FRANKENSTEIN BREAKS A RECORD

While the 1931 version of Universal's film, FRANKENSTEIN is celebrating its 90th Anniversary this year, the book that originated the story sold for almost $2 million at a recent Christie's auction.

The first edition of Mary Shelly's novel was published in 1818 in three volumes, and is considered rare. What distinguished this particular sale was the book's condition, which was listed in fine condition.

After over two centuries, the legacy of Frankenstein and his monster live on stronger than ever!

First Edition of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ Sells for Record-Breaking $1.17 Million

A rare copy of the iconic Gothic novel is now the most expensive printed work by a woman sold at auction

By Nora McGreevy | September 22, 2021 | smithsonianmag.com

A first edition of Mary Shelley’s iconic Gothic novel Frankenstein shattered expectations last week when it sold at Christie’s for a whopping $1.17 million.

Per a statement, the three-volume set broke the auction record for a printed work by a woman. The lot’s pre-sale estimate was $200,000 to $300,000.

As Alison Flood reports for the Guardian, the previous world record for a printed work by a woman was set in 2008, when a first edition of Jane Austen’s 1816 novel Emma sold for around $205,000.

The record-breaking copy of Frankenstein stands out because it retains its original boards—the blueish gray pasteboards that cover each volume. Nineteenth-century publishers used these disposable coverings to bind and sell books, with the expectation that the tomes’ new owners would eventually replace them with a permanent cover.

“The [book] is incredibly fragile and as a result very scarce, so a copy like this, particularly in fine condition, is highly desirable to collectors,” a Christie’s spokesperson tells the Guardian. “Overall, it’s a very strong market and we are seeing increased demand for fine examples of literary high spots.”

Christie’s notes that this edition of Frankenstein is the first of its kind to sell at auction since 1985. It numbers among dozens of rare first editions featured in the auction house’s sale of antiquarian book collector Theodore B. Baum’s holdings. Other titles sold include copies of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day (1919) and James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914). Sales from Baum’s collection netted more than $9 million altogether, according to the statement.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin wrote the first draft of her groundbreaking novel in 1816, while on a trip to Lake Geneva with her soon-to-be husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their friend, the famed poet Lord Byron. Stuck indoors during an unseasonably cold summer—the aftermath of a catastrophic volcanic explosion in Indonesia—the writers competed to see who could compose the most compelling ghost story.

“I busied myself to think of a story,” Shelley later recalled, “… [o]ne which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart.”

Inspiration struck one night as Shelley was attempting to sleep. Inspired by her eerie surroundings and recent discussions of galvanism, which suggested that scientists could use electricity to simulate life or reanimate the dead, the 18-year-old writer began crafting the tale of Victor Frankenstein, an obsessive scientist who brings a humanoid “creature” to life with terrifying consequences for both.

“I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together,” Shelley wrote in the text. “I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.” (Viewers can explore her original handwritten draft, complete with Percy’s line edits, online through the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford.)

A small London publishing house, Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, first printed Frankenstein: or, a Modern Prometheus in a limited series of just 500 copies on January 1, 1818. The first edition was published anonymously but featured an unsigned preface by Percy and a dedication to Mary’s father, philosopher William Godwin. Shelley didn’t publicly claim her novel until four years later, when Frankenstein was adapted into a popular play.

First Edition of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' Sells for Record-Breaking $1.17 Million

Illustration by Theodor von Holst from the frontispiece of the 1831 edition of Frankenstein Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Today, Frankenstein is regarded as a foundational, prescient work of science fiction.

“It’s a book that’s relentlessly questioning about where the limits are and how far to push, and what the implications are of what we do in the world,” Gita Manaktala, editorial director of MIT Press, told Kat Eschner of Smithsonian magazine in 2018.

At the time of its publication, however, reviews of the novel were mixed. Shelley herself was dissatisfied with the work, as she made clear in her annotations of the margins of at least one copy held in the collections of the Morgan Library and Museum. Available to view online, the critical comment reads, “If there were ever to be another edition of this book, I should re-write these two first chapters. The incidents are tame [and] ill arranged—the language sometimes childish. They are unworthy of the rest of the narration.”

In 1831, thirteen years after Frankenstein’s initial release, Shelley published a revised edition that included a reworked first chapter and other narrative changes. This 1831 text is the one that’s most widely read today, as Genevieve Valentine noted for NPR in 2018. Whereas the 1818 text is more sympathetic to Victor Frankenstein’s actions, Valentine argued, the later version emphasizes the scientist’s hubris in attempting to alter the natural state of the world.

Shelley also chose to remove an epigraph from John Milton’s 1667 epic poem about the Christian parable of original sin, Paradise Lost. The phrase, a question from the biblical first human, Adam, to God, opened the 1818 text: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man? / Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?”

