Among recently published books that fall within our bailiwick, the editors of American Heritage have selected some outstanding titles.
American Style: Classic Product Design from Airstream to Zippo
Written and photographed by Richard Sexton; Chronicle Books; 135 pages; $16.95.
William Mason worked out the Colt .45 revolver—the definitive hardware of Western outlaw and lawman alike—half a century before anybody thought up the term industrial design. Nevertheless, that lethally beautiful piece of sculpture is a prime example of it, and it takes its place in this book along with the Airstream Trailer, the Aladdin Workman’s Lunch Kit (that’s the lunchbox with the thermos in its rounded top), the Osterizer Blender, and 128 other products that reflect the author’s sense of the best of American industrial design.
As the inclusion of the Colt suggests, the range of products is a wide one, from Levi Strauss’s 1853 jeans to the Head Composite Edge tennis racket introduced in 1984. In between we get such artifacts as the Mason jar (1858), the Master padlock (1931), and the Slinky (1945). Some of the author’s choices seem too self-consciously design-y—Russel Wright’s long-snouted freeform pitcher, for instance, which one of his contemporaries described delicately as a “sickroom appurtenance”—and some just seem eccentric: the Brooks Brothers Diary is given a page of its own. Moreover, the author is somewhat in thrall to the products he has chosen, and his captions can be fulsome: of a handsome gold-and-black cylinder we are told that “no carbon battery looks like, or lasts like, the Duracell Battery.”
But in between the occasional fawning there is information of value to every American (the name M&M’s stands for Forrest Mars, president of the candy company, and an associate, Bruce Murrie), and there is something oddly comforting in going through this catalog of the furniture of our lives.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
by Harriet A. Jacobs; edited and with an introduction by Jean Fagan Yellin; Harvard University Press; 368 pages; $37.50 in hardcover, $9.95 in paperback.
Harriet A. Jacobs was not an ordinary slave girl, and her autobiography is not an ordinary account of the miseries of slavery. She was a slave who triumphed not only by luck or piety or passivity but by skillful planning and effective deceit.
Born in North Carolina around 1813, at eleven Harriet became the property of a three-year-old girl whose father, Dr. Flint, would sexually harass her for the rest of his life. He never raped her or permitted her to be lashed, but from the moment she reached puberty, he bullied, cajoled, threatened, and tried to trick her into becoming his concubine. He was enraged when she fell in love with a free black man, and wouldn’t permit her to marry him. Hoping to make herself less attractive to Dr. Flint, she defiantly became the mistress of a neighboring white man and bore him two children, who by the laws of slavery followed the “conditions of the mother.”
The rest of the story is about Harriet Jacobs’s campaign to save her children and herself from slavery. She spent seven years hiding in a three-foot space above a shed connected to her grandmother’s house. From there, as the editor explains in her excellent introduction, Jacobs “uses her garret cell as a war room from which to spy on her enemy and to wage psychological warfare against him. From her cramped hiding place she manipulates the sale of her children to their father, arranges for her daughter to be taken north, tricks her master into believing that she has left the South, and quite literally directs a performance in which Dr. Flint plays the fool while she watches unseen.”
With the help of Northern abolitionists, Jacobs’s account was first published in 1861. At the time, Lydia Maria Child, an editor and writer, helped her get her book ready for publication. The only major change Child suggested was to move all the “savage cruelties into one chapter” so that “those who shrink from ‘supping upon horrors’” would simply skip that section.
Even for those who have read extensively about the South’s peculiar institution, this autobiography of a slave will not easily be forgotten.
A Book of Days in American History
by Larry Shapiro; Charles Scribner’s Sons; 240 pages; $13.95.
There is now a birthday greeting on sale in gift shops tailored for everyone you know: a separate card for each day of the year that lists the famous people born on that day. The cards are oddly appealing. So, too, is the small volume A Book of Days in American History. It carries the reader, day by day, through the months of the year, providing varied and eclectic coverage of hundreds of events that have only their day in common. For instance, the entries for February 11 reveal that Thomas Jefferson’s secretary has obtained as requested a macaroni mold in 1789, marking the “debut of pasta in the United States”; that in 1808 experiments with open-grate burning of anthracite were initiated; and in 1812 the governor of Massachusetts began a practice that will forever bear his name: Gerrymandering. And so it goes, through the 365 days of the year.
Attractively bound and cleanly designed with illustrations on every page, many in color, the slightly more-than-pocket-size Book of Days makes a nice little package. Unlike a calendar, it is not tied to any one year, so its usefulness as a gift does not end in December. And the inclusion of a detailed index raises it to the status of a good reference work.
Permanent New Yorkers: A Biographical Guide to the Cemeteries of New York
by Judi Culbertson and Tom Randall; Chelsea Green Publishing Company; 405 pages; $16.95.
