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Unity! Attica Brothers Defense Pamphlet

This rare, four-panel pamphlet announced a petition drive and fundraising campaign in defense of prisoners indicted for the prison uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in New York from September 9-13, 1971—a landmark event in the civil rights and Black power movements.

The quote on the brochure’s cover was shouted by a Black prisoner on September 12, at the last meeting between the Attica protestors and a special observers’ committee, according to a New York Times story on September 15, 1971:

“To oppressed people all over the world,” he shouted. “We got the solution! The solution is unity!”

With 31 of the rebels dead in Monday’s bloody recapture of the prison, that statement may seem bombastic or pathetic. But for those of the observers’ committee who had chance to see the unusual society of the Attica prison yard during four brief days of visits, there is no doubt that the prisoners did achieve remarkable unity — even if it proved no solution to their problems.

The black inmate’s impassioned cry also suggests several other aspects of that strange society—its strikingly effective organization, its fierce political radicalism, its submergence of racial animosity in class solidarity.

Inspired by the burgeoning prisoners’ rights movement and after pressing authorities for better living conditions and political rights with no results, 2200 inmates at Attica Correctional Facility took over the facility on September 9 and took prison staff hostage, issuing a list of demands. On September 13, after negotiations on the demands had stalled, state police dispatched by Governor Rockefeller forcefully suppressed the revolt, ending in 43 deaths—the most deadly confrontation between Americans since the Civil War.

Activists outside the prison quickly mobilized to provide legal aid to those who had participated in the uprising, as their demand for amnesty had not been met. For several years, as the courts slowly decided the fate of dozens of participants in the revolt, these groups raised funds to hire lawyers, to broadcast the prisoners’ views of what had actually taken place, and to continue pushing for changes to the treatment and conditions of incarcerated people. Some groups also worked to resettle those who had been released back into society.

Mickey Mouse Israeli comic series

Nineteen years after Walt Disney created one of the most famous cartoon characters of all time, Mickey Mouse arrived in Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel). Mickey Ma’oz is considered the first Hebrew comic magazine. The animated bi-monthly series included comic strips featuring Mickey Mouse (Miki Ma’oz), Donald Duck (Danny Avazani), and Pinocchio, as well as local comic heroes like detective David Tidhar, Omer and Gomer, and others, combined with stories on Israeli children and their adventures.

The comics were rhymed and edited by the Israeli author and journalist Yehoshua Tan Pai (1914-88), who published Mickey Maoz—without seeking Disney’s permission—and other children’s books through a small publishing house he founded in Tel Aviv. The magazine included illustrations by Ze’ev Raban (1890-1970), one of the fathers of Israeli art.

Massive Four-Sheet Bamberg Wall Almanac

This enormous four-sheet broadside almanac was made around 1754 for the Bavarian Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg It is one in a long line of annual imprints going back at least as far as 1683, when the woodcut spanning the top of the present sheet—attributed to Nuremberg craftsman Johann Georg Lindstatt—was first used. Since the printer, Georg Andreas Gertner, had died three years prior to this publication in 1751, it is presumed that his widow, Anna Elisabeth Ida Gertner, was the actual printer.

This 1754 Bamberg almanac appears to be unique as no other copies are recorded. Institutional copies for the subsequent 1755 Bamberg almanac are found only at the Saatsbibliothek Bamberg (HVG 10/13) and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. Taking their ephemeral purpose with the obvious challenge of storing such large items in the long term, it can be suspected these prints are very rare.

This particular exemplar of the wall almanac reveals a kind of international fusion in its design. It combines the massive grandeur of the French wall calendars, popularized during the reign of Louis XIV in the 17th century, with the text arrangement of the German broadsheet almanac, characterized by numerous individual woodcuts surrounding a letterpress calendar.

The illustrations depart from the more traditional seasonal and biblical scenes of earlier examples. Instead, the arms of the powerful Prince Bishop Franz Konrad von Stadion und Thannhausen are centered at the top.

The size, perhaps, is the most remarkable deviation of this almanac from its German ancestors.

While earlier 16th-century wall almanacs commonly used two sheets pasted together along the short edge, this one pastes together four sheets along the long edge, substantially boosting its dimensions along both axes.

The sides are flanked by the arms of 33 additional regional nobles, as well as one blank where anyone might add their own armorial.

The daily calendar for the year, laid out in three columns, provides the usual data with the conventional combination of words and symbols: days of the week, specific dates, religious feasts, moon signs (represented by little zodiac ornaments), brief weather forecasts (wetter, windig, schnee), and symbols indicating phases of the moon auspicious days for undertaking certain activities (double cross for the best days to let blood, single cross for middling days, something resembling a mushroom for good days to bathe, a fleuron for good days to plant, an asterisk for good days to take medicine). The open square (tetragonus) and triangle (trigonus) represent astrological aspects (as could the asterisk).

