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“It is all a question, finally, of the nature of genius. The best explanation of genius that I know, the one that incorporates most of the facts we have, is Koestler’s — that the act of genius is simply the bringing together of two hitherto distinct spheres of reference, or matrices — a talent for juxtapositions. Archimedes’ bath is a small instance. Till him no one had associated measurements of mass with the commonplace observation of water displacement. The question is, for a modern investigator, what actually takes place in the brain at the moment that an Archimedes says, ‘Eureka!’ It seems clear, now, that it is a sort of breakdown — literally, the mind disintegrates, and the old, distinct categories are for a little while fluid and capable of re-formation.”

“But it’s just that,” I objected, “the re-formation of the disrupted categories, in which the act of genius consists. It’s not the breakdown that counts, but the new juxtapositions that follow. Madmen can break down just as spectacularly as geniuses.”

Dr. Busk smiled, enigmatic in her veil of cigarette smoke. “Perhaps that thin line that is said to separate genius from madness is only fortuitous. Perhaps the madman simply has the bad luck of being wrong. But your point is taken, and I can reply to it. You would suggest, I take it, that genius is only one per cent inspiration, that the process of preparing for the moment when the ‘Eureka!’ comes is what is crucial in the formation of genius. In short, his education, by which he becomes acquainted with reality.

“But doesn’t that just beg the question? Education, memory itself, is but the recapitulation of all the moments of genius in that culture. Education is always breaking down old categories and recombining them in better ways. And who has a better memory, strictly speaking, than the catatonic who resurrects some part of the past in all its completeness, annihilating the present moment utterly? I might go so far as to say that thought itself is a disease of the brain, a degenerative condition of matter.

“Why, if genius were a continuous process, instead of what it is — a fluke — it would be of no value to us whatsoever! Geniuses in a field like mathematics are usually played out by thirty, at the very latest. The mind defends itself against the disintegrative process of creativity. It begins to jell, notions solidify into inalterable systems, which simply refuse to be broken down and re-formed. Consider Owens, the great anatomist of the Victorian age, who simply wouldn’t understand Darwin. It’s self-preservation, pure and simple.

“And then think of what happens if genius doesn’t reign itself in but insists on plunging on ahead into the chaos of freest association. I’m thinking of that hero of you literateurs, James Joyce. I know any number of psychiatrists who could, in good conscience, have accepted Finnegan Wakes [sic] as the very imprimatur of madness and had its author hospitalized on its evidence alone. A genius? Oh yes. But all we common people have the common sense to realize that genius, like the clap, is a social disease, and we take action accordingly. We put all our geniuses in one kind or another of isolation ward, to escape being infected.”

-Thomas M. Disch, Camp Concentration, pg.62-64. 1968.

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In related linkage How Stuff Works takes on (in less verbose and dramatic form) the subject of how genius works.

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From Chapter 4, How do substances occupy the mind?, in reference to the image which served as thumbnail to this post-

Rembrandt is well-known for the buttery dab of paint that he sometimes puts on the ends of the noses of his portraits, and this nose is certainly greasy and has its little spot of white. But touches like that do not stand alone: when Rembrandt was interested in what he was doing, as he was here, he coated entire faces in a glossy, shining mud-pack of viscid paint. The skin is damp with perspiration, as if he were painting himself in a hot room, and he slowly accumulated a slick sheen of sweat. It is impossible to ignore the strangeness of the paint. If I looked at my face in the mirror and saw this, I would be horrified. The texture is much rougher than skin, as if it is all scar tissue. As a painter works, the shanks of the brushes become repositories for dried paint, and flecks of that paint become dislodged and mix with fresh paint, rolling around on the canvas like sodden tumbleweeds. They are all over this face, forming little pimples or warts wherever they end up. (There is a large one halfway up the nose.) Among contemporary artists, Lucien Freud has made an entire technique out of these rolling flakes and balls, and he lets them congregate in his figures’ armpits and in their crotches. In short, the face is a wreck, much more disturbing than the unnaturally smooth faces that most painters prefer.

