The highway bible to America’s sleeves-up eateries. “How to find the restaurants that serve the most succulent barbecued ribs, the crustiest skillet-fried chicken, four-star hot fudge sundaes and blue-ribbon apple pie-in small towns, in city neighborhoods and along the Interstate.” Visit Pink’s Chili Dogs in Hollywood: “Step right up and meet a hot bow-wow every street food scholar ought to know: Pink’s chili dog, an all-beef wiener topped with mustard and onions, then a load of chili sauce. This dog is a beaut, steamed until it seems ready to burst out of its crackling skin. It is normal-size, so you won’t likely see it beneath all the topping. It tastes great, just garlicky enough to have some punch but not overwhelm the rest of the package. It is muscular, juicy, a rewarding chew.” State-by-state reviews of more than 400 steak joints, oyster dives, chicken houses, waffle pits, BBQ huts and other roadside diners. GR

Publisher: Harper Perennial
Paperback: 489 pages

An ode to the Mother Road. Its birth, the people, the towns and the boom-time it created. “The miracle was not the automobile. The miracle of the early 20th century was the construction of the vast network of highways that gave automobiles someplace to go.” It didn’t hurt that the black ribbon slashed from East to West, the direction America was hankering to travel. Retirees to the Golden West for their health. Okies to California for jobs. WW II vets to Los Angeles to settle down. Black-and-white illustrations include architectural curiosities like Wigwam Village (1946), the Uranium Cafe (1955), the Coral Court Motel (1940) and the U-Drop Inn (1936). GR

Publisher: University of Oklahoma
Paperback: 224 pages
Illustrated

Don’t watch that—watch this! Escaping from bank vaults, popping out of jails, walking through brick walls, making elephants vanish, escaping from crates underwater and writhing free of straitjackets are the legendary illusions of Harry Houdini (alias Ehrich Weiss). “So fantastic were his tricks that many thought him to be supernatural, a mystic, and an amazing spiritualist.” But Houdini was just another dapper con-man, adept at swallowing keys and sliding open invisible panels. “Exposing his closely kept professional secrets, and revealing in general terms the whole art of stage magic, this book is now considered a classic study of Houdini’s strange deceptions.” Plus how to accomplish dozens of other famous magic tricks and stage illusions. First published in 1931. GR

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 279 pages
Illustrated

Original writings from (and about) the Pop decade. Calvin Tomkins in “Raggedy Andy,” 1976: “Andy called up Charles Lisanby one day in l962. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘There’s something new we’re starting. It’s called Pop Art, and you better get in on it because you can do it, too.’ Lisanby thought Andy was putting him on. Oddly enough, the whole thing happened so fast that Andy himself almost didn’t get in on it.” Warren Hinckle in Ramparts, 1967: “Dr. Leary claims to have launched the first indigenous religion in America. That may very well be, though as a religious leader he is Aimee Semple McPherson in drag. Dr. Leary, who identifies himself as a ‘prophet,’ recently played the Bay Area in his LSD road show, where he sold $4 seats to lots of squares but few hippies (Dr. Leary’s pitch is to the straight world), showed a Technicolor movie billed as simulating an LSD experience (it was big on close-ups of enlarged blood vessels), burned incense, dressed like a holy man in white cotton pajamas, and told everybody to ‘turn on, tune in, and drop out.’” Albert Goldman, New American Review No. 3, 1968: “A discotheque like the Electric Circus is a votive temple to the electronic muse, crammed with offerings from all her devotees. The patterns on the wall derive from Pop and Op Art; the circus acts are Dada and camp; the costumes of the dancers are Mod and hippie; the technology is the most successful realization to date-of the ideal of ‘art and engineering’; the milieu as a whole is psychedelic, and the discotheque is itself a prime example of mixed-media or total-environment art.” Plus Tom Wolfe on “The Girl of the Year,” Eldridge Cleaver from Soul on Ice, Susan Sontag on “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” R.D. Laing from The Politics of Experience, Marshall McLuhan from Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and Pauline Kael on Bonnie and Clyde. Read it quick, though, Oliver Stone has almost sucked it dry. GR