Sources:

Laure Beaumont-Maillet, Les effets du soleil: almanachs du règne de Louis XIV (1995), 7: “Jeopardized [fragilisées] by their large dimensions and by their ephemeral nature, tied to the calendar they accompanied, these prints have become very rare outside of public collections.”
Miriam Usher Chrisman, Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg, 1480-1599 (1982), 74: In 16th-century Strasbourg, wall calendars were found on the wall of a mine foreman’s widow, and in the office of an orphanage administrator.
Maxine Préaud, “Introduction,” Effets du soleil, 12: On massive 17th-century French wall calendars: “Almanacs are found where they are useful, which is to say, among people who work…. They were probably in cabarets…affixed to partitions [cloisons], exposed to the light, to smoke, and to cooking grease of kitchens in a dirty and dusty city, these images had a hard time reaching the end of the year in good condition. And, when their replacements came, they were thrown away, used to wrap vegetables or to light the fire.”
Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life (2011), 73: “At the heart of the need to locate oneself in time and space was the calendar, one of the many ways man organized time, and one of the first to be printed in the form of books or sheets to be hung on the wall.”
Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Interactive and Sculptural Printmaking in the Renaissance (Brill, 2018), p. 254: The broadside format “would become extremely popular in the second half of the sixteenth century, with numerous versions designed by Jost Amman, among other artists…The down-to-earth occupations mentioned correspond with the status of their owners.”

Mourning Veil Relic from the Holy House of Loreto

The Basilica della Santa Casa (Basilica of the Holy House) is a shrine in Loreto, Italy, where the house in which the Virgin Mary is believed to have lived is preserved. It has been a Catholic pilgrimage destination since at least the 14th century. The statue of Our Lady of Loreto enshrined in the Holy House is a black Madonna carved from Cedar of Lebanon and, like the Holy House itself, has a miracle-working reputation.

This holy pilgrimage souvenir signed in March 1736 has a (duly certified) fragment of the black gauze mourning veil worn by the statue during Holy Week to cover the basilica’s much-venerated cult statue of the Virgin and Child. These fabric fragments were prized not only as souvenirs, but also as wonder-working relics originating from arguably the most famous pilgrimage destination in all of early modern Europe. After Easter the veil would be cut up into little pieces and distributed among the pilgrims as relics—a custom that continues today.

The letterpress text on the certificate attests that the attached veil fragment covered the statue of the Virgin and Child on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, and that it also touched the Holy Dress of the Virgin and the Holy Bowl, two other powerful relics kept in the Holy House.

At the center of the sheet is a woodcut of the cult statue being transported atop the Virgin’s original house in Palestine. The custodian indicated that the certificate was given “Gratis” or free of charge, wrote the date on which the relic was certified, “24 Marzo 1736,” and signed his name and title: “Gioseppe Santoni Custode della S.a Casa.”

No other examples of this contact relic broadside are recorded, making this a unique survival of popular Roman Catholic veneration.

The story of the Santa Casa ranks among the more unusual legends from the Middle Ages. The house in Nazareth—where the Virgin was born and later conceived Jesus through the Holy Spirit—was carried in 1291 by angels to Tersatto (now Trsat, Croatia). In 1294, angels carried the House across the Adriatic to a grove near Ancona. It then was removed in 1295 to a hill near Recanati and then less than a year later to nearby Monte Prodo, not far from Loreto. In 1296, the Santa Casa was at last moved to its present location. It became one of the most popular pilgrimages sites in Christendom.

The veil fabric given to Loreto pilgrims is an example of a “touch relic” (also called “contact relics” and “secondary relics”), that is to say an object, in this case a veil, that came in direct contact with a saint’s primary relic (e.g., a body part or personal item owned by the saint). Other pilgrim-oriented touch relics from Loreto include engraved “envelopes” containing dust from the Holy House, as well as replicas of the Holy Bowl made of clay to which such dust was added. Examples of both are also held in the Sheridan Libraries’ Women of the Book Collection.

To learn more, see Karin Vélez, The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto: Spreading Catholicism in the Early Modern World. Princeton University Press, 2018.

Catacomb Saint Copperplate and Etching

This etched copperplate—unusually preserved here with an otherwise unrecorded contemporary print pulled directly from it—depicts the body of the virgin-martyr St. Gaudenzia as she was displayed in the convent of Capuchin nuns at San Giovanni in Bagnacavallo near Ravenna, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. The plate was etched by Vincenzo Marabini (1774-1847), very likely shortly after the arrival of the body of Gaudenzia.

Marabini is known from a handful of devotional prints, but none following the format seen here. The inscription of the print is fictive, made to look like an epigraphic inscription on the monument but in fact describing the print itself: “Image of the Virgin and Martyr Saint Gaudenzia, drawn and etched [exculpta] from the prototype, which in the interior chapel of the Capuchin nuns of Bagnacavallo is most religiously tended and venerated.”

