One Less Book

It's State Fair time here in Minnesota. I'm planning to attend on Tuesday, so I should have a report afterwards.

Right now that means my main participation is listening to small prop planes circling the fairgrounds, dragging advertising trailers. As of last year, the planes became an incessant irritation on both weekends, with the second "weekend" including Thursday through Labor Day.

They don't go over the Fair, oh no. They go over the parts of Saint Paul next to it and the adjacent suburb to the north, Falcon Heights, where people live. And as far as I can tell, the Fair's attendees don't notice the planes or the ads, so it's not only a waste of fuel and carbon pollution, it's burning the advertisers' money too. 

Except to make all of the people who live under the planes hate the advertisers and swear they will never use their services. 

So while I have been sitting in my house with the windows closed, I cleaned out some stuff. One thing I'm going to get rid of is a 1934 elementary school geography textbook I acquired at some point. It's a strange thing: I have no idea what grade level it was meant for. There are way too many words for a 1st or 2nd grader, but the kinds of questions it proposes for the child reader sometimes seem like they're meant for a 5-year-old. 

I have a hard time believing any kids, even in the 1930s, read and absorbed the content of this book. 

It did include this charming illustration, however:


Most of the book's images are halftone photos, but there are also a substantial number of line art cuts of animals and plants. I think those were repurposed from other publications, in the case of plants, likely from horticultural works. 

In the days of letterpress printing, you couldn't just do a drawing and scan it to reproduce on a page. Cuts like these were etched into metal and reused over and over again. 

I don't think these serious textbook publishers would have commissioned an illustration of anthropomorphic vegetables, but it's what they found to use that was close enough and it fit their budget. All they could do was add a somewhat disdainful caption, "The artist sees the garden vegetables as people."

Signature on a Placemat

I mentioned before that my parents were dyed-in-the-wool Democrats. That meant that they went to a lot of events where well-known politicians visited our out-of-the-way area in New York.

Here's a piece of evidence from one of those times, which I found while going through their stuff:

I know that isn't super easy to read, so I'll translate: For Betty – Best Bella Abzug 

I think I wasn't present for this event, but memory is malleable, so I'm not sure. 

I do definitely have a button like this one in my collection, though:

I didn't remember why I liked Bella Abzug specifically, but having just refreshed my memory on her Wikipedia page, I now know that she introduced the first federal gay rights bill, cosponsored the bill that established the first National Parks site dedicated to the achievements of a woman (Clara Barton), and ran against Daniel Patrick Moynihan for the Senate in 1976. (Retrospectively, I wish that guy had never won that first time, or ever served in that in office.)

P.S. Mueller

We're going through some boxes of stuff from the basement, deciding what to keep and what to recycle (or send to the trash, which in Saint Paul goes to an incinerator). As weirdo print designers, my other half and I have a few too many copies of the Twin Cities' various, now-defunct weekly alternative newspapers that we kept for various reasons.

Sometimes it was a particular article that included someone we know. Other times the illustration or photos are by someone we know. Sometimes it was just an interesting topic at the time, and now I can't quite figure out why it seemed so important.

While I was sorting through it all, I saw this cartoon by P.S. Mueller on the back page of the City Pages:

(Click to enlarge.)

I think I saw my first Mueller cartoon while I was living in Washington, D.C. in the mid-1980s — probably in the alternative weekly there — but it's possible it was after I came to Minnesota in 1986.  

At first I was going to crop in on my photo to only show the cartoon, and then I thought I should retain the part of the page I had included in order to retain the short text ads that ran around it to give a sense of the context. And the phone number that ran above it... sans area code. 

The 612 now associated with Minneapolis went without saying back in those days, since it covered the entire Twin Cities. We split into four area codes in the late 1990s and Saint Paul lost out to Minneapolis on retaining 612. 

I remember advocating for existing phone numbers to keep 612, with cell phone numbers getting a new area code. I still can't remember what geography the other two area codes (952 and 763) cover exactly.

Those were the days!

Two Manhattan Postcards

My maternal grandparents went to the 1939 World's Fair in New York City, according to the journal my grandmother kept during those years. I recently found a couple of postcards, unwritten, that may have been keepsakes from that stay.

One them is for the Chesterfield Hotel, a Midtown establishment that was in existence from the 1920s through the 1960s:

According to Ephemeral New York, it was an "unspectacular midcentury tourist and show folk favorite." They have a few details on minor events that happened there. It was 18 stories, with 600 "outside" rooms (I guess that means rooms with windows, because there were 900 rooms in total).

Copies of this postcard or one very much like it are available for sale online for a few dollars.

