An Animated Introduction to “the World’s Most Mysterious Book,” the 15th-Century Voynich Manuscript

in Books, History | October 10th, 2017

It has 240 pages filled with writing and illustration. Carbon dating places it around the year 1420. Scholars have spent countless thousands of hours scrutinizing it. But the so-called Voynich Manuscript has one quality more notable than any other: nobody understands a word of it. Last month, Josh Jones wrote about this singularly strange textual artifact here at Open Culture, including the digitized version at the Internet Archive that you can flip through and read yourself — or rather “read,” since the text’s language, if it be a language at all, remains unidentified. But before you do that, you might want to watch TED-Ed’s brief introduction to the Voynich Manuscript above.

The video’s narrator describes pages of “real and imaginary plants, floating castles, bathing women, astrology diagrams, zodiac rings, and suns and moons with faces accompany the text,” reading from a script by Stephen Bax, Voynich Manuscript researcher and Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at the Open University.

“Cryptologists say the writing has all the characteristics of a real language — just one that no one’s ever seen before.” Highly decorated throughout with “scroll-like embellishments,” the manuscript features the work of what looks like no fewer than three hands: two who did the writing, and one who did the painting.

Intrigued yet? Or perhaps you already feel an inkling of a new theory to explain this bizarre, seemingly encyclopedia-like volume’s provenance to add to the many that have come before: some believe the manuscript’s author or authors wrote it in code, some that “the document is a hoax, written in gibberish to make money off a gullible buyer” by a “medieval con man” or even Voynich himself, and some that it shows an attempt “to create an alphabet for a language that was spoken, but not yet written.” Maybe the thirteenth-century philosopher Roger Bacon wrote it. Or maybe the Elizabethan mystic John Dee. Or maybe Italian witches, or space aliens. At just a glance, the Voynich Manuscript poses questions that could take an eternity to answer — as any great work of literature should.

1,000-Year-Old Illustrated Guide to the Medicinal Use of Plants Now Digitized & Put Online

Wonderfully Weird & Ingenious Medieval Books

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Kintsugi: The Centuries-Old Japanese Craft of Repairing Pottery with Gold & Finding Beauty in Broken Things

in Art, History, TED Talks | October 9th, 2017

We all grow up believing we should emphasize the inherent positives about ourselves. But what if we also emphasized the negatives, the parts we’ve had to work to fix or improve? If we did it just right, would the negatives still look so negative after all? These kinds of questions come to mind when one ponders the traditional Japanese craft of kintsugi, a means of repairing broken pottery that aims not for perfection, a return to “as good as new,” but for a kind of post-breakage reinvention that dares not to hide the cracks.

“Translated to ‘golden joinery,’ Kintsugi (or Kintsukuroi, which means ‘golden repair’) is the centuries-old Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with a special lacquer dusted with powdered gold, silver, or platinum” says My Modern Met.

“Beautiful seams of gold glint in the cracks of ceramic ware, giving a unique appearance to the piece. This repair method celebrates each artifact’s unique history by emphasizing its fractures and breaks instead of hiding or disguising them. Kintsugi often makes the repaired piece even more beautiful than the original, revitalizing it with new life.”

Kintsugi originates, so one theory has it, in the late 15th century under the culturally inclined shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, during whose reign the sensibilities of traditional Japanese art as we known them emerged. When Ashikaga sent one of his damaged Chinese tea bowls back to his motherland for repairs, it came back reassembled with ungainly metal staples. This prompted his craftsmen to find a better way: why not use that gilded lacquer to emphasize the cracks instead of hiding them? The technique was said to have won the admiration of famed (and not easily impressed) tea master Sen no Rikyū, major proponent of the imperfection-appreciating aesthetic wabi sabi.

