Lotte Reiniger's Shadow Animation

Lotte was interested in silhouettes and paper cutting from the time she was a child. And she developed that interest into animation, and created the first feature-length animated film in the 1920s.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy Wilson. This is an
exciting time because Tracy is here visiting, so she's right
across the table from me. It is uh stupendous a day.

(00:23):
But it's also an exciting time because I have just
launched a new podcast, Yes you have called Drawn the
Story of Animation, which is about animation. It is. And
to prep for that podcast, producer Nolan I actually traveled
all over the place and interviewed dozens and dozens of
people in the animation industry. And one of the interviews
we did that was just an utter delight was Rebecca Sugar,

(00:45):
who is the creator of Stephen Universe. I would like
to say it does not surprise me at all that
this was an utter delight. It was an absolute delight.
And she is such a thoughtful and interesting speaker in
her approach to animation, and frankly, the world is so
unique and really like thoughtful doesn't give it enough credit,
but she thinks about everything and and what it means

(01:07):
and it's import in this really beautiful way. But one
of the people that she mentioned really loving uh in
terms of the work that they had done, was a
lot of Reineger, who was an animator in Germany at
the turn of the twentieth century, and a lot of
Reineger is one of those people that if you're into animation,
you have heard of her, probably because she did some

(01:29):
really important stuff and was really a trailblazer. But if
you are not into animation, you may have never heard
of her unless she saw that Google doodle a couple
of years ago and went who is that? That was
a lot of Reineger, and so I thought she merited
her own episode. Yes, you may have seen bits of
her work or things that were influenced by her work.

(01:49):
Her work is influential. Yeah, there's actually a segment in
an episode of Stephen Universe that's based on her work. Um,
there are a couple of other cartoons where you see
things that show up because her is unique and it
was pretty much the same her entire career, so it's
really easy to spot. Would people have been influenced by it?
So A Lotta was born Charlotte Elizabeth eleanor Reineger at

(02:14):
the very end of the nineteenth century on June two eight.
She was born in Berlin, Charlottenburg, Germany, and Latta was
interested in silhouettes and paper cutting from the time she
was a child. She was also interested in other forms
of art. She painted, and she put on plays there
in the house. She really loved acting, but her scissors

(02:35):
and her skill with them would dominate her life, and
to her this was just something she did almost unconsciously.
Paper Cutting as a folk art was really common in
Germany and Switzerland at the time that had been influenced
largely by Asian artwork that had had been kind of
migrated its way over, and that interest was very big
in Europe, but a lot of really excelled at it

(02:58):
in a way that seemed effortless. She wrote an article
for Site and Sound magazine in nineteen thirty six, and
here's something that she wrote in it quote, I will
attempt to answer the questions which I am nearly always
asked by people who watch me making the silhouettes. Firstly,
how on earth did you get the idea? And secondly,
how do they move? And why are your hands not

(03:19):
seen on screen? The answer to the first is to
be found in the short and simple history of my
own life. I never had the feeling that my silhouette
cutting was an idea. It so happened that I could
always do it quite easily, as you will see from
what follows. I could cut silhouettes almost as soon as
I could manage to hold a pair of scissors. I
could paint, too, and read and recite. But these things

(03:40):
did not surprise anyone very much. But everybody was astonished
about the scissor cuts, which seemed a more unusual accomplishment.
She also, as she said, enjoyed theater. She loved to
put on plays well into her teens, and at one
point she described her early attempts at staging plays in
her family's small apartment to be a little bit chaotic
because of the space limitations. But then when she started

(04:02):
using her silhouettes to put on shows, it solved the problem.
She made herself a small, little shadow theater, and she staged,
among other things, Shakespearean plays in it. When she started
studying under theatrical director Max Reinhardt, she would watch all
of the plays staged the theater from the wings, and
she was so taken by the actors as seen from

(04:22):
that angle, that she started cutting out silhouettes of them
while she was watching the shows. Yeah, it really was
like one of those things. It's almost how if you
know someone who knits and they take their knitting everywhere
with them and they'll have full, long conversations with you
while they're banging out a sweater or something very similar.
She would just show the scissors in paper all the time.
She started her professional career at seventeen, when she was

(04:45):
hired first to make title cards and then to make
rat puppets for director Paul Wegener. Those rats were for
the film The Pied Piper of Hamlin, and Lata had
actually been inspired to study with Reinhardt at the theater
after attending a lecture by Veganer, which had led her
to the decision to become an actress. Veganer had first
tried to use live rats for his film, but they

