A New Horror-Themed Tarot Deck Draws on a Century’s Worth of Scary Movies, Comics & Magazines

in Comics/Cartoons, Design, Film | October 23rd, 2023

Hal­loween looms.

Have we got a tarot deck for you!

Todd Alcott, the mad sci­en­tist respon­si­ble for Open Culture’s favorite mid­cen­tu­ry graph­ic mashups, infus­es his Hor­ror Tarot with a century’s worth of hair-rais­ing, spine-tin­gling imagery.

The artist admires the genre’s capac­i­ty for con­vey­ing sub­ver­sive mes­sages, explain­ing that “hor­ror is where we think about the unthink­able and rev­el in the things that are bad for us:”

Dra­ma can exalt the finest in human­i­ty, but hor­ror shows us who we real­ly are. From The Golem to Franken­stein to The Shin­ing to The Silence of the Lambs, hor­ror uses metaphor to explore the dark­est and most unfor­giv­able aspects of human nature.

As he did with his Pulp Tarot deck, Alcott put in hun­dreds of research hours, study­ing movie posters, pulp mag­a­zines, fan mags, paper­back books, and clas­sic comics to get a feel for peri­od design trends and exe­cu­tion:

I love see­ing the dif­fer­ent devel­op­ments in print­ing, from etch­ing to lith­o­g­ra­phy to silkscreens to off­set print­ing. All those dif­fer­ent meth­ods of cre­at­ing images, all ridicu­lous­ly com­pli­cat­ed back then, are now tak­en care of eas­i­ly with a few mouse clicks. In my own per­verse way, I want to bring those days back. I want to see the flaws in the process, I want to see the lim­i­ta­tions of repro­duc­tion, and, most of all, I want to be able to feel the paper the images are print­ed on.

The cards of the Major Arcana are inspired by film posters span­ning the silent era to the present day. Each card has close ties to Hor­ror Tarot Stu­dios, a fic­tion­al pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny that pur­ports to have been in busi­ness since the dawn of the motion pic­ture.

The Jus­tice card ref­er­ences mar­ket­ing tac­tics for grit­ty 70s dri­ve-in sta­ples like Last House on the Left and I Spit on Your Grave. The deck’s instruc­tion book­let con­tains a few anec­dotes about the pro­duc­tion of these movies, a help­ful bit of con­text for those who might have missed (or skipped) that fer­tile era of women’s revenge pic­tures:

I want­ed the Hor­ror Tarot Jus­tice to be some­one the read­er can root for, even if they’re hor­ri­fied by what Jus­tice promis­es: not death, but “what you deserve.”

Famous Mon­sters of Film­land, a prime pre-inter­net resource for hor­ror fans, was Alcott’s jump­ing off place for the Minor Arcana’s Suit of Wands.

You may have no knowl­edge of that sem­i­nal pub­li­ca­tion, but you’d prob­a­bly rec­og­nize some of the cov­er art­work by painter Basil Gogos, fea­tur­ing such MVPs as Frankenstein’s mon­ster, the Crea­ture from the Black Lagoon, the Phan­tom of the Opera and Drac­u­la. Alcott says that many of Gogos’ icon­ic mon­ster por­traits are more deeply ingrained in the pub­lic mem­o­ry than the art the stu­dios chose to pro­mote their movies:


…for the Suit of Wands I want­ed to cre­ate a series of por­traits done in his style, fea­tur­ing char­ac­ters he nev­er got around to paint­ing. The Four of Wands is a card about home­com­ing and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, and I had the idea to paint Fred­er­ick March’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as two sep­a­rate men, meet­ing for the first time in a back alley in Vic­to­ri­an Lon­don. 

A home­com­ing does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly require a phys­i­cal return to a phys­i­cal home — it can be com­plete­ly inter­nal. I want­ed to show Dr. Jekyll com­ing to terms with his inner strug­gle.

The Suit of Swords recre­ates the look of anoth­er indeli­ble hor­ror trope — the EC comics of the 1950s:

These comics were so lurid and per­verse that they actu­al­ly sparked a con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tion, which end­ed up putting them out of busi­ness. Again, before the inter­net, this is what hor­ror fans had avail­able to them, and comics pub­lish­ers had to keep push­ing the lim­its of what was accept­able in order to stay ahead of the com­pe­ti­tion. 

For the Five of Swords, I par­o­died and gen­der-swapped the infa­mous cov­er of Crime Sus­pen­Sto­ries #22. The Five of Swords is a card about being a bad win­ner, about gloat­ing at your oppo­nen­t’s defeat, about overkill. I fig­ured that a house­wife mur­der­ing her hus­band and then behead­ing him with a sword count­ed as overkill.

