JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 728  Blog Bookstore

What
greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an
unknown earth! Heart of Darkness

Coming
on the heels of yesterday’s post about (impossible) retinal memory and the
comfort of unusual color comes this bit of oddness from the House of La
Rosa.  101 Ways to Prepare Macaroni seems
about as benign and forgettable a title that one could write; that said, once
opened, this little pamphlet poured its heart out to the Naïve Surreal in us
all with the unforgettable (and accurate) color images of the promised linguine
delicacies.  Honestly, the cover is why I
have the thing—it is kind of perfect, a spare design that gets the message
across, and leaves plenty of white.  It
also uses a macaroni typeface.  But once
inside the imagination is left to wander quite a bit between the colors of
these foods that you were supposed to cook. And eat. 

I’ve
long been a fan of taking a good close look at the foods on the  tabletops and dining tables of country homes,
diners, and simple restaurants from the 1930’s—actually the Library of Congress
is a wonderful source for this kind of image, having many thousands of them
digitized from their monumental FSA collection. 
The vast majority of these though are in black and white.  There seems to be not much more comforting
than a checkered tablecloth on which a huge spread is laid for a farm family
and their hired hands: giant bowls of mashed potatoes, big plates of corn, a
huge pitcher of milk, and so on.  I could
dive right in.  (The image below–by FSA great Russell Lee, shows a Kilgore, Texas, roughneck stopping for lunch.  This is not exactly what I had in mind, but the man has a real plate, a beautiful bottle of milk, cutlery, and all wrapped up in heavy paper–this is what brought-from-home lunches should look like.  And it makes me hungry.)

Then
for some reason I started assembling a few hundred images of red photo ads of
foods from LIFE magazine from the 1940’s—these are truly spectacular things,
the reddest ads in the history of advertising. 
(I’ll get to these in a week.) 

 And
then came this funny little pamphlet and its bizarre display of food coloring
that is so contentious that it might be able to put folks off their food.  Have a look. I’m uncertain of what happened
to color selection for food advertising at this time; I do know that it is
confusing to our sensibilities. (Color reproduction is accurate.)