I was readingthrough some of my old notes about my digital projects and I noticed what seemed to be a curious error. The four numbers on the bottom left side of the ‘Toys’ page, 138,139,140 and 141, are not present on a microfilm version of MT, which I have. Several years ago I obtained a microfilm copy 8of Bessler documents, over 600 of them, which included all of MT, this was done via an international library loan system. This was back around 1997 or 1998, I think.
Anyway the microfilm predates the images contained in my version of MT, so I must assume that Bessler did not write them. I apologise for this mistake and I hope that not too many people did as I did, and make an ingenious explanation of these bogus figures.
There are a lot of three digit numbers scattered around the pages of MT and I think they are simply evidence that more than one file clerk tried put the papers of MT in some kind of logical order, and not Just MT, but all the other documents associated with Bessler. MT 137 is the last Bessler numbered picture, and numbering up to 141, might have included anything else.
I don’t have the date the microfilms were made but it could have been done a few years before I saw it.
The old microfilm version is on the left, with no sign of those four numbers. I published the pictures on the right above which came from the translator because they came with the translations. Many of the microfilm images were not so clear. It has recently occurred to me that there might another set of images made in 1991.
Glenn, who supplied the translations also passed on the following link which explains where his images came from. A friend of his was about to do a tour of various European cities had agreed to stop off in Kassel, to try to purchase printed copies of the woodblock images left by Bessler; the same ones I published as Maschinen Tractate (MT). The friend, Irv Thomas, wrote an account of his trip and in it he gave a full account if his search and eventual finding if the 141 prints.
Here is the link, I’ve included a short passage from his book below: http://www.irvthomas.com/Innocence%20Abroad/innocence15.html
“My English was understood at the reception desk, from where I was escorted upstairs to the manuscript room and turned over to a large, stolid-looking guardian of its treasures, who brought out for me a huge and ancient bound volume of papers, easily five inches in thickness and maybe twelve by eighteen inches in flat measure. It held hundreds of hand-written pages - separate documents of diverse size, almost all of them in German, a few in French. All equally obscure to me.
I could tell a bit by the format: many were letters, some were inventories and others appeared to be legal documents. The dates I saw ranged from 1712 to 1746 and a good many were signed by Bessler himself, but in the curious affectation of an anagram he used: Orffyreus. I couldn't immediately see how any of it could possibly be of use to Glenn. I might arrange to have a few copied and sent to him - though on what basis of selection I wasn't at all sure. Nevertheless, I stayed there patiently for an hour or more, going carefully through them page by page.
I was about done with it, hurriedly flipping pages toward the back binding, when I reached what certainly looked to be the engravings! Their smaller page format was almost tucked under the larger material above and might have thus been missed by Dr. von Mackensen. It had to be what I came for, for they counted out to 141 exactly, annotated extensively, perhaps by Bessler himself, and their subject matter was quite clearly what Glenn had expected. Hardly able to contain my excitement, I had now to deal with the language problem, to discover whether, and how, I might get copies of the entire batch.”
Irv obtained copies of the images. Did Glen use those images so carefully obtained by Irv, or did they come from a later source? If I used Glenn’s images then they date back to before 2016, but my microfilm is definitely older so we can assume that the four numbers on MT Toys page weren’t put there by Bessler.
JC
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