The Fruits of Java

Papaya

Salak Palm (Snake Fruit)

French Plantain

Rambutan

Durian

Mangosteen

Shaddock (~grapefruit)

Nam Nam

Cashew Tree

Champedak (~Jackfruit)

~Custard Apple

[click for full size versions; species names are in each image URL]

"Berthe Hoola Van Nooten accompanied her husband to Jakarta (then known as Batavia), the capital of Java, where he died. Left with debts to pay and a family to support, she marketed a selection of her paintings as chromolithographs and published under the title 'Fleurs, Fruits et Feuillages Choisis de l'Ile de Java Peints D'Après Nature', the first edition of which appeared in 1863-4 with the backing of the Queen of the Netherlands."

The fruit illustrations here (not all were native to Indonesia) come from an 1880 edition of 'Fleurs, Fruits..de Java' in which the hand finished chromolithographs were produced by Pieter De Pannemaeker. There are 40 plates in total (not just fruit) online at the superb and highly addictive Illustrated Garden website at the Missouri Botanical Gardens.

"Van Nooten was clearly a more than competent artist, for the splendid tropical plants, with their lush foliage, vividly coloured flowers and exotic fruit, have been depicted with great skill. She managed to accentuate the splendour of each species by adopting a style that combined great precision and clarity with a touch of neo-Baroque exuberance, revelling in the rich forms and colours of the tropics. "

Scandinavian Trolls

"[An]..explanation for the troll myth, is that the trolls represent the remains of the forefather-cult which was ubiquitous in Scandinavia until the introduction of Christianity in the 10th and 11th centuries. In this cult the forefathers were worshipped in sacred groves, by altars or by gravemounds. One of the customs associated with this practice was to sit on top of a gravemound at night, possibly in order to make contact with the deceased.

With the introduction of Christianity however, the religious elite sought to demonize the pagan cult, and declared the forefathers as evil. For instance, according to Magnus Håkonsen's laws from 1276 it is illegal to attempt to wake the "mound-dwellers". It is in these laws that the word troll appears for the first time, denoting something heathen and generally unfavourable."

While the exact origin(s) of trolls in Scandinavian folklore might be complex and somewhat contentious, Mme Balzamo¹ suggests that the illustrative forms we have all encountered probably had their precursors in the 16th century sociocartographic works of Olaus Magnus.

Magnus was responsible for the famous 1539 Scandinavian map, 'Carta Marina' [5Mb complete work or sectioned jpeg images] and released the massive 'Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus' in 1555, which purported to outline the history of the Nordic peoples. Both included illustrations of monsters and mythical creatures.

It may be coincidental but 'Carta Marina' was 'lost' for 3 centuries, only to be rediscovered in 1882, around the time when troll illustrations began to appear in popular literature.

Romantic fairytale illustrators Theodor Severin Kittelsen (i, ii, iii) John Bauer (i, ii, iii) and Elsa Beskow (i, ii, iii) are regarded as the leading artists of the polymorphic troll figure from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The genre would later be adapted by Tove Jansson for her internationally successful Moomin characters (i, ii, iii).

• ¹This post came about by my stumbling across an exhibition website of Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève: "Des Trolls, des Ogres et des Géants dans l'Illustration des Contes Populaires Nordiques" - almost all of the above illustrations come from here.
• Subsequently I found the Troll Blog, a comprehensive and interesting site in english with a lot of esoteric imagery.
• The wikipedia article on trolls is fairly extensive. It cites Camilla Asplund Ingemark as a reference: she completed her PhD thesis on trolls (the first Finnish dissertation on the subject) last year. There is a background article on the relationship of trolls and religion by Ingemark here.

The Portolan Atlas

Zodiac

Armillary Sphere and Table of Declinations
(The angular distance to a point on a celestial object,
measured north or south from the celestial equator)

Atlantic Ocean with portions of North America,
South America, Europe, and Africa

Palestine

Italy and the Dalmatian Coast

Pacific Ocean with portions of North America,
South America, Asia, and East Indies.

Oval map of the world with wind heads
(showing the sea route chosen by Magellan
for his [near] circumnavigation of the world)

Coats of Arms from 4 Portolan Atlas owners

A portolan or nautical atlas (or chart, manuscript or map) refers to an early modern European rendering, usually on vellum, in which complete coasts, ports and waterways were depicted together with characteristic direction lines from the thirty-two points of the compass. Essentially they were hand-drawn, practical navigation aids prior to the days of accurate surveying and map engraving techniques.

The most famous of these is the Portolan Atlas of Battista Agnese of which about 70 copies are known to still exist. Agnese was active as a cartographer from 1535-1564, during the heyday of Italian mapmaking, in the leading shipping and trade centres of Genoa and Venice.

Although Agnese was more of a copier than an original cartographer, the Portolan Atlas is highly regarded for its precision, detail and artistic value. It was state of the art for its time with the latest explorations and discoveries and the ocean maps could be overlapped for comparison and to produce an accurate map of the world.

In addition to the cosmological and artistic embellishments and text, the series included 13 maps of the known world. As a luxurious production, the atlas was unlikely to have been used in practical navigation and was probably commissioned by a wealthy citizen originally. The version from 1546 is said to be the highest quality and is held today by the Russian National Library in St Petersburg. (I noticed in passing that a facsimile copy retails at >$2500)

The above images (click for larger versions) come from a number of different manuscripts.

• The Huntington Library at the University of California have 4 versions: I (I think this is the best), II, III, IV - available in multiple sizes.
• The Library of Congress has another version, also with huge images available.
• NYPL has a different atlas again but the large images are smaller than screen size.
• Finns Books have probably the best summary/biography.
• Library of Congress summary.
• Description from University of Pennsylvania Library.

[There has been a slight truncation problem with the RSS feed on a few occasions in the last couple of months, including yesterday - that's a Blogger glitch for unknown (to me) reasons. So I haven't been tweaking anything. 99% of the time it all runs smoothly.]

Jewish Library Childrens Books

The Jewish National & University Library Collection

The Jewish National and University Library in Israel have about 30 childrens books available that range from 1879 to 1928 from the subject list. [link updated Nov 2011] The majority are from the early 1920s.

Viewing the books requires a DjVu browser plugin. You can then download individual pages if you want, which are only modestly sized but enormous when opened in an image viewing program like Irfanview. (eg. a 350kb DjVu file opens to ~6000 x 3000 pixel image).

The above images are a random assortment from a dozen or so books which I touched up slightly.