Benguiat style

Elaine and I dug the signage in this next-to-last episode of Route 66:


[From the Route 66 episode “Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way: Part 1,” March 6, 1964.]

And more recently, we dug the titles in the 1960s educational film You Be the Judge:



I was ready to issue a call to help, but I think I’ve answered my question: the designer behind this kind of lettering, though not necessarily these letters, would appear to be Ed Benguiat. The key word: interlock. House Industries’s Ed Benguiat Font Collection has an Interlock font (with nearly 1,400 ligatures) that pays homage to Benguiat’s work. Here is One minute ’til three in Ed Interlock:



I now realize that Benguiat’s interlocking letters are a trace element in Frank Holmes’s cover design for the Beach Boys’ album SMiLE. And now I’m trying to figure out where else I’ve seen interlocked lettering. Other album covers? Cereal boxes? I am in search of lost type.

Where have you seen interlocked lettering?

*

11:07 a.m.: There’s something similar in a poster for A Hard Day’s Night.

Related reading, sort of
All Route 66 posts (Pinboard)

[You Be the Judge, produced by Crisco, stars a young Bonnie Franklin. She and a girlfriend engage in a cook-off with a couple of goofy boys. The girls use Crisco and measure carefully, while the boys make a catastrophe of their dishes. And then the girls throw the contest. Some education. The film is available in the educational-film compilation How to Be a Woman (Kino). This DVD and the companion How to Be a Man include several films from Centron Corporation, whose employees created the great 1962 film Carnival of Souls.]

“War of the Welles”

From KPCC’s Off-Ramp: “War of the Welles,” a radio documentary about the Mercury Theatre’s 1938 adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. KPCC also has a re-broadcast of the Mercury program. Both are available as podcasts from this page.

Orange tree art

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Elaine and I have been photographing our Red Sunset maple over the past few days. Its leaves turned all at once. On Saturday, we saw the orange tones you see here. Today there’s much more red. Last year, storms and wind removed this tree’s leaves almost all at once. If that happens this year, we’ll have a keepsake. Which I realize is not keeping with the transience of fall’s beauty but what the heck.

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange car art : Orange crate art : Orange crate art (Encyclopedia Brown) : Orange flag art : Orange manual art : Orange mug art : Orange newspaper art : Orange notebook art : Orange notecard art : Orange peel art : Orange pencil art : Orange soda art : Orange stem art : Orange telephone art : Orange timer art : Orange toothbrush art : Orange train art : Orange tree art : Orange Tweed art

John Lennon on love

“Love means having to say you’re sorry every five minutes”: John Lennon, on The Dick Cavett Show (September 11, 1971).

Other Cavett Show posts
John Huston on James Agee
Marlon Brando on acting
Orson Welles, language maven

[For anyone who doesn’t get the joke: Wikipedia explains.]

Allan Block (1923–2013)

Allan Block was a sandal maker and fiddler whose Greenwich Village shop, Allan Block Sandals, became a center for old-timey music in New York. The New York Times has an obituary.

You can catch a glimpse of the sandal shop in this post on West Fourth Street’s role in an episode of Naked City. The shop’s location, 171 West Fourth Street, is now a tobacco and smoking accessories store. Elaine and I walked past it in May.

Art by Javier Pérez

[Javier Pérez, Trompclip.]

Elaine pointed me to the art of Javier Pérez. Beautiful and punny.

SEIU on campus

My friend Sara pointed me to news of the growing number of adjunct faculty joining Service Employees International Union:

Bill Shimer, a part-time lecturer in management and organizational development at Northeastern University in Boston, said he never imagined being part of the union movement. But he has been rallying colleagues to support an upcoming vote on whether to form a union.

“It’s not that people want to unionize, but we really don’t see any other way. There’s nowhere to turn and nobody is looking out for us,” said Shimer, who teaches five classes at Northeastern and two at another local university.

The university has responded by hiring a prominent law firm used by many corporations to discourage union organizing.

I am always surprised when a teacher finds the prospect of a union distasteful. I am saddened and not surprised when management university adminstrators feel the same way.

Thanks, Sara.

Ph.D.’s outside academia

The New York Times has an article on Ph.D.’s outside academia: The Repurposed Ph.D. What goes unaddressed: whether a doctorate is truly necessary for the kinds of work the article describes.

[Why Ph.D.’s ? The apostrophe is “traditionally used with abbreviations containing capital letters and periods” to form a plural (Garner’s Modern American Usage ).]

A drawer of the past

[Henry, November 2, 2013.]

I like the refrigerator, but I especially like the drawer — not just the suggestion of dovetail joints but the way the drawer drops when opened. No drawer slides in this comic strip world.

Related reading
All Henry posts (Pinboard)

[Why “the suggestion of dovetail joints”? Because there are no trapezoids. These joints hold together a two-dimensional drawer, so the extra strength of the traditional dovetail is not needed.]

Macintosh Plus emulator

James Friend’s Mac Plus emulator takes me back my first experience with a Mac: 1984, in a Boston computer store. The Mac seemed then to be a pleasant (and expensive) toy. Elaine and I ended up buying a Panasonic Senior Partner and an Olympia daisy-wheel printer. We were no visionaries. These machines would not work together, and we returned them both for a full refund (thanks to a friendly musician-salesman). Our next computer was an Apple //c. Many years (and Windows) later, our fambly is nothing but Macs.

The Mac Plus appeared in January 1986.

[Found via Daring Fireball.]