Banvard's Folly

Book excerpt: “Hearteningly strange . . . Collins exhumes little-known figures [and] recounts their perversely inspiring battles against the more logical ways of the world.” —The Onion Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck—or perhaps some combination of them all—leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity. Collins brings them back to glorious life. John Banvard was an artist whose colossal panoramic canvasses (one behemoth depiction of the entire eastern shore of the Mississippi River was simply known as “The Three Mile Painting”) made him the richest and most famous artist of his day . . . before he decided to go head to head with P. T. Barnum. René Blondot was a distinguished French physicist whose celebrated discovery of a new form of radiation, called the N-Ray, went terribly awry. At the tender age of seventeen, William Henry Ireland signed “William Shakespeare” to a book and launched a short but meteoric career as a forger of undiscovered works by the Bard—until he pushed his luck too far. Collins’ love for what he calls the “forgotten ephemera of genius” give his portraits of these figures and the other ten men and women in Banvard’s Folly sympathetic depth and poignant relevance. Their effect is not to make us sneer or revel in schadenfreude; here are no cautionary tales. Rather, here are brief introductions—acts of excavation and reclamation—to people whom history may have forgotten, but whom now we cannot.