The body of Gaudenzia remains at Bagnacavallo to the present day. This engraving appears to be a unique survival, as no other early prints of the Gaudenzia body/shrine have been forthcoming. The print was likely mounted to card and preserved with the plate to serve as an easy reference for visualizing the plate’s design, a common practice in the preservation and storage of such plates.

A saint of rather dubious attestation, Gaudenzia was “rediscovered” in 1796 in the Catacombs of Ciriaca in Rome near San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura, and shortly thereafter her body was transferred to the convent at Bagnacavallo. Gaudenzia ranks among the very last early Christian saints to be discovered in the monumental archaeological explorations of the ancient Roman catacombs during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

San Giovanni, a Camaldolese house during the eighteenth century, was closed following to the destructive suppression of religious orders during the Napoleonic period. In 1816, it was reoccupied by Capuchin nuns who ran the convent as a boarding school for the girls of local and regional aristocrats and landed gentry. The house is perhaps most (in)famous for being the school where Lord Byron sent his illegitimate daughter Allegra (1817-22), who tragically died there at five years of age.

Crucifix Paper Tool Sundials

These two “paper tool” sundial broadsides, present readymade, wall-mounted sundials based on the Crucifixion of Christ. The large central engraving was meant to be affixed to a plank of wood and needles inserted into Christ’s nail wounds to serve as the gnomons for the dials, marking time as the sun passes across the sky.

The text opens with a nod to the giants of celestial horology and then discusses how to use the broadside to build the sundial and provides details about how to use it. Users who followed the instructions would have had to destroy or damage the broadside—which likely was produced in small numbers to begin with—and so it is little surprise that so few examples survive today. These particular examples appear to be completely unknown to the scholarly literature on celestial horology.

The letterpress text was printed in Bologna, followed by a second run of the sheet through a roller press to add the engraving.

Bologna: Jacopo Monti, 1675. One other copy known, at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma.

The sundial was designed by a certain Milanese Barnabite cleric Virmundo Corio, and the copperplate was engraved by the Bolognese printmaker Francesco Corti. The Latin text was written by jurist Francesco Maria Bordocchi, who dedicated the piece to the jurist Vincenzo Butari of Osimo. The Latin poem at the foot of the sheet was composed by a cleric using the initials R. P. D. S. G.

Milan: Francisci Vigoni, 1675. No other copies are known.

The design of the engraving is spectacular, with the Crucifix set within a fictive niche flanked by Solomonic columns thought to have been in the original Temple of Jerusalem. Above is a cupid with his own sundial, whose quiver contains Christ’s three nails. On the steps leading up to the scene sit lions as putti display both Solomonic and Christological mottos. The dial furniture is shown as if it were woven into tapestries.

Using the Crucifix as a central design for sundials was already well established in celestial horology, perhaps most notably by Georg Hartmann (1489-1564), who created a cut-out “paper tool” of such a device; and also by Christopher Clavius, who provided a similar design in the last pages of his 1581 Gnomonices. The layouts of these predecessors, however, function differently than the dials presented in this broadside.

Far from losing market share to mechanical clockmakers, early modern creators of sundials in fact saw prospects for their devices improve: “This was primarily due to the need to periodically readjust mechanical clocks, bringing them into correspondence with the local solar time, as well as to the increasing awareness of the utility of public and private timekeeping” (Lloyd, 14).

Interestingly, the other known copy of the Bologna broadside is folded and was tipped into an autograph manuscript by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602-80), himself a celestial horologist of considerable importance as author of the Ars magna lucis et umbrae [1646].

Sources:

S. Karr Schmidt, Interactive and Sculptural Printmaking in the Renaissance, Brill, 2018, pp. 205-40.
S. A. Lloyd, Ivory Diptych Sundials, 1570-1750: A Catalogue of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University Press, 1992.
H. Maué, et al., Quasi Centrum Europae: Europa Kauft in Nürnberg 1400-1800, Verlag des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 2002, p. 367-71.

Handmade Collage of Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”

An unusual and charming collage in the tradition of the “dressed print,” depicting the famous Robinson Crusoe from the English adventure novel by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1719.

Our hero is returning from foraging and the hunt with his bounty, saw, axe, rifle, canteens, and cross-stitched (and thus probably not entirely effective) umbrella. His hut and nicely painted trees with multi-colored foliage give dimension to the background. Robinson’s pose here is probably based on the frontispiece of the 1720 French edition and other similar illustrations found in editions for children.

This unique and highly ephemeral item allows us to demonstrate to students the popularity of Defoe’s novel and its ready translation into an adventure story for younger readers. The medium is the message here as the maker took to foraging up various and sundry scraps in a creative and improvised collage, not unlike Crusoe himself scraping by on the island.

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