When, as children, we first catch wind of the existence of astrological symbols we are at a point in our lives when anything which might help solidify our identities by differentiation is something deserving of our attention. Most of us, I would venture to guess, take hold of our symbol for some short interval as children, and wring whatever meaning we can out of it, drawing corollaries between ourselves and others who shared the same sign, taking heart in character traits supposedly attached, bolstering, through mythical means, our sense of ourselves. When later in our lives we reject astrology as fanciful and amusing hokum it hardly matters. Our signs are still there as the tiniest footnote at the bottom of our appraisals-of-self. We will always see in them the faintest reflection.

An analogy might be that of the lapsed Catholic, who was brought up going to church, but who on adulthood rejected religion outright. Catholicism was something born-into, something outside oneself, something not chosen but inherited. Even after a definitive choice is made to reject it, however, the symbol of a cross will always manage to successfully travel that guarded pathway to our interiors. Whatever judgement the brain passes that symbol will still hold sway with the eyes.

When I was in art school I was obliged, as all hopeful image-makers are, to re-examine the personal symbology of my life. Did any of the tired old symbols carry any weight or meaning? Could any of them be used, adapted, perverted? It dawned on me around that time that though I was fond of “The Balance” as a symbol ⊕, the equal-armed beam balance which is universally used seemed not quite right. This scale with its symmetry and elegance and precision could simply never be an accurate symbol for me, my mind, or the life that I lived. It was altogether too platonic.

A few years later while working, for a short time, as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art an alternative symbol presented itself. During a shift I was stationed in one of those wonderful, dimly-lit, and comparatively empty areas of the museum ⊕, beside some long glass cases containing Roman artifacts. There were small functional and decorative objects of all kinds inside —vessels and tools and little statues and amulets all jostling together like a the contents of Romulus’ hall closet.

Amongst all of this iron and bronze a single object seemed to demand further scrutiny. It was asymmetrical and brutal looking, with its dangling chains each terminating in a hook. I had no guess as to its function or purpose. Torture device? Weapon? Brutish tool of animal husbandry? Looking at its little placard I discovered it was called a “Roman Balance” or “Steelyard” and that it was in fact a scale. I marveled for a moment at the coincidence. Of all the objects to draw my eye and interest it had to be a scale. I knew immediately that I’d found an object I could get behind, an object which resonated with me somehow. I’d found a proper Libran symbol for myself.

A bit of background information:

The Roman balance (or statera as it was originally known) is so called because no instance has been found of its existence prior to the Roman era. A similar principle was used in ancient Egyptian balances, however, and independently created examples have been found in China. Some evidence seems to exist that this type of scale was actually in use among Greek craftsmen in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C.E. before Hellenistic mathematicians like Archimedes ever formally demonstrated the theoretic basis for their workings. 

The Romans brought these scales to Britain around 55 B.C.E. and the English word ‘steelyard’ by which they are referred today is thought to be a mistranslation of the German ‘Stael-hof’ ⊕, which was itself the name of the base of the Hanseatic merchants of the Middle Ages, who used the Roman balance extensively in their businesses.

Functionally steelyards differ from the balance because they have unequal arms and employ a counterpoise, rather than a series of fixed-mass weights, which is shifted along the long arm in relation the the fulcrum. At the place where the counterpoise keeps the beam exactly horizontal, the weight of the object is indicated on an engraved scale on the long arm. ⊕

Though steelyards are less precise for weighing small objects like coins or jewels ⊕ they have the benefit of employing a single weight for a wide range of loads. They were particularly useful for weighing heavy objects like vehicles, sides of beef, and humans. Additionally they had the benefit of cheap manufacture and portability. In as much they were used as industrial scales straight through the eighteenth century and remain in use in markets all throughout Asia and and the Middle East today.

I happen to find them, with their precarious asymmetry, their hooks and chains and their myriad forms of sculpted counterweights quite compelling, and beautiful.

