelling stages of the process were essential for attaining the moonly detail he wanted.
The book was very popular in its day, running to four editions, and remains well worth a read. It contains enjoyable speculation on “the peculiar conditions which would attend a sojourn on the lunar surface,” and a consideration of the many benefits the moon daily bestows upon us earthlings. Beyond helping sailors to navigate at night and “cleansing the shores of our seas and rivers through the agency of the tides”, the most interesting and indeed prescient idea Nasmyth posits concerns the “stupendous reservoir of power that the tidal waters constitute.” He suggests that this energy “may be invoked by-and-by, when we have begun to feel more acutely the consequences of our present prodigal use of the fuel that was stored up for us by bountiful nature ages upon ages ago.”
Beyond exploring lunar mechanics and topography, the book can also be seen as an exploration into photomechanical printing (with which it was one of the first books to be illustrated). Published at a time when many were searching for the perfect form of reproduction — a photograph that could be both ink printed (not depending on light) and consistent over time. The first three editions of the book include a variety of processes including, engraving, photogravure, heliotype, lithograph, chromolithograph, and four different variations of the woodburytype. It is likely that the first two editions, published simultaneously, were partly experiments into which reproduction method was best. This seems to have been deemed the woodburytype given that the third edition, published more than ten years later, is comprised entirely of woodburytypes.
You can read the entirety of the first edition, from which we have reproduced the images below, at the Internet Archive, or buy a 2013 reprint. See the second edition here, and the third edition with the woodburytypes here. If your curiosity for 1870s lunar representations has been mightily piqued, consider launching yourself into Émile-Antoine Bayard’s wonderful illustrations for Jules Verne’s Around the Moon. And if you'd like a Nasmyth moon image on your wall then check out these three available in our online prints shop.
Finally, an intriguing point for all you conspiracy theorists out there who haven't yet noticed: the name of this man, who so studiously made convincing models of the lunar surface, is just one letter away from NASAMYTH.
Suspicious.
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public-domain-review
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Dec 6, 2018
|
Ned Pennant-Rea
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:35.887162
|
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}
|
mazes-and-labyrinths-1922
|
Mazes and Labyrinths (1922)
Text by Sam Dolbear
Feb 19, 2019
If we wish to outline an architecture which conforms to the structure of our soul […], it would have to be conceived in the image of the Labyrinth. – Friedrich Nietzsche, Dawn (1881)
William H. Matthews’ Mazes and Labyrinths, published in London in 1922, is itself labyrinthine: a vast and richly illustrated encyclopaedic portrait of these mysterious phenomena across time and space; from the Minotaur of Crete to the great cathedrals of Medieval France to the stately homes and spiritual nuclei of England.
Opening the book, one of the first things the reader finds is the dedication: to the author’s daughter Zeta whose “innocent prattlings on the summer sands of Sussex inspired its conception”. The preface reveals the nature of her prattle, a question as to “who made mazes first of all” . Towards the end of the book we are shown photographs of the beach mazes made for Zeta to explore, photographed before she'd discover them and make them "invisible".
So much is revealed in the book’s dedication: the allure of the maze, how it occupies a curious space between rationalism and mysticism that attracts the child and the adult alike. From the childhood of civilisation to the childhood of us all, the maze proves a mysterious presence, a thing to explore but also avoid. It's an ambivalence reflected in the varying roles they've played over the millennia: from the twists and turns of the medieval church maze meant to echo the spiritual journey, at its centre “heaven”, to the maze experienced as hell, an imprisonment and torture.
While flattered by her father’s dedication, in her later years Zeta herself attributes her father’s interest in mazes to his time in the First World War, the battlefields of which he left for in the year she was born. Although she surmises the seed to be his learning of a destroyed church maze on the Arras Front, one can’t help wondering if his experience of the labyrinth-like trenches may have played a role too. Whatever the seed, he was clearly hooked and, according to Zeta, "within two and a half years of returning from France he had researched, written, printed and published this book". A remarkable feat considering its breadth of scope and depth of exploration — and that he was on somewhat unchartered territory, it being the first book dedicated to the subject.
As for Zeta’s question on the origins of these structures, her father is unable to offer a definitive answer. "The boundaries of knowledge are still misty and ill-defined", he writes in the conclusion, but for him this is a quality which only makes mazes all the more attractive, "a circumstance that only gives zest to the subject".
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public-domain-review
|
Feb 19, 2019
|
Sam Dolbear
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:36.350236
|
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"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/mazes-and-labyrinths-1922/"
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|
the-fourth-dimension-and-the-bible-1922
|
The Fourth Dimension and the Bible (1922)
Text by Sam Dolbear
Mar 13, 2019
In many respects, the Victorian era — with its revelations of Darwin, dinosaurs, etc. — was not the simplest time to be a religiously-minded scientist: despair and doubt were rife. But towards the end of the nineteenth century, inspired by explorations into "unseen" phenomena such as x-rays and radioactivity, the positing of invisible worlds and higher dimensions began to offer some way to marry latest scientific developments with religious inclinations. At the forefront of this movement was the mathematician C. H. Hinton, the author of The Fourth Dimension (1904), a popular maths book based on concepts he had been developing since 1880 that sought to establish an additional spatial dimension to the three we know and love — visualised in the form of coloured hypercubes which he called “Tesseracts”.
Hinton's books were very popular and this notion of a higher dimension swept through not only scientific circles but also artistic, literary and, of course, religious and spiritual communities. People such as Rudolf Steiner and Charles Leadbeater ran with the spiritual angle offered which, in the case of Leadbeater's thought, included angels, demons, and departed spirits. All this sets the scene for this particularly extreme example of fourth dimension meets religion featured here, the mathematician William A. Granville's The Fourth Dimension and the Bible (1922). Where Hinton hinted, Granville goes full throttle explicit, seeking to explain the more mysterious aspects of the Bible through the rigours of pure mathematics, an ambitious endeavour which is, as he admits, "taking a voyage on practically unchartered seas".
Just as Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884) imagines a flat, two-dimensional universe in which our three-dimensional perceptual world is beyond comprehension, Granville wants us to leave room for another dimension, one beyond our mortal apprehension. This higher dimension is seen to be heaven, where God dwells, and all events here on earth simply three-dimensional manifestations of that higher heavenly aggregate. And it is this interaction between dimensions which can explain so many seemingly supernatural parts of the Bible (episodes which one imagines might challenge a rationally minded scientist). He writes that “a man (three-dimensional being) who has been translated from our space into a higher-dimensional space will remain invisible to earthly beings until he returns again to our space”. This has concrete instances: when Jesus twice escapes the threatening multitudes by disappearing, he does so into this alternative, imperceptible universe. Likewise, when Jesus enters the room of the disciples without using a door (John 20:19-23, 26-29), he did so mediated by the realm of the fourth dimension. For Granville too, celestial visitors (whether angels, archangels, prophets), all emerge from this fourth dimension, only to disappear again into that other realm. The concept of hell can also be thought in terms of mathematics, though it is (of course) referred to as a "lower dimension".
The mysterious workings of the Christian God has a long history of investigation through modern mathematics and science. In his posthumously published Daniel and the Apocalypse (1733) Sir Isaac Newton pioneered work on natural sciences as transposed onto theological commentaries. Slightly earlier, John Wilkins (1614–1672) in Mathematical Magick had attempted to use mechanical geometry to explain the wonders of the divine. Though the oscillation between empirical science and the theological is at times absurd, it can be understood to be motivated by a basic rationalism: that is, if theology was to avoid fanaticism, it must remain rooted in nature. If, as Emerson wrote, “Nature geometrizes” then, for Granville, so must God.
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public-domain-review
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Mar 13, 2019
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Sam Dolbear
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:36.777316
|
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"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-fourth-dimension-and-the-bible-1922/"
}
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the-library-of-the-future-a-vision-of-1983-from-1883
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The Library of the Future: A Vision of 1983 from 1883
Text by Sam Dolbear
Jan 30, 2019
Many visions of the future lie buried in the past. One such future was outlined by the American librarian Charles Ammi Cutter in his essay "The Buffalo Public Library in 1983", written a century before in 1883.
Cutter’s fantasy, at times dry and descriptive, is also wonderfully precise:
The [library], when complete, was to consist of two parts, the first a central store, 150 feet square, a compact mass of shelves and passageways, lighted from the ends, but neither from sides nor top; the second an outer rim of rooms 20 feet wide, lighted from the four streets. In front and rear the rim was to contain special libraries, reading-rooms, and work-rooms; on the sides, the art-galleries. The central portion was a gridiron of stacks, running from front to rear, each stack 2 feet wide, and separated from its neighbor by a passage of 3 feet. Horizontally, the stack was divided by floors into 8 stories, each 8 feet high, giving a little over 7 feet of shelf-room, the highest shelf being so low that no book was beyond the reach of the hand. Each reading-room, 16 feet high, corresponded to two stories of the stack, from which it was separated in winter by glass doors.
The imagined structure allows for a vast accumulation of books:
We have now room for over 500,000 volumes in connection with each of the four reading-rooms, or 4,000,000 for the whole building when completed.
If his vision for Buffalo Public Library might be considered fairly modest from a technological point of view, when casting his net a little wider to consider a future National Library, one which "can afford any luxury", things get a little more inventive.
[T]hey have an arrangement that brings your book from the shelf to your desk. You have only to touch the keys that correspond to the letters of the book-mark, adding the number of your desk, and the book is taken off the shelf by a pair of nippers and laid in a little car, which immediately finds its way to you. The whole thing is automatic and very ingenious...
But for Buffalo book delivery is a cheaper, simpler, and perhaps less noisy, affair.
... for my part I much prefer our pages with their smart uniforms and noiseless steps. They wear slippers, the passages are all covered with a noiseless and dustless covering, they go the length of the hall in a passage-way screened off from the desk-room so that they are seen only when they leave the stack to cross the hall towards any desk. As that is only 20 feet wide, the interruption to study is nothing.
Cutter’s fantasy might appear fairly mundane, born out of the fairly (stereo)typical neuroses of a librarian: in the prevention of all noise (through the wearing of slippers), the halting of the spread of illness (through good ventilation), and the disorder of the collection (through technological innovations).
In other utopian visions of the city, the library is often paramount. As Kavin Hayes has noted, in The Golden Bottle (1892) Ignatius Donnelly “imagined a reading room in every town hall, located at the center of each Utopian community, the remainder of the town being laid out in concentric circles. The utopian socialist Charles Fourier calculated that the library at the centre of his Phalanstère would amass 800,000 books with a natural encyclopaedia at its centre. In all of these accounts the library is a place where "civilisation" is preserved, displayed, and accessed. Other accounts highlight technological innovation as the heart of the utopian library. Edgar Chambless, for example, in Roadtown (1910), described “three underground railway lines situated one atop another with a single row of houses as long as the length of another railway located above ground. [...] Roadtown residents submitted their library requests by telephone, and a mechanical carrier rapidly delivered the requested books”. The city imitates the library and vice versa.
Far from a wild utopian dream, today Cutter’s library of the future appears basic: there will be books and there will be clean air and there will be good lighting. One wonders what Cutter might make of the library today, in which the most basic dream remains perhaps the most radical: for them to remain in our lives, free and open, clean and bright.