You can hear and see these stories of kintsugi’s origins in the videos from Nerdwriter and Alain de Botton’s School of Life at the top of the post. The clip just above offers a closer look at the painstaking techniques of modern kintsugi, which not only survives but thrives today, having expanded to include other materials, repairing glassware as well as ceramics, for example, or filling the cracks with silver instead of gold. And what could underscore the current global relevance of kintsugi more than the fact that the craft has inspired not one but two TEDTalks, the first by Audrey Harris in Kyoto in 2015 and the second by Maddie Kelly in Adelaide last year. We all, it seems, want to repair our cracks; kintsugi shows the way to do it not just honestly but artfully.

h/t the nugget

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Japanese Craftsman Spends His Life Trying to Recreate a Thousand-Year-Old Sword

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

People Walked a Little Differently During Medieval Times: A Quick Primer

in History | October 5th, 2017

Roland Warzecha runs a Youtube channel where he delves into the world of medieval weapons and combat. If you want to learn something about Viking shields and swords, medieval spears and combat techniques, spend some time there.

Above, Roland departs from his regularly scheduled programming and explores another facet of medieval life. Walking. That’s right, walking. It turns out that, as Boing Boing summarizes it, “before structured shoes became prevalent in the 16th century … people walked with a different gait, pushing onto the balls of our feet instead of rocking forward on our heels.” And that’s your lesson on medieval body mechanics for today…

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

How Marilyn Monroe Helped Break Ella Fitzgerald Into the Big Time (1955)

in History, Music | October 5th, 2017

Think of movie stars, and you’ll almost certainly think of Marilyn Monroe; think of jazz singers, and you’ll almost certainly think of Ella Fitzgerald. Their skills as performers, their inherent iconic qualities, the time of the mid-twentieth century in which they rose to fame, and other factors besides, have ensured that these two women still define the images of their respective crafts. But before their ascension to cultural immortality, the Angeleno Monroe and the New Yorker Fitzgerald’s paths crossed down here on Earth in 1955, and, when they did, the movie star played an integral role in breaking the jazz singer into the big time.

If you wanted to play to an influential crowd in Hollywood back in the 1950s, you had to play the Mocambo, the Sunset Strip nightclub frequented by the likes of Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Lana Turner, Bob Hope, Sophia Loren, and Howard Hughes. But at the time, a singer of the reputedly scandalous new music known as jazz didn’t just waltz onto the stage of such a respectable venue, especially given the racial attitudes of the time. But as luck would have it, Fitzgerald found an advocate in Monroe, who, “tired of being cast as a helpless sex symbol, took a break from Los Angeles and headed to New York to find herself,” writes the Independent’s Ciar Byrne.

There Monroe “immersed herself in jazz,” recognizing in Fitzgerald “the creative genius she herself longed to possess.” Together with Fitzgerald’s manager, jazz impresario and Verve Records founder Norman Granz, Monroe pressured the glamorous Hollywood club to book Ella. “I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt,” Fitzgerald said later, in 1972. “She personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night.” He agreed, and true to her word, “Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again.”

Though Monroe’s efforts didn’t make Fitzgerald the first black performer to take the Mocambo’s stage — Herb Jeffries, Eartha Kitt, and Joyce Bryant had played there in 1952 and 1953 — she did use it as a platform to ascend to unusually great career heights, comparable to the way Frank Sinatra launched his solo career there. The story has remained compelling enough for several retellings, including Bonnie Greer’s musical Marilyn and Ella and, more recently, through the hilarious unreliability of an episode of Drunk History. As real history would have it, Fitzgerald would go on to enjoy a much longer and more varied career than the tragic Monroe, but she did her own part to repay the favor by adding nuance to Monroe’s superficial public image: “She was an unusual woman — a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.”

Marilyn Monroe’s Go-Getter List of New Year’s Resolutions (1955)

The 430 Books in Marilyn Monroe’s Library: How Many Have You Read?

Marilyn Monroe Recounts Her Harrowing Experience in a Psychiatric Ward in a 1961 Letter

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Before the Bookmobile: When Librarians Rode on Horseback to Deliver Books to Rural Americans During the Great Depression

in Books, History | October 2nd, 2017

An odd phenomenon has been at work in the past few years. Print book sales slope upward while eBook sales creep down. The trend manifests the opposite of what most people—or most people who write about these things—expected to happen, quite reasonably in many respects. Perhaps through sheer historical momentum, print retains its aura of authority.

But everyone knows that buying isn’t reading, which may indeed be in decline given the primacy of images, audio, and video, of YouTube explainers and documentaries such as the one above, which tells the tale of the “Pack Horse Librarians.”

