Heaven Elf Us: Subversive Images From Elf-World

by Stephen J. Gertz

MEMO

From: DOD, Office of Small Arms Procurement

To: All Military Personnel

Re: Threat Alert

Recent satellite images of a distant land with no latitude or longitude have been thoroughly analyzed. Small arms, as well as legs and everything else, are a specialty of this strange culture of precious beings who toil all day doing nothing but lazing around on leaves and mushroom cap Barcaloungers, gettin' jiggy with it in tulip bowls, talking to birds, and when the winged-ones, members of the Elvian Air Force, are called to service, buzzing around humans, tapping them on the shoulder with a standard-issue PW-16 pixie-wand and offering unsolicited, subversive advice of the teeny fortune-cookie ilk, Elf-Land Roses undermining our troops' morale.

They fuel their decadent lifestyle with Fairy Dust aka, Elvian Flying Powder, adapted as Elvian Marching Powder for the infantry, whose preferred offensive tactic is to crawl inside the pants legs of innocent  citizens, then, using leg hairs as pitons, scale upward, detour the groin, and proceed directly to the ears, where they  swing on loop earrings as if daring young men on the flying trapeze. 

The images confirm earlier sightings at the time considered the fanciful imaginings of adult children, the most significant and celebrated being those found within In Fairyland, a classified report originally written and illustrated by undercover operatives of MI6 and boldly exposed and published for public consumption in London by Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer in 1870. 

The perpetrators were illustrator Richard ["Dickie"] Doyle (1824-1883) "nineteen when he joined the staff of Punch, for which he designed the first cover" (Osborne, vol. I, p. 442); he also designed the Punch masthead, used for over a century afterward. His father, John Doyle, was the noted Irish political caricaturist who signed his work, "H.B." 

Doyle collaborated with John Leech, W.C. Stanfield and other artists to co-illustrate three of Charles Dickens' five Christmas books, The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) and The Battle of Life (1846). After the success of In Fairyland he went on to illustrate a string of fantasy-themed books.

The writer, "William Allingham (1824-1889) was an Irish poet who became a friend of Leigh Hunt and was introduced to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood by Coventry Patmore" (Osborne, vol. I, p. 50).

"It is generally felt that Richard Doyle rose to his greatest heights with the graceful clusters of humanized and sentimentalized but endearing little elves he created for In Fairyland. In the case of this book the pictures preceded the text, a situation not uncommon in the history of illustrated children's books.

"The Irish poet William Allingham wrote verses to accompany Doyle's colorful fantasies. Edmund Evans produced the colored engravings; they are among the very finest examples of his work. Doyle's illustrations for In Fairyland were used again, in 1884, to illustrate Princess Nobody, an original fairy tale for children by Andrew Lang. This is the first edition of In Fairyland" (Morgan Library, Early Children's Books).

"Doyle's most sought-after book is the folio, In Fairyland - Pictures from the Elf-World, 1870 (second edition 1875), a masterpiece of book illustration and an outstanding example of the colour printing of the equally well-known Edmund Evans (1826-1905), a craftsman whose work for Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway, and other[s]... put him at the top of his profession. In Fairyland... is one of the finest books ever produced for children, and from the collector's point of view a most desirable item to add to any library of juvenile works, especially copies in the original green, morocco-grained, full-cloth bindings, pictorially blocked in gold on the front cover..." (Quayle, The Collector's Book of Children's Books, p. 41).

"In Fairyland has 16-colour plates, several of them with more than one subject on a page, and there is not a bad one among them. It was a small folio, with a charming binding, also designed by Doyle, and Edmund Evans surpassed himself in the printing of the blocks..." (Muir, Victorian Illustrated Books, p. 102).

All field officers are requested to be on alert. Copies of In Fairyland in the original pictorially gilt-stamped cloth binding are difficult to find in decent condition. The binding is typically distressed and plates are often heavily spotted and smudged due to age and playroom battlefield conditions.

A rare, fine copy.

The book is a must for all interested in the power of creatures equipped with small arms to charm big readers onto submission.
__________

DOYLE, Richard (illustrator). ALLINGHAM, William (text). In Fairyland. Pictures from the Elf-World. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer, 1870.

First edition, published December 1869 yet post-dated 1870, as typical of British publishing during the 19th century. Folio (14 7/8 x 10 5/8 in; 378 x 269 mm). [8], 31, [1] pp, printed on rectos only. Frontispiece and fifteen wood-engraved plates printed in color by Edmund Evans, many plates with three-four vignettes each. Miscellaneous black and white line illustrations, including title-page.

