Below are reproduced a few fine examples from Sins of America. But be ready.

You’ll laugh!

You’ll groan!

You’ll be outraged!

You’ll drink more heavily!

You’ll feel a tingling sensation in unmentionable areas of your person!

 


In short goodly reader… you’re pretty much sure to enjoy, sporting folk you are.

For more info on The National Police Gazette check out the following:

A Little Visit to the Lower Depths, by Gene Smith
The National Police Gazette at Everything2
The Sporting Life, at The Intimate Bachelor

To see how the Gazette eventually ended up see:

Cover Girls of WWII
Bad Mags
And the a modern, online version Here

Expect a follow-up with more. Hope you enjoyed.

Looking back on the visual legacy of the American Eugenics movement is quite fascinating. Aside from the historical photographs (always of interest) you are faced with a seemingly endless array of statistical data, a prospect which you’d intuit to be a rather dry affair. In looking, however, you find yourself alternately offended, amused, repulsed, empathic, and generally engaged. When was the last time a powerpoint pie chart made you uncomfortable or the bar graph in the margins of a trade magazine pissed you off?

The lingering power in much of the Eugenics material can be attributed to the fact it was aimed at a “general” audience. A large swath of it was created in an effort to sway the general populace toward its position. In as much there is often a strange marriage of dispassionate math with the visual language of tabloid journalism. The result being a surprising kind of statistical provocation that feels more akin to propaganda than science.

The diagrams and brochures and flash cards, meanwhile, which were not necessarily designed for public consumption, having been drawn up in a time well before our current notions of political correctness, seem to jump off the page in their bluntness, challenging our accepted decorum. In other cases the notions of heredity being explored, in this age prior to advances in genetic research, often juxtapose traits and classifications which illicit involuntary guffaws.

In few cases are the materials simply bland.

At bottom I’d say this is because the materials are always focussed on the one subject we, none of us, can ignore, which we all have opinions and ideas about- ourselves. Our favorite subject, and by extension our second favorite subject as well, how others are different from ourselves.

In any case having come across the mother load of visual material that is The Eugenics Archive I thought I’d draw your attention to just a few representative items in their collection for your offense, amusement, repulsion and engagement-

At this point, so many years later, these items fascinate not particularly because of the data they convey but because of their method of conveyance- surely a failing from a statistical standpoint, but not from an ideological one. Which it could be argued was really the whole aim of the enterprise anyway. They sure push all the age old buttons don’t they? The same ones which our politicians and ideologues, not coincidentally, are still pushing.

Taken on the whole, with the parade of references to insanity, albinism, neurosis, sex crimes, feeblemindedness, gigantism, larceny, “pauperism,” schizophrenia, “idiocy,” achondroplasia, promiscuity, murder, epilepsy, hypertrichosis, and “natural ventriloqual power,” immersion for any period of time in these materials makes you feel as though you were wandering through an Hieronymus Bosch painting. ‘Course, I always thought Bosch had an almost preternatural talent for capturing the reality of humanity in his fantasy, so perhaps that’s as it should be.

Hope you… enjoyed?

From the University of Hong Kong’s fascinating (but seemingly now defunct) search for extraterrestrial intelligence page:

“The book was unusual in that it was the first time that scientific knowledge had been written for the public in a common language and in a manner to encourage the reader to enjoy the process of learning. Hitherto, all scientific knowledge had been written only for other scientists and usually in some classical language. Newton, for example, was at that time busy composing his monumental work Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) - in latin, of course.”

And what scientific ideas was Fontenelle’s book offering up to the public exactly? The answer to that question represents the second reason the book is remarkable.

Owing a great deal to the previous work of Copernicus (the heliocentric theory of the solar system) and Descartes (particularly his theory of vortex motion of the planets meant to counteract Newton’s idea of gravity), his work rebutted the idea of a centre to the universe and speculated in great detail on the habitation and multitudes of other planets.

Now take that in for a second… this book was published in 1686 as I’ve said. That’s less than a century after Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for “desacrilizing” the Earth by suggesting the possibility of multiple inhabited worlds. It’s only 50 years after Galileo had lost his freedom and had been placed under permanent house arrest for writing “daring astronomical theories.”

