Monthly Archives: March 2016

Salem Lots

Several years ago, Bonhams Auctions held an auction of items from the Caren Archive, the largest private collection of American documents from the colonial era to the present. It was an extremely profitable event for all concerned, and so now there is a second sale coming up, and this one features several notable Salem items. The April 11 “Treasures from the Caren Archives II: How History Unfolds” auction comprises a wide variety of paper lots, among them one of the earliest English reports on the Salem Witch Trials, a 1777 financial document in which the Widow Sarah Putnam agreed to finance the Salem privateer Pluto during the American Revolution,  the “preliminaries of peace” negotiations that brought the Revolution to a close as reported by the Salem Gazette, Andrew Jackson’s 1834 State of the Union address, also reported in the Gazette, and a list of the Salem donors who contributed to William Henry Harrison’s successful presidential campaign in 1840.There’s also a great mezzotint image of Major-General Israel “Old Put” Putnam made in 1775 by Salem printer Joseph Hiller, based on a painting by Benjamin Blyth–very similar to the portrait of John Hancock this very pair produced in that same year.

Selling Salem 1693

Selling Salem Putnam 1795

Salem Gazette 1783 Preliminaries of Peace

Salem Gazette 1834

Selling Salem 1840

Salem Lots from the upcoming Bonhams Auction of items from the Caren Archive: Memoirs of the Present State of Europe, or the Monthly Account of Occurrences Ecclesiastical, Civil and Military. Vol II. No 1 [-12]. London: printed for Robert Clavel and Jonathan Robinson and Samuel Crouch, 1692-93;  BLYTH, BENJAMIN. 1746-1786. The Honble Israel Putnam Esqr. Major General of the United Forces of America. Salem, [MA]: printed by Joseph Hiller, [1775]; Salem Gazettes from 1783 and 1834; A handwritten list of 47 Whig subscribers offering to contribute funds to the campaign of William Henry Harrison, Salem, June 1840.

The two items that interest me the most are the 1693 London periodical and (oddly enough), the list of William Henry Harrison campaign donors. 1693 is very late in the history of the European Witch Hunt, and you would expect English reactions to the Salem trials to run along the lines of those backward, superstitious colonials, but this correspondent is not quite so condemnatory. He does however express the emerging enlightened mentality : In my opinion a Rational person, who is not Convinced of the Matter by his own Eyes, ought to suspend his judgment and to remain in a kind of Skepticism, until Experience shall receive farther illustrations from Experience. The Harrison document is interesting not because of the 47 names of Salem men listed (familiar prominent names) but because it sheds light on campaign finances in the mid-nineteenth century: the money went not to the production of hand-bills or newspaper advertising, but to defray the expenses of the Whig celebrations of the Fourth of July ensuing in addition to the cost of the collations…..” . Firecrackers and food (and drink), no doubt.


Little British Books

I have a particular predilection for small decorative books published in collectible series, which British publishers are particularly good at producing. I have posted about two of my favorite series before, Britain in Pictures and King Penguins, and on this recent trip I encountered some more! The very traditional and well-stocked Daunt Books, which in addition to selling books has its own imprint, had several series on display in their main store on Marylebone High Street in London, and Waterstones (now managed by James Daunt) had a beautiful display of the new Penguin Monarchs series AND two big bookcases full of classic Penguins. The British love their Penguins, and who can blame them?

Daunt Books London

Daunt Books

Daunt Books Display 2

Candlewick Press Collage

Daunt Books Display

All sorts of books at Daunt including pamphlets: the Candlewick Press “Poetry Pamphlets” are marketed with the pitch phrase “instead of a card”; the “Little Black Classics” were issued in a series of 80 volumes last year to commemorate Penguin’s 80th anniversary.

Penguins Orange

Penguins Blue

Penguin Monarchs

Penguin Monarch Charles II.

Over at Waterstones on Gower Street, there were vintage paperback Penguins in orange and blue, and the new Penguins monarchs series, “ short, fresh, expert accounts of England’s rulers in a collectible format” with commissioned covers. I want all 45 of them (44 kings and queens + Oliver Cromwell, of course).

