Duplicates

Image from the Early Office Museum

"Don't you know what duplicates are?" an incredulous Groucho Marx asks brother Chico in one of their better-known skits. "Sure," replies Chico, "that's a five kids up in Canada." The joke was a reference to the Dionne quintuplets born in Ontario in 1934, two of whom are still alive today. But of course we all know what duplicates are -- or do we? We're so used to the ability to make scans or photocopies today that the earlier copying technology of the 1960's and '70's -- the "Ditto," Mimeograph, or Gestetner machines -- seems almost impossibly antique. And yet it's still possible to re-create some of these earlier methods of copying today, such as the Hektograph (above), a precursor to the rotary mimeograph which also used aniline dye; instead of mounting the master copy of a cylinder, it was simply placed in a bed of gelatine, and the dye allowed to soak in; subsequent copies were made by simply placing a blank piece of paper on the gelatine and then peeling it off. Simple Hektograph kits were sold as late as the 1950's and can still be had on eBay or Etsy -- or one can, fairly easily, make one's own almost from scratch. And, while you're waiting for the gelatine to solidify, why not read the Early Office Museum's excellent History of Copying Machines?

A Few Talking Machine Records

This steroeview, part of a promotional set offered by the Sears, Roebuck Company to illustrate the plenitude and variety of its store offerings in 1906, shows how 78 rpm phonograph records were stored; before shipping or sale, a paper sleeve would be added. The long shot emphasizes the vast array of disks available, just waiting to be shipped to your front door. Note that the employee in this photo is wearing a special, shoulder-length glove on his left hand, to avoid scratching the discs! You can view an entire set of these stereoviews in this Flickr album, starting with card no. 1 -- Mr. Sears himself, of course!

Mona Darkfeather

In the annals of non-Indian actors portraying native American Indians in early silent films, Mona Darkfeather (born Josephine Workman) was among the most successful. She appeared in 110 films between 1910 and 1917, nearly always as an "Indian Maiden" figure. The studios she worked with -- Bison, Selig Polyscope, Nestor, Kalem, Universal -- were a who's who of early silent film, and her name and face were advertised with no irony whatsoever as though she were unquestionably

authentic, following the claim -- perhaps her own -- that she was a full-blooded Seminole. White men were often called upon to throw themselves on her mercy, lest some fearsome "chief" demand their death -- or, alternately, she would form a romantic attachment with a trader and run off with her beau. She had her own, impressive stationery, and succeeded consistently until the late 'teens, when -- for whatever reason -- the demand for her kind of role dried up. She did a few stage plays, divorced (and later remarried) her husband-manager Frank Montgomery, and lived to the ripe old age of 95. Her grave in Culver City is said to be unmarked.

Asylum cinema

One might not think about it, but one of the early uses of cinema film was to provide entertainment at many of the large residential psychiatric facilities -- then often known as "Asylums" -- in the US and the UK. Nowadays, of course, television provides a more wall-to-wall carpet of imagery, but back in the 1920's and '30's, full-size cinemas were a feature at many British asylums. The one shown above was found, still in place and in nearly working order, at the Stone House Asylum in Kent. The best-known patient at this facility was doubtless the poet and composer Ivor Gurney, now recognized as a significant "war poet," and whose compositions are still performed. Whether or not he attended the cinema is not known, but this projector -- a Gaumont Kalee 18 Carbon Arc model -- was successfully removed and restored; you can see a video of it in operation.

Elvish in Old English

In the annals of creating manuscript facsimiles with a false (but playful) sense of age, this document has a curious history. In the early stages of his subcreation, J.R.R. Tolkien composed a number of new texts in Old English, in which he described the creation of the world in the Elder Days; his original plan was to have all of the "Lost Tales" -- an early source of the legends later gathered in the Silmarillion -- recounted by a father to his son in Old English.

This is my own calligraphic interpretation of one of these texts, which I made in 1988 as a diversion when I was enrolled in Professor Geoffrey Russom's Old English class at Brown University.  Following Tolkien's own practice with his "Book of Mazarbul," I aged and discolored the document with an ink wash and a spell in the oven. Those with an acquaintance with the West Saxon dialect will have no trouble deciphering the text, which begins with "After that, the All-father, who in Elvish is called Iluuvatar created the world." The page is also preserved as part of Oxford University's excellent Woruldhord site, which collects all manner of resources for the study and teaching of Old English. And as for Professor Russom, he was not fooled. He took one glance at the fruit of my labors and muttered, "Tolkien, eh?" And then it was back to translating the Battle of Maldon.

Das Eskimobaby

In the annals of real and purported "Eskimos" on screen, there may well be no stranger depiction than that given by Asta Nielsen in Heinz Schall's 1916 film, Das Eskimobaby. Neilsen, known for her ability to delivery quirky performances, outdoes herself here as a Greelandic Eskimo, "Ivigtut," suddenly transported from her native land to Berlin, where the explorer who brought her there treats her as some exotic specimen. It's a riff on the old "civilizing the native" trope that had already become a movie staple, but Nielsen's furious resistance to civilization and all it represents makes for some manic scenes. She doesn't understand mirrors (of course) is repulsed by beards, beds, and western clothing, and refuses to shed her fur pants for a formal gathering. The film survives, and has been released by Edition Filmmuseum as part of their Four films with Asta Nielsen.

Batman

The impact of the original Batman television series on kids in the early 1960's would be hard to overstate. The first 45 rpm record I ever bought was the Batman theme song, and I persuaded my next door neighbor, a professional sign painter, to paint a sign for my tree fort that read "Bat Man House This Way" (I was disappointed, though, when he deliberately misspelled some words and painted it in a 'kiddie' font). These kinds of things are hard to measure, or record, but this photo from the Cleveland Press Collection at Cleveland State University comes close; here are some kids, dressed in their Sunday best, who have taken up residence in a Bat-cave of their own, with a chalked-up logo and a hole in the floor for extra Bat-realism. If I could have known where in Cleveland these kids were, I'd have wanted to join their club!

