More fabulousness culled from ye olde pages of the New York Times, this concerns the Ur-pop star Eva Tanguay, profiled here magnificently by Jody Rosen, who smartly connects the wild-haired vaudeville sensation with the later characteristics of punk and hip hop, as well as the mad headdresses of Lady Gaga (see the article’s accompanying slideshow).
Educational illustrations from a booklet acquired in Puerto Rico: Transportation and Communication from Laminas Latino No. 10. Undated. (reblogged from the amazing publiccollectors)
Reading about the New York Times’ great scrapple debate of 1872, I came across this letter from an anonymous New York bachelor in the same newspaper. In recounting his household budget and personal luxuries, the author tells a better and shorter short story than I’ve read in ages. Amazing.
“Schubert’s not distant, not alien, not detached, he’s full-blooded and alive, he’s home for me, he’s the emotional trailer park where I live, don’t you get that?, don’t you hear it’s so beautiful?, so much more intensely felt than this movie?, I wanted to scream all through the room, to the mainly 50-something women who had come alone in their Lexuses through the Florida rain to the mildewed and neglected theatre. No, no, so beautiful, I thought as Schubert’s echoes dopplered away and we returned to the morose mediocrity of the main score. I was like Bella abandoned by Edward, soundtrack bereft.” — Jeremy Denk addresses the ironic use of Schubert in The Twilight Saga: New Moon, in a post entitled Schubert’s Killer Abs and tagged Abs as Metaphor for Verse, General Cultural Self-Degradation, Shameful Movie Attendance, Twilight New Moon, Vampire Musicologists.
Madonna goes Mamma Roma for Dolce & Gabbana (via Towleroad)
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Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, designed by Helen Yentus and Jason Booher
Tasked with redesigning the entire Nabokov oeuvre, designer John Gall was inspired by the author’s passion for lepidoptery to create a series of display boxes to be filled by eminent book jacket artists. Among the other designers he picked for this Nabokov Specimen Box Project are Chip Kidd and Dave Eggers. (via Design Observer)
This mysterious image was taken from Square America’s slideshow of images from the 1933 and 1939 World’s Fairs.
A Trip to the Fair (Chicago 1 & New York 1939)
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Some Flickr-clicking led to to this sublime sketch by original Penguin designers Jan Tschichold and Erik Ellegaard Frederiksen. (via David George Pearson, also check his collection of sketches for the Penguin logo)