rummaging through venerable dust

I found these exquisite calling cards at the American Antiquarian Society web site, but it wasn't easy. 

First, some background I found interesting: The AAS, in Worcester, Massachusetts, is a library and learned society whose collection focuses on the "printed record of what is now the United States from 1640 through 1876." Founded in 1812 by a Revolutionary War patriot and printer named Isaiah Thomas, the Society had its start in a time of gentlemen scholars. "Amateurs" in the true sense of the word, they loved books, history, ideas-on-paper. Thomas, for example, donated his collection of 8000 books. The succeeding president, the colorful Christopher Columbus Baldwin, wrote to a friend "...an Antiquary should not pester himself with a wife: he should do nothing that may diminish his affections with venerable books." Clearly nothing diminished his ardor as he rummaged around in one sweltering attic for five August days ("the thermometer at ninety-three, I had a pretty hot time of it") on the scent of a promising trove. After searching through "trunks, bureaus, baskets, tea chests and old drawers" he carted away an astonishing forty four hundred and seventy six pounds of material for the collections. "Every thing was covered with venerable dust, and... I have never seen such happy moments." Unhappily, Baldwin's flame of historical passion was snuffed out the following year (1835) in a stage coach accident.

So, today the Society's collections now comprise 3 million items. The AAS site is sprawling--and comprehensively cataloged— but very spotty when it comes to online access to items. And its confusing. I got lost down many a blind alley thinking I was going to browse, say Book Salesman's Samples, or Rewards of Merit, only to be met by a few paragraphs and a treacherous sinkhole of links to inventories of related material. There are several "online exhibitions" some of which have enlargable images, many not. Also to be found through the AAS is the thoroughly engrossing Farber Gravestone Collection which I wrote about fairly extensively here. 

But, Dear Reader, I suggest you try rummaging around for yourself because you sometimes get the prize: a full, accessible roster of images-- as is the case for daguerreotypes...

 

Nero, the Barton family dog, c. 1880

from the clipping file

Schematic diagram of computer connections within the New York Public Library system. pre-1994.
note the arcane shapes and lightning bolts

I have always loved unintentionally deformed type. This was a fax gone awry. c. 2000

I used to have a very unusual photographer friend named Daniel who would send random photographs to my office fax, unannounced. This is Mannheim, 1994. Interaction with him was a series of non-sequiturs. 

A dot matrix printer, possessed. Retrieved from wastebasket, c. 1992. Not only was the text static-y and sprinkled with random tiny symbols, it apparently printed much larger than commanded to and ran right off the right side of the 8.5 x 11 paper.

"a child with an explosive" and other greetings of the Day

July fourth imagery from the New York Public Library Digital collection.

The tot directly above is identified as "Advertisement for Burr McIntosh monthly magazine that depicts a child with an explosive and a calendar of the month of July." The c. 1920 hooligans at top are "boys stuffing gunpowder into a toy canon." Eesh.

ancient memories

A couple of days ago I visited the venerable Museum of Natural History. Caught between appointments with too much time to kill, I decided to see the Silk Road exhibition. It had quite a bit of really provocative information and was quite a show-stopper of an installation—I may eventually write something on it here, but this post isnt about that. It's about a somewhat sidelined hallway mural on the fourth floor. In a niche at the end of one of the dinosaur galleries is the 25 foot tall Flying Reptiles by Constantin Astori (1889-1975). A Russian artist who came to New York in 1923, Astori worked for the Smithsonian and the Cooper Hewitt as a restorer. The American Museum of Natural History commissioned him to paint a mural in 1940, and Flying Reptiles is signed 1942.


Oddly, as soon as I saw it, it was familiar to me from a very early, distant memory, although I had no specific childhood recollection of it. Perhaps it was reproduced in one of my books on dinosaurs (an avid interest circa ages 5 through 10)? In doing a little armchair research I rediscovered another very familiar mural: the magnificent Age of Reptiles by Rudolph Zallinger. (Interestingly, like Astori, Zallinger was a Russian, from Siberia). Age of Reptiles is a massive 110 foot long fresco panorama completed in 1947 at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. (I'm ashamed to say in my 4 years in New Haven I never did get over to the Peabody—I intend to go in August.) The mural was reproduced in several dinosaur books in the late 60s/ early 70s and that's how I know it.

Age of Reptiles (detail) Rudolph Zallinger

Zallinger was by far the better draftsman but there is something I love about Astori's Flying Reptiles. Somehow, his mural conveys "Lair of the Zorgons on planet Rilor" in a loopy science fiction sort of way, rather than "speculative view of life on prehistoric earth." Its a bit humorous (see the pterosaur antics in the details above) and I half expect to see a Maxfield Parrish nymph perched one of the rocks, nevertheless I'm simply drawn into that fabulous compositional spiral toward an ancient technicolor sunset.

the world of threads

If someone said "thread cards" to you would you know what they were? I suppose everyone is so crafty these days you probably would. I stumbled across these enchanting objects from the French company Maison Sajou, purveyors of ciseaux, merceries, and ouvrages de dames (scissors, thread I believe, and "ladies' works" or fancy work). The threads and sewing notions are presented in several different lines of exquisite reproduction packaging ("There are other models to discover in this collection: Daoulas, Crozon, Camaret, Guilvinec, Bénodet, Plyben and Pontivy.") Owner Frederique Crestin-Brillet has written an illustration-packed publication about collectible haberdashery items which "concentrates uniquely on the world of threads in all their forms." Amazing that all this and far more would have been commonly traded—filling sewing baskets, tossed into drawers, never given more than passing notice. Oh, to think of all the small things we've lost track of.

