A Rare Book's Roll-Call of Dishonest, Immoral, and Unusual People

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1813, James Caulfield published a new, expanded, three-volume edition of his  Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters, of Remarkable Persons, From the Reign of Edward the Third, to the Revolution, containing 109 engraved plates and 292 pages of accompanying text,  finishing the work originally issued in two volumes 1794-1795 with sixty plates and 214 pages of biographical material.

Caulfield's purpose was to embellish with prints the "twelfth class" section found in James Granger's Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution, consisting of Characters dispersed in different Classes (2 vols., 1769), the "twelfth class" being those ‘such as lived to a great age, deformed persons, convicts, &c.’

It is, in short, an illustrated rogue's gallery of the odd, the dubious, the notorious, the eccentric, and the disreputable including:

Mother Damnable, the epitome of ugliness and the cursing, scolding, fuming, fire-flinging shrew not to confused with Mother Louse;

 

Blash De Manfre, the human Trevi Fountain commonly called the Water Spouter, who earned fame for drinking water in large quantities and regurgitating it as various sorts of wine, simple waters, beer, oil, and milk;

Elynour Rummin, the famous Ale-Wife of England, with "nose some deal hooked, and curiously crooked, never stopping but ever dropping; her skin loose and slacke, grain'd like a sacke, with a crooked back," but whose ale was renowned as A-1;

Margaret Vergh Gryifith, who had a six-inch horn protruding from her forehead;

Mrs. Mary Davis, who one-upped Margaret Vergh Gryifith with two horns growing on her head that would shed and grow again;

Francis Battaglia, alas not known as "Frankie Batts," who would devour half a peck of stones within 24-hours and six days later excrete them as sand through a colon with true grit;

John Clavell, the gentleman highwayman who wrote elegant poetry that begged mercy from judges, nobles,  and King, and was the author of A Recantation of an ill-led Life: Or, a discovery of the Highway Law (1627);

Archibald "Archie" Armstrong, the sharp-tongued master of buffoonery while jester to James I and Charles I, who earned renown and fortune as a Jacobean wise-acre, retired and became a loan-shark, and wrote A Banquet of Jeasts. Or Change of cheare: Being a collection of moderne jests. Witty ieeres. Pleasant taunts. Merry tales (1630);

Ann Turner, "a gentlewoman that from her youth had been given over to a loose kind of life, of low stature, fair visage, for outward behavior comely, but in prodigality and excess riotous," and was executed for murder;  

 Innocent Nat Witt, a poor, harmless idiot;

Moll Cut-Purse, "a woman of a masculine spirit and make [who] practised or was instrumental to almost every crime and frolick;"

Roger Crab, the sack-cloth wearing vegan hermit;

Mary Aubrey, who murdered her abusive husband then chopped him to pieces and cast him thither and yon;

Robert Fielding, gambler, bigamist, suspected murderer, and the vainest of all fops; 

Augustine Barbara Venbek, aka Barbara Urselin, whose "whole body and even her face was covered with curled hair of yellow color and very soft like wool";

Mary Carleton, who used more aliases than any knave in the Kingdom, was married three times, robbed and cheated several people, was often taken to be a German princess or at least a woman of quality, and was tried for bigamy and acquitted;

Mull'd-Sack, b. John Cottington, the genius pickpocket and miscreant who, one night while drunk, accidentally married an hermaphrodite named Aniseed-Water Robin (credited with twice impregnating himself and giving birth to a boy and a girl) in Fleet prison, "the common place for joining all rogues and whores together"; and many more.

James Caulfield (1764–1826) was an author and printseller. "Many old English portrait prints were too rare and valuable to supply the extraordinarily large demand for them. To this end, many old plates were republished and many old prints were copied. Caulfield came to specialize in prints illustrating Granger's twelfth class of people—‘such as lived to a great age, deformed persons, convicts, &c.’—whose portraits were very often the hardest to come by. In 1788 he began his work Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters of Remarkable Persons, a series of reproductions of old portrait paintings and copies of rare old or popular prints accompanied by letterpress biographies" (Oxford DNB).

(In a bibliographical aside, Granger's book made fashionable the practice of extra-illustrating historical or topological books, i.e. pasting in illustrations from other sources, which became known as "grangerizing" existing texts).

In 1819 Caulfield further extended his book to include Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters, of Remarkable Persons, from the Revolution in 1688 to the end of the Reign of George II.

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CAULFIELD, James. Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters, of Remarkable Persons, From the Reign of Edward the Third, to the Revolution. Collected From the Most Authentic Accounts Extant. A New Edition, Completing the Twelfth Class of Granger's Biographical History of England; With Many Additional Rare Portraits. London: Printed for R.S. Kirby, 1813.