Visually, viscerally, the steelyard seems to embody some aspect of balance, or perhaps the personal quest for it, which the equal-arm balance does not. After having discovered it there at the Met I visited it often. It didn’t take me long to realize that this object had symbolic potential far beyond the whimsical introspection it might supply for the comparatively small group of us who were born under the sign of Libra.

What, after all, do the scales symbolize for the rest of humanity?

Justice.

Thinking of the equal-arm balance, alone, in silhouette, or held aloft by the left hand of Themis / Justitia / Lady Justice, notions undoubtedly come to mind. They are precise and unambiguously immediate, aspirational and inspirational, they are resplendent and exalted, they are incorruptible and pure. In other words they have no relation whatsoever to the realities of human justice as it is experienced and met out.

Now look at the steelyard. It is hard-looking and vaguely menacing, all hooks and chains and lengths of metal. It has a brutality to it somehow. You can imagine wielding it like a club or a flail and imagine the damage it might do were it wielded against you. Then there’s its asymmetry, which on first glance seems so counterintuitive to achieve any kind of balance. By design its sides are unequal, set against one another at cross-purposes. One side only holds the weight while the other only passes judgement, and a not quite precise judgement at that.

It’s a strange, hard, dangerous looking object, all angles and points set against a shifting bluntness, and one could imagine that were you to hand one to a child she’d be just as likely to smash in a skull as to balance anything whatsoever.

Though functionally the steelyard can achieve the same aims as our aspirational equal-arm scale, visually it suggests a complexity and precariousness and menace entirely more human, and I’d argue entirely more appropriate, symbolically, for our notions of crime and punishment, corporeal or otherwise. If a pound of flesh needs weighing this is the scale for the job.

Add to this to the forms which the steelyard’s counterweight took, and could take, and all sorts of explicit symbolic relationships emerge. In the past these “poises” as they are sometimes called were often fashioned in the shape of gods, men, women or animals. One could easily imagine a slab of beef on the hooks counterbalanced by golden McDonald’s arches for instance, or an emaciated corpse counterbalanced by an Iron Cross, a knife counterbalanced by a black glove, a smoldering retarded child counterbalanced by a weight in the shape of Texas, a boot stamping on a human face, forever, counterbalanced by a giant silver dollar, or… well… whatever delightful image strikes your fancy!

The steelyard can do it all.

Anyhow, since happening upon that Roman balance about 12 years ago I’ve adopted it in my mind. When I think Libra I think steelyard, and so, conversely when I think steelyard I think, in some small way, of myself.

When I see a statue or etching of Lady Justice my mind reflexively erases that flimsy equal-arm balance with its impossible precision and imaginary exaltation and replaces it with its hard, practical, rough and ready, asymmetrical cousin. ⊕

Symbols are what they are, obviously, and not much more, but shouldn’t good ones reflect in some way the truth of a thing? Shouldn’t they hold their weight as it were? For me the steelyard does the job admirably and, yes, before you ask, even Nonists need symbols they can believe in.

Hope you enjoyed.

Quote: “Only 16, he walked into a Marine Corps recruiting office in Wichita and said he was 18. The recruiter didn’t believe him and sent him away. The Navy rejected Buckles as flat-footed. Finally, an Army recruiter in Oklahoma City accepted him, but only after Buckles insisted that the only proof of his age was in a family Bible back in Missouri. The state didn’t issue birth certificates in those days.

“I liked the Army right off,” says Buckles, recalling how he enjoyed calisthenics.

He was in a hurry to get to the front. A sergeant told him to join the ambulance corps because the French, America’s ally, were “begging for ambulances.” At Fort Riley, Kan., he learned how to use his belt to cinch a wounded soldier to his back and carry him from a trench.

He eventually got to France, but never close enough to the action to pull anyone from a trench.” —Andrea Stone, USA TODAY.

