Aviation Week magazine covers

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Here, and after the jump are a number of covers of Aviation Week which, depending on the date, is  also known as Aviation and Aviation Weekly and Space Technology. They are from the Internet Archives Aviation Week section where you can view more covers as well as browse the magazines interiors as well.

Once Upon a Time in India

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A few posts ago we viewed Paige Jiyoung Moon's paintings of everyday life. These are pictures of everyday life from 19th century India. While Moon's paintings evoked a feeling of familiarity, these earlier pictures of the mundane are far enough removed in time as to be exotic to us.

They are taken from the New York Library's Digital Collection. There are more after the jump, and of course many more at the link.

Visions of Dreams

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From time to time artists attempt to portray dreams. Their attempts are none too successful, I suspect because dreams are both dynamic and very personal and do not translate to paint well. Regardless, here are some examples of painted dreams (from The Public Domain Review).

Vintage Farm Magazine Covers

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 After following the adventures of Farmer Bill and his New Tractor, I decided to look up some old farmer's magazine covers to see what he read. So I went to MagazineArt to see what they were like.

From the titles of the articles, while a few were concentrated mainly on the business of farming, others were more focused on the rural/outdoors lifestyle. Those types had a heavy dose of old style Americana about them. Some also had romance stories, so some must have been aimed primarily at the farm wives. 

There are more samples after the jump, and of course many more at MagazineArt.

The Wonders of Vacuum Tubes

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Although they've been replaced by transistors and integrated circuits, there was a time when vacuum tubes were a fundamental component of modern electronics. Now exotic, they were common during the first electronic revolution.

Today you can buy hard drives, graphics cards and the like in stores, in the old-timey days vacuum tube testers were readily found in hardware and grocery stores. You could test vacuum tubes and buy their replacements easily, and it was a skill any do-it-yourselfer was expected to have.

Where there are products there is advertising. The problem is they were, like an oil filter in an engine, just a part of a machine, and not a very sexy or graphically interesting part at all. So how to sway consumer dollars?

The vacuum tube ads were pretty straight forward -- either a picture of a tube with copy extolling their virtues, or a their place in the wonders of radio emphasized. Here, and after a the fold, are some old ads that tried to sell what was then a mundane part of electronics.

Source: Duke University Libraries Digital Repository.

Moths & Butterflies Drawn by Naturalists

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 Prior to photography all scientific illustrations were drawn or painted. On the roster of all scientific expeditions was the artist. Here, and below the fold, are some of those old drawings of moths and butterflies. While some of the drawing are just listings of different moths or butterflies, frequently the illustrations show the plants they feed off, and the various stages of the insect's development.

From the Smithsonian Libraries Collection.

Monsters

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In 1665 Fortunio Liceti published an illustrated edition of his work De Monstris. Supposedly a work exploring deformities in nature, as you can see from the illustrations his monsters were quite fanciful. Not that it really explains his made-up monsters, he explained it as nature being like an artist that worked with what it had. As he said, "It is said that I see the convergence of both Nature and art because one or the other not being able to make what they want, they at least make what they can."

From The Public Domain Review. There are more images below the fold.

Pulp magazine covers

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The website Pulp Gallery has a very nice, and large selection of old pulp magazine covers. These samples, and the ones after the jump, are taken from it. There are many, many more at Pulp Gallery.

What struck me about the set these were taken from is the large number of covers that featured bondage in the form of tied up women, whippings and what-not.

WPA posters

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These are a set of posters put out by the WPA (Works Progress Administration) during the Great Depression. They're on a variety of topics: a lot of peformances, art, culture and technology. They also feature a fair amount of exhorting, which isn't a surprise because the WPA was one of the early institutions of nannyism.

I was surprised by how dull the colors were. I don't know if it is because they've faded, or if this greyed-down and muted palette was popular with the government at the time. Whatever the reason, they seem kind of dreary and depressing. 

There are more after the jump, and many more at the Library of Congress WPA Posters gallery.

