The exalted status of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica is reflected by the fact that everybody knows it as, simply, the Principia. Very few of us, by contrast, speak of the Historia when we mean to refer to John Ray and Francis Willughby’s De Historia Piscium, which came out in 1686, the year before the Principia. Both books were published by the Royal Society, and as it happens, the formidable cost of Willughby and Ray’s lavish work of ichthyology nearly kept Newton’s groundbreaking treatise on motion and gravitation from the printing press.
According to the Royal Society’s web site, “Ray and Willughby’s Historia did not prove to be the publishing sensation that the Fellows had hoped and the book nearly bankrupted the Society. This meant that the Society was unable to meet its promise to support the publication of Isaac Newton’s masterpiece.”
Fortunately, “it was saved from obscurity by Edmund Halley, then Clerk at the Royal Society” — and now better known for his eponymous comet — “who raised the funds to publish the work, providing much of the money from his own pocket. ”
Halley’s great reward, in lieu of the salary the Royal Society could no longer pay, was a pile of unsold copies of De Historia Piscium. That may not have been quite the insult it sounds like, given that the book represented a triumph of production and design in its day. You can see a copy in the episode of Adam Savage’s Tested at the top of the post, and you can closely examine its imagery at your leisure in the digital archive of the Royal Society. In the words of Jonathan Ashmore, Chair of the Royal Society’s Library Committee, a browsing session should help us “appreciate why early Fellows of the Royal Society were so impressed by Willughby’s stunning illustrations of piscine natural history.”
Though Savage duly marvels at the Royal Society’s copy of the Historia — a reconstruction made up of pages long ago cut out and sold separately, as was once common practice with books with pictures suitable for framing — it’s clear that much of the motivation for his visit came from the prospect of close proximity to Newtoniana, up to and including the man’s death mask. But then, Newton lays fair claim to being the most important scientist who ever lived, and the Principia to being the most important science book ever written. Almost three and a half centuries later, physics still holds mysteries for generations of Newton’s successors to solve. But then, so do the depths of the ocean.
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.
Once again, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl and producer Greg Kurstin have teamed up to celebrate Hanukkah by performing songs created by musicians with Jewish roots. Above, they perform–along with Jack Black–Rush’s “The Spirit Of Radio.” (Geddy Lee’s parents were both Jews who survived Auschwitz and Dachau. Lee tells their story below.) Other songs featured in this year’s celebration include Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” “Spinning Wheel” by Blood, Sweat & Tears, Janis Ian’s“At Seventeen” and more. Find performances from prior Hanukkah celebrations in the Relateds below.
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They’re almost an endangered species, the victim of the Internet, postal rate increases, and the jettisoning of any time consuming tradition whose execution has been found to bring the opposite of joy.
Christmas cards must hold a special place in both the V&A’s collections and heart, given that the museum’s founder, Henry Cole, inadvertently invented them in 1843.
As a well respected man about town, he received a great many more holiday letters than he had time or inclination to respond to, but neither did he wish to appear rude.
So he enlisted his friend, painter J.C. Horsley, to create a festive illustration with a built-in holiday greeting, leaving just enough space to personalize with a recipient’s name and perhaps, a handwritten line or two.
He then had enough postcard-sized reproductions printed up to send to 1000 of his friends.
Part of the reason the cards in the V&A’s collection are so well preserved is that their recipients prized them enough to keep them in souvenir albums.
Understandably. They’re very appealing little artifacts.
The upper crust could afford such fancy design elements as clever die-cut shapes, pop up elements, and translucent windows that encouraged the recipients to hold them up to actual windows.
Technological advances in the printing industry, and the creation of the cost-effective Penny Post allowed those whose budgets were more modest than Mr. Cole’s to participate too.
Their cards tended to be simpler in execution, though not necessarily concept.
In addition to the views we’ve come to expect — winter, Father Christmas, holly — the Victorians had a thing for jolly anthropomorphized food and some truly shameless puns.
Enjoy these Ghosts of Christmas Past, dear readers. We’re almost inspired to revive the tradition!
Read more about the advent of this tradition, including how it jumped the pond, in Smithsonian Magazine’sHistory of the Christmas Card.