 


Ghostly Courtiers

I’ve just got a few more English posts before I get back to the actual streets of Salem: I just took so many great pictures over there if I do say so myself! I’m going back to Hampton Court today–the other side of Hampton Court, which if of course a bilateral palace, with a Tudor side and a Baroque/Georgian one, the cumulative work of Sir Christopher Wren and Sir John Vanbrugh who were commissioned by the last Stuarts and the first Georgians to remodel the entire castle in a more modern (and presumably comfortable) style. If completed, this modernization plan would have resulted in the complete demolition of the Tudor palace but lack of funds and the shifting preferences of monarchs determined that it was (fortunately) not. I far prefer the Tudor palace, inside and out, but I really enjoyed the furnishings, paintings, and overall interpretation of the “Secrets of the Royal Bedchamber” exhibit in the royal apartments on the other side, populated by courtiers all draped in white Tyvek.  Like any old place touched by tragedy, there are rumors of ghosts at Hampton Court Palace, and it as if you are walking among them in these rooms.

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Baroque facades–with the Tudor roofline peaking out behind, dining rooms and courtiers; Below, the “Grey Lady” ghost, Sybil Penn, wandering through the palace.

Grey-Lady-low-res


Hooked on Hawksmoor

Well, I am very late to this party but I became absolutely obsessed with the works of British Baroque architect Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736) on my recent trip to London. Hawksmoor’s professional reputation was overshadowed in his own time–and long afterwards–by his association with two more prominent “gentlemen” architects, Christopher Wren and John Vanbrugh, but in the last few decades he seems to have emerged from their shadow. His oeuvre is impressive: under Wren he worked on St. Paul’s Cathedral, the naval buildings at Greenwich, several buildings at Oxford University, Hampton Court and Kensington Palaces and Westminster Abbey, the west towers of which were constructed according to his own design during his tenure as Surveyor General, and he collaborated with Vanbrugh on both Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace. I’ve been to all of these places, but I never associated any of them with Hawksmoor, or thought about Hawksmoor at all, until I saw his Christ Church, Spitalfields, early last week. From that point on the week belonged to Hawksmoor: I scouted out his six surviving London “Queen Anne” churches commissioned by the New Churches in London and Westminster Act of 1710, really looked at the Abbey’s west towers for the first time, and looked on the stately buildings of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich with a new appreciation.

Christ Church Spitalfields

Hawksmoor 1

Christ Church Spitalfields 1950s

Christ Church Spitalfields 1909

21. Christ Church, Spitalfields, London: by Nicholas Hawksmoor 1964 by John Piper 1903-1992

Christ Church, Spitalfields, shining like a beacon at the end of very busy Brushfield Street, afternoon and early evening (after its long restoration, completed in 2004), and in the 1950s and 1909; John Piper, Christ Church, Spitalfields, London: by Nicholas Hawksmoor, 1964, Presented by Curwen Studio through the Institute of Contemporary Prints, Tate Britain.

I just can’t stop looking at Christ Church! And I’m not alone: it has inspired scores of artists and photographers, and authors such as Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, and Alan Moore. In the poem Lud Heat (1975), which inspired Ackroyd’s (crime? suspense? mystery? not sure how to categorize it) novel Hawksmoor (1985), Sinclair envisions a “psychogeographical” alignment between all of the Hawksmoor churches, and later calls them “eternal” as opposed to the “shimmering trash” of the Docklands (in this great video). Sinclair is absolutely right; these churches do stand out, all of them, not just because of their stature and their distinctive spires but also because they present a rather odd combination of classical austerity and weight.You also have the sense that Hawksmoor was building temples rather than churches: these houses of worship don’t look precisely Christian! One of his six surviving London churches, St. George’s, Bloomsbury, is essentially a classical temple with a steeple on the side rather than the center, at the top of which is not Saint George but King George (I–in Roman dress, presumably he is the Saint), accompanied by a lion and a unicorn. It’s no wonder that our modern secular age admires Hawksmoor, the architect and the Freemason.

Hawksmoor St. Georges

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Hawksmoor St. Georges 3

Hawksmoor’s St. George’s Bloomsbury, completed in 1730; restoration completed in 2006.

