The world now has COVID-19 vaccines, of which more and more people are receiving their doses every day. A year and a half ago the world did not have COVID-19 vaccines, though it was fast becoming clear how soon it would need them. The subsequent development of the ones now being deployed around the world took not just less than a year and a half but less than a year, an impressive speed even to many of us who never dug deep into medical science. The achievement owes in part to the use of mRNA, a term most of us may recall only dimly from biology classes; through the pandemic, messenger ribonucleic acid, to use its full name, has proven if not the savior of humanity, then at least the very molecule we needed.
One shouldn’t get “the idea that these vaccines came out of nowhere.” On Twitter, Dan Rather — these days a more outspoken figure than ever — calls the prevalence such a notion “a failure of science communication with tragic results,” describing the vaccines as “the result of DECADES of basic research in MULTIPLE fields building on the BREADTH and DEPTH of human knowledge.”
You can get a clearer sense of what that research has involved through videos like the animated TED-Ed explainer above. “In the twentieth century, most vaccines took well over a decade to research, test, and produce,” says its narrator. “But the vaccines for COVID-19 cleared the threshold for use in less than eleven months.” The “secret”? mRNA.
A “naturally occurring molecule that encodes the instructions for occurring proteins,” mRNA can be used in vaccines to “safely introduce our body to a virus.” Researchers first “encode trillions of mRNA molecules with instructions for a specific viral protein.” Then they inject those molecules into a specially designed “nanoparticle” also containing lipids, sugars, and salts. When it reaches our cells, this nanoparticle triggers our immune response: the body produces “antibodies to fight that viral protein, that will then stick around to defend against future COVID-19 infections.” And all of this happens without the vaccine altering out DNA,
While mRNA vaccines will “have a big impact on how we fight COVID-19,” says the narrator of the Vox video above, “their real impact is just beginning.” Their development marked “a turning point for the pandemic,” but given their potential applications in the battles against a host of other, even deadlier diseases (e.g., HIV), “the pandemic might also be a turning point for vaccines.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
He writes in the preface that these recipes are intended to provide “musical interludes for the salivary glands,” warning readers that “no one should use this novel for a cookbook. Any serious cook should have the reliable originals in his or her library anyway.”
So with that caveat in mind…
Early on, the narrator/titular character, née Rudy Waltz, shares a recipe from his family’s former cook, Mary Hoobler, who taught him “everything she knew about cooking and baking”:
MARY HOOBLER’S CORN BREAD
Mix together in a bowl half a cup of flour, one and a half cups of yellow corn-meal, a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of sugar, and three teaspoons of baking powder.
Add three beaten eggs, a cup of milk, a half cup of cream, and a half cup of melted butter.
Pour it into a well-buttered pan and bake it at four hundred degrees for fifteen minutes.
Cut it into squares while it is still hot. Bring the squares to the table while they are still hot, and folded in a napkin.
Barely two paragraphs later, he’s sharing her barbecue sauce. It sounds delicious, easy to prepare, and its placement gives it a strong flavor of Slaughterhouse-Five’s“so it goes” and “Poo-tee-weet?” — as ironic punctuation to Father Waltz’s full on embrace of Hitler, a seeming non sequitur that forces readers to think about what comes before:
When we all posed in the street for our picture in the paper, Father was forty-two. According to Mother, he had undergone a profound spiritual change in Germany. He had a new sense of purpose in life. It was no longer enough to be an artist. He would become a teacher and political activist. He would become a spokesman in America for the new social order which was being born in Germany, but which in time would be the salvation of the world.
This was quite a mistake.
MARY HOOBLER’S BARBECUE SAUCE
Sauté a cup of chopped onions and three chopped garlic cloves in a quarter of a pound of butter until tender.
Add a half cup of catsup, a quarter cup of brown sugar, a teaspoon of salt, two teaspoons of freshly ground pepper, a dash of Tabasco, a tablespoon of lemon juice, a teaspoon of basil, and a tablespoon of chili powder.
Bring to a boil and simmer for five minutes.
Rudy’s father is not the only character to falter.
