A first edition of Frankenstein sent to George Gordon, Lord Byron by Percy Bysshe Shelley and signed by Mary Shelley “To Lord Byron from the author” has sold to a private collector for an undisclosed sum. The good news is that the collector, who prefers to remain anonymous, will allow the book to go on public display in the UK. No exhibits have been organized as of yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

Here’s a little something special about the find to tide you over as you wait. Peter Harrington, the rare book shop which sold the volume, had a private preview on September 25th which included a presentation about the writing of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s relationship with Lord Byron and the discovery of this signed copy. As I so often yearn for and so rarely find, they had the foresight and kindness to film the event and post a video of its highlights.

It starts with a brief introduction by Adam Douglas, Peter Harrington’s specialist in early books. This discovery is clearly the highlight of his career. “I’ve been a book seller for nearly 25 years now and I’ve been privileged to handle a number of exciting books, but I can honestly say that this copy of Frankenstein is the single most thrilling item that’s ever passed across my desk.” It didn’t occur to him or anyone else that this copy, which was known from a letter Percy Shelley wrote to Byron from Milan on April 30th, 1818, might have survived and be squirreled away in the library of a former Labour minister.

Enter the floppy-haired youth, Sammy Jay. In November 2011, Sammy was one of a phalanx of unemployed Oxford graduates with an English degree loitering around with nothing but time on his hands. His step-grandmother Mary, the second wife of his late grandfather Douglas Jay, generously put him to work sorting through his grandfather’s papers for the archives of Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. Among other roles, Douglas Jay was President of the Board of Trade (a committee of the Privy Council which is now part of the Department of Trade and Industry headed by a Secretary rather than a President) for three years (1964-67) under the Harold Wilson government. His papers would therefore be of interest to current and future historians of the period and were going to be kept in a proper archive at his alma mater.

Sammy says he almost missed the “little volume lying at an angle in a corner on the top shelf.” Thankfully he didn’t, and when he opened the thin leather-bound book missing its spine, he saw the inscription. He and Mary Jay stared at it jaws agape, then realized they had to get it to the Bodleian stat. Justifiably paranoid that they were holding an incredible literary and historical treasure, they carried it through the streets of Oxford to the Bodleian vaults in the only secure briefcase they had: Douglas Jay’s ministerial red box.

Once it arrived at the library unmolested, the Bodleian’s Keeper of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts Richard Ovenden verified that the dedication was in Mary Shelley’s distinctive hand. The multiple loops on the capital letter “t” in “To” are famously characteristic of Mary Shelley’s handwriting. Less than a year later, the discovery was announced to the public and the book put on sale at Peter Harrington.

Miranda Seymour, a past visiting professor at Nottingham Trent University and biographer of Mary Shelley’s, introduced a fascinating glimpse into the relationship between Mary Shelley and Lord Byron. I don’t mean “relationship” in the sense of sexual relationship, although certainly at the time many, many people thought there was some form of threesome going on, whether it was Byron, Mary and her stepsister Claire Claremont, or Byron, Mary and Shelley. In fact, when the four of them (plus Doctor John Polidori) spent that famous summer of 1816 on the south shores of Lake Geneva at Villa Diodati, the English colony in Geneva on the north shores of the lake spent their time spying on the party through the new telescope at the hotel and tittering about the goings-on.

Almost a decade later, that gossip still held enough sway that it informed the private journal entry Mary Shelley wrote after she heard that Lord Byron had died in 1824. Shelley had been a widow for two years by then, and Byron had been of great help to her after Shelley’s tragic drowning off the coast of Liguria, sending her money and giving her work as a transcriber. Upon hearing the news that Byron had died of a fever (probably sepsis brought on by bleeding with non-sterile instruments) in Missolonghi, Greece while fighting for Greek independence, she wrote:

This then was the coming event that cast its shadow over my last night’s miserable thoughts. Byron too has become one of the people of the grave, that miserable conclave to which the beings I love best belong. I knew him in the bright days of youth, when neither care nor fear had visited me, before death had made me feel my mortality and when the earth was the scene of all my hopes. Can I ever forget our evening visits to Diodati, our excursions on the lake when he sang the Tyrolese hymn to freedom and his voice was harmonized with the winds and the waves? Can I forget his attentions and consolations to me during my deepest misery? Never. Beauty sat on his countenance, and power beamed from his eye. His faults being for the most part weakness induced one readily to pardon them. Albe, the dear, capricious, fascinating Albe has left this desert world. God grant I too may die young and that region now ads that resplendent spirit whom I loved.