Todd Alcott’s Hor­ror Tarot is avail­able here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Watch the Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Film, The Golem, with a Sound­track by The Pix­ies’ Black Fran­cis

Behold the Sola-Bus­ca Tarot Deck, the Ear­li­est Com­plete Set of Tarot Cards (1490)

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Carl Jung on the Power of Tarot Cards: They Provide Doorways to the Unconscious & Perhaps a Way to Predict the Future

in Art, Design, Psychology | October 5th, 2023

It is gen­er­al­ly accept­ed that the stan­dard deck of play­ing cards we use for every­thing from three-card monte to high-stakes Vegas pok­er evolved from the Tarot. “Like our mod­ern cards,” writes Sal­lie Nichols, “the Tarot deck has four suits with ten ‘pip’ or num­bered cards in each…. In the Tarot deck, each suit has four ‘court’ cards: King, Queen, Jack, and Knight.” The lat­ter fig­ure has “mys­te­ri­ous­ly dis­ap­peared from today’s play­ing cards,” though exam­ples of Knight play­ing cards exist in the fos­sil record. The mod­ern Jack is a sur­vival of the Page cards in the Tarot. (See exam­ples of Tarot court cards here from the 1910 Rid­er-Waite deck.) The sim­i­lar­i­ties between the two types of decks are sig­nif­i­cant, yet no one but adepts seems to con­sid­er using their Gin Rum­my cards to tell the future.

The emi­nent psy­chi­a­trist Carl Jung, how­ev­er, might have done so.

As Mary K. Greer explains, in a 1933 lec­ture Jung went on at length about his views on the Tarot, not­ing the late Medieval cards are “real­ly the ori­gin of our pack of cards, in which the red and the black sym­bol­ize the oppo­sites, and the divi­sion of the four—clubs, spades, dia­monds, and hearts—also belongs to the indi­vid­ual sym­bol­ism.

They are psy­cho­log­i­cal images, sym­bols with which one plays, as the uncon­scious seems to play with its con­tents.” The cards, said Jung, “com­bine in cer­tain ways, and the dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions cor­re­spond to the play­ful devel­op­ment of mankind.” This, too, is how Tarot works—with the added dimen­sion of “sym­bols, or pic­tures of sym­bol­i­cal sit­u­a­tions.” The images—the hanged man, the tow­er, the sun—“are sort of arche­typ­al ideas, of a dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed nature.”

Thus far, Jung has­n’t said any­thing many ortho­dox Jun­gian psy­chol­o­gists would find dis­agree­able, but he goes even fur­ther and claims that, indeed, “we can pre­dict the future, when we know how the present moment evolved from the past.” He called for “an intu­itive method that has the pur­pose of under­stand­ing the flow of life, pos­si­bly even pre­dict­ing future events, at all events lend­ing itself to the read­ing of the con­di­tions of the present moment.” He com­pared this process to the Chi­nese I Ching, and oth­er such prac­tices. As ana­lyst Marie-Louise von Franz recounts in her book Psy­che and Mat­ter:

Jung sug­gest­ed… hav­ing peo­ple engage in a div­ina­to­ry pro­ce­dure: throw­ing the I Ching, lay­ing the Tarot cards, con­sult­ing the Mex­i­can div­ina­tion cal­en­dar, hav­ing a tran­sit horo­scope or a geo­met­ric read­ing done.

Con­tent seemed to mat­ter much less than form. Invok­ing the Swe­den­bor­gian doc­trine of cor­re­spon­dences, Jung notes in his lec­ture, “man always felt the need of find­ing an access through the uncon­scious to the mean­ing of an actu­al con­di­tion, because there is a sort of cor­re­spon­dence or a like­ness between the pre­vail­ing con­di­tion and the con­di­tion of the col­lec­tive uncon­scious.”

What he aimed at through the use of div­ina­tion was to accel­er­ate the process of “indi­vid­u­a­tion,” the move toward whole­ness and integri­ty, by means of play­ful com­bi­na­tions of arche­types. As anoth­er mys­ti­cal psy­chol­o­gist, Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, puts it, “the Tarot will teach you how to cre­ate a soul.” Jung per­ceived the Tarot, notes the blog Fae­na Aleph, “as an alchem­i­cal game,” which in his words, attempts “the union of oppo­sites.” Like the I Ching, it “presents a rhythm of neg­a­tive and pos­i­tive, loss and gain, dark and light.”

Much lat­er in 1960, a year before his death, Jung seemed less san­guine about Tarot and the occult, or at least down­played their mys­ti­cal, div­ina­to­ry pow­er for lan­guage more suit­ed to the lab­o­ra­to­ry, right down to the usu­al com­plaints about staffing and fund­ing. As he wrote in a let­ter about his attempts to use these meth­ods:

Under cer­tain con­di­tions it is pos­si­ble to exper­i­ment with arche­types, as my ‘astro­log­i­cal exper­i­ment’ has shown. As a mat­ter of fact we had begun such exper­i­ments at the C. G. Jung Insti­tute in Zurich, using the his­tor­i­cal­ly known intu­itive, i.e., syn­chro­nis­tic meth­ods (astrol­o­gy, geo­man­cy, Tarot cards, and the I Ching). But we had too few co-work­ers and too lit­tle means, so we could not go on and had to stop.