As Nina Rattner Gelbart puts it in the introduction to the 1990 edition of Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds:

“While much of Fontenelle sounds matter-of-fact to us—his talk of boundless universe, his speculation on intelligent and extragalactic life, his discussion of space travel—we have to remember that publishing his book three centuries ago was risky business. The ideas he was bandying about were bold, controversial, even forbidden. As they had been scarcely known to the average reader before he explained and disseminated them, these astonishing ideas suddenly became all the rage.”

Fontenelle himself seemed aware of the dangers and tried to pre-empt negative judgment from the religious quarters with a few choice words in his own preface to the book:

“It only remains for me to speak to the one group of people, who will perhaps be the most difficult to satisfy; Not that I haven’t given them very good arguments, but rather that they may, if they wish, refuse any good arguments. These are the scrupulous people who think there is a danger in respect to religion in placing inhabitants elsewhere than on Earth. I respect even the most excessive sensibilities people have on the matter of Religion, and I would have respected Religion to the point of wishing not to offend it in a public work, even if it were contrary to my own opinion. But what may be surprising to you is that Religion simply has nothing to do with this system, in which an infinity of worlds with inhabitants exist. It’s only necessary to sort out a little error of imagination.

When I say to you that that the moon is inhabited, you picture to yourself men made like us, and if you’re a bit of a theologian, you’re instanatly full of qualms. The descendants of Adam have not spread to the moon, nor sent colonies there. Therefore the men in the moon are not sons of Adam. Well, it would be embarassing to theology if there were men anywhere not descended from him, it’s not necessary to say any more about it; All imaginable difficulties boil down to that, and the terms that must be employed in any longer explication are too serious and dignified to be placed in a book as unserious as this. Perhaps I could respond soundly enough if I undertook it, but certainly I have no need to respond. It rests entirely upon the men in the moon, but it’s you who are putting men on the moon. I put no men there at all: I put inhabitants there who are not like men in any way.”

Fontenelle not only managed to avoid the usual persecution but in fact his book became an instant best seller of the day, and went on to be translated into no less than 10 languages. Perhaps it was the way he structured the book which helped it avoid censor (the book takes the form of a succession of casual evening conversations) or perhaps it was the the intentionally abstract and theoretical tone of the ideas themselves.

As Sylvia Engdahl puts it in the wonderful New Mythology of the Space Age:

“The ideas had less impact on culture than they have today. In the first place, they were abstract beliefs, a matter of principle rather than speculation about the future. It did not occur to anyone that travel between solar systems might become possible. It was assumed that mortals from one solar system could never have knowledge of the others, except perhaps in an afterlife. In the second place, although plurality of worlds was discussed by “natural philosophers”—they weren’t called “scientists” until the 19th century, when Whewell coined the word—it was not expected that science could ever learn anything about the subject, nor, for that matter, offer evidence for it.”

The reason for the volume’s wild popularity is less a mystery and accounts for yet another remarkable aspect of the book. The “casual evening conversations” are not had in a study between stuffy learned men, but between a charming philosopher and his hostess, a Marquise, in the evenings as they stroll through her moonlit gardens.

Paula Findlen, of Stanford University describes this change from the norm in her essay Becoming a Scientist: Gender and Knowledge in 18th c. Italy:

“No longer a man of the university, a scholastic master surrounded by male disciples, Fontenelle’s philosopher was a charming seducer of women, a wit who made science comprehensible by cultural analogy. His knowledge was no social liability that removed him from ordinary conversation, but the very reason that he held the attention of an aristocratic Marquise for several days and nights, as he educated her in the mysteries of the post-Copernican, cartesian universe.” In short, just exactly the kind of thing high society was likely to eat up. But Fontenelle took this arrangement a step further-

In a time when women were not expected to know much of anything “scientific” Fontenelle’s society lady was not strolling in the moonlight to be seduced, as might be expected, but to genuinely learn. He hoped to “encourage women through the example of a woman.” This was no small thing at the time and Fontenelle was quick to tell his female readers that the abilities of his imaginary woman philosopher did not exceed their own capacity to learn. Quite the opposite.