Quote: “After the armistice, he was assigned to guard German prisoners waiting to be repatriated. Seeing that he was still just a boy, the prisoners adopted him, taught him their language, gave him food from their Red Cross packages, bits of their uniforms to take home as souvenirs.

In the 1930s, while working for a steamship company, Mr. Buckles visited Germany; it was difficult for him to reconcile his fond memories of those old P.O.W.’s with what he saw of life under the Third Reich. The steamship company later sent him to run its office in Manila; he was there in January 1942 when the Japanese occupied the city and took him prisoner.” —Richard Rubin, NY TIMES.

He remained a P.O.W. himself for over 3 years. A strange symmetry there certainly.

How does Buckles feel about the quirk of circumstance which has left him, as the last American survivor of the Great War, a name for the history books?

Quote: “Someone has to do it.”

The Veteran’s History Project at the Library of Congress has a section devoted to Buckles which you might check out if your interested including a 148 minute video interview.

Cavellini was born into an Italian merchant family and ran a dry goods store, which in the post-war years following World War II he transformed into a thriving department store. In the late 40’s he began using profits from the family business to buy art. This is how his initial inroads into the art world began, as a collector and early (albeit decidedly amateur) proponent of Modernism. It wasn’t until about 1960, when he’d exhibited and sold much of his collection, that he began trying seriously to transition into becoming a creator of art rather than just a collector.

This was not, strictly speaking, his first foray into art-making however-

Quote: “At 15 he was dressing windows for the family shop and skillfully using brush and ink to letter price cards for the vitrines. This new-found graphic facility inspired some youthful experiments with sketching and caricature which continued during his army service and led to his being charged with lettering Mussolini’s slogans on corridor walls. A chance encounter with a local painter, Domenicao Mucci, resulted in some informal instruction in fundamentals. Right after the war Cavellini tried his hand at drawing landscapes, self-portraits and other figurative subjects. The wealth of art that he saw in the museums and ateliers of Paris during his 1947 trip persuaded him to abandon his paltry efforts, but about 12 years later he felt compelled to make art once again.” —Marcia E. Vetrocq, Art in America, 1993.

Now, just because you are compelled to create does not mean you are creating anything of particular interest to anyone else. I am of the opinion that if creating art fulfills you then the act of creation itself, its rush, its internal convolutions, its compelling emotional peaks and valleys, its ability to keep you engaged and distracted from self destruction, is reward enough. You may proclaim “I am an artist” in crowded rooms all you like, or you may work in a vacuum and never let on. Little matter, so long as you are actively fascinated and successfully avoiding the great emptiness at the center of it all, then positive outside valuations of your work are a luxury, comfy and gratifying but ultimately inessential. Cavellini did not seem to agree. For him, joining the canon was the only goal.

Public response to his work was tepid at best. He cycled quickly through styles and traditions seeking to find a voice which others might actually want to hear. He worked on abstractions, gestural pieces, collages, imagery of pop culture Icons, assemblage, etc, etc. Ultimately, the words which best describe his output to this point, however, are reproduction, homage, and appropriation. His work was “openly and blissfully derivative of the artists whose works he admired or collected.”

Quote: “Cavellini’s aggression toward the system of art, stoked by experiences of rejection both as a collector and as an artist, was expressed in acts of comically flagrant plagiarism accompanied by outrageous claims of authorship, in the seemingly endless reproduction and recycling of his own and others’ imagery, and in unabashed gestures of self-promotion.” —Marcia E. Vetrocq, Art in America, 1993.

He had 6 gallery shows between the years of 1962 and 1970 which by his yardstick were total failures, resulting in only two sales and total critical silence. It was this period of failure which inspired the conceptually self-referential “Autostoricizzazione” or “Self-Historification” which would occupy the rest of his artistic career, and find him trying desperately to “enter Olympus without asking anyone’s permission.”

Quote: “The biography of an artist is frequently written after his death, imperfectly and incompletely. Since I don’t want any such biography to be written about me, I’ve decided to write my own.” —G.A. Cavellini.