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public-domain-review
|
Jan 30, 2019
|
Sam Dolbear
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:37.284195
|
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}
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hans-prinzhorn-s-artistry-of-the-mentally-ill-1922
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Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922)
Text by Sam Dolbear
Feb 27, 2019
A year after the Swiss psychiatrist Walter Morgenthaler published his 1921 monograph on the life and artwork of Adolf Wölfli (a schizophrenic patient in his care), Hans Prinzhorn published Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill), a landmark text in the history of thinking about mental illness and creativity. Prinzhorn's groundbreaking study, the first of its kind, gained much attention in avant-garde circles of the time, interesting artists such as Paul Klee, Max Ernst, and Jean Dubuffet. In the 1940s, the latter went on to coin the term Art Brut (Raw Art), which along with the related concept of Outsider Art, has continued to capture the public interest, to the point where it has today (some might say ironically) become a successful art marketing category in its own right.
Prinzhorn had a varied life. Born in Westphalia in 1886, he became a student of philosophy and art history, before studying music in London. After this he turned to medicine, training as a psychiatrist in 1919. It was at the Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic that he began his pioneering work, not only through observation of patients but through analysis of their art production. He built a collection too: over 5000 paintings, drawings, and carvings, sourced from artists in various asylums in and around Heidelberg, mostly from patients diagnosed with schizophrenia.
It was from this archive that Artistry of the Mentally Ill was constructed and Prinzhorn developed his theses. He identified six basic drives that give rise to image making: an expressive urge, the urge to play, an ornamental urge, an ordering tendency, a tendency to imitate, and the need for symbols. For Prinzhorn, image making is driven by our intense desire to leave traces:
When we cover a piece of paper with doodles, when a child arranges colourful pebbles on his mud pie, or when we plant flowers in our gardens, one quality is common to all of these quite different activities, namely the enrichment of the outer world by the addition of perceptual elements. Like the need for activity, it is a final, irreducible psychological fact – an urge in man not to be absorbed passively into his environment, but to impress on it traces of his existence beyond those of purposeful activity.
The book caused ripples when it was published, not just in medicine but in the art world too. It reflected a breakdown of high culture’s claim to "civilisation", exposing the misery and turmoil at the heart of modern life. Against the grain, the book granted voice to the previously marginalised: those incarcerated, those deemed insane, those suffering under poverty, those untrained, those in the wrong type of institution.
Looking back, there is something ominous to the study. Prinzhorn identified a style that was to be named, over a decade later with the rise of National Socialism in Germany, as "degenerate" (Entartete). Such works were seen as opposed to an "original type", to a mythical figure of Germanness, a normality of supposed strength, resolution, and health. Exhibitions, most notably in Munich in 1937, were set up to name and exhibit these "degenerate" works. Artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky were featured, alongside hundreds of others, even Prinzhorn’s patients. As the art historian Stephanie Barron has argued, “one quarter of the illustration pages in the [exhibition’s] guide featured reproductions of the work of these psychiatric patients, taken from the famous Prinzhorn Collection”. The insane and the avant-garde were here equated, both equally pathologized. Millions of visitors flocked to the shows, and there followed the enforcement of policies of censorship, persecution, and oppression on a mass scale.
This is not the only story though. Prinzhorn’s huge archive of drawings and paintings remain testament to a spirit that still seeks to grant a voice to the voiceless. To look at these images is to allow these voices to speak again, for the vast range of human emotion and experience, otherwise forgotten and buried by history, to be heard. Yet, still, questions remain as to how Prinzhorn aquired the artworks in his collection — were they considered the property of the hospitals or artists? Were the artists consenting? Remunerated?
Below we’ve collected some highlights of the artworks presented in Artistry of the Mentally Ill: firstly a selection from the latter section of the book in which Prinzhorn delves into the lives and works of ten schizophrenic artists, and then, in a gallery at the very bottom of the post, a selection of the uncredited works featured in the book's first section (used to illustrate Prinzhorn’s theories).
For more works from the enormous Prinzhorn collection see this 1998 book Beyond Reason: Art and Psychosis Works From the Prinzhorn Collection and to read his Artistry of the Mentally Ill in English then see this 1972 translation
Karl Brendel
Karl Brendel was born in Turingian in 1870. A former bricklayer who had a leg amputated in 1902 after an accident, he had a history of hallucination, paranoia, and fanaticism. Between 1912 and 1913, he learnt to chew bread in order to create a material to construct models, later turning his energies to the wood carving.
August Klotz
August Klotz, born in 1864 in Swabia, painted according to an elaborate “colour alphabet” which allowed him to translate words into colours via a numerical key, which he used to constructed complex visual works.
Peter Moog
Peter Moog, born 1871, grew up in poverty in the Eifel country and struggled with alcoholism into adult life. He produced detailed work imbued with religiosity and once remarked to Prinzhorn that he finds “hundreds of facees in a floor mosaic or a speckled wall”.
August Neter
August Neter, born 1868 in Swabia, was prone to hallucinations. At school he experienced the apparition of 10,000 figures in half an hour, figures that remained in his memory into adulthood and became the subject of his drawings that Prinzhorn describes as “sober and precise”.
Johann Knüpfer
Johan Knüpfer, born 1866 in a village in the Oden forest, was committed to the asylum after six convictions of begging. His drawings reflect a complex relationship between words and images, sprinkled with religious themes and also birds, the language of whom Knüpfer thought he could understand.
Viktor Orth
Viktor Orth, born 1853 was from a noble family. In 1878 he became plagued with paranoia, shot himself on a train and was committed to the asylum. He kept to a fixed number of themes in his work: seascapes, figures, “catatonic drawings” and “ghosts”.
Hermann Beil
Hermann Beil, born in 1867 in Saxony to a family that was also committed to the asylum, suffered from manic-depressive episodes. He was known for his prolific and detailed drawing, scribbling on everything in sight, even toilet paper.
Heinrich Welz
Heinrich Welz, a lawyer born in 1883, once worked on a sociological text but became delusional, believing he could control the movement of the stars and converse with a mythical friend Greenleaf. During his stay in the asylum he developed a theory: that, if one connects all the places in Europe that were visited by Napoleon, a curve emerges that resembles the letter “N”.
Joseph Sell
Joseph Sell, born 1878, woke up “one day in 1907 [and] got out of bed, lit a candle, and acted so bizarrely that he was committed to the asylum”. He believed, through telepathy, that he could hear everything in the world in a single moment and his artwork developed a fantastical and futuristic style.
Franz Pohl
Franz Pohl, a locksmith born in 1864, showed paranoia but also signs of autism and schizophrenia. He dated all of his drawing meticulously, and his style jumped between the realistic and the fantastical. All the images, Prinzhorn consistently concedes, reflect significant technical abilities.
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public-domain-review
|
Feb 27, 2019
|
Sam Dolbear
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:37.630161
|
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|
alice-s-adventures-in-shorthand-1919
|
Alice’s Adventures in Shorthand (1919)
Text by Sam Dolbear
Feb 5, 2019
Sir John Tenniel’s famous illustrations might be your only guide through this edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. His small engravings mark various moment in Alice’s adventure, small islands of illumination in a sea of otherwise obscure text: from when Alice drinks the potion to when she goes to tea with the Mad Hatter to the final court scene with the Queen of Hearts. Bar the running headers, the surrounding text will remain entirely opaque, that is, unless you are blessed enough to be able to decipher shorthand, here transcribed along the system of John Robert Gregg by his niece Georgie Gregg Gingell. First published in 1919, the book saw a second edition in 1931 which was refurbished with a newly updated system of Gregg shorthand published two years earlier.
Shorthand has a long history: used by (or to preserve the work of) everyone from Cicero to Luther to Shakespeare to Pepys. Gregg’s version of shorthand represented one of the systems vying for supremacy at the end of the nineteenth century. It was based, like most methods, on the principal of "phonography", where sound (phone–) is depicted in writing (–graphy). The purpose of shorthand was to condense the act of writing: to shorten and to quicken. At the end of the nineteenth century, at a moment of rapid development in bureaucratic and clerical structures, shorthand promised speed; a system where the hand could keep up with the pace of both thought and speech. Gregg developed not only his method but a publishing house too, the Gregg Publishing Company that spread across the English speaking world.
This utilitarian function of shorthand sits a little oddly perhaps with literature, given the novel or the poem is a form associated with a different realm: that of leisure. This didn't stop Gregg rendering great classics into his enigmatic script, from Hamlet to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Of all the works given the Gregg Publishing Company treatment it is Carroll's Alice in Wonderland that stands out for particular attention, it being a text that already plays with the tension between the written and the spoken, between sense and nonsense, and which seems, at its heart, to rile against the rationality and economy that underpins the shorthand project. Carroll had died in 1898, a decade after Gregg’s first publication of his phonographic system. One can only imagine that he would have approved of the transposition of his fantastical story into a new system of signs.
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public-domain-review
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Feb 5, 2019
|
Sam Dolbear
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:37.947282
|
{
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|
the-life-and-adventures-of-peter-wilkins-a-cornish-man-1750
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The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man (1750)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Nov 28, 2018
The imaginary voyage, from which a hero returns made wise through extraordinary experience, is at least as old as Odysseus. But the major inspiration for this 1750 iteration is Gulliver’s Travels (1726), with which it shares elements of early sci-fi.
Our hero is Peter Wilkins, a Cornish man who takes to the sea to escape a complicated life, only to be captured by a French privateer and sold into slavery on the African coast. Upon escaping this newfound captivity, and successfully navigating a course through snapping crocodiles and lions, he steals a Portuguese ship and sets sail once again — this time ending up grounded on a rock. He survives for several months there à la Robinson Crusoe, before being sucked into a subterranean cavern toward the beautiful land of Graundevolet. He manages to find plentiful fruit and veg there, and even to make his own bread, but cannot alleviate his deep hunger for companionship.
Salvation comes in the form of a woman called Youwarkee, who happens to have the power of flight. The pair fall in love and journey to Nosmnbdsgrutt, the island home of the Glumms and Gawrys (flying men and women), where Wilkins wins an audience with the king. Amongst other things he manages to bring about the abolition of slavery through fine reasoning: “Would not the king have been a slave but for the accident of being begotten by one who was a king?” His new friends are a lens through which to contemplate the customs of his old English ones, as the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians were for Lemuel Gulliver. When Youwarkee dies, the melancholy and now aged Wilkins decides to attempt a return to England. The success of this final mission is tempered by his death upon landing at Plymouth.
The only English journal to mention the romance on its publication was the Monthly Review which declared it “a very strange performance indeed”. Though it was reprinted on the cheap in Dublin (1751), translated in France (1763), abridged in Germany (1767), and reissued in England (1783) it only rose to prominence in the nineteenth century when the likes of Coleridge, Shelley, and Southey appreciated its utopian bent; it even became the basis for a number of melodramas and pantos.
Until 1835 the main clue to the mystery of its authorship was the initials R. P. printed at the end of the dedication. In that year the sale of a set of manuscripts which had belonged to Dodsley, the book’s original publisher, revealed an agreement for the sale of the copyright. The author was now revealed to be one Robert Paltock, an attorney at Clement’s Inn, London. The fact that Paltock, a father to seven children, was in financial difficulties by 1748 may go a way to explaining his decision to turn romance writer.
Above we are featuring the first volume (and second here) of the 1884 facsimile of the 1750 first edition (the only not to be abridged), including the original six engravings by Louis Peter Boitard, which we’ve separately embedded below. They illustrate probably the most sci-fi element of the book, namely the “graundee”, a membrane that encases Gawrys and Glums and when unfurled allows them to float as in a boat or fly as if a bird. Wilkins declares it “the most amazing thing in the world to observe the large expansion of this graundee when open”, and his detailed description of it on pages 199–203 of Volume I repays a read.