Well, I do believe St. George’s was Hawksmoor’s last London church; his earlier ones do appear a bit more traditional/ecclesiastical but still display that distinctive Hawksmoor edge of composition and detail. Here are the rest of his churches, plus two more that he collaborated on with John James: St. Luke’s Old Street in Islington (which features an obelisk steeple!) and St. John’s Horsleydown in Bermondsey, which was demolished after sustaining bomb damage during World War II.

Hawksmoor St Alfrege

Hawksmoor St. Alfrege

Hawksmoor St. Alfrege 3

St. Annes Limehouse

St George in the East

St George in the East rendering BL

Hawksmoor St Mary Woolnoth City

450px-St_Lukes_Islington Hawksmoor

Hawksmoors lost church Bermondsey

St. Alfege Church, Greenwich, 1712-1714 (with window details); St. Anne’s Limehouse, 1714-27 (on the grounds of which there is a pyramid); St. George in the East, Wapping, 1714-1729 (I did not have time to make it out to Wapping, so I have “borrowed” a picture from here and a drawing of the facade from the George III topographical collection at the British Library. Next time!); St. Mary Woolnoth, 1716-27, right in the center of the City of London (very wide and narrow steeple); Two collaborations with John James, 1727-33: St. Luke’s, Old Street and St. John’s Horsleydown, demolished after World War II (from the Collections of the Metropolitan Archives of London). Similar fluted spires, but St. John’s had a comet on top!

So we have all sorts of classical elements, combined with more whimsical ones: columns, pyramids, obelisks, unicorns, comets. Mathematical precision and clocks. I don’t think this adds up to anything particularly pagan, much less sinister (somehow Hawksmoor acquired the moniker “the Devil’s Architect”–I’m not sure if this is a creation of his time or ours): I just think he was a man of his time, which was of course the Enlightenment. Quite a modern man, who ascended to the heights of a gentleman’s profession on his merits alone and worked primarily for institutions rather than patrons. He was impressive and his work remains impressive. I’m not precisely sure what his creative contributions were relative to those of his mentor, Christopher Wren, but I really felt Hawksmoor’s presence at Greenwich, almost as much as Christ Church, Spitalfields: maybe I’m getting a bit “psychogeographical” myself! Unfortunately we don’t seem to have this particular field of inquiry in the States: we’re just not that attached to our built environment to get that introspective about it.

Hawksmoor Greenwich

Hawksmoor Greenwich 2

So now I’m home, with only a few Hawksmoor books to sustain me. I need more: so now I’m going about collecting more texts, and some images that rival, or at least capture, the magnificence of Hawkmoor’s buildings. I really like the work of Andrew Ingamells, who has rendered several of Hawksmoor’s churches in aquatint etchings, and I would almost kill for Pablo Bronstein’s Four Alternate Designs for a Lighthouse in the Style of Nicholas Hawksmoor (Bronstein also designed and commissioned the construction of an actual Hawksmoor beach hut in the form of a lighthouse at  Folkestone, which you can see here).

Ingamells Hawksmoor Collage

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Hawksmoor Pablo Bronstein

Hawksmoor books

Trinity and Hawksmoor

Aquatint etchings of Hawksmoor churches by Andrew Ingamells, from a selection here; Pablo Bronstein’s “Four Alternate Designs”, Herald Street Gallery;  Architectural and historical analysis from Owen Hopkins and Mohsen Mostafavi and beautiful black and white photographs by Hélène Binet; just finishing up Ackroyd’s engaging Hawksmoor this morning!