This autostoricizzazione put him at the center of a fictional art history in which he was a towering figure. He created a fake encyclopedia entry for himself ⊕, posters announcing centennial exhibitions of his work at museums around the world, and a series of postage stamps honoring him in the context of the great masters. He created frontispieces of fictional works like Dante’s Divine Cavellini, Leonardo’s Treatise on the Painting of Cavellini, and Nietzche’s Thus Spake Cavellini. He commissioned portraits of himself by better known artists which he used in his own work, he travelled with a “court photographer,” and created a seemingly endless amount of self-portraiture.

This was all the tip of the autostoricizzazione iceberg, for Cavellini had become more than anything a conceptual artist and the one concept he explored, over and over and over, was himself and his own towering position within the history of art.

Quote” Here in Italy, perhaps, there are still people who want to label me «the famous collector,» or to think of me as a rich provincial who amuses himself with sophomoric experiments in making art. «Self-Historification» may still be too far ahead of the times; people still aren’t ready to take it seriously since they find it paradoxical, anomalous and full of presumption. They act as though they considered me an artist «to be kept under observation» as though I were still waiting my turn finally to «make it». Perhaps my way of doing things is still unclassifiable, and even though I’m no longer a young artist, I’m simply never mentioned whenever the critics try to put together a show of the most significant developments in art in recent years- Either criticism has no eyes to see with or else it thinks of these free-wheeling operations of mine as belonging to a world of the future that’s still to be materialized. The critics don’t want to admit or to understand that I’m a new Duchamp.”

“For quite some time now, I’ve been receiving daily testimonials in the form of art works that give praise and pay homage both to «Self-Historification» as a phenomenon and to me as a person. Nothing like this has ever happened to an artist before. This material is all destined to go into a «Cavellini Museum,» and scholars will sooner or later be forced to study and consult it, since it’s an entirely unprecedenied phenomenon in all of art hisiory, and it’s not likely ever to happen again.”

“By now, an incredibly large number of facts and circumstances has grown up around my process of «Self-Historification» and I feel that I have every reason to be convinced that it’s destined to be a great deal more than just a meteor that flashes for only an instant through the skies; slowly but surely, «Self-Historification» is destined to become one of the most firmly fixed stars in all of art hisiory. (It) has already proved to be an indication for the construction of a new civilization and an entirely new way of thinking.” —G.A. Cavellini, from Autoritratti, 1981.

Cavallini went on “self-historifying” himself right up until his death in 1990, leaving behind a mountain of works and papers, all designed to help him storm the annals… so let me ask you, had you ever heard of him before now?

Personally I’m not particularly bowled-over by Cavellini’s works pictorially speaking, though some are compelling, nor am I much interested in conceptual art of this kind. I do find his quixotic quest interesting however.

It strikes me that though most of us may never have heard of Cavellini, he has had a modicum of success at attaining his goal of artistic immortality. I am, after all, writing about him right now and extending his post-humous reach. And though I purchased his book of self-portraits in the Strand’s bargain bin, it was there to be purchased.

To me Cavellini is a bit of a sad clown character because the lengths to which he took his joke seems slightly tragic. Rather than the sly wink and implied mystery which many self-aggrandizing artists employ to better effect, Cavellini seems to me more like a hammy vaudevillian.

The analogy which immediately comes to mind is that Loony Tunes cartoon, called Show Biz Bugs, in which Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are competing for an audience’s applause. Bugs does a simple dance and gets wild applause. Daffy meanwhile goes all out, dances with visible effort, slides toward the audience on his knees with arms outstretched in expectation… and is greeted with the sound of crickets. For me that dance is Cavellini’s career. 

And yet as I said, he is remembered to some degree. Why? I would have to contend that in much the same way world history remembers, to spite itself, particularly potent screw-ups and villains, so too does art history make allowances for others than its paragons. In Cavellini’s case I’d say he took a certain brand of conceptual buffoonery to previously unknown levels, and so must be remembered as one of its giants. It’s only fair.