THE ROOTS OF PLANT HORROR

One of horror's sub-genres has up and crawled out of the garden -- plant horror. Not a new subject, but certainly an intriguing one and a topic that I find both creepy and fascinating.

The short article below is from a surprising source -- the Smithsonian, of all places! The author describes the origins and whys and wherefores of plant horror, the fear that one gets when thinking that plants are smart enough to, ahem, uproot humanity from its seat of power over the earth.

Getting to the Roots of “Plant Horror”
From the serious—pod people—to the farcical—”feed me, feed me!”—this genre has produced some strange stuff
By Kat Eschner | October 30, 2017 | smithsonian.com

Given enough time, ivy will rip through walls. As MythBusters proved, bamboo technically could grow through a tortured human’s body. Even seasonal allergies are pretty destructive–a study found that they can cause drivers to behave as if drunk.

Plants can be terrifying.What do plants want? This question birthed the genre of “plant horror,” something that stretches back at least to the Renaissance and continues today in video games like The Last of Us or films like The Happening.

Like other horror genres, such as zombie movies, the social anxieties of the time were played out onscreen in horror films that seemed on the surface to be simple science fiction. In Cold War America, when the modern genre of plant horror was created, it was about the greatest threat of all: communism. Fear of an alien political ideology and the potential nuclear consequences of the Cold War helped fuel an iconic genre of the era and produce some amazing plant-based creature features.

Consider Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Day of the Triffids or even Little Shop of Horrors. These all involve seemingly passive plants (well, maybe not Audrey Junior, the talking Venus flytrap of Little Shop) turning into monstrous and terrifying problems.

And while the zombie-like “pod people” of Invasion might seem a clear parallel for how American propaganda framed those living under Soviet rule in the 1950s and '60s, even carnivorous triffids and Venus flytraps are clear foils for the Soviets in their own way, write scholars Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari. The invading triffids, which supposedly came out of a Soviet lab, have human-like characteristics but are also distinctly plants.

The secret of plant horror, writes scholar T.S. Miller, is twofold. First, the traditional Western understanding of how the world works places plants at the bottom of a pyramid that contains all living things. In plant horror, they disrupt this seeming “natural order” by rising to the top as apex predators. Second, plants are at the bottom of the pyramid precisely because they are so very unlike humans. We can see ourselves in animals, even animals unlike us. But it’s much harder to see yourself in a rose bush, or even a Venus flytrap. They’re creatures from another world, a cellulose world, which is right next to us and which we depend on —but there’s no way to know what they might be thinking, or what, given the right circumstance, they might do.

[SOURCE: 5/18/2019 Getting to the Roots of "Plant Horror" | Smart News | Smithsonian

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/getting-roots-plant-horror-180965323.]

BONUS!

Here is a link to a video at Smitsonian.com that shows just exactly what happens when plants get a hold of their prey: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/category/science/the-carnivorous-plant-that-feasts-on-mice/?jwsource=cl

EXTRA BONUS!

Listen to this podcast of DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS by Space Monster at Mixcloud:

https://www.mixcloud.com/spacemonster/mr-darks-audio-nasty-the-day-of-the-triffids-part-1/

Listen to Part 2 and other cool podcasts from Space Monster HERE.

HAPPY 210th BIRTHDAY, EDGAR ALLAN POE!

"Poe brought horror down to earth and made us fear the ordinary and everyday" - Michael Capuzzo, The Smithsonian

So, who do you think is America's most influential writer: Hemingway? Twain? Melville? Think again. . . it's Edgar Allan Poe! It was Poe, after all, that introduced us to the detective story as we know it today. His 1841 tale, "The Murders In the Rue Morgue" initiates many of the tropes that persist in modern in crime fiction -- the eccentric A. Auguste Dupin (think Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and our favorite Weird Tales detective, Jules de Grandin) and the incompetent police (ex. Inspector Lestrade). The creator of the immortal Sherlock Holmes himself, Arthur Conan Doyle, declared Poe "father of the detective tale."

This short article from the January/February 2019 issue of SMITHSONIAN describes Poe's enduring legacy on the occasion of his 210th birthday!

MY NIGHTMARE WITH ECUADOR'S HEADHUNTERS!

The following story appeared in the March 1969 issue of ACTION FOR MEN. It describes the author's story of his trip to South America in search of the last native headhunter outposts on the continent. Over a period of days, he witnesses the (forbidden by law) head-shrinking ceremony, courtesy of his guide. The process is described in gruesome detail.

If the title of this post sounds familiar, that's because it's the title of an essay that I wrote that appeared on Bob Deis's superb cultural site, MEN'S PULP MAGS. After reading today's MMW post, get thee hence to this site by clicking HERE.

