You like me! You really like me! (I couldn't resist)

I have to say, I am over the MOON that somehow I've managed to pied-pipe EIGHTY ONE people into following this blog. Thank you, thank you, thank you guys!! Every single comment is ever so appreciated.

It's been a blast this year going gung ho into the whole blogging world, and having an outlet to share whatever wild obsession I've managed to catch, flu-like, and try and pass it on to other of a similar mind. I was so happy to be nominated for two awards in the last month, and somewhat sheepishly having been too lazy to graciously thank and acknowledge said awards, I now set about the task of doing so. I'm going to puncuate this entry with color photos of La Crawford, who I imagine would be my role model for accepting an award by spending hours getting ready and rehearsing a speech, in order to look casual and spontaneously perfect when the actual award presenting moment passed. Ain't she a pip. :) Note the plastic covers on the couches, both above and below, and the sad-eyed-kid painting she's had done of herself... ah, Crawford. I truly love her.

Ginger at Sailing Over a Cardboard Sea gave me the Versatile blogger award, and Paigey at Paigey the Vintage Dame bestowed unto me the Stylish blogger award. Well, who wouldn't want to be both stylish and versatile? Each award came with the following rules:

1. Thank the person who gave you the award and link back to them in your post. (Check... thanks, Ginger! Thanks, Paigey!)

[I love, in these photos, that on the right, her knitting matches her decor, and her hair is perfect. Get a load of that lamp. On the left, have you ever seen anyone more overdressed to comparison shop pickles IN YOUR LIFE? I want to be like you, Joan. I just want to be like you. Please look at the expression on the puppy's face. Too much.]

2. Tell 7 things about yourself.

1) Ridiculously nearsighted. Would wear Magoo like glasses without the blessed invention of the soft contact lense.

2) I'm six feet tall and my Bab's five seven-ish in his sock feet. Not as pronounced a difference as this (still quite glamorous) celebrity couple, but still pretty pronounced. I don't think I've ever dated anyone over 5'10''. Shout out to my shorties.

3) Majored in English Lit, minored in French and Cinema Studies. I became wildly proficient at French from becoming obsessed with François Truffaut in high school, and making 90 minute cassette tapes of the dialgoue tracks from his films. Mississippi Mermaid, though not his best, is my favorite after The 400 Blows.

4) Karaoke. Addict. I don't know why I get so high off the mike. Best songs: "Big River" by Johnny Cash and "I Would Do Anything for Love" by Meatloaf. In testing the latter song for suitability, I was compelled to watch the VIDEO for that song several times... I'd completely forgotten how insane Meatloaf is. Demons! Cops + helicopters vs Meatloaf-on-a-motorcycle chase! Crypts! Weird succubus like dames all over each other! You, sir, are an American hero.

5) Low carb diet enthusiast. Will go to the mattresses for Atkins any day ending in "y".

6) Wrote my college honors thesis on the shot for shot remake of Psycho vs. the original Psycho (subject of auteurship...if you write a letter, and then I rewrite YOUR letter in my handwriting, using your exact phrasing, is it my letter now or is it yours?). Same birthday as Hitchcock, h-u-g-e-l-y into his work.

7) Will not leave the house without eyeliner and mascara. What's the point?

[The grey and lime-ish yellow color scheme! The dachshund! Sign me up!]

3. Award up to 15 recently discovered bloggers.

Yippee! 10 blogs I'm nuts about right now:

By Gum, By Golly!

Honey Hi

A Sip of Sarsparilla

The Horrors of It All

Ranch Dressing with Eartha Kitsch

The Rabbit Hearted Girl

I Heart Everything

Teapot Honor

I Love Collecting

(Diet) Coke and Sympathy

Although there are many more, I'm just outta steam for the moment. Anyway, hope you enjoy the factoids and the Crawford pics. For more (for everything, really) Joan, check out The Best of Everything, hands down the most exhaustive fan site of hers on the whole of the internet. I while away hours over there trying to pick up makeup and hair tips. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

On to greater and more glorious things in the coming month! I have a whole slew of outfit photos I haven't managed to upload yet, but when I do...whoa, Nelly. :) Thanks for reading!

