This week, we present images from A Pictorial History of Science Fiction, by Science Fiction fan, writer, and publisher David Kyle, first published in 1976 by Hamlyn of London. It was typeset by Filmtype Services Ltd. of Scarborough, England, and printed in England by Sackville Press Billericay Ltd. Our copy is a second printing from 1977.
Kyle was the co-founder of Gnome Press with SF editor and publisher Martin Greenberg. Gnome operated from 1948 until 1962, publishing SF heavy hitters like Asimov, Heinlein, and Clark. Along with Sauk City, WI based Arkham House, Gnome was instrumental in demonstrating that there was a market for novel-length science fiction. However, they relied on mail-order sales and their inability to secure wider distribution left them unable to compete when better funded outfits entered the Science Fiction market, starting with Doubleday in 1950.
I remembered that I had set this book aside for a future post when flipping through our facsimile ofDürer’sApocalypse, printed by Eugrammia Press in 1964, so I was delighted to see that Kyle had evoked Dürer in tracing the lineage of science fictional imagery (see image three). While I personally don’t subscribe to the school of thought that characterizes things like theEpic of Gilgamesh, Ovid’sMetamorphoses, or the Sanskrit epic Rāmāyanaas examples of early science fiction, I understand the impulses underlying this theory. Much in the way that it can be difficult to untangle early scientific inquiry from mysticism and spiritual exploration, the threads connecting contemporary science fiction to a sense of the fantastical that has existed in literature for millennia is just as strong as the link between SF and the modern scientific method.
See captions for image source information.
For more SF inspired Science Saturdays, check out our posts on our collection of FantasticandAmazing Storiesmagazines.
Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) is most well known for establishing a systematic binomial nomenclature for describing biological entities. This system was first published in his Philosophia Botanica, published in Stockholm and Amsterdam in 1751. This week we present engraved plates from a Spanish edition of this work, printed in Madrid by the widow and children of Pedro Marin in 1792 under the direction of Spanish botanist Casimiro Gómez de Ortega (1741-1818), with additional material by the Swedish botanist Johan Andreas Murray(1740-1791).
From 1848 to 1855, the United States conducted a survey of the U.S.-Mexican border under the leadership of American surveyor and civil engineer William H. Emory. The survey established the border between the United States and Mexico as defined in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the results were reported in this three-volume set, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, published in Washington D.C. by government printer Cornelius Wendell from 1857-1859.
In addition to its documentation of the new boundary, the survey report was notable for its natural history content, including the most comprehensive vegetative investigation ever conducted on the 1,969 mile border between Mexico and the United States. Many botanists took part in different legs of the Survey, including the German-American botanistGeorge Engelmann who wrote the section on Cactaceae.
Among our favorite books in the collection is the 1597 first edition of English herbalist and gardener John Gerard’s The Herball, or, Generall Historie of Plantes, published in London by the Queen’s Printer John Norton. Besides its important place in the popular British understanding of plants, we are also impressed by its folio-sized, 1,484-page heft and its hundreds of delightful woodcut illustrations.
Gerard himself was not a botanical scholar. He was, rather, a high-ranking barber-surgeon, and as such maintained a strong interest in herbalism, supervising significant gardens, and becoming internationally recognized as a dedicated horticultural enthusiast. Despite his lack of scholarship, he is considered one of the founders of botany in the English language, and was among the earliest Renaissance natural historians, relying on empirical evidence rather than ancient authority, following in the line of such botanists as Leonard Fuchs and Gerard’s fellow plant enthusiast Matthias de l'Obel.
Gerard had already gained some notoriety with his earlier 1596 Catalogus arborum, fruticum, ac plantarum, a catalog of 1,039 rare plants he cultivated in his garden at Holborn, and it was the printer John Norton who approached Gerard with the idea of producing an English version of Flemish botanist Rembert Dodoens’s popular herbal, Stirpium historiae pemptades sex published in 1583, which was itself a Latin version of an earlier Flemish work by Dodoens, the Cruydeboeck published in 1554. Earlier work on a popular English-style herbal (Dodoens’s herb book had already been translated into English in 1578) had been attempted by English botanist Robert Priest before he died in 1596 and Gerard has been accused of plagiarizing Priest as well as Gerard’s contemporary l’Obel.
This may or may not be true, but what is true is that only 16 of the approximately 1,800 woodcuts used in the Herball are original. Norton rented the majority of the woodblocks from the Frankfurt woodcutter and printer Nicolaus Bassaeus, which had already been used in several other previously published botanical publications. Despite its derivative nature, Gerard’s Herball remained a popular, standard English reference source for well over a century, with revised and updated editions produced in 1633 and 1636.
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The latest Food for Thought articlefromICES Journal of Marine Science explores building up resilience and adaption of social-ecological systems of coral reefs, by drastically reducing local stressors.
This week we revisit the massive, 11-pound, 650-page, loose-leaf-bound manuscript titled Evolutionthat was completely handwritten by Hans Q. Ewald starting in 1936. It includes numerous original drawings by his wife Helen Ewald. It is a bit of mystery as to who the Ewalds were, we know so very little about them. UWM Special Collections came into possession of this manuscript in 1985 after it was sent from a donor in Portugal. The donor letter indicates that Hans Q. Ewald may have been a professor in Milwaukee. If anyone has any other information, please let us know!
We have previously highlighted various birds from this manuscript, but for this Science Saturday I thought I would show a sampling of other life forms such as dinosaurs, jellyfish, a locust (with a horse-like head), parasites, a pangolin, and a lion! The diversity of life on Earth is truly astounding.
the sun really went off with that whole “streaks of sunbeam over land” thing huh, like
lovely, spooky, grand, whatever it is it’s a MOOD.
My art teacher, Mrs. Green, assures me that this does not happen and any photo I see it in is faked. So my family now calls this, “the thing that doesn’t happen.”
I mean I’ve seen those with my own eyes, guess I’m fake too.
Does this count? Took it at my university in Jamaica :D
