100 years ago this coming weekend, in April 1912, four days after the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and three days after Harriet Quimby became the first woman to cross the English Channel by aeroplane, Denys Corbett Wilson - courtesy first of a buffeting wind that caused him to drop his compass overboard, necessitating a night's stay in Almeley, near Hereford, and second of taking advantage of this unscheduled stop to do some maintenance on his engine, filling it when he did so with the wrong grade of castor oil - found himself about half an hour into his flight from Almeley with a badly misfiring engine and in pressing need of a flat spot to make an emergency landing. Unfortunately, at that moment he was flying over the hills of Radnorshire where flat spots are a rarity, but nevertheless managed to touch down in a reasonably level field ('the only level bit of ground for miles, only 120 yards long and about 40 wide') in the remote hamlet of Colva, where the plane stayed for three days, awaiting Corbett Wilson's French engineer, Gaston Vial, to arrive and get it back into flying order. If Corbett Wilson had appeared in the Les aviateurs du monde series of postcards that were produced around this time, this - Corbett Wilson taking off from Colva just after dawn on the 21st, watched by the hundreds of onlookers who had come from far and wide before dawn to see this amazing sight - is what it might have looked like.
Monday, 16 April 2012
colva's aeronautical centenary
100 years ago this coming weekend, in April 1912, four days after the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and three days after Harriet Quimby became the first woman to cross the English Channel by aeroplane, Denys Corbett Wilson - courtesy first of a buffeting wind that caused him to drop his compass overboard, necessitating a night's stay in Almeley, near Hereford, and second of taking advantage of this unscheduled stop to do some maintenance on his engine, filling it when he did so with the wrong grade of castor oil - found himself about half an hour into his flight from Almeley with a badly misfiring engine and in pressing need of a flat spot to make an emergency landing. Unfortunately, at that moment he was flying over the hills of Radnorshire where flat spots are a rarity, but nevertheless managed to touch down in a reasonably level field ('the only level bit of ground for miles, only 120 yards long and about 40 wide') in the remote hamlet of Colva, where the plane stayed for three days, awaiting Corbett Wilson's French engineer, Gaston Vial, to arrive and get it back into flying order. If Corbett Wilson had appeared in the Les aviateurs du monde series of postcards that were produced around this time, this - Corbett Wilson taking off from Colva just after dawn on the 21st, watched by the hundreds of onlookers who had come from far and wide before dawn to see this amazing sight - is what it might have looked like.
Friday, 13 April 2012
30 henry jekyll's partial statement of the case
april 2012112mm x 194mm
hand-sewn booklet with wrappers
14 pages
Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case, chapter 10 of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is here divided, re-aligned, cropped and re-presented as a fractured and jittery account of his hubristic adventure that nevertheless – thanks entirely to Stevenson's clear and pungent phrasing – still clearly transmits his horrific journey into an irreparably parted self. Aligned to left and right but gapped between, the account is printed as two columns to be read across, though a reading down the columns is also possible. The rather sinister character on the cover of the booklet I found in Home Words for Heart and Hearth – a pious book dating from the same year that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885), filled with prayers, moralising stories and sermons and, best of all, engravings of various church worthies of the day. And a seedy-looking bunch they are too. There was some stiff competition for the cover, but in the end it was Dr. Jackson, the Late Bishop of London, who won out.
Thursday, 12 April 2012
33 disuse is bad for the machine
january 2012
hand-sewn booklet
124mm x 164mm
10 pages
The nine commandments laid down for the correct usage of 'His Master's Voice' products on a 1920s 78rpm record sleeve, among them: 'Don't wind spring too tightly'; 'Don't interfere with regulator unless an adjustment is necessary'; 'Avoid the slightest injury to the Mica Diaphragm', and – gnomically if now inscrutably – 'Keep leathers which operate on governor friction plate well oiled', have a hectoring quality which stems from the manner of their listing, beginning with Rule Number 1: 'Disuse is bad for the machine'. To me, this implied a proto-Orwellian world (though in time and vision it comes closer to the Moloch Machine and its ceaselessly gaping maw in Fritz Lang's Metropolis), with the suggestion of people as slaves to the requirements of machinery finding ready parallels in our own time. The short texts within, taking their cue from the 'His Master's Voice' commandments, are leashed neither to time nor place, making the writing hard to pin down, though its tone is characterised by a mournful, impotent regret at possibilities lost. The booklet is thin and deliberately cheap-looking, implying scarcity of resources in tawdry, mass-produced times.
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