The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 
they have a-changed


The late Suze Rotolo described her childhood home:

My parents . . . [l]ike several of their friends who had joined the American Communist Party in the 1930s . . . moved to a complex of apartments called Sunnyside Gardens specifically designed for working-class families . . . [T]he residents in general were politically all over the map, a mix of new and old Americans of various ethnic backgrounds and religions. . . .

This was the 1950s, the height of the McCarthy era. . . . We had bookshelves filled with books, a record player, and a collection of treasured 78s and 33+1/3 long-playing records. We listened to the radio; we didn't own a television. The other apartments were carpeted, had curtains on the windows, not Venetian blinds, and no bookshelves in the living rooms.

from the basically wonderful A Freewheelin' Time, pgs. 26, 32

Her suggestion of the volumeless volume of neighbors' living rooms brings to mind what a product of its time was the future imagined in Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury in 2000:

I tried to sell it to various magazines who were afraid of the subject matter because Joseph McCarthy was making such a ruckus in the country.

Nowadays, by contrast, maybe visible books are OK as long as you don't actually read them. Hence "books by the foot":

Here at Book Décor, however, we see books for more than their intellectual value. We also perceive them as excellent design investments. . . .

If . . . you are in the market for beautiful antique volumes whose appearance is more important than the actual text, then you've come to the right place.

posted by TiR at 7:01 AM