Green morocco-grained cloth pictorially stamped and lettered in gilt. Elaborately gilt-decorated spine. All edges gilt. Pale yellow-coated end-papers.

Morgan 168.
__________

Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
__________
__________

The Monsters Among Us (1665)

 by Stephen J. Gertz

Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.
Guillermo del Toro

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
Adrienne Rich 

I strongly suspect Guillermo del Toro will love this book. Ms. Rich might want to rethink her sleeping arrangements.

In the ancient world, both the sophisticated and the credulous, and the knowing and the ignorant, believed in monsters. Monsters were considered a part of the natural world, representing punishment for sin or the diversity and fecundity of life. In a world whose religions and mythology accepted belief in demons, spirits, the afterlife of ancestors into the present, and legendary beasts, monsters fit right into the scheme of things.

During the Renaissance in the West, with its revival of ancient learning and lore, and curiosity and quest to discover all that could be known about the world, the emerging flood of  information about new lands and animals created a sense that anything was possible. Within that context, human and animal monstrosities were considered probable, the consequence of human vice, curses, human and animal sexual congress, or magic.

Curious natural objects such as strangely shaped horns, fossils, skins, and minerals, human artifacts such as gravel stones from the bladder, and Siamese twins (not then known as Siamese twins) were all subjects for allegory and commentary. Folklore, cultural history, medicine, morality stories, and scientific curiosity mingled together, as reflected in the thinking of the seventeenth century Jesuit polymath, Athanasius Kircher, and the works of his assistant, Gaspar Schott.

The fervor over fantastic creatures began with Fortunato Liceti’s 1616 volume, De Monstris, not the first but certainly the most influential and respected survey of such, reissued in 1634 in a second edition edited by Flemish anatomist Gerard Blasius (1626-1692). This edition, the first to include illustrations, was certainly seen by Kircher. Schott's classic, Physica Curiosa (1st ed. 1662), based upon Kircher's notes and observations, deals with the marvels and curiosities of natural history and myth, including monsters.

Indeed, Physica Curiosa contains engravings (by a different hand) of some of the same "monsters" found here, i.e., the elephant man at p. 582 of Physica Curiosa (1662) is seen here at page 185;  others, such as those seen in the plate at page 593 in Schott, are here in the engravings on pages fifty-eight and sixty; and more.

Figure Explanation
A  A shamed woman's genitals.
B A membrane of the flesh, feeling shame, a church
attached to a woman  firmly on all sides, after childbirth
becoming too much like a purse, flaccid...

Treatises by other learned writers appeared in the wake of Liceti’s De Monstris, and soon museums and collections of curiosities in which monstrosities took a central, edifying role became popular throughout Europe, often enjoying courtly patronage; Kircher's museum at the Collegio Romano in Rome drew visitors from around Europe. Pygmies, mermaids, crocodiles, mandrakes, deformed fetuses, and other natural marvels were displayed and discussed in many similar places throughout the seventeenth century. They were the menageries, side-shows, the circus freak-shows of their era, evoking fear, wonder, fascination, and repulsion, proto-Barnum museums without the crassness and ballyhoo that Phineas  T. brought to the subject in the nineteenth century.

Liceti (1577-1657), however, took a different, more nuanced, positive view of the origins of monstrosities.

"The Paduan physician Liceti contested the 'vulgar' opinion that identified monsters with errors or failures in the course of nature. Liceti likened nature to an artist who, faced with some imperfection in the materials to be shaped, ingeniously creates another form still more admirable.

"On this view, monsters revealed nature not as frustrated in her aims but as rising to the challenge of recalcitrant matter, a constricted womb, or even a mixture of animal and human seed. 'It is said that I see the convergence of both Nature and art,' wrote Liceti, 'because one or the other not being able to make what they want, they at least make what they can,'" (Daston & Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature).

Lazarus Colloredo and his parasitic twin, Johannes.

"One of the earliest classifications of deformities Liceti's work was still under review in works on malformation in the 19th century. Includes both real and imaginary cases [as Physica Curiosa] and accurate descriptions of cases observed in the years following the first edition" (Garrison & Morton).

The Satyr Indica, aka an Orangutan.

This, the second illustrated edition (1665), is the most desirable, the first edition to  contain Gerard Blasius' fifty-three page Appendix of new and rare monstrosities including an additional fifteen engravings absent in the first illustrated edition of 1634, not the least of which are the famous plates of Lazarus and his parasitic twin, and the Satyr Indica, an orangutan mistaken for a deformed human, and the earliest, it appears, depiction of that now endangered primate.

