Counterpoint went to more expense and trouble on the production of this book than I expected, beginning with color throughout, which was a little surprising as this is a book intended for the trade and not a museum catalogue or art book per se. The book has nice chocolate-colored boards and a red and yellow headband. The 7¼ x 10 in. trim size makes it a little bigger than a standard trade book (often 5½ x 8½ or 6 x 9) but not so big as books intended mainly for the art market (which are often 9 x 12 or larger).

The front cover and spine are stamped with gold stamping (a little washed out here by my flash).

There are colored ensheets front and back. The image is a pair of Japanese screens (one shown above the other one) from the period covered in the book. Together these happen to fit the dimensions of the book perfectly, and they represent some of the best geographical knowledge of the time.

The book is well bound with sewn bindings so that it lies flat when opened.

All things considered, the art is nicely produced on 128 gsm matte paper with good opacity.

All in all, a nice piece of work, and for now attractively priced at $35.

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Living in the material world

I made this little sign for my office. I thought it might come in handy.

This marker goes with it:

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Errorist alert

As Presidents Day approaches, it is worth recalling one of our nation’s finest moments.

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The Gettysburg PowerPoint

Remember the buzz about Google Plus when it launched? It was a nice bump while it lasted. But I think it’s safe to say it hasn’t sustained itself. My #OccupyXmas piece over at Salon.com has had 504 Facebook likes since it went up a day and a half ago. How many Google +1s has it had? 18 — a little over 3 percent as many. I’d say the ball is in Google’s court. They’d better come up with a new feature, or this game is over.

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Google Plus versus Facebook: Where things stand today

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Give the headline writer a raise

 1616: The World in Motion

More about:

• Thomas Christensen
• 978-1-58243-774-3
• Counterpoint LLC

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Stunning, excellent, fabulous

In some respects this seems the oddest angle to take on Galileo and his work. It is true he never saw himself as undermining religion. His case was more an expression of internal politics within the church itself than any kind of assault on it. Still, the church — let’s just say it — came down squarely on the wrong side of this one, and that reflects badly on it. Nonetheless, the argument continues to this day, as this review of a recent biography indicates.

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Seeking the man behind science’s champion

I was thinking the other day about how my color preferences have changed over time, and that got me looking at a few pop psychology websites about color preferences.

The basic problem with these sites is that there are particular hues and then there are their concepts. So if a site asks you to rank your preferences by clicking on color swatches, you might say, “I like red, but I don’t like that red. Whereas if you are asked to quickly name your favorite color without thinking about it and you name red, you are most likely thinking of the concept of redness rather than of a particular hue.

Of course the notion of a favorite color is ultimately absurd. Red would be meaningless without all of the other colors to juxtapose with it. From the designer’s point of view, colors take meaning from how they are used in relation to other elements.

But as a sort of amusing parlor game it can be interesting to wonder about why one’s preferences change. As a child if you asked my favorite color I would have said blue — that’s the color I usually picked when choosing board game tokens, for example. As a young adult I would probably have given you a lecture about color philosophy and how existence precedes essence and why that is relevant to de Saussurian linguistics, but if (quite justifiably) hit over the head and forced to pick I would have said yellow. Now I find myself increasingly drawn to green, and when I go clothes shopping I often wish there were more greens offered (there are few).

I noticed that there is a great deal of disagreement on the various sites about what your color preferences “mean.” According to one representative site, a preference for blue reflects a conservative, reliable, sincere, trusting, and trustworthy personality; a preference for yellow a cheerful, fun, creative, and analytical bent; and a predilection for green a practical, down-to-earth, stable, balanced, compassionate, and calm nature. Sure.

A few years ago I read a couple of erudite books on color in art by John Gage, former head of the Department of History of Art at Cambridge University. Gage looked at color from a variety of different disciplines. I found his surveys interesting, but I find I have retained little of what I read in his books. It’s probably because I favor the wrong colors.

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Color psychology

North American Turkey, ca. 1612, by Mansur. Victoria and Albert Museum, IM 135-1921.