Lat­er inter­preters of Jung doubt­ed that his exper­i­ments with div­ina­tion as an ana­lyt­i­cal tech­nique would pass peer review. “To do more than ‘preach to the con­vert­ed,’” wrote the authors of a 1998 arti­cle pub­lished in the Jour­nal of Para­psy­chol­o­gy, “this exper­i­ment or any oth­er must be done with suf­fi­cient rig­or that the larg­er sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty would be sat­is­fied with all aspects of the data tak­ing, analy­sis of the data, and so forth.” Or, one could sim­ply use Jun­gian meth­ods to read the Tarot, the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty be damned.

As in Jung’s many oth­er cre­ative reap­pro­pri­a­tions of myth­i­cal, alchem­i­cal, and reli­gious sym­bol­ism, his inter­pre­ta­tion of the Tarot inspired those with mys­ti­cal lean­ings to under­take their own Jun­gian inves­ti­ga­tions into para­psy­chol­o­gy and the occult. Inspired by Jung’s ver­bal descrip­tions of the Tarot’s major arcana, artist and mys­tic Robert Wang has cre­at­ed a Jun­gian Tarot deck, and an accom­pa­ny­ing tril­o­gy of books, The Jun­gian Tarot and its Arche­typ­al Imagery, Tarot Psy­chol­o­gy, and Per­fect Tarot Div­ina­tion.

You can see images of each of Wang’s cards here. His books pur­port to be exhaus­tive stud­ies of Jung’s Tarot the­o­ry and prac­tice, writ­ten in con­sul­ta­tion with Jung schol­ars in New York and Zurich. Sal­lie Nichols’ Jung and Tarot: An Arche­typ­al Jour­ney is less volu­mi­nous and innovative—using the tra­di­tion­al, Pamela Cole­man-Smith-illus­trat­ed, Rid­er-Waite deck rather than an updat­ed orig­i­nal ver­sion. But for those will­ing to grant a rela­tion­ship between sys­tems of sym­bols and a col­lec­tive uncon­scious, her book may pro­vide some pen­e­trat­ing insights, if not a recipe for pre­dict­ing the future.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Artis­tic & Mys­ti­cal World of Tarot: See Decks by Sal­vador Dalí, Aleis­ter Crow­ley, H.R. Giger & More

Carl Jung Offers an Intro­duc­tion to His Psy­cho­log­i­cal Thought in a 3‑Hour Inter­view (1957)

The Vision­ary Mys­ti­cal Art of Carl Jung: See Illus­trat­ed Pages from The Red Book

How Carl Jung Inspired the Cre­ation of Alco­holics Anony­mous

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Behold the Jacobean Traveling Library: The 17th Century Forerunner to the Kindle

in Books, Design | September 27th, 2023

Image cour­tesy of the Uni­ver­si­ty at Leeds

In the strik­ing image above, you can see an ear­ly exper­i­ment in mak­ing books portable–a 17th cen­tu­ry pre­cur­sor, if you will, to the mod­ern day Kin­dle.

Accord­ing to the library at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Leeds, this “Jacobean Trav­el­ling Library” dates back to 1617. That’s when William Hakewill, an Eng­lish lawyer and MP, com­mis­sioned the minia­ture library–a big book, which itself holds 50 small­er books, all “bound in limp vel­lum cov­ers with coloured fab­ric ties.” What books were in this portable library, meant to accom­pa­ny noble­men on their jour­neys? Nat­u­ral­ly the clas­sics. The­ol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy, clas­si­cal his­to­ry and poet­ry. The works of Ovid, Seneca, Cicero, Vir­gil, Tac­i­tus, and Saint Augus­tine. Many of the same texts that showed up in The Har­vard Clas­sics (now avail­able online) three cen­turies lat­er.

Appar­ent­ly three oth­er Jacobean Trav­el­ling Libraries were made. They now reside at the British Library, the Hunt­ing­ton Library in San Mari­no, Cal­i­for­nia, and the Tole­do Muse­um of Art in Tole­do, Ohio.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Napoleon’s Kin­dle: See the Minia­tur­ized Trav­el­ing Library He Took on Mil­i­tary Cam­paigns

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renais­sance Inven­tion Cre­at­ed to Make Books Portable & Help Schol­ars Study Sev­er­al Books at Once (1588)

The Har­vard Clas­sics: Down­load All 51 Vol­umes as Free eBooks

The Fiske Read­ing Machine: The 1920s Pre­cur­sor to the Kin­dle

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An Introduction to Chinoiserie: When European Monarchs Tried to Build Chinese Palaces, Houses & Pavilions

in Architecture, Design, History, Travel | September 25th, 2023

Today it would be viewed as cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion writ large, but when Louis XIV ordered the con­struc­tion of a 5‑building plea­sure pavil­ion inspired by the Porce­lain Tow­er of Nan­jing (a 7th Won­der of the World few French cit­i­zens had viewed in per­son) as an escape from Ver­sailles, and an exot­ic love nest in which to romp with the Mar­quise de Mon­tes­pan, he ignit­ed a craze that spread through­out the West.

