Thursday Things: Books, Maps and Photos Edition
14 December 2023. Vol 5 No 50. By Dan McGirt. #227
Welcome to Thursday Things! If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the header or at the end of the post to let me know.
“Hi, I’m a deer in the snow. We’re doing that thing where the header image has nothing to do with the content of this issue.” Photo by Tim Schmidbauer on Unsplash
Neglected books
I have a feeling I may end up as an entry on this page someday, so save the link!
Writers whose lives and works have been ignored, overlooked, or completely forgotten by the mainstream of criticism and reference works.
ABOUT THIS SITE
Welcome to the Neglected Books page, edited and mostly written by Brad Bigelow. Here you’ll find articles and lists with thousands of books that have been neglected, overlooked, forgotten, or stranded by changing tides in critical or popular taste.
Here you can find links to and discussion of the works of … well, no one you’ve heard of. That’s the whole point. It’s a website about overlooked, forgotten works by overlooked, forgotten authors.
Why read what everyone else reads, right?
There are probably some real gems in here and you might find a new favorite author that makes you way cooler than people going on about Hemingway or James Joyce or the rest of those big name sellouts! It’s like being a fan of a band when they were still playing college bars, before they were famous.
Or long after they were forgotten. Because a quick browse shows that many of the authors on this page were a big deal back in the day. It’ simply that their fame and their work hasn’t “stood the test of time” to remain well-known today.
But, remember, the same was true of William Shakespeare for quite a long time. Dive in and see if any of these authors speak to you.
(And if you want to keep me off the Neglected Books page, check out my books!)
Photography firsts
You know I love listicles! This one caught my eye — a compilation of photography firsts. The first photograph, I learned, was taken in 1826 by French scientist Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, at his family's country home, Le Gras.
Or at least that’s the oldest photograph known to exist. You’ve got to figure there were a few earlier test photos that haven’t survived the centuries. But considering that a photographic exposure took eight hours back then, maybe not. Anyway, if we go with 1826, photography is almost 200 years old!
35 Photography Firsts That Paint A Fascinating Portrait Of Human History
In that time there have been many photographic firsts. I won’t list them all, but here are some of the photo firsts featured:
1838: The first time a human being was captured on camera
1839: The first selfie
1839 - 1840: The earliest surviving photograph of a woman
1843: The oldest surviving photo of a U.S. President (John Quincy Adams!)
1844: The first photo of people getting drunk
1853: The first smile ever photographed
1860: The oldest surviving aerial photo
1884: The first tornado captured in a photograph
1976: The first photo taken on Mars
1996: The first photo of the Earth from the Moon
Click over to the article to see them all!
The oldest known photographic image of New York City. The Upper West Side is a little more crowded now! (1848). Image: Wikimedia Commons
Oculi Mundi - Maps galore!
I’m addicted to maps. Fortunately, there are people much richer than me who are also addicted to maps and who have (or had) the wherewithal to collect rare and amazing maps that I would otherwise never see, but for the fact that someone collected them, digitized them, and made them available for all the world to see. Or at least all the world with an online connection.
Oculi Mundi: A Beautiful Online Archive of 130 Ancient Maps, Atlases & Globes
When it comes to maps, your first hit is always free. For you, maybe it was a Mercator projection of the world hung on the wall of an elementary-school classroom; maybe it was a road atlas in the glove box of your parents’ car. For Neil Sunderland, the earliest cartographic high seems to have come in childhood, from a humble map of Lancashire. When he found success in finance, his addiction grew in proportion to his means, and today his multi-million-dollar map collection includes the work of renowned sixteenth-century artists like Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, and Giovanni Cimerlino, who in 1566 depicted the known world in the shape of a heart.
Cimerlino’s cordiform Earth (bottom) is just one of the 130 historic “world maps, celestial maps, atlases, books of knowledge and globes” now available for your perusal at Oculi Mundi, an elaborate web site with the digitized holdings of the Sunderland Collection. “A platform to explore high-resolution images of these beautiful objects, to peek inside the books, and to discover information and stories,” it offers both a chronologically ordered “research” mode and a more free-form “explore” mode for browsing.
You too can visit the collection here: Oculi Mundi
Rudimentum Novitiorum, “an illustrated chronicle in Latin used by monks as a teaching aid for novices.” (1475) Source: Oculi Mundi via Open Culture
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