In honor of Thanksgiving, here’s a painting of an American turkeycock by the great Mughal painter Mansur (from my forthcoming book 1616: The World in Motion). Mansur was the greatest Mughal painter of natural history subjects.

It was an area in which the Mughal emperor, Jahangir, was deeply interested. A world in motion brought to his court many strange and curious creatures, which he invariably directed his painters to document. In 1612, when a large number of birds and animals were brought to his court from Goa, he wrote, “As these animals appeared to me to be very strange, I … ordered that painters should draw them in the Jahangirnama [his reign journal], so that the amazement that arose from hearing of them might be increased.”

Among the birds brought from Goa was this American turkey painted by Mansur. Like Abul Hasan (who painted the cover image of my book), Mansur ranked high in Jahangir’s esteem, and the ruler gave him the title of Nadir-ul-asr, “Unique of the Age.” “In the art of drawing,” he said, Mansur “is unique in his generation.” He ranked him together with Abul Hasan, saying, “In the time of my father’s reign and my own, these two had no third.”

Jahangir was proud of such creatures in his menagerie as flying mice, tailless monkeys, zebras, yaks, cheetahs, West Asian goats, Himalayan pheasants, dodos, ducks, and partridges. He had many of the foreign animals bred in captivity. When he received a strange animal he typically would record a verbal description of it before having its likeness painted. In 1616 he was presented with an Abyssinian elephant, noting that “Its ears are larger than the elephants of this place, and its trunk and tail are longer.” His concern for accuracy and completeness of documentation led to a naturalistic approach to paintings of natural history, of which Mansur was the foremost proponent.

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Turkey Day

Dear Tom,

On this date (the Saturday after Thanksgiving) back in 2010 C and I had recently returned from Europe. We had Thanksgiving with E, but C2 didn’t call or respond to calls, and we were worried about her. I had a nasty cold. C had first felt sick on the train from Innsbruck to Zurich.

I was working on the Kepler section of 1616. How’s that book looking?

It’s looking pretty good, thank me very much!

I had forgot about futureme.org, which lets you send messages to yourself in the future. How strange to get this message from myself from almost a year ago.

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Mailbag: Past Me

This map, from arstechnica, shows the distribution of genes of a protohuman species, Denisova hominins, among modern humans. The blue area in Europe, West Asia, and North Africa represent a low level of distribution of Denisovan genes, presumably because interbreeding in these areas was instead with Neanderthals. The Denisovan genes are most prevalent in New Zealand, but also in Australia, Southeast Asia, and southern China.

But what is striking about this map to me is something else: there is a strong distribution of Denisovan genes in northern South America. While there could be other explanations for this, this map seems pretty clearly to be indicating, in my opinion, that humans traveled directly across the Pacific to South America, and not across the Siberia-Alaska land bridge as used to be the conventional wisdom. It is possible that migration occurred that way too, but as far as this Denisovan-affected population is concerned, it sure looks like they just lit out straight across the Pacific.

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Denisovan migration across the Pacific

The short video trailer:

Carol says the short trailer overemphasizes Asia, which is a fair criticism, but I’ve about hit my limit for now on video work! I thought the long video trailer was just probably too long for most people, but early listeners Anne and Ellen had the following reactions: Ellen says “I like the long trailer better! I think it has a better sense of the book and is more engaging. But I think the audio track needs some work — the music’s a little loud and your voice a little quiet in comparison. I like the script and images you chose though.” And Anne says of the long version “I enjoy the narration and all the fabulous graphics … the music is well selected too. I wonder though-if the sound track could have less volume so the voice over is clearer to listen to. I preferred it in areas where the music was lower. It does run a little long but is very interesting.”

So on the basis of that feedback I’ve turned down the volume on the music (I hope by the right amount), uploaded the long trailer to YouTube, and embedded it here:

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1616 video trailers

• Marilyn Monroe : As refuge from the storm
• The Shakespeare Shakedown : Simon Schama on Roland Emmerich’s “inadvertently comic” film
• Hollywood disses the bard : James Shapiro: “Why anyone is drawn to de Vere’s cause is the real mystery”
• How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare : The evidence is overwhelming

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Links for Friday, Oct. 21

These days I’m pretty casual about my web presence, but a few years ago I gave some thought to maximizing the impact of blog posts. I ended up scheduling most of my posts for 5:00 am Pacific time. My strongest geographical regions were the U.S. east and west coasts, and that would be 8:00 Eastern time. A lot of people check their feeds in the morning, and it is incontrovertible that most people do the bulk of their browsing at work, little as employers like hearing this (so I mainly post on weekdays).