(05:05):
panicked and they ran everywhere except after the actor playing
the Pied Piper, which was what the action called for,
so he ended up having to go with the wooden rats,
which had earlier been dismissed as two time consuming a possibility.
Veganer had seen lots of backstage at the theater run
by Max Reinhardt cutting out all her silhouettes, and he
was fascinated. He liked the way she captured movement with

(05:28):
paper and shadow, and he introduced her to other artists
who were experimenting with the new medium of animation, and
just as Veganaer had been fascinated with her cutouts, she
was fascinated with animation, later writing quote, this was in
and the work was so interesting that from that time
I have rarely done anything else. Within a couple of years,

(05:50):
Lata was making her own films, short silhouette animations for
the German Institute of Cultural Research, and this institute was
set up to be sort of a workshop where art
and science came together in film, and it quickly became
identified as a nexus of experimental animation. So during those
early years, a lot of love of fairy tales was
a prime force in this creative endeavor. Her short animation

(06:15):
of the Cinderella story is captivating. It starts out with
the animator's hands visible as silhouettes, shows Cinderella being cut
from the paper to come to life, almost as if
by magic. Yeah. I was watching this last night while
I was prepping, and my husband did not know what
I was watching because I had my headphones on. It's silent,

(06:35):
but there's often you'll see it posted with music attached
to it. And I was really squirming in my seat
and he's like, what are you watching? And I was
like a lot of rhydingers Cinderella, and he's like, is
it that troubling? And I was like, somehow with cutout
silhouette paper, the cutting of the foot is really upsetting,
Like she really like animates, like the spurty blood in silhouette,

(06:58):
and it was it could just be that I was
in one of those states where I was highly susceptible
to just being kind of squeamish about something. But it's
oddly affecting to see it in that stark contrast. And uh.
One of the people in that art scene that Paul
Wegener introduced Lat too was art historian Carl Koch, who

(07:19):
was also part of that experimental animation group, and the
pair meant in nineteen nineteen, and they were married two
years later on December six. Lata's and Carl's relationship was
not just romantic. They were artistic partners, and they worked
together for the rest of their lives on projects. Lata
tended to lead artistically, while Carl helmed the technical aspects

(07:42):
of their various projects and handled the camera. In the
nineteen twenties, they spent their time between Berlin and Paris,
and they were deep in the modern art scene. German
playwright and poet bertle Brecht was a friend and an
avid supporter. Film director and author Genre Noir was also
a friend and a fan, and aimless Lee said of
Ranneger quote she was born with magic hands. Logic described

(08:06):
Berlin at the time as a place of quote many
artists who went their own ways and tried out new
methods of animating films. Yeah, it was a you know,
that unique time that throughout Europe. I think in any
of the the sort of capital cities, there was a
lot of really interesting art happening post World War One,
as everybody was kind of recovering just the way people

(08:26):
looked at the world had changed, and so a lot
of really interesting stuff was going on. Louis Hagen was
another important male figure in lat of his early career.
Hagen was a banker and he saw a lot of potential,
so much so that he provided his own money for
her to make her first feature links film. He had
also invested in film stock at the time, and this

(08:48):
was actually a pretty unique situation because a lot of
it wasn't pitching a movie to potential investors or anything.
It wasn't like she said, I have a project and
I need someone to fund it. She, like other animators,
was making short fun film holmes at the institute, and
at the time, a ten minute animated film was considered long.
So when Haggins saw a lot of work and then

(09:08):
asked if it was possible to make a feature length
shadow puppet film, it was pretty visionary on his part,
although the initial reaction amongst most people was that it
was a terrifying idea because it was so ambitious, but Reineger,
Coke and the collaborators that they worked with all thought
that it was a really interesting idea and they decided
to try it. The Adventures of Prince Ahmed was the result,

(09:32):
and this is often cited by film historians as the
first animated feature film, rather than Snow White, which is
the what is the popular memory was the first one.
Prince Ahmed pre dates Disney's Snow White by more than
a decade. Rinneger's film came out in while Disney's movie
had in nineteen thirty seven release. Whether that discrepancy is

(09:54):
due to lat of film being a smaller release or
simply having been foreign and not picked up by English
language press is not quite clear. Yeah, we'll talk about
it in a bit, but getting distribution for that film
was a little bit tricky, so that may have been
part of it. But also I think some of it
too is just the Disney engine of pr right, Like,
at that point in the nineteen thirties, Disney was well known.

