JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1858

This pamphlet (Are You Dressed Correctly?) comes from my extensive Naïve Surreal collection, which is composed of (a) pamphlets that were concerned with important ephemera in the past that today looks implausible  or impossible, and (b) pamphlets that addressed issues of, shall we say, a mostly-internal, very personal, High Imagination that may or may not have been part of the visual world or the imagined world of others.Kathleen Enright’s Are You Dressed Correctly? (1935) fits into category (a), mainly because the captions of the illustrations are  semi-devoid of connectivity with their illustrations, and in their simplicity are a bit of a challenge to make any association. That, or it is easy to disassociate image from caption and vice versa , making it easy for the images to slide right out of the book and stand on their own as some sort of self-educated Dadaist statement of simplicity. In this way they can almost form their own Alphabet of the Obvious.