Although historians tend to see Rembrandt’s method as an attempt at naturalism, it goes much farther than portrait conventions have ever gone, then or since. Consider what is happening in the paint, aside from the fact that it is supposed to be skin. Paint is a viscous substance, already kin to sweat and fat, and here it represents itself: skin as paint or paint as skin, either way. It’s a self-portrait of the painter, but it is also a self-portrait of paint. The oils are out in force, like the uliginous oozing waters of a swamp bottom. The paint is oily, greasy, and waxy all at once—even though modem chemistry would say that is impossible. It sticks: it is tacky and viscid like flypaper. It has the pull and suction of pine sap. Over the far cheek, it spreads like the mucilage schoolchildren use to glue paper, resisting and rolling back. On the nose—it’s rude, but appropriate—the paint is semi-solid, as if the nose were smeared with phlegm or mucus. On the forehead, it looks curdled, like gelatin that is broken up with a spoon as it is about to set. There is drier paint around the eyes, and the bags under the eyes are inspissated hunks of paint, troweled over thin, greyish underpainting. The grey, which is left naked at the corner of the eye and in the folds between the bags, is the imprimatura, and the skin over it is heavy, thick, and clammy. The same technique served for the wings of the nose, where dribbles of paint come down to meet the nostril but stop short, leaving a gap where the grey shows through. Of course, the nostril is not a hole, but a plug of Burnt Sienna with Lamp Black, and it also lies on top of the grey imprimatura. Rembrandt’s thin moustache is painted with wiggles of buttery paint, almost like milk clinging to a real moustache. Over the eyes and eyelids there are thick strips of burned earth pigments -Lamp Black and Burnt Sienna— covering everything underneath. The tar spreads up and inward, and then falls into the hollows between the eyes and the nose in dense pools like duplicate pupils.

There is no limit to this kind of description, because Rembrandt’s paint covers the full range of organic substances. It is more fully paint, more completely an inventory of what can happen between water and stone, ⊕ than the other examples in this book. And that means it is also more directly expressive of qualities and properties: it is warm, greasy, oily, waxy, earthy, watery, inspissate. It is not dried rock, like Monet’s cathedral, nor water, like his marine paintings. The thoughts that crowd in on me when I look this paint have very little to do with the underlying triad, or with the named pigments or oils. They are thoughts about qualities: I feel viscid. My body is snared in the glues and emulsions, and I feel the pull of them on my thoughts. I want to wash my face.

-James Elkins.

“I want to wash my face.” Ha. Love it.

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Any telling of the revolving door’s story must begin with the name Bockhacker, though the length of the tale which follows it varies considerably. German door historians, or “Türherstellers” as they are reverently called, will, to a man, offer the following information as regards the revolving door-

• H. Bockhacker of Berlin was granted German patent 18349 on December 22, 1881 for “thür ohne luftzug” or “door without draft of air.”

And… well, that’s about as far as their interest in the subject goes.

Outside of Germany the tale is different. All the great door histories (like De Grote Geschiedenis van Deuren and Il Glory dei Portelli) mention Bockhacker, of course, ⊕ but then shift focus to one Theophilus Van Kannel, of Philadelphia, who in 1888 was granted US patent 387,571 for a “storm-door structure.” The true story of the revolving door, both known and forgotten, is more than anything the story of Van Kannel.

Some commonly known facts about Van Kannel and his revolving door include:

• It is perfectly noiseless.

• It effectually prevents the entrance of, snow, rain or dust.

• It cannot be blown open by the wind.

• It excludes street noise.

• Persons can pass both in and out at the same time.

• It prevents a direct path between the interior and exterior of a structure, making it useful as a partial airlock, minimizing heat-loss.

• It circumvents all that annoying “You first” “No, you first” stuff.

