helmaspergerische notariatsinstrument

Decided in the plaintiff’s favour on this day in 1455 in the refectory (the dining room or fratery, a frat house and documented by the above notary public’s seal) of the Barefooted Friars of Mainz, financier and angel-investor Johann Fust (*1400 – †1466) won his legal suit filed against Johannes Gutenberg allowing him to seize the first printing of the Forty-Two Line Bible as compensation for the credit extended Gutenberg that the inventor had yet to repay, despite protestation and promises to remit the loan with interest.

After this unamicable split (the underlying motivation is unclear with some characterising Fust as a genuine patron and others as an opportunist out to steal Gutenberg’s insight all along) with assistant and technician Petrus Schöffer joining Fust to move merchandise and organise the next undertaking, the latter went to Paris to sell his books as manuscripts to members of the royal court—whom were pleased to acquire such handsome, high-quality volumes. Possibly conflating Fust with the near contemporary itinerant alchemist and astrologer Johann Georg Faust (subject and inspiration of Christopher Marlowe’s and Goethe’s tragedies), we get the source of the story that the printers were thought to be in league with the devil and that only witchcraft could have produced so many editions so quickly and uniformly and to escape punishment, Fust had to admit that they were printed and disclose the technology. While the advance may have been disruptive for the Paris book market, the Church welcomed such innovations for spreading the gospel, though literacy and the medium could be harnessed by all and sundry

rebel rabbit

Though we suspected the well-circulated GIF to be an authentic one if not a bit too on the nose for comfort, we had forgotten the context and provenance of the gag of Bugs Bunny sawing off the State of Florida and so appreciated the review of the motivation to carve out a higher bounty on his hide and proclaim himself a domestic terrorist. Though these critical antics which included in the same cartoon physically accosting senators, returning the island of Manhattan to the Native Americans, making the Panama Canal free for all trade traffic as well as unmooring the peninsula, shouting “South America, take it away!,” might have only been well-received for the brief window in which the short appeared (1949) when the United States was not at war with someone between World War II and Korea. Perhaps rectifying some of what had gone so astray with the nation wouldn’t be appreciated until just under a half-century later the decision to suspend the Florida recount and punt democracy to a supreme court packed with justices appointed by a political dynasty. More at MEL magazine—including the cartoon in its entirety—at the link above. Rascally rabbit indeed!

séance on a wet afternoon

Via our faithful chronicler, Doctor Caligari’s Cabinet, we are reminded that on this day—shared with many other anniversaries of the good and the great—that the 1964 British drama from film-maker Bryan Forbes starring co-producer Baron Richard Attenborough (*1923 – †2014) and Kim Stanley (*1925 – †2001), who plays a medium haunted and obligated by the memory of the couple’s departed son and concocts a plan to establish her reputation as a psychic, involving the kidnapping and ransom of the daughter of a wealthy family and lead authorities to the child through revealed through her second-sight. Stanley’s character cows her husband (Attenborough, originally the screenplay called for a same-sex couple played by Tom Courtenay and Alec Guinness but the latter turned down the role, prompting a major rewrite) into committing the crime, which goes awry.

iww

Marking the heightening tension between labour organisers and business executives in the US Pacific Northwest, the Everett Massacre, occurring on this day in 1916 was a flashpoint exacerbated by global economic downturn and depression. Dock workers and police authorities in service of commercial interests regularly clashed, and International Workers of the World members (Wobblies) were dispatched in support of an ongoing strike action and rally for fairer pay and better working conditions. In response to these demonstrations, local business enlisted and deputised more union-busting mercenaries and the standoff quickly escalated into armed conflict. The culpability for the violence and death is yet questioned, with some describing the IWW as a radicalised and over-zealous advocate for political and labour reform with other scholars and historians placing the blame on agents provocateur and corporate spies infiltrating the union members’ ranks.

catholicon

First printed in Tréguier on this day in 1499 with editions and updates continuing until 2001, the trilingual dictionary—in the sense of universal—was the sum of the complied entries by Bretagne priest Jehan Lagadeuc over the course of some three decades and was the first published Breton and French dictionary, referent to Latin. Sometimes referred to as the Catholicon Armoricum (from the Roman name for Brittany) to distinguish it from the Catholicon Anglicum—an English-Latin grammar—that emerged around the same time.

i got an empty cup, pour me some more

Though attested in the figurative sense to mean unfinished business since the nineteenth century and associated with the deleterious effects of too much drink until the turn of the century and the end of the Victorian-era, it is most likely a folk etymology, a backronym popularised by George Orwell’s 1933 Down and Out in Paris and London that the term hangover came from the Two Penny Hangover—the reported practise of draping the homeless or inmates of workhouses over a length of rope for a night’s accommodations. More comfortable that sitting up for the night or on resting on the cold stone floor—also maximising the number of lodgers per square metre—but the rope was promptly severed at five in the morning with the unfortunates tumbling and sent on their way. Language check and illustration both bookendings from Messy Nessy’s latest peripatetic internet journeys—with a lot more to discover at the link above.

if i concentrate hard enough, i can move things

Released in theatres in the US on this day in 1976, horror writer Stephen King only received twenty-five hundred dollars for the rights to his novel (in epistolary form)—which seems rather nominal compared to the thirty-four-million-dollar box office performance for North America and the continued franchise—but at age twenty-six was happy to receive that sort of recognition for his first published book, first in print just two years prior. Directed by Brian De Palma, the award-winning film stars Sissy Spacek as a shy high school student with a religiously fanatical mother who is relentlessly tormented by her peers—unaware of her telekinetic abilities.

novemberrevolution

Lasting through August of the following year, the revolt and uprising that replaced the constitutional monarchy of Germany and led to the formation of the Weimar Republic (previously) began on this day in 1918 with the Kiel Mutiny (Kieler Matrosenaufstand)—a revolt by a sailors of the High Seas Fleet (Hochseeflotte) demoralised and defeated in a senseless war. As testament to the social tensions between the general population and the aristocracy, the movement expanded outward from the city’s port and garnered some forty thousand rebels from the ranks of the navy, the army (which had been dispatched to quell the situation) and sympathetic workers, and by the next day they were able to organise articulate fourteen points outlying the revolutionary council’s demands: resolutions and demands including the release of political prisoners, complete freedom of the press, halting censorship of correspondence, cessation of fighting and the separation of being on- and off-duty (see also). By the seventh, King Ludwig III of Bavaria capitulated and announced the creation of a People’s Free State, and by the ninth, Emperor Wilhelm II abdicated and went into exile and Germany was declared a republic.