Rudy’s mistake happens in the blink of an eye, and manages to upend a number of lives in Midland City, a stand in for Indianapolis, Vonnegut’s hometown.
His family loses their money in an ensuing lawsuit, and can no longer engage Mary Hoobler and the rest of the staff.
Young Rudy, who’s spent his childhood hanging out with the servants in Mary’s cozy kitchen, finds it “easy and natural” to cater to his parents in the manner to which they were accustomed:
As long as they lived, they never had to prepare a meal or wash a dish or make a bed or do the laundry or dust or vacuum or sweep, or shop for food. I did all that, and maintained a B average in school, as well.
What a good boy was I!
EGGS À LA RUDY WALTZ (age thirteen)
Chop, cook, and drain two cups of spinach.
Blend with two tablespoons of butter, a teaspoon of salt, and a pinch of nutmeg.
Heat and put into three oven-proof bowls or cups.
Put a poached egg on top of each one, and sprinkle with grated cheese.
Bake for five minutes at 375 degrees. Serves three: the papa bear, the mama bear, and the baby bear who cooked it—and who will clean up afterwards.
By high school, Rudy’s heavy domestic burden has him falling asleep in class and reproducing complicated desserts from recipes in the local paper. (“Father roused himself from living death sufficiently to say that the dessert took him back forty years.”)
LINZER TORTE (from the Bugle-Observer)
Mix half a cup of sugar with a cup of butter until fluffy.
Beat in two egg yolks and half a teaspoon of grated lemon rind.
Sift a cup of flour together with a quarter teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of cinnamon, and a quarter teaspoon of cloves. Add this to the sugar-and-butter mixture.
Add one cup of unblanched almonds and one cup of toasted filberts, both chopped fine.
Roll out two-thirds of the dough until a quarter of an inch thick.
Line the bottom and sides of an eight-inch pan with dough.
Slather in a cup and a half of raspberry jam.
Roll out the rest of the dough, make it into eight thin pencil shapes about ten inches long. Twist them a little, and lay them across the top in a decorative manner. Crimp the edges.
Bake in a preheated 350-degree oven for about an hour, and then cool at room temperature.
A great favorite in Vienna, Austria, before the First World War!
Rudy eventually relocates to the Grand Hotel Oloffson in Port au Prince, Haiti, which is how he manages to survive the — SPOILER — neutron bomb that destroys Midland City.
Here is a recipe for chocolate seafoams, courtesy of one of Midland City’s fictional residents:
MRS. GINO MARTIMO’S SPUMA DI CIOCCOLATA
Break up six ounces of semisweet chocolate in a saucepan.
Melt it in a 250-degree oven.
Add two teaspoons of sugar to four egg yolks, and beat the mixture until it is pale yellow.
Then mix in the melted chocolate, a quarter cup of strong coffee, and two tablespoons of rum.
Whip two-thirds of a cup of cold, heavy whipping cream until it is stiff. Fold it into the mixture.
Whip four egg whites until they form stiff peaks, then fold them into the mixture.
Stir the mixture ever so gently, then spoon it into cups, each cup a serving.
Refrigerate for twelve hours.
Serves six.
Other recipes in Rudy’s repertoire originate with the Grand Hotel Oloffson’s most valuable employee, headwaiter and Vodou practitioner Hippolyte Paul De Mille, who “claims to be eighty and have fifty-nine descendants”:
He said that if there was any ghost we thought should haunt Midland City for the next few hundred years, he would raise it from its grave and turn it loose, to wander where it would.
We tried very hard not to believe that he could do that.
But he could, he could.
HAITIAN FRESH FISH IN COCONUT CREAM
Put two cups of grated coconut in cheesecloth over a bowl.
Pour a cup of hot milk over it, and squeeze it dry.
Repeat this with two more cups of hot milk. The stuff in the bowl is the sauce.
Mix a pound of sliced onions, a teaspoon of salt, a half teaspoon of black pepper, and a teaspoon of crushed pepper.
Sauté the mixture in butter until soft but not brown.
