Culture

In 1870, a twenty-year-old compositor at The New York Times named George Arensberg — nicknamed “The Boy” — set 2,064 ems of solid minion type in a single hour, the four-minute mile of hand typesetting. His peers dubbed him “the Velocipede,” and his record launched a decade-long craze: typesetting races that drew crowds in the thousands, offered prize purses up to $1,000 (half a year’s wages for a typical compositor), and turned “Swifts” like William C. Barnes (who set type blindfolded with his cases reversed) into minor celebrities. By the 1880s, the races had moved from printshop backrooms to dime museums alongside vaudeville and circuses. The 1887 booklet Fast Typesetting codified official rules and promised silver composing-stick trophies to future champions. But the most dramatic contest happened in 1886 at Boston’s Austin & Stone’s Dime Museum, where Miss L. J. Kenney set a women’s record of 24,950 ems — beating every man who had competed the day before. Officials refused to acknowledge her result, claiming “much latitude was allowed the ladies” without a shred of evidence, but the genie was out of the bottle: women compositors, paid 25–50% less than men and largely excluded from unionized newspaper composing rooms, had proven themselves on the same stage. As Alex Wright recounts in this adaptation from his forthcoming book Empire of Ink, the velocipede’s twilight came with Linotype’s arrival in the 1880s, but not before the Swifts had their moment in the spotlight — and used it to challenge the boys’ club that ran America’s newspapers.

The Brahan Seer — Coinneach Odhar — is Scotland’s most famous prophet, a 17th-century figure whose second sight was supposedly granted by a drowned Norwegian princess instructing a Lewis woman to give her son a magic stone. Alexander Mackenzie’s 1877 book The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer fixed the oral tradition in print, organizing predictions into categories: unfulfilled, doubtful, shrewd guesses, and those that came true. The most famous foretold the extinction of the Seaforth male line — the deaf-and-dumb last lord losing four sons, a white-hooded daughter returning from India, a sister killed in a carriage accident — details that align eerily with the real biography of Francis Humberston Mackenzie (died 1815). Yet as historian Alexander Sutherland notes, the Seer “is not a person so much as a concept.” His “black rain” prophecies have been read as nuclear fallout, oil spills, acid rain, or Highland prosperity. In 2001, 2,360 people attended a Brahan Seer Festival complete with operas, ceilidhs, and scholarly seminars on second sight.

When nineteenth-century Deccan merchants set out from the Kollur diamond mine, they consulted strange square diagrams to determine which days to travel, what to eat before leaving (coriander seeds on Tuesday, jaggery on Thursday), and how to position themselves relative to the rijāl al-ghayb — the “men of the Unseen,” a Sufi concept from Ibn ʿArabī that Ottoman sailors treated as a physical hazard roaming in a circular orbit around the earth. These charts come from a now-lost Urdu manuscript, Jaʿfar Sharīf’s Qanoon-e-Islam, translated in 1832 by the East India Company surgeon Gerhard Herklots, and they encode a palimpsest of intellectual history: the invisible constellation shukur yulduz that Mughal emperor Babur kept at his back in battle was never seen by any astronomer, yet it travelled from India through Buddhist Central Asia to Turkic courts and back south with the Mughals, requiring charts to locate a thing that doesn’t exist. Mathilde Montpetit traces how the superstitions of practical merchants preserved a trail of forgotten astronomy, Sufi mysticism, and the movement of ideas across four empires.

Kites are named for birds of prey in English, dragons in German, comets in Spanish, and wind zithers in Chinese — each language encoding a different cultural metaphor for the same simple frame of paper and string. Hunter Dukes’s collection for The Public Domain Review spans five centuries and a dozen countries, from Conrad Kyeser’s demonic windsock in a 1430 military manuscript to Hokusai’s illustration of an exiled samurai riding a giant kite, from Athanasius Kircher’s Jesuit psy-op kite inscribed “WRATH OF GOD” to Marco Polo’s account of binding “some fool or drunkard” to a man-lifting frame for naval augury. The collection moves through Chinese legend (Mozi’s wooden kite that crashed after three years of work), Mughal India’s kite-flying festivals, Ottoman sailors’ charts of the invisible constellation shukur yulduz, and the prehistory of aviation — Lawrence Hargrave’s box kites, the Wright brothers’ studies, and George Pocock’s 20-mph kite-drawn Charvolant carriage. Sixty-nine images across paper, woodblock, engraving, and early photography, held together by a single thread: the human urge to send something skyward and watch it pull.

