The Vintage Reader

Happy 4th of July!

2009-07-04T07:00:00.003-04:00

A recording of John Philip Sousa's band (but without him; he usually refused to conduct his band if he knew they were being recorded) playing his best-known march, "The Stars and Stripes Forever," which is also the National March.

John Philip Sousa was an interesting guy. He composed great music; he invented (or at least commissioned) an instrument, the sousaphone; he wrote novels. That's right, novels. Here's a sample:

The Fifth String (at Project Gutenberg)

WPA Children's Books (1935-1943)

2009-07-02T15:53:00.001-04:00

I would be a little disappointed if any of my regular readers didn't know at least the basics of the WPA; we've all heard about the WPA highway workers, builders, and such who built the nation's infrastructure during the Depression. We've probably seen the awesome posters designed by WPA artists. But did you know that the WPA also produced a series of children's science books? Well, then. You can look at them all online here:

WPA Children's Books (1935-1943)

Check it out

2009-07-02T06:57:00.003-04:00

I'm having a hard time coming up with titles for my posts these days, if you haven't noticed. Probably from lack of practice.

Anyway, Michael Schaub at The Bookslut points us to Awful Library Books, where people submit old books that have not stood the test of time particularly well.

Last night I dreamt...

2009-07-02T06:41:00.005-04:00

I went to Manderley again.

There's something so wonderful about Daphne du Maurier's leasing the house she based Manderley on, and renovating it with her own money. Not to turn a profit, but just because she loved it.

Times Literary Walks: Daphne du Maurier's Cornwall

(Tweeted by Jessa Crispin of The Bookslut)

What People Were Reading During The Depression : NPR

2009-06-29T09:33:00.000-04:00

NPR tells us What People Were Reading During The Depression. Interesting stuff: a dog's memoir by Virginia Woolf, some now-classic adventure tales, non-fiction (of course), and White Collar Girl, one of my personal favorites by Faith Baldwin. Linda, the heroine, leaves college and returns to her small hometown when her father dies, only to find that before his death he had lost the entire family fortune through speculation. First she goes to work for the local stationer, pushing postcards and touristy gewgaws at day-trippers from Buffalo, and spends her evenings hanging out with her high school friends. But then she takes a job selling investments to women so they can be financially independent if something happens to their husbands, and ends up saving her family, gaining her independence, and also getting the guy. It's Faith Baldwin in her prime, and it stands up well in the face of the passing decades. She had a gift for dialogue that usually keeps it from sounding too dated (even if sometimes it's a little strained because of her tendency to use conversation to explain the backstory), and she wasn't afraid to talk frankly and without sensationalism about things no other romance novelist would have touched—District Nurse has a scene with a botched abortion, for example, and The Incredible Year takes on casual adultery, promiscuity, and materialism.

I do wonder, after reading this, if we're about to see a flood of chick lit about plucky young women losing their jobs in the recession and finding love and a livelihood all at the same time. I might actually read something like that, as long as it didn't have shoes on the cover, and as long as the heroine's former job wasn't in publishing and her new job doesn't involve walking other people's dogs, working for celebrities in any capacity, or (despite having no previous professional experience either as a chef or a business owner) opening a whimsically named cafe that instantly becomes the place for everyone in New York to be seen. In the meantime, I think I'll go back and read White Collar Girl again.

(via Nathan Bransford)

Behind the scenes

2009-06-29T07:52:00.002-04:00

Ellen Raskin, author of the beloved children's book The Westing Game, thought it would be useful for writing students and others to see what goes into the preparation of a book manuscript: the writing, the editing, the back-and-forth between all the different people who have their hands in the project. So she tried to donate her own manuscript of The Westing Game to the library. Which didn't want it. (I know, I know: gifts and scope and all of that. I'm an ex-librarian, I've had to turn down gifts too.)

But she kept offering it to these folks, and eventually they caved... and took in the manuscript of the book that would go on to win the next year's Newbery. And now they've put it online, with audio and notes and design materials (she designed the jacket and some other elements of the book too). Enjoy!

