The Primary Source . . . of Flavor

3 Nov

As a writer and journalist, I couldn’t be happier with all the research options at my digital fingertips. There are days when the Great Almighty Screen provides all the information I could possibly want, information that used to require that I get off my ass, leave the house and talk to people.

But for my latest project I’ve started to get physical. One of the books I’m working on is set in 1954, and I’ve started to collect artifacts (mostly magazines) from that time. There is something about the Gestalt of an old issue of Cosmopolitan that is even more illuminating than the article about a man who put his wife in a mental hospital because for some reason she didn’t like being a suburban housewife (this happened a lot more than you think).

I’m talking about how the paper feels, and the art direction of the advertisements, and the strange causes of outrage in the letters to the editor, and the sensation of holding something that someone else held a long time ago and picking up the echo of their heart and of their mind.

Take, for example, this Wired photo essay of classic instruction manuals. Even though the subject matter isn’t dear to my heart, I got a thrill at seeing the binder for the first civilian nuclear energy plant in the US, as well as the Project Gemini “familiarization manual” (image left). The people who used these booklets didn’t give them a second thought, and yet from where we stand they witnessed a partial core meltdown and a trip to space.

Ideally you’ll put your mitts on the real thing, but in a pinch a picture or a snippet of video will do. I now make a Google images search and a YouTube search a mandatory part of everything I’m working on. Doing a Google blogs search is another way to pick up thoughts, images and impressions. You never know what you’ll find.


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4 Responses to “The Primary Source . . . of Flavor”

  1. Dara November 5, 2008 at 5:35 pm #

    My 1980′s copies of Spy are near and dear to my heart, I keep them in my office and find them oddly inspiring, the awkward Dewars’ ads, the girlish Madonna, and all. Knowing that I held them when I was a teenager makes them more precious. Knowing that they propelled me into journalism makes them seem foolish, but in a “it’s my foolish” sort of sentimental way. Paper is better than people think.

  2. Dennis Conrow November 6, 2008 at 1:57 pm #

    Dennis,

    I recently became aware of the Prelinger Library, a repository of digitized ephemera. It looks like it’d be good for a browse, though you don’t get the tactile senses.
    http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger_library

    -another dennis

  3. denniscass November 6, 2008 at 2:17 pm #

    Thanks, Dennis. I’ve already found something I can use.

    The entire archive.org site is something to see as well.

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