Cats in Japanese Woodblock Prints: How Japan’s Favorite Animals Came to Star in Its Popular Art

in Art, History | November 10th, 2022


Few coun­tries love cats as much as Japan does, and none express­es that love so clear­ly in its var­i­ous forms of art. Though not eter­nal, the Japan­ese incli­na­tion toward all things feline does extend deep­er into his­to­ry than some of us might assume. “In the sixth cen­tu­ry, Bud­dhist monks trav­elled from Chi­na to Japan,” writes Philip Kennedy at Illus­tra­tion Chron­i­cles. On these jour­neys, they brought scrip­tures, draw­ings, and relics – items that they hoped would help them intro­duce the teach­ings of Bud­dhism to the large island nation.” They also brought cats, in part as car­ri­ers of good luck and in part for their abil­i­ty to “guard the sacred texts from the hun­gry mice that had stowed on board their ships.”


Bud­dhism made a last­ing mark on Japan­ese cul­ture, but those cats prac­ti­cal­ly over­took it. “Today, cats can be found near­ly every­where in Japan,” Kennedy writes. “From spe­cial cafés and shrines to entire cat islands. Indeed the own­ers of one Japan­ese train sta­tion were so enam­ored with their cat that they appoint­ed her sta­tion­mas­ter.”

By the mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, the ukiyo‑e wood­block print mas­ter Uta­gawa Kuniyoshi could keep a stu­dio over­run with cats and not seem too ter­ri­bly eccen­tric for it. “His fond­ness for felines crept into his work, and they appear in many of his finest prints. Some­times they crop up as char­ac­ters from well-known sto­ries; oth­er times, they are beau­ti­ful­ly expres­sive stud­ies.”

Kuniyoshi made his name illus­trat­ing tales of his­tor­i­cal war­riors, but his artis­tic capac­i­ty also encom­passed “every­thing from land­scapes and ani­mals to ghost­ly appari­tions and scenes from pop­u­lar kabu­ki the­atre.” When the Toku­gawa Shogu­nate sensed its pow­er declin­ing in the 1840s, it banned such “lux­u­ries” as the depic­tions of kabu­ki actors (as well as geisha).

To accom­mo­date that demand, Kuniyoshi cre­at­ed humanoid cats endowed with fea­tures resem­bling well-known per­son­ages of the era. This in addi­tion to his series Neko no ate­ji, or “cat homo­phones,” with cats arranged to spell the names of fish, and Cats Sug­gest­ed As The Fifty-three Sta­tions of the Tōkaidō, a feline par­o­dy of Hiroshige’s ear­li­er Fifty-three Sta­tions of the Tōkaidō. Rat-eat­ing aside, cats aren’t known as espe­cial­ly use­ful ani­mals, but many a Japan­ese artist can attest to their inspi­ra­tional val­ue even today.

A col­lec­tion of Kuniyoshi’s prints fea­tur­ing cats can be found in the book, Cats in Ukiyo‑e: Japan­ese Wood­block Print.

via Illus­tra­tion Chron­i­cles

Relat­ed con­tent:

Cats in Medieval Man­u­scripts & Paint­ings

Insane­ly Cute Cat Com­mer­cials from Stu­dio Ghi­b­li, Hayao Miyazaki’s Leg­endary Ani­ma­tion Shop

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

Two Cats Keep Try­ing to Get Into a Japan­ese Art Muse­um … and Keep Get­ting Turned Away: Meet the Thwart­ed Felines, Ken-chan and Go-chan

Dis­cov­er the Kat­tenK­abi­net: Amsterdam’s Muse­um Devot­ed to Works of Art Fea­tur­ing Cats

In 1183, a Chi­nese Poet Describes Being Domes­ti­cat­ed by His Own Cats

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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Your Burning Questions About Coffee Answered by James Hoffmann

in Food & Drink | November 10th, 2022

If you have a ques­tion about cof­fee, James Hoff­mann prob­a­bly has an answer. The author of The World Atlas of Cof­fee, Hoff­mann has devel­oped a robust YouTube chan­nel where he explores the ins-and-outs of mak­ing coffee–from how to buy great cof­fee, to mak­ing excel­lent cof­fee with The Chemex and the Bialet­ti Moka pot, to grind­ing cof­fee with the right gear. And don’t for­get the mag­ic of adding salt to cof­fee.

Above, in a new video cre­at­ed by Wired, Hoff­mann con­tin­ues his edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, “answer[ing] the inter­net’s burn­ing ques­tions about cof­fee. What’s the dif­fer­ence between drip and pour over cof­fee? What’s the dif­fer­ence between iced cof­fee and cold brew? Does dark­er roast cof­fee have more caf­feine?” Tak­en togeth­er, he cov­ers a lot of ground in 22 min­utes.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Every­thing You Ever Want­ed to Know about the Bialet­ti Moka Express: A Deep Dive Into Italy’s Most Pop­u­lar Cof­fee Mak­er

The Bialet­ti Moka Express: The His­to­ry of Italy’s Icon­ic Cof­fee Mak­er, and How to Use It the Right Way

