The death of Johannes Gutenberg – 3 February 1468
Posted on | February 3, 2012 | No Comments
Where would humanity be without the stone axe, the wheel, the plough, the compass and the steam engine? Likewise the printing press, whose inventor Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg died on this day in 1468.
“Yes but” I hear you bookish pedants cry, “didn’t the Chinese T’ang Dynasty have a method of printing from carved wooden blocks?” Indeed they did, but its efficiency was limited. Wood blocks are fiddly to make, can only be used for one edition, will not take corrections, and degrade quickly.
Before Gutenberg books were an eye-wateringly expensive item. Each book took scribes months to produce. They hand-copied the text with quill pens using inks they made from gum, ox gall, soot and water onto sheets of parchment, an expensive product in its own right made usually from calf skin.
No wonder there were so few books and those that there were, were bibles; the only words worthy enough to commit to parchment. Most ordinary people had only ever seen one book – the bible in their parish church.
By the end of the 14th century there was a quiet unsung revolution going on; a water-powered method for making wood pulp-based paper had been developed. (Hence ‘paper mill’, since they were usually located on a river to power the process and provide the water.) Large quantities of uniform quality sheets were being produced cheaply.
Gutenberg was born sometime in the very late 1300s and worked in his native Mainz, Germany as a blacksmith and goldsmith. With his fine metalworking skills he developed his greatest gift to the world: moveable metal type. This he combined the traditional screw press (a Roman invention) to make durable, flexible and speedy printing equipment.
He cast tens of thousands of tiny individual metal letters in an alloy he devised of antimony, lead and tin. The letters could be ‘set’ to make words, sentences, pages, chapters, books, volumes! Initially fiddly to make and cast, yes, but they could be used again and again with no degradation. Letters were set by skilled compositors, inked and pressed onto paper. But wait: pre-existing inks were water-based and did not adhere to the type. No problem for our hero. Gutenberg set about inventing an oil-based ink, sticky like varnish, which would produce a crisp letterform on the paper.
All the elements were now in place to herald a revolution.
Gutenberg’s best known masterpiece is his 42 line bible, first sold at the 1455 Frankfurt Book Fair. Although it was an expensive two-volume affair, it caused a sensation. He wanted to keep his invention a secret, but the cat was out of the bag and by the end of the century more than 2,500 printing presses were hard at work throughout Europe. The public appetite for printed material proved, then as now, insatiable.
The first books were religious, but it didn’t take long for printers to branch out into classic literary texts, scholarly works, manuals, pattern books, story books. As more were published, books became cheaper, literacy increased and people sought entertainment. Just 23 years after Gutenberg’s bible, the first English printer, William Caxton, published Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. For the first time, English readers could read in their own language the exploits of characters they recognised from everyday life: the Miller, the Squire and the Wife of Bath.
Similarly, in Italy in 1472 Dante’s epic poem the Divine Comedy was published and helped to fix the Tuscan dialect as ‘Italian’, even though 14th century Dante considered himself a speaker of Latin. Books introduced the notion of spelling, helped to stabilise and standardise languages which in turn gave rise to a sense of nationalism.
Most importantly of all, the press had the power to spread ideas and information accurately. Scientific, cultural, technical, artistic, religious and political ideas could be shared and debated by many. The works of great philosophers such as Martin Luther and humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam could inform people, and for the first time almost gave them permission to think for themselves, armed with the information to make up their own minds. Governments and institutions couldn’t easily hide behind propaganda and self-serving lies anymore – although many still try.
As words became attributable authorship became important. Copyright laws were established to protect intellectual property. Reputations and fortunes were made. They still are.
Newssheets took a little longer to get going. In gossipy Venice a cheap newssheet costing one gazeta (hence Gazette) was circulated in the early 1500s, but it wasn’t until 1605 that what is widely regarded as the world’s first newspaper was published in Strasbourg with the least catchy title ever: Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien.
In 1900, author Mark Twain wrote: “The world concedes without hesitation or dispute that Gutenberg’s invention is incomparably the mightiest event that has ever happened … Whatever the world is, today, good and bad together, that is what Gutenberg’s invention has made it: for from that source it has all come … the evil wrought through his mighty invention is immeasurably outbalanced by the good it has brought …”
Map of Stratford-upon-Avon
Posted on | February 1, 2012 | 4 Comments
“I like this place and willingly could spend time in it”
– William Shakespeare in As you Like It
Stratford-upon-Avon is world famous as the birthplace of the English language’s most famous son: William Shakespeare. I too was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. And I have just finished drawing a map of the town; it’s my love letter to the place that shaped me and that will forever be home.
