Gallery – Slices of Blue Sky

B.T. Babbitt, Soap and Baking Soda Magnate of the Late 1800s

June 20, 2021 No Comments

At the end of my post on the Sanitary Fair in Brooklyn to raise funds for Union Army soldiers, I highlighted an advertisement from the B.T. Babbitt company, and noted that one of their all-text ad felt as if it could have been written today. It offered free shipping for certain orders and promised a donation to charity with every purchase. Those features, plus the wording made me think that this B.T. Babbitt company was a small operation, maybe even a huckster. I was wrong.

It didn’t take long to find out that that Benjamin T. Babbitt was a big deal: he held numerous patents, his company was an innovator in advertising, the company had multiple factories and multiple product lines, including a 300,000 sq. ft. (27,870 sq. m) factory in Lower Manhattan.

The B.T. Babbitt company was a pioneer in advertising and marketing, perhaps the first to use retail premiums to sell products in America, as they gave away free lithographic prints with purchase of baking soda ¹. Some of the marketing items that survive are advertising cards: one side typically shows a cute child or two, sometimes a pet, and always a box of B.T. Babbitt soap; the other side has text that praises the soap and its proprietor Mr. Babbitt. For example:

“Full of hope with Babbitt’s soap…Call on B.T. Babbitt if you would know how joyous life is beyond the clouds…”
“Behold! you washing world; the soap, / That lightens labor, brightens hope, / Begrudge to worthless wares your dimes, / And order BABBITT’S BEST betimes”

Art, Fish

Fish in Japanese Art: Hiroshige’s Woodblock Prints

January 18, 2020 2 Comments

Memorial portrait of Hiroshige from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

One of my favorite genres of art is the 19th century Japanese landscape print, especially the works by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), who is best known as the creator of several series that showed famous scenes from Japan, like “53 Stations of the Tokaido” and “Famous Views of the 60-Odd Provinces.” The subjects of the prints in the series vary between the long and medium view — for example, a rainbow over a the sea, or travelers passing over a bridge. So when I saw a series of Hiroshige fish prints appear in a Creative Commons CCSearch result, my curiosity was piqued. What was the story behind the series?

It turns out that prints of animals, fish and plants were relatively rare in Hiroshige’s catalog: in his 40-year art career, he designed over 10,000 single sheet prints and several hundred book illustrations, with only around 500 having an animal or plant as the subject [the statistics are from Birds and Flowers, a book in the reference list below].

After reviewing a few books about Hiroshige at the local libraries, I found the answer to my question, and it turned out to be straightforward: a poetry guild called Kyokashi hired him to make ten fish illustrations to accompany their poems. During the design and printing process the poets gave their poems to the woodblock carvers, who added the lettering to a block so it would appear on the final print.

Art, Blogging

Bring Zing to Your Posts with Public Domain or Creative Commons Images

May 3, 2018 No Comments

Soon after I started blogging 10+ years ago, I learned about Creative Commons licenses, which some creators apply to their own work so it can be shared with certain restrictions (note that this blog is currently licensed with a CC BY-NC-SA 2.5, and my Flickr collection also has a CC license). After figuring out the mechanics, I started using CC-licensed items to add visual elements to my blog posts (the first CC image I used was a lovely black and white photo of a crow in flight from Mark Lorch’s collection for my random musings about a Los Angeles street). I continued to use Creative Commons art, mostly from Flickr, when I wanted a picture of a carrot, or a wheel of cheese, or something similarly relevant to my post.

As time went on, new collections of images appeared and I learned about existing collections, and started to use them as sources of the art for my blog. Eventually, however, my tastes changed slightly and I started being attracted to the ‘vintage’ material in the archives. I liked adding quirky or unusual images to my posts — instead of a picture of a finished dish that I was writing about, I’d include something from an old seed catalog or a fairy tale (as in my post about turnip pickles and turnip greens).

In the spirit of the Creative Commons, I’ll share a few of my favorite sources and list some of their good and bad characteristics: Flickr Commons, Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CCSearch, Wellcome Collection image library, and Google Books/Hathi Trust.

Art, California Travel

Sacramento Murals: A City’s Stunning Surfaces (Gallery)

October 10, 2017 2 Comments

Maverique Style House mural, I Street between 20th and 21st, collaboration between Love Ponci, Meme, Ursula X. Young, Reds, Beth Emmerich — Maverique Style House mural, I Street between 20th and 21st, Sacramento. A collaboration between Love Ponci, Meme, Ursula X. Young, Miss Reds, Beth Emmerich (links to their pages below)

(Disclosure: I received a discount on the International Food Blogger Conference (IFBC) registration fee in exchange for writing three posts about my experiences at the conference.)

