Gothic Illuminated Sketchbook

Stephan Schreiber's late gothic pattern book was produced in Urach in the (now) state of Baden-Württemberg in South-West Germany in 1494. It was dedicated to Count Eberhard (Eberhard the bearded, later first Duke) of Württemberg.

The parchment manuscript appears to be a manual of templates and/or a practice book containing partially completed sketches, painted and calligraphy initals, stylised floral decorative motifs, plant foliage tendrils, fantastic beast border drolleries, together with some gold and silver illumination work.

'Spätgotisches Musterbuch des Stephan Schriber - BSB Cod.icon. 420' from Münchener Digitalisierungszentrum (MDZ), contains about sixty four pages in total (probably fifty illustrated pages). [catalogue record] [via Marion McNealy]

The Cheerful Cricket

The delightful chromolithographs above - mostly chapter title pages - were taken from 'The Cheerful Cricket and Others' by Jeannette Marks with illustrations by Edith Brown, 1907, at the Library of Congress. They've been spot cleaned a little and I boosted the colour slightly.

The book is also available at the Internet Archive:

"The Cheerful Cricket and Others is a collection of stories about how different insects and animals learn meaningful life lessons. There are little songs at the end of each story that children and adults can play and sing together."

I'm not sure I can decide if any of the few 'Jeannette Marks' online - possibly a suffragette, proud lesbian, poet, dramatist and/or english professor - are in fact the author of this book. Probably not.

Edith Brown, on the other hand, was a founding member of a group of young women known as the Saturday Evening Girls, who began meeting at the Boston Library in the late 19th century and later established Paul Revere Pottery.

"[The group was] part of a social and cultural endeavor that began in the Boston Public Library in the 1890s. They were the result of the convergence of three major movements influencing Boston at the time: the growth of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the evolving role of women and Women's Movement, and the Settlement House Movement."

See: one, two, three. (None of this has anything to do with the Cricket book at all of course.)

1829 Surgical Album

'Lithographische Abbildungen nebst Beschreibung der vorzüglicheren älteren und neueren chirurgischen Werkzeuge und Verbände, nach dem Handbuche der Chirurgie von Chelius geordnet, und am Schluße mit einer systematischen Zusammenstellung sämmlicher abgebildeter Gerätschaften versehen' by Franz Andreas Ott, 1829, Munich - among the ninety nine monographs in the wonderful Edoc database at Humboldt University in Berlin.

There are perhaps a dozen more surgical instrument lithographic plates in this album supplement. Note the thumbnail link at the top left of the page. There is next to no information online about the book or its author. [via Archivalia]

Asia on the World

'The Illustration of The Great European War No.16
- A humoros Atlas of the World'

It's tempting, finding this caricature map among a collection of propaganda prints relating to the Chinese Revolution of 1911/1912, to overstate the possible subtextual commentary on contemporary events in China.

The map was actually published in Japan in 1914 and the Japanese script is faithfully - apart from some misspellings - rendered into English with the correct dual names and also title added at the bottom of the print.

So, although the China-as-pig figure is seen examining the Manchurian lands of the former Qing Dynasty (ousted in the revolution to be replaced by the early form of the Republic of China) through a magnifying glass (or barometer, as the text apparently implies), it's hard to deduce any strong editorial meaning in the illustration.

Perhaps there is some suggestion that China was too busy smoothing out its own problems to take notice of the rest of the world being on the verge of war? Or that the agriculture-based society had little impact outside its own borders? The complicated series of circumstances that gave rise to the revolution included a sense that foreign powers had too much influence in China together with an emerging desire for a republic similar to America (in many minds), so there may be some measure of irony buried in the imagery.

But the print's title and detailed caricatures across the rest of the world point to the author/illustrator (Tanaka) employing a wider-angled lens, with the focus going far beyond China or Asia. There is a lot to see in the map, not only because it depicts the start of World War I from a satirical standpoint, but because the views being expressed are coming out of Japan/Asia.

My favourite parts are the tusked wart-hog of Germany, the semi-sea monster appearance of Britain (perhaps inspired by Gillray's 1790 cartoon map [see also: Robert Dighton's 1795 map]) and the stitch work appearance for some of the borders, suggesting impermanence.

Somewhat similar maps previously: The Paul Hadol 1870 caricature map of Europe [down the page] (and his 1877 octopus map); William Harvey's 1868 'Geographical Fun' and the 1899 'Angling in Troubled Water' map by Fred Rose.


All images in this post come from: 'Block Prints of the Chinese Revolution' at Princeton University -

"A collection of 30 poster-like block prints of the 1911 Chinese Revolution given to Princeton University East Asian Library by Donald Roberts, class of 1909. The collection is useful for investigations into the visual portrayal of the struggle of Han Chinese versus the Manchus during the 1911 overthrow of the Qing Empire, with issues of "modernity" and "nation" easily visible."

• 1911 Revolution in Chinese History by Richard Hooker.
• Xinhai Revolution at Wikipedia.
• 'Sun Yat-sen's 1911 Revolution had Its Seeds in Tokyo' by Sato Kazuo at Japan Focus.
• 'Great Awakening of Chinese Nation-Marking' - the China Peoples Daily on the 90th anniversary of the 1911 revolution.
• 1911 Revolution map at Unimaps.
• Very tangential: 'Living in the Chinese Cosmos - Understanding Religion in Late Imperial China (1644-1911)' - web exhibition site at Columbia University.
• Stefan Landberger's comprehensive Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages.
• My sincere thanks to Jim Weldon and Jonathan Dresner for their advice.

[update: see Dogs of War for more WWI satirical maps]