The Vintage Reader

There she is...

Last week was the Miss America Pageant. Since I went to a tiny little university that somehow has been the home of three Miss Americas and countless (not literally, but I can't count them) state pageant winners, I'm usually pretty interested in it. This morning while looking through the Miss A site I discovered Miss America 1949, Jacque Mercer. She made a study out of winning pageants, and published her findings in a book called How to Win a Beauty Contest.

She also raised Maltese dogs, was in 4-H, and designed and made most of her competition wear.

I've got spurs

IF ONLY it were 1952, and I was off on a Western holiday, I'd be packin' a pair of these. Along with my dungarees, a couple of nice gingham "cow-boy style" shirts, maybe a hat with an adjustable cord under the chin to keep it on my head...

...and of course, my lipstick. Oh, and a nice piqué dress with a light sweater and a pair of pumps for the evenings, of course.

I do love those boots I just linked to. In 1987 I had the perfect outfit to go with them. And someplace to wear it.

Western wear

Apropos of absolutely nothing: American Boots-Heel profiles for boots.

It never occurred to me until now that the difference between a "cowboy heel" and a "riding heel" was the spur ridge, but it probably should have.

Heels and toes are specific to brands, too, so while an "S toe" and a "J toe" are probably pretty standard, you might not find an "X toe" in just every brand.

And now you know.

Just because

I just really liked today's Bleat. Lileks is particularly good at capturing the feeling of a past he didn't live in. I know that 1941 feeling, but I didn't have it so much in 2001. I had it in 1989, though.

I've got to admit that most of the time when I listen to AM radio I have the same experience he had, but with ultraconservative ranters instead of ultraliberal ones. So I don't listen to AM radio much, except for WKBW, which is (eerily enough) the only station my 1939 GE radio picks up.

Yup, people are really that stupid

I have a lot of sympathy for the point of view expressed in The Thrilling Detective Web Site Classifieds: Help Wanted, having at one time been the recipient of e-mail messages such as "SEND ME EVERYTHING YOU HAVE ON THE OKALHAOMA CITY BOMMBING, I NEED PICTURES, PAPER IS DUE ON FRIDAY HURRY!!!!!"

I can't believe the sheer stupidity of people who think they're e-mailing, say, Stephen J. Cannell when they hit a Rockford Files site. I personally would not publish their e-mail addresses on my web site (except for the guy who says he's changing ISPs soon so a "quick response is recommended"--not APPRECIATED, mind you, but RECOMMENDED--and for him, I'd feel more like looking him up online and publishing his e-mail address, his postal address, and his phone number. Just in case somebody with the answer to his question wanted to contact him, of course) but their letters are entertaining reading. At least for those of us who are irritable insomniacs.

So let me get this straight...

This guy sells posters (he calls them "fine art prints" because each one is printed from an individual file) that are basically scanned paperback covers that he's touched up so they look original. If there's any indication that he actually owns the rights to the originals of any of these works, I can't find it on his site. But he doesn't want YOU using HIS work.

I don't discount--exactly--his skill in retouching scans of old paperbacks. But I do NOT believe that it constitutes the creation of an original work of art.

I wonder... if I were to take one of his "works" and scan it and retouch it so it looks like an old book cover, then sell it on my own web site, would he have a problem with that? I bet he would.

...and in related news...

Found this excellent overview of paperback cover artists after winning a copy of the FIRST mapback edition of Fools Die on Friday (the one with The Cover)

Still not showing here...

I CAPTURE THE CASTLE never did put in an appearance here, despite our town's cries of culture and sophistication. Oh brother.

Anyway, this review from Roger Ebert is kind of lukewarm, but well worth reading if only for the note about the rating. This sort of thing is one reason he's my favorite movie reviewer.

A civilized society

"We rebel in our very souls nowadays against the idea that conventional behavior, dress, and manners could possibly matter. We abolished all those rules with the best of intentions. But there is no getting around the fact that in the 1930s, people simply got more practice in acting as they ought than we do. I can't say what all that dogged practice was worth when push came to shove. I do know that in 1939 you could leave a pile of dynamite unguarded in the middle of New York City."

Read the rest: Dynamite, Manhattan, 1939 by David Gelernter (thanks to James Lileks for bleating this)

The provenance of vintage books

I think one of the really fun things about vintage books is thinking about the people who used to own them. Did a teenager once hide Suburban Wives from his parents? Did the woman who underlined passages in my copy of Elegance start storing her cashmere sweaters on top of the wool ones so they wouldn't get crushed?

I opened a copy of Etiquette: The complete modern guide for day-to-day living the correct way and found two copies of an article called "Writing Thank-You Notes." I found them so interesting because they're both on letterhead from the Buffalo Evening News. Was this something you could write in for, or did the former owner of my book write an etiquette column in the News? Since I don't really know where I picked this up, I have no idea.

There are some samples of good thank you notes. Here's one of my favorites:

"Dear Sandra,
I'm so excited about the (name of gift) that you sent. Who but you would have thought of something so clever and charming? I so appreciate your thinking of me.
Love, Jane"

That's a very good thank you note, and could be applied to anything from a sweater to, say, an Amazon gift certificate. It could be sent by e-mail if, say, you didn't know the person's postal address and didn't know how to look it up on the Internet.

I also like this:

"If you really detest the gift, find something nice about it (such as color) that you can praise sincerely."