New edition, expanded and completing the original two volumes 1794-95. Three tall octavo volumes (10 x 5 7/8 in; 254 x 149 mm). viii, 104; [2], [105]-198; [2], [201]-292 pp. 109 engraved plates (one folding), including engravings based upon the drawings of Marcellus Laroon (1653-1702). Publisher's original blue paper covered boards with white printed spine labels

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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The Bible Of Unconscious Buffoonery

by Stephen J. Gertz

Extra engraved titlepage.

Imagine that you've written a book that no one will publish; it's considered over-long and looney. So, to pump-up its importance, impress, and tacitly solicit subscriptions, you ask eminent men, oh, around sixty of 'em, to contribute "panegyricke verses upon the Authour and his booke" extolling your wonderfulness and that of your volume. Amazingly, they do. But your contributors ridicule the book.

You include their mockery, anyway. Some attention is better than none. You underwrite the cost of printing the book yourself and in doing so produce one of the great vanity publications ever issued, and if your contributors insult you, well, how flattering to your vanity that these great men took the time to do so.

Such was the case of Thomas Coryat (1577-1617) and his book, Three crude veines are presented in this booke following (besides the foresaid Crudities): no less flowing in the body of the booke, then the Crudities themselues, two of rhetoricke and one of poesie…, popularly known by its title from the engraved titlepage/frontispiece (and subsequent editions) as Coryat's Crudities: Hastily gobled up in five moneths trauells in France, Sauoy, Italy, Rhetia com[m]only called the Grisons county, Heluetia alias Switzerland, some parts of high Germany, and the Netherlands. Newly Digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset, now dispersed to the nourishment of the traveling Members of the Kingdome.

Coryat's traveling shoes.

Within, Coryat records his step-by-step 1,975 mile schlep across Western Europe. He didn't intend for it to be funny, it just turned out that way. Outlandish, toilsome and wacky adventures are related with such sober and solemn seriousness that the clod is completely unaware that he is a clown in his own touring circus.

"There probably has never been another such combination of learning and unconscious buffoonery as is here set forth. Coryate was a serious and pedantic traveller who (as he states in his title) in five months toilsome travel wandered, mostly on foot, over a large part (by his own reckoning 1,975 miles) of western Europe. His adventures probably appeared to his contemporaries as more ridiculous than exciting, but at this remove, his chronicle by its very earnestness provides an account of the chief cities of early seventeenth century Europe which is at least valuable as it is amusing. It was probably his difficulties with the booksellers which induced Coryate to solicit the extraordinary sheaf of testimonials prefixed to the volume. Possibly he acted upon the notion apparently now current among publishers of social directories that every person listed is a prospective purchaser of the work. At any rate he secured contributions from more than sixty writers at the time. Among his panegyrists appear the names of Jonson, Chapman, Donne, Campion, Harington, Drayton, Davies of Hereford, and others, each contributor vying to mock poor Coryate with solemn ridicule." (Pforzheimer) 

Now, imagine you're Ben Jonson, one of the contributors. You've read the book, and, after re-inserting your eyeballs - which, as if in an animated cartoon, grew to the size of softballs and popped-out of their sockets - you consider what to make of this. As your contribution you write a verse explanation of the engraved frontispiece, decoding its emblematic illustrations. It reads, in part:

Our Author in France rode on Horse without stirrop,
And in Italic bathed himselfe in their syrrop.

His love to horses he sorteth out strange prettilie,
He rides them in France, and lies with them in Italie.

You get the idea. It's an Elizabethan comedy roast but the roastee (known as the British Ulysseys, with accent on Odd-essy), basking in the attention, is deaf to the jokes. It's Mystery Science Theater 3000, the book edition, with eminent readers hurling written wisecracks at the deliriously ridiculous and over-long text while they peruse it from their reading chair, rather than vocally razzing a deliriously ridiculous and over-long movie from their seats in the theater.

Here's an excerpt from John Donne's panegyric to Coryat and his Crudities:

This Booke, greater than all, producest now,
Infinite worke, which doth so farre extend,
That none can study it to any end.
Tis no one thing; it is not fruite, nor roote;
Nor poorly limited with head or foote.
If man be therefore man, because he can
Reason, and laugh, thy booke doth halfe make man.
One halfe being made, thy modesty was such,
That thou on th' other halfe wouldst never touch.
When wilt thou be at full, great Lunatique?

Ouch!

Coryat apparently experienced this - and the other testimonials - as "Oooh, they like me, they really like me!"

I am sory I can speake so little of so flourishing and beautifull a Citie [as Turin]. For during that little time that I was in the citie, I found so great a distemperature in my body, by drinking the sweete wines of Piemont, that caused a grievous inflammation in my face and hands; so that I had but a smal desire to walke much abroad in the streets. Therefore I would advise all English-men that intend to travell into Italy, to mingle their wine with water as soone as they come into the country, for feare of ensuing inconveniences... 

In short, Coryat was drunk during his entire stay in Turin.

Complete copies of Coryat's Crudities are scarce. "Perfect copies with the plates intact are not common...The D.N.B. has repeated the statement that the Chetham copy is the only perfect one known" (Pforzheimer).