It was a long hot drive to Sacramento for the International Food Blogger Conference (IFBC) — a searing 95 F and increasing traffic intensity as I reached the city’s outskirts. Construction and some one-way street problems increased my irritation. And so, once I everything was loaded into my hotel room, I was ready for some fresh air. By that time, temperatures had started to drop, so the scorching day had turned into a pleasantly warm evening (something rare for a Bay Area resident like me, where we start piling on the layers as the fog rolls in at the end of the day).

Central Sacramento is a nice place to walk, thanks to an orderly street grid, low levels of traffic noise, and a mostly pleasant vibe. On this visit I discovered that it offers much more to the aimless ambler: murals — murals covering multi-story buildings, murals under parking lots, murals in alleys. Sacramento is becoming a city of murals and they offer the observant explorer new visual delights all over the city.

Art, Books

Decorative Letters In 1880s-Era Good Housekeeping Magazine

August 5, 2017 No Comments

Before magazine designers and editors could use lots of photos to enliven their pages, they needed other methods. In the late 19th Century, Good Housekeeping used decorative initials at the start of each article. Unlike typical initials, these weren’t simply larger or more ornate, but were creative depictions of letters that related to the magazine’s themes, like a wisp of steam above a cup of tea that looks like a W, or a table that looks like a T.

I first ran across these while searching Google Books for drink recipes that use burdock and dandelion, and was reminded more recently when looking for vintage kale salad recipes (I found one in the July 24, 1886 issue of Good Housekeeping).

The gallery above has a few of the more creative initials that I found in the May 15, 1886 issue, as well as the W that I found earlier in an 1889 issue.

As printing technology changed and design decisions evolved, the thematic letters turned plain: 1903 issue has plain initials, but then in a 1909 issue they are mostly decorative (e.g., an I with botanical flourishes around it). The next issue I could find was 1922, which had plain initials.

References
All letters except the W above the cup of tea are from Good Housekeeping, May 15, 1886. The W above the cup of tea is from Good Housekeeping, August 17, 1889. (via Google Books)

Book Reviews, California History, California Travel

Book Review: “Golden Gate” by Kevin Starr

June 11, 2017 No Comments

The Golden Gate Bridge is a global icon, a triumph of engineering, and a work of art. In American terms, it was shaped by the City Beautiful movement, the Progressive Era, and the Great Depression. More mysteriously, the Bridge expresses those forces that science tells us constitute the dynamics of nature itself. Like the Parthenon, the Golden Gate Bridge seems Platonic in its perfection, as if the harmonies and resolutions of creation as understood by mathematics and abstract thought have been effortlessly materialized through engineering design.

That’s the opening to Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge, a concise examination of one of the wonders of the modern world by Kevin Starr (1940-2017). It’s a slim volume, less than 200 pages — a sharp contrast to Starr’s greatest legacy, his monumental 7-volume Americans and the California Dream — that takes an expansive and slightly non-traditional look at this magnificent structure and site. In eleven chapters with one word titles (“Icon,” “Site,” “Money”, etc.), Starr looks beyond concrete and steel to bigger topics like the geological formation of the Golden Gate and San Francisco Bay, how the Golden Gate stayed hidden from the Spanish for years*, and its cultural and artistic meanings — the Bridge as an Icon, as a driver of local commerce, as a catalyst for metropolitan prosperity.

Art, Food Data Visualization, Food History

Ornate Celery Vases Brought Style to an Unexciting Vegetable

May 7, 2017 No Comments

The Seller of Celery by John Ingram - Metropolitan Museum of Art DP826283 — “The Seller of Celery” by John Ingram (18th c.)

When I typed “celery” into the CC Search box to search a few museums’ public domain collections to illustrate my previous post on celery on restaurant menus, I was expecting one or two results, perhaps a still life. And so I was surprised when the search returned a bunch of objects called “celery vases” from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It turns out that “celery vases” were a thing. And some of them are attractive works in glass or ceramic.

Celery was a popular vegetable in the 1800s and early 1900s — often served as an appetizer with other raw or pickled vegetables. And so the artisans of the era created appropriate dishes to hold the crisp green stalks. (I wonder: are potters and glass makers working feverishly on the ideal plates for avocado toast or bowls for kale salad?)

Art, Books

Another Batch of Vintage Book Covers

March 23, 2017 No Comments

"A Man's Man", book cover from the British Library

While browsing the amazing and often confounding Flickr Commons, I was entranced by a collection of late 19th century book covers from the British Library. The majority of the nearly 900 covers are “pulp novels,” but you’ll also find travel books, text books, and other miscellany. Last month I shared a batch of six vintage book covers, and this post has six more in the image gallery that have interesting art or a lurid title. (Click any one of the images to expand the image and navigate through the collection.)