These forgotten heroes, like the famed Pony Express, braved wind, rain, and rough terrain to deliver books to isolated settlers who otherwise may have had nothing to read.

But this is not a tale of cowboys and frontiersmen. The Pack Horse Librarians appeared in an Industrial Age, and what’s more they were mostly women. Called “book ladies” and “packsaddle librarians,” the librarians were deputized during the New Deal, when FDR sought to end the Great Depression by creating hundreds of jobs addressed to the country’s real social, material, and cultural needs. In this case, the Pack Horse Librarians responded to what many of us might consider a crisis, if not a crime.

“About 63% of the residents of Kentucky were without access to public libraries,” and somewhere around 30% of rural Kentuckians were illiterate. Those rural Kentuckians saw education as a way out of poverty, and the Works Progress Administration agreed, overseeing the book delivery project between 1935 and 1943. “Book women” made around $28 a month (a little over $500 in 2017) delivering books to homes and schoolhouses. By 1936, writes the site Appalachian History, “handmade and donated materials could not sustain the circulation needs of the pack horse patrons.”

Surveys of readers found that pack horse patrons could not get enough of books about travel, adventure and religion, and detective and romance magazines. Children’s picture books were also immensely popular, not only with young residents but also their illiterate parents. Per headquarters, approximately 800 books had to be shared among five to ten thousand patrons.

To compensate for scarcity, a University of Kentucky presentation notes, librarians themselves created books of “mountain recipes and scrap books of current events.” But the service quickly grew to delivering more than 3,000 donated books per month, after a drive in which every PTA member in the state gave to the cause.

Eleanor Roosevelt (photographed above visiting a Packhorse Library in West Liberty, KY) was a champion of the service, which founder Elizabeth Fullerton modeled after a similar venture in 1913, itself a professionalization of work done by the Kentucky Federation of Women’s Clubs in the late 19th century.

We can see that the history of women librarians on horseback goes back quite a ways. But it is a history now forgotten, despite the efforts of recent books like Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky. A recent trend involves suggesting historical American figures who might replace all those monuments to the Confederacy. We might well add Pack Horse Librarians to the distinguished list of candidates.

The service lost its funding in 1943, “leaving some communities without access to books for decades,” Appalachian History writes, “until bookmobiles were introduced to the area in the late 1950s.” These services seem quaint in an era when widespread delivery by drone seems imminent. We seemingly live in the most information-rich, instant access society in history. Yet a significant number of people in the U.S. and around the world have little to no access to the internet. And a similar degree of illiteracy—at least of basic information and critical reasoning—may warrant a similarly direct intervention.

via The Smithsonian

Striking Poster Collection from the Great Depression Shows That the US Government Once Supported the Arts in America

The Future of Content Delivery

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

1,000+ Historic Japanese Illustrated Books Digitized & Put Online by the Smithsonian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

in Art, Books, History, Museums | October 2nd, 2017

Surely we’ve all wondered what we might do as prominent nineteenth-century industrialists, and more than a few of us (especially here in the Open Culture crowd) would no doubt invest our fortunes in the art of the world. Railcar manufacturing magnate Charles Lang Freer did just that, as we can see today in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Together with the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (Sackler having made it as “the father of modern pharmaceutical advertising”), it constitutes the Smithsonian Institution’s national museum of Asian art, gathering everything from ancient Egyptian stone sculpture to Chinese paintings to Korean pottery to Japanese books.

We like to highlight Japanese book culture here every so often (see the related content below) not just because of its striking aesthetics and consummate craftsmanship but because of its deep history. You can now experience a considerable swath of that history free online at the Freer|Sacker Library’s web site, which just this past summer finished digitizing over one thousand books — now more than 1,100, which breaks down to 41,500 separate images — published during Japan’s Edo and Meiji periods, a span of time reaching from 1600 to 1912. “Often filled with beautiful multi-color illustrations,” writes Reiko Yoshimura at the Smithsonian Libraries’ blog, “many titles are by prominent Japanese traditional and ukiyo‑e (‘floating world’) painters such as Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716), Andō Hiroshige (1797–1858) and Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849).”