Chi­nois­erie was an aris­to­crat­ic Euro­pean fan­ta­sy of lux­u­ri­ous East­ern design, what Dung Ngo, founder of AUGUST: A Jour­nal of Trav­el + Design, describes as “a West­ern thing that has noth­ing to do with actu­al Asian cul­ture:”

Chi­nois­erie is a lit­tle bit like chop suey. It was whole­sale invent­ed in the West, based on cer­tain per­cep­tions of Asian cul­ture at the time. It’s very watered down.

And also way over the top, to judge by the rap­tur­ous descrip­tions of the inte­ri­ors and gar­dens of Louis XIV’s Tri­anon de Porce­laine, which stood for less than 20 years.

Image by Hervé Gre­goire, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The blue-and-white Delft tiles meant to mim­ic Chi­nese porce­lain swift­ly fell into dis­re­pair and Madame de Montespan’s suc­ces­sor, her children’s for­mer gov­erness, the Mar­quise de Main­tenon, urged Louis to tear the place down because it was “too cold.”

Her lover did as request­ed, but else­where, the West’s imag­i­na­tion had been cap­tured in a big way.

The bur­geon­ing tea trade between Chi­na and the West pro­vid­ed access to Chi­nese porce­lain, tex­tiles, fur­nish­ings, and lac­quer­ware, inspir­ing West­ern imi­ta­tions that blur the bound­aries between Chi­nois­erie and Roco­co styles

This blend is in evi­dence in Fred­er­ick the Great’s Chi­nese House in the gar­dens of Sanssouci (below).

Image by Johann H. Addicks, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Dr Samuel Wit­twer, Direc­tor of Palaces and Col­lec­tions at the Pruss­ian Palaces and Gar­dens Foun­da­tion, describes how the gild­ed fig­ure atop the roof “is a mix­ture of the Greek God Her­mes and the Chi­nese philoso­pher Con­fu­cius:”

His Euro­pean face is more than just a sym­bol of intel­lec­tu­al union between Asia and Europe…The fig­ure on the roof has an umbrel­la, an Asian sym­bol of social dig­ni­ty, which he holds in an east­ern direc­tion. So the famous ex ori­ente lux, the good and wise Con­fu­cian light from the far east, is blocked by the umbrel­la. Fur­ther down, we notice that the foun­da­tions of the build­ing seem to be made of feath­ers and the Chi­nese heads over the win­dows, rest­ing on cush­ions like tro­phies, turn into a mon­key band in the inte­ri­or. The fres­coes in the cupo­la main­ly depict mon­keys and par­rots. As we know, these par­tic­u­lar ani­mals are great imi­ta­tors with­out under­stand­ing.

Frederick’s enthu­si­asm for chi­nois­erie led him to engage archi­tect Carl von Gontard to fol­low up the Chi­nese House with a pago­da-shaped struc­ture he named the Drag­on House (below) after the six­teen crea­tures adorn­ing its roof.

Image by Rig­o­rius, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Drag­ons also dec­o­rate the roof of the Great Pago­da in London’s Kew Gar­dens, though the gild­ed wood­en orig­i­nals either suc­cumbed to the ele­ments or were sold off to set­tle George IV’s gam­bling debts in the late 18th cen­tu­ry.

Image by MX Granger, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

There are even more drag­ons to be found on the Chi­nese Pavil­ion at Drot­tning­holm, Swe­den, an archi­tec­tur­al con­fec­tion con­struct­ed by King Adolf Fredrik as a birth­day sur­prise for his queen, Louisa. The queen was met by the entire court, cos­play­ing in Chi­nese (or more like­ly, Chi­nese-inspired) gar­ments.

Not to be out­done, Russia’s Cather­ine the Great resolved to “cap­ture by caprice” by build­ing a Chi­nese Vil­lage out­side of St. Peters­burg.

Image by Макс Вальтер, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Archi­tect Charles Cameron drew up plans for a series of pavil­ions sur­round­ing a nev­er-real­ized octag­o­nal-domed obser­va­to­ry. Instead, eight few­er pavil­ions than Cameron orig­i­nal­ly envi­sioned sur­round a pago­da based on one in Kew Gar­dens.

Hav­ing sur­vived the Nazi occu­pa­tion and the Sovi­et era, the Chi­nese Vil­lage is once again a fan­ta­sy play­thing for the wealthy. A St. Peters­burg real estate devel­op­er mod­ern­ized one of the pavil­ions to serve as a two-bed­room “week­end cot­tage.”