(Albe was Mary’s nickname for Byron, a play on his initials LB and an anagram of Elba, the island to which Napoleon was exiled in 1814. Napoleon was a hero of Byron’s, which in Regency England you can imagine only added to the scandalousness of the man, and in fact the carriage that had brought him and his entourage to Diodati in 1816 was an exact replica of Napoleon’s coach.)

Even though she wrote this in her private journal, conscious of the likelihood that someday this material might be published as correspondence and diaries of famous people so often were, she crossed out “whom I loved” at the end of the passage and replaced it with “whose departure leaves the dull earth dark as midnight.”

Byron thought highly of her as well, which is notable because he tended to treat the women in his life pretty damn badly. He respected her intellect and her calm under pressure. She was just 18 when she left England with the married Shelley. It was a huge scandal. In addition to having to deal with the disapproval of her family and the general pearl-clutching and monocle-popping of English society, Mary had to navigate Shelley’s free love philosophy which included having sex with her sister. It was a complicated relationship and Byron admired how coolly she handled herself.

That regard he held her in is underscored by the survival of Byron’s copy of Frankenstein. He didn’t carry everything he owned to Greece with him. Many books and other possessions were shed in various places on the way and were dispersed locally. Yet, Frankenstein was in the shipment of five boxes of books sent to John Murray, publisher and executor of Byron’s estate, from Greece after Byron’s death. It was one of the select group of books he wanted to keep by his side.

Surrealist master Salvador Dalí was a jack of many trades. He produced prodigious numbers of paintings, prints, and sculptures and collaborated with artists as diverse as fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli (go lobster dress!) and film director Alfred Hitchcock (Dalí designed the dream sequence in Spellbound). In 1927 he designed the sets for Spanish poet Federico García Lorca’s play Mariana Pineda. It would be 12 years before he followed up on his foray into theatrical design, and this time it would be a ballet of his own conception.

Léonide Massine was the principal choreographer of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and its principal male dancer after Nijinsky left in 1919. In the wake of Diaghilev’s death in 1929, the Ballets Russes disbanded. Impresarios, dancers and choreographers formed a number of spin-off companies in the ensuing years. Massine danced and choreographed for one of them (the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, later renamed the Original Ballet Russe), then co-founded a spin-off of the spin-off (also named the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, hence the former company’s name change).

When Europe and most of the rest of the world plunged into war, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo toured the US and continued to do so throughout World War II. The company brought the rigor and beauty of Russian ballet to small towns all over the country that had never seen it before, leaving an indelible mark in the cultural landscape. You might recognize Léonide Massine as the choreographer and dance teacher Grischa Ljubov who plays the Shoemaker in the ballet-within-a-ballet-movie of the 1948 classic The Red Shoes.

Salvador Dalí and his wife Gala fled France and settled in New York City in the summer of 1940, but he had already spent much of the year before there. His Dream of Venus exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows had caused something of a sensation with its sleeping nude Venus in a grotto and models swimming topless in an aquarium wearing long-sleeved bathing suits with the chest cut out, lobster girdles and rubber fish tails. The Internet Archive has an awesome video of the exhibit in full color (the Dalí portion starts 51 seconds in).

That year, 1939, is also when Dalí and Massine first came together to work on a ballet written and designed by the Surrealist. Bacchanale was a ballet in one act using the Venusberg Bacchanale from the first act of Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser as the score. Choreographed by Léonide Massine and danced by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Bacchanale was a spectacle depicting the dreams of mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria in which stories from Greek mythology, most prominently Leda and the Swan, mingled with historical figures like famed courtesan Lola Montez. Dalí wrote the libretto and designed the sets and costumes. It premiered on November 9, 1939 at the Metropolitan Opera House.

Of course it was scandalous. The sight of dancer Nini Theilade dressed neck to toe in a nude bodysuit emerging onto the stage from the gaping hole in the chest of a gigantic bleeding swan was a particularly memorable scene. The swan was painted on a theatrical backdrop in oils, and it still survives today. I can’t find a single good picture of it which doesn’t crop out its charming perimeter of cubbyholes with skeletons and bones stuffed in them, but there are two great angled shots here and here from when it was on display in Germany a couple of years ago as part of the Against All Reason, Surrealism Paris – Prague exhibit.

Dalí’s next collaboration with Massine was a high-minded conceptual piece under the guise of a mythological theme. Set to Franz Schubert’s Great C Major Symphony, Labyrinth told the story of Theseus’ battle with the Minotaur in the labyrinth and his escape by following the ball of yarn given to him by his lover Ariadne. According to the program notes, the thread symbolizes the tradition of classicism which all romanticism seeks to find. To explore this theme properly, Dalí wanted to use a real cow’s head in the scene where Theseus defeats the Minotaur, which the dancers would cut chunks off of and eat raw on stage. It didn’t happen, much to everyone but Dalí’s relief, I’m sure.

