London’s Folly

Posted on August 2, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

I’ve spent a lot of time in London over the last two centuries and I’ve visited hundreds of local tourist attractions. I even wrote a guidebook for budget travelers to the city. But I’ve never seen anything like the latest tourism failure from the Westminster Council.

The Marble Arch Mound or Marble Arch Hill is a temporary, 25-meter(82 ft) high artificial hill erected near the famous 1820s Marble Arch by Hyde Park. It has a viewing platform on the top that’s reached by climbing a metal stairway and  a planned interior event space. There were also plans for an art gallery and a foodhall. The exterior was supposed to be covered in grass and lavishly landscaped. However, when the Mound opened to the public on July 26th, it lacked all of the advertized amenities. After the initial visitors complained about paying £4.50 to climb some stairs for a uninspiring view of Oxford Street, it quickly closed shortly afterwards.

According to the Westminster City Council, the attraction will soon re-open and stay up until January, 2022. I still don’t see why anyone would pay to climb a small artifical hill when London has so many more attractive viewing spots, including some pretty great real hills.

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August

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

 

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Serpentine Saturday

Posted on July 31, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

The wavy patterns on the edges, covers, and endpapers on this tooled and blind-stamped, half-bound book are from Carew’s Survey of Cornwall . This edition was printed in London by Thomas Bensley for J. Faulder and Rees and Curtis in 1811, although Carew’s book was originally published in 1602.  The marbled-paper pattern on this volume is what the University of Washington’s site on Patterned Papers identifies as Serpentine.

The pattern begins with a Turkish base. “A comb with one set of teeth is drawn through the bath twice vertically, once in either direction with the second pass halving the first. This step is repeated horizontally. Then the final step is to draw a comb, with one set of teeth set at slightly wider intervals, through the bath once vertically in wavy lines reminiscent of the way in which a snake moves.“ As we’ve noted before, when marbling the edges of a book, the text block is clamped tightly shut, and once dipped, the excess fluid is blown or shaken off quickly to prevent it from running into the book. Once dry, the marbled edges are burnished.

The frontispiece is a portrait of Richard Carew from 1586, rendered here as a stipple engraving by English engraver William Evans. Carew is shown holding a book with the Latin inscription Invita Morte Vita (In spite of life and death), and in the background there is an allegorical hammer and anvil with the Italian inscription Chi’verace durerà (Who is true will last).

 

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Subtle Differences

Posted on July 30, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

 

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THE STRANGE HISTORY OF A MYSTERIOUS BEING

Posted on July 29, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

I recently fell down a rabbithole after seeing a reference to 19th century American “Hollow Earth” proponents who toured the country giving lectures on the purported existence of a society living within the earth’s center. Some of these so-called explorers even raised funds for expeditions to reach the center of the earth. In the course of my own rambles, I stumbled on the novel Etidorhpa by John Uri Lloyd.

The book Etidorhpa; or, the End of the Earth: the Strange History of a Mysterious Being and the Account of a Remarkable Journey, is John Uri Lloyd’s whimsical take on the “hollow earth” genre. Published by the Cincinnati-based pharmacologist John Uri Lloyd in 1895, the novel focuses on a man named Johannes Llewellyn Llongollyn Drury, studying occult and alchemic phenomena, receives an unexpected visitor late in the night. A white-haired man teleports into his parlor. The old man entrusts a manuscript to our narrator, recounting events that transpired three decades earlier, and eventually introduces himself by the odd name of “I—Am—The—Man—Who—Did—It”.

The story then switches to content of the manuscript, which tells of the old man’s kidnapping by a secret hermetic society. His captors forced him to prematurely age in order to disguise his identity. Soon after, I—Am—The—Man is indentured to a guide, who is essentially a lizard man. The reptilian leads the now-aged man to the underworld (the entrance of which, we learn, is to be found in Kentucky). It’s like Dante meets Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland meets contemporary internet conspiracy theories about “the reptilian elite”. As Drury and the creature descend into the earth’s interior, their ever-evolving philosophical debate finds new scenery: forests of colossal fungi; a field of Brobdingnag hands affixed to the bodies of Lilliputians; and the experience of “eternity without time.”

The book’s title derives from an encounter with a being named “Etidorhpa”, who appears after I—Am—The—Man declines to drink a distillation of “derivates of the rarest species of the fungus family”. Instead of drugs, he is intoxicated by this seraphic creature, whose rhetorical flourishes almost eclipse her physical beauty. “The universe bows to my authority”, she says. “Stars and suns enamored pulsate and throb in space and kiss each other in waves of light; atoms cold embrace and cling together; structures inanimate affiliate with and attract inanimate structures; bodies dead to other noble passions are not dead to love.” She later introduces herself as an entity once known as Venus, but whose true name is Etidorhpa (“Aphrodite” in reverse).

If you are intrigued, it’s possible to read and download a digital version of the pre-Jules Verne Journey to the Center of the Earth at the Project Gutenberg website right here.

 

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War of the Worlds

Posted on July 28, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

I have been intrigued by the H.G. Wells iconic science fiction novel  War of the Worlds since I first read the book as a 10 year-old. The terrifying tale was first serialized in nine issues of Pearson’s Magazine (1897/98) with illustrations by Warwick Goble. These got reprinted in the first American edition of the book in 1898, but the original British book length edition published in 1898 was issued without any illustrations. However,the first Dutch translation from 1899 was published with 10 original drawings. The artwork was created by Jacobus Hendrik Speenhoff who was better known as a cabaret performer than an artist. De Strijd der Werelden was published in Amsterdam by Cohen Zonen and remains a highly sought after version by collectors on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

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If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear

Posted on July 26, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

TIL that Mary Shelley actually wrote her groundbreaking novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus while she was living in Bath, England. I also discovered that the new Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein, opened in Bath last week. The multimedia museum commemorates Shelley’s life and work over 205 years since she penned the now iconic book.

The new attraction tells the story behind the genesis of Frankenstein. Blurring the lines between museum and immersive experience, the museum celebrates the legacy of Shelley’s work across four atmospheric floors exploring the tragic life events and radical scientific thinking that inspired her imagination.

Bath’s newest museum covers all things Frankenstein from literature and pop culture, including movie memorabilia, artwork, books, and bizarre collectibles. There’s even a spookie basement multi-sensory experience.

 

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trembling with the same cicada sound

Posted on July 25, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

Here in the Northeastern U.S. we are experiencing the emergence of a brood of 17-year cicadas. Sitting in my garden listening to the noisy insects, I was reminded of this very short piece by the late American poet W.S. Merwin:

 

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For a cat every day is caturday

Posted on July 24, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

 

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where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people

Posted on July 23, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

While recently helping a friend plan a trip to Berlin, I encouraged him to visit the brilliant memorial at Bebelplatz in the Mitte District.

On May 10, 1933, in the Bebelplatz in central Berlin, members of the Nazi Student Union burned 20,000 books, objecting to the “un-German spirit” of many Jewish, Communist, gay, and liberal authors. Joseph Goebbels declared that “the era of exaggerated Jewish intellectualism is now at an end … and the future German man will not just be a man of books … this late hour [I] entrust to the flames the intellectual garbage of the past.”

In 1995, Israeli sculptor Micha Ullman created a memorial room under the plaza, with empty shelves enough to accommodate 20,000 books. A plaque set into the cobblestones bears a quote by Heinrich Heine:

That was but a prelude;
where they burn books,
they will ultimately burn people as well.

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