Add four pounds of fresh fish chunks, and cook them for about a minute on each side.
Pour the sauce over the fish, cover the pan, and simmer for ten minutes. Uncover the pan and baste the fish until it is done—and the sauce has become creamy.
Serves eight vaguely disgruntled guests at the Grand Hotel Oloffson.
HAITIAN BANANA SOUP
Stew two pounds of goat or chicken with a half cup of chopped onions, a teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of black pepper, and a pinch of crushed red pepper. Use two quarts of water.
Stew for an hour.
Add three peeled yams and three peeled bananas, cut into chunks.
Simmer until the meat is tender. Take out the meat. What is left is eight servings of Haitian banana soup.
Bon appétit!
The recipe that closes the novel is couched in an anecdote that’s equal parts scatology and epiphany.
As a daughter of Indianapolis who was a junior in high school the year Deadeye Dick was published, I can attest that Polka-Dot Brownies would have been a hit at the bake sales of my youth:
POLKA-DOT BROWNIES
Melt half a cup of butter and a pound of light-brown sugar in a two-quart saucepan. Stir over a low fire until just bubbly.
Cool to room temperature.
Beat in two eggs and a teaspoon of vanilla.
Stir in a cup of sifted flour, a half teaspoon of salt, a cup of chopped filberts, and a cup of semisweet chocolate in small chunks.
Spread into a well-greased nine-by-eleven baking pan.
Bake at two hundred and thirty-five degrees for about thirty-five minutes.
Cool to room temperature, and cut into squares with a well-greased knife.
Enjoy, in moderation of course.
I was wearing my best suit, which was as tight as the skin of a knackwurst. I had put on a lot of weight recently. It was the fault of my own good cooking. I had been trying out a lot of new recipes, with considerable success. — Rudy Waltz
Here are some things you may not know about Vincent Price:
He was once a young man.
Before becoming a horror icon in the 1950s, he was a successful character actor. “Only a third of his movies that he made were actually horror films,” says his daughter, Victoria Price. “He made 105 films. People don’t realize he had an extensive career in theater and radio.”
He came from a wealthy St. Louis family and harbored early anti-semitic views and a misguided admiration for Hitler in the 1930s.
He completely changed his views after moving to New York and was placed on Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s “Premature Anti-Nazi Sympathizer list” in the 1950s, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, notes Susan King at the L.A. Times, a list that “raised questions about those who had been against the Nazis before the U.S. went to war with Germany.”
He was a gourmet cook, had a degree in art history, and worked for nine years in the sixties as an art consultant for Sears….
He was blacklisted for being anti-Nazi too early….
After being denied work for almost a year, as Price’s daughter writes in her 1999 memoir, Vincent Price: A Daughter’s Biography, he chose to sign a “secret oath” offered by the FBI to salvage his career. Perhaps not coincidentally, he took a radio part soon afterward in Australia, as a split narrator/Winston Smith in a 1955 Lux Radio Theater adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984, perhaps fearful of a future in which secret oaths became the norm.
Orwell himself had made it perfectly clear what he feared. “Radical in his politics and in his artistic tastes,” Lionel Trilling wrote in a New Yorker review the year the book came out, “Orwell is wholly free of the cant of radicalism”; his talent as a writer of fiction is to make “common sense” political observations serve plot and character. Perhaps the most chilling of these arrives in the first few paragraphs of 1984:
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
We may be reminded of the distinctions between what “Orwellian” means and what it does not, as Noah Tavlin describes in a recent explainer: if someone’s “talking about mass surveillance and intrusive government, they’re describing something authoritarian, but not necessarily Orwellian.” Authoritarianism is pure brute force. The Orwellian requires a constant misuse of language, a violent twisting of conscience, a perpetual shouting of lies as truth until the two are indistinguishable. No one is served by this but nihilistic oligarchs, Trilling writes:
The rulers of Orwell’s State know that power in its pure form has for its true end nothing but itself, and they know that the nature of power is defined by the pain it can inflict on others. They know, too, that just as wealth exists only in relation to the poverty of others, so power in its pure aspect exists only in relation to the weakness of others, and that any power of the ruled, even the power to experience happiness, is by that much a diminution of the power of the rulers.
