The 1950s and 60s produced some amazing artifacts: the Space Age, the
Theme Park, the Contemporary Home, just to name a few. While the optimism
of those days may be long gone to greater public, we can relive the fantasy
and excitement of that gone-by era though a host of books. Here are the
better ones from my ever-growing collection.
Googie
Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture
Chronicling
the development of Coffee Ship “Googie” architecture,
this book takes readers through a pictorial journey of 1950s
Southern California, and all of its post-war wonders. The book
is filled with great photos (both color and black & white)
of Googie coffee shops and other buildings, and the text describes
how the architectural style came about. It’s great to not
just to be able to peek into the buildings, but also into the
mindsets of the Society that brought Googie architecture into
it’s heyday.
Judging
by the
title alone you may think this book is just another boring history
lesson. Once you open it you’ll discover
it’s
more of a coffee table book filled with tons of photos of retro-computers.
You get it all: mechanical adding machines, reel-to-reel computers,
vacuum tubes, large panels of flashing lights. Where the book
really shines is in it’s 1960s and 1970s mainframe photos,
complete with promotional images featuring Mod models and funky
furniture. There's complete text included in it's massive 480
pages, but I've never even tried to read it. The pictures are
too distracting.
Southern California in the 50's
Sun, Fun, and Fantasy
In
the 1950s, Southern California
saw amazing growth in Arts, Entertainment, and Architecture.
This book takes us back there: to the theme parks,
the shopping malls, the eateries, and the optimism that was born
in the 50s and still lingers today. It is superbly written, but
is worth it for the photographs alone, featuring a great mixture
of professional photos, vintage ads, and the occasional vacation
snapshot. I love the sections on Space Age and Western themes,
but really every page of this book has something amazing to offer,
whether you’re into it for nostalgia, the optimistic dreams,
or the almost-gone vision that SoCal had to offer. Warning: reading
this book will cause you to yearn for a road trip.
This is a thick
book with wall to wall photos of retro-future illustrations from
ads, comics, sci-fi digests, and other places. It's a great
series of images showing both intriguing and absurd visions of the
future which mostly never made it to reality. Jet packs, bubble cars,
pneumatic tubes, robots, and moving sidewalks fill every page. The
reproductions are sometimes from less-than-mint originals, so you
sometimes have to look beyond the imperfections, but that only adds
to the book’s charm. After all, if these were new graphics,
it would defeat the whole purpose of this collection. Here’s
to the future.
Meet
Mr. Product
The Art Of the Advertising Character
This
is a collection of marketing character, mostly from the "golden
age" of advertising, both well known (like the Charlie
the Sunkist Tuna) to the obscure (ever heard of Esso Oildrop?).
Flipping through is a lot of fun; There's not much here except
pictures, but that's really all we need. It brings a smile
to my face every time I read it, and it's a great book to have
out for when you have guests over. It always starts conversations.
