LOUIS PRANG'S INTERLOPER

Louis Prang was born in 1824 in a Province of the Kingdom of Prussia. His father was a textile manufacturer, and Louis grew up comfortably in that trade, working with his father for many years. After a while, his youthful political activities irritated the Prussian government (he was a bit too revolutionary for his time) and he was forced to emigrate, first to Switzerland, then to Boston in 1850.

He became a fairly successful lithographer, carving wood engravings for book illustrations. He eventually started his own business, L. Prang and Company, working in advertising and other business art. The company also printed maps, some of which were used (by both sides!) during the Civil War.

In 1873, he started printing Christmas cards – he is often referred to as the Father of the American Christmas card – and also manufactured a series of what were called “album cards,” which were used in scrapbooks. (Scrapbooking is nothing new, although the use of the gerund form certainly is trendy: I have several of my great-grandmother’s diaries in which she often mentions an evening spent “pasting scraps.”)  I’ve stumbled across quite a bit of Prang’s work in scrapbooks I’ve found in flea markets and antique shops.  I’ve got a few of his Christmas cards, too, and I’ll post some in December!

Louis Prang relocated his Massachusetts company from Roxbury to Springfield in 1897. He died in 1909 and is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain.

This card depicting the Muses was one of Louis Prang’s scrap album cards. The Muses were the goddesses who ruled over the arts and sciences. They are known collectively as the younger muses, and they influenced poetry, music, tragedy, comedy, dancing, astronomy, astrology, etc.

There were usually nine muses, but this card has ten.

So, which one is the interloper?

Make your guess in your comment, and feel free to be wickedly creative!



SEPIA SATURDAY

Every now and then, I pour myself a cup of coffee, shuffle into my office and settle down in front of the computer for some Blog Time – not to write and post on my blog, but to search for interesting blogs that others have posted.

A lot of what’s out there doesn’t interest me in the slightest, but a lot of it does. Occasionally I’ll stumble upon a blog that grabs me by the throat, and when I do, I create a shortcut for a folder on my desktop so that it’s easier for me to go back and visit again and again.

Sepia Saturday is one of those throat-grabbers.

Sepia Saturday is a blog hosted by Alan Burnett and Kat Mortensen. I’m not at all certain where they really are in the world (that’s one of the wonderful things about blogging), but from their spelling and word usage, I’m guessing they’re “across the pond.”

Their message is simple, yet hugely important: we have a responsibility to preserve not only photographic documentation of our ancestors, but also social documentation – the stories of their lives and their contributions to the society in which we live and to the people we have become.

Each Saturday, Alan & Kat post a photograph. There’s usually a theme (or several themes) connected to each photo: bicycles, occupations, time, hats, doorways, etc., and bloggers from all over respond to that photographic theme by posting photos of their own on their own blogs! You can follow those responses through links on Sepia Saturday’s site.

Go to: sepiasaturday.blogspot.com

Today they posted a great 1901 shot of a man and his two sisters; in turn, I offer a 1912 photograph of Margaret Sylvester Gould and her five brothers, one of whom -- the one sitting in the chair on the right -- was my grandfather. The boys are Howard, Allen, Richard, Prescott and Gardner, and they lived in Newton Upper Falls, Massachusetts.



BEN AMES WILLIAMS

About two weeks ago, I made a stop at one of my favorite flea markets and bought a small collection of newsprint ephemera – a food storage baggie crammed with three folded Boston area newspapers from the 1930s and 1940s: A section of The Boston Sunday Globe and the tabloids The Girls’ Companion and The Boston Sunday Post Fiction Magazine.

And there, on the front page of the April 4, 1943 edition of the fiction magazine, “The Siren Sea,” heralded as A Vivid Serial of Love and Hatred in the South Sea Isles.

Hmmm, I thought, that’s pretty fiery stuff for 1943!

I slipped it out of the baggie and opened it up; I saw the author’s byline just below the fold, and nearly dropped the paper on the floor: Ben Ames Williams!

Williams (1880-1953) was born in Macon, Mississippi, but moved with his parents to Jackson, Ohio, where his father was editor of the local newspaper. In 1904, he was in Newton, Massachusetts, where he attended the Allen School (three of his schoolmates were my great-uncles). He was a member of the Class of 1910 at Dartmouth. After graduation, he went back to the Boston area to work as a stringer for various newspapers, then became a full-time reporter for the Boston American.

That was just his day job.

His real calling was fiction, and he wrote lots of it. Although he collected a box of rejection letters (sound familiar?) he kept at it, and finally published his first story in 1915. The Saturday Evening Post (a big leaguer in the early part of the 20^th century) published much of his work, first in 1917, then 150 times more in the next twenty-odd years.

Anyone who reads historical fiction has read one of his most famous works: Come Spring (1940), the fictional account of the settling and founding of a town in Maine (said to be Union, Maine). It’s now out of print, but you can borrow it from the local library and still find copies in used book stores, flea markets and antique shops.

I loved Come Spring. It was the first work of historical fiction I read that did not focus on armies or presidents or land treaties or bloody battles or helpless women. It was, instead, about common people living common lives; about the hard work and determination of ordinary people living in a Maine community more than two hundred years ago.

And that’s my kind of history.

COLORED PENCILS

On my desk (which is really an inexpensive interior door stretched across two sets of double filing cabinets) I’ve got an old Dedham Pottery mug full of colored pencils.  I use them to fill in my appointment calendar, and each week turns into a wild splash of colors marking lunch and dinner dates, appointments, swimming schedules, and reminders of birthdays and anniversaries.