• The world’s first revolving door was installed at Rector’s, a restaurant in Manhattan’s Times Square, located on Broadway between west 43rd and 44th streets, in 1899.

Some largely forgotten facts about Van Kannel and his revolving door include:

• The original slogan for his door was “always closed.”

• It was marketed (in the Victorian manner) as helping to avoid “noxious effluvia” and “baleful miasmas.” Van Kannel himself authored a pamphlet which included the following: "It will save life, by preventing those deadly lung and throat diseases which are sure to overtake the unfortunate salesman, cashier, or clerk whose duty keeps him near the constantly opening front door."

• Van Kannel was an irritable sort. In response to the initial reaction to his door he had this to say: "Just like a turn-stile, so say nine out of ten persons who first see it. As well may we say a tea-kettle is like a locomotive boiler."

• Van Kannel originally intended his invention to be installed not only in public buildings but in private homes as well.

Which brings us to the crux of things-

That Van Kannel’s invention turned out to be useful, in the ways we consider it to be so today, is something of a happy accident. That’s not to say the inventor didn’t have a purpose in mind, he spent years perfecting his idea after all, but if you were to run down the list of its touted benefits you’d be forgiven for never coming upon the intended one.

More than anything the world owes the invention of the revolving door to revenge.

It seems that when Van Kennel was a boy, still in the care of his mother but just on the cusp of cultural manhood, he found the lingering rules of chivalry rather bothersome. In particular he refused to accept that he was expected to open the door for women and allow them to cross the threshold before him.

A silly sort of quirk to our minds, certainly, but it was taken seriously enough by his mother that after numerous warnings and threats she eventually felt compelled to take action. Van Kennel family histories have it that at some point in his twelfth year she administered a savage bare-bottomed spanking, during a salon in the family’s drawing room, in full and explicit view of 37 local mothers and daughters.

This very public shaming over what amounted to a matter of chivalry stuck with Van Kannel (no wonder- “Spankophilus” being a whisper that seemed to dog his steps for years afterward) and, far from teaching him a lesson, embittered him even further toward the “gentlemanly” behavior polite society required.

Had this been the only episode the world may have never had a revolving door to shuffle through. As it so happens, however, Theophilus Van Kennel married a woman who, though beautiful and slyly clever, had an odd and stubborn quirk of her own.

Young Abigail Van Kennel, it seems, refused to pass from one room of their apartments to another without the assistance of Theophilus. As a biographer later explained: She was willing to make many concessions to the new modern ways, but her mother had taught her to take matters of chivalry very seriously indeed. “Manners are the measure of a man!” she’d said “More so than his inseam, rest assured!”

Needless to say Theophilus was unaware of this outlook when he took Abigail as his wife, and was none to pleased at finding it out on their honeymoon. The result amounted to a battle of wills, fought atop a mountain, which to onlookers looked suspiciously like a mole-hill.

Theophilus had on one occasion tried to put his foot down on the matter, telling his wife in the morning, “all this opening doors twaddle just will not do! I can not be rushing around my own home to usher you from room to room! You are a grown woman and can locomote perfectly well on your own.” after which he stormed out of the house. He returned home in the evening only to find Abigail sitting defiantly just inside the bedroom door, right where he’d left her.

With the ugliness of Fate’s sense of humor now blindingly apparent, Van Kennel, incensed and stubborn as an ill mannered he-goat, devoted his full focus to finding some way to sidestep this rule of chivalry, or even, perhaps, create cause for a complete revision of the rules. 3 years and $9,837 later he found his answer in what we now call “the revolving door.”

You see, contrary to what you might think, the revolving door was not designed to keep out snow, or to minimize heat loss (though that it does both certainly lead to its success). Theophilus had something different in mind.

The revolving door was designed specifically so that whomever enters the door first is obliged to do all the pushing! This was Theophilus’ breakthrough. He saw immediately that with his design it would actually be most chivalrous for the man to proceed through the door first. He hoped that, without being reduced to stating it baldly, people would recognize this fact, and that when they did, presto! door-holding would be relegated to the stinking, festering, and massive compost heap of history.

