(Roughly) Daily

Tableau De L’Histoire Universelle depuis la Creation jusqu’a ce jour

…a fold-out print depicting all of human history from the time of creation (4693 BC = Adam & Eve; the great flood = 3300 BC) up to the date of publication (1858 by Eug. Pick, Paris). Vignettes of historically significant people, places and buildings etc are arranged along the borders.

Earlier posts (e.g., here and here) will have tipped readers to your correspondent’s weakness for charts and visualizations.  A wonderful collection at Bibliodyssey reminds one that interesting infographics have a long and storied history… and that earlier examples can be a mesmerizingly beautiful as their successors…

Tinted drawing showing the comparative lengths of rivers and heights of mountains worldwide. The first text page in this volume has the legend for this sheet.

In: ‘General Atlas Of The World: Containing Upwards Of Seventy Maps…’ by Adam & Charles Black, Sidney Hall and William Hughes, 1854; published in Edinburgh by A & C Black.

See them all at Bibliodyssey’s “Victorian Infographics.”

And for readers who are also listeners to This American Life, may enjoy This American Infographic— a project of E. J. Fox to create a visualization for every episode of that extraordinary series; e.g., Episode 5:

As we chart our progress, we might pause to celebrate a different kind of visualization coup: it was on this date in 1944 that Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat— based on a story by John Steinbeck– premiered at the Astor Theater in New York.  Starring the divine Tallulah Bankhead (along with William Bendix and Walter Slezak), Lifeboat was remarkable for confining all action to the space of the small boat awash in the ocean…

one-sheet

and for including the director’s trademark cameo in a newspaper ad for weight loss that one of the characters reads.

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