Again from his preface:

“I’ve placed a woman in these conversations who is being instructed, one who has never heard a syllable of such things. I thought this fiction would serve to make the work more enticing, and to encourage women through the example of a woman who, having nothing of an extraordinary character, without ever exceeding the limitations of a person who has no knowledge of science, never fails to understand what’s said to her, and arranges in her mind, without confusion, vortices and worlds. Why would any woman accept inferiority to this imaginary marquise, who only conceives of those things of which she can’t help but conceive.”

He goes on in that vein for a while. So whether it was clever recognition of an untapped market, a sincere desire to educate women and give them a fictional role model in the sciences, or to goad the men who would surely read the book into a more careful consideration we can not know. The effect, however, was to achieve all three. This book helped to popularize the ideas of a “plurality of worlds” (which we have recently firmly established as truth), extraterrestrials, and space travel, in a time when such ideas were totally revolutionary, and thus primed the public in some degree for ideas which would follow (like those put forth in Christiaan Huygens posthumously published Cosmotheoros for example.)

In any case Conversations on the Plurailty of Worlds made such a big impression on people’s imagination that, according to one source, “Not long after, at the time of the death of Newton, vast amounts of sentimental poetry about other solar systems appeared in literary magazines, much of it by women and some based on the theme of Newton’s soul viewing other solar systems on the way to heaven. People were as eager to visit them as we are today, but could imagine only one potential opportunity, a time after death when the soul…

According to others these same ideas heavily influenced what we now call the Baroque in Art and Theater.

These are no small accomplishments to be connected with for a man who was lampooned by Voltaire and to this day is considered only moderately noteworthy.

Wikipedia says as much in an entry:

“He has no claim to be regarded as a genius; but, as Sainte-Beuve has said, he well deserves a place ‘dans la classe des esprits infiniment distiugués’—distinguished, however, it ought to be added by intelligence rather than by intellect, and less by the power of saying much than by the power of saying a little well.”

Popularizing science is a task which 300 years later, in our age of stunning technology, liberal attitudes, and torrents of information, continues to be necessary. If only Fontenelle were around today to apply his particular talent to the task of re-popularizing evolution or pounding the importance of stem cell research into people’s skulls.

Hope you enjoyed.

For a bit of related reading-

A full Google book scan of Conversations…
Oeuvred de Fontenelle. (in French)
Some Fontenelle quotes.
An Essay on Fontenelle from Dramatic Essays of the Neoclassic Age.
Wikipedia entry.
French Tales of Infinity from Astrobiology magazine.
The Discovery of a World in the Moone at Giornale Nuovo.
To the Moon, Alice at Varieties of Unreligious Experience.

And lastly check out Extraterrestrial Life and Our World View at the Turn of the Millennium by Steven J. Dick which is a nice recap of ideas and trends which have lead to our current views on the same subjects.

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Note: This post was the first in a series of reworkings of old posts which date from before the redesign of The Nonist. The links have all been updated, the text has been edited slightly, and the images are all new. I will be periodically adding these reworkings into the flow of new content in an effort to eventually remove all the old pages from circulation.

Ancient Mythologies represent the ultimate expression of the game telephone. The stories, the names and places and outcomes, shift endlessly from source to source and from age to age. In as much I will make no attempt to recount the myth of the The Hundred-Handed Giants here. I’ll supply some links and leave the neat knot tying to you, if you’re interested. I mention the Myth only because I recently came across a group of paintings which I wanted to share that are related.

I picked up a slim volume containing some work by the French painter Lionel Guibout. Being woefully unilingual I could not read any of the accompanying text. The paintings were quite handsome, each depicting this crazy cluster of writhing bodies. They seemed to be angry and fearful and accusing and lunatic all at once. I had no idea what they represented, only that their frantic discomposure seemed meaningful somehow, and true. It wasn’t until I did a bit of research that I figured out that they were essentially portraits of the three Hecatoncheires.

