L.A. Noir-chitecture

I recently contributed a few cover scans to the program/guide for L.A. Noir-chitecture: A hard-boiled tour through the historic city organized by the Los Angeles Conservancy.

It included visits to the Glendale Southern Pacific Railroad Terminal (the crime scene in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity), Parva-Sed-Apta Apartments (the boarding house who’s tenants inspired characters in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust), Villa Primavera (a Spanish revival building featured in Nicolas Ray’s In a Lonely Place), the Warner Bothers Studios, and other surviving locations that defined the noir look.

Unfortunately I didn’t get the brochure in time to plug the tour (it happened back on November 9th), but apparently it was a great success, so maybe it will be repeated.

Sign up for the LA Conservancy mailing list if you want to hear about future tours and events.

Simple Hair Dryer


I found this plan for a Rube Golbergian hair dryer in the Popular Mechanics Handbook for Women, 1924, which contains some truly some truly ingenious domestic ideas. I’ll blog some of them over the next few weeks.

Happy Halloween, btw. Sorry an “asbestos lining” and exposed heating element is as scary as I can get today. I’m just not inspired.

Treasure Island Compliments of Hotel Taft NYC

While thrifting this past weekend I turned up and interesting bit of NYC ephemera. This edition of Treasure Island was published by and given gratis to guests of Hotel Taft:


It’s undated but I’m guessing late 1920s-30s from the cover design. The copyright page says
“Tarry at the Taft, New York”. The FEP carries this printed in bookplate:


and rear endpaper features an ad for “Hotel St. George Pool, Clark St., Brooklyn” where you can “Swim in Sparkling Natural Salt Water, Bask in Heathful Sun Rays” all for $1.


I found nine titles published by the Taft listed on ABE: Alice in Wonderland, Tale of Two Cities, Sherlock Holmes, Soldiers Three, Last Days of Pompeii, Scarlet Letter, The Dynamiter, The Light that Failed, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.

I wish hotel chains and publishers would try this again. It would be nice to find some reading material–besides the bible–on my hotel nightstand.

Obelisks of Erotic Gratification

I recently acquired a pile of Sexology: The Door to Sex Enlightenment, a digest started by Hugo Gernsback (of Amazing Stories fame). The magazine ran from the 1930s well into the 70s and features some fantastically batty sexual advice and history.

This diagram illustrating the “differing amounts of gratification offered by the auto-erotic act and the normal marital act” is one of my favorites.

Click on image for explanatory text.

You can easily see–through the dramatic difference in “the height and girth of the obelisk[s]”–that the “gratification derived from the auto-erotic act is only about 60% as much as that of the normal marital act”. But hey, I’m an obelisk half-full kind of guy.

Ping-pong

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }


House in Joy Court, The (Nightstand NB 1745) 1965 AUTHOR: Andrew Shaw (house pseudonym used by Lawrence Block; Donald Westlake) ARTIST: (unknown), originally uploaded by Hang Fire Books.

…and other indoor sports in the Pulp Fiction Cover Gallery.

Add me as a contact on Flickr or subscribe to my photostream and don’t miss a single cover.

Junk Boards as Mailing Protectors

If you have a sensitive constitution or are easily offended by violence against books please stop reading now.

I meant it.

Are you still here?

Okay. A while back I received a book packaged in the stripped-off boards of a junk title. I can’t remember the inspired seller who sent it to me but it was a brilliant idea.

Booksellers end up with skads of hardcovers that are completely unsellable. If you donate them to a thrift shop you’ll just have to look through them again. They burn gas to take them to the dump. And they have to be bundled separately from paper recyclables (if they can be recycled at all in your area).

However, as packing material they’re a panacea. Book boards are denser and stronger than any piece of box cardboard. They come in a variety of sizes and by using them in this way you’ll be fulfilling their destiny by protecting book contents that someone actually wants.

So after a recent cull I took a pile of beaten down books and skinned them like some necrobibliophilic Hannibal Lector (decorative endpapers, correctly yellowed blank pages, and bookplates/tickets should also be salvaged).


Now I use them to protect delicate pamphlets, magazines and vintage paperbacks. One caveat is that buyers may not realize their item is inside so you should mark the boards somehow. I’m going to make up an inkstamp to do this easily (and take advantage of another branding opp) but for now I just use a sharpie.

Horrified? Sickened? Appalled? You’ll get over it fast. Just say a prayer to the great book spirit and kill them quick and clean.

Jacques Le Tord: French Pin-up Artist

The blog Au carrefour étrange has been posting numerous pen and ink pin-ups/erotic illustrations by an artist named Jacques Le Tord. I’d never heard of him before but I’m instantly a huge fan.

Check out the back yards on his women and you’ll see why Robert Crumb moved to France.



Trying to find info on the artist but Babelfish isn’t doing me any favors. Best I could do is that Le Tord worked in the 50s and was published extensively in a magazine called Revue Pigalle.

Love to find a coffee table book or an English snyposes of his career.