A new study purporting to track people’s affective states through the day brings new information to this topic. Researchers tracked the relative use of positive and negative words in tweets at different times of the days throughout the week. They found that negative terms predominated early in the morning and mid-to-late afternoon, while positive terms were most common from 6:00 to 9:00 am and in the late evening. The pattern held even on weekends, when most people aren’t going off to work.

The methodology can be questioned. Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert points out that “if you counted the good and bad words people said during intercourse, you’d mistakenly conclude they were having an awful time.”

Supposing the results are valid, what are the implications for people posting to the web? Should you make negative posts when people are most negative and positive posts when they are most positive? Or should you always try to post when people are positive and will presumably be most receptive to what you are saying? Or does this not matter at all, and what you should really be looking at is the volume of traffic — my guess is that while people might be feeling positive around 10:00 pm there are probably significantly fewer of them online at that time than in the morning.

Well, I’m moving my post time forward an hour, from 5:00 am to 6:00 am. I hope you’re happy.

***

Informational graphic via the New York Times

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What is the best time of day to post to a blog?

• A look at the truthiness of presidential candidates : Whose pants are on fire? The answer won’t surprise anyone.
• A Bill of Rights for writers : Let’s rethink that e-book split

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Links for Friday, September 30

I recently lamented my belated discovery that “alt” text was not being displayed on mouseover of my images.

The estimable Peecay of Bibliodyssey has replied by e-mail with a description of his system:

I try to abide by the pure description (for a blind person, is how I understood it) to approximate an image with alt tag (eg. “woodcut of cat in colour from Japan, 16th cent.”)

But then I try to put something specific to the book or author or illustrator in as the title tag.

I’ve always worked under the assumption that – when including captions as well, below the image – I was priming those images as best they could be to be open to image search engines.

What I hear from the “SEO” types is that alt tags seem to help with search engines but title tags less so. That’s hearsay, really, and I haven’t tested it.

According to SearchEngine Journal, it is indeed important to keep the various tags different. Ann Smarty, speaking of the alt and title tags, says, “include your main keywords in both of them but keep them different. Keyword stuffing in Alt text and Title is still keyword stuffing.”

Wily Michael Gray has a helpful guide to optimizing images for search engines.

All good advice. But kind a lot of work to provide three different kinds of unique nonrepetitive text for all your images.

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More on the “alt” tag

evan s. connell

“Outstanding book. Tom Christensen’s scholarship is meticulous. The reproductions are beautiful. 1616 is a treasure.” — Evan S. Connell, Jr.

I got this nice blurb from Evan S. Connell (and to me that’s not boring at all). It’s great to get recognitions from a distinguished author not just of fiction (Mr, Bridge, Mrs. Bridge, etc.) but also of histories (Son of the Morning Star,etc.). Among his other honors, Evan was nominated for a Lifetime Achievement Man Booker Award.

I was a little anxious about blurbs for this book. I’ve been in museum publishing for so long that my literary rolodex had got pretty stale. But the blurb process has actually gone pretty well. I’m expecting one or two more to come in (I probably overdid it and should have left some for next time).