(10:15):
He had already done uh you know, Steamboat Willie of
course had happened, and he was already seen in the
the US as really a visionary and so I think
that story kind of balloon and poor Lotta's work was
left a little behind in terms of historical record. As
an asside to we should mention that there's actually a
third film that sometimes comes up as a possible precursor

(10:37):
to both Snow White and Prince Ahmed as a feature
length animation, and that is a project completed in Argentina
in nineteen seventeen titled l Apostole, and that film was
created by Carrie no Christianity. And the problem in this
one lies with verification because While Apostole may have been
the first animated feature no Prince of the film survived,

(11:00):
so we don't actually know whether it was long enough
to qualify for the title of first feature length animated film.
We're going to talk more about the specifics of the
Adventures of Prince Ahmed and how it was made, but
first we are going to pause for a sponsor break.

(11:20):
The production of Prince Ahmed ran from three to nineteen
twenty six. Lata and her husband Carl thought that in
telling the story as a silhouette puppet animation, they could
side step the technical problems that a live action version
of that story would have, and they could be completely
creative in ways that would be stifled if they had
to worry about things like sets and actors and logistics.

(11:42):
Having a huge crew. For example, a demon made with
a paper cutout wouldn't have any of the limitations that
it would in live action. You would have to worry
about a costume looking right or realistic or any of that.
And similarly, carpets and horses could take flight without a
massive crew wrangling pulleys or worrying about act or safety.
The film wasn't made by the two of them alone.

(12:04):
They had a small team to help them bring the
idea to life. The banker Lewis Hoggins set up an
attic studio for the production. Carl Coke was the producer
a lot it designed, cut and animated all the characters
in the backgrounds. Walter Ruthman headed up the special effects,
creating the fire and the volcanoes and the magic, and
bert Old Bartosh created a sea storm for the film.

(12:26):
Alexander Karden and Walter Turk worked as a lot as
assistants since her workload was huge. Yeah, and these were
all people that had come out of that same institute
of animation, so they were all friends and collaborators. And
they had decided early on in the process that they
were going to adapt something from the Arabian Nights, and
the idea was that they wanted to select a subject,

(12:47):
like we were saying above, that could only be done
with the unique opportunities that a lot of shadow puppets offered.
The team poured over the stories of the Arabian Nights
and they finally selected the elements that they felt would
be perfect for the film style all that they were planning,
and then they assembled those elements into a narrative, and
they refined their script until Prince Ahmed's story emerged. As

(13:08):
the team worked, they were really breaking new ground. The
idea of making a film and stop motion with silhouette
puppets was new. They didn't even know if what they
were filming would work until they had the film developed,
so they were working with the knowledge that all the
effort they were putting in could turn out to be
for nothing. Yeah. Nowadays, when people do stop action, they
can look right back at it on digital and be like, oh, yeah,

(13:30):
that one. We're oh no, we gotta go back. It
would be like, we spent twelve hours setting up these
shots and we have garbage to be a heartbreaking way
to do it. Uh. And this was understandably really stressful
for a lot of Uh. There's a lot of talk
anytime you're reading about the production of Prince Achmed about
how she was having some very real anxiety issues. Uh.
In addition to the unknown nature of the outcome, the

(13:53):
attic studio that Hoggins set up wasn't very tall. To
set up the camera that they needed over the animation table,
they had to use all of the vertical space available,
which meant that Lata was working on a table that
was very close to the floor, and she actually sat
on a seat that had been removed from a car
and then placed directly on the floor as she assembled shots.

(14:14):
And this vertical setup was actually very similar but again
predated the multiplane camera that was used by Disney. When
snow White was being made in the nineteen thirties, volfgang
Zeller was brought in to compose the film's music, and
because film didn't have embedded sound at this point, it
was common for an orchestra to play live with the films.
Frames with hues for the conductor were spliced into the

(14:36):
Adventures of Prince Ahmed so that the score would perfectly
compliment the visuals on screen. Yeah, the score was one
of those things that latter really felt like would provide
this support structure for the story and like just give
it that extra little something that it might need. Uh.
So that was also a kind of ambitious thing in
the midst of of early animation. And we'll talk a

(15:00):
little bit about how she timed that out in a bit. Uh.
There were also some financial challenges that happened during the
three years of film production. So the German economy, of
course was still in a period of recovery from the
First World War, and as the country tried to stabilize,
there were times when it looked like there Backer Hoggin
might not be able to keep paying for the project,
but he was really quite dedicated, even though in the