Alas, this copy, as with most of this book and so many other antiquarian volumes with famous, wondrous and stunning illustrations ripe for excision, lacks a key plate. We have, however, with the covert assistance of a secret agent librarian at a major institution, gained possession of  a reproduction of the missing plate, an ominous portent of monsters too frightening to contemplate living amongst us as jus’ folks, the family of man corrupted by a family of monsters in our midst:

Televisionicum Familia Munstris, w/strange blond humanoid at right.

______

LICETI, Fortunio. De Monstris. Ex recensione Gerardi Blasii, M.D. & P.P. Qui Monstra quaedam nova & rariora ex recentiorum scriptis addidit. Editio Novissima. Iconibus illustrata. Amsterdam: Sumptibus Andrae Frisii, 1665. Second illustrated edition (third, overall; first edition 1616; second and first illustrated, 1634), complete. Quarto. [16], 316, [28] pp [*4(f 1 as frontispiece), **4, ***1, A-z4, Aa-Pp4, Qq8, Rr-Tt4]. Seventy-three woodcut engravings.

Garrison & Morton 534.52. Osler 3235. Wellcome III, 514. Thorndike VII, pp. 52-53. Waller 5779. Rosenthal, Bibl. Magica 4375.
__________

Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
__________
__________

Future Utopia In Brooklyn, 1992! (In Case You Missed It)

by Stephen J. Gertz

Brooklyn, 1992, a great place to live.

It is cleaner; you can eat off the sidewalks. It is more peaceful; on Sundays you can hear a pin drop. It is healthier, and generally better than ever before. A 2¢ plain, (seltzer, i.e. seltza!) presumably, still costs two cents. Mass electrification via solar power and mechanization have brought widespread prosperity, and the extremes of wealth and poverty have been shaved. The electric car is standard (though not a Prius in sight). Government and the economy have meshed as a cooperative commonwealth. All land is owned by the state; people lease the sites of their palatial  - yes, palatial - homes.; every house a McMansion. Men and women are fully equal. Religion and science have buried the hatchet and are now best buds; indeed science and religion are one. Color photography has finally arrived. Various super-duper gizmos have increased the breadth and efficiency of personal communications.  Contact has been been made with Mars. The borough is now part of the city of Columbia, formerly New York. War is a thing of the past. The whole scene is, as they say in Brooklyn, "Cherce."

Oh, and dogs now understand human speech and can respond with a code of staccato barks.

Big changes since 1893, when the above was predicted. Bigger than when Bohemia colonized the Williamsburg district, bigger than when its HQ (hip quotient) burst the thermometer and led to gentrification, bohemian exodus, and Starbucks.

 

Earth Revisited is one of the more unusual novels of Utopian literature, a genre that thrived during the latter part of the nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

In 1892 Herbert Atheron is a successful businessman with a wife and two children. Only fifty, he contracts a fatal disease; he is dying as the novel opens. He regrets his life of crass money-making and rues the loss of Teresa, a young woman he was in love with in youth but who had tragically died. He loses consciousness.

When he awakens, he is a twenty-seven year old named Harold Amesbury, a man who has been ill and delirious for the last three months, nursed by Helen, who brings him back to a semblance of mental balance and introduces him to the world, Brooklyn, one hundred years later, a place of "bewildering magnificence and beauty." 

Helen and Harold draw close but his obsession with the long-lost Teresa drives a wedge between them and she leaves him. He boards at a house owned by a medium who leads him on a spiritual journey through time and space to the now-evergreen Sahara where he meets up with Helen. They experience a spiritual mind-meld and learn that Helen is the reincarnation of Teresa. They marry, take the last exit to Brooklyn, watch a tree grow there, and live happily ever after.

Byron Alden Brooks (1845–1911) "was a native New Yorker, born in the small town of Theresa. He was educated at Wesleyan University. Brooks was a teacher, journalist, and inventor as well as the author of several other literary works. His first book was King Saul (1876). As an inventor, he produced improvements in typewriters and linotype machines; his most notable innovation was probably the first typewriter that could shift between upper- and lower-case letters" (The National Cyclopedia of American Biography).

Only one thing remains in Brooklyn 1992 as it was in 1892. Dogs cannot scoop up their own poop. And they call it utopia...
 __________

BROOKS, Byron. Earth Revisited. Boston: Arena Publishing Company, 1893. First edition. Octavo. 318, (4 publisher's catalog) pp. Publisher's blue cloth boards, lettered in gilt.

Bleiler, Science-Fiction the Early Years 277. Negley 149. Sargent, p.49.
__________

Image courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books.

Read the entire text of Earth Revisited here.
__________
__________