Honor Bilt Modern Homes/Aladdin Homes (late 1910's/early 1920's)

I've been on a catalog binge on the aforementioned archive.org lately... you should see me sitting around trying to daydream keywords that would bring up the results I've come to expect from this endless font of full-scanned library books. "Hats" yields mostly picture hats of the Edith Wharton variety (thrilling!) The discovery of the Sears and Roebuck"Honor Bilt Modern Homes" (1921) and "Aladdin Homes" (1919) catalogs more than fit the bill for the kind of entries that I like-- home economics, full color illustrations, wish-fulfillment-fantasy-shopping. Look at page after page of full-hued, Technicolor tinted spec sheets for late teens/early twenties' houses? Don't throw me in the briar patch. :)

Looking at these guys, I reflect somewhat morosely on what could have been. I spent a few furtive weeks mooning over the 1920-built house below, which was on a backstreet off a major street, behind a razor wire fenced car lot and a Walmart neighborhood market that always reminds me of a zombie movie for its near constant foot traffic, in the parking lot, in the dark, as I'd drive home from downtown on the weekends. Still, the wraparound porch, original light fixtures, and one jade green glass tile fireplace had my little heartstrings wrapped up in knots. Yes, one of the walls in the upstairs bedrooms had a crack running from crown molding to baseboard. Yes, the entire backyard was taken up by a weird, ramshackle assortment of out-buildings (a garage, a workshop, a gazebo) to the point that there was hardly any grass. But I was very much in love. Even with its imperfections, what I wanted to be Babu's and my future homestead was a little out of our price range, and waaaaay out of our home improvement skill set (I can take up carpet, hammer, scrub, and paint, but that's about the width and breadth of it). Sigh, sigh, sigh.

As some solace, however, flipping through these catalogs, I daydreamed about how nice it would be to still be able to build one of these guys from scratch. In 1920, for one almost all inclusive price (minus labor, minus "cement, brick or plaster", minus the lot of land), I could have a brand new, fully loaded Aladdin or Honor Bilt house! I wonder how many of these are our next door neighbors or just down the street, even ninety plus years later. My dream house might just be one of these, still somewhere out there.

Wouldn't it be nice to throw away your rent receipts and start working on a mortgage, shouts the accompanying text in the picture below. This family certainly thinks so. And look at their new house! I would, too! The trellis on the porch is a nice touch. Click any picture to see a normal, real-life page sized version.

The advertising copy in the Aladdin catalog runs pretty much along the lines of "See the generous dimensions of the living room! Note the gracious curve of the ballustrades as you enter your new foyer!". However, the ad for the Roseland, above, is just wild and out. Hoping to appeal to the returning WWI veterans, or just riding a wave of patriotic fervor at the end of the Great War, the innocuous looking Roseland model's entry is begun in this way:

Um...what? When did Erich Maria Remarque start writing blurbs for ready constructed houses?

And then it just goes into specs for the construction! Can you picture the frustrated English major now ad man sitting at his desk in 1920 saying, "Jumpin' Jehosephat! At last! A chance to really shine!" before putting pen to the gun metal prose that preceded the actual advertisement writing? So strange!

Above, from left to right, the Elsmore ($1,964), the Americus ($2,166), the Hathaway ($1,334), and one of my favorites, the Allahambra ($2,674). The Allahambra package, without all the excluded items listed above, would cost approximately $28,389.76 in today's dollars. Still sounds like kind of a deal to me. The interiors would obvioiusly set you back a little more, but I would be so Gloria Swanson in these digs. You would have to pry the peacock feathers and opera length pearl necklaces out of my cold, dead hands.

Ugh! I am somewhat disgusted by how happy I would be in this house.

My friend Ruthie in high school lived in a house that looked a lot like the one on the right. Her mother did a painstakingly accurate needlepoint from her own design, in a perfect needlepointed image of the house, by which I was always mightily impressed. My own attempts at needle-based crafts have begun and ended with feeble attempts at cross-stitch and knitting, half started and gladly abandoned. Seeing some of the successes of others in the vintage blog circles I've been following, however, I must say I'm tempted to put my guts into it. Who doesn't want a pink elephant sweater?! (Disclaimer: I've been lusting after this By Gum By Golly sweater for weeks now) WHO. DOESN'T. I'm glad some people are still carrying the torch of handicraft. The house on the right is almost like the 1910's version of a McMansion...I can just see Jiggs and Maggie moving in. Who, of course, would make great neighbors for me in my Allahambra/needlepointed dream house next door.