A complete copy has, however, recently come into the marketplace.  Offered by Whitmore Rare Books, the asking price is $25,000. Despite its faults it's one of the great travelogues.

"Coryate drew on his experiences in writing Coryats Crudities (1611), which was intended to encourage courtiers and gallants to enrich their minds by continental travel. It contains illustrations, historical data, architectural descriptions, local customs, prices, exchange rates, and food and drink, but is too diffuse and bulky - there are 864 pages in the 1905 edition - to become a vade-mecum. To solicit ‘panegyric verses’ Coryate circulated copies of the title-page depicting his adventures and his portrait, which had been engraved by William Hole and which he considered a good likeness. About sixty contributors include many illustrious authors, not all in verse, some insulting, some pseudonymous" (DNB).

Coryat Meets Margarita Emiliana bella Cortesana di Venetia,

As for Thomas Coryat, the "great Lunatique" died in 1617 and now permanently sleeps with the horses in Italy, which beats sleeping with the fishes in Sicily. It's the difference among character assassination, corporeal execution, and the bestial joy of equine companionship on an arduous journey; bathing in horse-piss in Italy was a bonus, pass the Purell, please - and a barf-bag and incontinence pad, the better to endure Coryat's voyage to France and his feed to hungry fish as written in chapter one's first sentence:

I was imbarked at Dover, about tenne of the clocke in the morning, the fourteenth of May, being Saturday and Whitsun-eve, Anno 1608, and arrived in Calais (which Caesar calleth Ictius portus, a maritime towne of that of part Picardy, which is commonly called le pais reconquis; that is, the recovered Province, inhabited in former times by the ancient Morini) about five of the clocke in the afternoone, after I had varnished the exterior parts of the ship with the excrementall ebullitions of my tumultuous stomach, as desiring to satiate the gormandizing paunches of the hungry Haddocks (according as I have hieroglyphically expressed it in the front of my booke) with that wherewith I had superfluously stuffed my selfe at land, having made my rumbling belly their capacious aumbrie.

It isn't often that an author opens his book with a tableau presenting the painting of a ship with his (or anyone else's) diarrhea. It's a riveting first sentence with repulsive denouement; readers may spew the contents of their now tumultuous stomachs through their northern orafice. Yes, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, a dark and stormy night, with emphasis on the dark storm raging at Coryat's southern orafice. Yet sunny skies and silliness await the intrepid reader. Be not afraid. Read on ye armchair traveller, you have nothing to lose but your sanity to this seventeenth century version of your friend's interminable seminar with soporific slideshow about a recent vacation, no detail too picayune to omit. Coryat, for instance, never fails to tell the exact time of day that something occurred, and, it seems, reports on everything he put in his mouth -

 I did eate fried Frogges this citie [Cremona]

- and everything he encountered, with the possible exception of dust motes. He then concludes his exhausting review of each city with a breezy, unintentionally amusing, "so much for Paris;" "so much for Venice;" "so much for Milan." It's so very much.

Yea, verily and alas, the booke lacketh backgrounde musik by the eminent Elizabethan composer and performer, Boots Randolph, playing that olde English aire, Yaketie Saxe, to highlight its slapsticke gravitie and the inadvertent Keystone Cop qualitie of Coryat's adventures chasing after Europe, and enliven his dreary descriptions.

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Titlepage.

CORYAT, Thomas. [From engraved title]: Coryats Crudities. Hastily gobled up in five moneths trauells in France, Sauoy, Italy, Rhetia com[m]only called the Grisons county, Heluetia alias Switzerland, some parts of high Germany, and the Netherlands. Newly Digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset, now dispersed to the nourishment of the traveling Members of the Kingdome. London: Printed by W[illiam]. S[tansby]., 1611. First edition.  Quarto in eights (8 1/8 x 6 inches; 206 x 153 mm). [-]2; a8-b8 ([-]1 inserted after a3); b4; c8-g8; h4-l4; B8-D8 (D3 inserted after preceding D); E8-3C8; 3D4; [-]2 (first is signed 3E3; both are errata). Extra engraved titlepage (i.e. frontispiece) by William Hole, five engraved plates (three folding), two text engravings and numerous woodcut initials and head-pieces. With two leaves of errata.

Pforzheimer 218. Cox 98. Keynes 70.

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Images courtesy of Whitmore Rare Books, currently offering this volume, with our thanks.
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A Feast Of Fine Bindings

by Stephen J. Gertz

[Church of England]. The Book of Common Prayer…
London: W. and J. Wilde, 1699.
Binding by Richard Balley.

We've pulled out the white linen tablecloth, set the table with sterling dinnerware,  crystal champagne flutes, and platinum serving tray spread with fine bindings. Bon appetit!

Plunging necklines, sure. Backless bindings?

