A housekeeping note: (R)D will be off tomorrow– Sunday the 12th– returning on Monday…
Wikipedia has over 300 language editions. Each one picks different images to illustrate the same topic.
From Riley Walz, a marvelous way to explore the the images that different concepts conjure in different cultures: “In Every Language.”
(Image above: “Mother” in English, Portuguese, and others on the left; Italian, Esperanto, and others on the right)
* E. M. Forster
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As we visualize, we might recall that it was on this date in 1966 that Frank Sinatra recorded “Strangers in the Night.” According to Sinatra: The Life (Summers, Swan, 2006), Sinatra despised the song and called it “a piece of sh*t” and, per Frank Sinatra by Jean-Pierre Hombach, “worst f*cking song that I have ever heard.” Nevertheless, it became his first No. 1 hit since 1955’s “Learning the Blues” and remained on the Billboard charts for 15 weeks. His album of the same name became his most successful. The song also won him Grammy Awards for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, Record of the Year, and Best Arrangement.
A few months ago I had the fleeting thought to write a post about Stephen Biesty, the DK books cross-section legend. After learning he’d passed only just last year, I was disheartened to discover his personal website and galleries had gone offline, and there were no significant retrospectives of his career that I could find.
Now, after having looked through nearly every single work he produced and having read literally everything I could find online about him, I have come to find his quiet denouement rather touching. He certainly seemed to be private by design, offering only a handful of interviews in his lifetime. The longest profile I could find is weirdly condemning of his workmanlike ethos:
The artist himself is not quite as immediately engaging. Biesty is 35, with the smooth face and straight jeans of a Microsoft programmer. He lives in a Somerset cottage of grey-gold stone between a village church and a pair of wandering geese.
Biesty’s garden glows in the late-summer sun, yet he leads the way straight up to his studio and questions about his business. The room is almost bare of artist’s clutter, more an office with fax and easel and three paintbrushes laid parallel on a tissue to dry. ‘I don’t collect stuff,’ says Biesty.
He talks about his illustrating with a stern set to his chin, as if filling out a tricky detail. He doesn’t sketch – “There isn’t time to be doing reams of doodles” – but expands his work straight from thumbnail ideas to full-scale final pieces. These he completes, eyes close to the paper and hand in rhythm, layer by repetitive layer, between 7.30am and 5.30pm every weekday. “At lunchtime I go downstairs for half an hour and a sandwich.”
Biesty makes all this sound like mass production. “You’re employed to do one thing,” he says, straight as a factory manager. “Something that’s going to sell.” There are no posters of his pictures on his studio walls.
[…] Often, he answers with “we” rather than “I”.
I have to confess a great soft spot for all this. My great grandfather was studying technical illustration at Pratt before he was drafted into the war and lost at sea. His daughter became a graphic designer, as did her daughter — my mom. I appreciate that we all sat somewhere between art and science, heart and mind. Biesty’s seeming indifference towards an artistic identity gives his work more credibility for my tastes.
Biesty’s breakout moment came when the K of DK books asked Biesty to draw a steamboat in cross section. “I tried it lengthways and he said, ‘Fine. But try it the other way, like a loaf.’” And lo:
This became the centerpiece for his first book, Incredible Cross-Sections [here], and the seed for the rest of his career. Anyone around my age and above a certain threshold of autistic will have burned much library time on this amazing ‘90s run of DK books…
[Cole goes on to show and discuss other examples of Biesty’s work and to examine his influences…]
… Later in life, Biesty was able to admit some of the depth so evident in the work, as he accepted an award in 2011 for Into the Unknown [here]:
In a world where most information is stored and conveyed electronically, conventional non-fiction books for young people have taken a heavy hit. So is Into The Unknown a dinosaur, a final example of a Dying Breed? I believe not. In the years ahead, certainly fewer paper books will be produced. But those that are designed, written, and manufactured will be a bit like medieval manuscripts — special creations, works of art, unique, beautiful products to be collected and cherished. Into the Unknown, therefore, is not the end of a line but the beginning of a new, fresh and very beautiful one, and you have so kindly recognized that fact. Thank you all very much indeed…
* Robert J. Bezucha, The Art of the July Monarchy: France, 1830 to 1848
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As we show (in addition to telling), we might spare a thought for an illustrator of a different ilk, William Steig; he died on this date in 2003. A cartoonist (most notably, in The New Yorker), and illustrator and writer of children’s books, he’s best known for Shrek!, which inspired the film series of the same name, as well as others that included Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (which won the Caldecott Medal), Abel’s Island, and Doctor De Soto. He was the U.S. nominee for the biennial and international Hans Christian Andersen Awards, as both a children’s book illustrator in 1982 and a writer in 1988.