Life and Death of an Espres­so Shot in Super Slow Motion

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The Fiske Reading Machine: The 1920s Precursor to the Kindle

in Books, History, Technology | November 9th, 2022


The Sony Lib­rie, the first e‑reader to use a mod­ern elec­tron­ic-paper screen, came out in 2004. Old as that is in tech years, the basic idea of a hand­held device that can store large amounts of text stretch­es at least eight decades far­ther back in his­to­ry. Wit­ness the Fiske Read­ing Machine, an inven­tion first pro­filed in a 1922 issue of Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can. “The instru­ment, con­sist­ing of a tiny lens and a small roller for oper­at­ing this eye­piece up and down a ver­ti­cal col­umn of read­ing-mat­ter, is a means by which ordi­nary type­writ­ten copy, when pho­to­graph­i­cal­ly reduced to one-hun­dredth of the space orig­i­nal­ly occu­pied, can be read with quite the facil­i­ty that the impres­sion of con­ven­tion­al print­ing type is now revealed to the unaid­ed eye,” writes author S. R. Win­ters.

Mak­ing books com­pat­i­ble with the Fiske Read­ing Machine involved not dig­i­ti­za­tion, of course, but minia­tur­iza­tion. Accord­ing to the patents filed by inven­tor Bradley Allen Fiske (eleven in all, between 1920 and 1935), the text of any book could be pho­to-engraved onto a cop­per block, reduced ten times in the process, and then print­ed onto strips of paper for use in the machine, which would make them read­able again through a mag­ni­fy­ing lens. A sin­gle mag­ni­fy­ing lens, that is: “A blind­er, attached to the machine, can be oper­at­ed in obstruct­ing the view of the unused eye.” (Win­ters adds that “the use of both eyes will doubt­less involve the con­struc­tion of a unit of the read­ing machine more elab­o­rate than the present design.”)

“Fiske believed he had sin­gle-hand­ed­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ized the pub­lish­ing indus­try,” writes Engad­get’s J. Rigg. “Thanks to his inge­nu­ity, books and mag­a­zines could be pro­duced for a frac­tion of their cur­rent price. The cost of mate­ri­als, press­es, ship­ping and the bur­den of stor­age could also be slashed. He imag­ined mag­a­zines could be dis­trib­uted by post for next to noth­ing, and most pow­er­ful­ly, that pub­lish­ing in his for­mat would allow every­one access to edu­ca­tion­al mate­r­i­al and enter­tain­ment no mat­ter their lev­el of income.” Con­sid­er­ing how the rela­tion­ship between read­ers and read­ing mate­r­i­al ulti­mate­ly evolved, thanks not to cop­per blocks and mag­ni­fiers and tiny strips of paper but to com­put­ers and the inter­net, it seems that Fiske was a man ahead of his time.

Alas, the Fiske Read­ing Machine itself was just on the wrong side of tech­no­log­i­cal his­to­ry. Even as Fiske was refin­ing its design, “micro­film was begin­ning to catch on,” and “while it ini­tial­ly found its feet in the busi­ness world — for keep­ing record of can­celled checks, for exam­ple — by 1935 Kodak had begun pub­lish­ing The New York Times on 35mm micro­film.” Despite the absolute preva­lence that for­mat soon attained in the world of archiv­ing, “the appetite for minia­tur­ized nov­els and hand­held read­ers nev­er mate­ri­al­ized in the way Fiske had imag­ined.” Nor, sure­ly, could he have imag­ined the form the dig­i­tal, elec­tron­ic-paper-screened, and slim yet huge­ly capa­cious form that the e‑reader would have to take before find­ing suc­cess in the mar­ket­place — yet some­how with­out quite dis­plac­ing the paper book as even he knew it.

via Engad­get

Relat­ed con­tent:

The e‑Book Imag­ined in 1935

Napoleon’s Kin­dle: See the Minia­tur­ized Trav­el­ing Library He Took on Mil­i­tary Cam­paigns

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renais­sance Inven­tion Cre­at­ed to Make Books Portable & Help Schol­ars Study Sev­er­al Books at Once (1588)

The Page Turn­er: A Fab­u­lous Rube Gold­berg Machine for Read­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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An Asbestos-Bound, Fireproof Edition of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

in Books | November 9th, 2022

Even by the extreme stan­dards of dystopi­an fic­tion, the premise of Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451 can seem a lit­tle absurd. Fire­men whose job is to set fires? A soci­ety that bans all books? Writ­ten less than a decade after the fall of the Third Reich, which announced its evil inten­tions with book burn­ings, the nov­el explic­it­ly evokes the kind of total­i­tar­i­an­ism that seeks to destroy culture—and whole peoples—with fire. But not even the Nazis banned all books. Not a few aca­d­e­mics and writ­ers sur­vived or thrived in Nazi Ger­many by hew­ing to the ide­o­log­i­cal ortho­doxy (or at least not chal­leng­ing it), which, for all its ter­ri­fy­ing irra­tional­ism, kept up some sem­blance of an intel­lec­tu­al veneer.

The nov­el also recalls the Sovi­et vari­ety of state repres­sion. But the Par­ty appa­ra­tus also allowed a pub­lish­ing indus­try to oper­ate, under its strict con­straints. Nonethe­less, Sovi­et cen­sor­ship is leg­endary, as is the sur­vival of banned lit­er­a­ture through self-pub­lish­ing and mem­o­riza­tion, vivid­ly rep­re­sent­ed by the famous line in Mikhail Bulgokov’s The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta, “Man­u­scripts don’t burn.”

