Snow Day

Packing

Random finds during packing. Above, business card from a family trip.
Below, health votive from Greece.

Small 1920 notebook with maps, 26th Street Flea Market

matchbooks, 26th Street Flea Market

 

photo, Maine.

UPDATED: I am moving. This means everything comes off the walls and out of drawers and off the shelves—it's taken me a while to absorb the enormity of that. There is just so much stuff. I stop and think—well everything came in the door so everything can make it out. But much of this accumulation was just that-- a steady accrual, creeping in quietly, piece by piece. I've looked at this move as an opportunity to deaccession some things from The Collection: shells, old bottles, ceramics, mudlarking detritus, some wooden what-nots, a large cow head sign... But each shedding is a trial, almost every one produces a twinge of regret along with a brief little remembrance of where and when I acquired the item. The goal was to get rid of 1/4 of my flea market cache. It has been more like 1/10. Perhaps I will do further editing on unpacking.//

The passion for accumulation is upon us. We make “collections,” we fill our rooms, our walls, our tables, our desks, with things, things, things.

Many people never pass out of this phase. They never see a flower without wanting to pick it and put it in a vase, they never enjoy a book without wanting to own it, nor a picture without wanting to hang it on their walls. ... Their houses are filled with an undigested mass of things, like the terminal moraine where a glacier dumps at length everything it has picked up during its progress through the lands.

But to some of us a day comes when we begin to grow weary of things. We realize that we do not possess them; they possess us. Our books are a burden to us, our pictures have destroyed every restful wall-space, our china is a care, our photographs drive us mad ...We feel stifled with the sense of things, and our problem becomes, not how much we can accumulate, but how much we can do without. ... Such things as we cannot give away, and have not the courage to destroy, we stack in the garret, where they lie huddled in dim and dusty heaps, removed from our sight, to be sure, yet still faintly importunate...

—The Tyranny of Things, Elisabeth Morris (1917)

A friend noted:

Things. Recognized as once beloved. Now mostly just reminders of the excitement of their own discovery. Usually many layered time travel... to the time I found it, and further back, to the era the thing came from as well. So a perfect card of "Victory Hair Pins" takes me to both 1940 and 1987.

Recalling two eras was a wonderful observation. 

I still feel delighted by the specialness of the objects I have, but that delight is yoked to a sort of leaden duration of time in my possession. I feel I've "spent" the excitement of the piece by having it around so long. It needs to be discovered again. I have been putting things out in front of my house to be taken (in true Park Slope fashion) and have sold a couple things online. In a sense, by giving objects away or selling them I am reenergizing them— giving these finds a chance to delight anew.

Letter Perfect

above and below, two dramatically different Journal covers by the (Brooklyn!) master penman William E. Dennis (1860-1924).

Volumetric, constructed lettering with elaborate shadowing had its heyday in the 1890s to early 1900s.
Beautiful examples were found on stock certificates and maps (see BibliOdyssey for a collection of Sanborn map details)

 

No Bezier curves here!

 

Charles Paxton Zaner

A Journal cover created by a lesser hand (in my opinion) employing the ubiquitous
calligraphic bird flourish, a common practice device.
The penmen all too often literally "put a bird on it."

Much of what penman were hired for were business documents like these checks and vouchers.
This has hand written directions for the engraver and electrotyper.

Rules for drawing drop shadows

Commemorative cartouche for Ulysses S Grant, and "President" detail by Daniel T. Ames, 1868.
I believe Ames created the large ornament-choked plaque that still exists in the lobby of
the original Cooper Union building. Mid-nineteenth century lettering is usually fussier than later examples,
and typically employed more flourishes and scrollwork.

The Zaner-Bloser Collection at the University of Scranton is one of the largest collections of American ornamental penmanship of the later 19th and early 20th centuries.

The company was founded in 1888 by Charles Paxton Zaner as the Zanerian School of Penmanship. Elmer W. Bloser purchased a share of the company in 1891 and in 1895 the school changed its name to the Zaner-Bloser Company. They began publishing their own penmanship manuals. The school prepared students for careers as penmen. Penmen were essential to business, preparing legal vouchers, monetary notes, ledgers, writing correspondence and creating documents before the invention of the typewriter. They also created most advertising display lettering. Zaner-Bloser also taught students to become illustrators, engravers, and engrossers. Engrossing is the type of ornamental lettering used on diplomas, commemorative documents, and certificates. To my astonishment, Zaner-Bloser is still in business and--swimming against the proverbial tide--continues penmanship instruction today.