I have spent many hours these past 18 months drawing by hand quirky maps of the places I have lived and love: Avebury, Eynsham, Stanton Harcourt and Woodstock. It was inevitable that I would turn my pen towards the town of my birth.
When I was a girl I didn’t know how lucky I was to grow up in Stratford. I now appreciate the extraordinary legacy it left me: a deep sense of history, culture and community. And a passion for the English language! I wanted to put all that in my map.
The map shows not just the shape of the town and its buildings and roads, but also things you normally wouldn’t see on a map: history, nature, trees, birds, activities and – as this is a map of Stratford – lots of Shakespearean references; actors, theatres, characters and quotes. My friends and family also make cameo appearances. Hello mum!
Stratford has so many stories to tell and this is my story. If you’re a Stratfordian, you would have almost certainly drawn it differently; so I hope you will forgive my omissions and that the map will delight you anyway; whether you’re a resident Stratfordian or now living in exile, like me!
See more details of the map as it progressed.
Get your copy!
Copies of the map
are now available. Maps are A2 size (420 x 594 mm / 16.5 x 23.4 ins) and you can get them in two ways:
-FOLDED in a lovely colour cover for £4.99 + P&P
-FLAT, suitable for framing and signed by the artist for £12.99 each + P&P
Stocks are very limited, so grab yours today. Email me now if you’d like to pay by bank transfer or get one from my shop if you prefer to use PayPal. Maps will be posted when funds have cleared.
100 years since Scott reaches South Pole
Posted on | January 17, 2012 | No Comments
The stories of the early polar explorers are some of the most inspirational and moving tales that I know. And so I couldn’t let the day go by without noting that it was one hundred years ago today, that this photo was taken of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his men at the South Pole.
Pictured, left to right: standing Lawrence Oates, Captain Scott, Edgar Evans and seated Henry Bowers and Edward Wilson. Bowers took the photo, using a length of string to operate the camera shutter.
Instead of the glorious triumph they had hoped for, they arrived at the Pole only to discover that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team had beaten them to it by less than a month. Amundsen had arrived there on 14 December 1911. “Great God! This is an awful place”, Scott wrote in his diary.
The return journey was a disaster. Evans died on 17 February 1912 from starvation and frostbite at the base of the Beardmore Glacier. On 17 March 1912 Lawrence Oates who was suffering with appallingly frostbitten feet, stepped out of the tent and into a blizzard, knowingly sacrificing himself to save the other three. According to Scott he said: “I am just going outside and I may be some time.” But Wilson, Bowers and Scott died anyway – of cold and hunger – trapped in a tent by an unseasonal blizzard just 11 miles from their life-saving depot in late March.
I shall write a longer piece about Captain Scott to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his death on 29 March 2012.
My favourite things
Posted on | December 21, 2011 | No Comments
I began painting My favourite things last January and it has been hanging around waiting for me to complete it ever since. I finally managed it yesterday. It’s very simple picture really: an A to Z of some of the things I love best in the world from aardvark to zebra.
Before I painted in the background I photographed some of the details. Here’s D for dolphin, with a bit of C for chipmunk and I for impala:
And who wouldn’t be pleased to see a G for giraffe up close and personal as I did almost two years ago in Kenya? It’s not only their long eyelashes and reticulated markings that I love, it’s their extraordinary evolution; on the very edge of what’s possible for an antelope.
The eyes of an O for owl – another evolutionary triumph.
This detail shows the poor old Q for quagga, now extinct; an R for raccoon, those great opportunists; and a V for viscacha, a South American mountain-dwelling, rock-hopping, ludicrously cute social rodent.
And finally a pretty little F for frog. What’s not to love?
The self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi – 17 December 2010
Posted on | December 17, 2011 | No Comments
What a magic carpet ride it’s been this past year for our brothers and sisters in North Africa and the Middle East. Egypt’s Mubarak-led police state deposed, Libya’s mad dog Gaddafi fittingly gunned down in a sewer. And the struggle continues for reform in Bahrain, Yemenis fight for their rights, and brave and bullied Syrians continue to rise up against the barbarism of Bashar al-Assad’s evil regime.
The so-called Arab Spring signals such hope for the future! And it was sprung on this day last year when a young fruit-vendor immolated himself on the streets of a small rural town in central Tunisia.
Born in 1984 to a working class family, Mohamed Bouazizi became the sole provider for his family at the age of 10. Honest, hard-working, responsible, he was a young man that any family would be proud of. Everyday he would buy fresh produce with what little money the family had, wheel his wooden barrow a mile to the souk and resell the fruit and veg for to make just enough dinars to support his mother, younger brothers and sisters, his uncle, and his sister at university. With unemployment rampant, he was glad to have any work at all.