(15:22):
end he never made any money off of this investment,
but he really was devoted to it. Uh And they
managed to pull it through, and they finished the film
in early nine six. But even once the film was complete,
there was a problem. No theaters wanted to show it.
They felt like it didn't look like a complete film.
So Lata and her team took on a second project,

(15:43):
which was staging a premiere in May of nineteen six.
The Adventures of Prince Akhmed was shown in a small
theater in northern Berlin, who had delighted audience, with Wolfgang
Zeller himself conducting the orchestra. Yeah, apparently he got his
usual orchestra to kind of do it is a favorite
him because they were basically doing this whole thing on

(16:03):
a shoe string. And this screening turned out to be
something of a comedy of errors. Reineger and her team
had asked everyone they knew in the arts community to
invite people, and they did that, and they were thinking, oh,
it's on a Sunday afternoon, no one's going to come anyway,
But it turned up that way. More people showed up
than they were expecting. Uh, so many so that there
were arguments among attendees as they tried to jockey for seats,

(16:26):
and then the lens on the projector broke, so Carl
Koch went on a desperate adventure to try to get
a replacement, even though it was Sunday afternoon and all
the shops were closed. He did manage to, however, because
of the kindness of a shopkeeper. Police arrived and they
tried to shut the whole event down because the theater
was overcrowded. And then towards the end when all of
that was taken care of, a lot of spotted smoke

(16:48):
and she thought that the nitrate film had actually caught fire,
but thankfully that smoke was coming from damp sacks that
had been stacked on a heating vent who was more
of a steam situation, although probably not terribly safe, uh,
but it was at least not the film catching on
fire and did not cause a panic and stampede of
people running out of the overcrowded theater exactly. She was
very aware that the theater was not a safe place

(17:10):
for something like that to happen. Despite all this mayhem, though,
the film went on and this was basically an invitation screening,
similar to a press event that might happen today. The
reviews from the press were spectacular. Yeah. The next day
was like a lot of Reineger celebration day in the press.
Basically uh. Two months later there was another screening in Paris,

(17:30):
which was also a complete success, and this is considered
the film's public opening. It had a three month run
in one theater and then it transferred to another in Paris,
where it ran for six more months. It gained a
worldwide audience, but it still was not shown in a
lot of own country of Germany. Eventually, a German distributor
bought it and touted it as a detective film. It

(17:50):
was super weird, but eventually a lot of Reineger took
legal action. She got all the rights to the film
back and she was able to show it as intended
in her home country. After the success of the Prince
Ahmed project, she turned to the story of doctor Doolittle
and his animals for her next project. That film, which
has a thirty three minute runtime, debuted in nine. In

(18:12):
nine she started a new film, this time a live
action feature called The Pursuit of Happiness. Her live action
directorial debut fell victim to poor industry timing. Between the
start of the film and the finish of it, sound
had become part of the cinema experience, so what had
started out as a silent film was delayed so that
the dialogue could be dubbed in. But that effort went

(18:34):
really poorly and the film was a failure. After that,
she made no more live action or feature linked films
and went back to animated shorts for good. And as
is the case with anyone that we talked about from
this time period in Europe, the rise of the Nazi
Party in Germany impacted Reineger's life and work. In the
nineteen thirties, she and Carl left Germany, in her words

(18:55):
quote because I didn't like this whole Hitler thing, and
because I had many Jewish friends whom I was no
longer allowed to call friends. In the process, a number
of her films were lost. She had left the Negatives behind.
From ninety five until the end of World War Two,
Lata and Carl lived a pretty nomadic life. They moved
from country to country, but continued their work and continued

(19:16):
collaborating with other artists. In nineteen forty three they did
return for a while to Germany. Lata's mother was ill
and the couple took care of her during that time.
When the war ended, they became British citizens, and once
they settled north of London, they opened a production studio
called Primrose Production. Their business partner in this venture was
Louis Haggan Jr. That was the son of the banker

(19:39):
who had funded the adventures of Prince Akman. And this
was a really prolific time. Lata was incredibly productive in
her new home and she was churning out about a
half dozen shorts a year initially. Carl died in nineteen
sixty three and Latta was devastated. She started to become
more withdrawn. She stopped working. She made no films for

(20:00):
the next decade as she mourned her partner in life
and art. But Lata did not stay hidden away forever.
And when we come back, we'll talk about her later
career a little bit. But first we're going to pause
for a word from one of our sponsors. In nineteen nine,
Lata Reineger returned to Germany for the first time since