Orwellian societies exist solely to spread hatred and misery, even to their detriment, a point Price made at the end of another radio broadcast, a 1950 episode of NBC’s The Saint, in which the actor denounced racism and religious prejudice. Not long afterward, his name appeared on McCarthy’s list.
Price learned that the government could deprive him of his happiness unless he swore fealty to an insanely nonsensical political morality. His daughter offers the experience as one reason for his love of playing villains. “Most of the villains that he played had been wronged in some way. There was a reason for their villainy.”
Most of us who know Frida Kahlo’s work know her self-portraits. But, in her brief 47 years, she created a more various body of work: portraits of others, still lifes, and difficult-to-categorize visions that still, 67 years after her death, feel drawn straight from the wild currents of her imagination. (Not to mention her elaborately illustrated diary, previously featured here on Open Culture.) Somehow, Kahlo’s work has never all been gathered in one place. That, along with her enduring appeal as both an artist and a historical figure, surely made her an appealing proposition for art-book publisher Taschen, an operation as invested in visual richness as it is in completeness.
There’s also the matter of size. Though not conceived at the same scale as the murals of Diego Rivera, with whom Kahlo lived in not one but two less-than-conventional marriages, Kahlo’s paintings look best when seen at their biggest. Hence Taschen’s “large-format XXL” production of Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings, which “allows readers to admire Frida Kahlo’s paintings like never before, including unprecedented detail shots and famous photographs.” Presented along with a biographical essay, those photos capture, among other subjects, “Frida, Diego, and the Casa Azul, Frida’s home and the center of her universe.”
In creating his volume, editor-author Luis-Martín Lozano and contributors Andrea Kettenmann and Marina Vázquez Ramos focused not on the artist’s life, but her work. “Most people at exhibitions, they’re interested in her personality — who she is, how she dressed, who does she go to bed with, her lovers, her story,” says Lozano in an interview with BBC Culture. Putting together a run-of-the-mill Kahlo book, “you repeat the same things, and it will sell – because everything about Kahlo sells. It’s unfortunate to say, but she’s become a merchandise.” Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintingsis also, of course, a product, and one painstakingly designed to compel the Frida Kahlo enthusiast. Its ideal reader, however, desires to live in not Kahlo’s world, but the world she created.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In the mid-17th century, young Englishmen of means began to mark their coming of age with a “Grand Tour” across the Continent and even beyond. This allowed them to take in the elements of their civilizational heritage first-hand, especially the artifacts of classical antiquity and the Renaissance. After completing his architectural studies, a Londoner named Owen Jones embarked upon his own Grand Tour in 1832, rather late in the history of the tradition, but ideal timing for the research that inspired the project that would become his legacy.
According to the Victoria and Albert Museum, Jones visited “Italy, Greece, Egypt and Turkey before arriving in Granada, in Spain to carry out studies of the Alhambra Palace that were to cement his reputation.”
He and French architect Jules Goury, “the first to study the Alhambra as a masterpiece of Islamic design,” produced “hundreds of drawings and plaster casts” of the historical, cultural, and aesthetic palimpsest of a building complex. The fruit of their labors was the book Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra, “one of the most influential publications on Islamic architecture of all time.”
Published in the 1840s, the book pushed the printing technologies of the day to their limits. In search of a way to do justice to “the intricate and brightly colored decoration of the Alhambra Palace,” Jones had to put in more work researching “the then new technique of chromolithography — a method of producing multi-color prints using chemicals.” In the following decade, he would make even more ambitious use of chromolithography — and draw from a much wider swath of world culture — to create his printed magnum opus, The Grammar of Ornament.
With this book, Jones “set out to reacquaint his colleagues with the underlying principles that made art beautiful,” write Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Femke Speelberg and librarian Robyn Fleming. “Instead of writing an academic treatise on the subject, he chose to assemble a book of one hundred plates illustrating objects and patterns from around the world and across time, from which these principles could be distilled.” To accomplish this he drew on his own travel experiences as well as resources closer at hand, including “the museological and private collections that were available to him in England, and the objects that had been on display during the Universal Exhibitions held in London in 1851 and 1855.”