Seven "backless" bindings by Richard Balley, a late 17th century bookbinder in London, are known to have survived, and the above example is possibly the best preserved: because of their construction they opened poorly, were fragile, and easily fell apart. As such, they have little practical value and are noteworthy only because of their decorative nature; they are, at best, binding oddities. In the early eighteenth century the "wicked old biblioclast" and "the most hungry and rapacious" of book collectors, a bookseller who stood at the center of the London booktrade, John Bagford, wrote of Richard Balley that, "he hath contrived to bind a book that at sight you could not know the fore-edge from the back, both being cut and gilded alike, but this is a mere piece of curiosity, but still shows the genius of the workman."

FRENAUD, André. Enorme Figure de la Déesse Raison.
Paris: Joseph Zichieri, 1951.
Binding by Pierre-Lucien Martin.

Bound in 1967 in black goatskin after a design by Pierre-Lucien Martin (1913-1985) the above book is one of only twenty-four copies on papier pur chiffon d'Auvergne from a total edition of only thirty-four copies, this being copy no. 28.

Pierre-Lucien Martin studied bookbinding with Charles Chanat and design with Robert Bonfils and worked for several binders until winning the Prix de la Reliure Originale after World War II and opening his own bindery. Such was the demand for his work that he had to step away from actual binding and employ others as forwarders and finishers to execute his designs.

As here, lettering, multi-colored onlays, and trompe-l'oeil effects characterize much of his work

SUARES, André. Cirque.
Paris: Ambroise Vollard, 1933 (but unpublished).
Binding by Paul Bonet, 1956.

André Suarès' Cirque, featuring illustrations by Georges Rouault, was never published as planned. Only five copies, put together from disparate elements as maquettes by binder Paul Bonet between 1956 and 1959, have survived. Bonet designed their bindings, René Desmules forwarded, and André Jeanne finished them. Each is slightly different, a variant of the above example.

LUCIUS APULEIUS. De Cupidinis et Psyches Amoribus fabula anilis.
London: Ballantyne Press for he Vale Press, 1901.
Binding by Sibyl Pye.

Anna Sybella Pye, aka Sibyl, (1879-1958) is considered to be one of the most original bookbinders of the twentieth century. She began binding in 1906, met Charles Ricketts, whose bindings for his Vale Press she greatly admired and became her primary influence. He designed tools especially for her, including a few for this binding but most here are of her own creation. Here and elsewhere she specialized in inlaid bindings, excising the foundation leather and fitting leathers of other colors into the empty space, a much more difficult technique than onlaying, the far simpler and common method of applying thin leather atop the foundation. Her bindings were exhibited in Europe and and here in America. Her best work dates from 1925-1940.

BUNYAN, John. The Pilgrim's Progress.
[Shakespeare Head Press for]:
London: The Cresset Press, 1928.
Binding by Philip Smith, 1972.

Profiles In Binding: Philip Smith was born in 1928 and in 1972 designed the above binding shaped to a head in profile at board's fore-edge, the head in question that of the Pilgrim of title, his progress limned in the elaborate scenes symbolically depicted in different leathers.

In 1957, Smith joined the bindery of Douglas Cockerell & Son (Sydney Morris Cockerell). In 1961 he established his own shop to work as an creative book artist.

LUCIANUS SAMOSATENSIS. Dialogues.
Paris: Tériade, Théo Schmied, 1951.
Binding by Rose Adler, 1952.

Born in Paris, Rose Adler (1890-1959) designed jewelry, clothes, furniture, toiletry items, even mirrors but she is best known for her bookbinding designs, which later in her career became simplified, relying upon her choice of colors and mix of calf and goatskin leathers. 

She did not execute her binding designs but, rather, depended upon skilled craftsmen of her choice, which, more often than not, was, as here, Guy Raphaël, a long-time collaborator.

[Sammelband of Seven German Protestant Theological Works].
Breslau: Scharffenberg, 1573-1575.

The above volume is bound as a Sechsfächerband, a six-fold binding that can be opened in one of six different directions, revealing one book at a time. These type of bindings are generically known as Vexierbücher (puzzle or tease books, i.e. bindings that vex). As with Balley's backless bindings, multi-fold bindings are structurally weak and fall apart if stared at too hard for too long.

Produced from the mid-sixteenth century forward, they are primarily found on religious and devotional books. Why?

It appears that they provided quiet, unobtrusive amusement during long church sermons. As sacrilegious as this may seem, it's innocence itself compared to playing cards or little games during religious services; two examples of six-fold bindings on devotional books from the mid-late sixteenth century contain little boxes to store cards, etc.

In the late fourteenth century, Jean de Charlier de Gerson (1363-1429), famed doctor of theology, religious orator, and chancellor of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, condemned the playing of cards in church. His complaints were, evidently, ignored. Churchgoers continued to struggle against boredom, whether playing cards, twiddling thumbs, or amusing themselves with curiously bound prayer books.