Labyrinth debuted at the Metropolitan Opera House on October 8th, 1941 to lukewarm reviews. The general consensus was that the sets overwhelmed the dance instead of complementing it. Massine had found it difficult to choreograph the Schubert piece, and he was kind of over the dancing being just a pretext for Dalí’s latest artistic installation. The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo still included Labyrinth along with Bacchanale on their 1941-1942 tour, though.

Massine kept one of Dalí’s backdrops from that tour, the one where Theseus struggles mightily with the Minotaur. Years later in the mid-1970s, he found it while cleaning his house and offered it to Nicolas Petrov, a Yugoslavian choreographer and former protégé of Massine’s who had founded the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre. Petrov had PBT patron Leon Falk Jr. buy the curtain for the company. It was kept at the PBT for a while, then Falk gifted the backdrop to the Carnegie Museum of Art with the understanding that the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre could use it at will.

The museum has kept it in storage since they got it in October of 1976, unfurling it once in 2009 to document its condition, but although there was discussion at the time about how to display it for the public to enjoy, nothing came of it, possibly because its massive dimensions (26 1/2 feet high by 49 1/2 feet wide) make it 10 feet higher than the museum’s tallest gallery.

Theseus and the Minotaur is not currently on view at the museum, nor does it seem likely that its immense dynamism and dramatic impact will ever be allowed to grace the stage again, which is why it’s particularly awesome that another huge and dramatic backdrop from the Dalí-Massine oeuvre will tread the boards once more.

This one is from their third and final collaboration, a 1944 ballet called Mad Tristan, inspired by Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and set to music from the opera. In Dalí’s vision of the chivalric tale, Tristan is so maddened by love for Isolde that he sees her as the praying mantis devouring her mate. This mantis theme is something he had fiddled with before as part of his obsession with a pastoral painting by Jean-François Millet called The Angelus which Dalí saw as a depiction of mourning (he was convinced the couple are praying over the coffin of their dead child rather than a basket of potatoes) and of voracious sexuality.

In the Surrealist magazine Minotaure, Dalí had published an article entitled “Paranoiac-Critical Interpretation of the Obsessive Image of The Angelus by Millet” which he subtitled: “A Chance Encounter of an Umbrella and a Sewing Machine on a Dissecting Table.” From the 1933 article:

The umbrella… as a result of its flagrant and well-known phenomenon of erection, would be none other than the masculine figure in the Angelus which in the picture, as the reader will do me the favor of remembering, is trying to hide his state of erection — and thereby merely succeeding in drawing attention to it — by the shameful and compromising position of his own hat. Opposite him, the sewing machine … goes so far as to invoke the mortal and cannibal virtue of her sewing needle, the activity of which may be identified with that super fine perforation of the praying mantis “emptying” her male.

That same year he made Atavism at Twilight, now in the Kuntsmuseum in Bern, Switzerland, one of several paintings inspired by this view of Millet’s work. Notice the red wheelbarrow sticking out of the skull-headed man’s back and the red pitchfork sticking out of the praying mantis lady’s back. When designing the backdrop for the final climactic scene of Mad Tristan, Dalí employed that same imagery and then some, creating a large scale Surreal vision of the wounded and bleeding Tristan wearing a dandelion beret while ants walk all over a crack in his shoulder. Across from him is Isolde, reaching towards him with both hands. A wheelbarrow grows out of her back and two red crutches frame the scene on either side. The backdrop is 30 feet high and 50 feet wide.

Massine had left the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo due to conflicts with its manager and was by then working with Ballet International, a company founded by Chilean impresario and great eccentric Marquis George de Cuevas. Mad Tristan premiered at the International Theatre in New York City on December 15th, 1944.

Somehow, the backdrop from the final scene made its way to the Metropolitan Opera where it was found in prop storage in 2009. It was sold to an anonymous art collection in Switzerland for an undisclosed sum. There it was restored and there it has remained until now, but instead of falling down the collection rabbit hole, this great piece which has not been seen in public since 1944 is going to get a whole new life in a context that Dalí would surely have appreciated. It’s going to be a backdrop again for an acrobatic circus troupe.

The collectors contacted Daniele Finzi Pasca of the Company Finzi Pasca, who has directed shows for Cirque du Soleil and the closing ceremonies of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, asking him if he could think of a cool way to use the backdrop.

“The foundation decided not to put it in a museum,” Finzi Pasca said in an interview. “They preferred to come back with this backdrop to the theatre. We accepted the challenge and the invitation because it was exactly an element that can help us tell the story that we had in mind.”