I think this one would come in handy for thank yous for job interviews. Something like "The tour of the company grounds was truly impressive" for one of those "I'd-love-to-work-here-if-everyone-I-just-met-wasn't-such-a-jerk" interviews.

Should I just call it "Vintage Living" and be done with it?

Okay, so there's nothing about reading in this one, but I just ordered some adorable Halloween decorations from this place. I collect old Halloween decorations (doesn't everybody these days? I've been collecting them for many years) but I'm just as happy with reproductions, even if they don't have price stickers of 5 cents on the back.

There's a green one, and a pink one...

Here's the photo that so distressed me last week.

Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read

From Suzanne: IFLA - Quotations about Libraries and Librarians - Subject List

Ziggy says...

...there's a 99.8% probability that this movie critic is wrong (at least, about the unemployable part):

"Free of the gagging cuteness found in many movie children, young Dean acts with professional grace which should keep him in star parts until a first whisker makes him technologically unemployable."

From a 1946 review of The Green Years, featuring 10-year-old Dean Stockwell, one of the few child stars to go on to even more success as an adult actor. (Life, April 15, 1946)

Too good not to share

Okay, so I spend my Saturday mornings doing weird things like reading issues of Life from the '40s. This morning I'm reading a very hopeful 1946 edition that I bought at a book sale in 1985 and have somehow avoided reading until now. I bought it for the spring fashions; the New Look hadn't quite hit yet and skirts were still slim (but longer; also, jackets hit "fingertip-length," a change from the shorter skirts and jackets necessitated by rationing).

Actually, I found the fashions a little disappointing. Too much beige and brown (still a military influence?) and really ugly hats. Life always has such interesting articles, though. In "Shall I Remarry?" a war widow (one of 83,500, two-thirds of whom were under 30; 21,000 of those had one or more children) and her friends and family weigh in on remarriage. A year and a half after her husband's death, Bernadine feels that she's ready to start thinking about marrying again. At 24, she doesn't want to go through life alone. Her best friend thinks Bernadine should "take her time and shop around. Still, with two children you can't be too choosy, you know."

Lovelorn Editor Molly Mayfield of the Rocky Mountain News offers this advice:

"Bernadine should get out and meet lots of young people. The Y.W.C.A. offers splendid opportunities and there are two clubs right here in Denver, the Business and Professional Women and the Industrial Girls, who hold dances once a week. She also might join a sorority like the national Beta Sigma Phi, which is made up mostly of young professional women. She would come to know her sorority sisters, be invited to their homes and through them, perhaps meet eligible brothers, cousins and friends. She should remember that it's through other girls that you meet other men.

Many a man and woman has met his or her future mate through interests in a hobby. Here in Denver we have several photography groups and an active Mountain Club which Bernadine might care to join. There are also organized groups interested in stamp collecting, wildflower studey, first editions, choral singing and goodness knows what else. I would advise Bernadine to join, meet and enjoy. But I want to caution her about one thing. She should make sure that no one thinks she is anxious to marry. The minute a young man suspects he's being preyed upon, off he bounds. I would recommend taking quite the other stand. Convince him you eschew the very idea of marriage. I've seen this technique put into practice--and it works."

[Yeah, all the way up until he leaves you for his dream girl, who makes no pretense about her desire to greet him at the door every night with dinner on the table, kiddies scrubbed and sleepy, with a nice quiet evening of companionable television-watching to look forward to. -- Ed.]

So anyway. Bernadine's late husband's fraternity brother thinks that his friend Shel would be jealous because he was a quick-tempered kind of fellow, although he admits that Bernadine is "a mighty pretty little Irish girl" and that marrying again would probably be the best thing.

Apparently, the man she's been dating, Al, agrees. Al seems like an all-around good guy who says that he would have to be very sure "inside himself" that he could take the place of a father with her two sons, that he encourages her to talk about her late husband when she's feeling low, that any money from her first marriage should go toward the boys' education, and that the only thing holding them back is the housing shortage. Al is such a good guy that I'm betting war widows from all across America started showing up on his doorstep in Denver within days of publication of this issue of Life.

Bernadine's four-year-old Jimmy is even more persuasive, though:

"If I can't have Daddy back, I'd like to have a new daddy. Couldn't Al come and live here with us?"

Of course, the 21st century cynic in me wonders just how much Jimmy was coached before the reporter showed up, or maybe how much coaching the reporter did.

I thought it was interesting how often the housing shortage was mentioned in this article, considering the enormously biased article on said housing shortage that appears earlier in the magazine. Since I happen to agree with the pro-1946-government, anti-price-gouging-real-estate-company bias, I didn't mind it so much, but then I saw some truly appalling photos of how they could throw up eight cookie-cutter houses in a day in one of the ugly little postwar developments that are prevalent in my area, and re-started the internal battle between my sense of aesthetics in residential architecture and my admiration for building methods that could at least help provide affordable housing for the tens of millions of Americans with critical housing needs.

At which point my brain exploded.

Hey! He's not vintage!

I know that. But oh, how I love Neil Gaiman. I've never figured out the authorial whine of "Please buy my books new so I'll get the royalty!" I understand that authors have to make money too, but if you're not in it primarily for the readers, you're probably not a very good writer. Neil Gaiman is a very good writer. But you don't need to take my word for it: just buy a copy of Stardust. And hey--he doesn't mind if you buy it used.

You've probably seen the movie...

...but have you ever read the book? Here's an interesting story about the book, the old movie, and the new movie:
The Manchurian Candidate.