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…

Any telling of the revolving door’s story must begin with the name Bockhacker, though the length of the tale which follows it varies considerably. German door historians, or “Türherstellers” as they are reverently called, will, to a man, offer the following information as regards the revolving door-

• H. Bockhacker of Berlin was granted German patent 18349 on December 22, 1881 for “thür ohne luftzug” or “door without draft of air.”

And… well, that’s about as far as their interest in the subject goes.

Outside of Germany the tale is different. All the great door histories (like De Grote Geschiedenis van Deuren and Il Glory dei Portelli) mention Bockhacker, of course, ⊕ but then shift focus to one Theophilus Van Kannel, of Philadelphia, who in 1888 was granted US patent 387,571 for a “storm-door structure.” The true story of the revolving door, both known and forgotten, is more than anything the story of Van Kannel.

Some commonly known facts about Van Kannel and his revolving door include:

• It is perfectly noiseless.

• It effectually prevents the entrance of, snow, rain or dust.

• It cannot be blown open by the wind.

• It excludes street noise.

• Persons can pass both in and out at the same time.

• It prevents a direct path between the interior and exterior of a structure, making it useful as a partial airlock, minimizing heat-loss.

• It circumvents all that annoying “You first” “No, you first” stuff.

• The world’s first revolving door was installed at Rector’s, a restaurant in Manhattan’s Times Square, located on Broadway between west 43rd and 44th streets, in 1899.

Some largely forgotten facts about Van Kannel and his revolving door include:

• The original slogan for his door was “always closed.”

• It was marketed (in the Victorian manner) as helping to avoid “noxious effluvia” and “baleful miasmas.” Van Kannel himself authored a pamphlet which included the following: “It will save life, by preventing those deadly lung and throat diseases which are sure to overtake the unfortunate salesman, cashier, or clerk whose duty keeps him near the constantly opening front door.”

• Van Kannel was an irritable sort. In response to the initial reaction to his door he had this to say: “Just like a turn-stile, so say nine out of ten persons who first see it. As well may we say a tea-kettle is like a locomotive boiler.”

• Van Kannel originally intended his invention to be installed not only in public buildings but in private homes as well.

Which brings us to the crux of things-

That Van Kannel’s invention turned out to be useful, in the ways we consider it to be so today, is something of a happy accident. That’s not to say the inventor didn’t have a purpose in mind, he spent years perfecting his idea after all, but if you were to run down the list of its touted benefits you’d be forgiven for never coming upon the intended one.

More than anything the world owes the invention of the revolving door to revenge.

It seems that when Van Kennel was a boy, still in the care of his mother but just on the cusp of cultural manhood, he found the lingering rules of chivalry rather bothersome. In particular he refused to accept that he was expected to open the door for women and allow them to cross the threshold before him.

A silly sort of quirk to our minds, certainly, but it was taken seriously enough by his mother that after numerous warnings and threats she eventually felt compelled to take action. Van Kennel family histories have it that at some point in his twelfth year she administered a savage bare-bottomed spanking, during a salon in the family’s drawing room, in full and explicit view of 37 local mothers and daughters.

This very public shaming over what amounted to a matter of chivalry stuck with Van Kannel (no wonder- “Spankophilus” being a whisper that seemed to dog his steps for years afterward) and, far from teaching him a lesson, embittered him even further toward the “gentlemanly” behavior polite society required.

Had this been the only episode the world may have never had a revolving door to shuffle through. As it so happens, however, Theophilus Van Kennel married a woman who, though beautiful and slyly clever, had an odd and stubborn quirk of her own.

Young Abigail Van Kennel, it seems, refused to pass from one room of their apartments to another without the assistance of Theophilus. As a biographer later explained: She was willing to make many concessions to the new modern ways, but her mother had taught her to take matters of chivalry very seriously indeed. “Manners are the measure of a man!” she’d said “More so than his inseam, rest assured!”

Needless to say Theophilus was unaware of this outlook when he took Abigail as his wife, and was none to pleased at finding it out on their honeymoon. The result amounted to a battle of wills, fought atop a mountain, which to onlookers looked suspiciously like a mole-hill.
 