He did not count on this eventuality of course, having learned by then that traditions could, and traditionally did, prove irrationally tenacious. His design addressed this, however, and he was satisfied by the private knowledge that with his door at least, the act of obliging women first passage would be, in point of fact, the act of obliging them to open the door for you!

His own home, as well as the home of his mother, were outfitted with the first 14 revolving doors ever assembled.

In the years that followed, after his invention had taken root, though the tiresome rules of chivalry showed no sign of adapting, the loophole he’d so cleverly engineered amused him to no end. He’d walk past buildings in which his doors had been installed and laugh. He thought of the women all over New York being ushered dutifully into revolving doors by browbeaten sons and husbands, all proclaiming with a twinkle in their eyes, “No, no, after you!”

And that my friends is the true, very nearly forgotten, secret history of the revolving door.

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Disclosure: Most factual bits of this post were gleaned from James Buzard’s piece Perceptual Revolution while all untruths are, I assure you, my own. I’ll leave it to you to sort out which is which. 

Hope You enjoyed.

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Note: This post is in a series of reworkings of old posts which date from before the redesign of The Nonist. The links have been updated, the text has been reworked, and the images are all new. I will be periodically adding these reworkings into the flow of new content in an effort to eventually remove all the old pages from circulation.

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As I’ve mentioned here previously, one day I logged onto the site and found that I was, for no particular reason, vividly aware of its shortcomings. In my estimation, as pleasant as the old Nonist was in some ways, it was also victimized by certain design affectations. The lowercase body-copy, as one example, which did not go un-derided.

What might have been less apparent were the limitations which the tight formatting actually placed on content. I was constantly tailoring posts to better fit the fascistic design. It was tiresome and I decided to start over, from scratch, with an eye toward both simplicity and a greater range of freedom in terms of actual content.

These goals might make it sound as though the design I finally arrived at came naturally. I assure you it did not. Which brings me to the reason everything took so long-

Excuses. Excuses.

Letterpress, linotype, woodtype, woodblock, 19th century broadsides complete with the attendant ornament, borders, brass rules, dashes, and embellishments. I’ve been inspired by these for a long while. I’ve got hundreds of examples cramming folders on my machine. I’ve got books piled on the floor. I can look at them endlessly. When It became apparent I’d be redesigning I figured it would be a great chance to delve into the aesthetic.

I created a broadside-inspired site⊕ but something wasn’t quite right. It was awkward somehow and I wasn’t happy with it. I began futzing, noodling and re-jiggering. It took me entirely too long to realize what the problem really was. And it was simple. My goals and my inspiration were at odds. What I’d come up with was, though true to my inspiration, more affected, more bloated, and more constraining than what came before. Needless to say I was annoyed.

I decided to make a long overdue purchase, Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, to try and help myself refocus. (If there was one thing I was sure that I wanted it was clear, legible, and stylistically correct text.) It’s a fascinating book which were I worth my salt as a designer I’d have read long ago. Almost immediately I came across a sentiment expressed by Bringhurst which was relevant to the problem at hand when he called the 19th century a “dark an inflationary age in typography and type design.⊕

Just an offhand opinion, I know, but annoyed and behind schedule as I was it seemed like a omen too obvious to ignore. I decided to do the hardest thing I can think of, as a designer, and cast aside as many of my own crutches and old mainstays as possible. I decided to abandon any aspirations of “coolness” and focus instead on attempting elegance. I’m not certain whether I ultimately succeeded in this but I’ll explain my reasoning and let you be the judge.

The gut and its reasons.