Since he was a boy he’d been repeatedly harassed and bullied by municipal officials, with no recourse to the law. Tunisia’s government, run for 23 years by President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, was corrupt to the core. Local police would knock over his barrow, extort money, steal his fruit, or fine him for not having the ‘correct’ market permit.
In the morning of 17 December 2010, a policewoman confronted Bouazizi as he made his way to market. She wanted to confiscate his scales but he was having none of it. The policewoman slapped and spat at him, shouted insults and forced him to the ground. Her colleagues beat him. He was humiliated and could take no more abuse.
He ran to the governor’s office to complain about his treatment, but no one would see him. He shouted: ‘If you don’t see me, I’ll burn myself’. An hour later, Bouazizi stood outside the governor’s office, poured petrol over himself, called out “how do you expect me to make a living?”and struck a match.
Local people ran to help, the flames were put out and he survived – just – but suffered appalling burns to 90% of his body. He would never recover consciousness. He was taken to the local hospital and later transferred to a larger burns unit in Sfax.
Bouazizi’s family, friends and neighbours staged a small protest in the town at the way their son had been treated. Such dissent was not tolerated in Tunisia, and would almost certainly lead to arrest or beating. But they’d all had enough. Many of the young people protesting recognised in themselves the desperation Bouazizi felt, but this time they had a secret weapon: the internet. Armed with mobile phones and wi-fi, they filmed the protests and uploaded them to YouTube and Facebook. Video clips spread virally and were soon broadcast by influential international satellite news channels such as Al Jazeera. The outcry was deafening.
Tunisian forces tried in vain to silence the protest but the genie was out of the bottle. Twenty-six-year-old Bouazizi died of his injuries on 4 January 2011 a martyr and inspiration to the Arabic-speaking world. Ten days later on 14 January 2011 Ben Ali stepped down and escaped to Saudi Arabia.
Inspired by the shining Tunisian example, people in other countries – not just young people but ALL people – felt the same frustrations. Protest became a popular uprising with Friday prayers as the rallying point. Next stop Tahrir Square, Cairo. Arabian nights would never be the same.
The death of Mary Leakey – 9 December 1996
Posted on | December 9, 2011 | No Comments
This article also appears on Dorian Cope’s blog On This Deity.
No matter who we are and what we think, the beautiful truth is that we are all children of Africa. It was in no small part the painstaking work of Mary Leakey that revealed this. For more than 50 years under hot African skies, archaeologist Mary grubbed around in the earth searching doggedly for clues that would reveal the truth about human physical and cultural evolution. And, man, did she find them.
Born in London on 6 February 1913, Mary herself confessed to being rubbish at school; she couldn’t even pass exams in French, in which she was fluent having spent much of her childhood in France. Aged 12 her passion for prehistory was ignited when in the Dordogne, she was wowed by cave paintings. Unqualified in anything and unable to get into university, she had only a talent for drawing and an insatiable curiosity in prehistory. Unregistered, she attended university archaeology lectures and joined various archaeological digs.
“I dug things up. I was curious, and I liked to draw what I found” she later said.
Her illustrations would lead to her meeting and falling for archaeologist Louis Leakey. In 1936, after Louis’ messy divorce, they finally married and had three sons, Jonathan, Richard and Philip, all of who would make their mark in the field of archaeology. But it was not to be the easiest of marriages. Louis was a womaniser and basked in self-publicity.
It was Mary and Louis’ discoveries in East Africa which made the Leakey name synonymous with hominoid archaeology. She fell in love with Africa, loved living in tents, and at various excavations in Kenya and Tanzania, she simultaneously raised her sons, kept a pack of dogs (her favourites were Dalmations), smoked cigars, quaffed single malt and dug and dug and dug and dug.
At Olorgesailie, near Nairobi, she unearthed numerous handaxes and fossils and realised that she had found a place where early hominids had actually once lived and thrived 100,000 to two million years ago. She was on to something. Each new find, publicised by Louis with lectures, broadcasts and after-dinner speeches, seemed to be proving that East Africa was indeed the cradle of humanity. Mary’s methodical evidence-gathering, her scientific cataloguing, report-writing and sheer bloody hard work backed-up all Louis’ flashy raconteuse.
Her spectacular finds include: the skull of Proconsul africanus, a fossil ape; a 1.8 million-year-old skull of Australopithecus boisei, the so-called nutcracker man because of his huge teeth and jaws, and the bones of Homo habilis surrounded by stone tools. Reconstructing the bones, she revealed that Homo habilis was dextrous and had a brain big enough to make and use tools. It was a sensation and blew out of the water any theories that the origins of modern humans were to be found in Asia.