Bul­gakov, writes Nathaniel Rich at Guer­ni­ca, is say­ing that “great lit­er­a­ture… is fire­proof. It sur­vives its crit­ics, its cen­sors, and even the pas­sage of time.” Bul­gakov wrote from painful expe­ri­ence. When his diary was dis­cov­ered by the NKVD in 1929, then returned to him, he “prompt­ly burned it.” Some­time after­ward, dur­ing the long com­po­si­tion of his posthu­mous­ly pub­lished nov­el, he burned the man­u­script, then lat­er recon­struct­ed it from mem­o­ry.

These exam­ples bring to mind the exiled intel­lec­tu­als in Bradbury’s nov­el, who have mem­o­rized whole books in order to one day recon­struct lit­er­ary cul­ture. Europe’s total­i­tar­i­an regimes pro­vide essen­tial back­ground for the novel’s plot and imagery, but its key con­text, Brad­bury him­self not­ed in a 1956 radio inter­view, was the anti-Com­mu­nist para­noia of the U.S. in the ear­ly 1950s. “Too many peo­ple were afraid of their shad­ows,” he said, “there was a threat of book burn­ing. Many of the books were being tak­en off the shelves at that time.” Read­ing the nov­el as a chill­ing vision of a future when all books are banned and burned makes the arti­fact pic­tured above par­tic­u­lar­ly poignant—an edi­tion of Fahren­heit 451 bound in fire­proof asbestos.

Released in 1953 by Bal­lan­tine in a lim­it­ed run of two-hun­dred signed copies, the books were “bound in Johns-Manville Qin­ter­ra,” notes Lau­ren Davis at io9, “a chryso­lite asbestos mate­r­i­al.” Now the fire­proof cov­ers, with their “excep­tion­al resis­tance to pyrol­y­sis,” are “much sought after by col­lec­tors” and go for upwards of $20,000. A fire­proof Fahren­heit 451, on the one hand, can seem a lit­tle gim­micky (its pages still burn, after all). But it’s also the per­fect man­i­fes­ta­tion of a lit­er­al inter­pre­ta­tion of the nov­el as a sto­ry about ban­ning and book burn­ing. All of us who have read the nov­el have like­ly read it this way, as a vision of a repres­sive total­i­tar­i­an night­mare. As such, it feels like a prod­uct of mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry fears.

Rather than fear­ing mass book burn­ings, we seem, in the 21st cen­tu­ry, on the verge of being washed away in a sea of infor­ma­tion (and dis- and mis-infor­ma­tion). We are inun­dat­ed with writing—in print and online—such that some of us despair of ever find­ing time to read the accu­mu­lat­ing piles of books and arti­cles that dai­ly sur­round us, phys­i­cal­ly and vir­tu­al­ly. But although books are still pub­lished in the mil­lions, with sales ris­ing, falling, then ris­ing again, the num­ber of peo­ple who actu­al­ly read seems in dan­ger of rapid­ly dimin­ish­ing. And this, Brad­bury also said, was his real fear. “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a cul­ture,” he claimed, “just get peo­ple to stop read­ing them.”

We’ve mis­read Fahren­heit 451, Brad­bury told us in his lat­er years. It is an alle­go­ry, a sym­bol­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a gross­ly dumb­ed-down soci­ety, huge­ly oppres­sive and destruc­tive in its own way. The fire­men are not lit­er­al gov­ern­ment agents but sym­bol­ic of the forces of mass dis­trac­tion, which dis­sem­i­nate “fac­toids,” lies, and half-truths as sub­sti­tutes for knowl­edge. The nov­el, he said, is actu­al­ly about peo­ple “being turned into morons by TV.” Add to this the pro­lif­er­at­ing amuse­ments of the online world, video games, etc. and we can see Brad­bury’s Fahren­heit 451 not as a dat­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tion of 40s fas­cism or 50s repres­sion, but as a too-rel­e­vant warn­ing to a dis­tractible soci­ety that deval­ues and destroys edu­ca­tion and fac­tu­al knowl­edge even as we have more access than ever to lit­er­a­ture of every kind.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ray Brad­bury Reveals the True Mean­ing of Fahren­heit 451: It’s Not About Cen­sor­ship, But Peo­ple “Being Turned Into Morons by TV”

Ray Brad­bury Explains Why Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion (in Which Case We Need More Lit­er­a­ture!)

Helen Keller Writes a Let­ter to Nazi Stu­dents Before They Burn Her Book: “His­to­ry Has Taught You Noth­ing If You Think You Can Kill Ideas” (1933)

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

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Discover Friedrich Nietzsche’s Typewriter, the Curious “Malling-Hansen Writing Ball” (Circa 1881)

in Philosophy, Technology | November 9th, 2022

Dur­ing his final decade, Friedrich Nietzsche’s wors­en­ing con­sti­tu­tion con­tin­ued to plague the philoso­pher. In addi­tion to hav­ing suf­fered from inca­pac­i­tat­ing indi­ges­tion, insom­nia, and migraines for much of his life, the 1880s brought about a dra­mat­ic dete­ri­o­ra­tion in Nietzsche’s eye­sight, with a doc­tor not­ing that his “right eye could only per­ceive mis­tak­en and dis­tort­ed images.”