The irony is that today, very similar kinds of buffoonery regularly spawn millionaire art celebrities who are whole heartedly embraced by the art intelligentsia. Indeed in many respects he is conceptually a forefather of postmodernism. So perhaps Cavellini was ahead of his time, just as he said he was, and merely had the misfortune of being born in an era when the art world still had something like accepted standards one was expected to measure up to.

In any case, it’s all subjective now isn’t it? He says “emperor of presumption,” I say sad clown, you say potato. We’re all right and Art just keeps on chugging along.

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Most of the biographical information in this post was adapted from Marcia E. Vetrocq’s Art in America piece, Dispatches From the Jungle of Art. If you are interested in the artist I recommend reading it as it goes into much deeper detail.

The images were all scanned from Cavellini’s book Autoritratti.

You can see more of Cavellini’s work at The Cavellini Archive Foundation website.

What makes this particular document so fantastic is that in issuing these “Special Instructions To Players,” warning against foul language on the field, Major League baseball decided to reprint some of the offensive language verbatim. Hilarious.

See below and read for yourself.

Ha. God I love that.

It shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise though, considering in the 1890’s baseball players weren’t yet the over-groomed, under-motivated, millionaires we’re stuck watching today. Back then, if these guys hadn’t been playing ball they’d probably be exactly what they sounded like, longshoremen, or coal miners, or infantry grunts, or vice presidents.

A grateful hat tip to seldivider for bringing this to my attention, and giving me an excuse to coin the hyphenated term “shit-pickling.”

The oldest form of watermarks are today referred to as “wire watermarks.” These were made by bending pieces of wire into filigree designs, tying them onto the mesh of the paper molds, and impressing them into the paper pulp while it was still damp. The comparative thinness of the areas which were pressed under this wire formed an image which only revealed itself when the paper was held up to light. Scholars seem to agree that watermarks of this kind are very nearly as old as papermaking itself.

The first known watermarks appeared toward the end of the 13th century, originating with the Albigensian papermakers of Southern France and Northern Italy. (Though papermaking as an industry is said to have first taken root in Spain ⊕ the first great center of the papermaking industry in Europe was actually in Italy, specifically in Fabiano in the marquisate of Ancona, where mills were set up in 1276.) Their use spread very quickly all throughout Europe.

The purpose of watermarks at the moment of their invention is unclear. My guess is that they were invented accidentally and initially used in the service of kings or nobles seeking to secure the provenance of their communications (or, thinking more imaginatively, possibly to embed secret messages). Alternately they might have initially served a more noble cause still- amusement.

More qualified postulators think that perhaps they were a means of distinguishing between papers made by different workmen within “factories” who were paid by the sheet. Other theories, of course, abound-

Quote: “The first watermarks… were artless in design, the emblems were so mystic in character that it is reasonable to believe that they were meant to convey a meaning or signal among the workers who fashioned them. It has been suggested that these old devices may have been used solely as marks of identification for sizes of moulds and the paper formed thereon, or, as they are used today, simply as trademarks of the papermakers. Other writers have advanced the theory that they may have been employed in a purely symbolic sense… employed by the heretical papermakers as symbols of religious propaganda… embodying a hidden meaning understood only by the people of medieval times.

It might be suggested that the old watermarks were little more than a capricious notion of the papermakers who may have created the designs to satisfy their own artistic feeling. Another supposition… was that since the workmen could not read or write it was essential to appeal to them by means of pictures. Simply to have marked a mould with letters or numerals would have conveyed but slight meaning to the illiterate artisans of the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries; it was necessary to convey the meaning to them through the use of illustrations. For the same reason the signboards of inns and shops were of a pictorial nature inasmuch as the untutored populace could not have deciphered the lettered name had it been painted upon the swinging signs. -From THEOSOPHY, Vol. 53, No. 9, July, 1965.

