BG Library: LHJ Book of Interior Decoration

I recently visited my aunt in Indianapolis and found this book hiding in her stacks.  These images are from the Ladies Home Journal Book of Interior Decoration, copyright 1957.  The book originally belonged to my grandmother, who in the late ’50s was trying to expand her perception of what stylish home furnishings could look like.  Continue reading…

BG Library: Alexander Kira’s The Bathroom

Here’s why I love Prairie Avenue Bookshop: I’ve been looking for this obscure book about bathroom design for five years, since I first encountered it while working in a used bookstore in Wicker Park. Luckily I know the name and author, but when I asked the clerk at the front desk, “Do you have this book called The Bathroom by Kira?” she says, “Orange book? Bright orange? Big, bold letters on the cover? Yeah, I just saw that. I know we have it.” She emerges from the back room minutes later with a paperback copy and says, “Six bucks.”

An obscure design book I’ve searched for for years for under $10? You can’t beat it.

But let’s talk about The Bathroom. I’m not a designer. I’m not an architect. But I don’t think you have to be for this book to make sense. It’s a book that asks, why don’t we design bathrooms to function properly for what we really do in bathrooms? But in doing so, it totally tears down the establishment, the idea that “things are made this way because they are made this way and that’s that.” And also, “We won’t design for it because we won’t talk about it.”

I like this book. I like its analytical approach to subjects like the anatomy and physiology of urination (chapter 11), and whether or not reading is a hindrance to defecation (and therefore, should bathrooms be designed with that activity in mind?). But it goes even further into the uses of the bathroom: for washing pets and laundry, storing wet umbrellas, cutting hair and seeking personal time. How many of us have ducked into a bathroom, either at home, at work, at a friend’s house, simply to get some alone time to react to something, to think, to collect ourselves? And yet, has a bathroom ever been designed with that specific activity in mind? Should it be?

I like this book because it blows those questions wide open. (And because it includes naked pictures of people from the 1970s — always a sign of a great text.) Challenging long-held beliefs about design is something I hope BackGarage does, on occasion, even if only on the subject of price point. The Bathroom is a book I hope to live up to. I highly recommend it.

BackGarage Library: How to Hide Almost Anything

Secret Doors, by Flickr user Fletcher and Lauren.

It’s time for another addition to the BackGarage library. And while I love to share books about designers and home decorating, beautiful books like Classic Herman Miller, or the one I’ve been plugging lately, Pad: The Guide to Ultra-Living, in truth there’s another type of book I highly favor: the 1970s how-to manual.

A while ago I wrote about The Avocado Pit Grower’s Indoor How To Book. A classic 70s home manual, the prose it contains is so compelling you could actually read it for pleasure, even if you had no interest in growing avocado trees. (People, you’ll notice, do this all the time with cook books, and it spawned a whole genre of writing known as the “food essay.”) Something happened in the 1980s that turned most how-to books onto style over substance, and this fantastic genre of illustrative manual fell by the wayside.

So whenever I find a book like this at the thrift store I buy it and treasure it — out-of-print and long-forgotten, they’re not books you’d otherwise ever come across. So I love to share them here on BackGarage.

Today’s classic: How to Hide Almost Anything by David Krotz. This is a 1970s how-to manual in the classic sense, replete with paranoid hippie ramblings (note the title), cartoon nudity and Shakespeare quotes. The tag line is, “Come home, America. And find your treasures where you left them.” It is, as its title suggests, “the first and only handbook for everyone who has something to hide.”

But like the best of the 1970s how-to manuals, it’s more than an instructional text — it’s a Brautigan-esque love story, a free-to-be-you-and-me anti-government manifesto.  It’s about the true essence of DIY: not giving a fuck what others think and, if it damn well suits you, building a secret room into your apartment.  (For further reading about hidden rooms, check out The Steampunk Home.)

These books got lost in the 1980s and the boom that followed it, but maybe now that we’re re-entering the Great Depression they somehow carry more weight. What once might have seemed quaint or funny now seems eerily apropo. Like this passage, from the intro to How to Hide:

It all began with poverty. My wife came in from the winter cold, clenching the morning bills in her hands, and I sat smoking cigarettes to the ends wondering how we were going to pay to keep that warm apartment around us. Outside the frosted glass, the weird and the gifted people of New York’s Greenwich Village wandered the angled streets; it was still the charming artists’ quarter, but I didn’t find my life there charming at the moment. For while the President’s haggard face spoke optimistic words on the tube, the economy got worse and worse — and I was out of work.

Krotz then goes on to instruct his readers on a number of different methods for hiding things within your living space: behind panels, in baseboards, by building a “door jam space,” in humped pipes and beams and “surreptitious sills.” Or behind a spice rack:

There are all kinds of spice rack arrangements. Handy people make their own. It can be a closed-in cabinet or just a long shelf on which a gamut of spices are readily accessible for creative cooking. Ordinarily, I’m in sympathy with doing things creatively instead of by rote or from mediocre example. Still, in the case of this particular hidey hole, you can easily use one of those commercially designed and constructed spice racks available in fine stores everywhere. If you’re one of those Americans who limits himself to salt and pepper and shuns the basil, oregano, and curry, it won’t hurt you to buy a ready-to-use spice rack and actually try the spices in different dishes. But before I succumb to the urge to include recipes, let’s look at the kind of spice rack you’ll need for constructing this secret little kitchen nook.

Now you tell me, what book currently available in the instructional section of a Barnes & Noble would take that type of liberty with its prose?

A highly recommended hardcover — see for yourself:

Check out this title and some of my other suggestions for good reading in the BackGarage Library.

BackGarage Library: Family Room Projects You Can Build

I love old 1970’s decorating books. When I had my graphic designer friend create the BackGarage logo many years ago, this was the book I gave him to use as his inspiration: Family Room Projects You Can Build.

See more images in my Flickr photostream.

I’m not at all handy, if I were I might actually try the 40+ plywood projects detailed in this book, but I love looking at the pictures for inspiration. The idea behind these projects is simplicity: things that serve as storage and seating, work centers that double as room dividers, media centers that downplay the television. (And you can’t help but love the roller rink paint jobs, right?) Yes, some of it is awful and dated, but this book is still a great source of 1970’s decorating images, if you’re into that kind of thing. Buy it here.