Tiffany telephone dialer

Cooper-Hewitt’s Object of the Day: the Tiffany telephone dialer, a perfect mid-century gift, immortalized in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

If blogging is dead, I hope no one at Cooper-Hewitt finds out. I read Object of the Day daily and recommend it with enthusiasm.

Separated at birth?

The actor Myron McCormick and the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. We saw McCormick in an episode of Naked City the other night. Add a few inches of height and a soprano saxophone, and we might have been looking at Lacy.

If your idea of the soprano saxophone has been brought to you by the letter G, try the letters B, C, and L. With the first track, the soprano arrives at 1:55. It’s worth waiting for.

Related posts
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop
John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi
Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt
Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov
Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln
Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls
Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks
Joseph McCarthy and Ted Cruz

J. Logan Govers

[A logical sequel to the previous post. Click for a larger view.]

J. Logan Gover (1908–1986) was an east-central Illinois insurance agent, real estate broker, and civic leader. Many businesses used to give out calendars: I think it’s safe to assume that J. Logan Gover gave out glasses. I bought these three a few years ago at an estate sale. A strange and happy part of the story: Elaine’s quartet was to play for the wedding of a Gover granddaughter, a few days after the sale. Elaine told her about these glasses, and she and her fiancé came by and bought dozens.

An eBay seller has a J. Logan Gover glass with a fourth picture. I wonder how many J. Logan Govers there were.

[Snow is cheaper than Silk.]

Organization man?

[Click for a larger view.]

I found these photographs in a paperback copy of William H. Whyte’s 1956 book The Organization Man. The photographs, stamped April 6, 1960, were in an envelope bearing the name of a Lubbock, Texas, photography studio. Was the man in these photographs an organization man? Or was he playing the part? Did he buy the book looking for a way out?

Whyte’s book makes interesting reading in 2013. From the chapter “The Practical Curriculum”:

By default, the anti-intellectual sector of education has been allowed to usurp the word “democratic” to justify the denaturing of the curriculum, and while liberal arts people may win arguments on this score, the others won the war long ago. Once the uneducated could have the humility of ignorance. Now they are given degrees and put in charge, and this delusion of learning will produce consequences more critical than the absence of it.

I return to my pessimistic forecast. Look ahead to 1985. Those who will control a good part of the educational plant will be products themselves of the most stringently anti-intellectual training in the country. Nor will the laymen be out of tune with the vocationalists; to judge by the new suburbia the bulk of middle-class parents of 1985 will know no other standards to evaluate education of their children than those of the social-adjustment type of schooling. And who will be picking the schools to endow and sitting on the boards of trustees? More and more it will be the man of The Organization, the graduate of the business school — the “modern man,” in sum, that his education was so effectively designed to bring about.

A related post
A list found in an old paperback

Canned Heat and Cooper-Hewitt

Cooper-Hewitt’s Object of the Day today: a 1968 concert poster for Canned Heat at the Fillmore West. The artist is Lee Conklin.

Related reading
All Canned Heat posts (Pinboard)

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, December 16, 2013.]


[Hi and Lois corrected, December 16, 2013.]

Good answer, Hi. But I had to do something about the faulty mirror — or is that a vampire bracelet?

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

[All Hi and Lois repairs made with OEM parts and Seashore, an open-source image editor for Mac.]

A Naked City Mongol

[“Goodbye, My Lady Love,” Naked City, January 27, 1959. Click for a larger view.]

That’s Detective Jimmy Halloran (James Franciscus) and a Mongol pencil. It’s the ferrule that gives it away. Here’s another Naked City Mongol.

Yes, there are all kinds of ways to enjoy television. This post involves a highly specific application of the studies-in-material-culture approach.

Related reading
All Mongol pencil posts
All Naked City posts

[There are eight million pencils in the Naked City. This has been one of them.]

Growing optimism

I have sometimes described myself as “cautiously pessimistic.” Ha. But I am an optimist at heart.

Last night, my daughter Rachel told me that she thinks I’ve grown more optimistic over the years. I sure hope she’s right!

An Aldine House title page

[Illustration by R. W. A. Rouse. Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. (London: Aldine House, 1898.]

From a page about Everyman’s Library: “Aldine House, the offices of J. M. Dent and Sons, was located on Bedford Street in the Covent Garden district of London,” named of course after the great Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, founder of the Aldine Press.

Aldine has another meaning for me, as a joking adjective that described my great friend Aldo Carrasco. Yes, we knew about Aldus Manutius. We were Renaissance humanists, all the way.

[Gray’s poem is here. As for Robert William Arthur Rouse, one auction page gives his dates as 1867–1951. Another describes him as flourishing between 1882 and 1929. The image is from the British Library’s Flickr pages.]

A Bodley Head title page

[Illustration by E. H. New. Alfred Hayes, The Vale of Arden and Other Poems (London: The Bodley Head, 1895.]

Alfred Hayes (1857–1936) was a British poet; E. H. New (1871–1931), a British illustrator. I prefer the title page to the poetry: “Embosomed shall my cottage be / In woodlands, whence the village spire / Peeps.” You can find The Vale of Arden at Google Books. The image is from the British Library’s Flickr pages.