Theophilus had on one occasion tried to put his foot down on the matter, telling his wife in the morning, “all this opening doors twaddle just will not do! I can not be rushing around my own home to usher you from room to room! You are a grown woman and can locomote perfectly well on your own.” after which he stormed out of the house. He returned home in the evening only to find Abigail sitting defiantly just inside the bedroom door, right where he’d left her.

With the ugliness of Fate’s sense of humor now blindingly apparent, Van Kennel, incensed and stubborn as an ill mannered he-goat, devoted his full focus to finding some way to sidestep this rule of chivalry, or even, perhaps, create cause for a complete revision of the rules. 3 years and $9,837 later he found his answer in what we now call “the revolving door.”

You see, contrary to what you might think, the revolving door was not designed to keep out snow, or to minimize heat loss (though that it does both certainly lead to its success). Theophilus had something different in mind.

The revolving door was designed specifically so that whomever enters the door first is obliged to do all the pushing! This was Theophilus’ breakthrough. He saw immediately that with his design it would actually be most chivalrous for the man to proceed through the door first. He hoped that, without being reduced to stating it baldly, people would recognize this fact, and that when they did, presto! door-holding would be relegated to the stinking, festering, and massive compost heap of history.

He did not count on this eventuality of course, having learned by then that traditions could, and traditionally did, prove irrationally tenacious. His design addressed this, however, and he was satisfied by the private knowledge that with his door at least, the act of obliging women first passage would be, in point of fact, the act of obliging them to open the door for you!

His own home, as well as the home of his mother, were outfitted with the first 14 revolving doors ever assembled.

In the years that followed, after his invention had taken root, though the tiresome rules of chivalry showed no sign of adapting, the loophole he’d so cleverly engineered amused him to no end. He’d walk past buildings in which his doors had been installed and laugh. He thought of the women all over New York being ushered dutifully into revolving doors by browbeaten sons and husbands, all proclaiming with a twinkle in their eyes, “No, no, after you!”

And that my friends is the true, very nearly forgotten, secret history of the revolving door.

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Disclosure: Most factual bits of this post were gleaned from James Buzard’s piece Perceptual Revolution while all untruths are, I assure you, my own. I’ll leave it to you to sort out which is which. 

Hope You enjoyed.

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Note: This post is in a series of reworkings of old posts which date from before the redesign of The Nonist. The links have been updated, the text has been reworked, 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.

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In 1907, the Osaka-based journalist Miyatake Gaikotsu began publishing The World of Illustrated Postcards (Ehagaki Sekai) as a colour supplement to his monthly Humorous Journal (Kokkei Shinbun). This supplement took the form of a printed sheet of card, folded into an eight-page booklet, containing thirty postcards. Each card bore a colour design and a caption. In some cases the humour was straightforwardly coarse, in others, confusingly obscure: many readers are supposed to have complained of images they were unable to understand accompanied by captions that seemed to cast no light on them.

Gaikotsu was born Miyatake Kameshiro in Kagawa prefecture in 1867. His assumed surname means skeleton or skull. He launched his first satirical magazine at the age of 20. An article parodying the Emperor earned him, in 1889, a fine and the first of four prison sentences. Undeterred, Gaikotsu started the Kokkei Shinbun in 1901. It was a popular success, but his lampoons of police chiefs, dishonest businessmen and corrupt journalists attracted numerous fines and threats: at length, Gaikotsu voluntarily shut the paper down in 1909, ending it with a ‘Suicide Issue.’

I scanned these images from the current issue of FMR magazine, in which, in an essay about Gaikotsu and his postcards, Enrico Sturani writes: “Of those who created [the postcards], only one was known as an artist; the others were chosen from among the contributors to the Humorous Journal, possibly from among the printers, or among the public itself. But it was Miyatake who set the tone, either by choosing the sketches to be published, or by inviting a couple of the most prolific draughtsmen to accompany him to the baths to discuss new subjects, and ways of representing them.”

Besides commissioning postcards, Gaikotsu also collected them: he compiled more than two hundred albums of cards, many of them grouped thematically. There are, for example, albums devoted to women’s hairstyles, to illustrations of fruit, of clouds, and ‘curious things.’ There are albums of specially handmade postcards, of foreign postcards, of commemorative postcards. Even in the privacy of his collection, there is evidence of Gaikotsu’s satirical temperament in one album’s title: ‘Military Men - those who have destroyed Japan.’

