by Jon Lackman | 19 November 2010 | Books
The recent book Obelisk: A History is an unusual collaboration written by four quite different scholars including the renowned historian Anthony Grafton and published by The Burndy Library, an eccentric collection founded in 1941 in “extra space at the factory of the Burndy Corporation, a manufacturer of electrical connectors,” by Bern Dibner, an obelisk specialist who amassed the world’s largest collection of printed materials on the topic. As they note in their introduction, the obelisk has long been a subject of fascination:
The first book devoted to obelisks was published in Rome in 1589. Since then, there have been dozens, focusing on every aspect of the history of obelisks: from why they were first made, to the problem of how to move and set them up again, to their purported supernatural powers.
Their book traces the story of the fate and many meanings of obelisks across nearly forty centuries:
It is a story of technical achievement, imperial triumph, Christian piety, Christian triumphalism, egotism, scholarly brilliance, antiquarian obsessiveness, political hubris, bureaucratic indifference, bigoted nationalism, democratic self-assurance (and self-doubt), Modernist austerity, and Hollywood kitsch – in short, the history of Western civilization.
If I’d known about this book a couple months ago, I would have tried to review it together with The Totem Pole.