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public-domain-review
|
Nov 28, 2018
|
Ned Pennant-Rea
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:38.452947
|
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physical-training-for-business-men-1917
|
Physical Training for Business Men (1917)
Text by Adam Green
Jan 9, 2019
This superb series of photographs can be found in the wonderfully titled 1917 publication Physical Training for Business Men by American author Harrie Irving Hancock. The book's premise is that a certain quality of physical presence, "impressive carriage and appearance", are essential to "those who would succeed in the business world". This is not, however, all about pure athleticism. Despite his strength and endurance the athlete "may show many signs of bodily slovenliness" which would negatively effect his business dealings. More important than brawn is to foster "the appearance of physical ease, alertness, grace, and discipline." It is these qualities which Hancock promises to build through the exercises shown, a mixture, so he tells us, of those used in the military and certain martial arts.
Though the text is oddly compelling at times, it is the accompanying photographs that really standout. Taken by a "Mr Phelan" (who worked with Hancock on a number of other exercise books) they ingeniously make use of slow shutter speeds, and in some cases multi-exposure, to illustrate the movement of the particular exercise. Their functional value aside, this mix of austere poses and trails of motion blur make for wonderful and curious images. And novel too. According to Hancock, the "method of making these unique examples of camera work is Mr. Phelan's own invention now first set before readers." Four years earlier Swedish gymnast Theodor Bergquist published his Swedish House-Gymnastics (1913) which makes use of multi-exposure photographs to illustrate movement but not Phelan's trails of motion. Exactly how Phelan achieved the effect he does is not always clear, and though certainly the natural blur of slow shutter speeds seems to be involved it's also possible some of the trails were created, or at least significantly enhanced, in the darkroom afterwards. Whatever the method, the effect is marvellous.
The author Harrie Irving Hancock was best known for his many stories ("Boy's books") for children and juveniles, which often displayed a patriotic bent, and in particular for his 1916 four-book series The Invasion of the United States, which imagined the United States invaded by Germany in 1920–21. The popularity of the series is considered by some to have helped shift public opinion towards the United States getting involved in the First World War. Hancock was also an early Western expert on Jiu-Jitsu, and his The Complete Kano Jiu-Jitsu, co-authored with Katsukuma Higashi and originally published in 1905, is still in print today.
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public-domain-review
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Jan 9, 2019
|
Adam Green
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:38.938926
|
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|
highlights-from-the-cleveland-museum-of-art-s-release-of-more-than-30k-images-of-public-domain-works
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Highlights from The Cleveland Museum of Art’s release of more than 30k images of public domain works
Jan 31, 2019
Last week The Cleveland Museum of Art announced the release of more than 34,000 digital images of public domain works — all high resolution and totally free from restrictions on reuse (using the Creative Commons Zero designation). Founded in 1913, the museum is renowned for the quality and breadth of its collection, which includes more than 61,000 objects and spans 6,000 years of achievement in the arts. Here we've picked out some of our favourites from a few hours browsing the public domain collection (which didn't get through nearly half of what is on offer). In addition to images of 2D media we've also included at the end a smattering of objects, including a wonderful array of masks.
You can get exploring yourself by visiting their online collection, which has itself seen a very slick revamp to coincide with this open content release.
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public-domain-review
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Jan 31, 2019
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:39.276981
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"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/highlights-from-the-cleveland-museum-of-art-s-release-of-more-than-30k-images-of-public-domain-works/"
}
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medieval-pattern-poems-of-rabanus-maurus-9th-century
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Medieval Pattern Poems of Rabanus Maurus (9th Century)
Text by Sam Dolbear and Adam Green
Feb 26, 2019
Take a quick glance at De laudibus sanctae crucis (translated as In Praise of the Holy Cross), a ninth-century manuscript by the Frankish Benedictine monk Rabanus Maurus, and you might think you are looking at an elaborate word search or even a medieval knitting pattern. But these spectacular images are actually parts of a devotional poem. Every other page of this unique work contains a poem written out in a grid of letters, a seeming chaos of letters from which emerge other forms: not only new words but figures and shapes too.
This text is an early case of what became known as "pattern poetry". In the definitive study of the form, Dick Higgins traces its history to the Cretian "Phaistos Disk", made in the 2nd millennium BC, in which hieroglyphic text spirals out of the centre, as if it is written on the shell of a snail. The technique took on many different manifestations over the centuries: from Aratea (another 9th-century manuscript), to George Herbert's "Easter Wings" (1633), to Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1918), to the poesia concreta movement of mid-1950s Brazil which tied up experimental typography with modernist poetic forms.
True even of its medieval incarnation, pattern poetry has always played with the entanglement between the signified and the signifier, between meanings and their conduits, whether letters or words. But the complexity and ingenuity of how Maurus has interwoven layers of meaning marks De laudibus sanctae crucis as a particularly unique example.
Each grid of letters gives birth to various additional layers, varying in complexity from page to page. Each of these additional forms — be they bodies, shapes, or larger letters — are placed into the grid in such a way as to incorporate and make use of the letters from the grid poem to produce new poems (or at least words or sentences). For example, in one the words CRUX SALUS (The Cross is Salvation) are boldly highlighted from the grid. But closer inspection reveals a third layer here. Each of these large letters itself is comprised of a word: for example, within the C is the word “Seraphin” and within the R another member of the heavenly hosts, “Cherubim”. Both these additional layers (of the large letters and the words within) fail to disrupt the background grid and its sense. It is a remarkable feat of planning and invention.
More angels appear elsewhere in the work, new words and sentences spelt out by the limits of their bodies. If angels are seen as envoys or messengers, then Maurus here makes the announcers become their very announcements. Another common theme is geometric shapes, utilised in the majority of the poems, of varying forms but always hinting at a cross in their arrangement. Here Maurus points to a long held connection between geometry, symmetry, and the divine, where shapes reflect a unified order in nature and thus the perfection of God.
Accusations have long been levelled against pattern poetry as an art form. Ben Johnson dismissed it as “a pair of scissor and a comb in verse”, as the crude prioritisation of form over content. One cannot, however, lay this accusation against the pages of De laudibus sanctae crucis, in terms of its beauty, its devotional care, and the many woven layers of its textual and visual interplay.
Originally composed around the year 810, there are around eighty different copies we know of that survive from the period, a sign that the work was very highly thought of at the time. The images we are featuring here are from a beautiful copy thought to have been done under the direction of Maurus himself and offered to the abbey of Saint-Denis in France between 845 and 847, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Another notable version is a strikingly colourful copy held by the Vatican from ca. 825. The British Library also holds this 12th-century copy.
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public-domain-review
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Feb 26, 2019
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Sam Dolbear and Adam Green
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:39.776281
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}
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shakespeare-songs-from-victor-records
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Shakespeare Songs from Victor Records
Feb 20, 2019
From The Tempest
Where the Bee Sucks; 2. Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies
From Twelfth Night
O Mistress Mine
From Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure
Come Away Death; 2. Take, Oh Take Those Lips Away
From As You Like It
It Was a Lover and His Lass
From Twelfth Night and Henry VIII
She Never Told Her Love; 2. Orpheus with His Lute
From Love's Labours Lost
When Daisies Pied and Violets Blue (The Cuckoo Song)
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, The Victor Talking Machine Company produced a series of recordings of songs from the plays of William Shakespeare, sung by a variety of operatic vocalists of the day including American tenor Lambert Murphy (listed here under his pseudonym of Raymond Dixon), baritone Reinald Werrenrath, and soprano Laura Littlefield. If The Bard ever did specify melodies for the songs featured in his plays, nothing has survived today, and the arrangements used here by Victor are mostly more modern inventions. There are, however, a couple by the eighteenth century composers Thomas Arne and Joseph Haydn, and "O Mistress Mine" and "It Was a Lover and His Lass" by the Elizabethan musician Thomas Morley. Although contemporaries, it is not known if Morley and Shakespeare ever actually were acquainted, though some do suspect that they were and even collaborated.
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public-domain-review
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Feb 20, 2019
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:40.206117
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{
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"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/shakespeare-songs-from-victor-records/"
}
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robert-fludd-s-memory-tricks-1617
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Robert Fludd’s Memory Tricks (1617)
Text by Adam Green
Jan 17, 2019
Inspired by the mnemonic alphabet featured in Jacobus Publicius' pioneering 1482 book on improving memory, the great English polymath Robert Fludd came up with his own system of correspondences, where each letter or number is paired with an object which echoes its shape. The idea was that a string of letters or numbers could be recalled by the picturing of a scene involving objects. So the date 1066 could become a speared donkey lagging behind two snails; the acronym PDR, a crazed axe-wielding editor chopping up a bow and then placing the bits into a jug. Both the mnemonic alphabet and the numbers feature in Fludd‘s masterwork Utriusque Cosmi ... Historia, first published between 1617 and 1621. These alphabetical and numerical tables seem to be the simplest elements in a very complex mnemonic system Fludd developed, largely based around the memorising of complex musical structures. If you are wondering why a donkey is used to signify zero, Fludd helpfully provides an explanation, the “zero signifies a donkey, because (as they say) the donkey is of no use”.
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public-domain-review
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Jan 17, 2019
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Adam Green
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:40.700079
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{
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"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/robert-fludd-s-memory-tricks-1617/"
}
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the-private-life-of-a-cat-ca-1945
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The Private Life of a Cat (ca. 1945)
Text by Adam Green
Mar 19, 2019
The avant-garde film-makers Alexander Hammid and Maya Deren, married for five years between 1942 and 1947, collaborated on a number of films. One of their most influential creations was the highly experimental Meshes Of The Afternoon (1943), in which they explore the strange shifts and perspectives of human consciousness. A year or so later they turned from the inner lives of humans to that of animals: specifically the two cats (and then five kittens) with which they lived in their Greenwich Village apartment.
At 22 minutes long and full of lingering feline close-ups, your snappy cat meme video this is not. While not as overtly experimental as Meshes Of The Afternoon, the film is still fairly innovative for its time — featuring numerous takes from a cat's eye view, and graphic footage of five kittens being born seemingly unaided by the human hand (a scene which was to see the film banned by some cinemas). Indeed, the film is devoid of humans throughout, the wonderful footage cleverly edited to give an impression of a cat-only world, almost verging on anthropomorphism, as though these cats might be living in their Manhattan apartment independent of any owners.
Despite the fact that it is only Alexander Hamid's name which appears in the opening credits, many think it to be a collaboration: with Deren as director and Hammid as cinematographer and editor. Considering they explicitly shared the credit in other films from this time, including Meshes in the Afternoon, it seems likely that the two considered this to be purely Hammid's creation, the circulating notion of a collaboration perhaps referring to another version of the film, later scrapped, for which Deren supplies music and narration.
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public-domain-review
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Mar 19, 2019
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Adam Green
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:41.187829
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}
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class-of-2019
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Class of 2019
Dec 29, 2018
Pictured above is our top pick of artists and writers whose works will, on 1st January 2019, enter the public domain in many countries around the world. Of the eleven featured, six will be entering the public domain in countries with a “life plus 70 years” copyright term (e.g. most European Union members, Brazil, Israel, Nigeria, Russia, Turkey, etc.) and five in countries with a “life plus 50 years” copyright term (e.g. Canada, New Zealand, and many countries in Asia and Africa) — those that died in the year 1948 and 1968 respectively. As always it’s a motley crew assembled for our graduation photo, including a major figure of the European avant-garde, two of the most important figures in the history of film, the urinal-loving father of conceptual art, and three key figures in social justice movements.
