Posters from the Dells

Another year, another family reunion in Wisconsin Dells. (Here's a previous post about that place.)

It's been a tourist attraction for as long as there have been such things in the U.S., but particularly since the post-World War II boom. On this trip, I saw what I think are some original silk-screened posters from that era, hanging in the entry to a diner in Lake Delton.

I've omitted the objectionable one(s). 

(Apologies for the glints of light.)

Most of these attractions are still in business. Biblical Gardens and Fort Dells are the exceptions (thank goodness).

I love the exuberant illustration style and color use of these mid-century posters. I'm not sure if its nostalgia, given my age, or if they really are charming.

Beasts of Beaver Meadow

I didn't look into the second Pennsylvania environment builder very much before deciding to go there during my recent road trip. (Daughter Number Three-Point-One scouted it from Atlas Obscura.) 

The Beasts of Beaver Meadow is farther off the beaten path than Bill Rhodes People Friendly Garden, at least from the direction we were coming from. We traveled some almost-back roads to get there, and I wasn't sure online maps would stay with us the whole way across rural Pennsyvania, so I had written the directions down. They consisted of "this road becomes this road becomes this road," then "turn right then left at this area that's very hard to describe"... and things like that. So I'm glad the 5G or LTE or whatever it was stayed in place well enough the whole time.

We eventually found the Beasts at 1200 Berwick Street in Beaver Meadows. They aren't that far east of I-81 and the substantial city of Hazelton, but we were coming from the southeast, so the shortest way was a circuitous route. 

The Beasts were created by Joseph Woitko from concrete, glass, car parts, and other found objects, so classic outsider artist work. 

 

Woitko is clearly into the macabre. There were a lot of skulls:

Other pieces were hard to interpret (not that that's necessary):

He frequently use some molds with his concrete work, like the ice cream cones in this castle (I think it's a castle):

I didn't see everything (for instance, I just realized there are pieces on the opposite side of the road). 

As a side note, the steep and somewhat treacherous slope on the woodsy, shaded ground was covered with sweet woodruff, a nice ground cover. I've never seen so much of it on one location:

All in all, it has more of a haunted feel — whether that's intentional or not.

 

 

Bill Rhodes People Friendly Garden

Pennsylvania, it turns out, is not the greatest place to look for environment-builders and outsider artists, according to Roadside America and Atlas Obscura. There are finds in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas, sure, but in the rest of the state, not so much. 

There are two exceptions in the parts of the state I covered on this trip, though. The best one was Bill Rhodes People Friendly Garden, which I found on Atlas Obscura. It's at 248 S. 3rd Street in the nice small town of Hamburg, which is about two-thirds of the way from Harrisburg to Allentown (north of Reading). 

Rhodes is a welder, but he's also a sculptor who — unlike many reusers of found objects — paints his objects. 

The garden seen from above on one of the balconies.

Rhodes also renovated the historic duplex adjacent into several unique apartments, one of which he occupies. He's been there 25 years. The gardens are a fun accompaniment. 

My photos don't do the place and the work justice. 

This is the Seussian head of the blue-bodied creature in the next photo.

The water wheel was spinning, of course.

A warthog?

I asked Bill where he gets his found materials. He said he goes to a lot of flea markets, generally. He has two intermodal containers, one stacked atop the other, set up behind the building, that are full of pieces waiting to be used. 

Overall, it's quite an enterprise, and if you're anywhere nearby, it's worth going out of your way to visit.

Pics from the Road

I'm just back from my summer road trip, this time to a family reunion in the Delaware Water Gap in southeastern Pennsylvania. I'll have a few more posts about particulars, but here are some random photos from along the way. 

First the ones from the road: 

This is where the onions come from.

This attorney billboard, seen along the highways around Chicagoland, is very confusing to people from Minnesota, where pond hockey is a real sport in the winter. 

Apologies for the fuzziness of this image but I had to zoom in with my not-so-great phone camera. It was nice of that deer to cross right in its crossing spot, wasn't it? 

As seen in the elevator of one of the roadside hotels we stayed in.

While at the family reunion, I got a chance to touch the Appalachian Trail... which, believe it or not given the part of the country I am from, I have never done before. 

There was Japanese knotweed everywhere, including next to the entrance to the Appalachian Trail and along every stream. Ick.

In the historic (and unrenovated) municipal building in my home town, I was amused by the sign on the inside of the second-floor door, which was standing open and had a rubber door-stop keeping it that way.

This was the first time I have seen any of the new all-electric U.S.P.S. vehicles in person. Very exciting! I don't know if there are any of them in Minnesota or not. 

Just before we left for home, I stopped at a yard sale and saw this concrete evil baby... or proto gnome... or what is it? It was $5.00. I did not buy it. I have a feeling I will regret that for a long time.
 

Punches from Half a Millennium Ago

I found out from kottke.org that the Cambridge University library has digitized the Baskerville punches, sizes 16 and 60. 

Check that link out for an explanation of how punches were (and still can be) used to create metal type, and a little bit about who John Baskerville was. 

Here's a basic diagram to give you an idea of how the process works:


What Kottke's post made me think of was the time I visited the Plantin Moretus Museum in Antwerp, where I saw some of Claude Garamond's punches. That's Garamond as in Garamond…the typeface. But more importantly, his eponymous typeface was one of the earliest examples of what came to be called old style type, which dominated the printed word in the West for about 250 years, and continues in popularity to this day.

Plantin Moretus itself is a piece of history, since it was a working print shop for about 450 years. This is the hall on the second floor where the punches are housed in the wooden and glass cases along the walls:

 

The museum has two sizes of Garamond punches, a large set in the Greek alphabet and a text size in the Roman alphabet. 

 
My close-up photo of the small punches is not great, but imagine these letters are not much larger than if you broke off the end of a pencil tip. (If you want to see good photos of small punches, check out Cambridge's 16 point Baskerville photos. I think this Garamond type is several points smaller than that.) 

These are matrices that were stamped into copper from the larger Greek punches.

  
Each matrix would be placed into one half of a two-piece mold like one of these, the parts of which could slide to create different widths. Hot metal would be poured into the hole at the end of the mold to make the body of each piece of type.

If you click to zoom in on this picture, you can see that the Greek at left was printed from the composed type shown in the center. And that the accompanying Roman type below is in Dutch (or probably Flemish, my apologies). 

I remember at the time I took these photos, seven and a half years ago, I had that weird reaction I get to seeing talismanic historical objects. Today's Kottke post brought that feeling back, and I can't believe I never posted about this at the time.