Who hasn’t been fascinated by an old cemetery? A graveyard can be not only a place for hallowing the dead but also a gallery of good and atrocious art, an exhibit field of curious poems, a final stage for the pageantry of vanity, and an epigrammatic museum of forgotten lives—all in a pretty park. Yet many of us either find cemeteries faintly morbid or tend to overlook them. Here, to show us what we’ve been missing, is an excellent guide to the cemeteries of New York, by the authors of a similar Baedeker of Parisian burial spots.
It’s a thick, handsome, and handy paperback, organized by cemetery, with useful maps and with the larger graveyards arranged as walking tours. Even the most jaded New Yorker will be surprised by the riches it reveals. At Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, for instance, Isabella Stewart Gardner is buried in a vault designed by Stanford White, with bronze doors by Augustus Saint-Gaudens; Elias Howe reposes several feet from his dog, Fannie, whose gravestone is adorned with an effusive poem; DeWitt Clinton rests under a statue of himself wearing formal attire from the waist up and a toga from there down; George C. Tilyou, the genius of Coney Island, sleeps below the figure of a maiden dripping flower petals on his grave; Albert Anastasia and Joey Gallo are interred at locations their families prefer kept secret; Horace Greeley lies beneath an eighty-three-word epitaph of his own penning. Others at Green-Wood include Lola Montez, Samuel Morse, Henry Ward Beecher, Margaret Sanger, and Boss Tweed. And this is all in only one of New York’s cemeteries. More than a dozen other local graveyards also offer spellbinding historical surprises.
The book is a pleasure to browse through. Some of its biographies of famous people are too cute (that of Herman Melville begins, “Call me Herman”), but its wealth of detail about the resting places of famous, obscure, and anonymous people is fascinating, and the variety of human experience it conveys is astounding. One monument at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx memorializes a youth who in 1909 “lost life by stab in falling on ink eraser, evading six young women trying to give him birthday kisses in office of Metropolitan Life Building.” The epitaph of two astronomers reads, “We have loved the stars too deeply to be afraid of the night.”
The Fighting Lady: The New Yorktown in the Pacific War
by Clark G. Reynolds; Pictorial Histories Publishing Company; 355 pages; paperback; $14.95.
Probably no American ship since the frigate Constitution has gotten as much press as the USS Yorktown: Edward Steichen took his famous photographs of World War II carrier operations on her flight deck, she was the subject of any number of articles, and while the war was still going on she played herself in Twentieth Century-Fox’s technicolor epic Wing and a Prayer. Her fame may have infected the pilots and crew, for the vessel seems to have generated more than the usual number of diaries—the keeping of which was forbidden throughout the war. Years later, after chatting with her officer Cooper Bright, a non-carrier Navy man said, “It’s been a wonderful thing to meet you here in the Navy, Coop—to learn that I really didn’t participate in the Navy in World War II at all, that anybody of importance was only on the Yorktown.… No-one else counted. The Yorktown won the whole war by itself.”
Maybe not, but this big, fascinating book makes a pretty good case for the ship’s being emblematic of every carrier man’s experience in the Pacific war. Clark Reynolds has gathered an immense amount of material ranging from those diaries to caricatures of officers drawn by the men and has assembled it into a day-to-day record of life aboard ship during the career that carried the Yorktown from Norfolk Navy Yard to Tokyo Bay. There is plenty of action here—including an energetic eyewitness account of a Japanese torpedo run by American Hertage’s founder Oliver Jensen—but there are also the myriad other things that make up life in the crowded, busy city that is a modern carrier. As memorable as the pilots’ triumphant day’s work in the Philippine Sea are the scathing skits written by the officers about the showy Adm. Bull Halsey after he put the Yorktown into a typhoon and the bogus Pacific Fleet directive that was circulated through the vessel at war’s end requiring all personnel to “undergo an indoctrination course” before reentering civilian life. One of its many pointers read: “In America there is a remarkable number of beautiful girls … and many are gainfully employed as stenographers, sales girls and beauty operators or welders. Contrary to current practices, they should not be approached with ‘How much?’”
“Having Wonderful Time”: Topeka in Postcards, 1907–1914
by John W. Ripley; Shawnee County Historical Society, P.O. Box 56, Topeka, KS 66601; $5.50.
In 1907 Annie Parry Bundy—who ran the School of Pianoforte above the E. B. Guild Music Store on Kansas Avenue in Topeka—began, like half the world at the time, to collect postcards. She specialized in “scenics,” and her favorites were of her hometown. When she died, in 1937, the collection went to the Topeka Public Library, and some fifty of them make up most of the views in this handsomely produced booklet. All the cards are reproduced in color—the colors imparted to them by the German lithographers who issued most of the hundreds of thousands of postcards that flooded the country in the years before the First World War. As Ripley shows us, those same lithographers would insert stock pictures of motorcars into actual street scenes to give the card a satisfying modern look. Despite this deception—and the seething, utterly spurious night skies occasionally painted over daytime streets—the cards are a true and revealing record of the America they so exhaustively chronicled. These scenes of Topeka, each bearing a knowledgeable caption, will, of course, interest residents of that town. But they will also appeal to anyone who is drawn to the impregnable, foursquare cities of our Beaux-Arts age, when people knew what a business block should look like.