Pencils have been around since the 1400s, although the initial technology was a little rough – pencils were simply slender pieces of graphite bound with carefully wound string, which gave minimal support to the weak core. In the late 1500s, people figured out how to glue strips of wood around a piece of soft lead (much more support than the old string method!) and that led to the process of producing two distinct wooden grooved halves, inserting the lead, then gluing the two pieces together.

In 1858, a genius named Hyman Lipman patented the idea of sticking an eraser on the end.

Colored pencils appeared in the early 20^th century, and they’re made the same way, except that their cores consist of dye and pigment mixed with a binder; bases can be of wax, clay (very dry), oil (smudges easily) or water.

There are plenty of company brands: Crayola, Derwent, Faber-Castell, Felissimo (500 colors!), Pantone, Prismacolor, and Steadler to name a few, and the imaginative color lists from those companies include Raspberry, Bubblegum, Dollar Bill, Electric Green, Guppie Green (I thought guppies were a murky brown), UFO Green, Canary Yellow, Pale Lemondrop, Artichoke, Espresso, Snow White, Steeple Gray, Copenhagen Blue.

A company called Lakeshore makes a set of jumbo colored pencils for kids called “People Colors” (for diversity, because not all people have the same skin color), and it includes: Olive, Chestnut, Ebony, Gingerbread, Peach, Cinnamon, Wheat, Melon, Toast, Fawn.

So...I’m a Fawn (toss in a few Toast freckles and some Cinnamon age spots) with a mix of Pale Lemondrop & Steeple Gray hair and Copenhagen Blue eyes.

You?

 

QUEEN ANNE

I always thought Queen Anne's lace was named for the British Queen Anne; it turns out, though, that it was named for her great-grandmother, Anne of Denmark, consort of King James of England, born 1574. Anne was an accomplished lace maker, and her name became associated with the flower, which looks a lot like fine lace. She pricked her finger with her tatting needle one day; the little dot of dark red (visible in the photograph) that appears in every blossom is said to be a drop of her blood.

Queen Anne's Lace, Darcus carota, grows in meadows and pastures throughout North America. Native Americans boiled it for tea and also used it as a contraceptive (the details of that are a bit shaky to me, but it had something to do with the seeds).

Another common flower that oftentimes grows as a companion to Queen Anne is Solidago, known to most as goldenrod. There are more than eighteen species of it, and all have bright golden flowers on leaved stalks -- some smooth-edged, some serrated. Its medicinal applications include tonics for kidney troubles, colds, and other infections.

I come from a long line of wildflower pickers: My great-grandmother, grandmother and mother all picked huge amounts of Queen Anne's Lace and goldenrod. I remember bowls and vases full of the stuff -- lovely mixtures of bright yellow and soft white in their living rooms, on their dining room tables, on their grand pianos.

And now it's my turn. There's this vase, full of lace and rod, on my dining room floor right now; I'll refill it every four days or so until blooming season ends for both of them.

It reminds me of where I come from, who I am.

LARKIN SECRETARIES...

They were called "Larkin Secretaries," and they covered the neighborhoods and communities around the turn of the twentieth century selling Larkin Soap Company (Buffalo, NY) products door-to-door; housewives, mostly, earning premium certificates for every item they sold. They redeemed those premiums for home furnishings -- tables, chairs, sideboards, rugs, curtains -- even a grand piano, although I can't imagine how many bars of "Sweet Home" soap they had to sell to earn enough certificates to buy a piano!

One Maine woman who bought Larkin products was Ella Thompson, who lived in East Pittston from the 1870s to the early 1900s. I lived in her farmhouse 100 years after she did, and spent many hours picking over the house dumps. I know she bought perfume and china from the Larkin catalog -- I found her discarded bottles and broken plates and cups behind the stone wall up beyond the barn.

Ella also bught lots of Larkin Cold Cream: I have seven intact jars (four with lids), and found enough broken ones to indicate she used three or four jars a year, at least. They're made of milk glass (a beautiful floral pattern is visible in the photograph here), with single-screw aluminum lids that still fit snugly.

Every time I pick one up, every time I hold one in the palm of my hand, I am aware of Ella Thompson; I am touching what she has touched, and the two of us are connected, somehow, over all those years.

I have a name for that connection -- I call it history.

BODONI

Print it as it stands -- beautifully.

                                                     Henry James

Long before offset printing, the standard was letterpress -- a system of reproduction in which typeset copy (consisting of lines of reversed letters locked into a frame called a chase) was inked, then "pressed" onto paper, creating a left--to-right reading image.

You've seen this process in historical movies: the hardworking printer in Boston, for instance, churning out editions of the local broadsheet around the time of the American Revolution (think Benjamin Franklin, printer, before he got into bathtubs, kites and fireplaces).

One of the most famous type designers was a man named Giambattista Bodoni, who was born in Italy in 1740. His father was a printer, so he grew up in the trade; he apprenticed at the Vatican, and later became a well-known typecutter and engraver.

In 1798, he designed a new typeface, a font that blended the thicker lines of older typefaces with the finer, thinner ones of newer designs.

Bodoni gains its gracefulness from a balance between those thick and thin strokes of the letters. If designed well, books typeset in Bodoni can show that same graceful loveliness on an entire page, especially when the letters have some space between them, which keeps the lines smooth and easy to read.

You can see Bodoni in larger sizes, too, usually on movie posters and other advertising art. It's distinctive and powerful, especially in the bolder faces, as in the photo above.

Bodoni -- over two hundred years old, still being used.

Sometimes older is better.