BONUS:
How Does One Actually Shrink a Head?
How does one take a regular sized human skull and miniaturize it?
By Rose Eveleth
SMITHSONIAN.COM
MARCH 20, 2013

Shrunken heads are a key part of the “scary tribal people” setup. And some cultures did, in fact, create miniature heads for religious and spiritual purposes. But how does one take a regular sized human skull and miniaturize it?

The process is gruesome, according to Today I Found Out. First, the skin and hair had to be separated from the skull to allow them to shrink at different rates. Then, the eyelids were sewn shut and the mouth was stuck closed with a peg. And for the actual shrinking, the heads were put in a big pot and boiled for a very specific amount of time. Then, Staci Lehman writes:

Once removed from the pot, the head would be about 1/3 its original size and the skin dark and rubbery. The skin would then be turned inside out and any leftover flesh scraped off with a knife. The scraped skin was then turned with the proper side out again and the slit in the rear sewn together. The process wasn’t done yet. The head was shrunk even further by inserting hot stones and sand to make it contract from the inside. This also “tanned” the inside, like tanning an animal hide, in order to preserve it.

Once the head reached the desired size and was full of small stones and sand, more hot stones would be applied to the outside of the face to seal and shape the features. The skin was rubbed with charcoal ash to darken it, and as tribesmen believed, to keep the avenging soul from seeping out. The finished product was hung over a fire to harden and blacken, then the wooden pegs in the lips pulled out and replaced with string to lash them together.

When Westerners and Europeans started traveling and discovering cultures that practiced head shrinking, they were both terrified and fascinated. Many of them brought back shrunken heads and souvenirs. In the 1930s, a shrunken head sold for $25—$330 in today’s dollars. In fact, they were popular and lucrative enough that unscrupulous head-peddlers started trading in fake shrunken heads, made from the heads of sloths and other animals. And telling the difference between a real and fake shrunken head can be hard. In fact, one researcher claims that most shrunken heads on display at museums (including the American Museum of Natural History) are fake. Forensic researchers write about some of the ways to tell:

Tsantsas, or shrunken head, are an ancient traditional technique of the Jivaro Indians from Northern Peru and Southern Ecuador. Tsantsas were made from enemies’ heads cut on the battlefield. Then, during spiritual ceremonies, enemies’ heads were carefully reduced through boiling and heating, in the attempt to lock the enemy’s spirit and protect the killers from spiritual revenge. However, forgers have made fake tsantsas out of sloth heads, selling them as curios to international travelers. Morphologic criteria can help in the distinction of forged and authentic tsantsas. Presence of sealed eyelids, pierced lips with strings sealing the mouth, shiny black skin, a posterior sewn incision, long glossy black hair, and lateral head compression are characteristic of authentic tsantsas. On the other hand, fake tsantsas usually present few or none of those criteria. To establish authenticity of the shrunken head, we used all of the above-mentioned morphologic criteria along with microscopic hair examination and DNA analysis.

If you don’t have a DNA sequencer handy to identify your human head, William Jamieson Tribal Art says to look at the ears:

Imitation tsantsa are classified under two categories, being either non-human or human but prepared by someone other than the Jivaro tribesmen. As the most common non-human fakes are often made out of goat or monkey skin, one must pay particular attention to distinguishing between authentic and replicas. Indications of counterfeit tsantsa are characterized by looking for nasal hairs which is a notable distinction between identifying authentic heads and non-human replicas. In addition to this, it is also quite difficult to duplicate a shrunken human ear. The ear should remain in its original form only smaller. Fakes generally cannot match the intricate details of the human ear.

As for many topics of cultural anthropology in which the culture in question still exists and its members would like to be treated as people, head shrinking is a bit contentious. In the Shuar culture, shrunken heads (or ”tsantsas”) are extremely important religious symbols. One anthropologist writes:

That Shuar have killed people to make powerful objects, whereas we have made powerful objects to kill people, does not sustain any meaningful distinction between the savage and the civilized.

Is is hard for many people to not see shrinking of heads as a gruesome act. (Shrunken heads were found in the German concentration camp at Buchenwald, but never identified.) And many say that no new shrunken heads have been made for twenty years. In South America, many countries outlawed selling human heads in the 1930s. Whether or not heads have been shrunk since is still up for debate, but at least now you know how it happens.

TOPSTONE MASKS AS HIGH ART

Born in Normal, Illinois, this self-proclaimed photographer was anything but. Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s day job was as an optician, but his off-time was spent in pursuit of the perfect shot that would capture the connection of people in an image by depersonalizing them.

And how did Meatyard accomplish this? By having his subjects wear masks. But not just any mask – a Topstone mask! That's right, Meatyard created dozens of images with his subjects wearing Topstone and other Halloween rubber masks available at the time. To say that his photographs are visually arresting is a gross understatement!

After learning of Meatyard from the Ray Castile's last "Tomb of the Topstones" vlog, I did some digging and was astounded by what I found.

