Ruination & Despair

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we bring you a bit of sentimental fluff. Well, assuming you consider snails fluffy.

The Great Depression brought forth a number of dismal economic phenomena that people still associate with it today, including bread lines, apple sellers, homelessness, and panhandling. Life published so many cartoons on these iconic topics that we can hardly reproduce more than a representative sampling. Most are fairly self-explanatory. (Continue reading . . .)

Although Life was a humor magazine, its cartoonists did not ignore the unprecedented levels of unemployment and the gut-wrenching misery that accompanied the Great Depression. The Christmas issue for 1930, published on December 5, thus included this stark Madonna and child by Charles Dana Gibson. Presumably the famous Gibson Girl of the turn of the century had never imagined that her daughter and grandchild would be reduced to such a state. (Continue reading . . .)

Over the last couple of years, Archelaus cards have been intermittently available at Copenhaver, the oldest stationery store in Washington, D.C. Located at 1301 Connecticut Avenue (just north of N Street), Copenhaver dates its origins to an engraving and printing business founded by William A. Copenhaver and F. H. McAleer in 1884. I am pleased to say that with today’s delivery of Valentines, birthday cards, and blank notecards, our fine products once again grace its shelves!

President Herbert Hoover was a great believer in individualism and self-reliance, and his approach to the economic downturn, especially at the beginning, was therefore light on government intervention and heavy on encouraging voluntary individual action. His administration, joined by many prominent business leaders and opinion-makers, tried bravely to talk up the economy. The cartoons in Life adopted an ironic tone toward such efforts, which were clearly inadequate to the task at hand. (Continue reading . . .)

In 1564 the first printing press to be set up in Moscow was burned down by a mob that considered it the work of the devil.

Source: Carolyn Johnston Pouncy, introduction to The Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible, ed. and trans. Carolyn Johnston Pouncy (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 19.

People are frequently comparing the current economic crisis to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Accordingly, I thought I might begin my promised posts on vintage graphics with a look at that gloomy period. Specifically, I will be showcasing cartoons published in the American humor magazine Life, before it went under in 1936. Archelaus’s card designers — ever in search of suitable illustrations for our fine cards — have spent many hours poring over old issues of Life in the Library of Congress, and we have not been shy about scanning whatever interested us along the way. That research is the source of the illustrations for this series. (Continue reading . . .)

Our latest blank notecard features a quotation that pretty much sums up Voltaire’s Candide (1759) and its mockery of Leibniz’s philosophical optimism. The card also pretty well sums up our general attitude here at Archelaus. Just for fun, we are making it available in the original French, for anyone who might prefer it so.

The illustration is from John Sterling Kingsley, ed., The Riverside Natural History (Cambridge, Mass., 1888). It depicts a slender loris (stenops gracilis), a nocturnal primate from southern India and Sri Lanka.

Given the success of our notorious checkbox cards, it was surely only a matter of time before management would demand a checkbox Valentine. And now that time has come. Mind you, I’m not sure they were expecting the result to feature wild pigs, but I am arguing that we have a lucrative opportunity here to fill an empty market niche.

The illustration (like that of our “Peruvian llama” birthday card), is taken from that excellent seventeenth-century compendium, Edward Topsel, The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents (London, 1658).

We don’t expect to do very many posts consisting simply of links to things in other people’s blogs, but we’ve decided to make an exception for Curious Expeditions’ recent travelogue on Cappadocia, “Welcome to the Underground,” partly because the place is so very interesting, both historically and geologically, but mostly because its last king (reigned 36 BC to AD 17) was one of several tolerably obscure ancient personalities named Archelaus.

Sedigitus (Lat. sex, six; digitus, finger, toe): having six fingers or toes.

Source: Max Hohnerlein, Neues Namenbüchlein: Ableitung und Erklärung von 4200 Vornamen (Stuttgart, n.d. [1927]), 50.