Niet­zsche him­self declared that writ­ing and read­ing for more than twen­ty min­utes had grown exces­sive­ly painful. With his intel­lec­tu­al out­put reach­ing its peak dur­ing this peri­od, the philoso­pher required a device that would let him write while mak­ing min­i­mal demands on his vision.

So he sought to buy a type­writer in 1881. Although he was aware of Rem­ing­ton type­writ­ers, the ail­ing philoso­pher looked for a mod­el that would be fair­ly portable, allow­ing him to trav­el, when nec­es­sary, to more salu­bri­ous cli­mates. The Malling-Hansen Writ­ing Ball seemed to fit the bill:

In Dieter Eberwein’s free Niet­zch­es Screibkugel e‑book, the vice pres­i­dent of the Malling-Hansen Soci­ety explains that the writ­ing ball was the clos­est thing to a 19th cen­tu­ry lap­top. The first com­mer­cial­ly-pro­duced type­writer, the writ­ing ball was the 1865 cre­ation of Dan­ish inven­tor Ras­mus Malling-Hansen, and was shown at the 1878 Paris Uni­ver­sal Exhi­bi­tion to jour­nal­is­tic acclaim:

“In the year 1875, a quick writ­ing appa­ra­tus, designed by Mr. L. Sholes in Amer­i­ca, and man­u­fac­tured by Mr. Rem­ing­ton, was intro­duced in Lon­don. This machine was supe­ri­or to the Malling-Hansen writ­ing appa­ra­tus; but the writ­ing ball in its present form far excels the Rem­ing­ton machine. It secures greater rapid­i­ty, and its writ­ing is clear­er and more pre­cise than that of the Amer­i­can instru­ment. The Dan­ish appa­ra­tus has more keys, is much less com­pli­cat­ed, built with greater pre­ci­sion, more sol­id, and much small­er and lighter than the Rem­ing­ton, and more­over, is cheap­er.”

Despite his ini­tial excite­ment, Niet­zsche quick­ly grew tired of the intri­cate con­trap­tion. Accord­ing to Eber­wein, the philoso­pher strug­gled with the device after it was dam­aged dur­ing a trip to Genoa; an inept mechan­ic try­ing to make the nec­es­sary repairs may have bro­ken the writ­ing ball even fur­ther. Still, Niet­zsche typed some 60 man­u­scripts on his writ­ing ball, includ­ing what may be the most poignant poet­ic treat­ment of type­writ­ers to date:

“THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME:

MADE OF IRON YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS.

PATIENCE AND TACT ARE REQUIRED IN ABUNDANCE

AS WELL AS FINE FINGERS TO USE US.”

In addi­tion to view­ing sev­er­al of Nietzsche’s orig­i­nal type­scripts at the Malling-Hansen Soci­ety web­site, those want­i­ng a clos­er look at Nietzsche’s mod­el can view it in the video below.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in Decem­ber 2013.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Writ­ten With a Type­writer

The Keaton Music Type­writer: An Inge­nious Machine That Prints Musi­cal Nota­tion

The Endur­ing Ana­log Under­world of Gramer­cy Type­writer

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Jim Henson’s Commercials for Wilkins Coffee: 15 Twisted Minutes of Muppet Coffee Ads (1957–1961)

in Food & Drink, Television | November 8th, 2022

Drink our cof­fee. Or else. That’s the mes­sage of these curi­ous­ly sadis­tic TV com­mer­cials pro­duced by Jim Hen­son between 1957 and 1961.

Hen­son made 179 ten-sec­ond spots for Wilkins Cof­fee, a region­al com­pa­ny with dis­tri­b­u­tion in the Bal­ti­more-Wash­ing­ton D.C. mar­ket, accord­ing to the Mup­pets Wiki: “The local sta­tions only had ten sec­onds for sta­tion iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, so the Mup­pet com­mer­cials had to be lightning-fast–essentially, eight sec­onds for the com­mer­cial pitch and a two-sec­ond shot of the prod­uct.”

With­in those eight sec­onds, a cof­fee enthu­si­ast named Wilkins (who bears a resem­blance to Ker­mit the frog) man­ages to shoot, stab, blud­geon or oth­er­wise do grave bod­i­ly harm to a cof­fee hold­out named Won­tkins. Hen­son pro­vid­ed the voic­es of both char­ac­ters.

Up until that time, TV adver­tis­ers typ­i­cal­ly made a direct sales pitch. “We took a dif­fer­ent approach,” said Hen­son in Christo­pher Finch’s Of Mup­pets and Men: The Mak­ing of the Mup­pet Show. “We tried to sell things by mak­ing peo­ple laugh.”

The cam­paign for Wilkins Cof­fee was a hit. “In terms of pop­u­lar­i­ty of com­mer­cials in the Wash­ing­ton area,” said Hen­son in a 1982 inter­view with Judy Har­ris, “we were the num­ber one, the most pop­u­lar com­mer­cial.” Hen­son’s ad agency began mar­ket­ing the idea to oth­er region­al cof­fee com­pa­nies around the coun­try. Hen­son re-shot the same spots with dif­fer­ent brand names. “I bought my con­tract from that agency,” said Hen­son, “and then I was pro­duc­ing them–the same things around the coun­try. And so we had up to about a dozen or so clients going at the same time. At the point, I was mak­ing a lot of mon­ey.”