Giv­en that no record of the orig­i­nal inte­ri­ors exists, design­er Kir­ill Istomin wasn’t ham­strung by a man­date to stick close to his­to­ry, but he and his client still went with “numer­ous chi­nois­erie touch­es” as per a fea­ture in Elle Decor:

Pan­els of antique wall­pa­pers were framed in gild­ed bam­boo for the mas­ter bed­room, and vin­tage Chi­nese lanterns, pur­chased in Paris, hang in the din­ing and liv­ing rooms. The star pieces, how­ev­er, are a set of 18th-cen­tu­ry porce­lain teapots, which came from the estate of the late New York socialite and phil­an­thropist Brooke Astor.

Explore cul­tur­al crit­ic Aileen Kwun and the Asian Amer­i­can Pacif­ic Islander Design Alliance’s per­spec­tive on the still pop­u­lar design trend of chi­nois­erie here.

h/t Allie C!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Ver­sailles: Six Min­utes of Ani­ma­tion Show the Con­struc­tion of the Grand Palace Over 400 Years

How the Ornate Tapes­tries from the Age of Louis XIV Were Made (and Are Still Made Today)

Down­load Vin­cent van Gogh’s Col­lec­tion of 500 Japan­ese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Cre­ate “the Art of the Future”

Free: Down­load 70,000+ High-Res­o­lu­tion Images of Chi­nese Art from Taipei’s Nation­al Palace Muse­um

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Story of Lorem Ipsum: How Scrambled Text by Cicero Became Used by Typesetters Everywhere

in Books, Design | September 21st, 2023

In high school, the lan­guage I most fell in love with hap­pened to be a dead one: Latin. Sure, it’s spo­ken at the Vat­i­can, and when I first began to study the tongue of Vir­gil and Cat­ul­lus, friends joked that I could only use it if I moved to Rome. Tempt­ing, but church Latin bare­ly resem­bles the clas­si­cal writ­ten lan­guage, a high­ly for­mal gram­mar full of sym­me­tries and puz­zles. You don’t speak clas­si­cal Latin; you solve it, labor over it, and gloat, to no one in par­tic­u­lar, when you’ve ren­dered it some­what intel­li­gi­ble. Giv­en that the study of an ancient lan­guage is rarely a con­ver­sa­tion­al art, it can some­times feel a lit­tle alien­at­ing.

And so you might imag­ine how pleased I was to dis­cov­er what looked like clas­si­cal Latin in the real world: the text known to design­ers around the globe as “Lorem Ipsum,” also called “filler text” and (erro­neous­ly) “Greek copy.”

The idea, Priceo­nom­ics informs us, is to force peo­ple to look at the lay­out and font, not read the words. Also, “nobody would mis­take it for their native lan­guage,” there­fore Lorem Ipsum is “less like­ly than oth­er filler text to be mis­tak­en for final copy and pub­lished by acci­dent.” If you’ve done any web design, you’ve prob­a­bly seen it, look­ing some­thing like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, con­secte­tur adip­isc­ing elit, sed do eius­mod tem­por inci­didunt ut labore et dolore magna ali­qua. Ut enim ad min­im veni­am, quis nos­trud exerci­ta­tion ullam­co laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea com­mo­do con­se­quat. Duis aute irure dolor in rep­re­hen­der­it in volup­tate velit esse cil­lum dolore eu fugiat nul­la pariatur. Excep­teur sint occae­cat cup­i­datat non proident, sunt in cul­pa qui offi­cia deserunt mol­lit anim id est labo­rum.

When I first encoun­tered this text, I did what any Latin geek will—set about try­ing to trans­late it. But it wasn’t long before I real­ized that Lorem Ipsum is most­ly gib­ber­ish, a gar­bling of Latin that makes no real sense. The first word, “Lorem,” isn’t even a word; instead it’s a piece of the word “dolorem,” mean­ing pain, suf­fer­ing, or sor­row. So where did this mash-up of Latin-like syn­tax come from, and how did it get so scram­bled? First, the source of Lorem Ipsum—tracked down by Ham­p­den-Syd­ney Direc­tor of Pub­li­ca­tions Richard McClintock—is Roman lawyer, states­men, and philoso­pher Cicero, from an essay called “On the Extremes of Good and Evil,” or De Finibus Bono­rum et Mal­o­rum.

675px-Cicero_-_Musei_Capitolini

Why Cicero? Put most sim­ply, writes Priceo­nom­ics, “for a long time, Cicero was every­where.” His fame as the most skilled of Roman rhetori­cians meant that his writ­ing became the bench­mark for prose in Latin, the stan­dard Euro­pean lan­guage of the Mid­dle Ages. The pas­sage that gen­er­at­ed Lorem Ipsum trans­lates in part to a sen­ti­ment Latin­ists will well under­stand:

Nor is there any­one who loves or pur­sues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occa­sion­al­ly cir­cum­stances occur in which toil and pain can pro­cure him some great plea­sure.

Dolorem Ipsum, “pain in and of itself,” sums up the tor­tu­ous feel­ing of try­ing to ren­der some of Cicero’s com­plex, ver­bose sen­tences into Eng­lish. Doing so with tol­er­a­ble pro­fi­cien­cy is, for some of us, “great plea­sure” indeed.