Tudor Texture in London

Besides far superior public transportation systems and many more public smokers, I think the thing that Americans notice the most when they travel to Europe is texture: a built environment that looks comparatively embellished, nuanced with symbolism, and venerable. Despite London’s dynamic growth over the past twenty years or so, there is still a lot of historic fabric in the city–but much of it is deceptively and relatively “modern”, i.e., Victorian. The Houses of Parliament are probably the best example, but scattered around the city are myriad buildings that “look” older than they really are: especially pubs! I was charged with finding Tudor sites in London on this trip: a task that was not as easy as you might think. The successive catastrophes of the Great Fire of London and the Blitz obliterated much of the city’s pre-modern fabric and in between there were those “improving” Victorians! So what remains of Tudor London? Lots of things, primarily to be found in the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain, The Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Museum of London. Several places, namely the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey, St. Margaret’s Church nearby, Lambeth Palace just across the river, and the Tower of London and the sister churches of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate and St. Andrew Undershaft in the City. There is also the Staple Inn of my last post, whose very Tudor appearance probably owes much to an early twentieth-century “restoration”, and St. Bartholomew’s Gatehouse and the oldest residence in London, located on the picturesque City street of Cloth Fair. To the west, Hampton Court Palace, and to the east, Sutton House in Hackney, which was one of the highlights of my recent tour. You can’t quite immerse yourself in the Tudor era in modern London–but you can come close, for an hour or two, if you find the right spot.

Tudor Texture windows

Tudor Texture Queen's

Tudor Texture Sutton Windows

Tudor Texture Sutton Window

Hampton Court 4

Windows into the Tudor era: exterior of the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court (where we attended a service!), featuring the Tudor emblems of the portcullis and rose; looking out from the Tower towards the Queen’s apartments, built c. 1530 for Anne Boleyn; windows at the Sutton House, c. 1535; one of many impressive oriel windows at Hampton Court Palace.

Henry VIII at Hampton Court

NPG 4618; Catherine Parr by Unknown artist

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Tudor Texture Holme Family

Tudor People: Henry VIII at Hampton Court; my favorite of his wives, Katherine Parr at the National Portrait Gallery; the tomb of  his niece (and the grandmother of King James VI and I) Margaret, Countess of Lennox, in the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey; not quite Tudor-era people but I love this triptych portrait of the Holme family in the Victoria & Albert Museum, c. 1628.

Hampton Court

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Sutton House

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Gherkin and St. Andrews

Hampton Court courtyards and Sutton House and its central courtyards in Hackney; St. Andrew Undershaft in the City of London dwarfed by the Gherkin (my photograph didn’t turn out so well as the Gherkin wasn’t so textured; this is one credited to Duncan which I found here. It’s a pretty classic composition now, as you can imagine!)

So now finally for some real interior texture: the Tudors could not bear an unembellished surface and were particular fond of tapestries and wood paneling for their interiors. At Hampton Court, the private Tudor apartments were demolished to make way for the Baroque “restoration” of William and Mary’s reign, but the Great Hall of Henry VIII’s time remains, with its decorated hammer-beam roof and walls lined with The Story of Abraham tapestries. On the day that I was there last week, this room was full of English schoolgirls (in the best uniforms ever) drawing details from the tapestries in close consultation with their teachers, so it was hard for me to get a clear shot of the interior details (plus I was very taken with these uniforms–fortunately there are lots of pictures of the Great Hall online). Later in the week, at Sutton House, I walked around the house in complete isolation and marveled at each and every surface: it was like stepping back in time in some rooms, while in others the National Trust’s conservation/interpretation approach enabled one to look beyond the decorative facade into the bones of the house, which is a must-see for any Tudor fan.

Hampton Court Great Hall

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Sutton House Door

Sutton House doorway

Sutton House Linenfold Paneling

Sutton House plain paneling

Sutton House paneling

Sutton House Details

Sutton House upstairs

Schoolgirls in the Great Hall at Hampton Court; The very famous “Great Ware Bed”, c. 1590, at the Victoria & Albert Museum (this item could have a post of its own); The National Trust’s Sutton House in Hackney: front door, doorway, paneling, details from fireplace surround & hops woodcarving; upstairs drawing room.        


