Time magazine published its first Bicentennial issue in 1975, sold on newsstands as a regular softcover magazine dated July 4, 1776. Read the rest of this entry »
These pages come from the Rand McNally Road Atlas, 52nd edition, issued during the United States Bicentennial, probably in 1975. Back then, everybody issued Bicentennial goods. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were on U.S. postage stamps, pottery, and matchbooks, just to name a few of the thousands of places they were seen. Read the rest of this entry »
Edwin Tunis has written several books on early American history, illustrating his books with beautiful, accurate pencil drawings that complement the story. “The Tavern at the Ferry” shows the development of a Quaker business on the Delaware River in Pennsylvania from a home to an informal ferry operation to a ferry business and a tavern selling food and offering lodging. The book concludes with the Quakers’ involvement in the Revolutionary War. It is printed on sturdy laid paper, which looks yellow here owing to no flash. Read the rest of this entry »
This National Park Service Harpers Ferry brochure is from the 1950s or 1960s. Read the rest of this entry »
These are three National Park Service Independence Hall brochures. The second photos shows the newest brochure, which is at the bottom in the first photo, opened. Read the rest of this entry »
This book promoted the 1962 film version of “Mutiny on the Bounty,” based, as was the 1935 film, on the book by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, a fictionalized account of the 1789 mutiny in the South Pacific. The ship was built expressly for the 1962 movie in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada, and portrayed the Hispaniola in my favorite movie, the 1990 TV version of “Treasure Island” starring Charlton Heston as Long John Silver. The Bounty will visit Erie, Pa., on Sept. 9-12 during the Tall Ships Erie Festival. See tallshipserie.com. The website for the Bounty is tallshipbounty.org. Read the rest of this entry »
Thor Heyerdahl’s “The Kon-Tiki Expedition” tells the tale of six men who built a balsa raft in Peru and sailed it to Polynesia to prove it could be done, their purpose to support the theory that the Pacific Island peoples reached Polynesia not from the west, as most commonly stated, but from South America in the east. The crew made the voyage on their own, with no trailing modern boat to lend support, depending on radios for their sole means of contact with the 20th century, and Heyerdahl’s narrative offers a detailed look at sailing by wind power a few inches from the ocean and disaster while handling dilemmas such as sodium deficiency caused by exposure to the sun, a fierce storm, and proper nutrition. Heyerdahl describes making a soup of plankton scooped from the sea: “Our night’s catch looked as nasty at close quarters as it had been pretty at long range. And bad as it smelt, it tasted correspondingly good if one just plucked up courage and put a spoonful of phosphorus into one’s mouth. If this consisted of many dwarf shrimps, it tasted like shrimp paste, lobster or crab. And if it was mostly deep sea fish ova, it tasted like caviare and now and then like oysters.” The travelers learned to add a small amount of sea water to their diet to address their loss of salt through sweating. And they learned to catch a shark by feeding it by hand, grabbing its tail when it turned to dive, hanging on until it stopped struggling, and flipping it on deck. Heyerdahl published “Kon-Tiki” in 1950 and a special Rand McNally color edition for young people filled with color paintings by William Neebe in 1960. If you dream of escaping civilization and sailing close to the ocean, take a trip with Thor and friends on Kon-Tiki. Read the rest of this entry »
This book on the making of leather was published by The Ohio Leather Company of Girard, Ohio, in 1949. “The Story of Leather” measures 7.5 inches wide and 5.5 inches high and comprises 80 pages. Text and a wealth of photographs illustrate the process of converting raw leather to finished leather. 
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This ad is from 1941; it and the Compton’s ad are from the same sheet, possibly pulled from a large magazine.
This Compton’s encyclopedia ad is from 1941. Read the rest of this entry »