If you’re a glut­ton for pun­ish­ment, you can watch many of the Wilkins Cof­fee com­mer­cials above. And a word of advice: If some­one ever asks you if you drink Wilkins Cof­fee, just say yes.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2012.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jim Hen­son Teach­es You How to Make Pup­pets in Vin­tage Primer From 1969

Jim Hen­son Cre­ates an Exper­i­men­tal Ani­ma­tion Explain­ing How We Get Ideas (1966)

Jim Henson’s Orig­i­nal, Spunky Pitch for The Mup­pet Show

Jim Henson’s Zany 1963 Robot Film Uncov­ered by AT&T: Watch Online

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Around the World in 1896: 40 Minutes of Real Footage Lets You Visit Paris, New York, Venice, Rome, Budapest & More

in Film, History | November 8th, 2022

No cul­tur­al tour of Glas­gow could be com­plete with­out a vis­it to the Bri­tan­nia Panop­ti­con, the world’s old­est sur­viv­ing music hall. “Con­vert­ed from ware­house to music hall in 1857 and licensed in 1859, the Bri­tan­nia Music Hall enter­tained Glasgow’s work­ing class­es for near­ly 80 years,” says its about page. “By the time it closed in 1938 it had also accom­mo­dat­ed cin­e­ma, car­ni­val, freak show, wax works, zoo, art gallery and hall of mir­rors,” and it had also changed its name to reflect the fact that every con­ceiv­able form of enter­tain­ment could be seen there. Thanks to an ongo­ing con­ser­va­tion effort, the build­ing still stands today, and its details have grad­u­al­ly been returned to the look and feel of its glo­ry days.

In 2016, the Bri­tan­nia Panop­ti­con marked 120 years of show­ing film in that build­ing. Part of the cel­e­bra­tion involved upload­ing, to its very own Youtube chan­nel, this 40-minute com­pi­la­tion of real footage from 1896, the year its cin­e­mat­ic pro­gram­ming began. (Ambi­ent sound has been added to enhance the sen­sa­tion of time trav­el.)

In it you’ll catch glimpses of life as it was real­ly lived 126 years ago in places like Man­hat­tan’s Union Square, Lon­don’s Pic­cadil­ly Cir­cus, Budapest’s Széchenyi Chain Bridge, Rome’s Por­to di Ripet­ta, and Paris’ Bassin des Tui­leries — as well as the Pont Neuf and Arc de Tri­om­phe. The pre­pon­der­ance of Parisian loca­tions is unsur­pris­ing, giv­en that most of the footage was shot by the French broth­ers Auguste and Louis Lumière, pio­neers of both the tech­nol­o­gy and art of cin­e­ma.

The sons of a fam­i­ly involved in the nascent pho­tog­ra­phy indus­try, the Lumière broth­ers patent­ed their own motion-pic­ture sys­tem in 1895, the same year they gave their first screen­ing: the film was La Sor­tie de l’u­sine Lumière à Lyon, whose 46 sec­onds show exact­ly that. A few months lat­er, they put on a pub­lic pro­gram includ­ing nine more films of sim­i­lar length, each also con­sist­ing of a sin­gle shot in what we would now call doc­u­men­tary style. This proved enter­tain­ment enough to launch a world tour, and the broth­ers took their ciné­matographe to Lon­don, New York City, Bom­bay, Buenos Aires and else­where. This pre­sum­ably gave them their chance to shoot in such cities, sug­gest­ing that a wide vari­ety of loca­tions and cul­tures could become cap­ti­vat­ing mate­r­i­al for motion pic­tures: a propo­si­tion more than val­i­dat­ed by the sub­se­quent cen­tu­ry, but not one in which the Lumière broth­ers, who quit cin­e­ma less than a decade lat­er, seem to have put much stock them­selves.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the Films of the Lumière Broth­ers & the Birth of Cin­e­ma (1895)

Footage of Cities Around the World in the 1890s: Lon­don, Tokyo, New York, Venice, Moscow & More

Watch Scenes from Czarist Moscow Vivid­ly Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (May 1896)

Real Inter­views with Peo­ple Who Lived in the 1800s

What the First Movies Real­ly Looked Like: Dis­cov­er the IMAX Films of the 1890s

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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A Stunning, Hand-Illustrated Book of Mushrooms Drawn by an Overlooked 19th Century Female Scientist

in Biology, Gender, History | November 7th, 2022

Mush­rooms have qui­et­ly become super­stars of the glob­al stage.

Sure, not every­one likes them on piz­za, but who cares?

In the 21st-cen­tu­ry, they are hailed as role mod­els and poten­tial plan­et savers (not to men­tion a wild­ly pop­u­lar design motif…)

Time-lapse cin­e­matog­ra­phy pio­neer Louie Schwartzberg’s crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed doc­u­men­tary, Fan­tas­tic Fun­gi, has made experts of us all.

Go back a cen­tu­ry, and such knowl­edge was much hard­er won, requir­ing time, patience, and prox­im­i­ty to field or for­est.