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Thanks Aitch!

About all I can add to that is to say searches for more info on Gaikotsu, in English at least, don’t turn up much info. One thing I noticed, however, is that he does get mentioned in quite a few papers and articles dealing with Japanese sexuality at the turn of the last century. This seems to be for a couple of reasons-

For one he was a journalist with a decidedly mischievous bent and relayed many stories of daily life in the late Mejii and early Taisho periods which, because of their intention to amuse, reveal details which would otherwise likely go unreported.

The second reason are the postcards themselves.

Quote: “During the 1910’s, japanese porno-kitch was at it’s zenith. the artist and satirist Gaikotsu (Skeleton) Miyakatake filled his famous Kokkei Shinbun (Comic Newspaper) with a wealth of sexual innuendo… There were phallo-vuvlar symbols and all kinds of hints at sexual pastimes and phenomena- the most daring probably being the maid with with the japanese flag wrapped around her waist and carrying a sign saying “Today we are closed for a holiday”. The hint at monthly indisposition was suggested by having the red sun placed directly over her genital area. It can hardly have endeared Miyatake to the authorities; it pointed to a certain dissent in attitude, if not fact.”  -Fran Lioyd, Consuming Bodies: Sex and Contemporary Japanese Art.

Lastly I offer the following paltry bit of linkage for those wanting to explore further-

Postcard Guide Japan on Kokkei Shimbun postcards

MFA Boston’s Art of the Japanese Postcard which ostensibly has a large collection of works from Kokkei Shimbun, but whose images seem not to be loading.

Itami City Musum of Art [Japanese] which is evidently having a Gaikotsu show later this month, and the Kawasaki City Museum [Japanese] which had one fairly recently.

The Japanese wikipedia page for Gaikotsu

This odd Video

Amazon.jp offers at least 4 “pocketbook edition” collections of Gaikotsu’s work that I’ve been able to identify, though they are, of course, in Japanese.


From both Aitch and I-
Hope you enjoyed.

Well, as you might expect, it turns out that the “perfect alphabet” of the title, which the book sets forth as remedy to the “absurdities” of English, also mentioned in the title, is a phonetic alphabet created by Comstock himself.

Quote: “It is generally admitted that our orthography is more complicated than that of any other language. Various attempts have been made by different individuals to simplify it. The author of this treatise, however, proposes not only to simplify it, but to perfect it.”

Before you go off half-cocked mocking and scoffing Dr. Comstock for pomposity, first remind yourself that he invented his more-perfect-than-English alphabet at a time when religious and philosophical outlooks on causality were giving way to scientific ones, which is to say that the prevailing feeling among the educated was that with some properly focussed brain-power any “problem” could be “solved” by scientific means, that this was the age of the elocution movement, and that there had already been, before he ever set overconfident pen to paper, at least a century’s worth of individual efforts to overhaul English. Benjamin Franklin had made his own attempt as early as the 1760’s after all, and you wouldn’t mock old Ben now would you?

Then there is the little matter which, being so far removed from grammar school, you have likely forgotten- English is a weird and knotty frankensteinian creature.

(After many paragraphs to back up the statement) Comstock puts it this way: “Our language is hedged about with difficulties which can hardly be overcome even by years of laborious study. The young student is obliged to waste much precious time in learning to spell and read our crooked words, and the adult foreigner is appalled by obstacles which seem to be insurmountable. Now, all these difficulties would be entirely removed by the adoption of a perfect alphabet — an alphabet which should represent language phonetically.”

Of course, now that you’ve reminded yourself of these things, you can go ahead and laugh anyway.

I personally find myself amused, not so much by the seemingly quixotic quest to just put on the brakes and change the course of a living language, but by the obvious galled irritation Dr. Comstock felt.

Quote: “...the 38 elementary sounds of the English language are represented in 336 different ways, which may be considered equivalent to three hundred and thirty-six different letters! Is it possible to conceive of a more complicated, absurd, unphilosophical, and barbarous system of orthography?”

