The Colors of Space

The Lhari spaceport didn’t belong on Earth.

Bart Steele had thought that, a long time ago, when he first saw it. He had been just a kid then; twelve years old, and all excited about seeing Earth for the first time—Earth, the legendary home of mankind before the Age of Space, the planet of Bart’s far-back ancestors. And the first thing he’d seen on Earth, when he got off the starship, was the Lhari spaceport.

And he’d thought, right then, It doesn’t belong on Earth.

He’d said so to his father, and his father’s face had gone strange, bitter and remote.

“A lot of people would agree with you, Son,” Captain Rupert Steele had said softly. “The trouble is, if the Lhari spaceport wasn’t on Earth, we wouldn’t be on Earth either. Remember that.” Read More

Printers’ Marks

There are few phases of typography open to the charge of being neglected. An unquestionable exception occurs, however, in relation to Printers’ Marks.

This subject is in many respects one of the most interesting in connection with the early printers, who, using devices at first purely as trade marks for the protection of their books against the pirate, soon began to discern their ornamental value, and, consequently, employed the best available artists to design them. Many of these examples are of the greatest bibliographical and general interest, as well as of considerable value in supplementing an important class of illustrations to the printed books, and showing the origin of several typical classes of Book-plates (Ex-Libris). The present Handbook has been written with a view to supplying a readable but accurate account of this neglected chapter in the history of art and bibliography; and it appeals with equal force to the artist or collector. Only one book on the subject, Berjeau’s “Early Dutch, German, and English Printers’ Marks,” has appeared in this viii country, and this, besides being out of print and expensive, is destitute of descriptive letterpress. The principle which determined the selection of the illustrations is of a threefold character: first, the importance of the printer; secondly, the artistic value or interest of the Mark itself; and thirdly, the geographical importance of the city or town in which the Mark first appeared. Read More

The Ideal Book — The Importance of Legibility

By the Ideal Book, I suppose we are to understand a book not limited by commercial exigencies of price: we can do what we like with it, according to what its nature, as a book, demands of art.

But we may conclude, I think, that its matter will limit us somewhat; a work on differential calculus, a medical work, a dictionary, a collection of a statesman’s speeches, or a treatise on manures, such books, though they might be handsomely and well printed, would scarcely receive ornament with the same exuberance as a volume of lyrical poems, or a standard classic, or such like. A work on Art, I think, bears less of ornament than any other kind of book (“non bis in idem” is a good motto); again, a book that must have illustrations, more or less utilitarian, should, I think, have no actual ornament at all, because the ornament and the illustration must almost certainly fight. Read More

Bringing Physical Art Mediums to Digital Form

The reawakening of Art in Italy which followed the darkness of the Middle Ages, dates from about the beginning of the fifteenth century and is called the Renaissance.

The Italians have a method of reckoning the centuries which differs from ours. Thus we call 1800 the first year of the nineteenth century, but they call it the first of the eighteenth; so the painters of what was to us the fifteenth century are called by Italians the “quattrocentisti,” or men of the fourteenth century, and while to us the term “cinquecento” means the style of the sixteenth century, to the Italians the same century, which begins with 1500, is the fifteenth century.

I shall use our own method of reckoning in my writing; but this fact should be known to all who read or study art. Read More

The Modern Art Scene of Toronto

In speaking of art we often contrast the useful or mechanical arts with the Fine Arts; by these terms we denote the difference between the arts which are used in making such things as are necessary and useful in civilized life, and the arts by which ornamental and beautiful things are made.

The fine arts are Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Poetry, and Music, and though we could live if none of these existed, yet life would be far from the pleasant experience that it is often made to be through the enjoyment of these arts.

In speaking of Painting, just here I wish to include the more general idea of pictures of various sorts, and it seems to me that while picture-making belongs to the fine or beautiful arts, it is now made a very useful art in many ways. For example, when a school-book is illustrated, how much more easily we understand the subject we are studying through the help we get from pictures of objects or places that we have not seen, and yet wish to know about. Pictures of natural scenery bring all countries before our eyes in such a way that by looking at them, while reading books of travel, we may know a great deal more about lands we have never seen, and may never be able to visit. Read More

Tarzan of the Apes — Out to Sea

I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale.

When my convivial host discovered that he had told me so much, and that I was prone to doubtfulness, his foolish pride assumed the task the old vintage had commenced, and so he unearthed written evidence in the form of musty manuscript, and dry official records of the British Colonial Office to support many of the salient features of his remarkable narrative.

I do not say the story is true, for I did not witness the happenings which it portrays, but the fact that in the telling of it to you I have taken fictitious names for the principal characters quite sufficiently evidences the sincerity of my own belief that it MAY be true. Read More

Captains Courageous — A Story of the Grand Banks

The weather door of the smoking-room had been left open to the North Atlantic fog, as the big liner rolled and lifted, whistling to warn the fishing-fleet.

“That Cheyne boy’s the biggest nuisance aboard,” said a man in a frieze overcoat, shutting the door with a bang. “He isn’t wanted here. He’s too fresh.”

A white-haired German reached for a sandwich, and grunted between bites: “I know der breed. Ameriga is full of dot kind. I dell you you should imbort ropes’ ends free under your dariff.” Read More

Into The Primitive

Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego. Because men, groping in the Arctic darkness, had found a yellow metal, and because steamship and transportation companies were booming the find, thousands of men were rushing into the Northland. These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs, with strong muscles by which to toil, and furry coats to protect them from the frost.

Buck lived at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. Judge Miller’s place, it was called. It stood back from the road, half hidden among the trees, through which glimpses could be caught of the wide cool veranda that ran around its four sides. The house was approached by gravelled driveways which wound about through wide-spreading lawns and under the interlacing boughs of tall poplars. At the rear things were on even a more spacious scale than at the front. There were great stables, where a dozen grooms and boys held forth, rows of vine-clad servants’ cottages, an endless and orderly array of outhouses, long grape arbors, green pastures, orchards, and berry patches. Then there was the pumping plant for the artesian well, and the big cement tank where Judge Miller’s boys took their morning plunge and kept cool in the hot afternoon. Read More