Flaming Leopold

[click for larger versions]

This anonymous 1667 German festival book is online at the University of Bielefeld (the image quality after about page 60 is awful). The title is: 'Von Himmeln entzündete und durch allgemeinen Zuruff der Erde sich himmelwerts erschwingende Frolockungs-Flammen zu höchstfeyerli..' for which the translation is rather useless: 'From skies caught fire and by general Zuruff of the earth sky value erschwingende Frolockungs flames too more hoechstfeyerli..'

I am relatively confident it records the celebrations surrounding the first marriage in 1666 of Habsburg Emperor Leopold I of Austria/Hungary/Bohemia to his neice Margarite Theresa, daughter of King Phillip IV of Spain. A number of different hands were likely responsible for the engravings, which vary in quality through the work.

Spirit Books

Sacred Speaker
'The name Sacred Speaker refers to the fan shape and the original
use of folding fans in Japan--for communication with the gods.

Book of handmade Mexican bark paper, handmade paper from
Bhutan, Indian bagasse paper, twigs, glass beads, and thread on
a stand of covered dowels, binders board, and paper.' 1993

Terrestrial Talisman
'The beaded square on each page is based on the ho-t'u,
a Chinese talisman. The four-sided square represents
stability and order with its connection to the earth.

Book of Mexican amatyl paper, Japanese kyo paper,
bagasse paper, glass seed beads, and thread in a cradle
of grape vines on a base of binders board and paper.' 1995

Maternal Chain
'My father gave me the root which had been collected by my mother.
I named the book for the generational chain that connects us in spirit.

Book of handmade Mexican bark paper, banana fiber paper
from Costa Rica, glass seed beads, small twigs, and thread
in a cradle of a root on a base of binders board and paper.' 1999

Essential Inheritance
One of my parents gathered this piece of driftwood.
A physical part of my inheritance, it represents so much more.

Book of Mexican amatyl paper, banana paper, glass seed beads, and
thread in a cradle of driftwood on a base of binders board and paper. 2001

Ixchel's Dream
'I found the coconut shells along a rocky rise above a beach in Isla Mujeres,
Mexico. The name came to me instantly. At the end of the island were the
ruins of the temple of Ixchel, who was the Mayan moon goddess.

Books of amatyl paper, horn beads, wooden beads, and thread
in weathered coconut shells with beads and corn on a base of wood,
binders board and paper.' 2002

The Spirit Books Series © Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord [via Boston Book Arts]

Flora Brasiliensis

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"Flora brasiliensis was published between 1840 and 1906 by the editors Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, August Wilhelm Eichler, and Ignatz Urban, with the participation of 65 specialists from various countries. It contains taxonomic treatments of 22.767 species of Brazilian angiosperms, held in 15 volumes, divided in 40 parts, with a total of 10.367 pages."

In both english and portuguese, Flora Brasiliensis is a wonderful website with a powerful flash zoom or up to 10 pages at a time can be downloaded as pdf files. [via MetaFilter]

Searching the BibliOdyssey Archives

Link to BibliOdyssey at del.icio.us

It seems clear to me now that attempting to wrangle the varied material posted here into some semblance of organized arrangement was doomed from the outset to be unsuccessful.

[about 15 paragraphs of twaddle removed]

The last few days I've been posting all the entries at BibliOdyssey to the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to help make it easier to find things. I did this for myself essentially but it may be of use to people if, like me, the idea of loading 15 or 20 Mb pages from the weekly archives list is an aggravation.

It's 'unsuccessful' because it's impossible to wrangle art, literature, science and history and their related images into succinct and sensical tags. Mostly. Sometimes it's the image, sometimes it's the book, sometimes it's the illustrator that is the main focus. I might work this out when I go through the post but it doesn't mean that the way it's tagged is intuitive for others.

So I've added comments to the del.icio.us entries to make it all a bit easier. In some cases a new link has been added with the comment. Now and then I've put the main link from the post into the comment field to take a step out of the process. Generally I tried to describe the images in the post in addition to the factual information - date/name/title &c. It might be a couple of days until everything is indexed and available from the search box.

Anyway, it's done now. The tags aren't perhaps immediately logical but it's about the best I could come up with for various reasons [the edited paragraphs not above]. It helps me if I add the words 'tends to be about or relate to' before each tag.

Regional spread isn't reflected in the tags. Country tags are only used when they are actually relevant to the material in the post. Some of the tags (history and medieval particularly) are redundant and/or useless. No doubt I will tweak them as it occurs to me. I'll add a link to the del.icio.us site to the sidebar shortly. Feel free to make any suggestions or castigate me as seems appropriate. Now, where were we...?

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Herman Potočnik (pseudonym Hermann Noordung) (1892-1929) from Slovenia was a bridge builder with the Austrian army during WWI. After the war he studied electrical and mechanical engineering and specialized in rocketry.

Although sick with tuberculosis Potočnik wrote a book Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums - der Raketenmotor ('The Problem of Space Travel - The Rocket Motor') which was published in 1928 but dated 1929. He died within months of its publication.

This book is an engineering guide for space travel and is remarkably accurate in many of its predictions/recommendations. Potočnik "deals with issues such as weightlessness, space communications, maintaining a habitable environment for the crew, and extravehicular activity."

"The most often cited of Potočnik's original ideas are: the geostationary satellite, the residential wheel in space, the cylindrical observatory and the solar thermo-mechanical electric energy power station."

Potočnik made some mistakes in a few calculations and these were the immediate focus of attention when the book (with 100 illustrations) came out. Obviously he didn't get the opportunity to address the criticisms or correct the errors so it wasn't until 30 years later that Potočnik's work received wider recognition. Some of the diagrams and some german translations of sections from the original Slovenian were circulated however. Arthur C Clarke relied upon Potočnik's work when he outlined an idea for mass communication using geostationary satellites in the 1940s.

"His space station consisted of up to three modules: the "Wohnrad" (Inhabitable Wheel), the power station and the observatory. The modules would be connected by cables. The inhabitable wheel has the form of a giant wheel and rotates to simulate gravity in the living areas. On top of the wheel there would be parabolic mirrors mounted to concentrate the solar radiation for the power supply through a heat engine power station."

• The book was finally translated into english and published in 1999. The whole of the text is available online. Alas, no illustrations are included. [The foreword outlines Frederick Ordway's pursuit of the elusive Potočnik text over many years]
• The final image above - the Space Station Habitat Wheel - is available in many sizes from NASA.
• Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, Astronomy & Spaceflight.
• There seems to be about 7 or 8 original illustration and an outline of the book at the Slovenia Expo site.
• Wikipedia on Potočnik.
• The rest of the images come from the Noordung Museum.
• Basics of the Geostationary Orbit by Dr. T.S. Kelso.