Learn more about each of them by clicking on their names beneath the picture which will take you through to each of their Wikipedia pages. And for more names of those whose works will be going into the public domain in 2019 in countries with life plus 50 and 70 years copyright terms then see the Wikipedia pages on 1948 and 1968 deaths (which you can fine-tune down to writers and artists), and also this dedicated page.
And what about works entering the public domain in the United States?
Unlike other countries the United States does not deem a work to be in the public domain according to who created it (i.e. worked out by the death date of its creator), but rather when it was published. As some of you may be aware, in previous years the United States has seen precisely nothing enter the public domain due to copyright expiration (apart from some unpublished works). However, this time around all that changes!. For the first time in more than twenty years, on the 1st January, published works will enter the US public domain. This will be all works — be it books, films, artworks, or musical scores — published in the year 1923. Exactly why this is suddenly the case is a complicated affair, but basically revolves around a series of unfortunate legal proceedings – essentially the fault of Mickey Mouse (or at least his creators) – which saw extensions to previous copyright terms. But now these extensions are expiring and so each coming year will see the works of 95 years ago added to the US public domain — so on 1st January 2019 the works from 1923, in 2020 those from 1924, in 2021 those from 1925 and so on and so on (until 2073). A massive and very welcome expansion of the US public domain! Below are some highlights that'll enter on 1st January 2019.
Literature
Men Like Gods by H. G. Wells"In the Orchard" ad ""Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" by Virginia WoolfThe Prophet by Kahlil GibranThe Ego and the Id by Sigmund Freud (original German version)Towards a New Architecture by Le Corbusier (original French version)The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Murder on the Links by Agatha ChristieThe play Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw"Hypnos", "What the Moon Brings", "The Lurking Fear", and "Memory" by H.P. LovecraftDuino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke (original German version)New Hampshire by Robert FrostSpring and All and also the novel The Great American Novel by William Carlos Williams Harmonium by Wallace StevensTulips and Chimneys by E.E. CummingsPoems by Edna St. Vincent MillayAntic Hay by Aldous HuxleyA Son at the Front by Edith WhartonKangaroo by D. H. Lawrence.
Films
The Ten Commandments by Cecil B. DeMille (not his 1956 version, but rather the earlier silent first attempt) Safety Last! and Why Worry? by Harold LloydThe Pilgrim by Charlie ChaplinOur Hospitality by Buster KeatonThe Little Napoleon by Georg Jacoby (which features debut of Marlene Dietrich)The White Rose directed by D.W. Griffith
Artworks
Robert Delaunay – Portrait of Tristan TzaraMarcel Duchamp – The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)Max Ernst – Pietà or Revolution by NightM. C. Escher – Dolphins George Grosz – Ecce Homo (portfolio of lithographs)Wassily Kandinsky – On White IIHenri Matisse - Odalisque with Raised Arms and Window at TangierPablo Picasso - The Pipes of Pan and Paulo on a DonkeyMan Ray – Object to Be Destroyed (destroyed 1957)Paul Klee - Architecture, Tightrope Walker, and Masks
See these Wikipedia pages for more literature, music, film and artworks published in 1923.
For a great further reading on this new expansion to the US public domain checkout this article in the Smithsonian, this in the Atlantic, and this in the New York Times. And for those in California, the Internet Archive and Creative Commons are holding a special event on January 25th at the Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco.
To learn more about Public Domain Day visit publicdomainday.org.
Wondering if "bad things happen to works when they enter the public domain"? Wonder no more.
(Learn more about the situation in the U.S. and why the public domain is important in this article in Huff Post Books and this from the Duke Law School's Centre for the Study of the Public Domain).
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public-domain-review
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Dec 29, 2018
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:41.658829
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"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/class-of-2019/"
}
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women-at-work-during-world-war-i
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Women at Work during World War I
Text by Sam Dolbear
Mar 27, 2019
Last year marked two significant centenaries: the cessation of fighting in the First World War and the passing of legislation that expanded the electoral franchise to include women for the first time (at this point limited, however, to property-owning and degree-educated women over thirty). Historians have long connected these two events. The war, after the mass conscription of men to the front line, allowed women to enter the public sphere in unprecedented capacities, both in terms of work and leisure. As is documented by this vast collection of remarkable photographs, held by London’s Imperial War Museum, women’s lives were entirely transformed. The images show women performing a whole host of tasks: casting bricks, generating electricity, solutionising cork, building ships, painting railway stations, warming rubber, milking cows, signalling trains, smelting iron, blasting granite, making glucose, digging holes, and constructing houses, in addition to the work already prescribed to them such as childcare and domestic labour.
Looking through the thousands of photographs, perhaps surprising is how many show signs of joy: scenes of rural cooperation and industrial progress, of mutual support and collective endeavour. Indeed, if one were to stumble across the collection with no idea of context, they might appear to document some kind of feminist utopia (albeit one heavily bent on arms production). The trauma of the war, the loss of loved ones, the toil of work are often not visible there on the surface. No doubt this partly reflects a genuine positive spirit present amongst the workers, but one wonders also what role the medium might play here: the transforming presence of the camera (offering perhaps a welcome novelty from the daily grind, or triggering instincts to pose), and simply the limitations of the visual in conveying the lived reality of working life (as the German playwright Bertolt Brecht would later remark, the reality of a factory or workplace cannot be conveyed by a "merely photographic" reproduction). And this is not to mention the influence of any motives or biases of the photographers (George P. Lewis and Horace Nicholls among others) or their employers, the British government.
The conditions these women worked in were often dangerous and accidents were common. The TNT factories were particularly hazardous. In January 1917, an explosion at a plant in East London killed 73 people, and workers were nicknamed "canaries" due to the dangerous chemicals turning their skin yellow. The women were also paid less then their male counterparts: the munitions factories paid their female workers as little as half what they paid the men for doing similar jobs. In 1918, women working on London transport went on strike to demand equal pay, the first strike of its kind. Addressing the issue of unequal pay, in 1919 the Report of the War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry was published. It endorsed the principle of "equal pay for equal work", but went on to state that, because of women's "lesser strength and special health problems", the output would likely not be equal. In the same year, some advances in equal rights were made, enshrined in law with the The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919, which made it illegal to exclude women from jobs because of their gender. However, the 1919 Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act then forced most women workers to leave their wartime roles so as to make way for the returning men from the front.
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public-domain-review
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Mar 27, 2019
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Sam Dolbear
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:42.150990
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{
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"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/women-at-work-during-world-war-i/"
}
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leave-it-to-psmith-1923
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Leave it to Psmith (1923)
Apr 1, 2019
P. G. “Plum” Wodehouse was a staggeringly prolific and deeply influential British humorist. The list of writers and entertainers full of praise for Wodehouse is a long one. T. S. Eliot’s admiration was said to be “just this side of idolatry”. Douglas Adams named him a “great genius” who “writes pure word music”. Stephen Fry has called Wodehouse “the most amiable benefactor of mankind ever to tap a typewriter key” and labels him as a bridge "between great literature and ordinary, popular literature.” Wodehouse’s influence is not just restricted to the West. In 2018, the Japanese publishing company Kokusho Kankokai reported that, when Empress Michiko announced that upon retirement she intends to enjoy reading Wodehouse novels, they went from printing 100 copies annually, to “receiving orders for 100 a day”.
Of the countless number of characters Wodehouse invented in his seventy-two year career (over which time he published more than ninety books, forty plays, and two hundred short stories - as well as trying his hand at song lyrics and screenplays) the best known is the phlegmatic, savvy, and sagacious valet called Jeeves, from the long-running Jeeves & Wooster stories. But before Jeeves was Psmith — a character Wodehouse called "the only thing in my literary career which was handed to me on a silver plate with watercress around it”. Wodehouse based Robert Eustace Psmith on an acquaintance from his school days, Rupert D'Oyly Carte — an English hotelier and impresario. Psmith is an unflappable and witty eccentric. Never without his monocle and always ready to dive into improbable (even criminal) scenarios. Psmith is also a keen mind and a fan of Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, the oft-quoted line “Elementary, my dear Watson” is never uttered by the original Holmes. Its first appearance in any novel is when spoken by Psmith in Psmith, Journalist (1909).
Psmith’s most popular adventure took place in Leave it to Psmith (1923), a novel which has just entered the US public domain this year. The book is a crossover — the blending of two of Wodehouse’s most beloved universes: The Psmith Adventures (four novels) and The Blandings Castle Saga (11 novels and nine short stories). Psmith enters the world of Blandings Castle to pursue romance with the modern and vivacious Eve Halliday. There they encounter characters like the pottering and doddy Earl of Emsworth, the suspicious “extremely efficient” secretary Rupert Baxter, and a bevy of swindlers, imposters, dandies, and poets. It’s a classic Wodehouse rom-com, or, as he used to call his style, a musical comedy without music.
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public-domain-review
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Apr 1, 2019
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:42.628520
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"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/leave-it-to-psmith-1923/"
}
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the-tomb-and-the-telephone-box-soane-s-mausoleum-1816
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The Tomb and the Telephone Box: Soane’s Mausoleum (1816)
Text by Sam Dolbear
Jan 24, 2019
When London’s King’s Cross train station expanded north in the mid-1860s, the tracks cut through one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in the city: St Pancras Old Church. The novelist Thomas Hardy, at that point working as an architect, was charged with the task of clearing the site to make space for the station’s expansion north. Hardy exhumed the dead and placed their gravestones in a spiral around a tree. Today this tree remains, but the inscriptions are increasingly difficult to read, given the tree’s roots have begun to envelope the stones. Elsewhere in the cemetery, the gravestones mark the final resting places of other notable figures: there is Mary Wollstonecraft, writer of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) the mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818). Nearby is an imposing mausoleum inscribed with the name Sir John Soane, marking the final resting place of the collector-architect, whose eccentric house remains on Lincoln’s Inn Fields, as documented in the guide Description of the House and Museum of Sir John Soane (1835).
The mausoleum was erected in 1816, designed by Soane himself in memory of his wife Eliza, who died the year prior. Like much of Soane’s designs for London, of which only a few were realised, the mausoleum is built out of gleaming Portland stone, propped up in classical ruin. When Soane died in 1837, he joined his wife and their elder son John, who died prematurely in 1823, in the tomb that he had designed.
Visible from the graveyard and sharing its name with the same martyr, St Pancras, is the sister station to King’s Cross, a Victorian gothic masterpiece built by Sir George Gilbert Scott. Just under half a century after this station opened, the architect’s son, Giles Gilbert Scott had entered a competition to design a telephone box. He trod around the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church, in the shadow of his father’s masterpiece, and found inspiration: the central domed structure of Soane’s tomb. Though the design of the iconic red telephone box evolved over the years, from the K2 in 1926 to the K6 model in 1935, the structure remained the same: a column-like construction capped, like the tomb, by a domed roof.
Though Nikolaus Pevsner wrote that the nineteenth century “forgot about Soane”, it was ironically through his funereal-architecture that his spirit was revived. The ruined classical architecture of death had become one of the utilitarian icons of the twentieth century. These boxes are now relics on the streets, preserved by English Heritage and frequented by the occasional tourist, the occasional commuter with a flat battery, and the occasional poster of so-called "Tart Cards" that Gilbert and George (no relation to Sir George Gilbert Scott) arranged into artworks in 2011. Do these boxes still have a purpose? A number of years ago, a company selling coconut water ran adverts on the sides of old phone boxes in London: "FOR PEOPLE BORN AFTER 1994, THIS IS A PLACE ONCE USED TO MAKE PHONE CALLS", the text read. Like their architectural inspiration, these boxes now act as a memorial to a form of life now passed.