The “more is more” philosophy seems to be the overriding reality in web design. 85% of the sites out there are so crammed full of columns, thumbnails, text links, rollovers, nav-bars, banner ads, and animations that the act of bringing your eyes down a page has become a form of strenuous exercise.⊕

Many sites have little choice but to jam-pack every inch of screen real-estate. News portals and online merchants for example. They have a vast amount of data to dole out each day, the location of every bit of which needs to be immediately apparent. I don’t think the same can said for a huge swath of the internet and this approach by no means benefits all types of content.

It seems to me this over-use of the “more is more” aesthetic creates a sort of self-fullfilling prophesy in terms of internet reading habits and attention span. We are told time and again that people do not read things on the internet, they skim. We are told we, as content providers, have 3 seconds to clearly define our identity and purpose to a reader before they click away. Designers react accordingly and front load their entire site into a single browser window. So is it any wonder with all the clutter that people scan and scram? It’s like a defense reaction.

With this redesign I wanted to provide a counterpoint. As such the most important questions I had to ask myself were: How do people use the site? What would be the ideal user experience? And how do I present the content in a way which most encourages that ideal experience?

I’m not at all certain of the answer to that first question but I like to think people come here not only to see what’s on the other end of my links but to read what I’ve written and view what’s on display as well. That’s how I approach the content in any case. Further I have to assume that most visitors are interested in what is newly posted and generally ignore all the rest. It’s likely true for all blogs, new content is primary and archives, category trees, offshoots, ads, blogrolls, recent comments, shout boxes, etc, are secondary, at best.

In my mind the ideal experience would be entering a space where reading is easy on the eyes and the focus is undiluted, a space in which you could stretch out as it were, take off your coat, and stay a while. The ideal environment would then be one which emphasizes the content and puts aside the elements which readers would otherwise have to make an effort to ignore. Better that any effort is expended on what is secondary rather than on what is primary. The reading itself should be made effortless.

So what’s the best way to encourage this ideal experience which I’d like The Nonist to offer?

Ch-ch-ch-changes.

Obviously the main thrust of this redesign was simplicity but philosophically there was a shift as well which informed many of my choices. Against every piece of advice ever offered on web design I decided to stop tailoring the site toward the people who have never been here. Sounds silly but hear me out.

Many design choices are made with the people who don’t visit your site in mind. After all that’s exactly what all the “grab their attention in 3 seconds” stuff is really about. That’s also what design novelty and visual “gee-whiz” are about. Impressing potential first-time visitors. At some point it dawned on me that these are not the people I need to concern myself with. It’s my existing readership who deserve special attention. The non-functional bells and whistles of a site become invisible to return visitors after a while anyway, so why not do everyone a service and just remove it all?

People return to a site on the strength of its content and if a visitor can not take the time to discover what that content actually is without a multitude of visual cues and shiny things, then, well… In all likelihood they won’t have the patience to read my posts anyway. So if a visitor doesn’t see what they want to see in 3 seconds, and clicks away without bothering to read anything, then that’s o.k. with me. They’ve saved me some bandwidth. And hell, they’re not even reading this right now, which means there is no harm done in saying so.

So, beloved and patient readership, let’s consider the old site and run down the changes-

Looking at the old Nonist now I must say it’s awfully busy. This is in part because of the side bar. As you scroll down the page to read a post you must make an effort ignore the entire left side of the screen. As I said earlier everything contained in that sidebar, from a user standpoint, is secondary. How many times do you guys need to see the special-projects thumbnails or the blogroll? A hundred? A thousand? You already know what’s there. So I removed it.

The tight formatting of the main content created discrete blocks. In terms of the site as a whole it achieved a certain balance but at the expense of readability. The lower-case formatting of the text⊕ kept these blocks heterogeneous but again at the expense of readability, to say nothing of grammatical precision. To remedy this I reformatted the text to give it, and your eyes, plenty of room to breathe. As a designer large type tends to illicit a sort of pavlovian cringe, but I also changed the fonts and enlarged the text somewhat in an effort at greater clarity.