Right now the blurbs are looking something like this:

“Shakespeare may have died in 1616 (as incidentally did Cervantes—on the same date!) — but here we have Love’s Labour Found. A brimmingly generous intellectual feast, lavishly curated by Mr. Christensen — on every page a fresh marvel — the catalog, as it were, of a show just asking to be mounted, and the Show of the Year at that.” (Lawrence Weschler, Pulitzer Prize ­Finalist for General Nonfiction for Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder)

“With its stories of restless spirits and restless feet and its truly amazing images from Japan to Persia to Rome, this book will surprise and delight every reader and provide new insights into an interactive early modern world.” (John E. Wills, Jr., author, 1688: A Global History)

“Outstanding book. Tom Christensen’s scholarship is meticulous. The reproductions are beautiful. 1616 is a treasure.” (Evan S. Connell, Man Booker International Prize Nominee for Lifetime Achievement, author, Lost in Uttar Pradesh)

“With a masterful command of facts and data, Christensen shows how separate threads affected one another, transformed discourse, and contributed to the development of a truly global culture fully four centuries ago.” (Emily Sano, director emeritus, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco)

“Unforgettable characters and stories that illuminate many of today’s global aches and joys.” (Peter Laufer, James Wallace Chair in Journalism at the University of Oregon, and author, The Dangerous World of Butterflies)

“A brilliant creative examination and interpretation of the developed world’s recent history:  east, middle, and west. Christensen documents the main civilizations of East Asia, South Asia, the Near East, and Western Europe and the significant colonial civilization in Central and South America. A treasure of plates of art and maps alone.” (Gary Snyder, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Turtle Island)

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Another boring blurb post

The Danish Poet is a animated short film written, directed, and animated by Torill Kove. It is narrated by Liv Ullmann. Via Jason del Arroz.

Liv Ullman

Torill Kove

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The Danish Poet

“With its stories of restless spirits and restless feet and its truly amazing images from Japan to Persia to Rome, this book will surprise and delight every reader and provide new insights into an interactive early modern world.” – John E. Wills, Jr., author, 1688: A Global History

I received this lovely blurb for 1616: The World in Motion from the distinguished historian John E. Wills, Jr. (University of Southern California). Wills wrote a book called 1688: A Global History, which is perhaps the closest in spirit to mine. In fact, once I remembered having read reviews of that book it sort of hung over me while I was doing mine, and I scrupulously avoided looking at it to make sure my approach wouldn’t be influenced by it. (Now that I’m done and I’ve had a look I’m relieved to say that the books turned out to not that much alike.)

I don’t know Prof. Wills, and I approached him cold, and not without a bit of nervousness. Professional historians are often condescending to amateur historians like me. But Prof. Will was generous and gracious, and I am immensely thankful to him.

John E. Wills’s masterful history ushers us into the worlds of 1688, from the suicidal exaltation of Russian Old Believers to the ravishing voice of the haiku poet Bash?. Witness the splendor of the Chinese imperial court as the Kangxi emperor publicly mourns the death of his grandmother and shrewdly consolidates his power. Join the great caravans of Muslims on their annual pilgrimage from Damascus and Cairo to Mecca. Walk the pungent streets of Amsterdam and enter the Rasp House, where vagrants, beggars, and petty criminals labored to produce powdered brazilwood for the dyeworks. Through these stories and many others, Wills paints a detailed picture of how the global connections of power, money, and belief were beginning to lend the world its modern form. “A vivid picture of life in 1688…filled with terrifying violence, frightening diseases…comfortingly familiar human kindnesses…and the intellectual achievements of Leibniz, Locke, and Newton.”–Publishers Weekly

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John E. Wills on 1616

With a couple of forthcoming books and other projects in the works, I’m sometimes asked how I manage to do this considering I have a day job, and a long commute to boot. So now — drumroll — I’m finally going to reveal my secret (but you might not like it).

I don’t watch much television. I’ve never seen American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, Jersey Shore, Mad Men, The Sopranos, Real Housewives of Wherever, Two and a Half Men, Lost, or a lot of other popular shows.

In her recent Sunset magazine article “Time Lost and Found,” Anne Lamott writes, “Time is not free—that’s why it’s so precious and worth fighting for…. Fight tooth and nail to find time, to make it. It is our true wealth, this moment, this hour, this day.”

One interesting thing about people is how they use their time. If watching television or playing computer games fulfills your needs, then great, go for it. But if you’re compelled to engage in some kind of creative expression, then you have to make time for it. And that is probably going to mean giving something up.

It’s your choice.

*

Image of a television left out in the rain from striatic’s photostream.

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Productivity secret