She may be…a bag of TROUBLE. Syphilis – Gonorrhea.U.S. Public Health Service,United States, 1940s.Photomechanical print: color; 41 x 51 cm. Artist: "Christian."A sultry, heavily-made-up woman squints provocatively, while smoking a cigarette. WWII posters usually addressed men, and fingered promiscuous women as the source of contagion.They are an unholy alliance of science, art, medicine, politics, history, advertising, and propaganda. Dramatic images use visual shorthand to convey danger, disease, and death. Shadows, crowds, skeletons, vermin, blob-like micro-organisms, and sinister sick-o's threaten innocent men, women, and children. But these aren't posters for grindhouse horror flicks from the fabulous 50's. They're government issue placards...
Purdue Library Celebrates Wind Beneath Earhart’s Wings
George Palmer Putnam and Amelia Earhart, circa 1935. (All photos courtesy of Purdue University libraries.)The modern "manufacturing" of celebrities involves finding a camera-friendly face and figure with a charismatic personality, plus an indefinable personal magnetism, and using the power of mass media to create an overnight sensation. Result? A legion of people famous for being famous. Accomplishment is no longer a prerequisite for stardom: savvy promotion trumps talent. But a new exhibit at Purdue University's Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives and Special Collections Research Center proves this phenomenon existed far earlier than the advent of "reality T.V." America's most famous female...
New Swiss Library Will Run Like Clockwork
A Bird's Eye View Of The Rolex Learning Center.(All Images Courtesy Of SANAA.)Viewed from above it looks like a flat, wavy rectangle full of randomly placed holes-- and it's Swiss. A cheesy description, perhaps, but one that fits a glorious modernist library which opened on February 22, 2010 in the city of Lausanne. The Japanese architectural firm known as SANAA has created a single-story, slice-like structure so sublimely constructed it seems to float above the ground.Lausanne's Floating Library.The Rolex Learning Center for the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) is a single fluid space that undulates like free-flowing waves over...
Joyce Carol Oates: A Love Letter to Libraries in Longhand
Author Joyce Carol Oates."I try to write in the morning very intensely,from 8:30 to 1 p.m...I hand write and then I type.I don't have a word processor. I write slowly."(By Landon Nordeman for Smithsonian Magazine.) Contrary to Thomas Wolfe's dictum You Can't Go Home Again, in an article in the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine, "Joyce Carol Oates Goes Home Again," the eponymous author begs to differ. Joyce Carol Oates regales readers with a reverie on things changed and unchanged in the town of her birth, and reacquaints herself with the landmarks and buildings of a place that has continued...
Has This Library Solved "The Mystery Of The Mummy Paper?"
Under Wraps: Egyptian Mummy from the Vatican Museums. Reality or urban legend: were the wrappings of ancient Egyptian corpses recycled and pulped to create so-called "mummy paper?" Archaeologists and other scholars have long debated the veracity of claims that mummies were imported into the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century, stripped of their burial shrouds, and their bindings (largely composed of linen and other fibers such as papyrus and something akin to canvas) repurposed into printing paper. But, did this really happen? Are we being fleeced? Is this a fabricated tale? Can this yarn be unwound to get to the meat...