Yoshimura directs readers to such volumes as Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, Utagawa Toyokuni’s Thirty-Six Popular Actors, and artist, craftsman, and designer Kōetsu’s collection of one hundred librettos for noh theater performances. Even those who can’t read classical Japanese will admire an aesthete like Kōetsu’s way with what Yoshimura calls his “caligraphic ‘font,’ ” all “skillfully printed on luxurious mica embellished papers using wooden movable-type.”

While the online collection’s scans come in a more than high enough resolution for general appreciation, to get the full effect of bookmaking techniques like mica embellishment — which only sparkles when seen in real life — you’d have to visit the physical collection. Some things, it seems, can’t yet be digitized.

Enter the collection of Japanese Illustrated Books here.

Enter a Digital Archive of 213,000+ Beautiful Japanese Woodblock Prints

Japanese Kabuki Actors Captured in 18th-Century Woodblock Prints by the Mysterious & Masterful Artist Sharaku

Splendid Hand-Scroll Illustrations of The Tale of Genjii, The First Novel Ever Written (Circa 1120)

Behold the Masterpiece by Japan’s Last Great Woodblock Artist: View Online Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon (1885)

A Wonderfully Illustrated 1925 Japanese Edition of Aesop’s Fables by Legendary Children’s Book Illustrator Takeo Takei

“Tsundoku,” the Japanese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the English Language

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Did the Egyptians Make Mummies? An Animated Introduction to the Ancient Art of Mummification

in History | September 28th, 2017

Not every child looks forward to a trip to the museum, but how many have failed to thrill at the sight of an ancient Egyptian mummy? How many adults, for that matter, can resist the fascination of this well over 5000-year-old process of preserving dead bodies in a state if not perfectly lifelike then at least eerily intact? If you’ve ever wondered exactly how mummification worked — or if you’ve simply forgotten the descriptions accompanying the displays you saw on those museum trips — this short video from the Getty Museum’s Youtube channel provides an insight into how the ancient Egyptians did it.

The video uses a real mummy as a case study, the preserved body of a twenty-year-old man named Herakleides (as we know because his mummifiers, though themselves unidentified, wrote it on his feet), who died in the first century A.D. He had most of his internal organs removed — even his heart, which common practice usually dictated leaving in, but for some reason not his lungs — and spent forty days buried in salt that drew every last bit of moisture out of him.

He then received rubbings of perfumed oils, followed by a poured-on layer of resin to which strips of linen (the mummy’s characteristically copious “bandages” of popular culture) could adhere. Wrapped onto a board, equipped with a “mysterious pouch” as well as a mummified ibis, and covered with an unusual red shroud emblazoned with symbols and a portrait of himself, Herakleides was ready for his journey into the afterlife.

“Such elaborate burial practices might suggest that the Egyptians were preoccupied with thoughts of death,” says the Smithsonian’s page on Egyptian mummies. “On the contrary, they began early to make plans for their death because of their great love of life. They could think of no life better than the present, and they wanted to be sure it would continue after death.” The ancient Egyptians believed “that the mummified body was the home for this soul or spirit. If the body was destroyed, the spirit might be lost.”

If you find yourself sharing these beliefs, do have a look at National Geographic’s guide on how to make a mummy in 70 days or less. And just as you’d need to arrange the right ingredients to prepare a satisfying meal, something else the Egyptians enjoyed, don’t attempt any mummification at home without making sure you’re fully stocked with resin, ointments, lichen, strawdust, beeswax, palm wine, incense, and myrrh. And it goes without saying that however many feet of wrappings you’ve got, it couldn’t hurt to have more.

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The Turin Erotic Papyrus: The Oldest Known Depiction of Human Sexuality (Circa 1150 B.C.E.)

A Drone’s Eye View of the Ancient Pyramids of Egypt, Sudan & Mexico

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Photo Archive Lets You Download 4,300 High-Res Photographs of the Historic Normandy Invasion

in History, Photography | September 26th, 2017

Taxis to Hell – and Back – Into the Jaws of Death, by Robert F. Sargent, via Wikimedia Commons

In the mid-20th century, theorists like Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu exploded naive notions of photography as “a perfectly realistic and objective recording of the visible world… a ‘natural language,’” as Bourdieu wrote in Photography: A Middlebrow Art. Bourdieu himself wielded a camera during his ethnographic work in Algeria, taking dozens of conventional and unconventional photographs of the nation’s struggle for independence from France in the 50s. Yet he urged us to see photography as formally mediating social reality rather than transparently representing the truth.