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All images reproduced from The Wormsley Library: A Personal Selection by Sir Paul Getty (Maggs Bros./Morgan Library, 1999), with our thanks. If you love fine bindings, this book, the catalog to the Morgan Library's exhibition, is a must for your shelf. 

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Of Related Interest:

Magnificent Bindings, Bound To Be Great. 

The Guild of Women Binders, Bound To Be Great.

More Magnificent Bindings, Bound To Be Great.

The $65,000 Binding, Bound To Be Great.

Drop-Dead Gorgeous Bindings, Bound To Be Great.
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These Vintage Shoes A Tiffany Lamp Unto Your Feet

by Stephen J. Gertz

Say hello to the Karl Friedrich Schoensiegel Schuhmuseum in der Mappe (The Shoe Museum in Portfolio), an extensive archive of original watercolors, drawings, autograph manuscripts, and scholarly materials related to shoes and their historical and cultural significance by Schoensiegel, the Munich-based, erudite connoisseur of vintage footwear from around the world.

Schoensiegel was the most distinguished collector of such material during the first half of the twentieth century.

The collection is being offered by Librairie Jean-Claude Vrain of Paris.

The collection was last seen at Bonham's on June 22, 2011; the hammer fell at $42,700 including buyer's premium.

 

The archive is comprised of 349 watercolors, here sampled, and is grouped into several geographic and historical sections: Asia, Africa, America, Australia, and Europe; in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth centuries. Each watercolor is vivid, bright and clean.

Schoensiegel visited museums throughout the world and made sketches of each interesting shoe he came across, later developing the sketches into fully-developed watercolor drawings. The Schuhmuseum in der Mappe was exhibited in Berlin in 1939.

The shoes, alas, are not rated for comfort or practicality, though it doesn't take a genius to understand that if you have to walk in what appear to be Viking boats with bows curved upward to Valhalla or tie the toes of your shoes to your knees, a casual passeggiata through the streets of Siena - or anywhere else - will be a challenge without a podiatrist or cobbler following in your wake.

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All images courtesy of Librairie Jean-Claude Vrain, with our thanks.
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Of Related Interest:

Vintage Shoe Art Walks The Runway At Bonham's.

Confessions Of A Vintage Shoe Fetishist.
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Guericke's Got Plenty O' Nothin', and Nothin's Plenty For Him (1672)

by Stephen J. Gertz

One day in 1656, the citizens of Magdeburg, Germany were startled by the appearance of strange unidentified flying objects hovering over their town. Documented by a now-famous contemporary engraving, it should have led to panic in the streets. The town's mayor, however, Otto von Guericke (1602-1686), calmed the crowd with confidence empty of any reassurance whatsoever: Nothing to worry about, it's nothing at all. Nothing's happening. You are seeing nothing in action.

It was a great day for nihilism.

What the good folks of Magdeburg actually saw were two teams of eight horses try to pull apart two 20-inch diameter copper hemispheres that were greased at their mating rims and sealed when all the air was pumped out. It couldn't be done. Guericke had dramatically demonstrated the existence of a vacuum, of nothingness within the sealed hemispheres. In short, he proved that nothing could exist within something.

This was major. It was also controversial. The results are found in Guericks's Experimenta nova (1672), one of the great classics of science.

The subject of a vacuum or void, that is, nothingness, vexed natural philosophers and theologians. Ecclesiastic Jacques du Bois and Jesuit scholars Athanasius Kircher and his assistant and protégé, Gaspar Schott were in the middle of it along with Guericke, a scientist and inventor as well as politician.

"Schott first published what had originally been intended as a brief guide to the hydraulic and pneumatic  instruments in Kircher's Roman museum, expanding it into the first version of his Mechanica  hydraulico-pneumatica [1658]. But he added as an appendix [pp. 441-488] a detailed account of Guericke's experiments on vacuums, the earliest published report of this work. This supplement contributed greatly to the  success of Schott's compendium; and as a result he  became the center of a network of correspondence  as other Jesuits, as well as lay experimenters and  mechanicians, wrote to inform him of their inventions  and discoveries. Schott exchanged several letters  with Guericke, seeking to draw him out by  suggesting new problems, and published his later investigations" (DSB).


Schott, who Guericke cites in the subtitle to Experimenta nova, was a supporter of Guericke. His mentor, Kircher was not; a vacuum is impossible: God fills everything. 
This is one of the few examples of Kircher and Schott in disagreement.



Engraved titlepage.

 "Is it God's immensity or is it independent of God…Guericke's position on this matter emerges in the course of a summary account [in Experimenta nova] of the opinions of the ecclesiastics Jacques de Bois of Leyden and Athanasius Kircher, the eminent Jesuit scholar. In his Dialogus Theologicus-Astronomicus, published in 1653 and directed against Galileo and all his defenders of the heliocentric cosmology, Jacques du Bois had proclaimed the infinite omnipresence of God in an infinite void beyond the world. Du Bois should not have placed the divine essence in an infinite void, complained Guericke, but ought rather to to have declared that ' there is a place or space not in which the divine essence is, but which is itself the divine essence..."

