fotoLibrarian

Iain Gray from the Folly Fellowship recommended I watched a film called The Straight Story, about a man who rides across three US states on a lawnmower to visit his sick brother. He said it's a great film and there's a fantastic grotto in it. I said, yeah, I know, I wrote about it. Iain very politely said he couldn't find it in my book, Architectural Follies in America (John Wiley, 1996, ISBN 0-471-14362-6. Plug).

Meh, I thought.

I recorded the film and watched it last night. It is just as he described it. The grotto appears for about one second, looking exactly as I remembered it (from photos — I hadn't actually been there).

So I looked it up in my book. I looked under Iowa, and — it wasn't there! Panic! Am I going mad? The whole of Iowa was missing — and I had been under strict instructions to include every state.

The text of the book wasn't on my computer.

I wrote most of the book in 1994, on an old Apple Macintosh IIsi. I’ve had 5 Macs since then. I hunted through a drawer full of abandoned floppy disks and found one labelled AMERICAN FOLLIES. I then unearthed an elderly USB floppy disk drive, and wonder of wonders there was the text for the book! I hunted for Iowa, and found it in the index: IOWA, West Bend, Grotto of the Redemption.

Turn to page 155, and this is what you should have read:

… the undergrowth, still with pleas and prayers and offerings lying on its unofficial altar. There is also Pelletier’s gravestone, but his body was removed long ago.

In the upper Midwest the Virgin Mary battles with Paul Bunyan as the most popular icon for naive artists. The Revd. Paul Dobberstein built a rather substantial Grotto of the Redemption, taking up an entire block in West Bend, Ia. in 1912 in architectural homage to the Holy Mother, and his style made the wintry farmers who visited feel “I could do that.” They did. North from Minnesota came an eruption of Bunyania. From Brainerd to Bemidji, via Akely, Hackensack and Kelliher giant statues of Bunyan and his ox and his ax and his sweetheart bestride the landscape. There are also Bunyans to be found in Alburquerque, New M. and Klamath, Calif. No Popery for our Bunyan. Over in Dickeyville, Wis., lumberjack Fred Smith worked for fifteen years from 1949 to create a grotto and a gallery of heroes such as Kit Carson, a concrete park of secular idolatry.

The most touching of all American grotto makers was James Hampton, an impoverished black man from Elloree, South Carolina …

But the entire middle paragraph was cut. I never noticed, and I've only just found out.

Maybe I should read my proofs more carefully. And apologise to Iain.

I skived off on Friday (Protestant work ethic guilt kicking in hard), because I had the chance to see the Shell Gallery at A La Ronde, a remarkable folly house in Devon. The National Trust took over the house in 1991 and the gallery was closed, for reasons that became obvious as soon as I stepped into it.

I'm not a great supporter of our current Health and Safety legislation, of which more (much more) in another blog, but even I have to confess they were right to close it.

For a start it is alarmingly narrow, probably no more than 30 inches wide, with merely a fragile and ancient wooden handrail separating you from the 36 foot sheer drop to the floor of the hall below. I’ve asked for the width of the gallery to be verified. Secondly it is almost impossible to move within the gallery without brushing against the walls and damaging or destroying the dainty and delicate decorations. I’m pleased to report that the new slim trim Gwyn managed not to wreak any havoc at all.

It is breathtaking, but because I hadn’t been up to the gallery before, I was rather critical earlier of the National Trust’s decision to provide a video tour – see what I wrote below. But having seen it, I almost prefer it to the real thing; at least it’s considerably less frightening to a vertigo sufferer like me. You can control the cameras, placed either side of the gallery; you can tilt, scan and zoom. Given time, you can explore it more throughly than you could in person. You do not have to be continually watching your step. An excellent device.

Here’s what I wrote in 1998:

Some strange houses season Devon, few stranger than the sibling houses in Exmouth, A La Ronde and Point in View. A La Ronde is famous throughout the country and a magnet for tourists; justifiably because it is astonishingly appealing. It was built in 1796 by the cousins Jane and Mary Parminter, the exterior being allegedly inspired by the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, Rome’s St. Peter and even Batalha in Portugal, the chuch so well-liked by William Beckford, although the similarities are difficult to detect. The name is in fact misleading, for the building has sixteen sides rather than being round. Inside, the octagonal hall is thurty six feet high, surrounded at the top by the Shell Gallery, a grotto with a view, and the collections and handiwork of the Parminter cousins which are remarkable in their leisured intricacy. Now it is owned by the National Trust which has decreed that the Shell Gallery is too fragile to be visited by the lumpen tourist, so instead we are treated to a video walk-through. Fame has its handicaps. Here is an opportunity for a virtual heritage recreation.
A La Ronde has only once been owned by a man (the Misses Parminter were not interested in men); it is the most feminine house we know, and if that conjures up pictures of pink frills and chintz then you seriously misunderstand our meaning. We strongly recommend a visit; there is nothing like this anywhere in Europe. Except perhaps a little way up the road, where the more inquisitive visitor will discover Point In View, built in 1811 by the Misses Parminter as a little chapel surrounded by four almshouses, strictly reserved for single women. Awkward little pointed windows rob it of the charm which typifies A La Ronde but as a curiosity it should be seen when visiting the better known house. Its name is explained by the inscription above the chapel door: ‘Some point in view we all pursue’. Indeed.
Hugh Meller has recently proposed it was possibly based on plans by John Lawder of Bath, an amateur architect, related to the Parminters. But the snag is that Mr. Lowder was only seventeen when A La Ronde was built, and the edifice that is so reminiscent of A La Ronde, dates from 1816. We propose therefore, in order to save the Misses Parminter’s reputation as female amateur architects, that it is the other way round: A La Ronde influenced Lowder’s District National School at Bath.