Regardless of their origins watermarks were eventually adapted to be both trademarks (of a sort) for different paper-makers and a means of demarcating different types of paper, and batches, within their inventories. Today the oldest of watermarks are mainly used by conservators for dating documents and artworks. ⊕

The forms that these marks took were myriad and largely in-line with the common symbologies of the day, which is to say they were images commonly used in other spheres with meanings that were probably well understood by people of the time. Among them were all the expected animals (both terrestrial and fantastic), celestial objects, all manner of fruit and vegetable, tools, insects, flowers, crests, weapons, and symbolic bits–or indeed full on representations–of the human anatomy. By 1600 they had multiplied to the extent that individually identifiable watermarks numbered in the tens of thousands.

Though watermarking technology advanced quickly to allow for shades and complexity and greater detail I am personally most fond of these simple and somewhat naive forms which read like ancient pictograms or distracted doodles. They are infinitely more mysterious and, to my mind, more fittingly evocative of a craft practiced by skilled artisans utilizing callused hands.

For many many more examples and more information on the history of watermarking see the following-

Databases:
The Piccard watermark collection
Wasserzeichen des Mittelalters
Watermarks in Incunabula printed in the Low Countries
Watermarks in Incunabula printed in España
Mairie De Toulouse

Other:
Watermarks.info’s collection
British assoc. of paper historians
Motherbedford.com
Georgia Tech
Bates.edu
Theosophy, Vol. 53, No. 9
Whistler’s watermarks
Dürer’s watermarks
Dante’s watermarks
Make your own watermark.

Hope ye seekers, emphmeraphiles, and iconography thieves find something of interest in all that.

As longtime readers are no doubt painfully aware, when it comes to certain items I have the tendency to objectify, to glaze over purpose and function and context and just splash about in the shallows of aesthetics. The recent post on microscope slides is a good example. Well, I should warn you straight off that I’m about to indulge that tendency yet again, because every bit of practical and thoughtful background information I plan to relay was contained in that first paragraph.

Believe it or not LDEF, somewhat humble punching-bag though it may be, is gorgeous. More specifically the neatly arranged trays which cover every inch of its surface are, as a group and individually, some damned handsome items. Visually they represent the confluence of so many things I’m partial to that the LDEF might in some ways represent the perfect object for my ogling pleasure.

For me it brings to mind the abstraction of certain painters, a gridded and measured minimalism in graphic design, failed utopian architecture, and the shapes and surface textures of every science fictional interior ever put on film. Add to that the subtle color palette peppered here and there with super saturated counterpoints, the unintentional, almost accidental, nature of its beauty, and (having been well battered during its 32,422 Earth orbits) the indelible stamp of decay… and, well, what can I say?

The images which follow are each of individual sections of the LDEF’s exterior. I have cropped them where I thought necessary but they are otherwise exactly as they were photographed in 1990. Have a look.

Beautiful no?

Now, imagine all that visual goodness, and a whole lot more just like it, packed onto a 30 foot by 14 foot cylindrical surface, hurtling silently 275 nautical miles above the Earth, and our heads…

Yup, that’s the stuff. I hope you enjoyed these even a smidgeon as much as I do.

If you’d like to know more about the mission, the craft, the experiments, or the results of those experiments you can view NASA’s page here.

First a few words on the manuscript’s origins and possibly misleading title.

The Drake Manuscript is named for Sir Francis Drake, the famed English privateer, navigator, slave trader, politician, and pirate of the Elizabethan era, whose travels it is thought to illustrate. Though Drake was himself something of an artist ⊕, the images in Histoire Naturelle des Indes were not created by his hand. Nothing of his artwork survives as it turns out.

Truth be told there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that Drake had anything to do with the manuscript, let alone that it ought to be informally named after him. Such are the gears of history- grinding the anonymous down to invisibility and raising the famed higher… for a while at least.