The Grammar of Ornament was published in 1856, emerging into a Britain “dominated by historical revivals such as Neoclassicism and the Gothic Revival,” says the V&A. “These design movements were riddled with religious and social connotations. Instead, Owen Jones sought a modern style with none of this cultural baggage. Setting out to identify the common principles behind the best examples of historical ornament, he formulated a design language that was suitable for the modern world, one which could be applied equally to wallpapers, textiles, furniture, metalwork and interiors.”
Indeed, the patterns so lavishly reproduced in the book soon became trends in real-world design. They weren’t always employed with the intellectual understanding Jones sought to instill, but since The Grammar of Ornamenthas never gone out of print (and can even be downloaded free from the Internet Archive), his principles remain available for all to learn — and his painstakingly artistic printing work remains available for all to admire — even in the corners of the world that lay beyond his imagination.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Like most Japanese masters of ukiyo‑e woodblock art, Katsushika Hokusai is best known mononymously. But he’s even better known by his work — and by one piece of work in particular, The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Even those who’ve never heard the name Hokusai have seen that print, arresting in its somehow calm turbulence, or at least they’ve seen one of its countless modern parodies and tributes (most recently, a large-scale homage in the medium of LEGO). But when he died in 1849, the prolific and long-lived artist left behind a body of work amounting to more than 30,000 paintings, sketches, prints, and illustrations (as well as a how-to-draw book).
None of those 30,000 works are quite as famous as his Great Wave off Kanagawa, but very few indeed are as ambitions as the series to which it belongs, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. It is that two-year project, the artistic fruit of an obsession with Fuji and its environs, that Taschen has taken as the material for their new book Hokusai: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.
Produced in a 224-page “XXL edition,” it gathers “the finest impressions from institutions and collections worldwide in the complete set of 46 plates alongside 114 color variations” — all sewn together, appropriately, with “Japanese binding.”
Not only does the book reproduce Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji with Taschen’s signature attention to image quality, it presents The Great Wave off Kanagawa in a way few actually see it: in context. For that most widely published of all Hokusai prints launched the series, which continued on to Fine Wind, Clear Morning, Thunderstorm Beneath the Summit, and Kajikazawa in Kai Province, that last being an image held in especially high esteem by ukiyo‑e enthusiasts. One such enthusiast, east Asian art historian Andreas Marks, has performed this book’s editing and writing, as he did with Taschen’s previous Japanese Woodblock Prints (1680–1938). Experiencing the whole of Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, more than one reader will no doubt become as transfixed by Hokusai as Hokusai was by his homeland’s most beloved mountain. You can pick up a copy of Hokusai: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Maybe your interest in Japan was first stoked by the story of the seventeenth-century shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu and his campaign to unify the country. Or maybe it was Japanese food. Either way, culinary and historical subjects have a way of intertwining in every land — not to mention making countless possible literary and cultural connections along the way. For the curious mind, enjoying a Japanese meal may well lead, sooner or later, to reading Japan’s oldest cookbook. Published in 1643, the surviving edition of Ryori Monogatari (variously translated as “Narrative of Actual Food Preparation” or, more simply, “A Tale of Food”) resides at the Tokyo National Museum, but you can read a facsimile at the Tokyo Metropolitan Library.
Translator Joshua L. Badgley did just that in order to produce an online English version of the venerable recipe collection. In an introductory essay, he describes his translation process and offers some historical context as well. Ryori Monogatari was written early in the era of the Tokugawa shogunate, which had been founded by the aforementioned Ieyasu.
“For the previous 120 years, the country had been engulfed in civil wars,” but this “Age of Warring States” also “saw the first major contact with Europeans through the Portuguese, who landed in 1542, and later saw the invasion of Korea.” The foreigners “brought with them new ideas, and access to a new world of food, which continues to this day in the form of things like tempura and kasutera (castella).”