"…[Guericke's] criticism of Kircher differed somewhat…Kircher believed that even if a void culled exist without a body, which he denied, it could not exist without God. In the passage cited by Guericke, Kircher explained that 'when you imagine this imaginary space beyond the world, do not imagine it as nothing, but conceive it as a fullness of the Divine Substance extended into infinity.'  In Guericke's judgment, Kircher was wrong to say that 'God fills all imaginary space, vacuum or emptiness by His substance and presence' and simultaneously deny the existence of empty space. 'For how can God fill what is not' [Experimenta nova, p. 64]. Rather, Kircher ought to have concluded with Lessius that 'imaginary space, vacuum, or the Nothing beyond the world, is God himself,' as he finally does when he announces that the space beyond the world is not Nothing, but is the fullness of Divine Substance.'

"But if space is God's immensity, or even God Himself, Guericke insisted that we must nevertheless understand that 'the infinite essence of God is not contained in space, or vacuum, but is in Himself for Himself" (Grant, Much Ado Abut Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution, p. 218-19).

Presuming that your brain, as mine, dissolved into mush during the preceding theologico-philisophico disquisition about nothing, allow me to sum things up: Guericke made something out of nothing, Kircher thought nothing of it, but nothing is divine so let's move on. Don't tell the Know-Nothings, they don't know anything much less nothing.

Someone who, like Guericke, knew something about nothing and possessed it, too, sang about it in 1963, courtesy Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

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[KIRCHER, Athanasius. SCHOTT, Gaspar]. GUERICKE, Otto von. Experimenta Nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de Vacuo Spatio Primùm à R.P. Gaspare Schotto . . . nunc verò ab ipso Auctore Perfectiùs edita, variisque aliis Experimentis aucta. Quibus accesserunt simul certa quaedam De Aeris Pon Amstelodami [Amsterdam]: Johannes Jansson zu Waesberge, 1672. 

First edition. Folio. 8 ff. (including the engraved title), 244, (4) pp., errata leaf. Engraved title, engraved portrait of the author, two double-page engraved plates ((including that of the famous Magdeburg experiment and twenty engravings, many full-page. 

Dibner, Heralds of Science, 55 (pp. 30 & 67). Dibner, Founding Fathers of Electrical Science, pp. 13-14. D.S.B., V, pp. 574-76. Evans, Exhibition of First Editions of Epochal Achievements in the History of Science (1934), 30. Horblit 44. Sparrow, Milestones of Science, p. 16.

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Images courtesy of Martayan Lan, with our thanks.
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Another existential brain-twister:

The Story of Nobody, By Somebody, Illustrated By Someone.
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In Search Of Athanasius Kircher

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1602, the year of Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher’s birth, the study of nature was called natural philosophy. At his death in 1680 natural philosophy died with him; “science,” as we understand it today - the investigation of the natural world through rational, evidence-based means - had overtaken the old world and Kircher, the most celebrated figure in the world of knowledge of his time.

The 17th century was the most fascinating era in the history of scientific inquiry. It was an estuary for science, the rivers of ancient and medieval thinking about nature meeting and mixing with the nascent sea of rationalism in a fertile zone of transition, diversity, and productivity. Athanasius Kircher was in the middle of it all, a towering figure whose reputation for wisdom, knowledge, and erudition awed his contemporaries of the century’s first generation. The strange, the curious, and the marvelous were his stock and trade. Kircher was the Einstein of his age, a genius, the man with  all the answers, the most famous “scientist”  in the world.

The second generation remained in thrall of him but began to perceive cracks in his work (Leibnitz went from adore to abhor), which covered everything: astronomy, linguistics, microscopy, geology, chemistry, musicology, Egyptology, horology, medicine, magnetism, optics, pneumatics, mathematics, Hermeticism, you name it. He was, as characterized by scholar Paula Findlen, “The Last Man Who Knew Everything,” a grandiose statement yet not without truth. In Kircher’s time, the sciences had not yet split into separate and distinct entities and what was known about each was fairly limited. An omnivorous, insatiably curious intellect could be aware of all that was going on. Kircher was that man, an encyclopedia with legs.

From his base in the Vatican in Rome he stood at the center of The Republic of Letters, the vast international Jesuit network of correspondents. He was the hub through which knowledge from the four corners of the earth passed, collecting information and then distributing it through his letters and books.

By the time the century’s third generation of scientists began to assert themselves, however,  Kircher was old news, his reputation tattering, his life’s work derided. As time passed he was relegated to the scrap-heap and became a curious footnote in the history of science.

That changed in 1966, the year that John E. Fletcher completed his 900-page Master’s thesis on Kircher (published in 2011), the first in-depth inquiry into the man, his work, and his world. The thesis - more a doctoral dissertation - Athanasius Kircher, ‘Gernamus Incredibilia’: A Study of his Life and Works with a Preliminary Report upon his Unpublished Correspondence, opened a big door in academia. By the 1990s, scholars from around the world had rushed through it and the Kircher renaissance was in full flower. His importance in the history of science has been firmly re-established. It is impossible to understand the 17th century without coming to terms with Athanasius Kircher and his legacy.