The best guess as to the manuscripts origins are something along these lines-

The naive drawings ⊕ show signs of being created by several separate hands. Context reveals that these were likely the hands of Huguenots. Drake is known to have employed not only Huguenots on his voyages but artists as well. A “considerable number” of the images correspond to ports of call familiar to Drake, in some cases associated directly with his voyages, and Drake is mentioned by name, twice, in the manuscript itself. Hence, with a nice pile of circumstantial evidence to stand on, and no other clues, we have The Drake Manuscript.

Anyhow, whether this is simply an instance of a famous name capturing otherwise anonymous historical debris with its considerable gravitational pull ⊕ or simply an instance of fine deduction on the part of historians doesn’t matter much. What matters are the 199 fascinating images and accompanying captions.

Taken as a whole the images are an interesting mixture. The drawings of plants and animals are presented in a sort of cold practical manner, removed from their natural surroundings, with captions that read almost like a sales catalog, listing the virtues and drawbacks of each. ⊕ The drawings of the indigenous peoples themselves on the other hand are altogether warmer and seem to serve no greater purpose than curiosity.

The styles of the images are an interesting mixture as well-

Quote, “Some drawings are well rendered, others mere daubs, but most have a kind of buoyantly piquant vision of their subjects. Some are true to life, some–particularly the fishes with doglike snouts and ears–arise from an almost medieval fancy, and some may reflect a knowledge of printed sources.” - Verlyn Klinkenborg.

I’ve reproduced a group of the images below for your scrutiny. Some were chosen because I particularly liked the drawing, some because I was amused by the caption, and some because the ghost of Drake, boarding the deck of my apartment and holding me at sword-point, compelled me to. Have a look for yourself.

I find these fascinating, and believe me when I say I had trouble choosing from the 199 plates reproduced in the excellent facsimile.

Concerning the images themselves it amazes me to look at them in the artistic context of their time, because though I undoubtedly find them beautiful, when I remind myself that they were created in the 1590’s, and that at that same moment El Greco, Rubens, and Caravaggio were all active… well it’s surprising. Thought of in those terms it’s a wonder these weren’t made by the “Indians” themselves.

I think today, with television and advertising and graphic design having made the shared “visual language” so pervasive, we have a tendency to regard varying levels of visual sophistication simply as styles which homogeneously blanket entire eras, permeating everything from high art to life’s daily banalities. It may be true, to some degree, as far back as the 19th century, but images like those in the Drake Manuscript are, for me, a useful reminder that if you travel further back, our conceptions begin to break down and become little more than assumptions, based on the retrofitted categorizations art historians have coined for us.

The captions fascinate and amuse me for a similar reason. There is something comical to me about contemporaries of Shakespeare, Giordano Bruno, Cervantes, and Galileo ⊕ traveling to these “savage” lands, filled with a blustery and inalienable sense of their own superiority over the ignorant inhabitants, who upon arrival and lengthy inspection proceed to relay information as goofy and superstitious and folkloric ⊕ as their dark-age ancestors might have believed.

Of course, as not to fall into the same trap of egoistic presumption, and lest snide ephemera hunters of the 3000’s stumble upon this blog (attributing it, of course, to Markos Moulitsas or Xeni Jardin whilst my anonymous bones decay in quietude) and scoff at the wrong-mindedness of it all, I’ll shut my mouth right there.

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For a bit more on the manuscript see-

The Morgan Library page

Histoire naturelle des Indes on Google books.

This pdf from the National Humanities Center.

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I’ll only say this in closing, I enjoyed these and I hope you did as well.

Linotype was a hot-metal typesetting process, remember, so each of these images had to be carved, made into a mold, and cast in lead for use. Which is simply to say there was some actual effort involved in making them available. Yes folks, in the storied past even clip-art had to walk 20 miles, uphill, in the snow, to get anywhere.

