Yikes.

A perusal of miscellaneous retro comics paints guys as real jerks… it’s enough to make a man want to apologize on behalf of my whole damn gender!

(from a nice Flickr collection of 769 images here)

Austria, or wherever…

This is one of more than 350 vintage travel posters in an online collection compiled by The Boston Public Library’s Print Department—most date from the 1920s-1940s, the “Golden Age of Travel.” Enjoy the rest here.

R.I.P. Stéphane Hessel (1917-2013), Indignez-vous!

Paris, France

This is a small sampling of Autochrome images made ​​in Paris between 1914 and 1918. The Autochrome process was developed by the Lumière brothers in 1903. The technique was based on a composite of black and white emulsions passed through a series of color filters (red, blue and green) designed based on potato starch (this technique was abandoned in 1935 in favor of the process Kodachrome, then Agfachrome the following year).

See more of these amazing century-old images of the city of love here.

(mid-Century flashback)

I stumbled across a website/archive yesterday which shares more than 14GB of scans and cover illustrations from the genre known loosely as “pulp.” While some of the wide range of topics covered (1153 different tags!) will appeal to some and less so to others, this is an outstanding repository of paperback and magazine illustration well worth perusing for those interested in cultural ephemera and vintage (mostly American, and much of it cheesy) publishing : Pulp Covers

(Lent seems, somehow, appropriate for this post).

(re-posted from Ars Technica)

A new hypothesis from economist Andrew Francis argues that the terror of syphilis was so great among US residents that the sexual revolution of the 1960s simply wasn’t possible without getting the dreaded disease under control first. In his view, the development of effective treatments—most notably, penicillin—had a more profound effect on culture than even birth control measures.

This may be hard to grasp at first, since the fear of syphilis has fallen off so dramatically today. But there’s an easy way to transport yourself back in time 70 years or so, just before the rise of common antibiotics, to get a sense for life in a world where infectious diseases could prove so much more difficult to control. Thanks to the Work Projects Administration (WPA), a federal initiative in the late 1930s and early 1940s that put hundreds of thousands of American to work on public projects, we have an incredible visual archive of life at the time: 2,000 posters created by government-employed artists.

A surprising number of them relate to syphilis; indeed, it’s the largest public health issue addressed by the posters, many of which are now archived at the Library of Congress and available online. The posters are alternately terrifying, paternalistic, comforting, and informative, but they are never uninteresting.

View more many more posters on syphilis here, each with a written rationale for its design… Thanks to Gregor Brandt for the article link.

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English entomologist and engraver Moses Harris (1730-1788) devised the first full-colour wheel in 1766, creating the foundation of modern colour theory.

“The 18 colours of his wheel were derived from what he then called the three ‘primitive’ colours: red, yellow and blue. At the center of the wheel, Harris showed that black is formed by the superimposition of these colours.”

Thanks Moses. (source)

Braga, Portugal

My designer/climber friend Toze (Antonio Coelho) has shared a great little collection of Portuguese book cover designs from the 1920s through 1970s (in a Facebook gallery) here.

—Tecumseh (1768-1813, Shawnee leader)