We have been trained to interpret the perspectives most photographs adopt as objective views, when in fact they are “perfectly in keeping with the representation of the world which has dominated Europe since the Quattrocento.” Photography, in other words, tends to give us art imitating Renaissance art. It can be difficult to bear this in mind when we look at individual photographs—what Barthes calls “the This.”

Whether they document our own family histories or such momentous events as the Normandy Invasion that began on D‑Day, June 6th, 1944, photographs elicit powerful emotional reactions that defy aesthetic categories.

At the Flickr account PhotosNormandie, you can browse and search over 4,300 high resolution photographs from the pivotal Normandy campaign, “From iconic images like Into the Jaws of Death by Robert F. Sargent,” My Modern Met writes, “to troops interacting with locals as they liberate areas of Normandy.” The photos are deeply affecting, often awe-inspiring. When we look with a critical eye, we’ll find ourselves asking certain questions about them.

The skewed perspective and ominous sky in Sargent’s “Into the Jaws of Death,” for example, at the top of the post, might make us think of the Sturm und Drang of many a dramatic shipwreck painting from the Romantic period. Was Sargent aware of the similarity when he looked through the lens? Did he position himself to heighten the effect? In photos like that further up, of a French home displaying a pro‑U.S. sign on July 11th, 1944, we might wonder whether the residents made the sign or whether it was given to them, perhaps for this very photo op. As always, we’re justified in asking about the role of the photographer in staging or framing a particular scene.

For example, the photo of a German soldier surrendering to American G.I.s, above, looks staged. But what exactly these soldiers are doing remains a mystery. How much do these external details matter? Photography is unique among other visual arts in that “the Photograph,” Barthes writes, “reproduces to infinity” what has “occurred only once.” It is the meeting of infinity with “only once” that engages us in more existential explorations. All of these soldiers and civilians, sharing their joy and anguish, most of them now passed into history. Who were these people? What did these moments mean to them? What do they mean to us 70 years later?

The bombed-out cathedrals and defeated tanks make us ponder the fragility of our own built environment, though the destructive forces threatening to undo the modern world now seem as likely to be natural as man-made—or rather some new, frightening combination of the two. In the faces of the wounded and the displaced, we see specific manifestations of the same tragic invasions and migrations that reach back to Thucydides and forward to the present moment in world history, in which some 60 million people displaced by war and hardship seek sanctuary.

The images draw us away into general observations as they draw us back to the unrepeatable moment. This project began on the 60th anniversary of D‑Day “as a way,” My Modern Met explains, “to crowdsource descriptions of images on the now defunct Archives Normandie, 1939–1945. Thus, users are encouraged to comment on photos if they are able to improve descriptions, locations, and identifications.” History may rhyme with the present—as one famous quote attributed to Mark Twain has it—but it never exactly repeats. The photograph, Barthes wrote, “mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.” Moments forever lost to time, transmuted into timelessness by the camera’s eye. Enter the PhotosNormandie gallery here.

via My Modern Met

The Finland Wartime Photo Archive: 160,000 Images From World War II Now Online

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200,000 Photos from the George Eastman Museum, the World’s Oldest Photography Collection, Now Available Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

An Animated Introduction to “the World’s Most Mysterious Book,” the 15th-Century Voynich Manuscript

Kintsugi: The Centuries-Old Japanese Craft of Repairing Pottery with Gold & Finding Beauty in Broken Things

People Walked a Little Differently During Medieval Times: A Quick Primer

How Marilyn Monroe Helped Break Ella Fitzgerald Into the Big Time (1955)

Before the Bookmobile: When Librarians Rode on Horseback to Deliver Books to Rural Americans During the Great Depression

1,000+ Historic Japanese Illustrated Books Digitized & Put Online by the Smithsonian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

How Did the Egyptians Make Mummies? An Animated Introduction to the Ancient Art of Mummification

Photo Archive Lets You Download 4,300 High-Res Photographs of the Historic Normandy Invasion

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