But how did Cicero, that mas­ter styl­ist, come to be so bad­ly man­han­dled as to be near­ly unrec­og­niz­able? Lorem Ipsum has a his­to­ry that long pre­dates online con­tent man­age­ment. It has been used as filler text since the six­teenth cen­tu­ry when—as McClin­tock theorized—“some type­set­ter had to make a type spec­i­men book, to demo dif­fer­ent fonts” and decid­ed that “the text should be insen­si­ble, so as not to dis­tract from the page’s graph­i­cal fea­tures.” It appears that this enter­pris­ing crafts­man snatched up a page of Cicero he had lying around and turned it into non­sense. The text, says McClin­tock, “has sur­vived not only four cen­turies of let­ter-by-let­ter reset­ting but even the leap into elec­tron­ic type­set­ting, essen­tial­ly unchanged.”

The sto­ry of Lorem Ipsum is a fas­ci­nat­ing one—if you’re into that kind of thing—but its longevi­ty rais­es a fur­ther ques­tion: should we still be using it at all, this man­gling of a dead lan­guage, in a medi­um as vital and dynam­ic as web pub­lish­ing, where “con­tent” refers to hun­dreds of design ele­ments besides font. Is Lorem Ipsum a quaint piece of nos­tal­gia that’s out­lived its use­ful­ness? In answer, you may wish to read Karen McGrane’s spir­it­ed defense of the prac­tice. Or, if you feel it’s time to let the gar­bled Latin go the way of man­u­al type­set­ting machines, con­sid­er per­haps as an alter­na­tive “Niet­zsche Ipsum,” which gen­er­ates ran­dom para­graphs of most­ly verb-less, inco­her­ent Niet­zsche-like text, in Eng­lish. Hey, at least it looks like a real lan­guage.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Learn Latin?: 5 Videos Make a Com­pelling Case That the “Dead Lan­guage” Is an “Eter­nal Lan­guage”

What Ancient Latin Sound­ed Like, And How We Know It

Can Mod­ern-Day Ital­ians Under­stand Latin? A Youtu­ber Puts It to the Test on the Streets of Rome

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A Look Inside the Labor-Intensive Process of Making a Tiffany-Style Lamp

in Design | September 19th, 2023

What do Tiffany lamps have in com­mon with Kleenex?

A brand name so mighty, it’s become an umbrel­la term.

Of course, Kleenex is still man­u­fac­tur­ing tis­sues, where­as authen­tic lamps from Louis Com­fort Tiffany’s New York stu­dio were pro­duced between 1890 and 1930.

Hand­craft­ed of coiled bronze wire and many pieces of blown favrile glass arranged in intri­cate nat­ur­al motifs, bonafide Tiffany lamps can fetch prices of over a mil­lion dol­lars.

The “Tiffany lamps” for sale on Way­fair?

Not the gen­uine arti­cle.

Still, if the one on your end table brings you plea­sure, who are we to get snip­py about it?

There’s plen­ty of that atti­tude to be found in the YouTube com­ments for the above process video …

To be clear, what you’re see­ing is the process by which an afford­able col­ored glass lamp­shade in the style of Tiffany comes togeth­er at an over­seas fac­to­ry.

The qual­i­ty may be lack­ing, but it’s still a pret­ty labor-inten­sive propo­si­tion.

First, the pieces are cut by hand or using blades mount­ed on met­al arms. Their shapes and num­ber are pre­de­ter­mined by a pattern…again in the style of Tiffany.

You won’t find the speck­led con­fet­ti glass or gold­en hued glass with a translu­cent amber sheen that are defin­ing fea­tures of the real McCoy here…

Once the pieces have been cut and sort­ed, their edges are wrapped in cop­per foil tape. (In Tiffany’s day this would have involved hand cut­ting strips of cop­per, then smear­ing them with beeswax to help them to adhere to the glass.)

The wrapped pieces are then laid out in a mold accord­ing to the pat­tern and sol­dered togeth­er.

The bot­tom edge is rein­forced, and the shade is fit­ted onto a lamp base.

If you’re a muse­um cura­tor, a con­nois­seur of the gen­uine arti­cle or a glazier, we don’t fault you for get­ting a bit salty.

(Our favorite com­ment: Oh the human­i­ty. I used to be a glazier. I could­n’t fin­ish watch­ing the video. The way they cut the glass dry and slide it around with­out felt on the table makes me cringe. You can hear the crin­kling sound of glass par­ti­cles under it when it’s being slid around. The small­est con­toured cuts and breaks are so rough they’re prac­ti­cal­ly gnawed. If clear glass was han­dled this way every win­dow would have deep scratch­es and would prob­a­bly self destruct from ther­mal cycling or a strong breeze.)

If you’re sus­cep­ti­ble to ASMR, enjoy your tin­gles — all those crin­kling sounds of glass par­ti­cles!