The Westing Game Manuscript

Have your cake, and read it too

2009-06-09T21:54:00.001-04:00

Cake Wrecks: Sunday Sweets: Reading Rocks

Usually, Cake Wrecks is all about horrible cakes, but these are quite wonderful: cake homage to classic children's books. Enjoy!

That synchronicity stuff

2009-02-04T07:10:00.001-05:00

Well, I'm not sure if this counts as synchronicity or serendipity or what, but last week I was wracking my brain trying to think of a great fairy tale site I used to visit regularly. It's such a cool place that people like Jane Yolen and Ellen Datlow (I think; it might have been Ellen Kushner) used to post on the discussion board. And then today, what should show up in my RSS feeds but a post that links to SurLaLune Fairy Tales: Annotated Fairy Tales, Fairy Tale Books and Illustrations. That's the site, and since I've been away they've added an array of beautiful buyables from Cafe press and a TON of gorgeous fairy tale illustrations. Don't click that link unless you have a couple of hours to surf... but do click that link.

In Which The Vintage Reader Does Some Weeding

2009-01-20T07:38:00.004-05:00

This morning I went to my long-neglected PaperbackSwap account to see if I could figure out why nobody had yet requested the Moosewood cookbook I posted last week, since I know that there are always approximately 86 people wishing for any given Moosewood cookbook at all times. I know this because every time I add one to my wish list, I am at around #87 on the list. I solved that problem (apparently it didn't actually repost last time when I thought it did), but realized that I have lots and lots of books around here... somewhere... that I have never read but still really want to. And also a lot that I have gotten through PBS, read, and then not reposted, even though I have no intention of ever reading them again.

And so today, when I'm not watching inauguration coverage on the Internet and chatting with my Facebook friends about it, I'm planning to start weeding the Vintage Reader collection and posting on PBS. So if you're interested, head on over and check out new stuff from me (vintagereader). Keep in mind that I buy a lot of stuff in boxlots or at garage sales, so I haven't read a lot of my inventory and can't really tell you whether the books are any good or not.

[NOTE: If you're not already a member of PaperbackSwap and would like to be, click here to join (hint: that's my referral link, so if you join and swap 10 books, I get a credit! Which is worth approximately two bucks. But hey, free book for me!). It's a great way to get rid of your old books and get new ones, including some vintage ones.]

OMG, I've been tagged!

2009-01-15T16:22:00.003-05:00

Seriously, this is the first time anybody has ever tagged me for anything, except for those "participate if you want to" kinds of things, but Michelle at The Zen of Knitting has tagged me to list five (FIVE!) projects to commit to. Mine are a little different from hers, since I've nearly given up knitting entirely in favor of other pursuits, but here goes.

Make a shower curtain for Vintage Boy's bathroom. Several years ago I found some AMAZING Route 66 fabric in gorgeous retro colors and bought two yards of it. Then I saw it on sale at Jo-Ann Fabric and bought two more yards. Then it occurred to me that they might discontinue it, so the next time I had a coupon I bought two MORE yards. Which gives me six yards of Route 66 fabric, and that's just enough to make a shower curtain. Since Vintage Boy is still delirious over all things car-related, I've been buying him adorable Do Your Room car stuff at Target every time I see it on sale; fortunately, the colors are EXACTLY THE SAME as the ones in the Route 66 fabric. It's decorating kismet! He now has towels with vintage vehicles on them and a soap dispenser/night light (the headlights work!) in the shape of a vintage tow truck. Now all he needs to complete the decor is for me to make the shower curtain, which should take about an hour: sew yardages together at sides, hem the whole thing, and set big metal grommets across the top for shower curtain rings (a task that was assigned to Mr. Vintage Reader the last time I did this, and that he finds highly satisfactory, involving as it does pounding on metal with a mallet).

Make a small cardboard house (See previous blog post about small cardboard houses). Eventually I want to design my own Midcentury Modern cardboard houses (curious about this, I searched Flickr and found that someone else had already had that idea and implemented it wonderfully) but for now I will use a pattern from a master glitterhouse architect and learn from his expertise.

