This is the first year of Colton’s map publishing business. Ristow says that Colton published his first map in 1833, Burr’s map of New York State; this U.S. map must be as early. The graphic style is similar to Burr’s Universal Atlas maps, engraved the following year. With six detailed and elegant inset maps showing the environs of Albany, Boston, New York, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Baltimore & Washington; plus a small inset map of South Part of Florida. Outline color, folded into dark teal leather covers 13.5x8 with “Burr’s Map of the United States Published By J.H. Colton & Co. New York” and a decorative border stamped in gilt. Prime meridians: Greenwich and Washington.

About this collection:

The David Rumsey Map Collection was started over 25 years ago and contains more than 150,000 maps. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century maps of North and South America, although it also has maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, wall maps, globes, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children’s, and manuscript maps. Items range in date from about 1700 to 1950s.

Digitization of the collection began in 1996 and there are now over 21,000 items online, with new additions added regularly. The site is free and open to the public. Here viewers have access not only to high resolution images of maps that are extensively cataloged, but also to a variety of tools that allow to users to compare, analyze, and view items in new and experimental ways. (About)

Previously on Skandalon

This is Frank Grießhammer’s personal collection of adapters. See more at his Adapter Museum online.

Frank Grießhammer was born in 1983, and has studied in Saarbrücken, Florence and The Hague. He graduated in 2008 in communications design from HBKsaar, with the thesis project Kiosk Fonts, a platform for student writing projects. (Linotype.com)

First spotted via Stüff Stuff.

About The Burt Britton Collection of artists’ self-portraits:

Picking up a bartending shift at the Village Vanguard, the famous New York jazz joint where he usually worked the door, Burt Britton found himself alone at last-call with just one final patron, Norman Mailer. After pouring the esteemed author a final drink, the question was put to Burt, “What do you want from me, Kid?” Exasperated at the end of the long shift, Burt inexplicably responded, “draw me your self-portrait,” handed him a piece of folded paper, and that, simply put, is how it all began.

That night in the mid-Sixties Mailer produced and gave to Britton an amazing object of self-expression, the first of hundreds to come, a self-portrait of the author more revealing than 1000 words. Inspired by Mailer’s product, Britton started to collect. Still at the Vanguard, he gathered self-portraits by Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock after landmark 1966 concerts, he even got a portrait from a New York high-school basketball phenomenon, Lew Alcindor, later the champion Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Moving to the legendary Strand bookstore in about 1968, Britton encountered novelists, poets, journalists, and critics, both the highly regarded and those just starting out. He would respectfully ask local and visiting literary luminaries such as Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Jorge Luis Borges to add their self-portrait to his album with the same democratic spirit that he offered the young John Irving, just months away from the fame that came with The World According to Garp. (Bloomsbury’s auction catalogue : PDF)

Bloomsbury’s catalogue contains every items in the Burt Britton Collection along with details and explanations about the Collection in general and some specific explanations about each self-portrait as well. Alternatively, one can browse the collection over at the Bloomsbury Auctions official website. Back in 2009, there was a story about this collection in The New York Times: “Self-Portraits Speak More Than Words” by James Barron, September 23th, 2009.

Previously on Skandalon : Don DeLillo

Check the original post over at Ulrich’s website 3 Ton Gallery. Eric Ulrich is an artist and designer living in San Francisco. (About)

Since we’re talking about photography and typology, Chrisin has many other collections such as this one : emergency only buttons, doorlocks, doors gates and entrances, etc.

First spotted via This Isn’t Happiness

The photo comes from sarcoptiform’s photostream on Flickr. Because the way those photos were taken and assemble (frontal shot, neutral gray shade) it’s reminiscent (in a way) of Bernd and Hilla Becher typology of water towers (Amazon, Wikipedia).

The two authors behind the blog Mrs. Dean, Norman Beierle and Hester Keijser, did a much more elaborated (and explicit) hommage to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s water towers series : Joghurtbecher. It’s a study ― Becher style ― of… yogurt cups. See example here. More about Joghurtbecher.

“Animal Logic: Photography and Installation by Richard Barnes presents a mid-career survey of the work of acclaimed New York and San Francisco-based photographer Richard Barnes. Barnes’s work looks critically at both the natural world and the ways in which we attempt to institutionalize and classify nature within museums.” (from the Cranbrook Art Museum website).

Richard Barnes statement about this series is… coming soon.

Artist statement :

“In my work I have long been concerned with collection, curation and display and in the transition of objects from their original site to the museum and what happens to them along the way in the process. The passage of time affects meaning, adding value to an artifact in some cases and taking it away in others. Plaster casts of the stone tools in this installation heading towards a kind of extinction through the act of being de-accessioned are displayed beneath a photograph of a recently excavated prehistoric skeletal whale in the process of being cast. I am interested in these connections and disconnections.” (read more by visiting the whole series)

About Richard Barnes:

“Richard Barnes divides his time between commissioned work and personal projects. He looks at architecture as artifact and, placing it within the context of archaeology, challenges our conceptions of the way we inhabit and represent the built environment. His photographs are in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New York Public Library and the Harvard Photographic Archive. He was a recipient of the Rome Prize for 2005-06.” (read a whole lote more)

About the book:

“Burns is an ophthamlic surgeon, but his true passion is vintage photography. He has assembled a collection of more than half a million images and has authored or coauthored works on memorial photography, medical photography, and hand-colored daguerreotypes. Here he presents 127 images in as many pages and then another 50 or so pages of notes, providing specifics of the photographs and extensive discussion of the condition or medical practices shown. More than a few gruesome images are included, though the warm tones of the printing and the antique dress have an anesthetizing effect on the viewer. There are also a good number of images depicting obsolete mid-19th-century practices. The chronological arrangement does impart a sense of progress as we move from images of horrible deformity through pictures of amputation during the Civil War to photos of reparative surgery following World War I. This stunning documentation of a world-class collection belongs not only where there is an interest in the history of photography but also in medical teaching and history collections.” (Amazon)

About the Wikipedia Knowledge Dump:

“From the bold to the beautiful, from the wicked to the wise, every day the Wikipedia team relegates possibly “inappropriate” submissions to the garbage dump of time. Here, we make selected “potential” rejects immortal and preserve them for posterity. (All of these entries have been nominated for deletion at the time of posting.)”

The site is edited by Cliff Pickover. According to himself, he’s “a prolific author and futurist, having published more than 40 books, translated into over a dozen languages. Exploring topics ranging from computers and creativity to art, mathematics, parallel universes, Einstein, time travel, alien life, religion, dimethyltryptamine elves, and the nature of human genius” (Official website). He’s the author of such books as Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves (2005) and Jews in Hyperspace.

Here’s what you may find while browsing this knowledge dumpster:

• A list of Celebrity Laser Eye Patients
• An article on drunk blogging
• A list of songs about hair
• A list of fictional worms
• An article about the difficulty of having sexual intercourse with a mermaid
• A list of bands beginning with the word “lemon”
• An article about The Chickenology Encyclopedia : a compilation of answers to the question “Why did the chicken cross the road?”
• A list of notable moustaches in art and fiction
• An article about the sexuality of Abraham Lincoln
• An article about human cheese
• A list of Homer Simpson’s lifelong dreams
• Last but not least, let’s not forget the list of people who died in the bathroom.

Discovered via Doctorak, GO!