Consolidated by Ieyasu, Japan’s subsequent 250-year-long peace “saw an increased emphasis on scholarship, and many books on the history of Japan were written in this time. In addition, travel journals were becoming popular, indicating various specialties and delicacies in each village.” The now-unknown author of Ryori Monogatari seems to have gone around collecting recipes that had been passed down orally for generations — hence the sometimes vague and approximate instructions. But unusually, note publishers Red Circle, the book also “includes recipes for game at a time when eating meat was viewed by most as a taboo.” In it one finds instructions for preparing venison, hare, boar, and even raccoon dog.
Your fascination with Japan might not have begun with a meal of raccoon dog. But Ryori Monogatari also includes recipes for sashimi, sushi, udon and yakitori, all eaten so widely around the world today that their names no longer merit italics. Taken together, the book’s explanations of its dishes open a window on how the Japanese ate during the Edo period, named for the capital city we now know as Tokyo, which lasted from 1603 to 1863. (In the video just above, Tasting History vlogger Max Miller makes a typical bowl of Edo noodles, based on a recipe from the 1643 cookbook.) “From the mid-Edo period,” says the Tokyo National Museum, “restaurants began to emerge across Japan, reflecting a new trend toward enjoying food as recreation.” By the late Edo period, an era captured by ukiyo‑e master Hiroshige, eating out had become a national pastime. And not so long thereafter, going for Japanese food would become a culinary, historical, and cultural treat savored the world over.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Art, science, and magic seem to have been rarely far apart during the Renaissance, as evidenced by the elaborate 1540 Astronomicum Caesareum — or “Emperor’s Astronomy” — seen here. “The most sumptuous of all Renaissance instructive manuals, ” the Metropolitan Museum of Art notes, the book was created over a period of 8 years by Petrus Apianus, also known as Apian, an astronomy professor at the University of Ingolstadt. Modern-day astronomer Owen Gingerich, professor emeritus at Harvard University, calls it “the most spectacular contribution of the book-maker’s art to sixteenth-century science.”
Apian’s book was mainly designed for what is now considered pseudoscience. “The main contemporary use of the book would have been to cast horoscopes,” Robert Batteridge writes at the National Library of Scotland. Apian used as examples the birthdays of his patrons: Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and his brother Ferdinand I. But the Astronomicum Caesareum did more than calculate the future.
Despite the fact that the geocentric model on which Apian based his system “would begin to be overtaken just 3 years after the book’s publication,” he accurately described five comets, including what would come to be called Halley’s Comet.
Apian also “observed that a comet’s tail always points away from the sun,” Fine Books and Collections writes, “a discovery for which he is credited.” He used his book “to calculate eclipses,” notes Gingerich in an introduction, including a partial lunar eclipse in the year of Charles’ birth. And, “in a pioneering use of astronomical chronology, he takes up the circumstances of several historical eclipses.” These discussions are accompanied by “several movable devices” called volvelles, designed “for an assortment of chronological and astrological inquiries.”
Medieval volvelles were first introduced by artist and writer Ramón Llull in 1274. A “cousin of the astrolabe,” Getty writes, the devices consist of “layered circles of parchment… held together at the center by a tie.” They were considered “a form of ‘artificial memory,’” called by Lund University’s Lars Gislén “a kind of paper computer.” Apian was a specialist of the form, publishing several books containing volvelles from his own Ingolstadt printing press. The Astronomicum Caesareum became the pinnacle of such scientific art, using its hand-colored paper devices to simulate the movements of the astrolabe. “The great volume grew and changed in the course of the printing,” Gingerich writes, “eventually comprising fifty-five leaves, of which twenty-one contain moving parts.”
Apian was rewarded handsomely for his work. “Emperor Charles V granted the professor a new coat of arms,” and “the right to appoint poets laureate and to pronounce as legitimate children born out of wedlock.” He was also appointed court mathematician, and copies of his extraordinary book lived on in the collections of European aristocrats for centuries, “a triumph of the printer’s art,” writes Gingerich, and an astronomy, and astrology, “fit for an emperor.”
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