I’ve been re-reading one of my favorites books, Guillotine: Its Legend and Lore, by Daniel Gerould. It’s awesome fascinating. The book is a good secondary / social historical resource, busting with cool guillotine facts. Like for example, scientists tried lots of times over the years to see if people’s heads retained sentience after they’d been beheaded. In 1880, a Dr. Dassy de Lignieres actually had blood from a living animal pumped into the severed head of an exceuted criminal. Pretty cool. Anyhow, seeing as I’m a big fan of Gothic Guillotine Romanticism and the French Revolution and the Grand Guignol, I have been hankering after a real guillotine for a long time.
So I asked my father, who does terrific woodwork, if he’d build me one. He said no. Well, honestly, I didn’t think he’d say yes, for heaven’s sake, but I had to ask. So then I did a google search to see if there might be any close-to-life-size guillotine repros for sale online. So far, no soap. ( I did manage to order a tiny miniature one from some company called Tuscany or Tuscan or something, so at least that’s coming in 10 business days or less. )
But I really want a bigger guillotine. It would definitely have to be scaled down to fit in my apartment. And it would look very cool. I have an old department store mannequin that I could dress up like Madame du Barry, and put her neck in the little lunette and whoa, baby, that’s some conversation piece.
Definitely mindless and pointless stuff. I just had to get this off my chest.
scr4: thank you!! Man, that’s perfect. I never even considered magic props. You rock! I saved the page to my favorites. I have one of those “landmark” birthdays coming up in a couple of months, and I may ask for that guillotine. At “just under 7 feet”, it will fit my 8-foot apartment ceiling.
And leechbabe: I be female, and I’m harmless, I swear! Just ask all of my amputees… er… friends!
Oh, she’ll want that…it comes in very handy in the kitchen, for slicing melons and cabbages and things like that. Ever had Guillotine Cole Slaw? Mmmmmmm!
I built a small one sort of based on cheesechucker. It’ll throw a golf ball about 20 feet, but I think it’ll do much better than that. There’s a lot of tinkering and tuning that can be done still.
Forbin: that’s cool, that trebuchet. Is that like a small catapult? You could have a great time with one of those, for sure. Man, if only my dad weren’t so uptight! I mean, the world already has more than enough Adirondack chairs…
Uke… yeah, ain’t that book the berries? You wouldn’t happen to have read The Thrill of Fear by Walter Kendrick or The History of Hell by Alice K. Turner, would you? Also cool books.
Anyhow, the next time I visit my folks I’m gonna ask for the guillotine. Thanks again, scr4. I’ll keep you all posted!
Yeah, I bought The Thrill of Fear back when it came out, ten years or so ago…it’s pretty good, but not my favorite book on the history of horror fiction/drama/cinema/whatever. THAT would probably be David Punter’s The Literature of Terror.
I’m not familiar with The History of Hell. Is that the same Alice Turner who was, until recently, the fiction editor at Playboy magazine? I KNOW her!
Uke… yeah, it’s she, at least according to the bio info on the book jacket. Well, ain’t it a small world!! Tell her for me that I love that book, and all of the plates as well. The bibliography rocks, too. I really do love that book. Again, it’s mostly a secondary resource type book (and in my opinion they’re more fun to read than primary resources like nasty ole Latin translations of medieval texts anyhow), but really interesting and informative in its own right. I bought it maybe eight or ten years ago.
Incidentally, I’ll check out The Literature of Terror and see if I can get it. I reckon even if it’s out of print, I could get it online. This is cool.
Thanks for the links RalfCoder.
I’ve seen all those before though. Not trying to seem ungrateful, but I really think the trebuchet is neat, and have been dreaming about building one for a long time. I thought I might recruit my old girlfriend’s son as my “partner in crime”. He likes to visit me in my shop and build things with me.
:smack:
Hey! Another thing dumb me hasn’t made the time for.
MD is too far Creaky, or I’d work out a way for us to do both projects in a production run. I’ve always sort of wanted to build the trebuchet as a cooperative project with some woodworker buddies. (tradesman/artisans bonding, and all that…) A Guillotine would be a splendid companion piece to build alongside the trebuchet.
Try to imagine how a lumber or hardware sales rep would react upon entering the shop with production well along on those two monstrous instruments of the Devil!
I’ve been looking at trebuchet plans for about a month, ever since I caught a show on PBS about building a big 'un. Now if I can just get around to actually putting one together…
.50 cal lead balls (think black powder rifles) should make excellent ammo for a table-top model, eh?
Forbin… that would be great, wouldn’t it just? I thank you for your kind thought, anyhow! Heh… now you’ve got the image firmly in my mind of people coming into your shop and gaping at a trebuchet and a guillotine under construction! Maybe you could give them a tour wearing excecutioner’s gear…
Anyhow,If you ever do build the trebuchet or guillotine or both, let me know and e-mail me pics if you feel like it.
( Grapefruit sized rocks, excellent! Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, “Home Security System”! )
Green Bean… that is a great name for a hairdresser’s!! I’ve got this great mental image of the lady who sits at the front desk at the place cackling as she checks you in, knitting your name into a huge afghan. All the stylists would be wearing Jacobin bonnets and scruffy, bloodied clothes. Instead of books full of hairdos to choose from, there’d be human heads stuck on pikes displaying a variety of fabulous coiffures…!
You sound as if you’ve been lucky, though, Citizeness, to have escaped unscathed so far…
Mudshark: now that is cool. Too bad they wussed out on the blade!
I just wanted to clarify that that wasn’t a specific recommendation - I know nothing about that company. It just came up on my web site and I posted it as an example. If you shop around you can probably find a better deal.
Just a little bit O’ history a “catapult” in medievel times was something that shot a bolt (like a huge spear) not what we call a catapult. A “Springald” (SP???) was what we call a catapult.
AND (IF I remember correctly) “catapult” was a generic term for what we would call artillery.
BTW, although Gunpowder is considered to be what killed the castle (feudal) age, it is actually the Trebuchet that ended it, it was MUCH more acurate than the cannons of the age.
