Curious Men
Whenever a mysterious oddity arrived readers knew there was one man they could rely on to be at the scene: Frank Buckland.
Rescued after a century of obscurity, and culled from thousands of pages of Buckland’s eyewitness accounts, is the latest volume in Paul Collins’s Collins Library series.
The following is an excerpt from the book, which brings back to life 18 tales from one of the most curious men of all.
Immediately on viewing it, I exclaimed, “Julia Pastrana!”
“Yes, sir,” said the proprietor of the exhibition; “it is Julia Pastrana.”
Banvard’s Folly: Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck
In the 1850s John Banvard was “the most famous living painter,” whose “moving panoramas,” huge paintings in which various elements moved, attracted hordes of spectators. His Three Mile Painting, depicting the sights along the entire Mississippi River, was seen by 250,000 people in six months. But Banvard’s Folly was what neighbors called the Windsor Castle replica he built before losing almost everything in a promotional war with P. T. Barnum. The other great, now obscure overreachers Collins sketches include Alfred E. Beach, who secretly built a working model of a pneumatic transit system under the streets of New York; Psalmanazar, the eighteenth-century European fraud who billed himself as an abductee from Formosa, which he misidentified as Japan; and saccharine versifier Martin Farquar Tupper, ranked with Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning by adoring readers, including Queen Victoria. Just goes to show what poor judges of lasting worth the contemporaries of a “genius” can be. An excellent assemblage of ingenious creators and their fascinating and bizarre brainchildren.