Barbarous?! Hahaha.

We, all of us, find aspects of our own vocations thorny and annoying. The convolutions and abstruseness and wrong-mindedness which seem to permeate every human endeavor formulated or informed by any consciousness other than our own can exasperate; but imagine if your vocation was language! Imagine if it were English itself that stuck in your craw. Talk about fighting windmills. 

Anyhow, if you are interested, Comstock’s phonetic alphabet broke down essentially as follows- 

Quote: “This Alphabet comprises all the letters of the Phonetio Alphabet for the English Language, with additional ones to represent sounds peculiar to foreign languages. Comstock’s Phonetic Alphabet is the common, or Boman alphabet, not only so extended, by the addition of new letters, that there is a character for every articulate sound, but so improved by the introduction of signs for the various modifications of the voice in speech, that there is a character for every accent, inflection, intonation, etc. Hence it must be considered a perfect alphabet.”

Including all 44 characters and 16 tone marks Comstock’s perfect alphabet looked like this-

If you were enthusiastic about the alphabet and wanted to set about immediately hand-writing a letter to your dear old mother, or your betrothed in Niagara Falls, you could refer to this chart as a guide-

Meanwhile if you wanted to set about teaching the gents down at the club or the fellows at the beer garden this new method, some charts depicting mouth articulations, grouped by phoneme, would be helpful. Luckily Comstock furnished these, saying- 

Quote: “An accurate knowledge of the positions which the organs of articulation should assume in the formation of the several elements of vocal language, is very important to those who would speak with ease and elegance. To aid the reader still further in the acquisition of this knowledge, he is furnished with the various postures of the mouth, required in uttering the elements energetically, and singly.”

“The pupil should exercise his organs of speech, in the most forcible manner, every day, on all the elements. The vowels should be exploded from the throat, both interrogatively and affirmatively, in every range of pitch.”

Certainly, even armed with logic and charts and enthusiasm, there would be some doubters. To them, leaving aside stability and ease of use, you could quote a few of the many benefits Comstock himself lists, like, say-

3. It would enable one to spell and read in one-twentieth the time required by the present absurd and barbarous orthography.

4. It would render the teaching and the learning of the English language, which, by the old theory, are extremely irksome, highly interesting.

7. It would interdict provincialisms; because, according to this theory, all words are spelled as they are pronounced, and, consequently, pronounced as they are spelled, every graphic word being a perfect Daguerreotype of the vocal word which it represents.

10. As, in phonetic spelling, most of the words have fewer letters than are employed in our present orthography, this alphabet would enable a writer to put more matter upon the same page.

13. The adoption of this alphabet would not only be the means of greatly advancing the cause of science and literature, but would be invaluable to the missionary in disseminating a knowledge of the gospel among the heathen.

How can you argue with that? Comstock certainly couldn’t see any way.

Quote: “The Author feels confident that no one who peruses this treatise understandingly, will desire to cling any longer to the old system of orthography, unless he prefers chaos to order, —discord to harmony, —darkness to light. Hence, he sends forth his Alphabet to the world with the most sanguine expectation that it will meet the entire approbation of the public, and be speedily adopted.”

I might wonder weather, having seen his countrymen choose chaos, discord, and darkness over his perfect alternative, he died sanguine as well… were it not for the obvious linguistic contradiction of it.

Anyhow, hindsight being smug and sadistic as it is, we know his grandiloquent claims and aims came to naught. We know also that the scores of other contrived alphabets which came before and after his met similar fates. I don’t believe there has ever been a constructed script, in the history of the world, which has supplanted a “naturally” evolved predecessor by dint of logic and force of will. 

Perhaps it’s the fact that, as in Comstock’s case, a switch might benefit 3rd graders and immigrants but would effectively render the entire adult population of the country illiterate in the bargain?

Perhaps it’s because, ever since learning as ankle-biters what the characters MOMMY added up to, our alphabet is so intertwined with our language, and hence, our thoughts, our minds, our being, that we would never and could never willingly replace it?

Perhaps it’s because language is a vibrant and living and evolving thing which has never, not even in or present “barbarous” orthography, been truly tamed and finally codified?