The Scranton collection is incredible and includes professional journals, hand writing manuals, instructional material for children, photographs of children learning to write, scrapbooks containing examples of ornamental penmanship done by master penmen and more. A good portion of this is digitized and downloadable in large sizes!

B. de B. at the TDC

B. de B. on view at the Type Directors Club through March

see all the prints at www.b-de-b.com

 

B. de B. is a project of The Graphics Office. It's a growing collection of historically-based designs that rescues ephemera from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and reimagines it for the twenty-first.

Our alphabet prints are inspired by nineteenth-century British children’s educationalchapbooks, pamphlets of rhymes, folklore, and news that were sold on the street for pennies.

We created this series with images and letters from a large, antique scrapbook made in England in the 1830s, which we bought a few years ago. "B. de B. Russell Juvenile Album" stamped onto the cover led us to trace its long ago owner Blois de Blois Russell, a young man of privilege with a strikingly unusual name. He attended Oxford, rowed crew, and died at 22.The prints are on view through March at the Type Directors Club: 347 West 36th Street, Suite 603.

Come visit at upcoming events like Book Night: Present & Tense (Thursday, March 13) and Designers in the Nursery: A Look at Picture Books by Graphic Artists (Tuesday, March 18)

There are three sizes of prints on heavy, bright white archival stock available for order at
www.b-de-b.com:  8 x 10 inches   •  18 x 24 inches   •  24 x 33 inches

a journey through cloudland*

Note: Even more to bring to this encore post; a friend alerted me to Russian photographer Alexey Kljatov who is following in Wilson Bentley's path— fashioning a DIY attachment to his camera and capturing stunning images of snowflakes. See images at bottom. Yet another Russian, Andrew Osokin, has done the same just with a macro lens, documenting snowflakes as they touch the ground, moments before they disappear.

Kljatov is most in the spirit of Bentley with his personal intensity for the project and home made mechanical ingenuity. He also, like Bentley, photographs the snowflakes against a homemade black backdrop. Kljatov's specimens have a crystalline sharpness. Otherworldy, they look alien and almost unsettling. They are, for me, too clinical to have the same resonance as Bentley's soft, idiosyncratic and sometimes humorous work.
Also of note: A couple years ago this Talk of the Town (All Alike by Adam Gopnik) mentioning "Snowflake" Bentley was a beautiful adjunct to this post.

Wilson Alwyn Bentley (February 9, 1865 - December 23, 1931) was born in Jericho, Vermont, in a farmhouse that remained his lifelong home. He was home-schooled and never ventured far from Jericho. At 19, after he combined two treasured presents– a microscope and a bellows camera–Bentley succeeded in capturing the world's first photomicrograph of a snow crystal or snowflake. Working outside, of course, he caught each crystal on a black board and transferred it rapidly to a microscope slide. Doing this he was able to create about 5000 images over the course of his life.

In town, Bentley was considered odd and was known to many neighbors as the "Snowflake Man" because of his quiet demeanor and unusual preoccupation. Although he was a gifted musician– he played piano, organ, clarinet, coronet, and violin, as well as composed music –he devoted himself to his photography and study of snow.

In 1931 Bentley worked with William J. Humphreys of the U.S. Weather Bureau to publish Snow Crystals, a monograph illustrated with 2,500 photographs. After picking up his copies of the newly published book he walked home in a snowstorm. He died of pneumonia at his farm on December 23.

. . . . .
"The rare delight of seeing for the first time this exquisite lineaments under a microscope, the practical certainty that never again will one be found just like this one... To perpetuate each masterpiece the image of each of each rare gem in the photograph, before its matchless beauty is forever lost (to us) is an experience is so rare so truly delightful that once undergone is never forgotten...Was ever life history written in more dainty hieroglyphics!"– Wilson Alwyn Bentley

. . . . .
Bentley donated his collection of original glass-plate photomicrographs of snow crystals to the Buffalo Museum of Science
*Bentley's description of a snow crystal's trajectory

Thanks to Herbert Pfostl/Blindpony for alerting me to Bentley.

Snowflakes by Russian photographer Alexey Kljatov. Read more about his technique on his blog

 

Snow Days

blizzard 1922

c. 1830s. Why the women are out in snow in short sleeves is a mystery

"Diana in the Snow", 1915 Jessie Tarbox Beals
Diana was the statue atop the old Madison Square Garden which used to actually be on Madison Square

1914

c. 1940, Shorpy

Snow removal, 1908 NYC

"Snow man— Happy Days”, 1888

Snow shoeing, 1886