Now, John Glassie, a former contributing editor to The New York Times Magazine, has written a biography, A Man of Misconceptions, to introduce Kircher to a popular readership. This is important. When we think of science in its modern beginnings we think of Isaac Newton, its father. But Kircher was Newton’s scientific grandfather; he influenced everyone in his heyday and immediate wake, even his dissenters, who were inspired to correct his mistakes. He was ultimately proved wrong about just about everything he wrote about, and he wrote a  lot, over thirty books, each, for the most part, huge tomes lavishly illustrated with some of the century’s finest, most dramatically designed copperplate engravings, all created under Kircher’s direct supervision. His books were must-reads for the 17th century cognoscenti.

It is what he was so wrong about and why that makes Kircher one of the most fascinating characters to have ever trod the world stage.

First edition, 1658.

He believed that inner Earth was populated by demons and goblins - but not pygmy men; don’t be silly. He believed in palingenesis, which has nothing to do with the origins of a certain ex-governor of Alaska but everything to do with regenerating plants from their ashes; he claimed to have done it; alas, no one could replicate his success. A method to heal a wound at a  far distance from the wounded without direct intervention? Sure. A machine that organized the chaos of knowledge into an easily comprehensible order? Done that. Sunflower seeds that tell time? You betcha. Snake stones with magic properties? Why not? Rivers of fire within Earth? You doubt it? Christianity in ancient China,  way before the Jesuits arrived in the 16th century? Kircher saw evidence. The lost mysteries of the universe found in Egyptian hieroglyphics? Kircher was sure he’d discover them.

These are the sorts of things that Kircher whole-heartedly embraced. It was not unreasonable, then, for Glassie to have subtitled his bio, The Life of an Eccentric in a World of Change.

Third edition, 1678. (First edition, 1664, i.e. 1665).

Yet “eccentric”  is a misnomer. It is only in retrospect that Kircher can be viewed so and only out of context. The comic possibilities in his life and work are certainly apparent - Kircher, in his autobiography, a posthumously published (1684), slight octavo volume of 78 pages, inadvertently keys into them, his early years related as a sort of Perils of Pauline as told by a somewhat pompous dignitary astonished at every footstep by each adventure, his survival, and the grace of God and the Virgin Mary. Glassie often tends to mine the comedy of Kircher, a rich vein to be sure but not the mother lode.

When Kircher was wrong, he was very wrong. His published a formula for squaring the circle that met with scorn and outright amusement by his fellow mathematicians. Contemporaries, often friends, wrote entire books refuting Kircher. Italian poet and scientist, Francesco Redi (1626-1698), devoted his Esperienze intorno alla generazione degl’insetti (1668) and Esperienze intorno a diverse cose naturali (1671) to demolishing Kircher’s ideas on regeneration and spontaneous generation. When he later wrote a letter to Kircher outlining the negatives in Kircher’s claim of the miraculous healing powers of the snake-stone, that did it.

From Kircher's Arca Noë (Noah's Ark, 1675).

Kircher never responded to his challengers; he had surrogates handle the dissenters. His disciple and assistant, Guiseppe Petrucci, wrote Prodromo apologetico alli studi Chircheriani (1677) to attack the “envious and strident ignorance of his unjust accusers.” As seen in  the book's engraved title-page, Petrucci is writing a very long scroll to the heavens while sitting on the back of Kircher's critics, symbolized by a crocodile with a cherub on its beak to keep its mouth shut, Kircher's books at his feet with vultures picking at them; there was a lot to defend.

But when Kircher was right, he was dead-on correct. In Scrutinium Physico-Medicum...Pestis (1658), he was the first to propose the germ theory of contagion, the most significant contribution to medicine since William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood in 1628 (De Motu Cordis). He correctly gleaned the relationship between heiroglyphics and the Egyptian Coptic language. There are other examples. His convictions were absolute and unshakeable.

Engraved title page to  Petrucci's
Prodromo apologetico alli studi Chircheriani (1677).

He had, however, a soft-spot for the curious and strange, and was often persuaded by the slimmest evidence of the incredible. But he was not alone in that. To one degree or another, every natural philosopher and serious thinker of the 17th century was fascinated by what nature was revealing to them in their observations and studies. It was a world of marvels and wonders all to the glory of God and the majesty of His creation, often strange and bizarre but, as was slowly becoming manifest, knowable in a reliable way.

