Companion to the Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture

Matthew Holbeche Bloxam - Companion to the Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture (1882)

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As you may have gathered I have a weakness for many types of older scholarship even if, as in this case, I don't have much interest in the subject.  This book's wonderful title, though, hides something even more specific - the book is entirely about vestments from the period of Edward VI as seen in church and other religious decoration.  Since the author starts immediately on the topic with no introduction I'm not sure if there's any particular reason for selecting it - maybe personal leanings, maybe attempting to reconstruct what was lost during the dissolution of the churches, maybe there was just a lot of material.  (By the way, the book that this companions can also be found on Open Library.)  In any case good for that antiquarian itch even if you're not an architectural or Church historian.

Ladies' Manual of Art

Ladies' Manual of Art (1887)

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A guide to all types of decorative art and crafts (their idea of ladies' art) that starts with rudiments of drawing and goes to move involved forms such as stained glass, oil color landscapes, paper-flower making.  It's interesting to see crafts that no longer exist or more likely have been mechanized so much that nobody does them by hand - Pearl Embroidery on Velvet, Vitrimanie, Wax Art, China Painting.  The book doesn't hesitate to include photography and even taxidermy!  Not many craft manuals today would explain how to preserve insects and certainly not intestinal worms (p279).

As you can see from the second illustration below it's generally on such an introductory level that I'm not sure the instructions would help anybody learn anything.  Who could possibly figure out how to draw from being shown the idea of perspective?  The previous pages even explained what a circle is.  I don't think this is entirely due to it being aimed at the "Ladies" in the title since the introduction says this is also intended to teach children.

The Encyclopædia of Face and Form Reading

Mary Olmstead Stanton - The Encyclopædia of Face and Form Reading (1889)

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When starting this blog I expected to include more crank/kook works but they've been sparse in the digital library (though the rest of the digital world is overrun with them).  My suspicion is that digitized books are drawn from libraries who tended to either not collect this material or to have purged it over the years.  And there might not just been too many printed during this public-domain time.  Sure, there's a fair amount of spiritualist and Theosophical material but that seems quaint today if not outright dreary and hardly worth the trouble.

The Encyclopædia of Face and Form Reading is full-blown kook territory, maybe not as amusing as elaborate Illuminati conspiracies or cryptozoological fantasies but it has all the marks of somebody gripped in an obsession.  For one thing it's 1200 pages of dense, small type.  Stanton is certain about physiognomy, the idea that a person's outside appearance indicates their character and has created an elaborate, detailed system to present her conception.  It's minutely detailed, categorized and sub-categorized - if nothing else the structural presentation is quite impressive and I'll have to admit that Stanton was a fairly sturdy and clear prose stylist.  Still, the overall effect is bizarre.  A contemporary review of one of Stanton's earlier books in The Atlantic Monthly (1883, p719) said "No one who had not previously seen a human face would be likely to recognize it in the extraordinary collection of faces which illustrate this volume. Indeed, the general analysis of the human being leaves one a little in doubt whether he ever saw a man or woman."

Some excerpts:

"A high cultivation of the color-sense is a religious duty, and all parents should see that their children are instructed in this direction. The lives of thousands are dependent upon knowledge of colors, as in comprehending the signals by colored lights at sea and on railways. Boys, particularly, should be instructed in chromatics, as many of them will follow professions which necessitate the knowledge of colors." (p412)

"A round dimple in the chin denotes art-loving tastes, for the reason that a round dimple is caused by a combination of the round muscle with the round bone, and this combination is the one best adapted to assist every species of art-work, except sculpture. The latter requires square bones and round muscles for its best illustration." (p777)

"I believe that the squareness of his [Beethoven's] bony system, which is well defined in his forehead and shoulders, had a great influence upon his conduct, causing it to be square and honest." (p678)

"A comedian of the first rank must possess high artistic qualities and a many-sided nature. He must be adaptable and keenly apprehensive. He requires a very sensitive brain and a nervous system of fine quality, together with a large endowment and fine degree of muscle, an excellent thoracic development, and a good share of the vegetative system, to give power to the domestic and social sentiments and to afford nutrition essential to his arduous labors." (p1130)

It's easy enough to mock this today though many if not most people still think some milder variation is true - how often do you hear somebody explain what body language means or how certain facial movements indicate that somebody is lying, even though clearly if these have any truth at all it's very narrow and contingent.  Stanton apparently has no doubts whatsoever but it's hard not to wonder.  Reading that first excerpt (and she goes on about color for a few more pages) makes it seem like people had some widespread color-viewing deficiency.  Elsewhere she makes definite statements about things she can't possibly know - Julius Caesar's thoracic capacity for instance.  And her standards would appear to exclude most of us from the highest quality,  (Physiognomy is easily racist and though I'm certain there must be examples in this book Stanton seems to have not bothered.)