ISS Astro Viewer

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 I stumbled across the website Astro Viewer that tracks the position of the International Space Station. It shows you its ground track, as well as a Google map of the area it is flying over. There is also a tab to assist in finding times when you can observe it from the ground.
   

19th Century seed catalog covers

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These seed catalog covers from the 1800s and early 20th Century are nice examples of graphic design from the era before modernism and its minimalism. I still find it odd that more present day designers don't mine this earlier and often very striking style for inspiration. The again, as counter-intuitive as it may sound, I think most graphic designers are far less creative than they imagine themselves to be -- there is an awful amount of heard mentality in the field.

It also struck me that these covers must have expensive to produce and print back in the day. I wonder if these companies had in-house art departments, or if they commissioned work directly from the printers or from whatever passed for ad agencies back then?

There are more examples after the jump, and many more examples, including flower seed catalogs and back covers at Seed Catalogs from the Smithsonian Institution.

Toy soldiers

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I had a couple of these toy soldier packages when I was but a sprout. One was of a western-style log fort, the other may have been the Anzio package shown in the ad below. It had a plastic map with the beach and trenches and what-not printed on it. You landed your toy soldiers on it from landing crafts and then fought the true Mother of all Battles. Rarely did more than one soldier survive capturing the beachhead.

These ads, and the ones after the jump, are from Tom Heroes Comic Book Ads page. He has a lot more ads and other vintage comic book and video game material at his site. Be sure to check it out if you have fond memories of those days.

Old show posters

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These are posters for plays and shows from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. It must have been a fertile time for entertainers. Without movies and later TV concentrating where shows were produced there were little theaters all across the nation. The pay may not have been good, but there was ample opportunity to sing, dance and act.

There are more posters after the jump, and many, many more (around 2100 of them) at the Library of Congress online catalog Posters: Performing Arts Posters.

Canadian WWII posters

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Canada declared war on Germany in 1939 after the invasion of Poland. It was the first time Canada, as a fully sovereign nation, ever declared war. It contributed enormously to the allied war effort. 

These images, and the ones after the jump, are just a small sample from the Canada at War forum thread Canadian Second World War Propaganda Posters & Sketch's. There are many, many more at the link, and the Canada at War website is a fantastic resource detailing Canada's contribution to WWII as well as the other wars she has been involved in.

My EFLI tailgating quandry

Tasty Bite to the rescue

With the first game of the Elite Football League of India (EFLI) set to kick-off on July 15th I realized I had a problem -- what food to serve at my tailgate party?

I figure that bratwurst, Buffalo chicken wings and the usual American tailgating fare don't quite fit with the Indian league. What to do? Being an extremely early American fan of the league, I decided that I can pretty much make up whatever tailgaiting traditions I want to.

With that in mind, I decide the EFLI tailgating snacks should be Indian food, or at least a reasonable facsimile of Indian food, so I tired Googling for food served at Indian cricket matches. Well, to make a long story short, not surprisingly that search didn't yield any results.

I then tried watching YouTube Indian cooking videos to get some recipes, but, while they were interesting, they were also far more involved then I cared to get into and besides I probably wouldn't be able to find all of the ingredients I needed anyway.

It seemed I was foiled, but never let it be said that I'm a quitter. It dawned on me that I have seen packaged Indian foods in the grocery store. A quick Google search led me to the Tasty Bite website. They specialize in Indian and Pan-Asian cuisine, which is just what I was looking for.

Even better, they have a recipe section and a look through their appetizer and sandwich recipes showed them to be fairly easy to make. So, I've ordered some of their packages and plan on making a sample or two which I will talk about in further posts. 

Stay tuned, and feel free to submit your own EFLI tailgate recipes if'n you have any.
     

Database of murals

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Mural Locator is a website that's building a map that shows the location of murals. When you click on a pin on the map it shows you a thumbnail of the mural as well as its location. They also have a gallery of murals, which is where I got these samples.

They also have articles and news about murals, as well as form that allows you to submit a mural to their database.