If you’re some­one who’s insa­tiably curi­ous as to how ordi­nary things are made, we hope you’ll con­sid­er the twelve min­utes of this Process Dis­cov­ery video time well spent, and no less inter­est­ing than their non-nar­ra­tive peeks into the man­u­fac­ture of bub­ble mail­ers, snow globes and swim gog­gles …

We leave you with a brief tour of the “real thing”, cour­tesy of the New York His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety:

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent

 

 

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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A Fully Functional Replica of the Antikythera Mechanism, the First Analog Computer from Ancient Greece, Re-Created in LEGO

in Design, History, Technology | September 18th, 2023

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Dis­cov­ered amidst the wreck­age of a sunken ship off the coast of Greece in 1901, the Antikythera Mech­a­nism (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) is often con­sid­ered the world’s old­est known ana­log com­put­er. Dat­ing back to approx­i­mate­ly 150–100 BCE, the device has a com­plex arrange­ment of pre­cise­ly cut gears, all designed to track celes­tial move­ments, pre­dict lunar and solar eclipses, and chart the posi­tions of plan­ets. It’s a tes­ta­ment to Ancient Greek engi­neer­ing. Above, you can see a ful­ly func­tion­al repli­ca of the Antikythera Mech­a­nism re-cre­at­ed in LEGO, cour­tesy of the sci­en­tif­ic jour­nal Nature. As one YouTu­ber put it, “The device is unbe­liev­ably cool, and the video is mas­ter­ful­ly done.”

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

How the World’s Old­est Com­put­er Worked: Recon­struct­ing the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism

Down­load Instruc­tions for More Than 6,800 LEGO Kits at the Inter­net Archive

With 9,036 Pieces, the Roman Colos­se­um Is the Largest Lego Set Ever

 

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Vin Mariani, the 19th-Century Cocaine-Infused Wine, Imbibed and Endorsed by Presidents, Popes & Writers

in Design, Food & Drink, History | September 8th, 2023

In the nev­erend­ing quest to ele­vate them­selves above the fray, today’s mixol­o­gists — for­mer­ly known as bar­tenders — are putting a mod­ern spin on obscure cock­tail recipes, and res­ur­rect­ing anachro­nis­tic spir­its like mahia, Char­treuse, Usque­baugh, and absinthe.

Might we see a return of Vin Mar­i­ani, a Belle Époque ‘ton­ic wine’ that was hit with such august per­son­ages as Queen Vic­to­ria, Ulysses S. Grant, Alexan­der Dumas and Emile Zola?

Prob­a­bly not.

It’s got coca in it, known for its psy­choac­tive alka­loid, cocaine.

Cor­si­can chemist Ange­lo Mar­i­ani came up with the restora­tive bev­er­age, for­mal­ly known as Vin Tonique Mar­i­ani à la Coca de Per­oum, in 1863, inspired by physi­cian and anthro­pol­o­gist Pao­lo Man­tegaz­za who served as his own guinea pig after observ­ing native use of coca leaves while on a trip to South Amer­i­ca:

I sneered at the poor mor­tals con­demned to live in this val­ley of tears while I, car­ried on the wings of two leaves of coca, went fly­ing through the spaces of 77,438 words, each more splen­did than the one before…An hour lat­er, I was suf­fi­cient­ly calm to write these words in a steady hand: God is unjust because he made man inca­pable of sus­tain­ing the effect of coca all life long. I would rather have a life span of ten years with coca than one of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 000 cen­turies with­out coca.

Mar­i­ani iden­ti­fied an untapped oppor­tu­ni­ty and added ground coca leaves to Bor­deaux, at a ratio of 6 mil­ligrams of coca to one ounce of wine.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the result­ing con­coc­tion not only took the edge off, it was accord­ed a num­ber of health­ful ben­e­fits in an age where gen­er­al cure-alls were high­ly prized.

The rec­om­mend­ed dosage for adults was two or three glass­es a day, before or after meals. For kids, the amount could be divid­ed in two.

Reign­ing mas­ters of graph­ic design were enlist­ed to pro­mote the mir­a­cle elixir.

Jules Chéret leaned into its ener­gy boost­ing effects by depict­ing a come­ly young woman clad in skimpy, sheer yel­low replen­ish­ing her glass mid-leap, while Alphonse Mucha went dark, claim­ing that “the mum­mies them­selves stand up and walk after drink­ing Vin Mar­i­ani.”

While we’re on the sub­ject of corpse revivers, 21st-cen­tu­ry mixol­o­gists will please note that a cock­tail of Vin Mar­i­ani, ver­mouth and bit­ters, served with a twist, was a par­tic­u­lar­ly pop­u­lar prepa­ra­tion, espe­cial­ly across the Atlantic, where Vin Mar­i­ani was export­ed in a more potent ver­sion con­tain­ing 7.2 mil­ligrams of coca.

Ange­lo Mariani’s inno­va­tions were not lim­it­ed to the chem­istry of alco­holic com­pounds.

He was also a mar­ket­ing genius, who cur­ried celebri­ty favor by send­ing a com­pli­men­ta­ry case of Vin Mar­i­ani to dozens of famous names, along with a hum­ble request for an endorse­ment and pho­to, should the con­tents prove pleas­ing.

