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Well folks, my family and I will be in fabulous Barcelona until August 28th, so while we're gone, please entertain yourselves by visiting the many fine sites at Swankola which include:
Mock Duck - an artfully done collection of old cookbooks
The Perfect Square Root - record-cover galleries
Thrift Item of the Moment - self-explanatory, I should think
I'll post some trip updates and photos if time allows.
Thanks go out to the totally bitchin' PCL LinkDump for the linkage.
I've owned and read quite a few of these books too over the years.
Once again, the redoubtable James Lileks has unearthed a treasure trove of off-kilter retroimagery. This time, it's a collection of scanned covers from the Tom Swift Jr. book series. I owned every single one of these hilariously formulaic tomes as a child, but when I became a teenager, I decided that no girl was ever going to want to date a geek who possessed such an adolescent collection of sci-fi wankery, and threw them all away.
It took me a couple more years to realize that not wearing blue pinstriped overalls every day was the second step on my road to obtaining steady female companionship.
UPDATE: Inspired by Uncle Jazzbeau's comment on this post, I went a' googling and found these nice (and ginormous) scans of dustjackets from the original Tom Swift Sr. books that were written in the 1930s.
The The Health Physics Instrumentation Museum has an incredible collection of atomic toys, atomic movie posters, and atomic brand names, along with galleries and galleries full of very cool, but extremely dangerous radioactive devices.
Pass the Radium Butter, please.
Thanks, Omar!