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Printing a Book, Old School from Armin Vit on Vimeo.
An Encyclopedia Britannica video on book printing and binding c1947. Combines all of my favorite elements: Books, hot metal, and hazardous work environments.
Thanks to Mark Hurst for the referral.
My first solid day of thrift-hunting in a while. The thermos, viewmaster and records/Cds are for me, the rest will turn up on eBay and book venues.
This photo belongs to the Junk in Your Trunk photo pool on flickr where it’s marked up with special Thrift-o-Vision annotations.
I found three layers of booktickets from “Douglas & Foulis, Booksellers & Librarians, 9 Castle Street, Edinburgh” pasted to the cover of My Lady Castlemaine: A Life of Barbara Villiers (Hutchinson, 1912).
(top to bottom = newest to oldest)
This catalogue of Douglas & Foulis‘ circulating library gives a fascinating glimpse of the rules of the library, its charges (for one guinea a year, a person could borrow one book a month; for ten guineas, 30 books a month), and what books it contained. Through the supplementary ‘List of Books Added during 1913-1917’, it also gives a rare insight into reading tastes and the circulation of books during the First World War. It is easy to find out what books were published during this period: here we can see that books such as ‘Trench Pictures from France’ and ‘Russian Court Memoirs 1914-16’ were easily accessible to Edinburgh readers with five shillings (the lowest subscription) to spare.
Not sure how long the library lasted but I believe this is the address today.
I found this copy of Mauel Puig’s Betrayed by Rita Hayworth with a painstakingly hand-crafted nudey cover.
I find a lot of altered erotica PBs, but usually they’re going the other way and de-emphasizing the sleaze.
This book is up for grabs. Email me if you want it (for cost of postage).
Also in the book was this bookstore record-keeping slip from the “Loreen Inventory Control System” dated 1976.
Any bookstore veterans ever encounter this? Looks like you fill in a number for the initial order and then mark how many are sold in each successive month. I’d don’t envy the poor clerk who had to fill these things out.
I’ve seen this disturbing spanking painting at BrooklynFlea for a couple of weeks running. This was the best image I could get on my phone cam. I can’t identify what tool the spanker is using and the spankee is kind of unfinished from the waist down.
Creepy…..
So just to expand on my 140 characters of Twittered disgust earlier today:
I was sitting with Alice eating yummy tacos at BrooklynFlea. We were in the shade near a roped-off area where the food dealers hook up to power. Despite the ropes, cement steps and pointy cast iron fence, numerous hipster Brooklyn parents (ie: demi-tards) were letting their preschoolers play unsupervised jump rope over the draped electrical cords.
One little girl jumped onto a cord–pulling it from the outlet–and blacked out a food booth. A power-yuppy–in the middle of some kind of mutually felating day-trader phone interview–looks over at the girl (not his daughter) and the rats’ nest of industrial electrical cords plugged into an exterior socket and says “Sweety can you plug that back in?”. Un-fucking believable.
To top that off, I hit the 7th Avenue flea market on the way home and stopped at a dealer’s table with a selection of shabby vintage books layed-out in the broiling sun. I picked up what was labeled as a “1st Edition Ayn Rand Anthem $20” with no jacket and completely faded spine, looked at the CR page and and noted that the printing date of the book was a good 20-years after the copyright date. Now I’m no Randroid but that does not equal “1st Edition” to me. I went to put it back and the dealer snatched it from me and said “I’ll take that!” and mumbled that next time I shouldn’t open a “sealed” book. Apparently a mislabeled worthless book stuffed in a moldering sandwich bag equals archivally sealed these day. I said “Keep it then, it isn’t a first anyway”, but what I meant to say was “Stick it you ignorant, leathery crone.”
Of course if I did say that, I would have immediately entered the Twilight Zone and become the desperate curmudgeon–selling smutty paperbacks for cheap tequila–that is the future me.
You gotta be careful.
I have a long post on my ideas for the perfect zombie video game posted at Tor.com. Read it and marvel at how much of my brain has been eaten by the living dead.
On a related note, Mark Hurst of Good Experience sent me a link to a free, print ‘n play zombie solitaire game called Zombie in My Pocket.
Snipped it out and played this morning. Voodoo zombies, easy set up, intuitive rules and quick play. Spent a lot of time cowering and running from room to room with a chainsaw. Definitely worth laser printing and mounting on cardstock.
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Glance: Special Burlesque Issue (June 1958, Vol. 2, #5), originally uploaded by Hang Fire Books.
It’s a chapbook-size magazine containing an essay on the state of the art in burlesque, illustrated with 70 plus photos of 1950s performers (very few repeats). [you can buy it here]
The dancers pictured include: Lili Christine (cover), Irma the Body, Bubbles Darlene, Gypsy Nina, Tina Christine, Billy Boyd, Betty Howard, Winnie Garrett, Patti O’Day, Ann “Bang Bang” Arbor, Jill Huntley, Thunder, Evelyn West, Ora Lee Branch, Lili St. Cyr, Amber Halliday, Penny Page, Laura Lou Love, Cory Baysinger, Gypsy Rose Lee, Nannette, Ann Corio, Syra Marty, Penny Page, Ricki Corvette, Tempest Storm, Bonnie Bayia, Sheree North, Taffy O’Neill, and Louise Angel.
On a related–zaftig ladies in painted-on costumes–note, I’ve been fixated on the casting for the next Batman movie. Nolan is going to do Catwoman as a “vamp in her twilight years” (I’m guessing with shades of Susan Alexandre Kane) and there was horrifying speculation that Cher was going to play the part. I’m not against the angle (Miller did it in Dark Night Returns) even though it doesn’t make sense with the film’s timeline.
If he’s going that way, I think modeling her after a retired burlesque dancer would be a good direction. I love backstage photos when the dancers aren’t “on”, they look really tired and the ridiculously sexy costumes are just uniforms. That’s how I want to see Catwoman. Alice and I were brain-storming actresses…she has to be glamorous but look like she’s had it rough, curvy but not botoxed to death….I was thinking Elizabeth Shue…or maybe it this could be Sean Young’s second chance…Helen Mirren or Anjelica Huston would play her mother of course…
Okay, kind of a random post but it’s a good snap-shot of my head on any given afternoon.
Just finished an amusing and historically informative collection of Publishers Weekly articles from the 1930s-40s called Selling Books.
The book is s snapshot of a lost era when retail was a new exciting career option, every major department store had a large book department, book clerks (presumed to be female) were absolute authorities on what one should read, and a book reference desk took up about 20 feet of counter space.
Here are a few choice quotes:
Treat all customers with the same courtesy and painstakingness–and “all customers” will include the towns most crashing snob matron and her negro cook, the town’s internationally known hydraulic engineer and the convalescent inmates of a nearby sanitarium.
Paper-covered books have not been the same success here in America that they have been in Europe. Apparently the American people were unwilling to fill their shelves with any but cloth bound books. That a change in point of view is in the offing however, is evidenced in the success of paper-covered Penguin Books being imported from England and in the sale of Pocket Books with their laminated covers.
It also includes numerous photos of period book departments and staff, some still valid info on window design and a suggested reading list containing some interesting titles. Including this one that I’m curious about:
How to Run a Rental Library by Groff Conklin
Anyway I know this stuff is porn to some people so I’m going to share the joy. I’ll trade this book for another curious or useful title on book-selling, collecting, bookplates, ephemera, etc. What have you read and enjoyed and don’t mind passing along?
Note: This book is purely a reading copy–ex-libris and somewhat musty–so I won’t demand any better.
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Hang Fire Books 