From 1968 until Louis’ death in 1972, Mary and Louis lived separate lives. He loved celebrity lecture tours and fundraising, while she loved only digging at Olduvai in Tanzania, which had by this time become her home, as it was to so many of our human ancestors. Mary had worked most of her life in Louis’s shadow but her most remarkable discovery came in 1978 when her team spotted, quite by chance, what she thought might be footprints of a human ancestor.
And so on 2 August 1978, on hands and knees, Mary spent hours with a paintbrush and toothpick to carefully reveal the well-preserved imprints of heel, toes and arch. Exposed by erosion, she deduced that the tracks had been made by an early bipedal hominid. She stood up, lit a fine Havana and declared: ”Now this really is something to put on the mantelpiece!”
The trail of footprints went for 75 feet. Two or three people had walked here 3.7 million years ago; a large one, perhaps male, a smaller one, maybe female and a tiny one, possibly their child. Like a bushman tracker, she read the prints and noted that at some point the female had stopped and turned before continuing. Perhaps she sensed a lurking predator or heard a thunderclap? The footprints remain the earliest known traces of human behaviour and they established that hominids were walking upright far earlier than previously supposed.
”This motion, so intensely human, transcends time” Mrs. Leakey wrote, ”a remote ancestor – just as you or I – experienced a moment of doubt.”
The story of how we Homo sapiens evolved is still being drafted by scientists. It’s a long story, but there is no doubt that Mary wrote the first chapter. We dig you, Mary.
Easter Island stoneheads
Posted on | December 3, 2011 | No Comments
A lifetime’s ambition was achieved last month when Moth and I visited Easter Island, the most isolated inhabited place on the planet, rightly famous for its giant stone sculptures. It was a joy to sit and sketch them.
On this page of my sketchbook, I drew in the bougainvillea garland I was presented with when we arrived on the island.
The monument at Tongariki features 15 moai all in a row – here are just nine of them – my paper wasn’t big enough (nor did we have enough time) to paint all 15.
At the far south west of island, lies the islet ot Motu Nui, the focus of the birdman cult.
There are more sketches of Easter Island on my Facebook page (you don’t have to be a Facebook user to see them). And here are some of our photos of the different sites on Easter.
The death of Hernán Cortés – 2 December 1547
Posted on | December 2, 2011 | No Comments
This article also appears on Dorian Cope’s blog On This Deity.
“He came dancing across the water with his galleons and guns, Looking for the new world in that palace in the sun”- from Cortez the Killer by Neil Young
Hernán (Hernando) Cortés was a glory-seeking, ruthless murderer capable of barbaric cruelty, who more or less single-handedly destroyed the ancient Aztec culture. Using terror tactics, guns and horses he ‘conquered’ Mexico and unknowingly, with his small band of men he spread European diseases such as smallpox, measles and Catholicism to the indigenous peoples of Mexico who had no natural immunity. Today, the anniversary of his death, we remember him as a warning from history.
Born in 1485 in Spain into the family of minor nobility, he quit his legal studies aged 16 to go adventuring. Excited by tales of the exquisite treasures to be plundered in the New World he set sail for Santo Domingo in 1504 and got to Cuba by 1511. It was here, alongside conquistador Diego Velázquez, and built his reputation for cunning, daring and learned the art of war-mongering.
Defying Velázquez’s orders, in 1518 Cortés sailed to Mexico, which had only very recently been discovered by Europeans. He wanted to be a conquistador, make a name for himself, claim the land for Spain, grab some gold and convert some natives to Christianity. And he had The One True Christian God on his side!
He landed at what is now Veracruz, in Mayan territory, with about 10 ships, a few hundred men, no more than 20 horses and a dozen cannons and established a settlement. The Mayan people, a decentralised farming civilisation, had never seen anything like it before. Massive ships! White men wearing strange clothes! Huge animals on which a man can ride! And very big, loud guns capable of extraordinary damage. Such was the shock of the invasion the frightened local people formed alliances with Cortés who found he could do anything and take anything he wanted. The Mayans told of him the riches of the neighbouring Aztec empire. And boy-oh-boy, he fancied some of that! He would march on the capital Tenochtitlán, ruled over by Emperor Montezuma II and he would conquer it.
Before he left he scuttled all but one of his ships so that the men remaining at the new settlement couldn’t mutiny and bugger off back to Spain while he was away. There was to be no going back.
As he travelled he took advantage of regional enmities, inciting communities who feared the Aztecs to rise up and come with him. En route he converted people to Christianity. That turned out to be pretty simple: the indigenous people simply added a new god to their Holy catalogue of deities.
