- - - - Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
- - - - Eccentrically yours Steven Poole and John Dugdale on Banvard's Folly Saturday December 7, 2002
Banvard's Folly, by Paul Collins (Picador, £14.99) This charming compendium of history's brilliant losers pays homage, in its title, to eccentric artist John Banvard, "the most famous living painter in the world" in the 1850s. He painted a panorama representing 3,000 miles of the Mississippi on an extremely long canvas, whose total surface area was three square miles, and made about $1m from exhibiting it, wound between hand-powered cranks, in theatres. But his popularity quickly waned and he died a pauper in 1891. Among the other lost souls resurrected by Collins's researches are the eccentric adventurer who believed the entrance to a hollow earth lay at the South Pole; the scientist who discovered "N-rays", which unfortunately didn't exist; the Frenchman who believed we could all communicate using musical tones; and the man who invented the pneumatic underground railway. Visionaries, noble meddlers and deluded fantasists: let us celebrate them all. SP - - - -
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