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public-domain-review
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Jan 24, 2019
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Sam Dolbear
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:43.087506
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{
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"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-tomb-and-the-telephone-box-soane-s-mausoleum-1816/"
}
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curiosities-of-puritan-nomenclature-1888
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Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature (1888)
Sep 18, 2012
A fascinating look at some of the more bizarre names given to children during the 17th century in England. Among the names explored are "From-above", "Free-gift" & "More-fruit" for unexpected additions to families; "Humiliation", "Abstinence" & "Sorry-for-sin" to express those qualities considered to be virtues; and just the plain brilliant/weird/mean, such as, "Job-rakt-out-of-the-asshes" and "Dancell-Dallphebo-Marke-Antony-Dallery-Galleiy-Caesar".
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public-domain-review
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Sep 18, 2012
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:44.041122
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{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/curiosities-of-puritan-nomenclature-1888/"
}
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the-hyginus-star-atlas-1482
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The Hyginus Star Atlas (1482)
Sep 12, 2012
Hyginus' Poeticon Astronomicon is a star atlas and book of stories whose text is attributed to "Hyginus", though the true authorship is disputed. During the Renaissance, the work was attributed to the Roman historian Gaius Julius Hyginus who lived during the 1st century BC, however, the fact that the book lists most of the constellations north of the ecliptic in the same order as Ptolemy's Almagest (written in the 2nd century AD) has led many to believe that the text was created by a more recent Hyginus. The text describes 47 of the 48 Ptolemaic constellations, centering primarily on the Greek and Roman mythology surrounding the constellations, though there is some discussion of the relative positions of stars. The first known printing was in 1475, attributed to "Ferrara", though it was not formally published until 1482, by Erhard Ratdolt in Venice, Italy. This edition carried the full title Clarissimi uiri Hyginii Poeticon astronomicon opus utilissimum. Ratdolt commissioned a series of woodcuts depicting the constellations to accompany Hyginus' text. As with many other star atlases that would follow it, the positions of various stars are indicated overlaid on the image of each constellation.. however, the relative positions of the stars in the woodcuts bear little resemblance to the descriptions given by Hyginus in the text or the actual positions of the stars in the sky. As a result of the inaccuracy of the depicted star positions and the fact that the constellations are not shown with any context, the Poeticon astronomicon is not particularly useful as a guide to the night sky. The illustrations commissioned by Ratdolt did, however, serve as a template for future sky atlas renderings of the constellation figures. (Wikipedia)
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public-domain-review
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Sep 12, 2012
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:44.709333
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{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-hyginus-star-atlas-1482/"
}
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ernest-shackleton-on-his-south-polar-expedition-1910
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Ernest Shackleton on his South Polar Expedition (1910)
Aug 30, 2012
Ernest Shackleton on his British Antarctic Expedition 1907–09, otherwise known as the Nimrod Expedition, the first of three expeditions to the Antarctic led by the Anglo-Irish explorer. Its main target, among a range of geographical and scientific objectives, was to be first to the South Pole. This was not attained, but the expedition’s southern march reached a farthest south latitude of 88° 23′ S, just 97.5 nautical miles (180.6 km; 112.2 mi) from the pole. This was by far the longest southern polar journey to that date and a record convergence on either Pole. A separate group led by Welsh Australian geology professor Edgeworth David reached the estimated location of the South Magnetic Pole, and the expedition also achieved the first ascent of Mount Erebus, Antarctica's second highest volcano. For this achievement, Shackleton was knighted by King Edward VII on his return home. (Wikipedia)
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public-domain-review
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Aug 30, 2012
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:45.138825
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{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/ernest-shackleton-on-his-south-polar-expedition-1910/"
}
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morning-on-the-farm-1897
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Morning on the Farm (1897)
Oct 5, 2012
A recording from the Library of Congress Berliner collection - the performer N.R. Wood imitates various animal sounds heard during the early morning, including sheep, cattle, cock, hens, guinea hen, turkey, hawk, crow, and other birds. Recorded in Washington, D.C. by Berliner Gramophone, 5th August 1897.
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public-domain-review
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Oct 5, 2012
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collection
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2024-05-01T21:42:45.724260
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/morning-on-the-farm-1897/"
}
|
|
the-coverdale-bible-1535
|
The Coverdale Bible (1535)
Sep 10, 2012
The Coverdale Bible, compiled by Myles Coverdale and published in 1535, was the first complete Modern English translation of the Bible (not just the Old Testament or New Testament), and the first complete printed translation into English. The later editions (folio and quarto) published in 1539 were the first complete Bibles printed in England. The place of publication of the 1535 edition was long disputed. The printer was assumed to be either Froschover in Zurich or Cervicornus and Soter (in Cologne or Marburg). In 1997 the printer was identified as Merten de Keyser in Antwerp. The publication was partly financed by Jacobus van Meteren in Antwerp, whose sister-in-law, Adriana de Weyden, married John Rogers. The other backer of was Jacobus van Meteren’s nephew, Leonard Ortels (†1539), father of Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598), the famous humanist geographer and cartographer. Although Coverdale was also involved in the preparation of the Great Bible of 1539, the Coverdale Bible continued to be reprinted. The last of over 20 editions of the whole Bible or its New Testament appeared in 1553. (Wikipedia)
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public-domain-review
|
Sep 10, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:46.226755
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-coverdale-bible-1535/"
}
|
|
cartoon-portraits-of-men-of-the-day-1873
|
Cartoon Portraits of Men of the Day (1873)
Aug 17, 2012
A book of caricatures of famous "Men of the Day" (as was the case in 1873) - including the likes of Darwin, Swinburne, Tennyson and Browning - drawn by cartoonist Frederick Watty and accompanied by biographical pieces on each of the subjects. With the exception of one, it is a compilation of all the cartoon portraits that were featured in Once a Week, a magazine originally founded as a result of a dispute between Bradbury and Evans and Charles Dickens. Bradbury and Evans had been Dickens' publisher since 1844, including publishing his magazine Household Words. In 1859, Bradbury and Evans refused to carry an advertisement by Dickens explaining why he had broken with Mrs. Dickens. In consequence, Dickens stopped work on Household Words and founded a new magazine, All The Year Round, which he decided would be editorially independent of any publisher. Bradbury and Evans responded by founding Once A Week, with veteran editor and abolitionist hero Samuel Lucas at the head. (Wikipedia)
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public-domain-review
|
Aug 17, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:46.697402
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/cartoon-portraits-of-men-of-the-day-1873/"
}
|
|
cartoon-portraits-of-leading-19th-century-figures-1873
|
Cartoon Portraits of Leading 19th-Century Figures (1873)
Aug 17, 2012
A selection of the more well known of the (male) leading 19th-century figures featured in Cartoon Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Men of the Day (1873) with drawings by Frederick Watty and accompanied by biographical pieces on each of the subjects. With the exception of one, it is a compilation of all the cartoon portraits that were featured in Once a Week, a magazine originally founded as a result of a dispute between Bradbury and Evans and Charles Dickens. Bradbury and Evans had been Dickens' publisher since 1844, including publishing his magazine Household Words. In 1859, Bradbury and Evans refused to carry an advertisement by Dickens explaining why he had broken with Mrs. Dickens. In consequence, Dickens stopped work on Household Words and founded a new magazine, All The Year Round, which he decided would be editorially independent of any publisher. Bradbury and Evans responded by founding Once A Week, with veteran editor and abolitionist hero Samuel Lucas at the head. (Wikipedia)
|
public-domain-review
|
Aug 17, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:47.002833
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/cartoon-portraits-of-leading-19th-century-figures-1873/"
}
|
|
roundhay-garden-scene-1888
|
Roundhay Garden Scene (1888)
Sep 27, 2012
Roundhay Garden Scene is an 1888 short film directed by inventor Louis Le Prince, considered to be the world's first film ever made using a motion picture camera. According to Le Prince's son, Adolphe, it was filmed at Oakwood Grange, the home of Joseph and Sarah Whitley, in Roundhay, Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire, United Kingdom on October 14, 1888. It features Adolphe Le Prince, Sarah Whitley, Joseph Whitley and Harriet Hartley in the garden, walking around and laughing. It was recorded at 12 frames per second and runs for only 2.11 seconds. Le Prince later used his camera to shoot trams and the horse-drawn and pedestrian traffic on Leeds Bridge. These pictures were soon projected on a screen in Leeds, making it the first motion picture exhibition. After returning to France, in September 1890, Le Prince was preparing to go back to the UK to patent his new camera, followed by a trip to the US to promote it. Before his journey, he decided to return home and visit friends and family. Having done so, he left Bourges on 13 September to visit his brother in Dijon. He would then take the 16 September train to Paris, but when the train arrived, his friends discovered that Le Prince was not on board. He was never seen again by his family or friends. No luggage nor corpse was found in the Dijon-Paris express nor along the railway. No one saw Le Prince at the Dijon station, except his brother. No one saw Le Prince in the Dijon–Paris express after he was seen boarding it. No one noticed strange behaviour or aggression in the Dijon-Paris express. The French police, Scotland Yard and the family undertook exhaustive searches but never found his body or luggage. This mysterious disappearance case was never solved. (Wikipedia)
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public-domain-review
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Sep 27, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:47.310840
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/roundhay-garden-scene-1888/"
}
|
|
the-bestiarium-of-aloys-zotl-1831-1887
|
The Bestiarium of Aloys Zötl (1831-1887)
Aug 16, 2012
These beautiful watercolours come from the Austrian painter Aloys Zötl's Bestiarium, a series of exquisite paintings of various animals undertaken from 1831 through until his death in 1887. He was relatively unknown until, decades after his death, his work was "re-discovered" by surrealist André Breton who was taken by the surrealist aesthetic he saw present in the images - as he writes: "Lacking any biographical details about the artist, one can only indulge one's fantasies in imagining the reasons which might have induced this workman from Upper Austria, a dyer by profession, to undertake so zealously between 1832 and 1887 the elaboration of the most sumptuous bestiary ever seen." (Wikipedia)
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public-domain-review
|
Aug 16, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:47.799931
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-bestiarium-of-aloys-zotl-1831-1887/"
}
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|
moriarty-playing-cards-1916
|
Moriarty Playing Cards (1916)
Oct 4, 2012
Actresses featured in the Moriarty playing card series issued in 1916 by the Movie Souvenir Card Co. of Cincinnati, Ohio. The back of each card is a reproduction in multiple-colors of the painting "The Chariot Race." The ad card within the pack proclaims: "Get a few packs of "Movies"--A Veritable Picture Gallery of the celebrities of the Movie World, treated with such a genius that it is the greatest novelty ever made in Souvenir Playing Cards, and is complete for playing all card games."
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public-domain-review
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Oct 4, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:48.343801
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/moriarty-playing-cards-1916/"
}
|
|
spring-morning-in-the-han-palace-17th-c
|
Spring Morning in the Han Palace (17th.c)
Sep 26, 2012
A 17th century copy of Spring Morning in the Han Palace, a famous handscroll by the 16th century Ming Dynasty artist Qiu Ying [Ch'iu Ying]. It depicts imperial life at its most idyllic. During the years of the Qing [Ch'ing] Dynasty, copies such of this of Qiu Ying's painting were popular because they were considered an excellent guide to elegant behaviour. (Above image stitched together from images, below, in the collection of the Walters Art Museum).
