I want to write this entry for our blog for a couple of reasons.
There is real stuff in the real world, not just images on a website or photos in a book. I'm a firm believer in the need for people to collect a vocabulary of experiences to form a kind of dictionary-like format that you can pull from when a problem in search of a solution rears its ugly head.
Most notably for students there are ways to experience
Books, movies, are not things. Fact.
These aren't right, so think them out a bunch more.
Avant Garde : Part 1 / Bernie Herman
I was sitting quietly at home, and I got a phone call from my friend Bernie. He was up in Chadds Ford at an antique store and had come across a copy of the 1960s magazine, Avant Garde. Avant Garde was a highly controversial, sexually-oriented magazine, published by Ralph Ginsburg and designed by Herb Lubalin, one of the most highly regarded designers of the 1960s. The magazine was a norm breaker. No advertising. Provocative. Visually groundbreaking. The issue Bernie had found was the Wedded Bliss : A Portfolio of Erotic Lithographs by John Lennon issue.
I hopped in the car and drove the 25 miles to the antique store, and as planned there was the issue. $20. I bought and returned home with a slightly stunned sense of surprise that things like this that, at the time I would only see in a design history book are sitting out there, for real, somewhere.
Back in the 60s my university friend Tim's mother had a subscription to Avant Garde, so I had seen several of the issues. Also, to say the least Tim's mom was the coolest mom on the planet. Once, soon after moving to Delaware, I heard that you could call up books and magazines in the Library of Congress. You couldn't check them out, but they would bring them to you.
I drove the 100 miles to Washington for an afternoon to gaze firsthand on magazines designed by Lubalin. Avant Garde. Fact. Eros. It was a fabulous way to spend an afternoon.
The fact that they might sit on a "for sale" shelf took me by surprise.
A few years later I found out that they had a complete set of Avant Garde right in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.
Avant Garde part 2 : Portland, Maine
Jill and I were in Portland, Maine, to connect with Amelia, a friend from Houston, Texas. The 450-mile drive from Newark, Delaware, had taken less time than we expected. With the extra time, we were walking around town and came across a bookstore. After 25 minutes without finding anything we couldn't live without, we were just walking out the door. The owner / clerk wished us a good day in an incredibly sincere way that immediately made me feel bad that I hadn't bought anything.
Chadds Ford came to mind.
"You don't, by any chance, have any copies of Avant Garde, do you?
"I should have 5 or 6 in a box in the back of the room." He had 7 @ $7.50 each. I bought them.
Avant Garde part 3 : still in Portland, Maine
Starting to walk out of the store for the second time, I asked, "You don't know of another store around here that might have more of the magazines, do you?"
"I know a guy that used to have some." He dug through his Rolodex and gave me his phone number.
In the meantime, Amelia and her friend had caught a taxi over to where we were. We tried our new lead, calling from the store's phone. Nothing. We grabbed a quick bite to kill a bit of time, and as we were driving out of Portland, we stopped at a 7-Eleven that had a pay phone on the side of the building. Jill and I had a conversation about how much I could pay to complete the set. We settled on $400.
A man answered. We told him the story about how we had come to call him. "Do you have any issues of Avant Garde for sale." "Yes."
“Can I tell you which issues I have and see if you have any that I don't have."
He agreed, and I read out the numbers of my copies. After I finished, he said he had all of the ones I didn't have. It turns out that he had the whole set, but didn't want to break them up. Then he started talking about how rare they were, and I could feel the price going up.
I studdered a bit and asked how much he wanted for them.
"They are pretty rare, so I would need seven fifty," he said. My quick in-my-head math told me that was $300 more than Jill's and my agreed upon high.
I asked, "For the set." He says, "No. Each."
Hmmm. $7.50 and not $750.00.
Hmmm. $105.
"Can we drive to where you are?" "No, I'll come to the 7-Eleven."
We looked through the box in the back of his Jeep, and sure enough, the whole set was there. I got bold and asked if he would be willing to take a check, hoping I could save our cash for the rest of our trip. He said, "Sure." I pulled out my idea for identification. He said, "Do you think I thinksomeone is going to cheat me in a parking lot over a magazine deal for a set of Avant Gardes?"
After I got back home I gave the 7 doubles to my friend, Martha, and I still have my complete set.
The original John Lennon issue strangely had a second version of the cover. So I have the full 15 issues.
A couple of years later I had the chance acquire a copy of the prototype for Avant Garde, so now our collection has the "complete" complete set.
Nowadays it is easy to just look on AbeBooks.com, but the search that day was fabulous.