Or perhaps it’s just that the overwhelming majority of us are not elocution teachers, or linguists, or grammarians, and so the quirks of English just simply do not stick in our craws enough to warrant, in any of our minds, a “solution?”

Hell, I don’t know.

Though his perfect alphabet is all but forgotten, I would like to thank Dr. Comstock, none the less, for not only affording me a chuckle (which I suppose I ought to be offering apologies for rather than thanks) but more importantly for occasioning circumstances in which the letters “Phonemenon” could be put together, in that exact order, and be something other than a misspelling.

So in his honor, finally, let me offer the following, may it live on in the minds and mouths of we who have choosen chaos, discord, and darkness:

Pho·nem·e·non [fo-neem-uh-non]
noun. plural: phonemena.
1. A vocalization, or sound made with the mouth, that is perceptible by the senses.
2. A remarkable or outstanding utterance.

Hope you enjoyed.

Further reading and viewing:

Books
An Inquiry Into the Nature and Form of the Books of the Ancients, c.1837
Bibliopegia: Or, The Art of Bookbinding in All Its Branches, c.1848
Bookbinding Considered as a Fine Art, Mechanical Art, and Manufacture, c.1882
Bookbinding Old and new: Notes of a Book-lover, c.1895
Bookbinding for Amateurs, c.1885
The Art of Bookbinding: A Practical Treatise, c.1890
Modern Bookbinding, Their Design and Decoration, c.1906
Historical Essay on the Art of Bookbinding, c.1883
The Art of Book-binding, Its Rise and Progress, c.1850
A Collection of Facsimiles of Historical & Artistic Book-bindings, c.1889
Examples of the Art of Book-binding, c.1897
The Book, Its History and Development, c.1908
A Short History of Bookbinding, c.1895
Bookbinding in England and France, c.1897

Sites
Publisher’s Bindings Online, 1815-1930
Cyclopaedia: Virtual Bookbinding
Hand Bookbinding: Plain and Simple to Grand and Glorious
American Bookbinders Museum: Tickets & Equipment
Bookbinding and the Conservation of books: Colour Plates & Dictionary.
Deutsches Buchbindermuseum
Netherlands National Museum Special Collection
History of Irish Bookbinding
Scottish Decorative Bookbinding
History of Chinese Bookbinding
Bibliopegia: A History of Bookbinding

Enjoy.

This first sequence was a “corporate presentation for television” (read: mini-commercial) created by Bass for the Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation. It appeared at the beginning of the series Small World, which the company sponsored. Its goal was “to indicate the firm’s range of activities through symbols.” Saul handled the animation and it was put out by Playhouse Pictures.

You can see the entire sequence in one large image by clicking here.

The second sequence was also created for Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation. This time the “corporate presentation” focused on the companies range of packaging materials and their “functional suitability.” Again Saul handled the animation and it was put out by Playhouse Pictures.

You can see this entire sequence in one large image by clicking here.

It’s hard to really get a sense of these mini-commercials from a handful of stills, to tell whether they were “successful” as corporate presentations, whether they were fun, or catchy, or memorable. I suspect that they were.

It’s interesting to see, even on this limited level, how Saul approached that task which has been seemingly omnipresent since the beginning of direct advertising- making giant corporations which manufacture things like blasting powder, gunpowder, ammunition cartridges, and and endless array of deadly chemicals seem cuddly and approachable, or at very least human. This is a task advertising agencies still wrestle with today, with often cloying and nauseating results. (Think petroleum, defense, tobacco, and pharmaceuticals.)

I believe beyond his unquestionable talents Saul actually had a built-in advantage over those that wrestle with the task today. The 50’s and 60’s were an era in which the friendly, “cartoony,” hand-drawn illustration was king. King I say! It was a visual language and style that could make damn near anything seem wholesome. ⊕

Lastly, as a tiny bonus let me offer a few scant shots from the title sequence for the film The Shrike which Mr. Bass did and which seem to be absent from the internet as well. Here you go.

Anyhow, hope you completeists and design-folk found some pleasure in that. To the rest of you- better luck next time.

Note: all of sequence images above were scanned from the book, Design In Motion by John Halas and Roger Manvell, published 1962.