I've found little information about Stanton.  She was a member of the Pacific Coast Woman's Press Association and even briefly its treasurer.  She lived at Monterey Bay, California and her husband apparently was A.P. Stanton, business manager of the San Francisco newspaper Argonaut.

Geophagy

Berthold Laufer - Geophagy (1930)

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This is the final post in the Berthold Laufer series.  There's more but the remaining available books tend to be straightforwardly scholarly and the other interesting titles don't appear to have been digitized yet - Was Odoric of Pordenone Ever in Tibet? (1912), The Gold Treasure of the Emperor Chien Lung of China (1934), Oriental Theatricals (1923).  You can view The Bird-Chariot in China and Europe (1906) at The Hathi Trust but I haven't based posts on that source because downloading requires that you be associated with a partner library.

When I was a kid there was a small embankment where the road by my father's office was cut through a hill.  From time to time people would come by and dig handfuls of a white clay out of the embankment which it turns out they would eat.  The story is that their diet was missing certain nutrients and this is how they filled that need.  Whether that's true or whether that's just why everybody thought this practice existed wasn't clear.  My father says he hasn't seen anybody do this in twenty or so years so maybe it's died out.

Laufer's Geophagy looks at this practice in a wide variety of cultures and times.  (Though sadly he's a bit too hopeful noting "The days are gone when the discussion of a problem started with the Greeks and Romans whose importance in the history of civilization is not much greater than and in many respects inferior to that of the Asiatic nations.")  Laufer notes that geophagy can result from various reasons - religious, culinary, severe hunger, experimentation and medical.  He references several studies in dismissing the nutritional explanation though this is one instance where more recent information would be useful.  Results of a quick Google search tend to support the idea that there's no nutritional benefit and perhaps unsurprisingly reveal that there's people even today who claim otherwise.

The bulk of the book, though, is basically a catalog of geophagy broken down by region.  The reports tend to be the same whether it's Chinese famine-food, Siberian stone butter, Aztec cakes and so forth.  Sometimes the earth material is eaten straight, sometimes mixed with other food. There's even a tiny dispute about whether the South American Otomac added crocodile fat to their clay or not. Why people think they're doing this, though, varies widely as noted in the introduction and that's where Geophagy is most interesting.  It helps that Laufer approaches his sources with a critical mind, calling one writer "credulous" or noting where another is condescending (Laufer clearly has the idea of racism in mind but doesn't seem to label it as such).

Jade: A Study in Chinese Archaeology and Religion

Berthold Laufer - Jade: A Study in Chinese Archaeology and Religion (1912)

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We approach the end of the Laufer series with this look at jade in China.  A full-length book this time, Jade catalogs fruit dishes, sword ornamentation, funerary items, protective amulets, chimes, decorative sculptures and early uses as axes and hatchets.

Ivory in China

Berthold Laufer - Ivory in China (1925)

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This could be considered a sort of companion to the last post about diamonds in China though the focus this time isn't so much on folklore (though there's plenty of that) as on early Chinese accounts of the elephant along with art, walrus ivory, ivory substitutes (sea-horse teeth?), things made from ivory (including cricket cages) and ivory making its way through Europe and the Americas.

The Diamond

Berthold Laufer - The Diamond: A Study in Chinese and Hellenistic Folk-Lore (1915)

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This title is one I would haven't looked at twice if it wasn't from Berthold Laufer but anybody following the last couple of weeks of posts will guess correctly that it's a collection of assorted information, stories and proto-Borgesian footnotes.  Chapter titles include "Legend of the Diamond Valley", "Toxicology of the Diamond", "Acquaintance of the Ancients with the Diamond" and "Stones of Nocturnal Luminosity" (which should be the title of a prog-rock album).  Laufer claims that since diamonds don't occur naturally in China the diffusion of the stones from the West carried alongside diamond folklore and is an unusual chance to study that progress.  Like all these pamphlets there's not room to develop that idea in any great detail but any work that goes in one page from the Alexander Romance to Nizami to a Sindbad story is certainly worth the time.