Wit­ness Fun­gi col­lect­ed in Shrop­shire and oth­er neigh­bor­hoods, a hand­bound, hand-illus­trat­ed 3‑volume col­lec­tion by one Miss M. F. Lewis, of Lud­low, Eng­land.

Miss Lewis, a tal­ent­ed artist with an obvi­ous pas­sion for mycol­o­gy spent over 40 years painstak­ing­ly doc­u­ment­ing the spec­i­mens she ran across in England’s West Mid­lands region.

Each draw­ing or water­col­or is iden­ti­fied in Miss Lewis’ hand by its sub­jec­t’s sci­en­tif­ic name. The loca­tion in which it was found is duti­ful­ly not­ed, as is the date.

The hun­dreds of species she cap­tured with pen and brush between 1860 and 1902 def­i­nite­ly con­sti­tute a life’s work, and also an unpub­lished one.

Cor­nell University’s Mann Library, where the only copy of this pre­cious record is housed, has man­aged to truf­fle up but a sin­gle ref­er­ence to Miss Lewis’ sci­en­tif­ic myco­log­i­cal con­tri­bu­tion.

Eng­lish botanist William Phillips, writ­ing in an 1880 issue of the Trans­ac­tions of the Shrop­shire Archae­o­log­i­cal and Nat­ur­al His­to­ry Soci­ety, not­ed that he been “per­mit­ted to look over [a work] of very much excel­lence exe­cut­ed by Miss M. F. Lewis, of Lud­low”, adding that “sev­er­al rare species [of fun­gi] are very artis­ti­cal­ly rep­re­sent­ed.“

The his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance of Miss Lewis’ work extends beyond the fun­gal realm.

As Sage writes in Miss­ing Miss­es in Mycol­o­gy, a post on the Mann Library’s Tum­blr cel­e­brat­ing Miss Lewis and her con­tem­po­rary, Eng­lish mycol­o­gist and illus­tra­tor, Sarah Price, women’s work was often omit­ted from the offi­cial sci­en­tif­ic record:

While we’re now see­ing con­sid­er­able effort to rec­ti­fy the record, the dis­cov­ery of untold sto­ries to fill in the blanks can be tricky busi­ness. It’s not that the sto­ries nev­er hap­pened — the field of botany, for one, is replete with some pret­ty spec­tac­u­lar evi­dence of women’s (often unac­knowl­edged) engage­ment with sci­en­tif­ic inquiry, embod­ied in the detailed illus­tra­tions that cap­tured the insights of obser­va­tions from the nat­ur­al world. But the pub­lished his­tor­i­cal record is often woe­ful­ly scant when it comes to clos­er detail on the lives and careers of the women who have helped car­ry mod­ern sci­ence for­ward.

We may nev­er learn any­thing more about the par­tic­u­lars of Miss Lewis’ train­ing or per­son­al cir­cum­stances, but the care she took to pre­serve her own work turned out to be a great gift for future gen­er­a­tions.

Leaf through all three vol­umes of Miss M.F. Lewis’ Fun­gi col­lect­ed in Shrop­shire and oth­er neigh­bor­hoods on the Inter­net Archive:

Vol­ume I

Vol­ume II

Vol­ume III

Via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent 

John Cage Had a Sur­pris­ing Mush­room Obses­sion (Which Began with His Pover­ty in the Depres­sion)

How Mush­room Time-Laps­es Are Filmed: A Glimpse Into the Pio­neer­ing Time-Lapse Cin­e­matog­ra­phy Behind the Net­flix Doc­u­men­tary Fan­tas­tic Fun­gi

The Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Atlas of Mush­rooms: Edi­ble, Sus­pect and Poi­so­nous (1827)

Alger­ian Cave Paint­ings Sug­gest Humans Did Mag­ic Mush­rooms 9,000 Years Ago

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The History of Jazz Visualized on a Circuit Diagram of a 1950s Phonograph: Features 1,000+ Musicians, Artists, Songwriters and Producers

in Design, Music | November 7th, 2022

The dan­ger of enjoy­ing jazz is the pos­si­bil­i­ty of let­ting our­selves slide into the assump­tion that we under­stand it. To do so would make no more sense than believ­ing that, say, an enjoy­ment of lis­ten­ing to records auto­mat­i­cal­ly trans­mits an under­stand­ing of record play­ers. One look at such a machine’s inner work­ings would dis­abuse most of us of that notion, just as one look at a map of the uni­verse of jazz would dis­abuse us of the notion that we under­stand that music in all the vari­eties into which it has evolved. But a jazz map that exten­sive has­n’t been easy to come by until this month, when design stu­dio Dorothy put on sale their Jazz Love Blue­print.

Mea­sur­ing 80 cen­time­ters by 60 cen­time­ters (rough­ly two and half by two feet), the Jazz Love Blue­print visu­al­ly cel­e­brates “over 1,000 musi­cians, artists, song­writ­ers and pro­duc­ers who have been piv­otal to the evo­lu­tion of this ever chang­ing and con­stant­ly cre­ative genre of music,” dia­gram­ming the con­nec­tions between the defin­ing artists of major eras and move­ments in jazz.

