“Bunkie, Louisiana: Colonel A.A. Haas, the founder of the town, once gave his daughter a mechanical monkey that he had bought for her when he made a trip to New Orleans. His daughter, Maccie, could not pronounce monkey, so she called the toy Bunkie. Later, when the town was officially incorporated in 1885, her father, in a capricious moment…” You get the picture. ‘Ropeka is the Dakota Indian word for “good place to dig potatoes.” GR

Publisher: Citadel
Paperback: 241 pages

The best thing about the popular visions of the future was, they promised that the future was going to be FUN. Whopping, Jules Vernian, amazing, eye-popping FUN. Cars that turn into airplanes, rocket packs, flying hot dog stands, two-way wrist televisions, monorails whizzing through massive metropolises, airplanes the size of steamships. Clean, effortless, streamlined, Jetsons-style F-U-N. And anybody could play the future game: “In 1894, an obscure socialist named King Camp Gillette published a curious utopian tract, The Human Drift, in which he outlined his vision of utopia. Gillette prescribed for the future an astonishing collection of 40,000 skyscrapers, clustered together in one grand ‘Metropolis’ near Niagara Falls. Built around vast atriums covered over with huge glass skylights, the steel-framed buildings would house most of the North American population in cooperative apartments… Within a few years, however, Gillette’s socialist future was a thing of the past, as he turned to perfecting the invention that was to bring him lasting fame in the annals of capitalism—the safety razor.” GR

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University
Paperback: 158 pages
Illustrated

Circus art as entertainment, chattering, luring and sizzling the dollars out of patrons’ pockets. “With its retina-searing colors, freak appeal and bombastic reconstructions of human and animal anatomy, the circus sideshow banner preyed on our inexhaustible curiosity to come face to face with the grotesque and the unimaginable.” Banners from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries include: “The Sword Swallower!” “The Alligator Man!” “Priscilla, the Monkey Girl!” “Woman Changing to Stone!” “Popeye!” “Iron Tongued Marvel! The Great Waldo!” (A talented “ingestor” from Germany, he could “gobble objects of unusual size, including lemons and mangos, which he then regurgitated on demand.”) An entirely different assortment of banners than presented in Freaks, Geeks, and Strange Girls. GR

Publisher: Chronicle
Paperback: 96 pages
Illustrated

The art and science of car design is a cynical crock of sheet metal, a sucker’s game of chrome, a stylist’s laughing deceit, a jellybean for the sweet tooth of America’s auto-buying public. Eighty years of designers and their model trends are explored here, from the clay-model magic of Harley Earl (at GM in the ‘20s), to the customizers’ tricks appropriated by John DeLorean (with GM in the early ‘60s). Example: A new form of technological expressionism was advanced by designer Bill Porter (GM, late ‘60s): “I was interested in exploring more profound fusions of technology and design.” This idea found expression in the ‘68 GTO, which was “free of chrome clichés but nonetheless bore the look of advanced jet aircraft in its subtly sculpted forms.” The look was developed further in the 1970 Pontiac Firebird, to which Porter gave “not only an aircraft feel but also a ‘muscular look,’ as if the skin of the car were forced out by the mechanical strength underneath.” Auto styling is all looks and sex-fantasy—but we love it. Detroit’s pencilpushers give us a rolling chance at the American Dream. GR

Publisher: Routledge
Paperback: 264 pages
Illustrated

Kings of Kustom Kulture: See Nick Matranga’s chopped coupe, painted royal maroon with a gold iridescent finish. Von Dutch’s pinstriping on a flamed Ford woody wagon. The “Mandarin,” nosed and decked with an oval grille shell and frenched Ford headlights. Kool Kars. In the ‘50s you could see their work in movies like High School Confidential and Hot Car Girl. Later, in the ‘60s, you could see Barrismobiles on TV’s The Green Hornet and Batman. “Sam and George Barris… epitomized customizing, and in the ‘50s they were at the leading edge of their craft. This portfolio of their work in that lively decade lets you examine the range of their creativity. They produced vehicles that were shapely and subtle, and also created cars whose customizing was colorful, loud, and extreme.” Fully featured—in color—are the Barris brothers’ legendary kustoms including the “Golden Sahara,” a remade 1953 Lincoln Capri, complete with television in the front seat and a full bar in the back. It was the Barris version of a GM Dream Car, and Detroit had to take notice—they were being upstaged by “a bunch of guys in California.” GR

Publisher: Classic Motorbooks
Paperback: 128 pages
Illustrated

A black-and-white photo-book ode to the girdle, the garter belt and the pointy bra. “Remember the days when you found the secret shoebox hidden in the back of your father’s night table? Inside were pictures of GIRLS! Beautiful girls, in various stages of undress! And they weren’t Mom! There was no denying it, Dad did think about sex, “about girls, gals, sirens and sex kittens, all posed to tease and titillate his horny soul.” GR

Publisher: Shake
Paperback: 94 pages
Illustrated

This time it’s capsule histories of men’s magazines, from Playboy to Poorboy. The ‘60s’ cheesiest cheesecake, from Alan Betrock, the “King of ‘50s Sleaze” (his collection is legendary), each one with a cover full of female cleavage and with articles like “Are Burlesque Queens Really Dumb?” and “The Sexual Side of Crime.” Hundreds of black-and-white cover shots of such magazines as Gent, Modern Man, Escapade, Fling, Nugget, Rogue, Scamp, Satan and Sir Knight. GR

Publisher: Shake
Paperback
Illustrated

Facsimile edition of the handwritten manuscript the author gave to his friend’s daughter, young Alice Liddle, in 1864, complete with original illustrations and an oval portrait of Alice glued to the last page. Revised and expanded with new illustrations, this early adventure was reproduced using a zinc-block photo process (called photo-zincography), and became the Alice in Wonderland tale we are familiar with today. GR

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 128 pages
Illustrated

The German Art Association pulled all the “decaying foulness” of modern art out of the museums and exhibited the best examples of “the hunchbacked idiots” in a show titled “Degenerate Art” in 1937. It was an unexpected smash. Wait till they see the good stuff, thought Adolf. So he got all his volk art together in the “Great German Art Exhibition 1939.” “How are we to judge this art?” asks the author. “The eye of the art historian is not enough. Our emotional response to the art produced under Hitler is overshadowed by history… Today, with all the knowledge we have of the horror of the Third Reich, it is impossible to look at these pictures without remembering their actual function. Which is ironically what the Nazis intended. Our suspicion that a wicked regime produces only inferior art is legitimate and widespread. There is evidence for this when faced with the overwhelming mediocrity of the artwork which was exhibited.” GR

Publisher: Abrams
Paperback: 332 pages
Illustrated

Bela Lugosi achieved Hollywood fame as Dracula and went out the same way, buried in the character’s cape and ring. As much as he tried, he couldn’t escape his “swarthy foreigner” typecasting. And that accent—like some Hungarian hillbilly! Female fans loved it, though, and even today Lugosi’s good looks still spell S-E-X. A series of essays by different authors, “this book covers Lugosi’s films from the pre-Dracula early sound era, details his Universal and 1930’s classics, investigates his stint on poverty row at Monogram and PRC in the 1940s, and explores his downward spiral, working with Ed Wood for drug money in the 1950s.” Undead, indeed. GR

Publisher: Midnight Marquee
Paperback: 312 pages