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the Burns Method Part II: Death Avenue and Martha Stewart

I first came across this astonishing photo of West 26th street and Eleventh Avenue on Shorpy but it's originally from the George Grantham Bain Collection of the Library of Congress. This is probably one of the richest images I've ever seen—it verges on the surreal in its disparate simultaneities. Surely GG Bain didnt see, at the time of clicking the shutter, all the separate stories he was recording.

Journeying around the image—something I think of as the Ken Burns method— its fascinating to see the details of that moment. [NOTE 7-18: I shouldn't be surprised there's a Wikipedia entry about the "Ken Burns Effect"— I just cant believe I didnt know about it or the Apple reference.]
There's the coal bin on the front of the train engine, the man making his way on crutches, the spindly "ice" cart. From the camera's vantage point (and ours) the young boys and chalk drawings on the sidewalk could have been captured by Kertesz. Notice the "flagman" riding in front of the train—here a barrel cart has gotten in between. Boys on horseback, called "West Side cowboys," had to carry a red flag to warn of the approach, at six miles an hour, of each locomotive.

New York Central's freight line had run along Tenth and Eleventh Avenues since 1849. Known as "Death Avenue" for the number of pedestrians killed by the mix of railroad and street life, the name was used collectively for both streets. Statistics vary; one study recorded 21 deaths on Tenth and Eleventh from July of 1907 to July of 1910. Somehow the flagmen didnt seem to make walking along the avenue much safer. A New York Times notice from November, 1911, about the year of this photo, announced:

"Another 'Death Avenue' suit was filed yesterday [by the brother of the victim]... Cyrus J Burby was crossing Tenth Avenue, the complaint states, when his foot became wedged between the track and the sidewalk. Before he could extricate himself a train bore down on him without warning and he was decapitated."

In 1929 the City and State of New York and the New York Central Railroad agreed on the West Side Improvement Project, which would replace "Death Avenue" with a seemingly futuristic elevated line that entered warehouses on their upper floors. 

By 1931 the entire block in this image— the west side of Eleventh Avenue, 26th to 27th streets— had become the magnificent Starrett-Lehigh Building. The Lehigh Valley railroad had retained the ground floor as a vast freight yard, and the 19-story, 1.8 million-square-foot building, with its three gigantic elevators to lift and lower trucks, was put up directly above it. (Today the axle grease has been wiped away and Comme des Garcons, Hugo Boss, and Martha Stewart are among the tenants)

The High Line, as the new elevated freight line was called, opened to trains in 1934 and was used until the early 1980s. Saved from demolition by a grassroots movement in the early 2000s, a portion of the High Line is now a park that is so exquisite, so unbelievably well done, it's hard to believe it got built in New York. In my opinion, it is one of the triumphs of this city.

the Burns Method

Image at top is "Lower Hudson Street" about 1865, the other is "Washington Statue in Union Square" about 1860. 

At bottom is how I used the Union Square crop, which I thought was vaguely and abstractly menacing, in the Lincoln and New York exhibition at the New-York Historical Society. It was intended to help suggest (along with the engraving, etc ) the mounting popular dissatisfaction with Lincoln that led up to the Draft Riots.

NOTE 7-18: I shouldn't be surprised there's a Wikipedia entry about the "Ken Burns Effect"— I just cant believe I didnt know about it or the Apple reference.

One of the many things I admired about Ken Burns' famous Civil War series was not just the amazing evocation of the 1860s—but the exceptional sense of being enveloped in the 1860s. This was achieved, in part, with Burns' habit of dramatizing the photographs. By dramatizing I mean his practice of zooming into a small corner of a photograph, panning across it, and drawing back, at some point, so that the viewer sees the entire image. It's a journey across the image. Not only is this a clever way for a documentary filmmaker to increase the store of visuals he can draw from (each image can yield two or more scenes, especially helpful when sources are historical and of limited availability) it is also a method of revivifying, showing the life within the image.

Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography) speaks of the excitement of (select) images, the "the pressure of the unspeakable [within the image] which wants to be spoken." In his somewhat overwrought way, Barthes explains that the "adventure" and "animation" of certain images in turn animate the viewer. By isolating and framing small parts of a scene, or panning across a battlefield or streetscape, Burns extracts "adventure" from images that may, on first look, be quite standard or dull. Training the camera across a photograph recreates in a small way the experience of three dimensional world. It places the viewer in the setting and evokes the sensation of taking in that very scene. Also, by refocusing the eye on small corners, the viewer is privy to other stories that might escape notice when seeing the photo in its entirety. For Burns' camera, a single image of Richmond in ruins could offer up "resoluteness" in teasing out the tiny details of street life or it could reinforce "devastation" by lingering on each and every physical manifestation of war.

I was mesmerized by these latent stories in historical images. Limited only by the resolution (image quality) of the image one is working from there's the potential for extracting candid moments, where none seemed to exist. When I worked on the "Lincoln and New York" show at the New-York Historical Society I felt strongly that the galleries needed to have a sense of immediacy. Lincoln's walk through New York City on his way to his speaking engagement at Cooper Union should seem like the real walk it was. I had hoped to use photographic murals of New York street scenes only— no engravings—to place the visitor on those New York streets. (Of course others weighed in on the design and things got watered down, but still...) Above are two of several images I drew from— they're pretty powerful even without the Burns method, so my job was easy.

Why was I even thinking about this now? A typographer friend, Nick Sherman, created this amazing post of signage seemingly extracted out of nowhere from vintage photographs.