The other postcard is for a Chinese restaurant that is lost to the mists of time as far as the Interweb is concerned:

However, its address at 30 Pell Street in China Town is still the site of a Chinese restaurant, and sure enough, Street View shows us that the building is still the same with a different coat of paint, and there is still a vertical sign in place, though it's now in Chinese:

The current restaurant's name is House of Joy. Whether it is, as the back of the postcard says, a "Modern Chinese Restaurant... Serving Real Cantonese Dinners at Popular Prices," I cannot say.

When Calculators Were Paper

My dad had a friend who was an electrical engineer in the mid-20th century, and inherited from him a bunch of paper calculators and slide rules used for various tasks. Partially because I'm a pack rat and partially because they have some cool graphics, I brought them along, thinking I would do something with them... some day.

Well, today is the day, and posting their pictures here is the something. Then I will see if a vintage shop is interested in their physical versions.

I don't have any particular commentary on these, or knowledge about what most of them were used for. Resistors, ohms, what have you. Sure, a couple of them are obvious, and others are not:

I find the human ingenuity in the making of these physical artifacts itself — with their sliders, grommets, die cuts, and various meaningful colors — the most interesting part. 

One Lyndon

My parents were dyed-in-the-wool Democrats who lived in a rural area of upstate New York, which meant they were used to being the political minority all the time. 

Here's a piece of memorabilia I found while helping them downsize. As I'm looking at downsizing myself, I just found it in a box of their stuff. I imagine I kept it to post it here!

The copyright says 1966, so it must be from the midterm elections that year:

(Click to enlarge for better viewing.)

The copy is all about inflation, but the heading at the top of the back side may sound familiar to contemporary ears: "Keep America Safe and Sound."

On the far right side of the back are the words "Help Defeat Inflation" — a proto-version of what became Nixon Gerald Ford's slogan, WIN (Whip Inflation Now). 

__

Thanks to Michael Leddy for reminding me of the correct WINning candidate.
 

Driving Safely Was Important

I've mentioned before that one of my grandfathers was a bread truck driver. I recently found a 1950 in-house newsletter from the company he worked for. It's a little piece of social history.

It's offset printed, rather than letterpress. It's a smallish booklet with 12 5.5x8.5" pages, so it's made up of three letter-size sheets of paper folded in half and saddle-stitched. Black ink only. There are halftone photos throughout, as well as small illustration "cuts." It wasn't cheap to make, though for the time it was probably relatively inexpensive. 



It's called "Sell," and its audience was the company's salesmen. (Though for some reason, there's a photo of three babies on the cover.*) I can't determine whether the company had separate salesmen or if the bread truck drivers were the salesmen. 

The content breaks down into three areas:

• Product information (2 pages)
• General puffery about how to be a good salesman (3 pages)
• Information about being a good driver, taking care of the trucks, and recognition of specific safe drivers, including my grandfather… which accounts for why they kept this piece (4 pages).

There was also a page about the company's radio advertising and a page with a consumer letter praising their products, including a company response. Part of that page had the rest of the article about taking care of your truck.



I was surprised how much the content on driving safely and taking care of the trucks outweighed each of the other two areas. I don't think a present-day company's in-house sales newsletter (if such things still exist) would have that content mix.

___ 

* I found the reason tucked inside the newsletter: the babies were triplets born to the daughter of one of the drivers, who was based in Pennsylvania. Those children would be 76 years old now. It really was a family-oriented company.

Lost & Found

This is from the Lost & Found of a large event held recently here in the Twin Cities:

I took a photo of it because I'm fascinated by the metal logos and namemarks of companies found on old equipment (as I've written about a few times in the past). 

But I'm also sad that a person has lost this hammer and hasn't come to claim it. It seems likely that it has a family story behind it. 

I hope it has a new life with whoever ends up with. I hope they cherish it and use it for another lifetime and hand it on to another generation.
 

The Lost Art of Bus Passes

I always appreciate posts by the English stationery and ephemera shop Present & Correct, and share some of their visuals in my BlueSky roundups. They have a blog where they write up particularly interesting finds.

A recent one was a collection of weekly 1950s bus tickets from Milwaukee. Here are a few of them:

There are 30 tickets altogether, no two alike. 

Here are some thoughts about how the tickets would have been made.

Each one was printed in three ink colors. The large dates were hand-lettered, while the smaller words were set in metal type, likely either on a Linotype or Ludlow system, then printed to a proofing press. The proof type was cut out and pasted up with the hand lettering and other ornaments.

Each color had its own paste-up, possibly done as acetate overlays with the black on the bottom layer on illustration board. Registration marks were on each layer. The layers may have sometimes include rubylith for large areas of color.

Each layer was then shot with a large camera to make an offset printing plate, which was printed in one of the predetermined colors. Offset lithography was a common printing process by the 1950s, and was faster and cheaper for the type of long runs needed like these. These were probably sheet-fed, rather than web.