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public-domain-review
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Sep 26, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:48.789807
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/spring-morning-in-the-han-palace-17th-c/"
}
|
|
illustrated-initials-from-a-german-fairytale-book-1919-edition
|
Illustrated initials from a German fairytale book (1919 edition)
Sep 20, 2012
Frontispiece and illustrated initials by the artist Friedrich Heinrich Ernst Schneidler for Deutsche Märchen seit Grimm (German Fairytales since Grimm), a German fairytale book originally published in 1912.
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public-domain-review
|
Sep 20, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:49.577915
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/illustrated-initials-from-a-german-fairytale-book-1919-edition/"
}
|
|
anatomically-labelled-x-ray-images-1920
|
Anatomically labelled X-Ray images (1920)
Aug 28, 2012
Images of the illustrative radiographs from Cunningham's Manual of Practical Anatomy 7th ed. (1920) revised and edited by Arthur Robinson.
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public-domain-review
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Aug 28, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:50.043910
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/anatomically-labelled-x-ray-images-1920/"
}
|
|
the-knife-throwing-mother-and-her-children-1950s
|
The Knife-Throwing Mother and her Children (1950s)
Sep 3, 2012
The knife-thrower Louella Gallagher throws knives at her daughters Connie Ann, 5, and Colleena Sue, 2.5 yrs old, in Austin, Texas. As the newscaster comments: "...Evidently Colleena Sue has more trust in Mother's aim than the audience has. It takes a steady eye and a stout heart to heave knives at the apple of your eye, but this female William Tell has no qualms and plenty of faith..."
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public-domain-review
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Sep 3, 2012
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collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:50.512425
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-knife-throwing-mother-and-her-children-1950s/"
}
|
|
16th-century-prosthetics-1564
|
16th-century Prosthetics (1564)
Sep 28, 2012
Images of mechanical prosthetics as designed by Ambroise Paré in his book Dix livres de la chirurgie (Ten books of Surgery). Paré was the official royal surgeon for kings Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III and is considered to be one of the fathers of surgery and modern forensic pathology. As well as a designer of surgical instruments, he was also a leader in surgical techniques and battlefield medicine, especially the treatment of wounds. (Wikipedia)
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public-domain-review
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Sep 28, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:50.936189
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/16th-century-prosthetics-1564/"
}
|
|
an-alphabet-of-celebrities-1899
|
An Alphabet of Celebrities (1899)
Sep 24, 2012
Intricately rhymed and beautifully illustrated alphabet book on the world of late 19th century celebrity. It ends up creating quite wonderfully bizarre a-historical scenarios by throwing names with the same beginning letter all in with each other - for the letter N: "N is for Napoleon, shrouded in gloom,/ With Nero, Narcissus, and Nerdau, to whom/ He's explaining the manual of arms with a broom."
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public-domain-review
|
Sep 24, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:51.381322
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/an-alphabet-of-celebrities-1899/"
}
|
|
bach-s-organ-works-played-by-albert-schweitzer-1935
|
Bach’s organ works played by Albert Schweitzer (1935)
Sep 21, 2012
Albert Schweitzer was a German (writing in French also) theologian, organist, philosopher, physician, and medical missionary. As well as his important theological work (he depicted Jesus as literally believing the end of the world was coming in his own lifetime), he developed various theories on music, in particular the work of J.S. Bach. He explained figures and motifs in Bach's Chorale Preludes as painter-like tonal and rhythmic imagery illustrating themes from the words of the hymns on which they were based. They were works of devotional contemplation in which the musical design corresponded to literary ideas, conceived visually. Schweitzer's interpretative approach greatly influenced the modern understanding of Bach's music. His pamphlet "The Art of Organ Building and Organ Playing in Germany and France" (1906) effectively launched the 20th century Orgelbewegung, which turned away from romantic extremes and rediscovered baroque principles. In addition to his contribution to music theory, Schweiter also made many seminal recordings of Bach's organ recitals. In mid-December 1935 he began to record for Columbia Records on the organ of All Hallows, Barking-by-the-Tower, in London - the recordings above. He developed a particular technique for recording the performances of Bach's music known as "The Schweitzer Technique" which involved a new positioning of microphones. (Wikipedia)
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public-domain-review
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Sep 21, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:51.894818
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/bach-s-organ-works-played-by-albert-schweitzer-1935/"
}
|
|
russian-fairytales-1915
|
Russian Fairytales (1915)
Oct 2, 2012
A collection of Russian fairytales translated from the Russian of Nikolai Polevoy, a notable editor, writer, translator in the early 19th century. The translations were made by Robert Nisbet Bain, a British historian who worked for the British Museum, and a polyglot who could reportedly speak over twenty languages fluently. He famously taught himself Hungarian in order that he could read the works of Mór Jókai in the original after first reading him in German, going on to become the most prolific translator into English from Hungarian in the nineteenth century.
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public-domain-review
|
Oct 2, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:52.369653
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/russian-fairytales-1915/"
}
|
|
the-hindenburg-explodes-1937
|
The Hindenburg Explodes (1937)
Aug 26, 2012
Dramatic Universal newsreel footage of the Hindenburg disaster which took place on Thursday, May 6, 1937, when the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed during its attempt to dock with its mooring mast at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey. Of the 97 people on board (36 passengers, 61 crew), there were 35 fatalities; there was also one death among the ground crew. The actual cause of the fire remains unknown, although a variety of hypotheses have been put forward for both the cause of ignition and the initial fuel for the ensuing fire. The incident shattered public confidence in the giant, passenger-carrying rigid airship and marked the end of the airship era. (Wikipedia)
|
public-domain-review
|
Aug 26, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:52.772693
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-hindenburg-explodes-1937/"
}
|
|
the-hole-book-1908
|
The Hole Book (1908)
Aug 31, 2012
While fooling with a gun, Tom Potts shoots a bullet that seems to be unstoppable. A literal hole on each page traces the bullet's path as it wreaks havoc across various scenes until it meets its match in a particularly sturdy cake. A native of McDonough County, Illinois, Newell built a reputation in the 1880s and 1890s for his humorous drawings and poems, which appeared in Harper's Weekly, Harper's Bazaar, Scribner's Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Judge, and other publications. He later wrote and illustrated several popular children's books, such as Topsys and Turvys (1893), a collection of poems and images which could be viewed upside-down or right-side-up; The Hole Book (1908), featured above; and The Slant Book (1910), which took the shape of a rhomboid and told the story of a baby carriage careening down a hill. (Wikipedia)
|
public-domain-review
|
Aug 31, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:53.257340
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-hole-book-1908/"
}
|
|
tarzan-of-the-apes-1918
|
Tarzan of the Apes (1918)
Sep 17, 2012
The very first Tarzan film ever made, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' original novel Tarzan of the Apes of only 4 years earlier. The film is directed by Scott Sidney and stars Elmo Lincoln, Enid Markey, George B. French and Gordon Griffith. It is considered the most faithful to the novel of all the film adaptations, though only tells the first part of the novel, the remainder becoming the basis for the sequel, The Romance of Tarzan (also from 1918 but directed by Wilfred Lucas).
|
public-domain-review
|
Sep 17, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:53.709871
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/tarzan-of-the-apes-1918/"
}
|
|
woodcuts-from-18th-century-chapbooks
|
Woodcuts from 18th-Century Chapbooks
Oct 8, 2012
A selection of woodcuts from an 1882 book compiling facsimiles of 18th-century chapbooks. To see the pictures in context and peruse the full chapbooks see our post in the Text section where we have the full book. See also our post dedicated to the "topsy-turvy" woodcuts.
|
public-domain-review
|
Oct 8, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:54.206742
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/woodcuts-from-18th-century-chapbooks/"
}
|
|
chapbooks-of-the-eighteenth-century-1882
|
Chapbooks of the eighteenth century (1882)
Oct 8, 2012
Wonderful book offering facsimiles of hundreds of 18th century chapbooks upon a huge range of subjects - from tragic tales of revenge and murder to guides for interpreting dreams and moles - and the exquisite illustrative woodcuts which would often accompany the text. Included in this compilation is an informative introduction by John Ashton on the chapbook phenomenon, with additional commentary on some of the works.
|
public-domain-review
|
Oct 8, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:54.623773
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/chapbooks-of-the-eighteenth-century-1882/"
}
|
|
german-folk-dress-1887
|
German Folk Dress (1887)
Sep 7, 2012
Images from Deutsche Volkstrachten, Original-Zeichnungen mit erklärendem Text (1887) by Albert Kretschmer, a book detailing the folk dress of the peoples in areas covering modern day Austria and southern Germany. Albert Kretschmer (1825-1891) was known for his highly detailed drawings, watercolors and lithographs usually in publications detailing varieties of German and international costumes and historical clothing. In addition, he worked until 1889 as a costume designer at the Königliches Schauspielhaus in Berlin. (Wikipedia)
|
public-domain-review
|
Sep 7, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:55.067865
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/german-folk-dress-1887/"
}
|
|
first-year-anniversary-of-the-berlin-wall-1962
|
First Year Anniversary of the Berlin Wall (1962)
Nov 9, 2012
Universal newsreel from 1962 looking at the 1st year anniversary of the Berlin Wall.
|
public-domain-review
|
Nov 9, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:55.973271
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/first-year-anniversary-of-the-berlin-wall-1962/"
}
|
|
president-woodrow-wilson-s-daughter-singing-star-spangled-banner-1915
|
President Woodrow Wilson’s daughter singing Star Spangled Banner (1915)
Nov 6, 2012
Margaret Woodrow Wilson, the daughter of President at the time Thomas Woodrow Wilson, singing the U.S. national anthem "Star Spangled Banner" in 1915. After her mother's death in 1914 Margaret served as the First Lady of the United States until her father's second marriage in 1915. She would go on to make several recordings around 1918. In 1938 she travelled to the ashram of Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, India where she chose to stay for the rest of her life. She was later known in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as 'Nistha' (Sanskrit for "sincerity"). In 1942, she and the scholar Joseph Campbell edited the English translation of the classical work on the Hindu mystic, Sri Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna by Swami Nikhilananda, which was published in 1942. She was to die two years later, 6 years after entering the ashram, of a kidney infection aged 57. (Wikipedia)
The lyrics of the "The Star-Spangled Banner" come from "Defence of Fort McHenry", a poem written in 1814 by the 35-year-old lawyer and amateur poet, Francis Scott Key, after he witnessed the bombardment of Fort McHenry by the British Royal Navy ships in Chesapeake Bay 200 years ago this year in the War of 1812. The image above shows the U.S. flag flying above Fort McHenry in 1914. (Wikipedia)
|
public-domain-review
|
Nov 6, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:56.461317
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/president-woodrow-wilson-s-daughter-singing-star-spangled-banner-1915/"
}
|
|
manuscript-handbook-of-firework-design-1785
|
Manuscript Handbook of Firework Design (1785)
Nov 5, 2012
Beautiful hand-written and illustrated treatise on firework design and manufacture, including 'blue-prints' for the devices and explosive recipes.
|
public-domain-review
|
Nov 5, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:56.959014
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/manuscript-handbook-of-firework-design-1785/"
}
|
|
posed-portraits-of-19th-century-baseball-stars
|
Posed Portraits of 19th-Century Baseball Stars
Oct 24, 2012
Selection of studio posed photographs from the New York Public Library's Spalding Collection, a series of over 500 photographs, prints, drawings, caricatures, and printed illustrations donated in 1921 by early baseball player and sporting-goods tycoon A. G. Spalding (whose name to this day is printed across every ball used in the National League). The photographs below feature players of different teams from New York and Philadelphia and seem to be mostly taken in the 1870s and 1880s.