After two months on the road Cortes’ men, now numbering thousands, reached the city of Cholula. There he massacred tens of thousand of unarmed people to both frighten the Aztecs waiting for him in nearby Tenochtitlán and to warn his own men that such brutality would be meted upon them if they rebelled. The city was torched. Cortes marched on towards Tenochtitlán. Some say his arrival outside the city co-incided with an Aztec prophecy about the coming of white-skinned men. This might explain Montezuma’s generous welcome of Cortes – or more likely, scouts from Cholula had already informed him of Cortes’ brutality and the welcome was an attempt to appease him.
In November 1519 Cortés arrived in the bountiful, complex and watery city of Tenochtitlán. He was received by Montezuma dressed in feathers and gold, who lavished gifts upon the Spaniard. The good will wouldn’t last. Cortés superior fire power and barbarism meant that Montezuma was always doomed, despite the city’s lakeside defences. Montezuma was taken hostage. To cut a two-year-long story short, there were massacres, appeasements, skirmishes, truces and finally a siege – but the end was evitable. By August 1521, Montezuma was dead, the Aztec empire was history and Cortés claimed Mexico for Spain. Cortes personally governed the territory from 1521 to 1524 from Mexico City, newly built from the ruins of the once-glorious Tenochtitlán.
Once conquered, the indigenous people were brutalised, exploited and died in their thousands from wave after wave of European diseases. An account written in 1528 describes the scene after Cortes’ conquest: “The houses are roofless now, and their walls are reddened with blood. Worms are swarming in the streets and plazas, and the walls are splattered with gore. The water has turned red, as if it were dyed, and when we drink it, it has the taste of brine. Our city is lost and dead. We have chewed dry twigs and salt grasses, we have filled our mouths with dust and bits of adobe, we have eaten lizards, rats and worms….” You get the idea.
Later in his murderous career Cortés would explore Central America hoping to find a strait from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He did not. Instead he discovered the territories of what he called California, a name he chose from a popular early 16th-century novel and a word first printed on a map by Diego Gutiérrez in 1562. The name stuck. In 1541 Cortés returned to Spain and retired to an estate near Seville where he died on 2 December 1547.
Mexico would not be an independent self-governing state until August 1821.
“He came dancing across the water, Cortez, Cortez, What a killer.”- Neil Young
Sketches of Chile
Posted on | November 28, 2011 | No Comments
We returned from our travels in Chile yesterday. I made lots and lots of sketches. Here are just three. If you want to see more, check out my Facebook page, you don’t need to be a Facebook user to see them. If you are a FB user, don’t forget to ‘like’ me – I’ll be uploading photos of Easter Island later this week.
This is the Rio Petrohue in the Chilean lakes district, Patagonia. The insects feasted upon me as I painted, but who cares when you have a view like this?
Chile’s Torres del Paine national park in Patagonia is surely one of the world’s most spectacular unsung natural wonders. And there’s hardly anyone there!
Some quick and dirty sketches of magellan penguins. My goodness it was cold there and the icey wind practically blew my sketchbook out of my hand!
Bitten by It Bites
Posted on | October 27, 2011 | No Comments
Of all the many unsung bands lurking out there in MusicLand, It Bites are up there as possibly the most under-rated progressive rock band in the world. Their back catalogue is littered with crisply crafted songs and symphonic compositions to treasure. Until last night I had not had the very great pleasure of seeing them perform live.
If you relish: a Rush-like big fat long song with a catchy melody, unpredictable left turns and weird time-signatures; Queen-like soaring harmonic vocals; the power pop of The Feeling but want more balls; the complex and unpredictable compositions of Genesis; if you enjoy all these things then try It Bites. They are never, ever dull. They quote from hard rock, funk, blues, reggae, and in true progressive rock style combine the lot to produce something really vital, exciting and different. It shouldn’t work, but it does.
And so a small but enthusiastic crowd at Leamington Spa’s Assembly Rooms gathered last night to lap up whatever It Bites could throw at them. They didn’t disappoint.
Most of the musicians of the current line up John Mitchell (lead vocals, guitar), John Beck (keyboards, backing vocals), Bob Dalton (drums, backing vocals), Lee Pomeroy or Nathan King (bass guitar, backing vocals) make their living as session musicians and tour intermittently as It Bites.
The crowd bayed with delight as they performed It Bites favourites including Kiss like Judas, Old Man And The Angel, and the lyrical The Wind that shakes the barley, finally playing their hit Calling all the heroes, which you will remember, pop-pickers!
More please.
Photos: Moth Clark