Londonopolis

I have returned from my whirlwind tour of London, which is itself a whirlwind, continuing and even intensifying the dynamic expansion (up and out) that I witnessed the last time I was over there, with no cessation in sight! There’s nothing new about this: the metropolis (Londinopolis, according to the title of James Howell’s 1647 survey Londinopolis an historicall discourse or perlustration of the city of London, the imperial chamber, and chief emporium of Great Britain: whereunto is added another of the city of Westminster, with the courts of justice, antiquities, and new buildings thereunto belonging) emerged in the later sixteenth century and just kept growing all the way up to the twentieth century, when wars stopped and then resuscitated its regular redevelopment. London remains the “chief emporium” of Great Britain, but also of the world. It was difficult to take a picture anywhere in the city without capturing a crane in the background: construction zones abound in every district. And even where there are no cranes there are constant contrasts between old and new–some quite shocking–and some more subtle. But London remains an amalgamation of neighborhoods, and I do wonder what its citizens think of the relentless development pressure. You hear complaints of “blackened” Belgravia, where wealthy foreigners have purchased flats in which they will never live, and “iceberg houses” with hugely built-out basements below ground, but what looks like folly architecture to me seems okay to Londoners. I purchased a book by Rowan Moore, the architecture critic for the Observer, to give some insights into London’s 21st-century building boom during the long flight home, but Slow Burn City was more about anecdotal building than perceptions of planning, for the most part.

I did complete my planned itinerary (including Botticelli Reimagined at the Victoria & Albert, which was ok, but from my perspective presented in backwards order; the Pepys exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, which adhered to its one man’s life and times format without fail, and the AMAZING sixteenth-century Sutton House in Hackney, which will get its own post), and took students to Hampton Court, Westminster, Greenwich, and the Tower of London. The rest of the time I spent in the east end–in Spitalfields and Shoreditch– exploring bustling neighborhoods that I didn’t know very well, inspired by the wonderful blog Spitalfields Life and steadfastly avoiding the Salem-like Jack the Ripper Museum, which was supposed to be about the lives of the female victims (and working-class women in general) but is somehow not. Spitalfields is surrounded by modern buildings but its core is eighteenth-century, and it has been a long-time refuge for immigrants: French Huguenots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Irish and Jews in the nineteenth, and Bangladeshi today. It is home to the Old Spitalfields Market, which is probably the best market in London, a city of great markets. I fell hard for an architect there, and I don’t mean my husband (who came along): one sight of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields and I was a goner–so he’s going to get his own post too.

Some of my favorite places and photographs: more focused posts to follow all week.

London Staple Inn

London Staple

London Liberty

London Busts

Real Tudor and Faux Tudor: Two of my favorite buildings in London: the Staple Inn in Holborn and Liberty of London; busts from Liberty, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

London Trooping

London Tower View

London 483

London Tower

London Graffiti Collage

London V and A courtyard

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Troops trooping near Buckingham Palace; In the Tower yard; armour in the White Tower; “graffiti” on window frames in the Tower and at Hampton Court Palace; The view from the White Tower–fortress against modernity! In the garden at the Victoria & Albert; the view south across the Thames from the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.

London St Pancras

Pancras todayLondon Marleybone 2

London Marylebone

London Placques

The amazing St Pancras train station and adjoining hotel, saved from demolition by Poet Laureate John Betjeman, whose statue is prominently situated inside; Marylebone streets; a few blue placques.

London 455

London Spitalfields

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London Fournier

Very Vibrant Spitalfields: Nicholas Hawksmoor’s STUNNING Christ Church, Spitalfields (completed 1729) with which I am OBSESSED; the view from the Church: old and new buildings encasing the market; a few items from the market (thanks Carol!), the beautiful Fournier Street; an effigy of London Mayor Boris Johnson (or Donald Trump)?


Off to London, Leaving Links to Salem Ladies

I’m off to London for Spring Break so will not be posting for a while, but I wanted to leave some links to some of the posts I’ve written on Salem women to fill in for me in my absence. It is Women’s History Month after all, and some of these ladies did not get the love and attention that I feel they deserved! Finding these ladies was an exercise that convinced me that I need to figure out how to develop an index for this compendium when I get back.

I know London is not the typical Spring Break destination, but it is always my favorite destination: for this particular trip (on which I will be accompanied by students!!!!) I have the Botticelli Reimagined exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum on my agenda as well as Samuel PepysPlague, Fire and Revolution at the National Maritime Museum, and I really want to visit Sutton House in Hackney, as Tudor structures are relatively rare in London. Then all (or some) of the usual places. I know London pretty well but am open to suggestions (particularly for food–I never know where to eat) so comment away: I am not bringing my laptop but will check in with my phone.