The show, which had begun taking shape as an exploration of dreams and ideas, soon coalesced around the Dali.

“Working with the surrealism gives the opportunity to explore these ideas, to create strange images,” Finzi Pasca said of the show, which will include the company’s trademark acrobatics as well as theatre. “It’s a show that’s funny and also moving and touching.”

The new show, La Verita, will debut at Montreal’s Théâtre Maisonneuve on January 17th, 2013. After that, it will tour South America and Europe. There are no tour dates scheduled in the United States as of yet.

I was just talking about German Enigma encoding machines in the entry about the carrier pigeon, and now I stumble on an exceptionally beautiful one going up for auction at the Bonhams Scientific Instruments sale on November 14th. Sadly, I’m just short the estimated sale price of $64,000-$96,000, but I haven’t gone through my couch cushions yet so fingers crossed.

The Enigma enciphering machine was invented in 1918 by German engineer Arthur Scherbius. It’s an electrical Morse code-producing device that used a keyboard, lamps and a set of rotors to scramble text, then send it out to a receiving machine whose rotors were set in the exact same way as the originating machine’s. Enigma first went into production in the early 1920s and was used for civilian applications such as the protection of corporate trade secrets and private communications. The German Navy began to use it in 1926, but it was the German Army who in 1928 created a version distinctly different from the commercial machine. They added a plugboard which swapped pairs of letters and vastly increased the encipherment permutations.

Presciently aware of the increasing likelihood of war when the Nazis became the majority party in German parliament in 1932, the Polish Cipher Bureau set to work on breaking Enigma. French Military Intelligence provided them with some important information that they had received from a German spy, most notably two sheets of Enigma daily key settings which laid out the calibration to decrypt messages for the day: the wheel order, rotor position, how the plugs should be connected to the plugboard, etc. Mathematician Marian Rejewski was then able to figure out how the military version of the Enigma encoder scrambled text. With this understanding of the logic of the mechanism, the Bureau was able to create replicas of Enigma machines that they could then use to intercept and decode German messages using daily keys which in early days came from spies and later were sorted out by permutation catalogs.

Germany kept adding layers of difficulty to the machines, and even though the Polish Cipher Bureau was incredibly successful in fighting back against each change, by late 1938 all the additional work of deciphering required to crack the code cost more than the Bureau had to spend. As war loomed ever closer in 1939, Poland decided to share their intelligence on the care and feeding of Enigma with France and Britain. In July of 1939, cryptologists from all three countries met outside of Warsaw and the Polish Cipher Bureau let the Allied experts in on everything they knew about breaking Enigma.

Gustave Bertrand, head of the cipher department of French Intelligence, was at the conference. With him was British Secret Agent Biffy Dunderdale whose mission, which he chose to accept, was to smuggle two Polish Engima replicas out of the country and to safety. He was successful, getting the machines first to Paris and then to London where the Bletchley Park codebreakers could now, just five weeks before the outbreak of war, pick up where the Polish Cipher Bureau had left off, which was as huge a morale boost as it was an information boost.

Even though Germany added more rotors, more plugs, reflectors and other elements of difficulty as the war progressed, making decryption a consistently huge challenge, by 1945 the Allies were able to break Enigma codes in less than 24 hours. The Germans continued to use Enigma, not realizing that their coded messages were now crackable, or rather, not believing that the Allies would go to the immense trouble of, say, inventing Colossus computers that could calculate the daily key settings from trillions of possible combinations no matter how many rotors, plugs and variables Germany added.

Approximately 100,000 Engima machines were produced in Germany during the war. They were captured during Allied campaigns and occasionally taken as under-the-table souvenirs by troops. There are Enigma machines in museums and private collections around the world. The breaking of Enigma at Bletchley Park remained a government secret in Britain until 1974, after which the nerdy drama appeal of the story piqued interest in the machines. Nowadays when they come up for auction they’re expensive and highly desirable to collectors. Most of them have reproduction parts, though, or bits that were taken from one disabled machine to make another machine complete.

The three-rotor 1941 model going on the auction block next week is entirely original and entirely intact. It is still in working condition with its original operating instructions affixed to the inside lid. There’s even a spare bulb rack complete with original bulbs, not to mention that it’s a damn good-looking piece of machinery with its striking white-on-black keyboard, ebonite-mounted plugboard and oak case with the remains of the factory wax seal and writing still visible on the lid.