As Christmas approaches, we reach for our bookshelves and pull down Charles Dickens’ beloved tale of hardship, revelation, and a miser’s redemption in the holiday season. I speak, of course, of The Cricket on the Hearth, published in 1845 as the third of what would be Dickens’ five Christmas books. (The first, of which you may have heard, was A Christmas Carol.) From the very year of its publication, The Cricket on the Hearth found great success as a stage production, and it continued to be adapted even in the age of radio. The story was a century old by the time it aired on NBC, in the broadcast that opens the five-and-a-half-hour compilation of Christmas old-time radio above.
That video is just one of three uploaded in the past few weeks by the Youtube channel An Evening of Old-Time Radio. It collects a variety of Christmas-themed specials and broadcasts from shows like Lux Radio Theatre, The Coronet Little Show, and CBS Ceiling Unlimited (an aviation-promoting wartime effort created by Orson Welles).
The second volume features more than six hours of holiday episodes from the hit series of the Golden Age of Radio, including sitcoms like Our Miss Brooks, The Life of Riley, Fibber McGee and Molly, and its spinoff The Great Gildersleeve. Their characters, much like their listeners, struggle to do their shopping and organize their parties — and amid it all, of course, find their way to the true meaning of Christmas.
The latest video in An Evening of Old Time Radio’s “Yuletide OTR” series includes radio adaptations of It’s a Wonderful Life, which now defines the genre of the Christmas movie, followed by one of Dickens’ Christmas Carol. Scheduled for release this Christmas day, the fourth installment promises yet more seasonally appropriate stories — with the requisite gags, complications, and final swells of good cheer — from such mid-century domestic comedies as The Aldrich Family, Lum andAbner, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. But as you’ll hear, neither could thriller, mystery, and western shows like The Man Called X, The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe, and The Six Shooter resist telling a Christmas tale — nor can we, all these decades later, resist hearing one.
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.
“Christmas time is here, by golly / Disapproval would be folly / Deck the halls with hunks of holly / Fill the cup and don’t say ‘when.’ ” So sings musical satirist Tom Lehrer on his hit 1959 album An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer — which was recorded in March of that year, not that it stopped him from taking an out-of-season jab at the holidays. “Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens / Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens / Even though the prospect sickens / Brother, here we go again.” If it seems to you that he takes a dim view of Christmas, you should hear how he sings about everything else.
Now, more easily than ever, you can hear how Lehrer sings about everything else, by simply downloading his music from his web site. “All copyrights to lyrics or music written or composed by me have been relinquished, and therefore such songs are now in the public domain,” he writes. “All of my songs that have never been copyrighted, having been available for free for so long, are now also in the public domain.” In short, he adds, “I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs.” We posted about the release of those songs themselves into the Public Domain a couple years ago, but last month Lehrer made the songs available online–for a limited time.
Not only is An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer free to stream or download on TomLehrerSongs.com — complete with tracks not available even on Spotify — so is its follow-up Revisited, That Was the Year That Was (featuring performances of the songs he wrote for the American version of That Was the Week That Was) and the three-disc collection The Remains of Tom Lehrer. Together these albums contain all the music Lehrer recorded before he stood up from the piano and became a professor, first of political science and later of mathematics (though he did teach some musical theater as well.)
Given his secular Jewish origins and his obvious disdain for the Mammonistic holiday season (at least “as we celebrate it in the United States”) Lehrer would surely get a laugh from us taking this free release of all his music as a Christmas gift. And yet, like all the best Christmas gifts, it has both a surface value and a deeper one. Despite their topical late-fifties-early-sixties references to things like “new math” and Vatican II, his songs can still make us laugh today. But they can also show younger generations a satirical sensibility they’ve never known: culturally literate, dry with well-placed plunges into the lowbrow, transgressive without cheap crudity, all supported by musical aplomb. Maybe Lehrer decided to make his music free because now, in his tenth decade, he can be sure that nobody will surpass him. Find his music 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.
I never use a metal detector and I often walk little more than a mile in 5 hours, yet I can travel 2,000 years back in time through the objects that are revealed by the tide. Prehistoric flint tools, medieval pilgrim badges, Tudor shoes, Georgian wig curlers and Victorian pottery, ordinary objects left behind by the ordinary people who made London what it is today.
As she says in the short film above, her first find has become one of her most common — a clay pipe fragment.
The term mudlark was invented to describe the poverty stricken Victorians who scoured the foreshore for copper, wire, and other items with resale value, as well as things they could clean off and use themselves.
Today’s mudlarks are primarily history buffs and amateur archeologists.
