I love my local library

I do, I love my local library.

I love my local library waaaaaaaay more than any human should. And it's not just because my friend Bob is the new big cheese at the library, although that's part of it. I love my local library because it's huge, it's well lit, it has books, magazines, CD's, DVD's, graphic novels, and because it's within walking distance of my house. But the reason I am loving my local library today is because they had a massive used book sale there today.

They had a deal where you pay $20 bucks and you could get all the books you could pack in a box. When we found that out we went wild. Sparky got a bunch of novels and a few non fiction books as well and I got these books:
A Foot in the Grave has some really cool and creepy illustrations in it. Zhou Enlai has great shots of vintage Communists in it. Puppet Making spoke to me and it said, "Touch the puppet head." I look forward to reading the slim novel about how Napoleon cheated death.

I really made a score when I picked up those two USDA books about our nation's food supply, one is from 1966 and the other is from 1969. They both are packed with great vintage photos of farms, animals, people, and food from that era. I got a book about by a guy who directed exploitation movies in the '50's, '60's and '70's, a book about the history of wine, and a book of essay's on food.
Speaking of food, I found four, count them four, cookbooks that are filled with pictures of bad food. I can wait to share them with you on my blogs and on Flickr.

Thanks Johnson City Public Library!

New Vintage Photo Sets on Flickr

I just added some new scans of photos from children's picture books from the 60's, 70's and 80's on one of my Flickr accounts. This one is from Let's Take a Trip to Czechoslovakia.

This is from the early 60's classic Our Neighbors in Japan.

This one is from State Police.

My favorite pictures in this set come from the early 70's classic Calling Car 24 Frank: A day in the life of two New York City Policemen. This little book was astonishing to me not because it had such great photos that really captured that time period or because it had a Dragnet "just the facts ma'am" quality to it. It was astonishing to me because they chose to profile a mixed race team of cops, one of whom was a Muslim. Publishers would go out of their way today to keep any mention of Muslims on the NYC police force out of print.


Ah well, feel free to enjoy these pictures from a simpler more innocent time.

Lobsterman

I just finished putting the scans of this children's picture book up on Flickr and you can see all of them here.

This book was first published in 1962, the year I was born!, and it's an amazingly beautiful piece of work. I think it's a stunning artistic achievement and I can't imagine all the work that Ms. Ipcar put into all these stunning illustrations. I'm sure if I had read this book back when I was a kid that I'd have become a lobsterman when I grew older. Sadly, I read the book about the fat smart ass who wrote pithy blog posts all day long instead, oh well.

Here's some random pages from the book:




Ms. Ipcar, age 90, is still alive, as I write this anyway, and she has a website that you can see here.

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One of the reasons I bought a scanner was to save books like this from being forgotten. I think it's important to save bits and pieces of the more esoteric parts of our popular culture on the internet. I'm glad I got to scan and save this beautiful book, even if only one other person gets to see the art and read the story of it then I feel like I've done something worthwhile.