Projects: under-sea ephemera

Kurt Wiese, A walk on the bottom of the sea, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1946

In the introduction to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1946 edition, general editor Mary Lamberton Becker asks us to imagine the tall and handsome Jules Verne, "sunburnt as a sailor" hunched over various volumes on mathematics and science at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, 1870 (www.bnf.fr). In the hushed light of the National library, "Verne began to write a new kind of novel, blending make-believe and reality as no one had done before". His imagination peopled the future with fantastic machines in never before seen landscapes, combining meticulous research and make-believe in "the perilous trip on paper" of the Nautilus submarine.


Underwater paper plant studies, Meredith Carruthers, 2008

A light network of marine plants, of that inexhaustible family of sea-weeds of which more than two thousand kinds are known, grew on the surface of the water. I saw long ribbons of fucus floating, some globular, others tuberous,; laurenciae and cladostephi of the most delicate foliage, and some rhodomenaie palmatae, resembling the fan ofa cactus. I noticed that the green plants kept nearer the top of the sea, whilst the red were at a greater depth, leaving to the black or brown hydrophytes that care of forming gardens and parterres in the remote beds of the ocean.
- Jules Verne, A walk on the bottom of the sea, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1870