Centuries before The Matrix had Neo download Kung Fu in seconds, medieval scholars had their own shortcut to learning: the Ars notoria, a manuscript of diagrams and incantations promising instant mastery of university subjects. Anne Lawrence-Mathers traces the history of this forbidden text, condemned by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa theologiae as demonic, yet copied and owned by religious institutions for centuries. Its intricate figures — geometric patterns mixed with unpronounceable angel-names — were meant to be contemplated while reciting elaborate prayers across lunar cycles, granting knowledge of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, even medicine. The article recounts the haunting story of John of Morigny, a 14th-century monk who became addicted to the Ars notoria, suffered terrifying visions of demons demanding worship, and eventually renounced magic — only to have his replacement text burned at the University of Paris. The work survived into print in 1657 and remains a testament to the enduring fantasy that true knowledge might come without effort, without books, without years of quiet discipline.

By 1600 nearly fifty Italian plays featured a pedant as a main character — a vain, irascible schoolmaster who mangled Latin and vernacular into incomprehensible gibberish, wore a moth-eaten toga while claiming the dignity of Cicero, and was reliably incompetent at his own profession. Arnoud Visser traces this stock figure from Francesco Belo’s El pedante (1529) — the first play to put a pedant center stage — through Pietro Aretino’s Il marescalco (where the pedant counts Venus among the nine Muses) to Giordano Bruno’s Il candelaio (whose Manfurio offers a fake etymology of “pedant” that a painter gleefully demolishes: “pe” for pecorone (idiot), “dan” for da nulla (worthless), “te” for testa d’asino (donkey head)). The satire’s target was not learning itself but the humanist claim that scholarship constituted a superior form of nobility — a direct challenge to hereditary aristocracy. The courtly audiences who laughed at these parodies were, in effect, putting social climbers in their place. The pedant was also associated with sexual deviancy (sodomy and pederasty) despite thin historical evidence — a potent slander that weaponized masculine virtue against the new intellectual class. From Shakespeare’s Holofernes to Molière’s female pedants, the figure spread across Europe, a lasting monument to the tension between erudition and pretension.

Louis Pope Gratacap (1851–1917), curator of mineralogy and conchology at the American Museum of Natural History, was the kind of polymath whose commute — three hours round-trip from Staten Island — he spent reading voraciously. His novel The New Northland (1915) is arguably the first work of fiction to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex, beating Burroughs’s The Land That Time Forgot by three years. The story follows Americo-Nordic adventurers who discover a warm Arctic realm called Krocker Land (a barely disguised nod to the AMNH-sponsored Crocker Land Expedition, which was still in the field when the novel hit shelves) where they find prehistoric animals, lush valleys, and a decaying race called the Radiumites who transmute base metals with radium. The novel is so thick with metafictional play — a yellow-journalist editor named Azaziel Link frames the narrative, characters debate serialization rights and movie potential, and the text is flagged as having been “substantially emended” — that it nearly collapses under its own cleverness. Yet it was precisely Gratacap’s perch at the museum, under Henry Fairfield Osborn (who had named T. rex in 1905), that gave him access to paleontological knowledge unavailable to Doyle or Haggard. Richard Fallon rescues this eccentric, overstuffed novel from obscurity, showing how a museum curator’s serious play produced the first fictional roar of the tyrant lizard king.

The Public Domain Review’s collection on the Mâr-Nâmeh — a late-15th-century Zoroastrian Persian text that lists the thirty days of the Zoroastrian calendar and what seeing a snake on each day portends. The contradiction at its heart is what makes it fascinating: Zoroastrians held snakes in absolute contempt. Snakes are khrafstar — the baneful spawn of Ahriman, the sole origin of evil — and killing one was meritorious; the “snake-killer” stick even doubled as the instrument for punishing criminals. Yet the book is full of auspicious snake omens: “If you see a snake on the day of Sheherivar, you will soon find an absent friend in your arms.” Scholars suspect echoes of pre-Zoroastrian snake veneration (Martina Palladino: “in pre-Zoroastrian Iran, these animals were not perceived negatively”) or Egyptian influence on the text. The source is a 1911 Bombay anthropological lecture by British surgeon George Waters, who translated the text with footnotes; the original scan lives on the Internet Archive, public domain. Like the poems of Hafez and Turkish coffee grounds, the book’s favorable omens were a source of solace in divination — even if you’d just stumbled on some fork-tongued fiend.