Waiting game

Well over a year ago now, the book True Prep hit the bookshelves. Around the time that it came out, I was sort of interested in purchasing it (especially having somewhat recently found The Official Preppy Handbook), but held off buying it, knowing that my stack of books I'd been meaning to read was somewhere between knee and mid-thigh level when stacked on top of one another.

Fast forward over a year later into the dead of winter and wouldn't you know it, I find a copy peeking at me from the thrift store shelf.

At only $1, this time I couldn't pass it up (especially considering it looked brand-new). Like the predecessor before it, the book is a microscopic look at prep culture and all that it entails, and while I'm sure there's a lot of truth in it, it reads like a giant piss take to me. Definitely worth what I paid for it, but I probably would have felt somewhat burnt had I paid full price.

It wasn't my only find at the same stop, though, as I not only got a really great navy and bright green silk ribbon belt, but an insanely electric linen tie that might best be described as Pantone Warm Red C. It's so summer it's not even funny.

Take Ivy (take two, coming soonish)

I know I've posted about this before, but I'm bumping this post up because Amazon.com has Take Ivy for a ridiculous $13.47 pre-order price. That's almost half off the cover price and almost 4 dollars lower than the lowest price I've seen it. I just ordered my copy and you might want to as well, because according to The Trad, "The first printing is 10,000 copies of which 6,000 have been pre-sold." (and this was from a post nearly a month ago).

So yeah, 1-month advance warning. Take Ivy, the much written about photo book from Teruyoshi Hayashida, is being reprinted (finally) and released on August 31, 2010.



Originally shot in the 60s, this elusive book has been sort of a holy grail of prep style for basically forty years. Over the past couple years, copies have sold on various auction and book sites for hundreds of dollars, and The Trad even went through the painstaking (and surprisingly non-litigious, so far) process of scanning and posting the entire book on his site.

Pre-orders are sitting at a dirt cheap $16.50 right now, but I'm sure I'll re-post this when it's release date gets a little closer.

My new nickname is "Skip" or "Chip"

The other day I was doing my usual skim through the local thrift store bookshelves when I ran across The Official Preppy Handbook. I'd been aware of this book for some time, and even knew that author Lisa Birnbach (along with designer extraordinaire Chip Kidd) were planning an update of sorts with True Prep, which is slated to come out in a couple months.

What I didn't know was that the aforementioned Preppy Handbook was out-of-print (so my 99 cent buying price ended up being a pretty good score). I also didn't know that it was largely a snark fest.



I guess that if I'd actually paid attention and read about the book a little more, I would have realized such, but I honestly figured that it was something like Take Ivy with more prose and illustrations instead of pictures.

And actually, after looking through it, there is some quite useful information, including definitions that I hadn't quite picked up on and some other little nuggets that are entertaining at the very least. That said, there are times where it borders on Mad Magazine-esque humor.

Or, at least I think it does.

Perhaps it's meant to be straight-up serious and my midwestern roots simply can't comprehend it all.

At any rate, it's a fun little book to have, but probably no substitute for Dressing the Man: Mastering the Art of Permanent Fashion or The Esquire Handbook of Style: A Man's Guide to Looking Good when it comes to actual advise on not looking like a slob.

Ahoy. Greetings.

That project I mentioned a couple posts ago ran a bit long and shelled me out a bit, but things should slow down and allow me to get back to some regular posts here. I'll start off with one of the cooler garage sale finds of the year so far, a ship log (the "Ship St. Paul") from the early part of the 20th century that I got at a yard sale for $2.





Obviously, this book has seen some wear and tear. The corners of the cover are all worn down, the binding is split with pages loose on the inside, and there's water damage galore. That said, it didn't smell musty and I could detect no active mold, so I simply couldn't pass it up.


Inside the front cover was the ships forecastle card, which was cool enough in its own right.





The book is filled with page after page of entries that basically describe what would be the day-to-day life on a Northwestern shipping boat 100 years ago. There are lots of descriptions of weather, which I'm sure got somewhat monotonous for someone on the boat at the time, and while I haven't read through the entire book, my landlubbing self finds the hand-scrawled entries absolutely fascinating.





Of course, I had to do some internet searching on the boat, just to see if there was any more information out there, and sure enough, there were not just one, but two great photos on the University of Washington's digital collections site of the boat. Below is one of them, but be sure to check them both.

"Crew on deck of the Northwestern Fisheries Co. cannery ship ST. PAUL leaving Seattle, Washington, March 1912" - from the John Cobb field notebook

One of the only other mentions of the boat (not to be confused with another, more famous Ship St. Paul that was key in the discovery of Alaska) was that according to this article, it was turned into piece of a Seattle pier aquarium sometime in the early 30s (which then closed in 1956).

A lot of times when I'm thrifting or hunting around at garage sales, I'll buy something simply for its "object" value. This log book had that in spades. It's unique and incredibly aged, with not only words that tell a story, but an appearance that does so as well.

Yes, the back cover is even faded a different color than the front

Favorite Finds: "Destiny" by Otto Nuckel

In addition to finding a lot of my wardrobe at thrift stores and garage sales, I buy a lot of other things at these places as well. I've cultivated a modest, but respectable record collection from LPs I've paid less than $3 apiece for, and the bookshelves in our old house are absolutely overflowing. There's a near constant culling going on, and we still have stacks of books in corners of rooms as they look for homes on actual shelving.

A couple years back, I ran across one of my personal favorite book (and object) finds in a book by Otto Nückel, a German illustrator and graphic artist from the early part of the 20th century. I didn't know much about him at the time I ran across his book, but with a stunning 188 woodcuts (one on each page) in a cloth-bound hardback book from 1930, I knew that for $2, I needed to buy it.







Because this is a story told without words, the individual panels themselves are incredibly descriptive and beautifully rendered. They're also quite bleak, and while the title certainly refers to the story arc of the main female character, there's pitch-black humor in the title as well; Of course, everyone's destiny is that they eventually die.

This frame is not a spoiler, simply an illustration I found to be more animated, lest you think it is all still life.

It's not a particularly valuable book in that it sells for maybe $50 dollars or so in decent condition, but it's one of those titles that I've had for some time now and pull out every year or so just to look through. They simply don't make many books like this any more (although, I do have it sitting rather close to my Chris Ware collection on a shelf, and after a post-book discussion with Ware himself about Nückel, I feel like it's a fairly good choice).

It's also one of those completely random finds that you stumble across while buying things second-hand that you end up learning something from and then feeling like your life is a bit more rich because of it. Oh, and there's even a section with a clothing tailor.



For those not wanting to hunt down the out-of-print hardback version, Dover Publications put out a nice paperback reprint of the book in 2007. The book object is not the same, but the masterclass engraving work of Nückel is on full display.

Serendipity

Over the years, my wife and I have found a lot of great books at thrift stores. We've picked up signed copies of antique books and nearly new copies of recently-released tomes that we'd been meaning to buy but hadn't yet gotten around to.

Then, not two weeks after starting this blog, my wife runs across the following title for a dollar and gifts it to me one evening. Coincidence? I think not.



As expected, there's a ton that I didn't know, and I've found myself guilty of trashing many of the ground rules (or at least, suggestions) within. That said, this little pocket book seems like it will be a great resource for me as I try to expand my knowledge base.

After all, it's a marathon, not a sprint.

Right?