Release of the Picturenary!
Every library contains a dictionary, as do many homes and bookshops. And why not? It’s a useful thing, a dictionary, for it lists and defines every last word in the English language. Should you want to know what a word means, how to pronounce it, its category or origin, you need only consult a dictionary. But what about pictures?
Finding information on pictures has always been a difficult task, made perhaps more difficult by the lack of suitable reference materials. This week that all changed as the Movable Type Printing Company announced the publication of the first eight volumes of the long-awaited Picturenary.
Once completed, the multi-volume work will show, with accompanying information and learned commentary, every picture in existence; including photographs, drawings, mosaics, etchings and napkin doodles.
While sought after by several large reference collections, pre-release sales of the Picturenary have been far below expectations. In response to the slow sales, Movable Type Printing announced that they would speed up production; releasing three volumes per year, instead of the two planned.
The currently available eight volumes contain some 43,000 pictures, all of them of aardvarks, the city of Aachen or men named Aaron. By 2012, the Picturenary should move forward into pictures of abacuses and Abbasids. . Photographs of the letter A will be saved for a special series of volumes featuring pictures of words and a series of special volumes have been set aside for abstract art which will include multitudinous interpretations of the work.
Picturenary editor Horvald Tomlinsson was taken aback when asked about the recursive problem of the Picturenary. That is, that for each image shown, a new copy of the image is created requiring another entry in the Picturenary. Tomlinsson responded that perhaps a blue-ribbon panel could study the subject, or the internet could help.
As part of the announcement, Movable Type Printing has requested that all people in the world send in copies of their snap-shots and vacation pictures, especially if they are named Abbey or have recently visited an abbey.
The Sordid History of the Picturenary!
Since the first Cro-Magnon men and women wrecked the cave walls at Lascaux with their graffiti of bison, mankind has dreamed of having a Picturenary. The first attempt to catalogue all known pictures was undertaken in 215 B.C. when Chinese Emperor Chin ordered his artisans to create ceramic miniatures of all known statuary. Unfortunately, Emperor Chin died before the project was completed and it was abandoned during the Great Han Pottery Destruction.
Thousands of miles away and hundreds of years later, the Council of Nicea planned to create a collection of all known pictures of Christ and the Disciples, to act as a companion book to the standardized Bible. This effort was abandoned when the Council of Hippo declared The Pictoriam to be a route to the sinful worship of graven images.
In the early 19th Century, Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce became the first person ever to successfully compile all known photographs when he placed the first photograph on his desk.
The Picturenary’s only modern antecedent was a DARPA project begun in 1972. The effort relied on creating a miniature black hole in the belief that an object of infinite mass would contain infinite information. Unfortunately the project was found to be missing at least 433 entries after a project scientist looked up a pair of drawings his son had made as a child and found them absent.
It wasn’t until 1998 that an ambitious young editor at Movable Type Printing, a Daniel Bester Inc. company, first began the modern Picturenary, when his collection of pornographic images won the Nobel Prize for Photography Accumulation. And the rest, is history, or more accurately, the rest is current events.