When asked his opinion about the movie based on his picture book, Shrek!, William Steig responded: “It’s vulgar, it’s disgusting — and I loved it.” (With the release of Shrek 2 in 2004, Steig became the first sole-creator of an animated movie franchise that went on to generate over $1 billion from theatrical and ancillary markets after only one sequel.)
Your correspondent is headed off on the road, so (R)D will be in temporary hiatus. Regular service should resume on/around October 13. To keep you occupied until then, this tasty tidbit from Neal.fun (Neal Agarwal): “I’m not a robot.”
In 1840, British architect George Wightwick published a world history of architecture in the Romantic mode, inviting readers to enter a vast garden where Buddhist iconography rubs shoulders with Greek temples and Egyptian pyramids gaze upon Gothic cathedrals. His intended audience? Idle women. Matthew Mullane revisits this visionary but ultimately unpopular text and explores the legacy of attempts to gatekeep the realms of imagination and fantasy pertaining to the built environment…
The “Prince Architect” welcomes you: “You will see, within this domain, an epitome of the Architectural world. Mine is, as it were, a palace of congress, wherein you will be successively addressed by humble (but, it is hoped, characteristic) representatives of the great families of Design in ancient and Mahomedan India, China, Egypt, Greece, ancient and modern Italy, Turkey, Moorish Spain, and Christian Europe”.
This grandiose introduction is offered by the protagonist of George Wightwick’s Palace of Architecture: A Romance of Art and History (1840). The reader, an imagined visitor referred to in the second person, is quickly handed a map showing the “architectural world” not as a diagram of transmission, a “tree” of influence, or a catalogue of entries, but a picturesque garden. Flanking the central palace is a group of buildings representing the “ancient” corners of the world, including India, China, Burma, and Egypt. At the top-right corner of the map, Greek and Roman structures curl leftward to show a European panoply of styles including Gothic, Soanean, Greco-Roman, and finally, two pointed styles from the Christian and “Mahomedan” perspective. Before entering this garden, you face the palace gate, an unruly collage of world architecture history consisting of, among other things, a Gothic spire, an Islamic dome, and crude prehistoric stone. The gate represents the chasm between the Prince Architect’s overflowing storehouse of experience, and you, the new guest, with none. The well-traveled architect sourced the building’s components from his extensive travels and “crammed [it] with observation, the which it vents in mangled forms.”2 You, the reader, are homebound and observationally deficient and therefore must feel beguiled. However, after a guided journey through the grounds of the palace, “you will return, competent to read the significant details of what, now, only vaguely addresses your understanding.”
Unlike more familiar world histories of the nineteenth century that enticed readers with pages full of illustrations, simplified categorizations, and appeals to scientific rationality, Wightwick’s tour of world architecture was a poetically narrated experience. His florid language and direct reference to the reader were intended to “address the eye and ear of the general public with the eloquence of picturesque illustration and impassioned comment”. He believed that “the error of architectural authors has been that of writing technical treatises for professional readers” and approached the public with a different proposition: “[architecture] requires no critical knowledge of its beauties to admit; neither are its mathematics necessary to a certain enjoyment of the associations that may be connected with a building.”5 In other words, plans, geometry, and other artifacts of specialized knowledge are impediments to actually knowing architecture and its history, and a general audience requires none of that. What they need is a basic level of historical knowledge introduced in an evocative manner so that “the joy of being competent to appreciate” can be unlocked in order to experience “the poetic enchantment of Architecture [that] transfixes the soul of the beholder, and leaves him spell-bound under the combined influence of the phantom past, and the palpable present”. Instead of relying on the empirical evidence of professionals alone, after just one tour through the palace of architecture, you will be in command of architectural knowledge as your “own poet”.