Also known as Cottys, Cottus, or Kotos. Sometimes appended “The Striker” or “The Furious.”

Also known as Briareus, Ægæon, or Egeon. Sometimes appended “The Vigorous” or “The Strong.”

Also known as Gyes. Sometimes appended “The Big-Limbed” or “The Vaulter” or “The Crippler.”

Unfortunately, as with the book these were taken from, pretty much all the information on Lionel Guibout I was able to find is in French, or at very least a language other than English.Biographical info
Galleria Delleone
Vid of an exhibition in which the paintings above are are seen among other work.

More on the Hecatoncheires-
Wikipedia entry
Theoi Greek Mythology
Greek Mythology Link
Clash of the Titans at Infoplease
Encyclopedia Mythica entry
Orpheus, Myths of the World
The Age of Fable
Giants, Monsters, and Dragons
Classical Gods and heros

Postscript-
Dante actually encounters one of the Hecatoncheires, Briareus, in Pergatory (12:28-30). After seeing Briareus Dante concludes his monstrosity was his lack of intellect rather than his gigantic stature, which he declared was quite in proportion. Zing!

I knew there was something inherently “true” about those paintings.

Further description: The gold false cuvette opening to reveal the erotic scene of an African woman wearing pearls and a man with a dog at his heels. The polychrome enamel figures engaged in an amorous encounter spring to life when the repeat mechanism is activated. Anonymous Swiss. Circa 1900.

Oh to be a human of any epoch! Brilliant I tells ya. Brilliant.

(Found on Antique-watch.com. Also: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10)

Let’s do a visualization exercise.

Try to let go of your movie-induced visions of post-apocalyptic struggle, centered on flesh eating irradiated men, broken eyeglasses, and thunderdomes, and focus instead on standing in a dark, rubble-strewn bunker trying to make heads or tail out of a (greek to me) number-laden slide rule… do you see what I see?

Now that’s horror!

(Why, oh why, am I so unprepared? And why did I take so many gad damned Humanities courses anyway? Fucking art school!)

Personally I don’t remember ever even seeing one of these items first hand. That seems to have as much to do with the timing of my birth (1974) as with my decidedly hippy-leaning parentage. Let’s look to John Walker (maintainer of fourmilab.ch and co-author of AutoCAD) for some firsthand accounting-

Quote: “Anyway, when some champion of human liberty in a Che Guevara T-shirt and Mao jacket was haranguing his audience with claims like “A single Hiroshima bomb set off downtown would annihilate this university and all of us in the blink of an eye”, what better way to burnish one’s Strangelovian credentials than to whip out a handy-dandy nuclear bomb computer slide rule, whip—slip—slide, and interrupt, “Naaah . . . fifteen kilotons at five miles? Surface burst? Why, that’s only a quarter to a third of a pound per square inch overpressure—it’ll probably break some window glass but that’s about it.” Flipping the slide rule over, “The flash isn’t even enough to cause sunburn, and the immediate radiation is next to nothing.” For some unfathomable reason, this never seemed to either carry the argument or suitably impress chicks.

Back in those psychedelic days of yore, you could order your own fantastic pastel plastic nuclear bomb effects computer directly from the U.S. Government Printing Office for a single green dollar, and for three dollars more, obtain the authoritative 730 page book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, upon which it was based. With the winding down of the nuclear arms race and eventual end of the Cold War, interest in the actual consequences of setting off nuclear weapons waned. The book and computer were last updated in 1977, and subsequently went out of print.”

Indeed.

Well that explains why when I look at one of these circular slide rules all I see is some nifty looking, though totally opaque, information design and why rather than envisioning all sorts of weighty cause and effect scenarios my first thoughts are instead, “mmmm pretty” and “I bet Tufte would approve of those.” Have a look at some for yourself and see what you think.

I must admit the very thought of some determined engineer brandishing one of these after a bomb blast, to calmly draw even a smidgeon of rational data out of the situation, is a heartening thought. Where as most of us would immediately set about trying to cobble together flying machines out of lawnmower parts or riot down at the sporting-goods store in covetous search of hockey masks and shoulder pads some among us might yet be able to do something useful.