I realize, of course, that these images were almost certainly not “official” logos and that they were likely just pulled from the vast storehouse of imagery Linotype had at their disposal. But the very fact that, in an election year, they chose to offer symbols for 10 possible parties means that there was enough demand to warrant a supply. Linotype is still going strong after all so I think we can trust their business acumen.

In any case here is the page-

Nice of them to set up a sample ballot wasn’t it?

Interestingly as it turns out their example here was not to different from the ballot that citizens saw in the Presidential election of that year. There were, in fact, candidates from 7 different parties represented. Granted the 5 who were not Democrat or Republican only garnered 5.5% of the vote as a group… but still.

If I were to update their page for the present day (taking demand into consideration when formulating our supply of course!) it might as well look like like this-

That’s no fun is it?

Now in the interest of full disclosure for those of you who weren’t paying close attention the last time around, in 2004 there actually were at least 10 parties represented on the ballot.

“10 you say?!”

Yes, 10. Minus the obvious those parties were the Libertarian, Constitution, Green, Socialist, Peace and Freedom, Prohibition, Christian Freedom, Socialist Equality, Workers World, and the Personal Choice Party.

Sounds just positively bustling and vibrant doesn’t it?

It doesn’t look so vibrant unfortunately. I mean when was the last time you saw the logo for the Socialist Equality Party emblazoned on one of the 20 massive HD screens which are continuously swirling and pulsating behind Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room? In fact, now that I think of it, have you ever seen any of their logos anywhere? ⊕

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

This sounds like a job for Linotype! They can dig into their vast stores of imagery once more for the American electorate and bring forth handsome and heroic emblems which in one bold stroke typify all that the parties stand for… these emblems can pepper posters and banners and bumper stickers across the entire expanse of this great nation and the ideals for which… oh wait, that’s right, there is no demand. Sorry.

These parties already have logos obviously, ⊕  it’s just that so few people care that we’ll never see them. “Miscellaneous characters” indeed.

Setting aside the socio-political ramifications of this essentially two-party system, let’s just say that from a visual standpoint it would seem we the people are stuck with the same dull, uninspiring,

elephant show.

Which brings me, finally, to the issue that I’m certain is gnawing at the young and idealistic designers reading this, who, like teary-eyed children listening to their parents discuss a dead puppy from the top of the stairs, are wondering about the those poor cast-aside logos from the 1920 Linotype catalog, which having once symbolized grand ideals now seem so hopelessly lost in the wilderness…

Let me just say this, you sweet and gentle kids- cry not!

Cry not for the Eagle or the 5 Pointed Star! Cry not for the Fountain or the Book or the Moose! Nay child; cry not for the Torch, the Scales, the Bell or the Strong Arm because in America… in America we graphics professionals see to it that no logo is left behind!

There. Feel better? Good. Now here’s some warm milk, off to sleep with you, daddy’s got a whole lot of whiskey he needs to swallow.

And let’s not forget that enigmatic architectural face, or “Cybertectural Animot,”  which began the post. It is a detail of a piece depicting walking cities by artist Mike Wilkes, and you can click here to see the full image.

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You might look at these images of the future and find them stylistically dated, and they are 30 years old at this point, literally images of futures past, so I wouldn’t argue with you. I do think, however, that in a very palpable way these images, and images like them from the late 50’s all the way through the early 80’s, represent something which, in sci-fi’s drive toward the future, and possibly more to the point its drive toward “respectability,” the marketers of the genre have let slip away. That thing being Style.

A critique of the current face of science fiction and fantasy, as embodied in its book covers, is a voyage I plan to undertake, enthusiastically, in a future post. So I’ll just leave it at that for now.

In the meantime I hope you enjoyed these at least as much as those Strand cashiers seemed to, and I hope the sensation of feeling nostalgia for decades old visions of the future which have not nor may ever arrive is not to off-putting. Likewise I hope deeper reflection on the oddity of such a feeling does not leave any ugly bruises on your brain.

Until next time…