Hauntological dumping ground.
Absolutely fascinating current affairs programme from 1972 looking at advice columnists - Dr Stephen Black talks to Marjorie Proops of the Daily Mirror , Evelyn Home of Woman , Claire Rayner of Petticoat and Jane Firbank of Forum , who between them "deal with more than 100,000 letters a year". Most of these columnists have multiple assistants helping them and offices full of reference books and…
Have not posted on here for some time, simply because I have had nothing of much interest to to put here. Don't seem to find much intersting stuff in Charity shops or Car boot sales anymore. However found this superb book online not so long ago and just knew instantly I had to buy it (a very good price it was) Published in 1966 this hard back (copy) is quite stunning. Documenting the building of…
Does any phrase bring to mind the atmosphere, the aroma, of the British 1970s better than "sex maniac"? Not a rhetorical question - I genuinely am curious if there's a more evocative word or phrase. I mean, there's "secondary picket". The top ad above is from 1976, the one below it from 1978. The Sex Maniac's Diary launched in 1972, which surely proves its echt-Seventiesness. ("Kinky" would be the…
Not actually "music" though - more like sermons and speeches via Mercier Catholic Record Club Irish Christian club LP series in 1960/70s I wonder if they really thought that in the face of declining interest from the young and the with-it, all God needed was a bit of modish packaging x
Sad children's discarded dolls, teddys, gnomes etc. at Perry Barr Crematorium.
Colour supplement piece glued into a scrapbook circa 1979 - the author is possibly Keith Waterhouse. Attempts to put these prank tactics into practice - in the elevator at Dillons, in department stores - led to underwhelming results. Perhaps grown-ups instinctively tune out the prattlings of children. Perhaps we weren't good enough actors. Conversely, eavesdropping rarely trawls up anything very…
Test Transmission all things Keith Seatman and more: Ghost Signs : I have been randomly taking photos of Ghost signs for some years now, Ghost signs are historic, faded and outdated tatty advertising images ...
Paladin - second only to Picador as a publisher's name to set the arty-intellectual bibliophile's heart a flutter... Radical, countercultural, polemical, esoteric, transgressive, avant-garde, youth culture ... a feast for the hungry young mind, portions selling at a reasonable paperback price. Eye-catching design. I have six of the above Paladins - and in the the same covers as shown. These are…
A sketchbook page.
An advert in Sounds , April 1983 " Outside London, 24 hours a day, except during the season's major cricket matches, when it's available at the end of play " Even without the summertime disruption caused by cricket, this doesn't seem the most compelling of offers to the pop-loving public: " all your favorite singles " but that translates to " four different songs " during the week, going up to…
The library at the academic institute where I work part-time recently had a massive chuck-out. Scanning the tomes strewn across the tables, I was struck by the high proportion of reference books - encyclopedias, dictionaries, guides, thesauruses, -ographies of various types. Quite a few of them seemed to be just lists bound between hard covers - an inventory of modernist sculptures made in the UK…
Finally managed to get a very old copy of Struwwelpeter (shock-headed" Peter) this is a very dark and strange collection of childrens stories. Written in 1845 by Heinrich Hoffman. Hoffmann wrote the book in reaction to what he perceived as a lack of good books at the time for children. In six short, illustrated stories, Hoffman, a physician from Frankfurt, told grisly moral tales: of a boy who…
[post formerly at the old Found Objects but reconstituted in honor of Britain's greatest footballer, Sir Bobby Charlton , RIP- and a great comb-over owner] One thing I've noticed on my visits back to England over the last few years--you will never see a comb over anymore. They used to be the mark of male middle age. Bus conductors, men in betting shops, famous footballers, TV quiz presenters....…
What passes for a chilly morning in Southern California (I've grown soft). So I made some porridge for breakfast. Felt like there was a small bonfire in my belly for an hour or so later. Reminded me of these cosy-yet-eerie commercials for Ready Brek oatmeal from back in the day. They were eerier still in my memory, because I pictured them in black-and-white (but I guess that's only because we had…
Back in 2019 I posted a number of pages/ads from the 1962 publication Wireless world back then I had every intention of putting more pages from Wireless World on here, but somehow I got sidetracked. So after a few years delay, here are some more pages from the wonderful Wireless World.
You used to see this chap's books a lot in the 1970s - Edward de Bono Pioneer of what would be later called "thinking outside the box" but what he dubbed "lateral thinking". This was the big one: But he milked the idea over the course of God knows how many books - below is just a small sampling. x He even branched out into illustrated children's books (at least that's what I think this is)…
No doubt everyone is familiar with this Zardoz zy cover. But I hadn't really clocked that there was a whole discography of releases from Westminster Gold with a similar visual look presumably pitched at the younger, "with it" generation. The work of a designer called Christopher Whorf . Lots of cheesecake imagery That one made me think of PiL's Metal Box , of course. Also visual puns and japes…
In 1981 the British Film Producer Harold Baim made 3 documentry films about British Cities (Birmingham, Aberdeen and Portsmouth) all narrated by the actor Telly (Kojak) Savalas. Originally there were supposed to have been 11 of these short films, but only 3 were ever made. When asked why Telly Savalas?? Baim replied "its a marketing ploy" Baim's short films known as Quota Quickies were originally…
A delightful clip of a young June Tabor performing the trad. arr ditty "While Gamekeepers Lie Sleeping" - a song about poaching. From the show Fanfare , which was built around the boy band Flintlock, who'd become popular on 1970s kids TV through appearances on You Must Be Joking and Pauline's Quirkes . What I like about this clip, alongside the performance, is the way that the six young lads plus…
At 16.05 minutes into Ken Russell's decidedly eccentric documentary In Search of the English Folk Song , local minstrel Bob Appleyard sings about a giant oil refinery on the Solent. The whole doc is worth a watch.
Quatermass 2 was filmed in Hemel Hempstead as it was being built (effectively a new town, populated with London overflow, glommed onto the side of an existing, much smaller and more charming town - which thereafter became known as Old Hemel). In the movie it doubles for the fictional town of Winnerden Flats. The new Hemel now dwarfs its older namesake, like a carbuncle on a buttock that swells to…
Watch and listen not for the play itself but the intro / title sequence for Play For Today in 1973 - a cool if brief slice of avant electronic crash bang wallop. The starkness and abrasiveness seem to be preparing the viewers: " gird yourself for some grim, barebones social realism ". I noticed this when watching Mike Leigh's debut TV play Hard Labour (there is a season of Leigh on Telly running…