The hobby has become so popular that The Port of London Authority, which controls the Thames waterway along with the Crown Estate, has started to require foreshore permits of all prospective debris hunters.
Permitted mudlarks can claim as souvenirs however many Victorian clay pipes and blue and white pottery shards they dig up, but are legally obliged by the Portable Antiquities Scheme to report items of potentially greater historic and monetary value — i.e. Treasure — to a museum-trained Finds Liason Officer:
Any metallic object, other than a coin, provided that at least 10 per cent by weight of metal is precious metal (that is, gold or silver) and that it is at least 300 years old when found. If the object is of prehistoric date it will be Treasure provided any part of it is precious metal.
Any group of two or more metallic objects of any composition of prehistoric date that come from the same find (see note below).
Two or more coins from the same find provided they are at least 300 years old when found and contain 10 per cent gold or silver (if the coins contain less than 10 per cent of gold or silver there must be at least ten of them). Only the following groups of coins will normally be regarded as coming from the same find: Hoards that have been deliberately hidden; Smaller groups of coins, such as the contents of purses, that may been dropped or lost; Votive or ritual deposits.
Any object, whatever it is made of, that is found in the same place as, or had previously been together with, another object that is Treasure.
How did all this historic refuse come to be in the Thames? Maiklem told Collectors Weeklythat there are many reasons:
Obviously, it’s been used as a rubbish dump. It was a useful place to chuck your household waste. It was essentially a busy highway, so people accidentally dropped things and lost things as they traveled on it. Of course, people also lived right up against it. London was centered on the Thames so houses were all along it, and there was all this stuff coming out of the houses and off the bridges. It was the biggest port in the world in the 18th century, so there was all the shipbuilding and industry going on.
And then of course, there’s the rubbish that was used to build up the foreshore and create barge beds. The riverbed in its natural state is a V shape, so they had to build up the sides next to the river wall to make them flatter so the flat-bottom barges could rest there at low tide. They did that by pouring rubbish and building spoil and kiln waste, anything they could find—industrial waste, domestic waste. When they dug into the ground further up, they’d bring the spoil down and use it to build up the foreshore, and cap it off with a layer of chalk, which was soft and didn’t damage the bottom of the barges.
One of the reasons we’re finding so much in the river now is because there’s so much erosion. While it was a “working river,” these barge beds were patched up and the revetments, or the wooden walls that held them in, were repaired when they broke. But now, they’re being left to fall apart, and these barge beds are eroding as the river is getting busier with river traffic.
There are numerous social media groups where modern mudlarks can proudly share their finds, and seek assistance in identifying strange or fragmented objects.
Maiklem’s London Mudlark Facebook page is an education in and of itself, a reflection of her abiding interest in the historic significance of the items she truffles up.
Witness the pewter buckle plate dating to the 14th or 15th-century that she spotted on the foreshore in late November, turned over to her Finds Liaison Officer and researched with the help of historic pewter craftsman Colin Torode:
Prior to c.1350 pewter belt fittings seem to have been rather rare, although a London Girdlers’ Guild Charter of 1321 which banned the use of pewter belt fittings does show that the metal was certainly in use. In 1344 the Girdlers’ guild again reiterated the ban on what they felt were inferior metals such as pewter, tin and lead. In 1391 however, a statute recognized that these metals had been in use for some time and that their use could continue without restriction
This ornate plate would have had a separate buckle frame attached to it and is probably a cheaper copy of the more upmarket copper alloy or silver versions that were produced at the time.Although the the openwork design is similar to those found in in furniture or church screens, it’s not religious or pilgrim related.
Maiklem also challenges fans to play along from home with “spot the find” videos for such items as a Tudor clothes hook, Georgian cufflink, and a German salt glazed, stoneware bottle’s neck embossed with a human face.
The river also spews up plenty of drowned rats, flushing them out with the sewage after a heavy rain. Other potential hazards include hypodermic needles and broken glass.
In addition to such safety precautions as gloves, sturdy footwear, and remaining mindful of incoming tides, Maiklem advises novice mudlarks to look for straight lines and perfect circles — “the things that nature doesn’t make.”
It takes practice and patience to develop a skilled eye, but don’t get discouraged if your first outings don’t yield the sort of jaw dropping discoveries Maiklem has made — an intact glass Victorian sugar crusher, a 16th-century child’s leather shoe and Roman era pottery shards galore.
Sometimes even plastic comes with a compelling story.