Write a Facebook app. I have several started already, but just haven't gotten around to finishing them to my standard, which is Not Another Crappy Facebook App That Doesn't Work, and Nobody Would Want to Use Even If It Did.

Finish a mystery short story for potential submission to EQMM's Department of First Stories. I have very good premises for about 10, good beginnings for two, and sucky beginnings for about five. No middles or ends. Which is saying something, because short stories, as the name implies, are just NOT THAT LONG.

Plant a Victory Garden.

EDIT: I haven't figured out who to tag yet. I'm not sure I still have readers, let alone readers who do projects. Hmm...

What is a Glitter House?

2008-12-22T08:52:00.001-05:00

What is a Glitter House?

A fascinating and time-consuming site that includes the history of "glitter houses," small cardboard houses covered with glitter that were popular in midcentury America. There are also links to some incredible instructions for making your own cardboard houses.

Creepy covers: The Crooking Finger

2008-10-07T10:33:00.003-04:00

I must confess: I'm a sucker for a cool, creepy cover. This 1946 Dell Mapback caught my eye in a used-and-new bookstore in Geneseo, New York, one bright autumn afternoon, and $2 later, it was mine.

Another confession: I have not actually read this book. I have no idea whether the book itself is any good or not. But the cover is a classic by Gerald Gregg, whose airbrush technique gave him the most distinctive style of any of the artists who did covers for the Dell Mapbacks. He called it "stylized realism," and it makes his covers easy to spot: bold shapes, soft edges, intense colors, and often macabre subjects (okay, that was dictated by Dell, not by him, but a lot of his covers feature skulls, blood, and weapons) mark his work.

Gregg started working for Western Publishing (the company that did Dell's production work at that time; the relationship between the two companies was kind of strange, but essentially, Western did the artwork, editing, printing, and other production, and Dell did the acquiring and marketing) during the Depression, and illustrated covers for lots of the Dell paperbacks as well as some Big Little Books, which were also printed by Western. During World War II, he also worked extra time in the shipping department at Western, according to the definitive book about the Dell paperbacks, Putting Dell on the Map: A History of the Dell Paperbacks, by William H. Lyles.

Gregg's creepy covers are second to none, but he also did some of the best romance covers in my collection. Maybe I'll post those in February. :-)

Halloween Humiliation: the cold climate edition

2008-10-05T18:08:00.007-04:00

Those of you who live in cold climates understand the challenge of coming up with a costume that's warm enough to withstand a chill, and yet still manages to get its point across. Nothing ruins your Survivor: Bali costume like a wool muffler, I always say. But if you're handy with a pair of knitting needles, your child can stay nice and toasty, and everyone whose door he or she visits will still be able to tell that they're being visited by a small... er... chicken? Little girl? WTF? I don't know what they are either, and it seems like a waste of good yarn—and time—to me. I like to have fun with my kid, but this is just cruel.

Oh, wait: you'll need instructions (click the image to supersize).

(From McCall's Needlework & Crafts, Fall-Winter 1965-66; I found a complete run of these from 1961 to 1976 in my mother's house recently, so expect more Needlework & Crafty goodness)

Long day; no post.

2008-10-04T22:25:00.005-04:00

It's been a long day. We loaded up the Vintage Toddler and went to OAFCON, where we looked at many vintage comics, but came home with just one thing: a very large wall calendar, illustrated with some of DC's hot heroes of 1986 (it's a 1986 calendar), like Batman, Teen Titans, Superman, Sgt. Rock, and of course, AMBUSH BUG! Then we drove down the road and had onion burgers at a place that had an Elvis impersonator waiting tables (no, really: check him out here). Then we headed back home and had to go to Target, which is always an ordeal with an almost-three-year-old, and right after we got home the nursing home called because my mother thought I was 14 and lost somewhere, and I had to go over to prove to her that I'm a) not 14; and b) not lost, so, like I said, it's been a long day.