(20:22):
the end of the war. Her work was being rediscovered
by art enthusiasts in Germany and abroad, and this really
led to a second phase of her career. She started
a lecture tour in the United States. She loved sharing
her knowledge with others and wasn't the least bit secretive
about telling people exactly how her films were made. Then
doing so, she got excited about making animation again, and

(20:43):
in these talks, Reineger described her animation technique is very simple.
She would literally use words like primitive and caveman to
describe her art. Even though the look of her animation
feels almost enchanted. It does not seem primitive at all,
even to modern eyes, I don't think, But to her
it was just a matter of following a series of
simple steps, time consuming, but she didn't think there was

(21:05):
anything special or difficult or unique about it. This reminds
me of um like people who are really really skilled
and adept at at something will be like, oh it's easy,
you just do this, and well, okay, that's easy. For you,
not not for me so much so. She would cut
her figures out of black cardboard and thin lead. The

(21:27):
lead sections helped keep the paper flat. She would attach
the limbs that hinged joints with the pieces wired together,
and then to create the appearance of movement, the figures
were photographed frame by frame with minuscule shifts in their
postures and limbs, so that once the frames were run
all in succession, the characters moved. This is really similar
to how stop motion animation is filmed, but in this

(21:48):
case the puppets are flat. The backgrounds were also cut paper,
but that medium was transparent and it was layered to
create shifts in the background. Yeah. Her background stuff is
so beautiful and looks so rich to me. I just
encourage everybody to watch one of hers, because you'll be like,
that's just paper, but it's really really beautiful. Uh. The

(22:12):
figures and the backgrounds were laid on a backlit glass
table for photography, and the light was bright enough that
it caused the various wires at the hinges to disappear
visually as the frames were captured one by one on
that camera suspended over the glass table to keep the
soundtrack and the animation timed together. A lot of would
time out the soundtrack and then use that to calculate

(22:33):
how many frames she needed for the piece of music
she was using. Based on needing twenty four frames per second.
That calculation was basically a shot list as she advanced
her camera one frame at a time to create the
finished piece of film. There are an estimated three hundred
thousand shots in Prince Ahmed. Yeah, to elaborate on that

(22:53):
just a little. So basically she'd be like, Okay, this
music has four bars of this melody that I want
to use, and it takes six seconds or whatever. I'm
probably coming up with completely, um ridiculous numbers here. But
then she would multiply that by twenty four and realized
that was the number of frames she had for you know,

(23:13):
this character to gesture carefully or whatever. And so she
would break that down and be like, that means I
have to move it this much per frame to complete
this gesture. Painstaking, yes, but to her it's so simple. Um.
There's a really good video that I will include in
the show notes that was made kind of later in
her life that is a little bit of a mind

(23:34):
blower because it is that thing where it's somebody that
goes it's so easy. And you see her cutting out
a character from one of her things, and she draws
like the most rudimentary guide before she starts cutting, but
then she's really fast and then it comes out and
it looks perfect. And then she doesn't even draw, and
she's cutting legs and arms and putting it all together,

(23:56):
and she looks like a sorceress lady. None of it
seems like a human could be assembling at all and
bringing it to life that quickly. Again, she was clearly
very skilled. That's why people marveled at her as a child. Um.
But in nineteen eighty Lata made her last film, which
was called The Four Seasons, and then she died on
June nineteenth, nineteen eighty one, after having just turned eight two.

(24:18):
In recent years, the Adventures of Prince Ahmed has been restored,
and this was a painstaking process. As we mentioned earlier,
there was no existing camera negative, and none of the
original German prince survived either, but the British Film Institute
has a colored nitrate positive of the film with English intertitles.
Those are those transition cards that appear in older films,

(24:39):
so the audience can read exposition or character dialogue. This
is a copy that is meant to be used to
create other copies because of its delicate nature and because
they realized this is an important thing to preserve. Three
black and white duplicate negatives were made of that nitrate
positive over the years, one in five, one in nineteen
fifty five, one in nine nine, and then those copies

(25:02):
were the ones that were used to make additional copies
of the film. But the nitrate positive has been well
cared for and it is in relatively good shape. So
the film restoration lab Lamagine Retrovata and Bologna, Italy was
able to make a new, beautiful copy of the film
with the score intact. It was released by Milestone Films
in two thousand one, and it's now available on home video,