I’m still feeling quite giddy over this bit of plastic. I came to Cornwall this week to write and to beachcomb. I hoped I might find a small piece of Lost Lego, but I wasn’t holding out much hope. Calm weather means less plastic: good for the beach, bad for the Lego looker. Then I found this wedged between two boulders. It’s one of the black octopuses from the Lego spill of 1997 when, 20 miles from Land’s End, a huge wave hit the cargo ship Tokio Express. It tilted 45 degrees and 62 containers slid into the water. One container was filled with nearly 5 million pieces of Lego, much of which was sea themed. Little scuba tanks, flippers, octopuses, cutlasses, life rafts, spear guns, dragons and octopuses like this still wash up on the beaches of Cornwall and further afield.
Stay abreast of Lara Maiklem’s mudlarking finds here.
Try your hand at mudlarking the Thames in person, during a guided tour with the Thames Explorer Trust.
Bruce is best known as Elvis Costello’s bassist on about a dozen albums as The Attractions, but Bruce has been in bands since 1970 and has done numerous session gigs, most notably for Al Stewart’s early albums, plus The Pretenders, John Wesley Harding, Billy Bragg, and many more.
Your Nakedly Examined Music host Mark Linsenmayer interviews Bruce to discuss his work on “Blood Makes Noise” by Susanne Vega from 99.9 Degrees (1992), play clips from several of the most famous Attractions tunes (using when possible the 1978 Live at the El Mocambo album) plus “La La La La Loved You” by The Attractions (w/o Elvis) from Mad About the Wrong Boy (1980), the first half of the title track of Quiver’s Gone in the Morning (1972), and we conclude by listening to a cover of The Beatles “There’s a Place” by Spencer Brown and Bruce Thomas from Back to the Start (2018). Intro: “Radio Radio” by The Attractions feat. Fito Paez from Spanish Model (2021). For more about Bruce’s musical and literary projects, see brucethomas.co.uk.
Rare indeed is the ancient-history buff who has never dreamed of walking the roads of the Roman Empire. But unlike many longings stoked by interest in the distant past, that one can actually be fulfilled. As explained in the video above from Youtube channel Intrigued Mind, a fair few Roman roads remain in existence today, albeit only in sections, and mostly ruined ones at that. “Like other incredible monuments that still stand, as if to prove the power of the Roman Empire, there are a surprising number of Roman roads still in use today,” some converted into modern highways, but “many still paved with their original cobblestones.”
Of all such roads, none has more importance than the Via Appia, or Appian Way, whose construction began back in 312 BC. “The first long road outside of the greater city of Rome that wasn’t Etruscan,” it “allowed Romans to make their first major conquest” and begin their mighty empire’s “conquest of the world.” Without understanding the storied Via Appia, none of us can truly understand Roman history. But to grasp the context of the Roman Empire, we can hardly ignore the even older roads like the Via Domitia, which was “the road Hannibal used to invade Italy, 100 years before the Romans claimed it” — not to mention an important setting in the Greek myth of Heracles.
You can still cross one of the Via Domitia’s bridges, the Pont Julien in the south of France. In that same country stand the more-or-less intact Pont Flavian, originally built along the Via Julia Augusta, and the Pont du Gard, the most famous and elegant Roman aqueduct of them all. Nor should enthusiasts of Roman infrastructure miss the Alcantara Bridge in Spain, the Manfred Bridge in Germany, or the ruins of Trajan’s Bridge — made into ruins deliberately, by Trajan’s successor Hadrian — in Romania. The most serious among them will also want to go as far as the Middle East and travel the Via Maris, which connected Egypt to Syria, and the remains of the bridge across Caesar’s Dam in Iran.
Iran belonged, of course, not to the Roman Empire but the Persian one. But “legend has it that the Persian emperor captured the Roman emperor and forced him to use his army to build the dam and the beautiful bridge to cross it.” All was fair, it seems, in the expansion and conflict of ancient empires, and the ruins scattered across their vast former territories testify to that. Though much less technologically advanced than, say, modern freeway systems, the Roman roads that survive have proven surprisingly robust, a phenomenon examined in the video just above by history Youtuber Told in Stone — a Chicagoan, incidentally, who acknowledges that the Via Appia has never had to take a Windy City winter.
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.
The majority of us have more in common with the Grinch, Scrooge, and/or the Little Match Girl.