So no Halloween post today, but never fear: more humiliation follows! And maybe some non-humiliation-based Halloween fun, too.

The humiliation continues

2008-10-03T18:51:00.008-04:00

	"But moooooooom," Timmy, your 10-year-old son, whines, "I wanted to be PIPPI LONGSTOCKING for Halloween! Can't you make me a costume?"

Luckily for your son, you are a wise little mother. The kind of mother who has a costume box. The kind of mother who can whip up a creative costume out of, gosh, just any old thing she's got on hand. The kind of mother who saves up box lids from her Alcoa aluminum wrap for years just to send off for Alcoa's Book of Decorations. The kind of mother who has a son who wants to be Pippi Longstocking for Halloween.

Countdown to Halloween Humiliation, 2008

2008-10-01T23:47:00.004-04:00

[I'm really bad at countdowns and stuff, but I'm going to follow the Retropolitan's example and at least attempt something Halloween-related every day, because this year I am really in the mood for Halloween, despite unseasonably high temperatures.]

One of the really neat things about being a parent—one of the things that actually convinced me to become one, as a matter of fact—is coming up with neat Halloween costumes for kids. Of course, the costumes that you come up with are not necessarily costumes that kids consider "neat." For example, last year, the Vintage Toddler was a scarecrow for Halloween. Here's how that turned out:

Not only is he clearly unhappy (although part of that might be from having to sit in Grandma's godawful ugly recliner; he does have a fairly strong sense of aesthetics for somebody who thinks Dora the Explorer is "cute"), but he's also obviously physically uncomfortable, due to the itchy raffia around his wrists and having his shoes on the wrong feet, which I didn't even NOTICE until I saw this picture.

That's part of what makes this an ideal Halloween costume. Halloween costumes are not supposed to be comfortable. For one thing, if they're comfortable, kids will want to wear them every day for months, and that's just WRONG. Yes, I know, you're nurturing your little man's sense of individuality and his confidence in his own choices by letting him run around dressed like a Power Ranger until Christmas, but I'm pretty sure this is how America has ended up in the sorry sartorial state we're in now, where adults wear flannel pajama pants to Wal-Mart at 10:00 on a weekday. For another thing, part of the fun of Halloween is being intensely uncomfortable, while simultaneously certain that you've got the best costume EVER. Did you ever see that episode of Beverly Hills 90210 where Donna dresses up like a mermaid and then can't move all evening and has to hop because, hello, TAIL? (It's also the episode where Kelly is date-raped and there's a whole thing about how even though she was wearing a sexy devil costume or something she didn't deserve it; I usually tuned out the Kelly story lines. It's not that I don't think that's a good point to make, especially to teenagers, but come on: just skip to the PSA already and spare us the tortured plot and all the Kelly-angst.) Try bobbing for apples in a rubber Richard Nixon mask sometime. If that's not fun, I don't know what is.

Something else that makes this costume ideal is that it's cheap. Here's the rundown:

1. Oshkosh overalls a size too large: 50 cents at a garage sale.
2. Flannel shirt, also a size too large: free, hand-me-down.
3. Half a yard each of tan and red burlap: less than $2, craft store.
4. Felt squares in assorted colors: 25 cents each, craft store.
5. A couple of skeins of embroidery yarn: 50 cents each (maybe), craft store.
6. Boots: $20, Stride Rite outlet, but those are actually his fall boots, so they don't really count.
7. Hat: free, hand-me-down.
8. Raffia: three skeins, about $1, craft store.
9. Bandanna: free, from the costume box (You don't have a costume box? Everyone needs a costume box. Start one today.).
10. Catnip mouse (on hat): not really sure; I found it under the sofa. Presumably I bought it for the cats at some point, but they might have just found it somewhere and brought it in.

It took me a couple of hours in front of the TV with a big honkin' needle to sew felt patches on the garage-sale overalls, wrap the hand-me-down hat in burlap, and use packing tape to make "cuffs" of raffia that I sewed to the cuffs of the pants and shirt. Big stitches. Really big. And presto: one miserable little Halloween scarecrow.

