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.
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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.
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.
Even by the extreme standards of dystopian fiction, the premise of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451can 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 451not 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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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.
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.
Mark Mothersbaugh’s studio is located in a cylindrical structure painted bright green — it looks more like a festive auto part than an office building. It’s a fitting place for the iconoclast musician. For those of you who didn’t spend your childhoods obsessively watching the early years of MTV, Mark Mothersbaugh was the mastermind behind the band Devo. They skewered American conformity by dressing alike in shiny uniforms and their music was nervy, twitchy and weird. They taught a nation that if you must whip it, you should whip it good.
In the years since, Mothersbaugh has segued into a successful career as a Hollywood composer, spinning scores for 21 Jump Street and The Royal Tenenbaums among others.
In the video above, you can see Mothersbaugh hang out in his studio filled with synthesizers of various makes and vintages, including Bob Moog’s own personal Memorymoog. Watching Mothersbaugh pull out and play with each one is a bit like watching a precocious child talk about his toys. He just has an infectious energy that is a lot of fun to watch.
Probably the best part in the video is when he shows off a device that can play sounds backward. It turns out that if you say, “We smell sausage” backwards it sounds an awful lot like “Jesus loves you.” Who knew?
Below you can see Mothersbaugh in action with Devo, performing live in Japan during the band’s heyday in 1979.
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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in February 2015.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
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