I also love the coloring in the pictures...never had considered a green roof before, but they do "pop". The red and the green and the yellow of these houses, as well as the landscaping, give you a good idea of what a model home would look like BEFORE someone decided to remove the shutters, paint it teal, and park a broken down pick up truck in the yard. Ninety years can be hard on some houses.





The "Kentucky", above, has a great, planar kind of design that appeals to me for its massive, Cracker Barrell like front porch. Plus, the fact that you could refer to it as "My Old Kentucky Home". None too shabby.



Here are some interiors, this time done by photograph. Not as cluttered my house would have to be, but so open! So airy!

These last three will give you an idea what the entire ad looked like without my virtual clipping scissors:







Give me those awnings!

Moral being: there's more than one 1920 constructed fish in the sea! I hope I run across one of these in my happy homehunting days with more money stuffed in my mattress to offer up to a purveyor of real estate. Which one would you like to live in? DO you live in one?

See the original catalogs, fully scanned, available for your viewing:
HERE and HERE

Vive l'archive.org!

Vantine's Catalog (1917, 1919, 1920)

While lazily perusing my very favorite website yesterday afternoon, trawling for goodies with keywords like "catalogs" and "hats- fashion" in the American texts subheading, I came across an entry for a shipping exchange store with a sizable mail order division called Vantine's. Neverheardofhim? If you were looking for an exotic birthday gift in 1917 New York, you needed look no further than A.A. Vantine's import store, located at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 39th Street, in "the heart of the new shopping district and near to the theaters". That's down the street from Times Square, people!



According to Vantines.net, A.A. Vantine, the store's proprietor, was one of the first businessmen to import items from the Far East to stock his store, described in an advertisement as "the most interesting store in the world... a wondrous, ever changing exhibition of antiques and modern works of art from each nook and corner of Japan, China, Turkey, Persia, India, and the Holy Land". He ran this store at the same location from 1866 until his retirement in 1887. In the 1920's, the management fell into the improbable hands of a drug dealer with mob connections by the name of Arnold Rothstein, who used the business's trade based transportation lines to move product from Asia to America. He was killed in hotel room shooting in 1928. The gaps before and after this strange interlude are unknown to me, except that these catalogs were printed in the time between Vantine and Rothstein's respective stewardships.

What a lot of things you could buy, through mail order, in 1917-1920 America! You have to think about this being a time without the internet or television, in which most people's experience of Asia, if any at all, would be limited to *maybe* The Mikado, *maybe* Madame Butterfly. I can imagine Talullah Bankhead or Zelda Fitzgerald lounging around the house in one of these kimonos. Languidly, of course.

Note the yellow kimono'd girls weird, jazz age pose. Very Clara Bow.

And shoes! Do they have shoes!

Everything from dainty slippers to weird, fur covered, mini-mukluks. Which pair do you prefer?

Let's not get started on jewelry. I'm a sucker for any kind of jade or coral and these pieces look so crisp. I was interested in the Egyptian baubles, but those were unfortunately in black and white. See the composition of the simple beaded necklaces in every color to the left, though! I want one of each.

Writing paper, natch. I thought of a 1918 girl's commencement book I bought the year I actually graduated from high school, which had neatly listed "fancy writing paper" as one of the gifts the girl in question received.

Lamps and disembodied legs which have inspired later lamps. I like the shade on the coral one, but don't the others seem a little tacky for 1917-1920? I keep trying to think of what these items must've looked like to people at the time.

Gorgeous painted toys! Not particularly Asian looking to me, except maybe the bottom row, but very pretty. The "grotesque duck" in the middle of the page on the left is cracking me up. What....?

Toy kettles/jars on the left, real kettles/jars on the right. No one wants to get cookies out of a face that is both bald, mangled, and melting (center space, bottom row). I mean...I'm right.

Lingerie illustrations. Note the pretty, sloe-eyed girls, gazes askance, draped in demure, gauzy offerings.

These dolls walk! How...oddly creepy. Yet ingenious! I love the different poses they've give the toy dog on the right.

If you go to the Vantine's website, you can some really great postcards of the interior of the store, just covered in treasures hauled home from far-distant locales. There are also examples of some of the merchandise, which, while charming, looks a little better in these illustrations than in breathing life.

If you could walk into Vantine's as it was then, or better yet, still order these items by mail, what would you take home?

Much belated clothing post next...! I've been wearing some keepers. :)

See the original catalogs HERE, HERE, and HERE.