A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words: World War II in Infographics
I have said it here before, and I will doubtless say it again: I hoard collect reference books. There is something about the words “atlas,” “dictionary,” or “encyclopedia” in a title that causes me to stop and take a second look at a remainder table, second hand bookstore or library sale.* I own dictionaries for languages I don’t know, historical atlases for many times and places, an encyclopedia of gods from different cultures, a dictionary of twentieth century culture that I’ve never opened, a book on the principles of statistics that has come in handy more than once, and an odd little volume by Barbara Ann Kipfer titled The Order of Things: How Everything in the World is Organized into Hierarchies, Structures and Pecking Orders that I have turned to more often than I would have thought possible. If pushed to explain, I’ll claim that they are part of my working library. Sometimes it’s even true .
All of which is a long way of saying I was thrilled when a review copy of World War II Infographics landed on my desk several months ago.
Created by a team of historians and data designers, led by Jean Lopez, the managing editor of Guerres & Histoire (War & History) magazine, World War II Infographics tells the history of that war entirely through well-designed graphics.
World War II Infographics is visually stunning, but this is not a picture book. Its 357 maps and infographs provide a data-rich examination of 53 topics, beginning with the fall of democracies across Europe in the period between the two world wars and ending with unrest and independence in Europe’s colonial empires after the war.
Whether considering aircraft production statistics, Soviet military losses, or desert campaigns in the Sahara, World War II Infographics uses geopolitical, economic, demographic and military data, organizing each topic in ways that ask new questions about familiar information and often provide new answers to familiar questions.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I want to see what I can learn about the RAF bombing of Berlin in 194o. After all, World War II Infographics is part of my working library.
*I have a special fondness for the weird and quirky reference books that don’t survive on standard bookstore shelves
Part of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
A Brief History of the Pencil
A giant pencil that I received as a Christmas present in Nuremberg. Thanks, Christopher!
One of the unexpected things I learned during our visit to Nuremberg over the holidays is that the city was the home to the first mass-produced graphite lead pencils, beginning in 1662.
Before we visited Nuremberg, I hadn’t given the history of pencils much thought.* In fact, the only piece of pencil history that I knew was that Thoreau invented a better pencil, and then got bored with the whole thing and went off to do something else. But I would have been hard pressed to tell you what made Thoreau’s pencil better. (We’ll get there in a moment.)
As those of you who have hung around here on the Margins for a while know, I can’t resist tracking down the story behind a bit of history trivia. Here’s some of what I found:
- The roman stylus is the immediate ancestor of the modern pencil: a thin metal rod that was used to make a light mark on papyrus. Some styluses were made of lead, which why we still call pencil cores leads even though they have been made of graphite ever since the stylus became a pencil.
- In fact, graphite is the reason styluses became pencils. In 1564, someone discovered a large graphite deposit in Borrowdale, England. Graphite makes a darker mark than lead, but it is too soft and brittle to use without something to hold it. At first, people wrapped graphite sticks in string, but eventually someone inserted a graphic stick into a hollow piece of wood. Poof! A pencil.
- The new industry/craft of pencil making was transformed in Nuremberg. As I’ve mentioned before, the Nuremberg council kept tight control over craft processes in the city. Pencil-making was seen as a two-step process, requiring craftsmen from two different trades to create a single pencil: a lead cutter to shape the graphite and a carpenter or knife handle maker to put the graphite in a wooden case. A storekeeper named Friedrich Staedtler, who was not a member of either skilled trade, figured out how to make a better pencil from start to finish. Pencil makers became a recognized craft category by the 1730s.
- I was astonished to learn that Thoreau didn’t just invent a better pencil; he revolutionized the American pencil industry. American graphite was less pure than British graphite and pencils made from it smudged. Thoreau worked for a time in his father’s pencil factory and was determined to create a better product. After hitting the books at the Harvard Library, he came up with a method of blending graphite and clay that solved the problem. The Thoreau pencil factory took off. Shortly thereafter, Thoreau also took off for Walden Pond. (FYI: He went back into the pencil business occasionally when he needed cash.)
That’s all I’ve got. If you’re interested in learning more about pencil history, everyone seems to agree that the book to read is The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski. I must admit, I’m tempted. **
*On the other hand, I’ve spent a lot of time reading about the history of paper, which was invented in China and then spread to Europe via the Islamic world—making it exactly the kind of thing I’m fascinated by.
**In fact, I’m tempted by several of Petroski’s books.
Dangerous Melodies
Several years ago, I reported on an excellent book about how pianist Van Cliburn’s victory at Russia’s first Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958 helped change the course of the Cold War.
It was a revelation, but I didn’t realize that the culture battles of the Cold War were only one example of the role that classical music played in American cultural and political life for much of the 20th century. In Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War, Julliard-trained musician and historian Jonathan Rosenberg explores the surprising ways in which classical music in the United States became repeatedly tangled in international politics.
It is a complicated and often ugly story. Music lovers divided into two camps. Musical nationalists found it difficult to separate the United States’ troubled relationships with Germany, Italy and later Russia from those countries’ musical heritage. Musical universalists believed that music not only rose above nationalism but could be used to heal schisms between nations. For more than 50 years the two groups clashed repeatedly over questions of who should be allowed to perform in American concert halls and opera houses and what music they should be allowed to play, forcing the directors of musical institutions to make hard decisions. The music of Beethoven, Brahms, Strauss, and Verdi, among others, became the focus of heated debate, and occasional violence. With the advent of the Cold War, the role of music and politics became even more complex as the United States government deployed American musicians as ambassadors for “the image of freedom in oppressed countries abroad.”
In fact, Rosenberg argues, neither the fears of the musical nationalists nor the hopes of the musical universalists proved true. At most, classical music gave Americans a forum for discussing the nature of loyalty, patriotism, democracy, freedom and oppression. Who knew?
Much of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.