Geographica Incognita

One of my favorite genres of writing is what might be loosely categorized as facetiæ -- writings which pretend to be something, complete with all its apparatus, but are in fact something else. The genre goes back at least as far as Lucian's True History, and this sense of the word "history" -- as in The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling -- evokes perfectly the form I love most. My novel Pyg is cast in much the same mold.

Some years before that, though, my friend and colleague Jon Hauss and I wrote a shorter text of this kind, giving it the impressive title Geographica Incognita -- "Unknown Geography." It was, like its source texts (Poe's "Descent into a Maelstrom," "MS. Found in a Bottle," and the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym), framed as a quite serious study, though one undertaken with playful purposes. Jon and I dubbed it a "collapseration." And the editors of the New Orleans Review quite liked it, and published in in 1999 in an issue which is now, happily, available online for free.

The Soul of Edgar A. Poe

From The Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 25, 1860

Faithful followers of this blog will have read some weeks ago of the curious case of the stolen "Ultima Thule" Daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe, and of its likely thief, the "comic songster" Ossian Euclid Dodge. Mr. Dodge, though not a young man, headed west, and set up a music shop in Cleveland, Ohio, on Euclid Avenue, a thoroughfare whose name must have gratified his ego. While there, he permitted his purloined photograph to be copied, as well as used as the subject of a portrait in oils of Poe by the painter and sculptor William Walcutt. Alas, Walcutt's painting too has become lost over the intervening epoch, along with his reputation -- aside from a few scattered references in the press of his day, there are few of his works in museums today, and even the date of his death -- 1882 or 1895 -- is uncertain. His one remaining work of note is the Perry Monument in Cleveland.

The 'Annie' Daguerreotype of Poe

Unknown maker, American, daguerreotypist; Edgar Allan Poe, late May - early June 1849, Daguerreotype; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

There are two reasons for celebrating the 'Annie' Daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe -- first, the portrait itself, named after Mrs. Anne Richmond, Poe's friend and the original owner of the photograph, and the curious story of its making and her care of it (she survived Poe by fifty years), and secondly, because it is among the images being made freely available by the Getty Trust as part of its new Open Content program. Following the lead of the Rijksmuseum, the Getty is making a wide array of high-res images of its collections -- any in which no other copyright is known -- available for free to anyone. It is a bold move, and one I personally welcome; there's nothing that so irks a researcher as inordinate fees for images which -- other than the fact that the museum owns their originals -- would long be out of copyright.

The "Ultima Thule" Portrait

It is, perhaps, one of the most famous portraits in the world, so ubiquitous in print and online that no one seems to realize that the original has gone missing. I refer to the "Ultima Thule" Daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe, which was stolen along with its large black walnut frame from the photographer's store window at 33 Westminster Street, Providence, sometime in the late 1850's. Daguerreotypes, of course, are "one offs" -- there is no way, strictly speaking, to print another from them -- but one can take a fairly good, though far from perfect, Daguerreotype of a Daguerreotype, and it was through this means that the "Ultima Thule" portrait has come down to us today, and become so common. Indeed, the source for most reproductions is a third-generation copy at the Library of Congress, which bears its maker's attempt to obtain copyright in 1904.

But who stole the original of this Daguerreotype? And where is it now? Click here to find out more.