![brisk snowman brisk snowman](http://www.memoryade.com/uploads/1653698502nestea.jpg)
Barentz died trying to find the Northeast Passage to China and engravings in the sixteenth century atlas Petits Voyages by the famous de Bry brothers depicted snowmen in the distance. I had heard about this 200-yr old wall portrait and made a point of making a detour down the street named after the important explorer. Always looking for any snowman references, we spotted a very old mural of Willem Barentz on the outskirts of the city. When I finished that arduous task a week later, I hitched a ride to Amsterdam from an old friend who also acted as my Dutch translator. I focused on the approximately 15,000 woodcuts, drawings, etchings, and paintings created before 1750 that were categorized as winterscapes, examining each suspicious mound of snow with a magnifying glass, hoping to spot anything that resembled a snowman. Here I would stay until I finished combing the catalog and double-checking the results of the art experts who helped me the past four years looking for the earliest depictions of snowmen (or snowballs.or snowball fights-where there's smoke.). The Royal Library's collection of images of all kinds is the world's largest at 8 million+.
![brisk snowman brisk snowman](https://images.freshop.com/00083900001384/e26dfb5e1c345b8e44162d85ead39b84_large.png)
Days later, an express train took me to The Royal Library at The Hague, where I met with experts to discuss the particulars of the first printed snowman which was in their possession in that historic, illuminated manuscript. This I knew through Professor Pleij in his amazing but unknown Dutch book, De sneeuwpoppen van 1511. My journey to the University of Amsterdam would take up what was left of the winter and began by flying to Belgium and then a trolley to the Brussels city museum, where old maps charted the politically charged and pornographic snowmen made throughout the town in The Miracle of 1511. I needed his blessing before I went to press with my shocking tale as to the first documented snowman, a story that would upset many and put me immediately under attack. Prior to turning in my manuscript I would have to meet face-to-face with the renown Professor Herman Pleij.
![brisk snowman brisk snowman](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/fc/69/12/fc691292e48677f2b8bc6d6225f62e39--two-year-olds-snowman-crafts.jpg)
But of course all of this culminates to solving the true mystery, The First Snowman. These were punctuated by benchmarks for this frozen Forrest Gump such as The Revolution of 1870, The Snow Angel of 1856, The Massacre of 1690 and The Two Ball Theory. The chapter titles were to include The White Trash Years, The Hollywood Years: “There's No Business Like Snow Business,” The Dean Martin Years: Drunken Debauchery and Other Misgivings, The Era of Snowman Deconstructionism, Belgian Expressionism and Early Classism in Snow Sculpture. Initially, my editors fought my plan to have the book going back in time (history books are always in chorological order) but I wanted my book to unfold as a mystery with the solution appearing at the end. I had divided my findings into logical, sequential chapters. But definitely a gentleman scholar and confidant I have become the leading authority on the subject of the snowman.
#BRISK SNOWMAN MOVIE#
Like that pivotal moment in the movie Castaway when we see these words appear on the screen and cut back to see a buff Tom Hanks now a seasoned desert island virtuoso, I too was now a different person. Now I was taking it up a notch, scouring museums and libraries in the oldest cities, examining their public and private art collections, gaining access to archived journals (which meant putting on the payroll Columbia history students who knew Dutch and Old English to translate leads in old diaries and chronicles I suspected mentioned snowmen or contained snowman-like activities.). Instead I enlisted the help of leading historians from around the world who seemed genuinely excited take a break from whatever it was they were working on to be invited on my own personal Holy Grail. Books on winter pastimes were vague on the subject and wrongly concluded when snowman-making become popular. But as I suspected, these artifacts were of the modern snowman, the results of folk-art gone bad and while it resulted in a pretty cool (and enormous) snowman collection, I had no real clues to the snowman's past. I started in the more obvious places, places I would consider the archaeological digs of kitsch snowmen long discarded the flea markets and ebay.