Life magazines in the mall
Jill and I were walking through Christiana Mall one afternoon. In the hallways of the mall they had a lot of pop-up shops selling antiquest. One was a guy who was selling Life Magazines,. His sign said “Buy your birthdate.
I looked, but they didn’t have my date. Life Magazine was a weekly back in those days so your odds immediately dropped to 1:7 that your birthday would come up. I passed on just getting the right week, which he had, and moved on down the mall.
A couple hundred feet farther along there was another booth selling old ads. He had thousands of them, divided into hundreds of categories. I taught advertising design and looked through “Automobiles : Volkswagen” to see if there were any early VW ads, especially looking for “Think Small” and “Lemon”, two of the most highly creative ads of the 1960s. No luck and we started moving on through the mall.
A bit farther along the math hit me relating to the lucky happenstance of those 2 stores being there that day. If I knew what ads were in which Life Magazines (the VW ads always ran in Life and Time magazines) then I could buy the exact ads I wanted by just buying the magazine.
I asked Jill if she would be willing to go with me to the University of Delaware Library and look through microfilm of Life Magazines to find “Think Small” and “Lemon.”
“No problem” and off we went.
I knew that the VW year that marked the start of the campaign was the 1960 model year. So we started looking at Life Magazines starting in July of 1959 to be sure we caught the beginning of the model year which typically was in September. We found the first VW ad in an August issue. We found “Think Small” in a February issue and “Lemon” in April. Back to the mall.
I told the guy what I was looking for and asked if I could look through the issues I thought they might be in. All of the magazines were in plastic sleeves that were taped shut. He had both issues and both ads were in there as expected. We spent most of the next week looking through microfilm.
Each Life Magazine probably averaged something like 120 pages. We looked through magazines from July 1959 through 1972. That is about 81,250 pages of Life Magazine. We would put a reel of microfilm in the machine and just crank through it about half the speed you could do if you were flying. It was surprisingly easy to see a VW ad. Always black and white. Very distinct layout. You could easily see other advertisers who were trying to copy them.
I ended up buying about 250 copies of Life Magazines from the guy. All with different VW ads in them. Still have them. He sold them for a price that was dependent on the cover. I would pay from $10 to $75 for each magazine. Boatload of cash in total.
Doves Press Bible Genesis 1 : 1
It was my 60th birthday. I was thinking about buying something cool for my own birthday present. Something printing by the Doves Press came to mind. I went on ABEbooks.com to see if there was a copy of the Doves Bible. I set the website to show most expensive items first (to make sure you are looking at the good ones) from most expensive was a copy for $23,000. Hmmm. MaybeF a bit more than I was ready to spend. But in looking through all the listings there was another that caught my attention.
For $1,000 there was a folio (folded sheet providing 4 pages), 1 of which was Genesis 1 : 1, widely considered to be one of the dozen most beautiful pages ever printed. It was being offered by a NYC bookseller. Well it was my birthday, but that was a lot for a single sheet of paper. I heed and hawed about it for a week or so.
In the meantime my daughter, Terre, invited Jill and I to New York, where she lived, so she could give me my birthday present in person. We set that up to get together on Friday, March 17, St. Patrick’s Day. My birthday was on March 6. We reserved a room at the Chelsea Hotel (our favorite place to stay in the city) for the weekend.
Every day I would check on Genesis 1 : 1. About a week ahead of going to NYC it was gone.
Related to the present she was going to give me she said, “Don’t try to Google it!” So first thing I did was Google it. You should know is that Terre and I liked to go to rock concerts together, and my favorite place to go was Madison Square Garden. Stevie Ray Vaughn, U2 (twice), Radiohead, Coldplay, Paul McCartney, Jeff Beck. Nothing scheduled for the 17th. Hmmm. Finally, pay dirt. The Allmann Brothers were playing at the Beacon Theater. Must be it.
Terre said meet her up near 57th Street and we would go get the present. We slowly made our way from 22nd Street, making several phone calls along the way while wadung through St. Patrick’s Day crowds, Terre was getting slowly more and more insistent that we hurry. Finally, getting there, Terre met us on the street and ask us to fome up while she finished up doing whatever it was that she was doing.
She had said she was helping some friends that ran a redoreing studio help set up for a party they were throwing. We walked into the slighty open door. Whoa, I knew someone that was there. Then someone else. Then another. The room was full of about 200 former students. Honestly, my eyes sfanned the room for the Allmann Brothers. Bummer, they didn’t seem to be there. Maybe that was going to be for later.
Mueller-Brockmann
Gill Sans original tissues / St. Bride Printing Library