Image Credits
All book covers from the British Library’s Flickr Commons collection, in the Book Covers found by the community from the Mechanical Curator Collection. No known copyright restrictions.

The Cowboy Clan, or the Tigress of Texas, Aldine Publishing Company
Dark Dashwood, the Desperate; or the Child of the Sun, Aldine Publishing Company
Mad Tom’s Mission; or Crushing the Silver Scorpions, Aldine Publishing Company
The Texas Tramp, or Solid Sam the Yankee Hercules, Aldine Publishing Company
A Man’s Man, F. V. White & Co.
Cloven Hoof – The Demon Buffalo of the Border Vultures, Aldine Publishing Company

Art, Books

More Sketches by W.M. Thackeray

February 16, 2017 No Comments

Thackerayana has too many enchanting sketches to be limited to a single post of Thackeray sketches, so I’m highlighting ten more sketches (this time as a “slider,” instead of a tiled gallery). In the gallery you’ll find struggles with umbrellas, fencing vegetables, dancers, and more.

Big hair, drawing by W.M. Thackeray from Thackerayana (1875) - page 325 — Big hair, drawing by W.M. Thackeray from Thackerayana (1875) – page 325

I want to highlight one of the sketches, which I call “big hair.” To accompany the drawing, Thackerayana has a long quote from a publication called the ‘World’ on May 3, 1753, which I assume held the big hair sketch in its margins. It’s a conversation between a father, mother and daughter about hair styling:

“But how do you like my pompon, papa?” continued my daughter; “Is it not a charming one? I think it is prettier than mamma’s.”
“It may, child, for anything that I know; because I do not know what part of all this frippery thy pompon is.” [said papa]
“It is this, papa,” replied the girl, putting up her hand to her head, and showing me in the middle of her hair a complication of shreds and rags of velvets, feathers, and ribands, stuck with false stones of a thousand colours, and placed awry.
“But what hast thou done to thy hair, child, and why is it blue? Is that painted, too, by the same eminent hand that coloured thy cheeks?”
“Indeed, papa,” answered the girl, “as I told you before, there is no painting in the case; but what gives my hair that bluish cast is the grey powder, which has always that effect on dark-coloured hair, and sets off the complexion wonderfully.”
“Grey powder, child!” said I, with some surprise; “grey hairs I knew were venerable; but till this moment I never knew they were genteel.”
“Extremely so, with some complexions,” said my wife; “but it does not suit with mine, and I never use it.”

Reference

Thackerayana: Notes and Anecdotes, illustrated by nearly six hundred sketches by William Makepeace Thackeray, depicting humorous incidents in his school life, and favourite scenes and characters in the books of his every-day reading, by Joseph Grego, published by Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly (London), 1875. Full text at Archive.org. No known copyright restrictions.

Art, Books

Vintage Book Covers from the British Library

February 9, 2017 No Comments

"Seth Slocum, Railroad Surveyor, or The Secret of Sitting Bull", book cover from the British Library

On my journeys through the amazing Flickr Commons, one of the more exciting finds is a collection of late 19th century book covers from the British Library. The nearly 900 covers are primarily what we today call “pulp novels” written for the mass market, but there are also travel books, text books, and other miscellany. In the image gallery in this post, I’ve included some of my favorites, covers with interesting art or a lurid title — Her Bitter Awakening is a favorite right now. (Click any one of the images to expand the image and navigate through the collection.)

I’d love to read Seth Slocum, Railroad Surveyor, or the Secret of Sitting Bull — how often do you see an adventure story about a surveyor, an important but not glamorous job? I suspect that the story is about a surveyor working in the western territories who gets mixed up in conflicts between settlers and Native Americans. (Update, 7/20/19: I watched the first few episodes of AMC’s Hell on Wheels, and one of the most important characters in the first episode is a railroad surveyor, part of a crew mapping the route of the intercontinental railroad through the Great Plains.)

Unfortunately, the book is available as a PDF download and the text quality is rather poor, as the screenshot of two pages from the digitization below show. It would not be easy to read this book on a computer or mobile device. (But here’s something worth trying: use Acrobat Pro to extract the Seth Slocum part of the PDF as images, then use an image editor to sharpen the text.)

Pages from Seth Slocum, Railroad Surveyor, digitized by the British Library — Pages from *Seth Slocum, Railroad Surveyor*

Her Bitter Awakening, Thrilling Stories Committee
Buffalo Bill – The Buckskin King, or the Amazon of the West, Aldine Publishing Company
Lance and Lasso! or Adventures on the Pampas!, Aldine Publishing Company
Seth Slocum, Railroad Surveyor, or The Secret of Sitting Bull, Aldine Publishing Company
The Skipper of the Seagull, Aldine Publishing Company
Tiger Dick the Faro King, or The Cashier’s Crime, Aldine Publishing Company