That elaborate pile of art

The world has made great strides in freeing information in the form of scanned documents. Archive.org, Public Domain Review, the Library of Congress, Europeana, tons of museums: all have huge online collections worth exploring.

But we’ve only scratched the surface of all that stuff that lives in libraries. Take, for example, this title, brought to my attention on Twitter by John Overholt, Curator of Early Books & Manuscripts, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Well, I mean to say, wot?

The first thing we need to ask is, why do we know this title exists and yet it has not been scanned for the greater edification of the general populace? John explained, “It’s an interesting situation—no original copies are known, and this record is for a facsimile edition made in the 1930s, which itself is only known in a couple of copies.”

Still, Yale Libraries…

Anyway, 18th-c. nudism is not what I’m here to talk about. Instead, if you will click on the catalog entry above, notice in the left-hand margin a list of “similar items.” I’m still exploring those rabbit holes, but here’s the one that has brought us together today.

At first glance, I thought we were looking at a paper toy, a clockwork of some kind, with planets, all the Muses, plus architecture… This thing has it all.

But after some study, I realized that it’s probably a kind of descriptive guidebook to Mr. Henry Bridges’s ‘microcosm.’ (The bit about the parody of Pope was confusing as well, until I decided that someone had written a poem about the clock in the style of Pope’s intro to Addison’s Cato and the author had included it as a bit of puffery for his traveling marvel.)

I need to see this thing, don’t you? (And the treatise on nakedness…)

Anyway, here’s my point, if indeed I have one: I quite like the phrase “that elaborate pile of art, call’d the microcosm.” That, after all, is what we’re working towards, isn’t it? An elaborate pile of art, the universe in miniature, everything distilled into our paintings or poems or novels or gardens or cocktails or whatever it is we have take the time and effort to distill.

I also think this part of the description is germane to our task. It claims that the mechanism shows the planets “moving round in their periodical times, always corresponding with the heavenly bodies, provided the clock is kept going.”

Provided the clock is kept going.

There’s the catch, isn’t it? You have to keep winding that clock to keep it going. Put energy in to get energy out.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be looking at ways we can do that.