- - - - COPYRIGHT 2001 American Library Association
- - - - Banvard's Folly: Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck. (Review)_(book review) Mike Tribby. Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 American Library Association Collins, Paul. Banvard's Folly: Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck. May 2001. 272p. illus. St. Martin's/Picador, $25 (0-312-26886-6). 920.02. 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. Named Works: Banvard's Folly: Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck (Book) - Reviews Copyright Booklist Article A75563449 - - - -
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