Then there is the matter of the header. I really liked the old rotating headers. I think they said something about the attitude here and, well, they were pretty. But they were pretty huge as well. And again, how many times do return visitors need to see a logo that takes up half the screen? You know damned well where you are, wouldn’t a single line of simple text do just as well?

The nav-bar and all relevant content from the side-bar ⊕ have been folded into the hidden drop-down menu. For new readers and those of you looking for something specific the whole of the site is still just a click or three away. Otherwise deeper navigation is mercifully hidden away from the new content allowing you to read in peace.

I have not ported the old posts over to the new design. Bad form I know. It pains me but the archive still contains all the old posts formatted as they were originally created. The set-up is different enough that trying to move them all over would have been simply too much of a pain in the ass. As it stands now the old site still exists in paralell the the new one. I plan to repost my favorite content from the old site here periodically and will eventually remove the leftovers all together. For the time being any incoming links are safe, and cluttered reminders of the past will simply have to co-exist with the present, tacky though that may be.

Lastly, what would theoretically be the biggest change in this Nonist version 3.0, is the change in membership. I say theoretically because most of you will likely not even notice the change. Up until now the site has been set up to allow members to post content. In that only a very small handful of the over 200 members ever did (and of them even a smaller percentage did so on a regular basis) I’ve decided to remove this functionality and along with it the facade of the editorial “we.” The Nonist is now officially what it has always been in practice anyhow, my own personal site. I apologize to those of you who took the time to register but I’ll be removing all member accounts shortly. A membership would serve little purpose now.

And so that, as they say, is that. This is the new Nonist, an attempt at elegance in form and readability in function. As stated I’m not yet certain whether I’ve succeeded in these attempts, but for better or worse it’s done. We hear over and over that content is king. This new site is set up such that it will sink or swim on its content alone. Its a self-imposed challenge for me to craft some fine quality goodies because if I don’t there won’t be much else to look at.

I’m sure there will be hiccups and necessary tweaks (as such I encourage you all to let me know if you encounter problems). There are also a couple sections I’m still planning on launching (a gallery, a forum, a store, etc) but truth be told I’m sick of looking at code. So we’ll just take it all as it comes. Now all that remains is to see if I can remember how to blog. Here’s hoping. 

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From the back of the Advertisement originally written in a fine hand:

Strangely all my searching for further information on “Dr. Peppy’s Symmetrical Circus” have come up empty. None of the old timers on my uncles side of the family remembers anything about the circus and none of his children’s children remember ever hearing it spoken of. It’s almost as though the Circus never existed! lucky we have this record otherwise it might have been forgotten forever ay?

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Another after effect of mega-fires like London’s was Fire Insurance, and it was these Insurance companies that actually formed the first private fire brigades to protect their client’s properties. The naming of streets in London at this point was haphazard at best, and private homes were not numbered, so as a means for the Insurance Brigades to distinguish their properties, each company adopted a distinctive emblem, and began attaching it, in the form of brightly colored metal plates, to the sides of their policy holder’s buildings. These were called “Fire Marks” and their use was widespread for about two hundred and fifty years all across Europe, in Russia, and eventually the U.S.

Practical and utilitarian as they were, they also happened to be pretty damned gorgeous. See below for a sampling and links to some sites where you can see more.

Most of the marks pictured above originated at Roy Addis’Firemarks.co.uk and Dmitry Nikulin’s Old Russian Fire marks pages. Both of which are chock full of beautiful pieces. If you have any interest in Fire marks I’d recommend these sites as your first stops. Believe me when I say what I’ve shown here is only the tip of the iceberg. All but the last of the extra-large images are taken from Clarence P. Hornung’s Treasury of American Design (incredible book!) published in 1950.

A couple of other destinations to see more are: Vicasa, Firemarks.net, Hammerdown, Erie Insurance, and Iicfiremark.

To read more in depth info on their history I recommend The Fire Mark Circle’s history pages. Also American Fire Marks, A Good Story.

Hope you enjoyed.

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