These include the “inno­va­tors that laid the foun­da­tions for jazz music” like Scott Joplin and Jel­ly Roll Mor­ton, “orig­i­nal jazz giants” like Louis Arm­strong and Ella Fitzger­ald, “inspired musi­cians of bebop” like Char­lie Park­er, Dizzy Gille­spie, and such lead­ing lights of “spir­i­tu­al jazz” as John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, and the late Pharoah Sanders.

You prob­a­bly know all those names, even if you only casu­al­ly lis­ten to jazz. But you may not have heard of such play­ers on “the cur­rent vibrant UK scene” as Ezra Col­lec­tive, Shaba­ka Hutch­ings, Nubya Gar­cia, Koko­roko, and Moses Boyd, or those on “the explod­ing US scene” like Kamasi Wash­ing­ton, Robert Glasper, and Makaya McCraven. The map includes not only the indi­vid­u­als but also the insti­tu­tions that have shaped jazz in all its forms: clubs like Bird­land and Ron­nie Scot­t’s, record labels like Blue Note, Verve, and ECM. Even the most expe­ri­enced jazz fans will sure­ly spot new lis­ten­ing paths on the Jazz Love Blue­print. Those with an elec­tron­ic or mechan­i­cal bent will also notice that the whole design has been based on the cir­cuit dia­gram of a phono­graph: the very machine that set so many of us on the path to our love of jazz in the first place.

You can find oth­er dia­grams map­ping the his­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, Rock, Hip Hop and Alter­na­tive Music here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Linked Jazz: A Huge Data Visu­al­iza­tion Maps the Rela­tion­ships Between Count­less Jazz Musi­cians & Restores For­got­ten Women to Jazz His­to­ry

Hear 2,000 Record­ings of the Most Essen­tial Jazz Songs: A Huge Playlist for Your Jazz Edu­ca­tion

1959: The Year That Changed Jazz

Langston Hugh­es Presents the His­to­ry of Jazz in an Illus­trat­ed Children’s Book (1955)

Hear the First Jazz Record, Which Launched the Jazz Age: “Liv­ery Sta­ble Blues” (1917)

Behold the MusicMap: The Ulti­mate Inter­ac­tive Geneal­o­gy of Music Cre­at­ed Between 1870 and 2016

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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When Medieval Manuscripts Were Recycled & Used to Make the First Printed Books

in Books, History, Technology | November 4th, 2022

“Old paint on a can­vas, as it ages, some­times becomes trans­par­ent,” play­wright Lil­lian Hell­man observed in Pen­ti­men­to, the sec­ond vol­ume of her mem­oirs. “When that hap­pens it is pos­si­ble, in some pic­tures, to see the orig­i­nal lines: a tree will show through a wom­an’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea.”

Sev­en years ago, some­thing sim­i­lar start­ed hap­pen­ing with thou­sands of old books, dat­ing from the 15th to 19th cen­tu­ry.

Age, how­ev­er, did­n’t force these vol­umes to spill their secrets…at least not direct­ly.

That hon­or goes to macro X‑ray flu­o­res­cence spec­trom­e­try (MA-XRF) and Erik Kwakkel, a book his­to­ri­an who the­o­rized that this tech­nol­o­gy might reveal medieval man­u­script frag­ments hid­den in the bind­ings of new­er texts, much as it had ear­li­er revealed hid­den lay­ers of paint on Old Mas­ter can­vas­es.


How did this strange “hid­den library” come to be?

Books were high­ly prized objects when man­u­scripts were copied by hand, but as Kwakkel notes on his medieval­books blog, “thou­sands and thou­sands of medieval man­u­scripts were torn apart, ripped to pieces, boiled, burned, and stripped for parts” upon the advent of the print­ing press.

Their pages were pressed into ser­vice as toi­let paper, bukram-like cloth­ing stiff­en­ers, book­marks, and, most tan­ta­liz­ing to a medieval book spe­cial­ist, bind­ing sup­port for print­ed books.

This prac­tice was so com­mon that the bind­ings of near­ly 150 ear­ly print­ed books in the Yale Law Library are known to con­tain pieces of medieval man­u­scripts.

These mate­ri­als may have been down­grad­ed in the lit­er­ary sense, but to Kwakkel they are “trav­el­ers in time, stow­aways in leather cas­es with great and impor­tant sto­ries to tell:”

Indeed, sto­ries that may oth­er­wise not have sur­vived, giv­en that clas­si­cal and medieval texts fre­quent­ly only come down to us in frag­men­tary form. The ear­ly his­to­ry of the Bible as a book could not be writ­ten if we were to throw out frag­ment evi­dence. More­over, while ancient and medieval texts sur­vive in many hand­some books from before the age of print, quite often the old­est wit­ness­es are frag­ments. At the very least a frag­ment tells you that a cer­tain text was avail­able at a cer­tain loca­tion at a cer­tain time. Step­ping out of their leather time cap­sules after cen­turies of dark­ness, frag­ments are “blips” on the map of Europe, express­ing “I exist­ed, I was used by a read­er in tenth-cen­tu­ry Italy!”