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Sutton House Hackney

A Botticelli variation, a Pepys poster, and a drawing-room in Sutton House, Hackney.

So here are some links that will lead you to Salem ladies, if you are so inclined. Despite years of blogging, I’ve hardly scratched the surface when it comes to interesting and notable Salem women, as I have sought to expose those whose stories don’t get told again and again and again. I seem to be drawn to artists, but there are lots of entrepreneurs and activists and just interesting women whom I have yet to “cover”–some men too!

Colonial women: A Daring Woman; Ann Putnam; The Pardoning of Ann Pudeator; Four Loves; Minding the Farm.

Authors:  A Scribbling Woman from Salem; The Little Locksmith; Mary Harrod Northend; Mrs. Parker and the Colonial Revival in Salem (could also go under “artists”); Tedious Details.

Artists:  Painting Abigail and Apple Blossoms; Fidelia Rising; Miss Brooks Embellishes; Salems Very Own Wallace Nutting;Paper Mansion.

Uncategorized:  The Mysterious Miss Hodges; A Salem Suffragette; The Woman who Lived in my House;  Ladies of Salem; A Salem Murder Mystery; The Hawthorne Diaries; Factory Girls and Boys; Little Folks and Black Cats; Bicycle Girls.


Hawthorne’s Homes and Haunts

In the later nineteenth century there emerged a particular genre of topical nonfiction writing which focused on literary “shrines”, and Nathaniel Hawthorne received lots of attention from its practitioners. There were several periodical articles and books published with variant titles in the “Homes and Haunts of Hawthorne” realm, exploring the role of environment on his works with varying degrees of depth. As he was a native son, obviously Salem plays a central role in these analyses, generally as an urban and conversely puritanical place from which he wanted to escape to Concord and pastoral points west. No doubt all these authors were inspired by Hawthorne himself, not just his works but also his (quite self-conscious) words, written in 1840 about a garret room in his uncle’s house on Herbert Street where he spent quite a bit of time: Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in days gone by….Here I have written many tales–many that have been burned to ashes, many, doubtless, that deserved the same fate….If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed.  All of the Hawthorne biographers did indeed make their way to the stark Herbert Street house (which Hawthorne later described as “Castle Dismal”) and it is interesting to see its comparative depictions. Winfield S. Nevins calls it a “severely plain”, common, though tidy, tenement house in his 1894 article in The New England Magazine, while Helen Archibald Clarke goes much more negative in her 1926 book, Hawthorne’s Country: It is now a tenement house, into which one does not care to intrude farther than the yard, so untidy that no amount of enthusiasm for shrines can blind one to it. When asking the way to the house, one is apt to be met by the reply: ‘I cannot speak English’. It is a comfort to remember that in Hawthorne’s day the district was not so closely built up [YES IT WAS],and was at least quiet and clean, and that however unlovely the lines of the house, the beach and boundless ocean were not far off.  Well, you can tell that she is going to prefer Concord to Salem!

Hawthorne Collage

Sepia drawings of Hawthorne’s birthplace, then on Union Street, now on the campus of the House of the Seven Gables, and the adjacent rear window of 10 Herbert Street from  W.B. Closson’s Homes and Haunts of the Poets, a series of etchings issued by Prang in 1886, and a photograph of the same buildings from Winfield S. Nevins’ “Homes and Haunts of Hawthorne” from New England Magazine (15) 1894.

Both authors include lots of illustrations in their works, including drawings, prints and photographs, but Nevins wants to portray a past Salem for the most part, devoid of people, while Clarke lets us see some 1926 inhabitants in the Witch City: children are prominently placed on Gallows Hill, even though it is not exactly clear what this site has to do with Hawthorne. The time span between the two texts affords us to see the restoration (or creation) of the House of the Seven Gables, never the home of Hawthorne but perpetually his most conspicuous Salem “haunt”.