I’ll post what I wrote in 2006 in a little while.

When I’ve written it, that is.

Look, I know a lot about a lot of different things, but I can’t really claim to be an expert in anything, except follies, and fonts, and fotoLibra. And Mah-Jong, probably.

Yet here I am, dispensing wisdom and knowledge about scanning and directing people here and there when it struck me that the last time I’d personally scanned anything was in January.

Time to dust off the EPSON Perfection 4870 scanner. It’s a fine piece of kit, even if it’s 2 years old now, especially if you use Hamrick’s VueScan software instead of the clunky old stuff that comes with the machine.

What triggered this? Two things – my blog posting yesterday about scanning and a letter from a reader who had enjoyed “Follies Grottoes and Garden Buildings” which I wrote with my great pal Wim Meulenkamp, the eminent Dutch art historian.

The reader visited Jersey, where we had described “The Quotation House” in the following terms:
“Jersey : Quotation House, 1970s
Somewhere on the island (we visited only 25 years ago), there must be, there should still be, this bizarre house which was covered with mene tekels: all over the house itself, in the garden, on the gate posts and on the garden wall, everything covered with biblical quotations. Why do disturbed people so often rely on the Bible to broadcast their insanity? A small sample reads: 'Murderers'; 'If a man B found lying with a woman married 2 an husband, then they shal [sic] both of them die'; 'It is an honour for a man to cease from strife: but every fool will B meddling'.
We would really like to know if Quotation House still survives—drop us a line on your next visit for tax reasons.”

Well it doesn’t. Alf Le Flohic (our helpful reader) discovered that it was the home of Chalmers Bisson of Mont Cochon in Jersey. He died around 2000, and the property was erased shortly afterwards. Not a jot remains. The Societé Jersiaise didn’t have a photo.

But I did. I went to Jersey in the early 1980s to visit Paul Brown at Channel TV. It was a miserable grey day, as my photos clearly show, and I found the Quotation House and snapped off a few dull images — photographs that Yvonne dismisses as SWILL, ‘because all you can do is See What It Looks Like.’

I unearthed the photos and through some miracle the negatives were still with them. Here’s a scanning opportunity, I thought.

The 4870 comes with a variety of plastic carriers to hold differing sizes of negative and transparency. You slot in the 35mm colour negs, emulsion side down, and open Photoshop. File> Import and select the 4870 from the list of scanners available. It’s greedy to have more than two.

The software opens, and here I’ll describe EPSON’s own EPSON Scan, and the settings I input.
Mode: Professional Mode
Settings> Name > Current Setting
Document Type: Film
Film Type: Color Negative Film
Destination
Image Type: 24-bit Color
Resolution: 2400dpi
After clicking Preview, a window opens showing thumbnails of the film strip. Here one can rotate them so they are correctly positioned, essential if they are to be uploaded to fotoLibra. You can also select which pictures will be scanned. As I’ve chosen 2400dpi and I have an elderly computer, this takes a little while — in fact enough time for me to write this blog.

Eventually the images appear. I’m doing this as a refresher test, rather that for any real expectation of a sales, so I only do a cursory clean-up in Photoshop with the remarkable Healing Brush, and a touch of color balancing, contrast and levels adjustments.

Now I must add the IPTC metadata in Photoshop, because that means the data is saved with the file on fotoLibra and gives me added security of copyright.
Document Title: Quotation House.
Author: Gwyn Headley.
Description: I’ll put that in the keywords.
Description Writer: Gwyn Headley
Keywords: folly; wall; graffiti; religious mania; Christianity; biblical quotations; demolished; Jersey; Channel Islands, Chalmers Bisson, Mont Cochon, St Helier
Copyright Status: Copyrighted
Copyright Notice: ©Gwyn Headley / fotoLibra
Copyright Info URL: http://www.fotoLibra.com.

OK, that's done. I then save them as LZW compressed TIFFs. fotoLibra accepts LZW compression. The four images come out at 15.2MB, 13.9MB, 17.3MB and 16.5MB. Without LZW compression they’d have been 20.3MB, 19MB and so on. Not much of a saving, but 25% is 25%.

Then on to the fabulous fotoLibra DND upload tool to get them on to the site. Type in my username and password.

Oops. I’m not recognized.

Type them in again. Correctly this time. Good. All OK. Drag the files to the DND window and click on ‘Upload Now.’ Yes, I have broadband but it’s not the fastest broadband you can get. I’m uploading 4 files, 16, 15, 17 and 14MB, a total of 62 MB. Let’s see how long it takes. It tells me it’s rolling along at 449 kb/s but I don’t believe it for a moment.

All done. Well, I could have gone and had a cup of tea or two. 37 minutes. 320 kb/s at the end. You can set fotoLibra DND to upload lots of pictures at a go and simply go off and leave it to its own devices. Clever thing.

So I’ve found some old pictures from 1981 (a quarter of a century ago!) scanned them, helped them along a little with Photoshop and uploaded them to the site. It’s tremendously easy.

Search for “Quotation House” to see the pictures.

Rough, aren’t they?