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Unknown Pleasures 31 Jan 2010

This classic image is CP1919, the Cambridge pulsar at 19 hours 19 minutes right ascension. It is the ‘dying star’ image appropriated for Unknown Pleasures. The story goes that Bernard Sumner found the image in ‘The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy’ and gave it to Peter Saville. Saville inverts the image at the last minute and the rest is history. What is interesting is the image’s biography and reproduction. Below left is from ‘The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy’. Yet it was originally printed in ‘Scientific American’ (right) in January 1971, eight years before ‘Unknown Pleasures’ and six years before the Cambridge Encyclopaedia. Somewhat tangentially, CP1919 also appears in Graphis Diagrams (1974). Another cult artefact with it’s own set of narrative tentacles.