Why they used three colors instead of two or four, I don't know; I assume it was based on the press they ran on. Maybe it was a five-color press and they ran two passes at a time, with black ink common to both. Or if we could match up the dates of all the passes, we would find that two consecutive passes share one color in addition to black, and therefore could run on a four-color press. 

One additional detail to note: each ticket has an individual number added in the bottom right corner. So that's a final process the tickets went through before being distributed. I don't know why some of them have a letter A added and some don't.

It's clear these tickets were designed by the same person, and it was probably a major part of that person's job to create each one — from sketch to full design to final production and press check each week. 

All replaced by magnetic strips and barcodes. 

We'll Be Left with the Afterglow

As sometimes happens after a BlueSky post, there's a remnant that's too long to include.

This one is from a person named April Daniels. She wrote,

When radioactivity was discovered, there was a rush to market for all sorts of radioactive consumer goods. There were water jugs made out of uranium glass, for example. I think about that a lot these days whenever I see AI products being marketed to consumers.

I have no doubt that this technology is very useful in important ways. I also have no doubt that many of the proposed applications right now are entirely, hilariously, horrifyingly inappropriate.

This happened with asbestos, too. My grandpa brought some home for his kids to play with, like clay.

And the AI industry is seriously trying to push Congress into making it entirely illegal to regulate them so they can push this stuff out as fast as possible and make it as hard as possible to remove from our lives. 

It's like they KNOW it's radioactive asbestos, and want to get ahead of the cleanup.

Some of the responses were:

Dracula Enthusiast @kmfao.bsky.social

Radium emanation bath salts to cure arthritis, rheumatism, and fatigue, that was a thing. I can’t remember what they were called, but they had x-rays machines in shoe shops that they used to ensure the shoes were fitting properly, but kids played with them to see the bones in their feet
Chicago Tafia Welsh Society

There were radioactive breakfast cereal toys stuffed with literal Polonium, aka the stuff the Russians use to poison their enemies:


Christian Mutig @ductos.bsky.social

a digression, but my favorite examples of this are from old comics where you'd see Donald's nephews or Bob Hope or Little Audrey or whoever going "I love this chunk of uranium I found! Its so much fun to hug and listen to it tick! I think I'll put it in my mouth for safe keeping!"
Michaela Joffe @joffeorama.bsky.social

The original “now with AI!”:


Sharon Z

An Important Day, Unmarked

This morning, multiple BlueSky accounts informed me that today is Confederate Surrender Day.

@andrewpaul.bsky.social pointed out that the fact that it isn't a federal holiday tells us "pretty much all you need to know about the U.S."

Jonathan Ladd shared this historic ad:


And Peggy Flanagan, my preferred candidate for U.S. Senate here in Minnesota, shared a post by John Moe, who wrote:

Happy Confederate Surrender Day from Minnesota where we still have your goddamn flag and we’re not giving it up:

That's the Confederate battle flag that belonged to the 28th Virginia Infantry Regiment. It was captured by the 1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment at Gettysburg. Virginians periodically ask Minnesota to return the flag, and Minnesota always says...

No.

Were you taught to celebrate April 9? I was not. It seems as important as July 4 to me. But we don't notice it at all.

Punches from Half a Millennium Ago

I found out from kottke.org that the Cambridge University library has digitized the Baskerville punches, sizes 16 and 60. 

Check that link out for an explanation of how punches were (and still can be) used to create metal type, and a little bit about who John Baskerville was. 

Here's a basic diagram to give you an idea of how the process works:


What Kottke's post made me think of was the time I visited the Plantin Moretus Museum in Antwerp, where I saw some of Claude Garamond's punches. That's Garamond as in Garamond…the typeface. But more importantly, his eponymous typeface was one of the earliest examples of what came to be called old style type, which dominated the printed word in the West for about 250 years, and continues in popularity to this day.

Plantin Moretus itself is a piece of history, since it was a working print shop for about 450 years. This is the hall on the second floor where the punches are housed in the wooden and glass cases along the walls:

 

The museum has two sizes of Garamond punches, a large set in the Greek alphabet and a text size in the Roman alphabet. 

 
My close-up photo of the small punches is not great, but imagine these letters are not much larger than if you broke off the end of a pencil tip. (If you want to see good photos of small punches, check out Cambridge's 16 point Baskerville photos. I think this Garamond type is several points smaller than that.) 

These are matrices that were stamped into copper from the larger Greek punches.

  
Each matrix would be placed into one half of a two-piece mold like one of these, the parts of which could slide to create different widths. Hot metal would be poured into the hole at the end of the mold to make the body of each piece of type.

If you click to zoom in on this picture, you can see that the Greek at left was printed from the composed type shown in the center. And that the accompanying Roman type below is in Dutch (or probably Flemish, my apologies). 