The church San Pedro Apóstol was built by Jesuits between 1570 and 1606 over an Inca huaca (sacred space) in the small Andean town of Andahuaylillas 25 miles west of Cuzco. The Jesuits had arrived in Peru just two years earlier, in 1568, and promptly set about building churches and schools in the remote towns and villages which the Dominicans who arrived with Pizarro in 1532 had not reached. San Pedro Apóstol’s architecture is simple: one nave, one apse, a bell tower, in whitewashed adobe and brick construction with a modest mural on the second story balcony of the facade. On the inside, however, is an explosion of colors, saints, allegories, gold leaf, geometric and floral designs which has rightfully earned it the nickname “the Sistine Chapel of the Andes.” There’s hardly an unpainted spot to be found from baseboard to ceiling.

Although Jesuits oversaw the decoration of the church, over the decades they enlisted teams of highly skilled indigenous artists and some famous names like Diego Quispe Tito, scion of a noble Inca family and leader of the Cuzco School of painting, and the Lima-born, Italian-taught Spanish painter Luis de Reaño who in 1629 created murals at the entrance depicting the roads to Heaven and Hell in Mannerist style. Canvases of scenes from the life of St. Peter are set in massive gold frames along the walls.

Amidst the traditional Christian figures of saints, the walls and ceilings of the church are filled with Andean flowers, fruits and geometric patterns. The coffered ceiling of the vestry was not made out of wood, but through a pre-Columbian technique called kur-kur that combines cane, straw, and mud to create a surface that looks like wooden beams in some angles and like undulating fabric in others. The kur-kur ceiling was then painted in the polychrome Mudéjar style, an Iberian style heavily influenced by Islamic art in use in Spain between the 12th and 16th centuries. The indigenous artists altered it to include far more florals along with the Moorish rhombuses, squares and large central octagonal star in keeping with the local aesthetic. Gold leaf accent pieces are scattered throughout.

Elements of traditional religion are also included in the decor, a syncretism that played an evangelical role since it smoothed over the rough edges of conversion from the Inca deities to the Christian ones. For example, in the Annunciation painted above the choir the Holy Spirit is represented not by a dove, but by a hole in the wall. The sun shining through the hole brings the Inca sun god Inti into the church even as it symbolizes the third divine person of the Trinity.

The sun also tops the massive Baroque altarpiece, carved out of cedar then covered with gold leaf, silver leaf and Venetian mirrors. A solar disc with a painting of the lamb of Christ in the middle and 19 gold rays shining out from it rules over all the painted and carved saints and the carved Assumption of Mary.

The imagery isn’t the only mechanism of conversion. Above the font in the baptistery is the “puerta de las cinco lenguas” (door of the five languages), which is inscribed with phrase, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” translated into five languages: Latin, Spanish, Quechua, Aymara and Puquina. The last of these is extinct today, which makes the inscription even more historically significant.

The many beauties of San Pedro Apóstol de Andahuaylillas were in serious danger from earthquake damage, previous restorations that had replaced some of the adobe and caused structural problems, roof leaks, insect infestation and bat poop. In 2008, the World Monuments Fund stepped into the breach, planning and funding a three-year conservation plan to restore the walls, roof, ceiling and paintings. It was a big job, and the restorers took no short cuts.

A large part of the project focused on stabilizing the murals, all of which are executed in tempera, with conservators opting to use organic materials such as liquids extracted from cacti over man-made chemicals. Many murals had been repainted and conservators had to strip back multiple layers of paint to reach the original composition. For example, the “Road to Hell” mural had four layers that needed to be removed. Instead of trying to recreate lost murals, conservators chose to paint these areas in a light colour. A 17th-century ceramic pot containing ochre pigment and a wooden brush was discovered during the project, shedding further light on the materials used by the artists.

When it came to the decorative ceiling made from mud and straw—traditional construction materials in the region—conservators were faced with removing one metric tonne of bat droppings in the space between the roof and the ceiling. Structural issues such as the replacement of adobe were also addressed, and all of the church’s sculptures, as well as its altars, received treatment.

As of October 31st, the conservation of the church is complete. Thinking ahead, the WMF also created a youth heritage program to involve the community’s young people in the process, teaching them valuable skills while motivating them to protect their town’s cultural heritage in the future.

Separate from the WMF project, the two organs in the church were also restored. The Gospel Organ (also known as the Saint Cecilia organ) and the Epistle Organ (also known as the King David organ) were installed between 1606 and 1610 and later decorated by Luis de Reaño. In desperately poor condition after centuries of exposure to moisture, they were both restored by the French organ builder Jean François Dupont in 2007 and 2008 and are now back in full fettle. Here they are being played by Norberto Broggini in videos which happily include some great shots of the glorious ceiling and walls.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDpdgb3Ggdo&w=430]

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