Wightwick’s preference for “speculation and belief” over technical demonstration was directed toward a very specific readership: idle women. The seemingly neutral “you” that drew readers into the palace grounds was in fact aimed at the “fair countrywomen of England”. At a time when female readership of both popular and specialized material was growing, the book is perhaps the first world architectural history written specifically with women in mind…
…
… Critical responses to Wightwick’s entreaty to female readers spanned from bemusement to venomous reproach. The Gentleman’s Magazine recognized that the book was not for the “scientific observer” of architecture but acknowledged that it could nonetheless “afford amusement to the ‘fair’ and fashionable admirers of the art”. W. H. Leeds, writing under the penname Candidus, was not so generous. He published an excoriating review that held the book up as an example of the withering effects of Romanticism on contemporary architectural discourse. He called Wightwick the “wickedest dog in existence” for audaciously dedicating his book not to any reputable institute, but “to a woman, or a no-man” and thinking “that romance has anything to do with art—at any rate, with architecture”. Leeds argued that Wightwick’s avoidance of technical description, scarce reference to plans, and indulgence in imagination threatened to turn architecture into an unserious field of curiosity, charm, and play — all words invariably tinged with the feminine. If Wightwick’s book gained the influence its author wanted, then surely “that which has hitherto been the task of a higher order of intellect is now to become the amusement of women—perhaps the plaything of children”. Careful to not appear ungentlemanly, Leeds clarified that he is not opposed to women enjoying or appreciating architecture in a passive way, but Wightwick’s encouragement of active speculation and creative rearrangement of architecture history was dangerous. “We object to it”, he reasoned, “not because we question the capacity or the sex, but because we see no occasion for increasing the number of designing women”. Where Wightwick saw idle women as eager consumers, Leeds was concerned that an overly enticing history would shock them out of their idleness and convince them that they, too, could make architecture.
Men like Leeds feared that “designing women” would disrupt two key aspects of English architectural culture, its homosociality and its claim to truth. The first was perhaps an annoyance, but the second could be disastrous. Leeds argued that women’s flimsy associations and predilection for exclamations like “how exceedingly pretty!” could trigger the collapse of all architectural knowledge made by men before them.23 Such anxiety represents the panic of a discipline whose propulsive drive to include more and more case studies and accommodate more and more readers also brought unwelcomed actors, like women, dangerously close to the inner circle of architectural expertise. The discrediting of Wightwick’s book shows the quick hardening of professional and epistemological borders to maintain credibility…
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… Into the twentieth century, architectural history remained stubbornly male dominated and the gendering of architectural fantasy and imagination as feminine stymied any hope that such ideas could gain professional credence. Things quickly changed in the 1960s, when young architects championed phenomenology as a critique of modernism’s universalizing assumptions about user experience. Historian Jorge Otero-Pailos argues that this phenomenological revolution allowed for a generation of so-called postmodern architects to challenge architectural history’s longstanding positivist bent. The buildings of Charles Moore, Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown playfully assemble specific and invented historical references, provoking the viewer in a manner that is not so dissimilar from Wightwick’s mutant palace gate.
While postmodernists experimented with architectural history, the written output of architectural historians such as Charles Jencks ironically remained somewhat conventional and tied to the explanatory textbook. Fantasy and imagination seemingly still carried an indelible stigma. However, a few recent books suggest a return of the repressed, so to speak. Françoise Fromonot’s The House of Doctor Koolhaas (2025) tells the history of a famous house by Rem Koolhaas through the genre conventions of a detective novel. Charlotte Van den Broeck’s Bold Ventures: Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy (2022) blends researched histories of architectural failure and suicide with self-reflective passages that question the authoritativeness of words like “explanation” that are so often used in history texts. Past authors are being rediscovered as well. Lin Huiyin’s mid-twentieth-century poems reflecting on a changing China are at last being translated and reframed as examples of architectural history. These texts are refreshingly strange — just as strange as walking into the Palace of Architecture — and signal that the discipline is finally shedding some of its enduring prejudices about imagination and fantasy…
As we dwell on design, we might send connected birthday greetings to an architect of a different kind, Sir Tim Berners-Lee; he was born on this date in 1955. A computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the browser, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP, he is a professorial research fellow at the University of Oxford, a professor emeritus at the MIT, and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees its continued development.
Neither do some myths. Ross MacFarlane on the lore of the seas…
Whether through their gleaming, glittering promotion of imagined (ever-improving) technological futures or their troubling “human zoo” displays of colonial peoples, a few World Fairs and Universal Expositions — the Great Exhibition of 1851 or Chicago World’s Fair of 1890 perhaps — have lived long in the imagination. Most, however, have not: the International Fisheries Exhibition of 1883 is among their number.
Between May and October of 1883, more than 2.6 million visitors travelled to see the spectacle in the grounds of the Royal Horticultural Society in London. At the centre of its displays from over thirty countries and colonies was an aquarium containing 65,000 gallons of water — the largest exhibition aquarium ever constructed. With an eye to posterity, the organisers did their best to promote themselves, creating a Literary Department that produced a variety of guides and handbooks for the exhibition throughout its six-month run. Two of these tie-in publications — Sea Monsters Unmasked and Sea Fables Explained — spoke particularly to the paradoxical place of the sea in both the imagination and science of the late nineteenth century: as a setting for tales of mysterious beasts, but also an increasingly scrutinised space for research on a shrinking globe.