Still, it’s hard to resist the preternaturally mature 11-year-old Björk reading the nativity story in her native Icelandic, backed by unsmiling older kids from the Children’s Music School in Reykjavík.
Particularly since I myself do not speak Icelandic.
It would also appear that little Björk, the fiercely self-reliant latchkey kid of a Bohemian single mother, was far and away the most charismatic kid enrolled in the Barnamúsikskóli.
(Less than a year later her self-titled first album sold 7000 copies in Iceland—a modest amount compared to Adele’s debut, maybe, but c’mon, the kid was 11! And Iceland’s population at the time was a couple hundred thousand and change.)
As to the above performance’s religious slant, it wasn’t a reflection of her personal beliefs. As she told the UK music webzine Drowned in Sound in 2011:
…nature is my religion, in a way… I think everybody has their own private religion. I guess what bothers me is when millions have the same one. It just can’t be true. It’s just…what?
Still, it probably wasn’t too controversial that the programmers elected to cleave to the reason in the season. Icelandic church attendance may be low-key, but the overwhelming majority of its citizens identify as Lutheran, or some other Christian denomination.
(They also believe in elves and 13 formerly fearsome Yule Lads, descendants of the ogres Grýla and Leppalúði. By the time Björk appeared on earth, they had long since evolved, through a combination of foreign influence and public decree, into the kinder, gentler, not quite Santa-esque version, addressing the studio audience at the top of the act.)
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Among the ranks of Open Culture readers, there are no doubt more than a few art-history majors. Perhaps you’ve studied the subject yourself, at one time or another — and perhaps you find that by now, you remember only certain scattered artists, works, and movements. What you need is a grand narrative, a broad story of art itself, and that’s just what you’ll find in the video above from Youtube channel Behind the Masterpiece. True to its title, “A Brief History of Art Movements” briefly describes, and provides a host of visual examples to illustrate, 22 phases in the development of art in just 23 minutes.
The journey begins in prehistory, with cave paintings from 40,000 years ago apparently created “as a way to share information.” Then comes the art of antiquity, when increasingly literate societies “started creating the earliest naturalistic images of human beings,” not least to enforce “religious and political ideologies.” The religiosity intensified in the Middle Ages, when artists “depicted clear, iconic images of religious figures” — as well as their oddly aged-looking babies — “and decorated them with extensive use of gold and jewels as a way to attract more people to the church.”
When many us think of art history — whether we studied it or not — our minds go straight to the subsequent period, the Renaissance, during which “artists started to appreciate cultural subjects like art, music, and theater” as well. They created “portrait paintings, anatomically correct sculptures, and symmetrical architecture,” and the invention of the printing press greatly expanded the pool of potential appreciators. Then, in the Baroque movement, enormously skilled artists like Bernini and Caravaggio “emphasized extravagance and emotion,” and other forms followed suit with more intense embellishments of their own.
From eighteenth-century France emerged the “playful and utopian” Rococo period, which was followed by the backward-looking “interest in renewed simplicity” that characterized Neoclassicism, which was followed by Romanticism, a movement whose artists “looked within and found inspiration in their own imaginations, and the nature around them.” It was the leveling French Revolution that brought about the conditions for the rise of Realism, with its focus on “depicting real people in everyday life,” the kind of subjects to that point overlooked in major works of art.
In the second half of the nineteenth century the development of art hit the gas, bringing on the imperfect vitality of Impressionism, the daring subjectivity of Post-Impressionism, the extreme subjectivity of Expressionism, and the sinuous luxury of Art Nouveau. Technology had always been a factor in how art changes, but in the twentieth century — as Cubism gave way to Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and the Bauhaus — it came to the fore. This brings us up to living memory: movements like Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, and the inclination of today’s artists to deal in “ideas rather than aesthetics,” all on display in most any museum you care to visit. Or at least they are in the museums of the West, there being, after all, a whole world of other art histories out there to understand besides.
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.
Back in 1993, the Beat writer William S. Burroughs wrote and narrated a 21 minute claymation Christmas film. And, as you can well imagine, it’s not your normal happy Christmas flick. Nope, this film – The Junky’s Christmas – is all about Danny the Carwiper, a junkie, who spends Christmas Day trying to score a fix. Eventually he finds the Christmas spirit when he shares some morphine with a young man suffering from kidney stones, giving him the “immaculate fix.” There you have it. And, oh, did we mention that the film was produced by Francis Ford Coppola?
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