As a plus, this year I'm going to make the costume into an adorable Halloween decoration for my mother by adding a head, hands, and feet and stuffing it with fiberfill, and hope it doesn't scare the bejesus out of the toddler when I take him for visits. "Look, honey, Grandma has a fake YOU! Isn't that GREAT?"

Because Halloween is all about the scary.

See you tomorrow. Maybe.

Vintage fandom

2008-09-09T10:10:00.002-04:00

Attention, Oklahoma readers: OAFCON 2008 is coming up next month in OKC. From the site:

"Please remember this is not a modern day comic book show. No artist alley, no anime, no new comics. Mostly the dealers bring old comics, pulps, art, books, and etc dateing from 1900-1980. Facsimiles and modern day reprints of older material are welcome and will be available."

I must confess that I only vaguely remember ever hearing about the Oklahoma Alliance of Fans, the hosts of the show (hence OAFcon). I think they might have hosted a small con I went to in 1981, where I picked up a lovely pulp anthology of Robert Sheckley's stories (Store of Infinity, I think) and a full set of the Wonder Bread Star Wars cards. But if Bart is involved, it's bound to be a class act.

Back to normal

2008-09-01T07:14:00.003-04:00

If you visited yesterday, you did not see this blog. That's because I forgot to renew my domain, and apparently when that happens my registrar drops the domain from their DNS. At least it didn't get snapped up by the hordes who want "vintagereader.com" for their very own!

But everything seems to be back to normal now and I've got the domain for a while yet. Let it serve as a lesson to me to pay attention to all those emails from the registrar telling me to renew my domain NOW. (In my defense, I'm pretty sure those started going to the spam folder a few days ago, with no intervention from me, purely because of their frequency.)

No, you can't find an egg cream in Oklahoma.

2008-08-29T23:19:00.001-04:00

As a child, I was obsessed with Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh. Harriet, in case you haven't read the book, is a young girl who runs around with a notebook spying on people. She hides in dumbwaiters, she sits in trees, she scales roofs and peeks in windows to watch her neighbors secretly eating cat food and receiving odd statuary. When her notebook is confiscated and passed around, she loses her best friends because of some of the things she's written about them, and then she also loses her nanny, who gets married.

Much of Harriet's life seemed exotic and desirable to me. She had all of New York to run around in, apparently with no adult supervision. People took her to the drug store to get egg creams. And that's what this post is actually about: the egg cream.

I always pictured an egg cream as a frothy off-white concoction, served in a glass with whipped cream and a cherry on top. Boy, was I wrong. They apparently consist of milk, seltzer, and chocolate syrup. That sounds horrible, but given Harriet's love of tomato sandwiches (which also sound horrible), I don't suppose I should have expected her to have a discriminating palate.

Anyway, here's everything I needed to know about egg creams: Egg Cream, History of New York Egg Cream, Egg Cream Recipe.

I knew it.

2008-08-29T15:39:00.000-04:00

As a 1930s wife, I am
Superior

Take the test!

How to do a bibliography online

2008-08-26T18:09:00.001-04:00

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has done a bang-up job of an online bibliography. Click on the year in the left-hand column, and the stories and their authors (along with some neat notes) come up on the right.

If I were to ever do that online bibliography of Twilight Zone magazine that I've been threatening to do since before my first blog post here, I'd do it a lot like this.

Today in Orwell

2008-08-21T09:18:00.001-04:00

I've been following The Orwell Diaries, a blog whose posts consist of George Orwell's diary entries beginning in August of 1938. Each post appears 70 years to the day after Orwell wrote it. In today's entry, Orwell reports that he visited a fifth-century megalith; the blog entry links to a satellite view of the site on Google Maps. I'll spare you the obvious comment about that and just say I think it's really neat, and the ability to hyperlink adds a completely new dimension to an old journal.

Also, Orwell included a newspaper clipping about a method of canning fruit without heat or syrup. I need to do a little research to see if this is actually a viable method of canning, or just a labor-intensive way to get botulism.