|
public-domain-review
|
Oct 24, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:57.467128
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/posed-portraits-of-19th-century-baseball-stars/"
}
|
|
the-sonnets-of-michelangelo-1904-edition
|
The Sonnets of Michelangelo (1904 edition)
Nov 19, 2012
Most famous for painting the Sistine Chapel and his sculpture of David, the Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo was also a prolific poet, in his lifetime penning more than 300 sonnets and madrigals. It is in his poetry that many critics have seen present the clearest evidence of his homosexual leanings. The openly homoerotic nature of the poetry has been a source of discomfort to later generations. Michelangelo's grandnephew, Michelangelo the Younger, published them in 1623 with the gender of pronouns changed, and it was not until John Addington Symonds translated them into English in 1878 that the original genders were restored - the book featured here is a later edition of this work which features the Symonds translations side-by-side with the original Italian (see here for the 1st edition, with no Italian). Even in modern times some scholars continue to insist that, despite the restoration of the pronouns, the sonnets represent "an emotionless and elegant re-imagining of Platonic dialogue, whereby erotic poetry was seen as an expression of refined sensibilities". (Wikipedia)
|
public-domain-review
|
Nov 19, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:57.938897
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-sonnets-of-michelangelo-1904-edition/"
}
|
|
robert-louis-stevenson-s-baby-book-1922
|
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Baby Book (1922)
Nov 13, 2012
A remarkable record of the first few years of author Robert Louis Stevenson's life, as noted down by his mother in a "Baby Book". The book featured above, published in 1922, consists of a facsimile of the original handwritten baby book followed by a transcription. Amid various baby-related milestones, such as first teeth, crawl, walk, etc., we hear reports of a young "Lou" (also called "Boulihasker, Smoutie, Baron Broadnose, Signor Sprucki,.. Maister Sprook") first engaging with and questioning the world around him... here's a few little golden snippets:
When 1 year old...
Jan 13th: Smout gives up his forenoon sleep and calls books "oufs" because he expects to find pictures of dogs in them.
3 years old...
April 17th: When Smout was drawing pictures he said "I have drawed a man's body, shall I do his soul now?"
4 years old...
January 10th : When Lou saw the sun looking red he said "It's just like a great big orange thrown up into the sky."
February 6th: Lou dreamt that "he heard the noise of pens writing."
March 17th: Smout's dream " I dreamt that I was going downstairs and I saw a Russian bear looking out at the pantry door, and it came up and took hold of my foot and I awoke and it was just a dream."
March 27th: Another dream." I dreamt that I was at a marriage and a boy asked me to go to his room and when I looked out at the window I saw a basket hanging down from the sky and it was full of doors all around and somebody gave me something that wasn't good for me and I would not take it." The something appeared to be a cookie of some kind and he said the basket "was hung on a nail driven into a cloud."
|
public-domain-review
|
Nov 13, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:58.122048
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/robert-louis-stevenson-s-baby-book-1922/"
}
|
|
17th-century-calligraphy-from-germany
|
17th century Calligraphy from Germany
Oct 18, 2012
Select full page spreads from a 17th century German book on calligraphy entitled The Proper Art of Writing: a compilation of all sorts of capital or initial letters of German, Latin and Italian fonts from different masters of the noble art of writing. Although some can be recognisable as letters, it seems that a penchant for elaborate decoration has made most of them wonderfully illegible.
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public-domain-review
|
Oct 18, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:58.595927
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/17th-century-calligraphy-from-germany/"
}
|
|
the-proper-art-of-writing-1655
|
The Proper Art of Writing (1655)
Oct 18, 2012
A 17th century German book on the art of writing. The full title (in English) reads The Proper Art of Writing: a compilation of all sorts of capital or initial letters of German, Latin and Italian fonts from different masters of the noble art of writing. A great range of different styles are represented seemingly increasing in elaborateness, and also illegibility, as the book goes on.
See a selection of the full page spreads in our post for the Images collection.
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public-domain-review
|
Oct 18, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:59.088978
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-proper-art-of-writing-1655/"
}
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the-calaveras-of-jose-guadalupe-posada
|
The Calaveras of José Guadalupe Posada
Nov 2, 2012
José Guadalupe Posada (1851–1913) was a Mexican illustrator known for his satirical and politically acute calaveras. Deriving from the Spanish word for 'skulls', these calaveras were illustrations featuring skeletons which would, after Posada's death, become closely associated with the mexican holiday Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Most of these calaveras were published by the press of Antonio Vanegas Arroyo which produced inexpensive literature for the lower classes, including thousands of satirical broadsides which Posada illustrated. Through this focus on mortality Vanegas Arroyo and Posada satirised many poignant issues of the day, in particular the details of bourgeois life and the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. On January 20th 1913, 3 years after the start of the Mexican Revolution, José Guadalupe Posada died at his home in obscurity. He was penniless and buried in an unmarked grave. It was only years later in the 1920s that his work became recognised on a national and international level after it was championed by the French ex-patriot artist Jean Charlot who described Posada as “printmaker to the Mexican people”.
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public-domain-review
|
Nov 2, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:59.559626
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-calaveras-of-jose-guadalupe-posada/"
}
|
|
numerical-hands-1797
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Illustrations from Vincenzo Requeno's Discovery of Chironomia (1797)
Nov 15, 2012
After “reviving the practice of painting with encaustic colored waxes” and having “revitalized the lost, ancient method for speaking at a distance with telegraphy”, the Spanish monk Vincenzo Requeno fixed his gaze on a new task in Scoperta della Chironomia (1797): reestablishing the “unknown and necessary” practice of communicating intelligibly with the hands.
According to Requeno, this gestural art was employed for two different audiences in Ancient Greece and Rome: on stage, as a method for expression, and in the forum, as a technique for calculation. Since emotions do not express themselves regularly — “burning passions . . . modify people’s bodies different” — Greek and Roman theater developed “a fixed and stable law of convention” that governed a performer’s hands. “Without the intelligence of this art it is impossible to understand the structure of the Greek tragedies, the strength attributed by the ancients to the gestures of their pantomime,and many historical passages of the ancient theater.” On the other hand, chironomia allowed orators in the Roman forum to practice a form of shorthand computation, which Requeno suspects has roots reaching back to “the heroic times of Greece”. Furthermore, since alphabetic letters can be mapped to numbers, he conjectures that it was once possible to spell out written composition rapidly across the fingers’ pads and joints. Like his predecessor John Bulwer, who drew upon a similar corpus of classical writers in an attempt to fashion a universal sign language, Requeno is haunted by the emotional registers that were lost when our modern hands became expressively arthritic.
The images below come from Requeno’s Appendix to Scoperta della Chironomia and offer techniques for signing both numbers and letters. He offers a blueprint for assigning the first eleven letters of the Italian alphabet to the left hand — gestures that could be mirrored with the right hand for communicating the rest of the alphabet — and concludes his treatise with a belief that ancient art forms might find new life if the proper gestures are employed. “By making use of the gestures of the Greeks, leaving aside their alphabet, we will be able today with golden simplicity to renew ancient art”.
For more on “digital” computation and memory, see Kensy Cooperrider’s essay, “Handy Mnemonics: The Five-Fingered Memory Machine”. For an English project contemporary to Requeno’s own, see Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia (1806), which attempted to create a rhetoric of gestures based off of the works of Cicero and Quintilian.
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public-domain-review
|
Nov 15, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:42:59.997277
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/numerical-hands-1797/"
}
|
|
dennison-s-bogie-book-for-halloween-1920
|
Dennison’s Bogie Book for Halloween (1920)
Oct 30, 2012
Decoration, costume and party suggestions from 1920 for the night of Halloween, that one time (according to the book) "of all the year when an opportunity is supposed to be given for looking into the future and having one's fate settled for the coming twelve months". Full of lots of handicraft tips on making that perfect spooky zone, as well as various party games (mostly involving blindfolds and choosing future loves) and a couple of ghost stories to read when midnight strikes. So.. "Why not invite your friends to a Hallowe'en party and join in the fun of trying some of the time-honored ways of finding out what the future holds in store?"
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public-domain-review
|
Oct 30, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:43:00.490820
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/dennison-s-bogie-book-for-halloween-1920/"
}
|
|
birds-from-the-natural-history-of-carolina-florida-and-the-bahama-islands-1754
|
Birds from The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands (1754)
Oct 10, 2012
A selection of birds as featured in Volume 1 of (the magnificently titled) Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands: containing the figures of birds, beasts, fishes, serpents, insects, and plants: particulary the forest-trees, shrubs, and other plants, not hitherto described, or very incorrectly figured by authors. Together with their descriptions in English and French. To which are added, observations on the air, soil, and waters: with remarks upon agriculture, grain, pulse, roots, &c., by Mark Catesby and George Edwards.
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public-domain-review
|
Oct 10, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:43:00.948929
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/birds-from-the-natural-history-of-carolina-florida-and-the-bahama-islands-1754/"
}
|
|
recital-of-the-23rd-psalm-and-he-leadeth-me-1919
|
Recital of The 23rd Psalm and “He Leadeth Me” (1919)
Oct 19, 2012
The 23rd Psalm recited by Rev. William H. Morgan D.D. and followed by a rendition by the Calvary Choir of the hymn "He Leadeth Me", originally written by Joseph Gilmore who had this to say about its creation:
As a young man who recently had been graduated from Brown University and Newton Theological Institution, I was supplying for a couple of Sundays the pulpit of the First Baptist Church in Philadelphia. At the mid-week service, on the 26th of March, 1862, I set out to give the people an exposition of the Twenty-third Psalm, which I had given before on three or four occasions, but this time I did not get further than the words “He Leadeth Me.” Those words took hold of me as they had never done before, and I saw them in a significance and wondrous beauty of which I had never dreamed.
This recording from 1919 is made by Thomas Edison and housed at the Library of Congress. The 23rd psalm is perhaps the best known of them all, importnat in both the Christian and Jewish traditions. It is particularly popular in the world of cinema where it is used in an interesting variety of scenes - to give just a few examples: at the end of the 1973 film The Wicker Man, Howie recites it as he is being engulfed in flames; in the 1980 David Lynch film The Elephant Man, Merrick recites it and so reveals his intelligence; in the 1997 film Titanic it is recited while the ship is sinking.
|
public-domain-review
|
Oct 19, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:43:01.404718
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/recital-of-the-23rd-psalm-and-he-leadeth-me-1919/"
}
|
|
a-description-of-the-brain-of-mr-charles-babbage-1909
|
A Description of the Brain of Mr. Charles Babbage (1909)
Nov 12, 2012
Charles Babbage, (1791–1871) was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer. Considered the "father of the computer", Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer that eventually led to more complex designs. Babbage himself decided that he wanted his brain to be donated to science upon his death. In a letter accompanying the donation, his son Henry wrote:
I have no objection...to the idea of preserving the brain...Please therefore do what you consider best...[T]he brain should be known as his, and disposed of in any manner which you consider most conducive to the advancement of human knowledge and the good of the human race.