Obviously the slide rule in general has largely become a outmoded technology with the coming of the scientific calculator and more recently, these, how-you-say, computronics. But as with all technological corpses there remains a fervent underground of admirers and collectors who keep a fire burning in the tomb. Which in the case of slide rules, nuclear themed specimens especially, is a blessing. After all with a few well placed electromagnetic pulses -care of some lovely nuclear explosions- they could very quickly return to state of the art, technophile coveted, status.

If you’re a true technology junky and want to get a jump on the apocalyptic gadget frenzy (sure to be kicked off in the pages of the mimeographed editions of endgadget and gizmodo) or would simply like to feel less stupid when all hell breaks loose, Fourmilab offers the Build Your Own Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer page as a public service.

Happy computing!

The images in this post were adapted from the following:
ORAU’s page on Nuclear Slide Rules
Cyberheritage.org’s Pounds House, Plymoth

For a bit more-

Micro-history of the slide-rule
Wiki history of the slide rule
Curious Lee

Lastly, I ought to mention that the slide rules pictured here were chosen not for their visual niftiness but strictly for their function. There are MANY handsome looking slide rules to be seen out there which would surely prove inspirational to purveyors of information graphics and retro-design lovers alike. I can recommend the following-

Rekeninstrumenten’s slide rule catalog
Sphere’s circular slide rules page and slide rule universe
Greg’s slide rules
Slide rule museum

Hope you enjoyed.

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It dawned on me only recently that in the vaults and safes and state of the art library humidors which house the priceless historical paper trail of the American ascent, there are legal documents, many still binding, which, beside the paragraphs of legalese, the caveats, the statutes, the declarations, and the protocol, feature, of all things, small enigmatic drawings of woodland creatures.

Beside heavy wax seals you’ll find the beaver, the wolf, the turtle, and the deer, in a loose free-hand application of ink. The eagle, which eventually became a symbol of the American State, and seems ever present in the form of impossibly intricate etchings, might conceivably have made its first appearance in the annals of American documents⊕ as an Indian Chief’s totemic signature.

Quote: “Not much is understood about the exact function of totem symbols, or indeed what totems meant to the individuals who made their mark on documents. The following quote from Benjamin Slight (1844), offers a fairly typical explanation of what Europeans of the time believed these symbols to mean: When their signature is required to any document of any kind, in connexion with their names, they affix what is called their tootams, having the same juxtaposition as the seal of an English transaction. The tootam is a rude sketch of some fish, fowl or animal, which is designative of the tribe to which the individual belongs, or expressive of the name, he as an individual, bears.

Totem symbols may well have reflected band or family affiliation, and may also have suggested territorial or community ancestry, but they may have also referred to personal names or descriptive characteristics of the individual who adopted the symbol. Generally, these symbols remain a mystery, and perhaps rightly so, given the sometimes quite private and personal importance they had for the individual.” -Neal Ferris, Preface to Deeds/Nations by Greg Curnoe.

Quote: “A totem could be used to represent an individual or a group. Original documents signed by Native Americans using their totem are extremely rare. Most researchers who look at printed versions of documents signed by Native Americans, such as peace treaties, are familiar with the phrase “made his mark,” followed by an “X.” The impression left by these printed documents are that Native Americans were devoid of a written means of expression and that even tribal leaders were reduced to signing critical documents such as treaties with a crude mark. Actually the Native American’s totem, or signature, was often a fine drawing that reflected a characteristic of the individual’s name or a central event in their life. Because printers had difficulty inexpensively reproducing these art-like totems, the practice arose of simply stating that the signer had “made his mark” and placing an “X” in the appropriate location on the printed document.” -Clarke Historical Library at CMU.

Of course animal totems were by no means only used as signatures-

Were it not for the grim circumstances of their creation the very thought of our weighty and hallowed American historical documents being peppered here and there with naive drawings of indigenous animals would make me smile, surprising and counterintuitive as it feels. In context, however, the little creatures take on a mournful aspect which force you instead to visualize anxious and uncertain hands hovering just above dubious pieces of paper. Naive as they may appear, these animal drawings may actually have more import and consequence for the hands that created them than any ever made.