Publisher: Marlowe
Paperback: 527 pages
Illustrated

From cliché to archetype, mass media style. Born into a working, middle-class Arab/American family in 1950s Pittsburgh, “We never experienced the sting of today’s ethnic slurs,” says the author, who cites how the Arab world is shafted in hundreds of popular TV shows, from Johnny Quest to Scooby Doo, from Cannon to Cagney and Lacey, from PBS documentaries to CBS reports. The author interviews major television producers, and, embarassed, they cop to the medium’s “painting minorities with a broad brush… Television is shorthand,” they say. Here’s proof. GR

Publisher: Bowling Green
Paperback: 146 pages
Illustrated

Who can forget: Inger Stevens picks up Death as a hitchhiker! The three-armed Martian meets the three-eyed Venusian! Beauty is ugly in “The Eye of the Beholder”! “It’s a good thing you did”! The last man on Earth finally has time to read—then he breaks his glasses! William Shatner and the fortune-telling Devil! “TO SERVE MAN—It’s a cookbook”! The dummy that becomes human! “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet!” The little girl who rolls under her bed and into another dimension! The airliner that goes back in time! “Room for one more, honey!” “Five Characters in Search of an Exit!” Agnes Moorhead fighting the little aliens! “A Most Unusual Camera!” Mr. Dingle’s Martians! Mr. Bevis and the angel! “Come back, Bunny, we need you!” Anne Francis turns into a Dummy! Monsters on Maple Street! “A Stop at Willoughby!” They’re all here, every episode, including Rod Serling’s intros. Plus dialog passages from the scripts, production history and bios of such contributing writers as Beaumont, Matheson, and of course, Serling. GR

Publisher: Silman-James
Paperback: 466 pages
Illustrated

Lift the conservative rock of the Eisenhower years, and underneath you’ll find a writhing mass of popular magazines on crime (Police Dragnet Cases), sex (Peep Show), scandal (Shocking News) and vice (The Lowdown). Hundreds of black-and-white covers are reprinted here, with brief overview. Recalls a time when Confidential was the largest selling newsstand magazine in the country, selling 4 million copies per issue. GR

Publisher: Shake
Paperback: 112 pages
Illustrated

Finlay was the king of pen-and-ink pulp illustration for over 30 years (1935 to 1970), producing more than 1,600 works. Mostly connected with Weird Tales, the artist’s work graced many sci-fi pulps as well. This volume presents dramatic and haunting inside illustrations for various science fiction tales, with a few grotesque monsters included, and a complete set of horoscope creatures done for an astrology magazine. The cross-hatching, the stippling, the dramatic contrasts of light and dark, all the trademarks of his technique are here. His meticulously rendered worlds of fantasy and imagination still call out to be explored. GR

Publisher: Miller
Paperback: 144 pages
Illustrated

More brilliant pen-and-ink musings on man’s struggle—the shock, surprise, pain and fear—with himself and Hell’s demons. “Finlay brought a much-needed ingredient to Weird Tales’ pages,” says magazine alumni Robert Bloch. “Glamor. In contrast to the smudgy scrawls of all too many of his predecessors, he offered a crisp clarity and dazzling detail of design which elevated illustration to the level of true art.” GR

Publisher: Miller
Paperback: 160 pages
Illustrated

How Vegas was built, from the Meadows Club in 1931, to the Flamingo in 1946, up to the Mirage in 1989. “In all those streamlined façades, in all those flamboyant entrances and deliberately bizarre decorative effects, those cheerfully self-assertive masses of color and light and movement that clash roughly with the old and traditional, there are certain underlining characteristics which suggest that we are confronted not by a debased and cheapened art, but a kind of folk art in mid 20th-century garb.” Or, as one wag puts it: “‘They begin to become art… or psychiatry.’” GR

Publisher: Chronicle
Paperback: 128 pages
Illustrated