{science} – Page 64 – { feuilleton }

Le Palais de l’Optique, 1900

Here at {feuilleton} the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 is never far away. This post is linked to those of the previous two days via the zodiac signs which decorate the lavish canopy on the Palais de l’Optique, one of the smaller exposition halls. The zodiac signs seem oddly inappropriate for displays of scientific endeavour until you discover that the principal attraction was François Deloncle’s Grande Lunette, or Great Telescope, one of the largest refracting telescopes ever built.

The astrological signs, then, signify the heavens which the telescope allowed an audience to view on a giant screen. The elegant poster advertising the attraction is by Georges Paul Leroux (1877–1957), and was discovered at Gatochy’s Flickr pages. The diagram below shows the colossal scale of thing and—appropriately—ought to be viewed at a larger size on Pignouf’s page. When you consider the small scale of film projections in 1900 the screenings from this monster must have been quite spectacular. The Exposition Universelle 3D Project has additional photos.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exposition Universelle films
• Exposition jewellery
• Exposition Universelle catalogue
• Exposition Universelle publications
• Exposition cornucopia
• Return to the Exposition Universelle
• The Palais Lumineux
• Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
• Exposition Universelle, 1900
• The Palais du Trocadéro

Weekend links 26

The interior of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County “Old Main” Building, 1874. Reblogged over the past few days on numerous Tumblr postings, none of whom had bothered to find out any details about the picture. I’m with Silent Porn Star on the contextless reblogging issue.

• Keith Richards et Mick Jagger à Londres, TV interviews with the Glimmer Twins from 1968 with some remarkable footage in the second half of Jagger filming the penultimate shot of Performance. That French video site requires further exploration. Also there is a short film from 1961 with Jacques Lasry demonstrating the Cristal Baschet. Related: Jacques Doyen & Jacques Lasry play their Cristals while Arlette Thomas and others read French poetry. I wrote something about the mystery of the Cristal two years ago this week.

• Two great album cover blogs from Jive Time Records: Project Thirty-Three is “a shrine to circles, dots, squares, rectangles and triangles, and the designers that make them come to life on album covers” while Groove Is In The Art “celebrates the era when psychedelic graphics and pop art met the mainstream”.

• At A Journey Round My Skull: Night Hallucinations: illustrations by Jaroslav Šerých for Tales of the Uncanny (Prague, 1976); Snark, Strangeness and Charm, Mahendra Singh’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll and others.

Laurence Chaves illustrates De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

• Austin Osman Spare: Fallen Visionary at the Cuming Museum, Southwark, London in September, “will be the largest showcase of [Spare’s] work in a public museum since his death in 1956.” Jerusalem Press are publishing an expensive monograph to accompany the exhibition.

• Freeing “Pale Fire” From Pale Fire; “the next big Nabokov controversy”. Probably not but the thesis is an interesting one.

• Quintessential ‘topiary’ in Gandalf’s Garden: Barney Bubbles, head shops and Op Art graphic design.

• Monster Brains discovered some more paintings by Thomas Häfner.

• Spaceweather’s Northern Lights gallery.

• The passion of Krzysztof Penderecki.

• More Bookshelf porn.

• White peacocks.

• Sussan Deyhim: Daylaman | Desert Equations (for Brion Gysin) (with Richard Horowitz) | An interview at WorldStreams.

Several links this week via Adrian Shaughnessy’s Twitter feed. Thanks!

Liceti’s monsters

Illustrations from De monstrorum natura, caussis, et differentiis libri duo (On the nature, causes and differences of monsters, 1616) by Italian scientist Fortunio Liceti who we’re told has a crater on the Moon named after him. Further images from Liceti and his contemporaries can be found at Les Monstres de la Renaissance à l’âge classique, an online exhibition of assorted teratisms, prodigies and abominations. Via Monsieur Peacay, no monster he.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Skeleton clocks

Behold the complexity of the Smith of Clerkenwell skeleton clock from 1865, one of many such intricate devices at this site devoted to the collection, restoration and construction of skeleton clocks old and new. The Clerkenwell manufacturers also made a musical version of this machine and I like this moonphase astronomical clock from 1870. Don’t mention Steampunk, these chronometers are surely Clockpunk if they’re anything.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Midsummer Chronophage
• The Corpus Clock

Portuguese Diseases

This volume appears to be in print now, the Portuguese edition of The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, a unique fantasy anthology compiled in 2003 by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts. The new edition is published by Saida de Emergência and translated by Luís Rodrigues, João Seixas and Vítor Morta. I didn’t design this cover with its eccentric kerning but I did design the original edition for Night Shade, to date still one of my most elaborate and detailed book designs, too elaborate for the larger publishing houses, in fact, who either dropped or amended the deliberately diseased title spread for their paperback editions. You can see some of the original pages below. I sent the Portuguese publishers all the artwork and layouts but since I haven’t seen a printed copy of the book I don’t know how the interior looks. I don’t even know whether my name appears on the cover as it does here since other examples online show a different design. However, it’s often the case these days that cover designs get sent out prematurely for marketing purposes before things have been finalised.

Title spread.

Contents spread.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Pasticheur’s Addiction