The materials for this post were adapted from the following:

A History of the Art of Writing
Collectionscanada.ca
Deeds/Nations
Earlytreaties.unl.edu
Clarke Historical Library
American Historical and Literary Antiquities
College of William and Mary, Swem Library
The Canadian Encyclopedia
The Empire State: A Compendious History of the Commonwealth of New York.

The image which began this post was adapted from Clarke Library’s page The Native American Treaty Signers in the Great Lakes Region.

Hope you found this of interest.

There are many beautiful examples to be seen and more info to be had at the following:

Early Visual Media
World of Stereo Views
La Collection D’appareils
The Laughing Bone
ookami_dou’s Vintage Flickr set

Hope you enjoyed.

“A hornbook consists of a piece of parchment or paper lesson pasted onto a paddle-shaped piece of wood. The name derives from the leaf of horn, made from sheep and goat horn that was softened and then boiled in water to produce true horn that could be pressed and cut into sheets, that was attached to the board by a brass or latten border by minute tacks. Hornbooks generally presented the alphabet above arabic numerals and the Lord’s Prayer. This evidence of rudimentary letter-learning and the hardiness of the hornbook itself speaks to the very young audience the hornbook aimed to please and more importantly indicates a tradition of reading material for the very young that dates back to the Middle Ages.” -The Victorian Web.

“To protect it from grubby fingers the sheet was mounted on a frame and was protected by a thin sheet of transparent cow’s horn – hence the name. The frame was usually made from wood, often oak, but occasionally more costly materials, such as silver or even ivory, were used. Wooden hornbooks were often covered in leather. Although the text itself was not illustrated, a picture was often engraved or embossed on the back of the frame. For the sake of utility, hornbooks often had a handle with a hole in the end, allowing them to be hung from a child’s belt or girdle.” -Andrew W. Tuer History of the horn-book.

“Hornbooks were particularly personal and often formed part of a child’s wardrobe, being attached by a string or thong to a belt. The hornbook’s physical intimacy both mirrors and promotes the child’s internalization of the alphabet.” -Patricia Crain The Story of A.

“In its early manifestations, the pedagogical alphabet is headed not by the letter A but by the “Christ Cross.” From at least the fifteenth until well into the nineteenth century, the alphabet’s English nickname was the “Christ-Cross Row,” shortened to “criss-cross row” and “crossrow.” Because the alphabet is associated with Catholic iconography, as if the two sets of signs were really part of one semiological system, one of the struggles of the Reformation would be to wrest the alphabet away from the Church.” -Patricia Crain The Story of A.

“Originally the letters of the alphabet had been laid out in a cross but that later, when the letters were arranged in lines, a cross was placed at the beginning to remind the pupil that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” -Brewer’s dictionary of phrase and fable.

“There are records of hornbooks being in use until the mid-nineteenth century but their heyday was over. By the end of the nineteenth century the hornbook had not only gone out of fashion but surviving examples were extremely rare, as most had either been destroyed or lost. The few that did survive were mainly in the hands of collectors. The word hornbook survived as a term for an elementary treatise on a subject.” -King’s College London, book of the month page for May 07.

“The humble hornbook was treated with the full measure of contempt lavished on a thing which has served its purpose. ‘Destroy and forget,’ said everybody, and alas! Everybody did. That a tool which was used by so many generations of children over hundreds of years could be forgotten so easily seems almost impossible, yet it was.” -Andrew W. Tuer History of the horn-book.

Forgotten? Yes, indeed it was. I’d never even heard the word “hornbook” until this morning. But as is said, “you learn something new everyday,” even without having your ass paddled by a wooden alphabet primer.

The images were all adapted, and the quotes were all taken, from the following sources:

Read and Be Wise, Library of Congress.
Abracadabra: Language, Memory, Representation.
History of the horn-book, King’s College London.
Wikimedia Commons.
The Victorian Web.
The Hornbook and It’s Use in America, by George A. Plimpton.
IUPUI, The Hornbook.

Hope you enjoyed.