These acco­lades were col­lect­ed and repur­posed as adver­tise­ments that assured ador­ing fans and fol­low­ers of the product’s qual­i­ty.

Sarah Bern­hardt con­ferred super­star sta­tus on the drink, and not so sub­tly shored up her own, grand­ly pro­nounc­ing the blend the “King of Ton­ics, Ton­ic of Kings:”

I have been delight­ed to find Vin Mar­i­ani in all the large cities of the Unit­ed States, and it has, as always, large­ly helped to give me that strength so nec­es­sary in the per­for­mance of the ardu­ous duties which I have imposed upon myself. I nev­er fail to praise its virtues to all my friends and I hearti­ly con­grat­u­late upon the suc­cess which you so well deserve. 

Pope Leo XIII not only car­ried “a per­son­al hip flask” of the stuff to “for­ti­fy him­self in those moments when prayer was insuf­fi­cient,” he invent­ed and award­ed a Vat­i­can gold medal to Vin Mar­i­ani “in recog­ni­tion of ben­e­fits received.”

Mar­i­ani even­tu­al­ly pack­aged the glow­ing endorse­ments he’d been squir­rel­ing away as Por­traits from Album Mar­i­ani. It’s a com­pendi­um of famous artists, writ­ers, actors, and musi­cians of the day, some remem­bered, most­ly not…

Com­pos­er John Philip Sousa:

When worn out after a long rehearsal or a per­for­mance, I find noth­ing so help­ful as a glass of Vin Mar­i­ani. To brain work­ers and those who expend a great deal of ner­vous force, it is invalu­able.

Opera singer Lil­lian Blau­velt:

Vin Mar­i­ani is the great­est of all ton­ic stim­u­lants for the voice and sys­tem. Dur­ing my pro­fes­sion­al career, I have nev­er been with­out it.

Illus­tra­tor Albert Robi­da:

At last! At last! It has been dis­cov­ered — they hold it, that cel­e­brat­ed microbe so long sought after — the microbe of microbes that kills all oth­er microbes. It is the great, the won­der­ful, the incom­pa­ra­ble microbe of health! It is, it is Vin Mar­i­ani!

(We sus­pect Robi­da penned his entry after swal­low­ing more than a few glass­es… or he was of a mis­chie­vous nature and would’ve fit right in with the Sur­re­al­ists, the Futur­ists, Fluxus, or any oth­er move­ment that jabbed at the bour­geoisie with hyper­bole and humor.

Mar­i­ani used the album to pub­lish the Philadel­phia Med­ical Times’ defense of celebri­ty endorse­ments:

The array of notable names is a strong one. Too strong in stand­ing, as well as in num­bers, to allow of the charge of inter­est­ed motives.

Mar­i­ani also includ­ed an excerpt from the New York Med­ical Jour­nal, denounc­ing the unscrupu­lous man­u­fac­tur­ers of “rival prepa­ra­tions of coca” who pirat­ed Vin Mariani’s glow­ing reviews, “crafti­ly mak­ing those records appear to apply to their own prepa­ra­tions.”

Else­where in the album, med­ical author­i­ties tout Vin Mariani’s suc­cess in com­bat­ting such mal­adies as headaches, heart strain, brain exhaus­tion, spasms, la grippe, laryn­geal afflic­tions, influen­za, inor­di­nate irri­tabil­i­ty and wor­ry.

They fail to men­tion that it could get you much high­er than vins ordi­naires, defined, for pur­pos­es of this post, as “wines lack­ing in coca.”

The psy­choac­tive prop­er­ties of coca def­i­nite­ly received a boost from the alco­hol, a col­li­sion that gave rise to a third chem­i­cal com­pound, cocaeth­yl­ene, a long-last­ing intox­i­cant that pro­duces intense eupho­ria, along with a height­ened risk of car­diotox­i­c­i­ty and sud­den death.

…some dead celebri­ties could like­ly tell us a thing or two about it.

Mariani’s for­tunes began to turn ear­ly in the 20th cen­tu­ry, owing to the Pure Food and Drug Act, the grow­ing tem­per­ance move­ment, and increased pub­lic aware­ness of the dan­gers of cocaine.

We may nev­er see a Vin Mar­i­ani cock­tail on the menu at Death & Co, Licor­ería Liman­tour, or Par­adiso, but the Drug Enforce­ment Administration’s Muse­um keeps a bot­tle on hand.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Coca-Cola Was Orig­i­nal­ly Sold as an Intel­lec­tu­al Stim­u­lant & Med­i­cine: The Unlike­ly Sto­ry of the Icon­ic Soft Drink’s Inven­tion

How a Young Sig­mund Freud Researched & Got Addict­ed to Cocaine, the New “Mir­a­cle Drug,” in 1894

The Cof­fee Pot That Fueled Hon­oré de Balzac’s Cof­fee Addic­tion

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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