Homes and Haunts Dearborn

Hawthorne Homes and Haunts Chestnut

Hawthorne Houses Mall Street

Hawthorne Homes and Haunts Custom House Clarke

Hawthorne Homes and Haunts Main

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Gables collage

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Photographs of Hawthorne’s Dearborn and Chestnut Street residences, along with the Turner-Ingersoll House before its transformation into the House of the Seven Gables (on the left above) from Winfield S. Nevins’ 1894 article, “The Homes and Haunts of Hawthorne”; photographs of the Mall Street house, the Customs House, a view towards Washington Square, the “Sockets” of Gallows Hill, and the House of the Seven Gables from Helen Archibald Clarke’s Hawthorne’s Country (1926).


Recovered

I enjoyed clicking around a crowdsourced graphic design project called Recovering the Classics the other day featuring new covers for old classics produced by anyone and everyone who had the inclination. Bibliographic art is always interesting to me, and I think it is a dynamic genre as interest in things that appear to be fading naturally and conversely escalates. Even though some of the cover designs are a bit simplistic (or confusing, or not particularly representative of what’s inside), it’s interesting to compare them: just click on a big image and you will see all the other submissions for the same title. I am naturally drawn to the starker, more symbolic designs as well as those which are slightly retro or antiqued in some way, and I am a sucker for nearly every new cover of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter that I encounter: they are always an easy A in my book.

rtc_The+Scarlet+Letter_MrFurious framed

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rtc_The+Wonderful+Wizard+of+Oz_Ji+Sug+Kang framed

RTC Kafka Collage

RTC Jekyll Hyde Covers

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RTC Frankenstein Collage

Book covers by MrFurious (The Scarlet Letter), Huy Ho (Jane Eyre); Ji Sug Kang (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz); J.R.J. Sweeney and Roberto Lanznaster (Metamorphosis); Ioannis Fetanis and MrFurious (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde);  Michelle Kondrich (The Jungle); Nick fairbank..f9 design (The Jungle Book); Steve St. Pierre (Dracula); and Luis Prado, Alexis Tapia, and Ed Gaither–Modern Electrographic (Frankenstein). I don’t know why no one has caught the prominent typo yet!

More covers on view at Recovering the Classics.


Salem Film Fest 2016

CATS, architecture, the Renaissance (or pseudo-Renaissance)…all my favorite topics are featured in documentary films screening at this year’s Salem Film Fest, which opened last night with Curious Worlds: the Art & Imagination of [miniaturist] David Beck. The festival is now a Salem tradition, in its ninth year, and of course a welcome addition to the non-witchy/kitschy calendar. I usually go to one or two films, and regret not seeing more. Even though the slogan of the festival is Come to Salem, See the World, its organizers always include some local productions, so the entire experience has a “glocal” feel to it, which seems appropriate for our city, our time, and this particular medium. This evening we will see Concrete Lovethe Böhm Family, which purportedly “paints an intimate and pointed portrait of the complexity and inseparability of life, love, faith and architecture” through its examination of the life and work of German architect Gottfried Böhm, the patriarch of an architectural dynasty which includes his three sons. This weekend, I’ve got my eye on Projections of America, featuring 26 short propaganda films about America: the people produced for European audiences following the liberation of France in 1944, Kedi, all about the hundreds of thousands of cats that roam the streets of Istanbul, American Renaissance, a short on Renaissance-faire culture (I can’t miss this, as hopefully it will give me all sorts of insights into my students), and The Million Dollar Duck, (not to be confused with the 1971 Disney film of the same name) about the fierce competition among six artists to win the Federal Duck Stamp Contest, the only juried art competition sponsored by the U.S. government. I feel honor-bound to see this last movie, as one of Salem’s most illustrious artists, Frank Benson, was actually one of the competition’s first victors!

Salem Film Fest Concrete Love Poster

Salem Film Fest Poster_Projections_of_America

Salem Film Fest Kedi Still

Salem Film Fest Kedi Cat

Salem Film Fest AMERICANRENAISSANCE_web_1

Salem Film Fest Million Dollar Duck

Duck Stamp

German poster for Concrete Love: the Böhm Family; Projections of America poster;  character cats in Kedi; a “Renaissance” plague doctor in American Renaissance, poster for The Million Dollar Duck, and Frank Benson’s winning design from 1935.


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