Both books were written by Henry Lee (ca. 1826–1883), the former naturalist at the Brighton Aquarium and a prominent science communicator du jour. Numbering just over 100 pages each, Lee’s two brief works exude a Darwinian confidence. In them, a professional man of science, following in the great naturalist’s wake, exposes the follies of the past, rationalising traditional accounts through logical reasoning and recent discoveries in the marine world.
Although Lee narrates accounts of sea beasts to disprove them, the pamphlets also serve as unintended compendia of maritime folklore on aquatic cryptids…
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, we might recall that it was on this date in 1881 that a pertpetual motion machine was patented by John Sutliff…
Patent examiners are busy people, and when this application arrived at the U.S. Patent Office in 1881 it seemed innocuous enough — the inventor, John Sutliff, had called it simply “motor.” So they issued the patent.
It is, in fact, a perpetual motion machine. When ball L rolls to the left, it depresses the bellows, which fills the submerged bulb, raising the lever and turning cogwheel F. This pivots the box, which sends the ball back to the right, drawing air into the bellows and submerging the bulb again, “and so on alternately.”
Thus the cogwheel turns forever, driving shaft H, which you can hook up to anything you like. A convenient source of endless free energy, and it’s been under our noses all this time.
… and so we endeavor to teach the alphabet to young children. Hunter Dukes on an amusing– and revealing– example from the 18th century…
It’s as easy as ABC!It’s as easy as pie! In an abecedarium titled The Tragical Death of a Apple-Pye, both idioms come true, as children learn an alphabet whose letters greedily gorge on pastry.
The edition featured here was published by John Evans, a major contender in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century children’s literature. His formula was simple: undercut the competition, including John Newbery’s firm, by selling unprecedentedly affordable books. He captured an emerging market: children’s books for hard up families who had managed, against the odds, to acquire literacy. And while his competitors targeted a middle-class audience, Evans “stayed true to the street literature tradition in which he had been brought up”, writes literary historian Jonathan Cooper, who gives 1793–1796 as the likely date for Apple-Pye. It was printed on a press at No. 41 Long Lane, West Smithfield, and sold for a halfpenny, like Evans’ other sixteen-page chapbooks — a tiny format, roughly measuring 3.5 inches tall by 2.25 inches wide.
The book is really three texts in one. First comes an ABC list in which the “life and death” of an apple pie plays out across the alphabet. “Apple Pye, Bit it, Cut it, Dealt it, Eat it . . . Took it, View’d it, Wanted it, X, Y, Z, and &, they all wish’d for a piece in hand.” With so many letters vying for a slice, they decide together on an equitable solution: “They all agreed to stand in order / Round the Apple Pye’s fine border / Take turn as they in hornbook stand, / From great A, down to &”.
Next we encounter “A Curious Discourse That Passed Between the Twenty Five Letters at Dinner-Time”. The abecedarian order repeats, but now the letters speak. “Says A, give me a good large slice. . . . Says I, I love the juice the best.” Finally, Evans includes some self-promotion — “if my little readers are pleased with what they have found in this book, they have nothing to do but to run to Mr. Evans’s” — and a woodcut picture of “the old woman who made the Apple Pye”, which transitions abruptly into Christian pedagogy: “Grace before meat”, “Grace after meat”, “The Lord’s Prayer”. Like in other eighteenth-century children’s books, such as The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread, learning here is figured as a kind of gustatory consumption: children eat up the alphabet lesson, while its glyphic personifications wolf down their slices. (The link between sweets and syllabaries is more ancient still: Horace recorded teachers bribing pupils with letter-shaped biscuits to encourage their alphabetical uptake.)
Evans’ edition was published in the late eighteenth century — reworking a primer by Richard Marshall from the 1760s — but The Tragical Death of a Apple Pye is perhaps an even older story, first published, according to some scholars, in 1671. For a modern reader, it preserves English paleography as it existed in an earlier state: across the sections, U and V are used interchangeably, like I and J, and “&” is the ultimate letter, after Z. In an attempt to offset the ampersand’s semiotic difference, teachers well into the nineteenth century instructed students to pronounce the final letters of the alphabet as “x, y, z, and per se &”, hiving off the ampersand with the Latin by itself…
More on (and many more illustrations, including the image at the top, from) TTDoaAPhere, via “The Gentle Author.”
* Victor Hugo
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As we learn our letters, we might send instuctive birthday greetings to a woman still hoeing this row: Denise Fleming; she was born on this date in 1950. An award-winning illustrator and creator of children’s books, she has written dozens of volumes for the very young, among which was her contribution to the tradition of which Evans was a part…
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