A few lines of a muti­lat­ed text can often be suf­fi­cient to iden­ti­fy it, as well as the loca­tion and gen­er­al tim­ing of its cre­ation:

That said, it is not easy to make sense of the remains. Binders seem to have par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoyed slic­ing text columns in half, as if they knew how to frus­trate future researchers best. Iden­ti­fy­ing what works these unful­fill­ing quotes come from can be a night­mare. Dat­ing and local­iz­ing the remains can cause insom­nia.

Pri­or to Kwakkel’s high tech exper­i­ments at Lei­den Uni­ver­si­ty, mod­ern researchers had to con­fine them­selves to acci­dents, as when, say, an old book’s spine cracks, reveal­ing the con­tents with­in.

Macro X‑ray flu­o­res­cence spec­trom­e­try turns out to be well equipped to detect the iron, cop­per and zinc of medieval inks beneath a lay­er of paper or parch­ment.

But it does so at a pace that might not knock a medieval scribe’s socks off.

Pro­duc­ing a leg­i­ble scan of what lurks beneath a sin­gle vol­ume’s spine can require as much as 24 hours, and expen­sive and time con­sum­ing propo­si­tion.

With thou­sands of these bind­ings hid­ing so close to the sur­face in col­lec­tions as mas­sive as the British Library and Oxford’s Bodleian, be pre­pared to remain on your ten­ter­hooks for the fore­see­able future.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Messy Nessy 

Relat­ed Con­tent 

A Medieval Book That Opens Six Dif­fer­ent Ways, Reveal­ing Six Dif­fer­ent Books in One

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

Cats in Medieval Man­u­scripts & Paint­ings

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Join her in New York City on Novem­ber 11 to cre­ate a col­lab­o­ra­tive Kurt Von­negut Cen­ten­ni­al fanzine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Comiclopedia: An Online Archive of 14,000 Comic Artists, From Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, to Mœbius and Hergé

in Comics/Cartoons | November 4th, 2022

Nobody inter­est­ed in comics can pass through Ams­ter­dam with­out vis­it­ing Lam­biek. Hav­ing opened in 1968 as the third com­ic-book shop in human his­to­ry, it now sur­vives as the old­est one still in exis­tence. But even those with­out a trip to the Nether­lands lined up can eas­i­ly mar­vel at one of Lam­biek’s major claims to fame: the Comi­clo­pe­dia, “an illus­trat­ed com­pendi­um of over 14,000 com­ic artists from around the world.” Dis­play­ing the same kind of pre­science that inspired him to open his store ahead of the com­ic-indus­try boom, Lam­biek’s founder Kees Kouse­mak­er launched this online ency­clo­pe­dia in 1999, more than a year before Wikipedia first went live.

The video above offers a brief illus­trat­ed his­to­ry of the Comi­clo­pe­dia, but the pro­jec­t’s ambi­tion comes across just as clear­ly in alpha­bet­i­cal­ly orga­nized index pages. Amer­i­can com­ic-book icons like Stan Lee and Jack Kir­by get exten­sive entries, of course, but so do news­pa­per com­ic-strip cre­ators from George Her­ri­man and Win­sor McCay (fea­tured on this page) to Charles Schulz and Bill Wat­ter­son (whose entry fea­tures not just Calvin and Hobbes but such ear­ly work as a pan­el pub­lished in his col­lege news­pa­per). There are even fig­ures not known pri­mar­i­ly as com­ic artists: the late Char­lie Watts, for instance, whose art­work includ­ed the back cov­er of Between the But­tons, or David Lynch, who for nine years “drew” The Angri­est Dog in the World.

For 23 years now, the Comi­clo­pe­dia has main­tained its com­mit­ment to both includ­ing deep cuts of that kind as well as con­stant­ly widen­ing its inter­na­tion­al per­spec­tive. You’d expect its robust entries on Jean Giraud, bet­ter known as Mœbius, and Georges Remi, bet­ter known as Hergé, but you’ll also find intro­duc­tions to the likes of Ser­afín Rojo Caa­maño, cre­ator of a host of char­ac­ters beloved in twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Spain (includ­ing the per­pet­u­al­ly drunk­en mar­chioness­es), and Kim Seong-hwan, whose unflap­pable old man Gob­au bore wit­ness to half a cen­tu­ry of tumul­tuous South Kore­an his­to­ry.

Nor have Lam­biek or the Comi­clo­pe­dia ignored the comics of its home­land. “Kouse­mak­er and his entourage wrote var­i­ous essays, arti­cles and books about comics,” says the page on the store’s own sto­ry, and with­out their work “much of the Nether­lands’ comics his­to­ry might oth­er­wise have remained unex­plored.” Batavo­phones can enjoy a thor­ough overview of the his­to­ry of Dutch comics here; oth­ers can read a more con­densed Eng­lish ver­sion here, or set the Comi­clo­pe­di­a’s coun­try fil­ter to the Nether­lands and sam­ple the work of the 1,045-and-counting artists cur­rent­ly in the data­base. If you do make it out to Ams­ter­dam, after all, you’re going to want to know Tom Poes from Eric de Noor­man from Kapitein Rob before­hand.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

Explore a Big Archive of Vin­tage Ear­ly Comics: 1700–1929

Read The Very First Com­ic Book: The Adven­tures of Oba­di­ah Old­buck (1837)

How to Make Comics: A Four-Part Series from the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art

Free: Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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