From the early 1630s through the late 1660s, Kircher’s influence was felt everywhere in the sciences and other areas of intellectual inquiry. He was the elephant in the Vatican, second only to the Pope in public awareness but probably more interesting as a tourist attraction for visiting dignitaries, of which there was a steady stream. Making the pilgrimage to see him and his museum of natural curiosities and marvelous machines was like a trip to Disneyland with Walt as personal guide. (He loved building ooh-ahh sundials, clocks, and machines; he was a gadget freak. Born in the 20th century but with 17th century perspective, Kircher might have invented Magic Fingers: A Miraculous Device to Bring the Muscles of the Human Body and the Mind Into a State of Complete Blissful Relaxation While in a Supine Position Upon a Mattress in a Cheap Roadside Hostelry). Kircher can be accused of many things but eccentric is not one of them. He was completely of his time and no one thought him nutty. He was the most distinguished citizen of the  world of knowledge. The rationalists of the era did not grow up in a vacuum.

For the last six years it has been my ongoing privilege to be deeply involved in building the world’s finest collection, public or private, of Kircher’s books in all significant editions and translations and more: first editions of books that influenced him, that he influenced, were dedicated to him, referred to him and his work, positively or negatively, and/or were written by a significant friend or correspondent (there were many), in the finest copies obtainable. The client is a man of vision. One day Athanasius Kircher and His World will be donated to the collector’s alma mater where it will dwarf in size and scope the Kircher collections at Stanford and Brigham Young universities. Reading all the significant literature in English about him including many of Fletcher's papers, identifying, finding, putting each book into perspective within Kircher’s universe and writings, and composing a compelling story for the client continues to be a personal joy as well as a professional responsibility.

Glassie’s book was a pleasure to read, even if, at times, I was frustrated by his reliance on entertainment to put Kircher across. After six years of immersion I feel as if I know the man. But readers who love interesting non-fiction narratives, are attracted to the unusual (which is just about all of us), love to learn about fascinating people and interesting times and have some fun, too, will enjoy A Man of Misconceptions.

MATHER, Cotton. The Christian Philosopher:
A Collection of the Best Discoveries in Nature,
With Religious Improvements.
First edition, London: 1721.
Second edition, Boston: 1815.

In 1721, forty-one years after Kircher’s death, the esteemed Jesuit came to America via the first book written by an American (and the first book, period) to introduce the new world of science and its marvels to the Colonies. The Christian Philosopher: a Collection of the Best Discoveries in Nature with Religious Improvements cites Kircher and often, his work presented on a par with that of Robert Boyle, Hooke, and Newton, with some of the dubious claims of Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus (1665) accepted at face value. It was written by Cotton Mather, the Puritan pastor of Boston’s North Church, prolific writer, controversial figure in the Salem Witch Trials, and proud member of the Royal Society of Science perhaps best known as Ichabod Crane’s favorite author. In 1815, just shy of a hundred years after its initial publication, The Christian Philosopher was reprinted in an edition published in Boston in 1815, an early year in the Second Great Awakening, the religious revival movement that swept through the United States during the  the 19th century. 

With this book Kircher’s shadow has stretched across the centuries to influence modern Americans. How else to explain Marshal B. Gardner’s A Journey to the Earth’s Interior (1913, reprinted 1920) “showing the Earth bisected centrally through the polar openings and at right angles to the Equator, giving a clear view of the central sun and interior continents and oceans,” a work of pure gibberish and pseudo-science all dressed-up with charts, diagrams, and yes, an illustration of a “working model” of Marshall’s Earth with central Sun. Pyramid power, magnetic bracelets with curative powers, magic rocks in Sedona, Arizona, healing crystals - the New Age movement - is Kircher-land, the 17th century re-asserting itself to declare, I'm still here. Significantly, within Mather’s subtitle was an ill-omen of things to come: “With Religious Improvements,” science mediated by dogmatic faith, the very thing that doomed Kircher. His belief that the world of nature was a magical place whose laws conformed to Catholic tradition was the achilles heel that lamed his thinking,  ultimately too loose and credulous.

There is evidence that toward the end of his life Kircher may have understood that science had changed forever and his critical thinking left something to be desired.

"In the forty years in which I have played a role in this theater of all people," he wrote to the mystic poet Quirinus Kulmann (1651-1689), "I have learned from frequent experience how much trouble may result from an inconsidered piece of writing."

Receipt for a cashed letter of exchange signed by Kircher,
April 21, 1667.

In the end, if Kircher was eccentric it was only in his belief that alchemy was nonsense and its practitioners charlatans at a time when it was still popularly accepted. In later life and after his death Kircher was accused by some of being a charlatan.

It is the supreme irony of seventeenth century science that its greatest paragon of rationalism, the man whose work changed the world and whose methodology became standard, had a dark secret that the Royal Society kept hidden for hundreds of years, suppressing his manuscript papers on the subject lest his towering contributions be stained and deeply discounted. His first and foremost passion, which he pursued to the end of his life, was scorned. It was an embarrassment.  It was so Old World. It was charlatanism. It was a scandal.

Isaac Newton was a dedicated alchemist. You can take  a man out of the 17th century but you can't take the 17th century out of  the man.

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All images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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