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.

A Girl and her Dog, 30 Years Later

When I posted the image of Labradorean Inuit celebrity Nancy Columbia and her dog at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904, the post got quite a lot of views. Miss Columbia was indeed, as my friend Kenn Harper has aptly said, the "most famous Inuk in the world," the star of stage and screen (she wrote and appeared in "The Way of the Eskimo," produced by Selig Polyscope in 1911). But by the time this photo was taken sometime in the 1930's she'd married, had a daughter, and retired almost completely from public appearances; indeed, this may have been her last. By this time, she was living in the Santa Monica area in Los Angeles, and the photos above -- staged on a backdrop with a little "snow" on it -- appears to have come from some dog show; it's part of a sequence of dog show photos on glass plates that were part of the Security Pacific Bank Collection, and which are today -- happily -- available to the public via the digital photo collections of the Los Angeles Public Library, where I was able to help them identify the photo's subject in 2010. 

From Nightclubs to Christ

Dr. Jack Van Impe was certainly an impassioned preacher in his younger days -- so impassioned that at several points on this early recording he's completely overcome with zeal, and the words seem to tumble from his mouth faster than he can assemble them into sense. The best segments here are his rants against  Rock music, which he declares is "more dangerous than heroin, LSD, or any drug you can name." There's a comparison to Pavlov's dogs ("the beat means eat!") and a warning that by 1973 this "dirty, lascivious, filthy rock mucic" will have kids "committing sex openly on the street." It was a DJ sampling classic for ages, and was used by (among others) Rage Against the Machine, DJ Shadow, and Pizzaman (the last of whom hired an actor to lip-synch the reverend's lines in his video). The LP is long out of print, and clips are still surprisingly hard to find online (doubtless Van Impe and his current ministries are not pleased), but at least one long segment is on YouTube.

Masonic Insurance

Back in the 1920's, insurance companies offered a variety of special plans to members of fraternal organizations -- the Odd Fellows, the Elks, the Moose, and of course the Masons -- at a discounted rate. On the theory that these memberships constituted a pool of respectable and less risk-prone sorts, these policies went for as little as $2.00 a year, as in the advertisement above from a Masonic magazine. There were just a few disqualifiers -- 'fits and disorders of the brain' -- but these were to be self-reported, again on the theory that those who belonged to such social fraternities were more likely to be honest. Some of the companies established for this purpose, like Acacia, went on to become large insurance companies for the general public; there's an interesting history of Masonic insurance available here.

Alice Guy Goes North

Watching the first episode of Mark Cousins's Story of Film on TCM, I was glad to see him credit the pioneering director Alice Guy-Blaché as the person to very nearly invent the idea of a story arc. A number of the films she made for Gaumont are readily available on DVD from Kino Lorber, but very her early American films, produced for Solax with her husband Herbert are much less well-known. The Blachés were innovators not only in story lines, but in portraying such things as the struggles of immigrants or the everyday life of an African-American family, that many studios didn't think were screenworthy. And here, in an advert from 1911, is another genre-busting film; more than a decade before Nanook of the North, the Blachés tackled Arctic exploration as a film subject. The movie, alas, is not known to have survived, but it was probably filmed in Saranac Lake, New York, at a film 'camp' established by champion dog-musher Caribou Bill Cooper; Cooper's "Arctic Film Company" rented out its sets and dog-teams for all manner of early "Northern" films.

Rescuing Balto

Most people still know something of the story Balto, the Siberian Husky who led his dog team on the crucial final link of the serum run to Nome, Alaska in 1925. And yet, despite the engaging animated version of Balto's life, and its (forgettable) sequels, few realize that, within a year or two after his heroic feat, Balto himself needed rescuing -- from a dime museum where he was confined, ill-treated, and exploited by a showman in search of that "one thin dime" from his customers. As news of Balto's situation spread, the good people of Cleveland, Ohio stepped up with a "Balto fund" that collected enough money to buy him and six of his companions from the museum and install him in permanent, comfortable home at the city's zoo. Balto's arrival was heralded by a parade on March 19, 1927, which was well-attended despite the rain. Balto lived out his years in comfort with top veterinary care; after his death in 1933, his remains were taxidermied and placed in a case at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History -- where they may still be seen today. You can read more about Balto's life and career here.

The American Woman is Becoming Ugly

Courtesy of the Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries

Ugly is as ugly does -- and there were few characters on the lecture circuit in the 1920's and 1930's uglier than Dr. Albert Wiggan. Wiggan was a tireless lecturer and advocate for "eugenics" -- the word comes from the Greek for "good genes" -- the now long-since discredited pseudoscience which used spurious and vague notions of ability and "imbecility" to cook up evidence that immigration, "race mixing," and poor people having large families were a threat to the future of the human race. The image above comes from a pamphlet promoting his lectures on the Redpath Chautauqua Circuit, a popular, barnstorming tent full of lecturers that packed them in from coast to coast.

On bokes for to rede

This stray leaf -- all that remains of a copy of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night -- is from the library of my grandfather Scot Butler Clarke. It was presented to him by Hiram College professor John S. Kenyon, chair of the English department. Perhaps it was a prize for some scholarly achievement; perhaps a personal gift (my great-grandfather Elbert was a math professor at Hiram for many years, and all of his children went there). The quote on the bookplate is Chaucer, of course, from the Prologue to his Legend of Good Women, and the fragment has two more leaves, the first stating "The Riverside Shakespeare," and the second with a copperplate engraving of the Middle Temple Hall -- which still stands -- and where Twelfth Night was first performed in 1602.