eBook - ePub
Banvard's Folly
Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck
- 320 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
About this book
"Hearteningly strangeĀ .Ā .Ā . Collins exhumes little-known figures [and] recounts their perversely inspiring battles against the more logical ways of the world." ā
The Onion
Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luckāor perhaps some combination of them allāleapt straight from life into thankless obscurity.
Collins brings them back to glorious life. John Banvard was an artist whose colossal panoramic canvasses (one behemoth depiction of the entire eastern shore of the Mississippi River was simply known as "The Three Mile Painting") made him the richest and most famous artist of his dayĀ .Ā .Ā . before he decided to go head to head with P. T. Barnum. RenĆ© Blondot was a distinguished French physicist whose celebrated discovery of a new form of radiation, called the N-Ray, went terribly awry. At the tender age of seventeen, William Henry Ireland signed "William Shakespeare" to a book and launched a short but meteoric career as a forger of undiscovered works by the Bardāuntil he pushed his luck too far.
Collins' love for what he calls the "forgotten ephemera of genius" give his portraits of these figures and the other ten men and women in Banvard's Folly sympathetic depth and poignant relevance. Their effect is not to make us sneer or revel in schadenfreude; here are no cautionary tales. Rather, here are brief introductionsāacts of excavation and reclamationāto people whom history may have forgotten, but whom now we cannot.
Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luckāor perhaps some combination of them allāleapt straight from life into thankless obscurity.
Collins brings them back to glorious life. John Banvard was an artist whose colossal panoramic canvasses (one behemoth depiction of the entire eastern shore of the Mississippi River was simply known as "The Three Mile Painting") made him the richest and most famous artist of his dayĀ .Ā .Ā . before he decided to go head to head with P. T. Barnum. RenĆ© Blondot was a distinguished French physicist whose celebrated discovery of a new form of radiation, called the N-Ray, went terribly awry. At the tender age of seventeen, William Henry Ireland signed "William Shakespeare" to a book and launched a short but meteoric career as a forger of undiscovered works by the Bardāuntil he pushed his luck too far.
Collins' love for what he calls the "forgotten ephemera of genius" give his portraits of these figures and the other ten men and women in Banvard's Folly sympathetic depth and poignant relevance. Their effect is not to make us sneer or revel in schadenfreude; here are no cautionary tales. Rather, here are brief introductionsāacts of excavation and reclamationāto people whom history may have forgotten, but whom now we cannot.
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Yes, you can access Banvard's Folly by Paul Collins in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Historical Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Notice
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- Epigraph
- 1. Banvardās Folly
- 2. The Clever Dullard
- 3. Symmes Hole
- 4. The Man with N-Ray Eyes
- 5. If Only Geniuses Knew How To Scheme
- 6. 22,000 Seedlings
- 7. Psalmanazar
- 8. The Pneumatic Underground
- 9. He Being Dead Yet Speaketh Not
- 10. A Dedicated Amateur of Fashion
- 11. A. J. Pleasontonās Blue Light Special
- 12. Your Glorious Day is Coming
- 13. Walking on the Rings of Saturn
- Further Readings
- Acknowledgments
- Praise for Banvardās Folly
- About the Author
- Copyright