Half of Babbage's brain is preserved at the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons in London, the other half is on display in the Science Museum in London. The 1909 article featured here, as well as a wonderfully detailed description of the brain complete with a gloriously dizzy abundance of scientific terms, includes in its latter half a series of photographs of the brain itself. We've featured these images below.
|
public-domain-review
|
Nov 12, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:43:01.864754
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/a-description-of-the-brain-of-mr-charles-babbage-1909/"
}
|
|
live-footage-of-king-alexander-s-assassination-1934
|
Live footage of King Alexander’s Assassination (1934)
Oct 9, 2012
One of the most notable newsreel films in existence - footage showing the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia on 9th October, 1934. While the exact moment of shooting was not captured on film, the events leading to the assassination and the immediate aftermath were. The body of the chauffeur (who had been killed instantly) became jammed against the brakes of the car, allowing the cameraman to continue filming from within inches of the King for a number of minutes afterwards. The film was later revealed to have been manipulated slightly in order to give the audience the impression that the assassination had been captured on film. Three identical gunshot sounds were added to the film afterwards, when in reality Chernozemski shot over ten times, killing or wounding a total of 15 people. The exact moment of assassination was never filmed.
On Tuesday 9 October 1934 the King Alexander arrived in Marseilles to start a state visit to the Third French Republic, to strengthen the two countries' alliance in the Little Entente. While Alexander was being driven in a car through the streets along with French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou, a gunman, Vlado Chernozemski, stepped from the street and shot the King and the chauffeur. Alexander died instantly, slumped backwards in the car seat, eyes open. Barthou was wounded in the arm but died later due to inadequate medical treatment. The assassin, Vlado Chernozemski, was a Bulgarian, member of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) and an experienced marksman. Immediately after assassinating King Alexander, he was cut down by the sword of a mounted French policeman, and then beaten by the crowd. By the time he was removed from the scene, he was already dead. (Wikipedia)
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public-domain-review
|
Oct 9, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:43:02.338286
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/live-footage-of-king-alexander-s-assassination-1934/"
}
|
|
plates-from-robert-thornton-s-temple-of-flora-1807
|
Plates from Robert Thornton’s Temple of Flora (1807)
Nov 8, 2012
"The Temple of Flora" is the third and final part of Robert John Thornton's New illustration of the sexual system of Carolus von Linnaeus, considered by many to be the greatest of all flower books. It consists of a series of sumptuous depictions of flowers notable for their epic and unusual settings. Interwoven amongst the images are various descriptions, histories and poetic odes regarding the flowers featured. The first plates were engraved by Thomas Medland in May 1798 from paintings by Philip Reinagle. Between 1798 and 1807 they produced a total of thirty-three coloured plates, engraved in aquatint, stipple and line. Others engravers included Joseph Constantine Stadler working from the painting of Peter Charles Henderson. When he planned the project, Thornton had decided to publish seventy folio-size plates. Lack of interest from the general public spelled disaster for the scheme, and the holding of a lottery could not save it from financial ruin, neither did a page in the work dedicated to the spouse of George III, Queen Charlotte, patroness of botany and the fine arts. (Wikipedia)
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public-domain-review
|
Nov 8, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:43:02.685693
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/plates-from-robert-thornton-s-temple-of-flora-1807/"
}
|
|
illuminated-version-of-lord-tennyson-s-morte-d-arthur-1912
|
Illuminated version of Lord Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur (1912)
Oct 25, 2012
Alfred Lord Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur, written as early as the spring of 1835, was a retelling of the third, fourth and fifth chapters of the twenty-first book of Malory's Romance about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and the Knights of the Round Table. Tennyson later would incorporate a much extended and altered version of the poem into his The Idylls of the King, as the last section titled 'The Passing of Arthur'.
The illuminator Alberto Sangorski (1862-1932) was late to the world of calligraphy, at the age of 43 beginning to work for his younger brother Francis in the famous Sangorski and Sutcliffe bookbinding firm. One of his greatest achievements was a unique jewel bound version of Omar Khayyám's Rubáiyát, now referred to as 'the Great Omar,' which never reached the American collector who commissioned it as it was sent across on the ill fated Titanic in 1912.
|
public-domain-review
|
Oct 25, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:43:03.166974
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/illuminated-version-of-lord-tennyson-s-morte-d-arthur-1912/"
}
|
|
cantonese-opera-white-hibiscus-at-night-1920
|
Cantonese Opera - White Hibiscus at Night (1920)
Oct 12, 2012
The traditional Chinese song "White Hibiscus at Night" sung by Peony Su, a star of the Cantonese Opera during the 1920s and 30s. Learn more here.
|
public-domain-review
|
Oct 12, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:43:03.673792
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/cantonese-opera-white-hibiscus-at-night-1920/"
}
|
|
will-rogers-talks-to-the-bankers-1924
|
Will Rogers Talks to the Bankers (1924)
Nov 16, 2012
William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers (1879–1935) was an American cowboy, vaudeville performer, humorist, social commentator and motion picture actor. He was one of the world's best-known celebrities of the interwar period and by the mid-30s was internationally known as a leading political wit and top-paid Hollywood movie star. At the peak of his success, in 1935, he died when a small airplane he was travelling in crashed in Alaska. He joked about his own early death:
When I die, my epitaph, or whatever you call those signs on gravestones, is going to read: "I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I dident like." I am so proud of that, I can hardly wait to die so it can be carved.
In this recording Rogers turns his satirical wit to the world of bankers. (Wikipedia)
|
public-domain-review
|
Nov 16, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:43:04.114041
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/will-rogers-talks-to-the-bankers-1924/"
}
|
|
hirschvogel-s-geometria-1543
|
“I Reunite Architecture and Perspective”: Hirschvogel’s Geometria (1543)
Oct 15, 2012
One theory about wormholes — those speculative cosmological structures that tunnel between distant points in the universe — holds that spacetime can be folded like a piece of paper, bringing the near and far into proximity. Examining the manuscript pages from Augustin Hirschvogel’s Geometria (1543), collected below, we are thrust into an analogous encounter with early solid geometry; suddenly the distant past is thrown up before our eyes on screen, and we glimpse another form of interdimensional folding, one much less hypothetical.
Visualizing various polyhedra in three dimensions, Hirschvogel unfolds these bodies on the page, creating flat “nets” (as mathematicians call them) that resemble blueprints for paper sculpture. Dürer was the first to use this method, in Underweysung der messung (1525), and Hirschvogel expresses his debt to him in Geometria, a volume with grand and humorous ambitions, judging by the title page’s inscription: “The Book of Geometry is my name. / All liberal Arts were originally derived from me. / I reunite Architecture and Perspective”. Standing on his master’s shoulders, Hirschvogel drew an Archimedean solid that Dürer’s hands never touched, the rhombicosidodecahedron, which has thirty square faces, twenty triangular faces, twelve pentagonal faces, sixty vertices, and more than one hundred edges. Hirschvogel was evidently proud of this accomplishment, for it adorns his title page too, refashioned as a perch for an owl, the ancient avian symbol for wisdom — here mobbed by lesser birds, perhaps enemies of knowledge. When not drawing shapes, Hirschvogel made solid objects, specifically “Tyrolese owl jugs” (or so some scholars have conjectured), which may have been awarded for feats involving archery or drunkenness.
In Ancient Greek geometry, the Platonic solids were connected to the foundational elements of matter: earth, water, fire, and air. Born in Nürnberg and living the majority of his life in Vienna, Hirschvogel witnessed a fifth association come on the scene in the sixteenth century, the association of dodecahedrons with heaven. Hirschvogel took this sacred geometry further, mapping the Latin alphabet’s vowels onto polyhedra. What purpose this may have served, we do not know, but it hints toward a divine, mathematical language, in which sounds and solids cohere in the eye and on the tongue. The abstractions on the pages of this manuscript, held by Dresdon’s Saxon State and University Library, have gained depth as they’ve aged — smudgy stains litter the paper, interacting with its complex geometry. This decay seems to drag the geometer down from the lofty world of mathematical forms, back into the irregular geometry of embodied life.
For more on Dürer and Renaissance geometry, see Noam Andrews’ essay “The Polyhedral Perspective”. For some lovely stellated and uniform polyhedra, see our post on Max Brückner’s collection.
|
public-domain-review
|
Oct 15, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:43:04.595038
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/hirschvogel-s-geometria-1543/"
}
|
|
coloured-plates-from-essai-d-anatomie-1745
|
Coloured plates from Gautier D'Agoty's Essai d’Anatomie (1745)
Oct 22, 2012
These extraordinary illustrations were produced in 1745 by Gautier D'Agoty, and form a remarkably detailed atlas of the head, neck, and shoulder areas of the human body, with explanatory text in French. The scenes were based on cadavers dissected by Joseph Duverney and made using the mezzotint method (from the Italian “mezza tina” or “half tone”). Mezzotints are produced by rocking a toothed tool over a metal plate to create tiny holes that hold ink. The roughened surface is then polished to varying degrees of smoothness, thus reducing ink-holding capacity and creating subtly darker and lighter tones. Coloured mezzotinting was invented in 1719 by Gautier D’Agoty's master, Jaques Christophe Le Blon, and involves making three separate impressions (of blue, yellow, and red ink). Since the mezzotint technique is quite labor-intensive, it had largely fallen out of favour by the twentieth century. As the Internet Archive description explains:
Most often used to reproduce paintings by famous artists, mezzotint printing was rarely used for original works of art, making the "Essai d'Anatomie" a work of great scientific and artistic significance. The original copy of the "Essai d'Anatomie" held by the Rudolph Matas Library of the Health Sciences at Tulane University was restored, bound, and digitized by William Kitchens. The restoration work was completed on May 6, 2008. These remarkable anatomical images from the 18th century provide a fascinating look into both the artistic and scientific climate of the period.
|
public-domain-review
|
Oct 22, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:43:05.066375
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/coloured-plates-from-essai-d-anatomie-1745/"
}
|
|
clay-animations-of-jospeh-sunn-1926
|
Clay animations of Joseph Sunn (1926)
Oct 16, 2012
From the Prelinger Archive - two early clay animations (The Penwiper and Green Pastures) by pioneering Chinese American animator Joseph Sunn from San Francisco. These films are part of the "Ralph Wolfe's Mud Stuff" series.
|
public-domain-review
|
Oct 16, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:43:05.509842
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/clay-animations-of-jospeh-sunn-1926/"
}
|
|
the-art-of-invigorating-and-prolonging-life-1822
|
The Art of Invigorating and Prolonging Life (1822)
Oct 11, 2012
A comprehensive look at all the tricks in the trade in securing a longer and fuller life. As well as detailed regimes (often involving drinking wine and taking siestas), there is included in its pages this view of life laid out by William Jones.
|
public-domain-review
|
Oct 11, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:43:05.977490
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-art-of-invigorating-and-prolonging-life-1822/"
}
|
|
a-wake-in-hell-s-kitchen-1903
|
A Wake in Hell’s Kitchen (1903)
Oct 27, 2012
Strange little short from the American Mutoscope & Biograph Co, housed at the Library of Congress. From Biograph picture catalogue, Nov. 1902 [MI], p. 39:
This scene is laid in the parlor of a New York tenement. Two watchers at the wake are smoking and drinking, while the widow is weeping over the coffin. The attention of the three is attracted for an instant, and the supposed corpse rises up, drinks all the beer in the pitcher which is standing on a table nearby, and lies down in the coffin again. The mourners return, and seeing that the beer is gone, engage in a controversy over it. During the scrap the corpse jumps out of the coffin and takes part in the melee.
|
public-domain-review
|
Oct 27, 2012
|
collection
|
2024-05-01T21:43:06.534306
|
{
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/a-wake-in-hell-s-kitchen-1903/"
}
|
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