Archive for the 'Review' Category

Book Review: At a Crossroads

May 8th, 2008

You just graduated college, now what to do? Conventional wisdom tells us it’s time to get out there in the so-called “real world” and get in on the ground floor of a lifelong career. That’s what you’re repeatedly told in your teens and early ’20s, but from a jaded 39 year-old’s perspective I now know […]

Book Review: Jackie Ormes

March 14th, 2008

I love it when a book exposes me to an event or person that I’d previously known nothing of. This happened recently when a friend sent along an email linking to an article on Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist. This book grew out of author Nancy Goldstein’s interest in a doll modeled […]

Book Review: Art Out of Time

January 26th, 2008

Dan Nadel’s Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969 arrived as a Christmas gift from my s.o., who bought it off my Amazon wish list after I blindly put it on there a few years back. Something about the cover design and the concept of trolling through old newspapers for comic obscurities appealed to […]

Bette in Bookstores

November 14th, 2007

Although only the latest in a long string of similar bios, Ed Sikov’s Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis is an excellent book which manages to uncover new insights into the subject. Having considered Sikov’s 1998 bio on Billy Wilder one of the finest books on filmmaking ever, I devoured this one in galley […]

Book Review: Hand Job

October 21st, 2007

Michael Perry’s Hand Job: A Catalog of Type gathers the work of 55 artists who, in rebellion against computers, excel in hand-drawn typography and design. I remember first noticing this trend in the opening credits to Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, with cast and crew names floating around in lettering mimicking the loopy and unpolished […]

Book Review: Uncovered

September 27th, 2007

You might have seen the work of photographer Thomas Allen floating around the weblogs a few months back — he’s the guy who cuts out and arranges pulpy paperback books from the ’50s in surprising and delightful ways. Now some of his work has been collected in a new monograph, Uncovered: Photographs by Thomas Allen. […]

Book Review: Taking Things Seriously

September 16th, 2007

Back when I worked at the local newspaper, one of the things I confiscated for myself was this ancient metal Swingline stapler which appeared to date from the Kennedy/Johnson era. Streamlined in design, heavy as a rock, painted Industrial Tan and covered in years of grime and scotch tape detritus, the stapler was so out […]

Book Review: Stacked Decks

July 26th, 2007

I’m ashamed to admit it, but reading Stacked Decks: The Art and History of Erotic Playing Cards is something akin to browsing through your dad’s secret stash of Playboys.
In this nicely appointed book, vintage erotica collector Mark Rotenberg guides us through his playing card collection — with examples ranging in date from the quaint, ample-thighed […]

Book Review: Charley Harper

June 1st, 2007

About five or six years ago, me and my partner stumbled across some excellent framed prints of stylized birds in a dusty antique store. They looked to be from the ’50s, but the prints’ appealing freshness and simplicity had a timeless quality. The birds literally appeared to fly off the paper they were printed on. […]

Book Review: Fly Now!

May 16th, 2007

Consumer note: although
Fly Now!: The Poster Collection of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum is published by National Geographic, it doesn’t contain a single nature photograph (the closest might be a ’70s poster showing a flock of flamingos). What it does have are dozens of gorgeous American and European poster designs from the glory […]

Book Review: Core Memory

May 7th, 2007

I have a strange affinity for wall-sized computers in old movies. Banks of blinking lights and spinning reels of magnetic tape made for nice background scenery, but they’re nothing compared to the real stories behind those early, rare and expensive computers. These pioneering machines are explored in an unexpectedly sumptuous way via Core Memory: A […]

Book Review: Mingering Mike

April 18th, 2007

Today I start a new and (hopefully) continuing scrubbles.net feature in which new books which fall under the “pop culture/art/design/retro goodness” umbrella are reviewed. Our first subject is Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar from Princeton Architectural Press.
The story behind this book really started in late 2003, when Washington D.C. deejay […]