Featured on PDR in the collection “How He Came to Life One Day”: Photographs of Snowmen (1854–1950)

What did the first snowman look like? And who rolled it? In the early 2000s, Bob Eckstein, the world’s foremost (only?) snowman historian, went searching for an icy Adam and its mittened creator, and arrived, four years later, on an illumination from a late-fourteenth century medieval book of hours: folio 78v of MS KB, KA 36, held by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague. It shows a rather sympathetic snowman, arms and legs already liquified, getting roasted “alive” over a hellish grate. Textual descriptions stretch further back. A Daoist monastic manual known as the Fengdao Kejie (early seventh century) describes religious icons “carved in ivory, cut in wood, shaped in piled-up snow”. But perhaps the snowman and the caveman knew each other too. Whenever the…