A Miscellany

I've lost count of how many carloads of books I've transported from my old farm to the new, grandly-named 'business centre', but I've reached a point where enough is enough. The rest of my books are going in the bin. They've been on sale for nearly two years without attracting a single customer, so my conscience is clear.

As Channing says in Spearhead From Space: "Destroy. Total Destruction. "

During the last few long, dusty days of throwing unwanted books in bins, I've come across a few gems. Here are my favourites:

As the advertising slogan used to say, "You can be sure of Shell".

This is from the good old days when having your five a day probably wasn't such a good idea, unless you thoroughly washed the carcinogenic residue off. Thanks to people like Rachel Carson, DDT was eventually banned from agricultural use, although the UK doggedly persisted until the mid-80s.

The last time I saw the acronym DDT, it was on a bottle of headlice shampoo. I didn't buy it.

This is from a 1940s boys' annual and features a novel solution to the problem of not being able to wear a tie in space.

If the British Empire had endured, perhaps this is how we would have conquered space, once we'd solved the problem of how to make a decent pot of tea in zero gravity.

There isn't much to be said about this leaflet. I just rather like the early 1950s graphic style. Apparently Nordkapp is Norwegian for Northern Cape.

I have no idea who this woman is, but spookily she looks just like a friend who has just died. I'd guess that this was taken in the late 70s or early 80s.

The photo fell out of a novel, where it was marking a page.

I can't really say why I like this illustration, but I think the combination of of the twilit sky and the lamplight in the foreground reminds me of a magical 'Night and Day' display that used to be exhibited in the Science Museum, many years ago.

I don't know why they got rid of it. They kept the Shipping gallery, which was very dull and didn't have any buttons to push.

These two images are from a late-1930s guide to photography. Both pictures evoke something of Britain between the wars - an era whose dying embers lasted until the late 1960s (and in the case of my wife's grandparents, the 1990s).

The first reminds me of a parade of shops on the border between Kew and Richmond, one of which was a delicatessen that my parents conspicuously avoided, probably because it sold 'funny' foreign food.

The second photo has an appealling wintry, Sunday afternoon atmosphere, unusually relaxed compared to most family group shots of the time.

The photography book also contained this loose insert:

The general message seems to be: feel free to snap away, but not if you're an enemy alien. I'm not sure if this notice alone would be a sufficient deterent to any foreign types, keen on assisting the Third Reich.

On the subject of the Fatherland, I opened a 1912 textbook for German schoolchildren learning English and discovered this gently-amusing anecdote:

'James II., when Duke of York once paid a visit to Milton. In the course of conversation he told the blind poet that the loss of his sight might be a punishment laid on him for having written against the late King.

"If, " replied Milton, "the calamities of this world are indications of Heaven's wrath, how guilty must your late Highness's father have been! I lost only my eyes: he lost his head."'

Finally (and apologies to anyone who has already seen this on Twitter), here is a great British brand-name that we don't hear very much of these days. I wonder what happened to them?

Miss Perkins, Bulgarians, Town Planning and the Blitz

Winter was awful. I was ill for the best part of three months and consumned more antibiotics than a supermarket chicken. But I've been gradually recovering during the last few weeks and have worked like the clappers to make up for lost time. It seems to be paying off.

I've been working through a delivery of books that has an enjoyably ecclectic range of titles. Here are a few that caught my eye:

I'm a big fan of the coloured frontispieces in old children's novels. Often they are the only illustration in the book and have to entice a potential reader with a scene of mild peril.

Girls tend to be standing outside a study, waiting to be upbraided, whilst boys can usually been seen hiding from an assailant, who is either an angry master, foreign agent or beligerent farm labourer.

The caption for the above picture is "Miss Perkins looked straight at the girls". It would be a Miss Perkins.

But it was a very different age, as this book below reminds us:

I Googled this book title and ended up with some pictures of a number of very healthy looking young men with George Michael beards.  They all looked very cheerful and for a brief moment, I wondered if I would have been a happier person if I was a gay Bulgarian.

I'll never know.

The next book that appealed is this 1960s educational title:

The book purports to give an unbiased overview of the development of towns and cities, but 50 years on, it seems ridiculously prejudiced. Like many other books and television programmes of the time, it has a blind faith in planning and modernism as the saviours of mankind. For example, the illustration below has this caption:

"A modern town does not grow up accidentally. It is carefully planned so that we can enjoy living in it."

The reality, of course, is quite different. Most people prefer living in a town that has evolved slowly over time, in response to people's needs, rather than the soulless creation of priggish idealogues, avaricious businessmen and corrupt councillors. The text claims that these concrete buildings "are pleasant to look at." Really?

The most striking book I found today was a collection of photographs from the Second World War. Apparently, this picture of blind children in a shelter during an air raid was voted the favourite war photo by readers of an American magazine in 1943.

I'm not surprised. It is a powerful image that still shocks and upsets:

The photo below is also very moving. This was taken after an air raid in Sussex, during which 20 children were killed at a school:

"And finally..."

Like the news, it's usually best to end on a lighter note, so I'll finish with this nice juxtaposition of a theatre poster and a bombed-out building:

Colour Me Bad

There isn't a theme to this post, but I promise that it will not feature any animals. All of the following illustrations have been discovered during the last few days.

I've always had a soft spot for 1970s fashions, particularly the neo-Victorian style of Jon Pertwee's Doctor Who and Peter Wyngarde's Jason King. However, these migraine-inducing designs from Sewing Illustrated show a very different sartorial zeitgeist:

The woman looks a little uncomfortable, and it's not just because the man's hand is dangerously close to her left breast. She knows that she looks utterly ridiculous.

 

"A colour-co-ordinated lawn rake? Thanks Dad!" 

Designs like these are enough to make anyone yearn for the age of clothing coupons and post-war austerity. These pictures, from two decades earlier, show a very different world:

 

"I say. Awfully well done Mr Fuller. Your merrows have surpahhhssed themselves this year..."

"Ebsolutely splindid! Congretulations!"

Did these people fight for a world of patchwork denim and yellow garden rakes? No. But somehow this period was the midwife to the age of Garry Glitter, Jimmy Savile and the Bay City Rollers.

A decade earlier, the stakes were even higher than gardening competitions:

It all has me longing for a quieter, more innocent age, before people said "Yay!" and "LOL". A time when gentlemen of commerce would have to sit in silence during train journeys. Perhaps the 1880s:

 

This 1886 Boy's Own illustration looks as if it's recording the very first use of a smartphone, but actually the young man is looking at a portrait of his recently-deceased sister. In my desire to escape to the past, I'd forgotten about consumption, rickets and polio. I wouldn't have made it to adulthood.

Finally, my favourite cover this week. Did you know that Japanese women used to look like Elizabeth Taylor?