(25:25):
so a whole new audience can discover this very haunting
and imaginative artistry. Yeah, it's a really fun movie. UM,
I have not been able to find it. I saw
a note somewhere that someone said it had been on
film Struck if you are a subscriber to that service
and you want to see it, but I can't find
it on film struck currently, so I don't know if
it's like Netflix whereas something's come and go, but it

(25:47):
is available on home video if you are looking for it.
Over the course of her six decade career, a lot
of Reineger made almost sixty films. This is a woman
working in animation directing all of these films, which is
why people call her a trailblazer. But she was so
under the radar, I think, particularly for us uh consumers,

(26:09):
that nobody realized like, oh, there's this amazing woman director
making all of these really beautiful films. About twenty of
her films, unfortunately have been lost. And I wanted to
close out with a quote from Lata because it illustrates
just how much she preferred to focus on the art
of her work rather than analyzing the technical aspects of it, which,
as you recall we mentioned, it's kind of more her

(26:29):
husband Carl's domain. And this quote is again from that
nineteen six essay that she wrote for Site and Sound magazine.
She wrote, quote, there remains a good deal to say
about the artistic problems of this type of film, about
its future, and about its value. But I am content
to leave these matters to those people whose profession it
is to bother about such problems. I feel that I

(26:51):
do better to concentrate on making the films, and on
making as many as my good luck allows. Each new
film raises new problems and questions, and I can own
hope to live long enough to do justice to them all.
Kind of a good encapsulation of what she was like,
because she really was like especially I think after she
you know, did not enjoy trying to get into live

(27:14):
action film and had some some other problems where she
was like, look, this is when I'm good at and
I really like doing it, and I think it's magical
and fun, and I'm gonna keep going forever. Just an
interesting Very few people have that kind of career focus
their entire lives. Yeah, she had a lot of beautiful stuff.
I encourage people, Like I said, we'll include that that

(27:35):
video of her, a link to that video in our
show notes. But if you just tootle around the web
looking at her work, you'll be delighted and probably in
a rabbit hole for a long time. So I apologize
for any time you may lose, but it's well spent
in my opinion. You have some listener mail for us
It is from our listener, Patty, and she says greetings
and salutations. I listened to your podcast while I met

(27:55):
my full time weekday job at Case Western Reserve University
Medical Library. She works at inter Library Loan, which I
did briefly at Oglethorpe University. Uh. You might notice that
the flip side of this letter is a page from
a photo copied article that is now ready to be
reused and recycled. I love when people do that, so
thank you. However, you might find my part time weekend

(28:17):
job far more interesting. She works as a gallery guard
at the Cleveland Museum of Art. What I do find
it interesting. I have been to that museum and I
like it keeps. I've enclosed some booklets from recent and
ongoing installations I thought you might be interested in, including
Fashionable Mourners. That's good stuff. Uh. Conserving Caravaggio, William Morris

(28:37):
Designing in Earthly Paradise, and my favorite road down one
hundred years his The Thinker is probably one of the
most parodied works of art, and the c m A
has the most notorious copy, the one that was vandalized
by an explosion in nineteen seventy. She bookmarked the page
in the book about it so that we could see
it easily. So there's plenty here to you and over
because the c m A is pretty darned awesome. Awesome,

(28:59):
I agree, And then she may it's a really interesting
um suggestion for a story. But she said us so
much material from the museum that I I love this stuff.
It is no secret. You guys have heard me wax
rapsodic about museums many times on the show for museum catalogs.
Are like, oh that's good stuff. That's one of my
favorite things on earth. So thank you, thank you, thank you, Patty,

(29:20):
because this is a delight and I feel very spoiled.
I love it. I will be kept very busy and
out of trouble hopefully for a while. With these I
saw them sitting here on the table, and because I'm
not in this studio physically with you often, it didn't
occur to me that they were something that you brought
in here for a listener mail. I was like, who

(29:41):
left all this art on the table? That's cool? Huh,
it is cool, and it was Patty. Uh So if
you would like the right, guys, you can do so
at History Podcast at House to works dot com. You
can also find us across the spectrum of social media
as Missed in History, and we are at missed in
History dot com, where you can visit us to see
all of the episodes, see and listen to all of

(30:02):
the episodes that have ever existed on the show from
the very beginning, and you can get some show notes
for any of the episodes that Tracy and I have
worked on together. So come and visit us and missed
in History dot com and we'll explore history together. For
more on this and thousands of other topics because it

(30:22):
how staff works dot com. M