The Book Collection That Devoured My Life - WSJ.com

2008-07-05T07:00:00.001-04:00

An excellent piece by Luc Sante, sent by a friend this morning: The Book Collection That Devoured My Life - WSJ.com.

"I need to fill out my knowledge of Prague, 1949, or the Elizabethan prose writers, or the cross-migration between New York newspapers and Hollywood in the '20s and '30s. I buy every book I see about Gypsies, and most firsthand accounts of vaudeville, and almost everything by lesser-known New Yorker writers of the old regime. I'm always on the lookout for memoirs -- frequently by the less-than-famous -- that supply concrete details of daily life, rather than simply lists of names or dates of parties or, heaven forfend, litanies of traumas."

I love this, and find it reassuring that there are other people who have the same kind of collecting quirks I do. I'm always picking up things like homemaking books from the 50s and 60s (especially textbooks for home ec classes); city-living memoirs from the 40s and 50s (mainly New York and Chicago); romance and science fiction pulps—not necessarily the ones in great shape, either; pamphlets of all kinds; pretty much anything published by Popular Mechanics in the 50s and 60s; malt-shop novels from the 50s; anything at all from 1942 onward with helpful hints for rationing; 1960s backlash-against-feminism marriage manuals like The Total Woman (which on its own is so awful I've never been able to get through it); multiple copies of Important Books That I Should Have Read, like The Feminine Mystique; different editions of childhood favorites, like Cheaper by the Dozen and Rose in Bloom; and manuals for machines I don't own, because seriously, you never know when you're going to run across an old Osterizer or a Rambler American with Flash-o-Matic pushbutton transmission, and it would be a shame if you bought it and couldn't find a manual.

So what kinds of books do you collect? Discuss in the comments!

I Can Fly

2008-06-15T16:36:00.004-04:00

Recently my mother-in-law—mother of four, grandmother of seven, step-grandmother of four, and retired school librarian—decided to offload some of the stacks of children's books she's accumulated through the years, and Vintage Toddler was the lucky recipient. He and I both fell in love with one adorable Little Golden Book called I Can Fly, illustrated by Mary Blair (cover, as well as some other wonderful Mary Blair art, here). Mary Blair was a Disney animation artist, and helped define the style most of us think of as classic Disney; she worked on Cinderella, Peter Pan, and Alice in Wonderland, among others, and she designed the Disneyland "small world" ride, which I was completely obsessed with after visiting Disneyland at the age of five. But it's mostly her illustration style that I find completely appealing; every time we read I Can Fly I notice something in the illustrations that I haven't noticed before. The colors and shapes she used are the same ones I like in other midcentury design, but what makes her work so appealing to me is her subject matter—children and animals. I'm usually not big on artwork involving children, but I just love the way Mary Blair made them look.

So I was pleased to find this: ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive: Golden Book: Mary Blair's Baby's House. I particularly love it that without text, there's no telling whether "Baby" is a girl or a boy. I have no idea what the text says, and I'm not sure I care.

EDIT: Ever since I linked to the Baby's House post on the ASIFA web site, something has been bothering me, and I couldn't figure out what it was. There are links at the bottom of that post to another Mary Blair book: The New Golden Songbook. It looked a little familiar to me, but I didn't recognize the cover at all, so it took me a while to remember that this book was in our music cabinet when I was growing up. By the time I came along—15 years after my oldest sister, who would have been two when this book came out—the cover had been lost to the ages from being handled by lots of grubby little hands, but the rest of the book was reasonably intact. I might actually have to go ransack my mother's house today to see if I can find it.

Oh, wow.

2008-05-07T21:26:00.001-04:00

Regular readers know that I have a great fondness for Secret Fun Spot, home of one of my very favorite original cartoons ever, in the whole world. And now my taste is validated, as J.J. ABRAMS MENTIONS "SECRET FUN SPOT" IN ROLLING STONE!

Too cool, Kirk. Just too cool.