Evenings on the lake

Pop-up and Movable Books: A Tour Through Their History

via Scrubbles:

UNT Libraries: Pop-up and Movable Books: A Tour Through Their History

The Old Car Manual Project

Billed as an online help forum for restorers of classic cars, this site contains a very nice helping of vintage automotive sales brochures. For those interested in advertising art and mid-century design (like me), this site is a treasure-trove...

Brochures - The Old Car Manual Project

Note: this is a Geocities webpage. Please be aware that bandwidth and load-times may be affected.

Zinken

Jørgen Holm's website serves as a convenient collection point for recent news concerning archaeology, evolution, and Martian exploration. Of particular interest are his links to recent paleolithic artifact discoveries such as this:

Zinken

Goodbye Captain

Today, I am definately feeling my age. With the passing of Bob Keeshan today (just announced over the news wires), and Fred Roger's passing last year, almost all my most familiar childhood television companions are now gone...

Design Observer

is a rather nice site dedicated to sundry design and culture topics. One of the contributors to this site is Jessica Helfand, whose book Reinventing the Wheel {concerning the historic development and use of volvelles (wheel charts)} is near the top of my must-read-in-the-very-near-future list.

Design Observer

Edward Burtynsky

Via Boing Boing, the photography of Edward Burtynsky

Siberian Photos

An interesting colection of late 19th century photos of Siberia, courtesy of the library at UC Berkeley.

Siberian Photos

Chautauqua

Now half forgotten, the Chautauqua movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries represented a significant aspect of American cultural life. Begun in 1874 as a series of lectures to educate Sunday School Teachers, the Chautauqua concept quickly grew beyond its humble origins to become a nation-wide phenomenon. At its zenith, the traveling Chautauquas appeared in over 10,00 communities and were experienced by an estimated 45 million people.

Basically a Chautauqua was a multi-day "summer camp" in which a number of lecturers, actors, musicians, and humorists would make entertaining and edifying presentations on various topics to small town audiences. The audience would crowd into tents over successive days to hear a series of orations and concerts designed to entertain and uplift them. Combining elements of tent-revivalism and the self-improvement movement, the Chautauqua became a potent vehicle for rural Americans to gain knowledge and experience a taste of "intellectual" culture. In an era predating the widespread existence of radio, movie theaters (Chautauqua tents served as some of the very first venues for the screening of motion pictures), and television, the Chautaqua was really one of the first expressions of American mass culture.

Perhaps the best (and certainly most exhaustive) web resource on the Chautauqua Movement comes from the University of Iowa Library's collection, Traveling Culture: Circuit Chautauquas of the 20th Century, which is linked through the Library of Congress' staggeringly deep American Memory project.

A small series of chautauqua photos from the Cowley County Historical Museum in Southern Kansas. This link is somewhat fitful, so please be patient while it loads.

Maqroll the Gaviero

He is the sort of individual few of us will ever meet, but whose existence (even in the fictional realm) emphatically speaks to the unimaginable complexity of human existence. He is a man imbued with a strange moral rectitude and a philosophical vision which approaches at times the aridity and beauty of Camus' existentialist ideal. The Gaviero's existence seems so rich and yet so infinitely sad to his readers precisely because it embodies the shifting, provisional nature of what one might call the drifting life. It is a kind of rootless cosmopolitanism which, while admitting adventure and exoticism in its frequently sordid particulars, is nevertheless imbued with the knowledge of inevitable defeat and oblivion, a necessary fatalism whose starkness is thrown into greater and greater relief even as we learn more and more of Maqroll's story.

And yet... The very act of reading the Gaviero's adventures makes it more difficult to actually understand him; his essential nature (not unlike that of Emma Bovary's, to use a somewhat dubious comparison) is actually obscured by the accretion of event and circumstance around him. As Mutis' novellas progress, Maqroll begins to elude us, to become less a character (with attendent symbolic baggage, etc.) and more of a cipher, someone whose true nature is forever closed to us. And perhaps this is the real triumph of Maqroll the Gaviero (and by extension, that of his author): he transcends the limits of his fictional life and becomes--like all compelling figures in literature--almost real.

The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, by Alvaro Mutis

Also, an interview with Alvaro Mutis, courtesy of Bomb Magazine.

Illuminations: Revisiting the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition of 1901

Remembered primarily as the scene of President McKinley's assassination, the 1901 Pan-American Exposition was also a hugely important moment in American cultural history.

Following 8 years after the successful 1893 Chicago Exposition, the 1901 fair represented not the dawning of American triumphalism, but certainly its apotheosis. With exhibits from around the globe, as well as the latest technological marvels (infant incubators, a whole pavilion devoted to the wonders and power of electricity), the Buffalo Exposition might be viewed as the defining inaugural moment in what was to be called "the American Century."

The Library at SUNY Buffalo has compiled an amazingly useful amount of information on the Pan-American Exposition, bringing together primary materials as well as a whole slew of useful essays on various aspects of the event.

Illuminations: Revisiting the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition of 1901