A few unphilosophical items picked up over the last month or so: The end of info-mac It’s odd to be nostalgic about something that was once part of the radiant future. Adam Engst, the author of Tidbits, a long-running newsletter on the Macintosh and th…

Some backstory: I put that collection together in the two days leading up to the birth of our son in early November. Needless to say, I’ve been a bit distracted since.

On to Ramelli. He was a pretty cool cat. I’ve put together a brief biography if anyone’s interested. His revolving bookcase was an anomaly of the Diverse et Artificiose Machine. Most of the work is devoted to means of raising water and siege machinery.

There are a lot of odd little factoids swirling around Ramelli’s life. Although he lived and worked in France, he was Italian. He hailed from a town on the shores of Lake Lugano. Twelve years after his birth, Domenico Fontana was born in a town on the other side of the lake. Fontana later became an architect in Rome and is famous for his Della Transportatione dell Obelisco, the only machine book to appear in Galileo’s library.

Ramelli was also involved in a notorious case of plagiarism. It’s likely that Ambroise Bachot–his assistant–stole many of Ramelli’s fortification designs and published them in his own works: Le Timon and Le Gouvernail. Despite this gaff, Bachot lauded Ramelli as the “new Archimedes.” I’m not sure if this epithet was a compliment given the Aristotelian bent of the time!

On the issue of Ramelli’s book wheel, I only know of one that was definitely built. Dante Gnudi–husband of Martha Teach Gnudi–built a model in the late 1960s. For details, see:

Hall, Bert S. “A Revolving Bookcase by Agostino Ramelli.” Technology and Culture 11(1970): 389-400.

But you could also try something like george[at]deregulo.com - he may well have some kind of email set up for the domain.