Following is an article from the Smithsonian website from 2011 that provides further information about Ralph Eugene Meatyard and his masks.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard: The Man Behind the Masks
The “dedicated amateur” photographer had a strange way of getting his subjects to reveal themselves
By David Zax
Smithsonian Magazine | November 2011

One day in 1958 or ’59, Ralph Eugene Meatyard walked into a Woolworths store in Lexington, Kentucky. An optician by trade, Meatyard was also a photographer—a “dedicated amateur,” he called himself—and he kept an eye out for props. He might drop by an antiques store to buy eerie dolls or emerge from a hobby shop with a jar of snakes or mice cured in formalin. In Woolworths, he came upon a set of masks whose features suggested a marriage of Picasso and a jack-o’-lantern.

“He immediately liked their properties,” recalls his son Christopher, who was with him at the time. Meatyard père bought a few dozen. “They were latex and had a very unique odor,” says Christopher, now 56. “In the summer they could be hot and humid.”

Over the next 13 years, Meatyard persuaded a procession of family and friends to don one of the Woolworths masks and pose in front of his camera. The resulting photographs became the best known of the pictures he left behind when he died of cancer in 1972, at age 46. That work, says the photographer Emmet Gowin, who befriended Meatyard in the 1970s, is “unlike anyone else’s in this world.”

“He picked the environment first,” Christopher says of his father’s method. “Then he’d look at the particular light in that moment in that place, and start composing scenes using the camera.” With the shot composed, he would then populate it, telling his subjects where to place themselves, which way to face, whether to move or stand still.

For the 1962 portrait on the preceding page, Meatyard chose an abandoned minor-league ballpark and arranged his wife and their three children in the bleachers. (Christopher is at left; his brother, Michael, is in the middle; his sister, Melissa, at the bottom; and their mother, Madelyn, is seated top right.) The title he gave the image—Romance (N.) From Ambrose Bierce #3—provides only the broadest hint of what he was up to: In his Devil’s Dictionary, Bierce had defined “romance” as “fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as they are.”

But still, why masks? Well, “the idea of a person, a photograph, say, of a young girl with a title ‘Rose Taylor’ or the title ‘Rose’ or no title at all becomes an entirely different thing,” Meatyard once said. “ ‘Rose Taylor’ is a specific person, whether you know her nor not. ‘Rose’ is more generalized and could be one of many Roses—many people. No title, it could be anybody.” And in the same way, a mask “serves as non-personalizing a person.”

And why would someone want to do that? In an essay on Meatyard’s work, the critic James Rhem quotes one of his sitters, Mary Browning Johnson: “He said he felt like everyone was connected, and when you use the mask, you take away the differences.”

Gowin, who posed for a Meatyard portrait, recalls thinking that wearing a mask would surely erase all sense of personhood. “But when I saw the pictures,” he says, “I realized that even though you have the mask, your body language completely gives you away. It’s as if you’re completely naked, completely revealed.”

Meatyard, whose surname is of English origin, was born in Normal, Illinois, in 1925. He served stateside in the Navy during World War II and briefly studied pre-dentistry before settling on a career as an optician. He plied that trade all his working life—9 to 5 on weekdays, 9 to noon on Saturdays—but photography became his ruling passion shortly after he purchased his first camera, in 1950, to photograph his newborn son, Michael. Four years later, Meatyard joined the Lexington Camera Club. Endlessly curious, he sought inspiration in philosophy, music and books—historical fiction, poetry, short stories and collections of Zen koans. Zen and jazz were enduring influences. “How many businessmen run Buddhist-style meditation groups over the lunch hour?” asks Gowin.

Despite his self-proclaimed status as an amateur, Meatyard soon became known in serious photography circles. In 1956, his work was exhibited beside that of Ansel Adams, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan and Edward Weston. Five years later, Beaumont Newhall, then director of the George Eastman House, listed him in Art in America as one of the “new talents” in American photography. In the late 1960s, he collaborated with the writer Wendell Berry on The Unforeseen Wilderness, a book about Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. In 1973, the New York Times called him a “backwoods oracle.”

His last major project was The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater, a series of portraits of his wife and a rotating cast of family and friends; it was published posthumously in 1974. The project’s title was inspired by the Flannery O’Connor story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” in which a woman introduces both herself and her deaf-mute daughter as “Lucynell Crater.” In Meatyard’s book, everyone is masked, and everyone is identified as “Lucybelle Crater.” As Gowin says of his friend: “He was so many people all mixed up in one.”

The bookish Zen jazzmeister also served as president of the local PTA and the Little League and flipped burgers at the Fourth of July party. Meatyard “was a quiet, diffident, charming person on the surface,” says his friend the writer Guy Davenport. But that, he added, was “a known ruse of the American genius.”

David Zax, a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York, is a frequent contributor to Smithsonian.