I remember at the time I took these photos, seven and a half years ago, I had that weird reaction I get to seeing talismanic historical objects. Today's Kottke post brought that feeling back, and I can't believe I never posted about this at the time.

See the U.S.A. Through 1960s White American Eyes

I recently got a copy of this kids' coloring book at a used bookstore or garage sale (I can't remember where):



The back cover says it was recommended as a supplementary aid to grade school pupils. It's from the Bonnie Books Child Craft Series, and the copyright is 1960 by James & Jonathan, Inc. 

As the cover says, it depicts:

• PEOPLE from the pages of history
• PLACES important landmarks of our destiny and 
• EVENTS past and present. 

It was published a year after I was born. Material like this was what filled my childhood, in and out of school. It's what were we taught, what we were shown as reality about our country.

First, meet our main characters, Johnnie and Janie:

The setup is that these two are going on an unattended trip around the country, visiting various uncles and aunts who will show them historic places. They'll travel on trains and planes, alone, even though they appear to be about 6 and 8 years old. 

Mom and Dad send them off without a moment's hesitation. As you did back then, I guess. (No one in my family did anything like this.)

Their time riding on trains is the only point when Black people (who are all men) are shown in the coloring book, and they are, of course, all in serving roles:

There were four Black men in various roles on the trains.

The kids take a train from the West to Chicago, and later from Philadelphia to New York. They also fly an awful lot for people in 1960, and flying is shown to be very luxurious:







Here's a list of the historic indoctrination they are subjected to by their relatives:

• Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean.
• Gold was found in California (nothing about what effect that had on the people who lived there before that).
• The Alamo was defended by heroic [freedom-loving implied] Texans who perished. (Not.)
• The giant oil derricks in Oklahoma... are great.
• Ferdinand de Soto discovered the Mississippi River.
• The founding fathers are to be revered, with several of them getting full-page portraits and pictures of their slave labor camp homes.
• Ponce de Leon discovered Florida.
• Peter Minuet bought Manhattan "from the Indians" for $24 in trinkets and cloth.
• The Boston Tea Party was carried out by Indians, as far as a kid could tell from the image shown, and was about paying taxes on tea. Rather than because the tea on the ship was priced to undercut tea smuggled by colonists.
• Four full pages about the Pilgrims: Plymouth Rock, religious freedom, the Mayflower, how the Pilgrims "tilled the soil," and the establishment of Thanksgiving (with no help from anyone). 
• And of course, Columbus discovered America.

I was taught every one of those things in school. Except we did hear about Squanto helping the Pilgrims.  

Given the simplistic drawing style in this book, a child seeing this illustration would assume these men are supposed to be Native Americans, rather than people pretending to be. The Tea Party is generally a complicated topic to put into a coloring book. 


There isn't a lot of finished coloring in the book, and what there is was clearly done by a fairly young kid. The exception is this page showing Columbus, which was done by an adult or at least a teen or preteen. Columbus, in this person's imagination, was blond and had very light skin. It's not hard to imagine where they would have gotten that idea.

I did appreciate that Johnnie and Janie's New Yorker uncle Bill took them to Coney Island (for a whole day) by subway and bus while wearing a business suit and hat:

If this book were done now, Bill probably would have driven them there in a Cadillac Escalade.

A Voice from 1981

A friend who used to work for Ambassador (TWA's in-flight magazine) shared this with me recently. It seems the magazine's editor, William Reynolds, wrote to a number of well-known writers and asked them for a list of books that we all should read. 

He got responses from Studs Terkel, Isaac Asimov, Jerzey Kosinski, and David Brinkley. Some had interesting lists, and others less so. 

The best response was from Ursula K. LeGuin, and I'm not saying that just because I love her writing. Here's the note, which was typed on monarch-sized paper:

And as text:

March 23, 1981

Mr. William J. Reynolds
Senior Editor
AMBASSADOR
1999 Shepard Road
Saint Paul, Minnesota 55116

Dear Mr. Reynolds:

I drew a blank trying to think of books that "we should all read." The "should" really scares me. The kind of books I read were written to give pleasure and delight. I am now trying to think of books that we should not read, and even this is very difficult. Perhaps MEIN KAMPF, perhaps the instruction manuals of the KU KLUX KLAN, perhaps THE ODYSSEY in Greek, unless we understand Greek. I guess I am stumped. Maybe I will now go read the latest Harlequin Romance, although I know I shouldn't. 

Yours very truly,

Ursula K. LeGuin 

UKL/d

Note the initials at the end: I wonder who "d" is? I assume her assistant. The letter was typed on an IBM Selectric with the Letter Gothic type element. From the looks of the Xerox copy, her letterhead is either engraved or thermography, given the way the thin parts of the letters didn't make full contact with the paper when copied.

At this point in 1981, LeGuin was 51 years old.