Future Perfect

Rating:
Summary: Gee, wasn't tomorrow swell!
Review: I love this paperback. Dozens of color pictures (mainly sourced from adverts) of the future created when optimism was in the air and one was led to believe that science would conquer most frontiers and life was going to be one long continuous weekend. Editor Jim Heimann has wisely restricted his choice of images from the mid-thirties to the start of the fifties, so they picture a very streamlined future. Amongst all the pictures are twenty-three super covers from the science and mechanics type monthly magazines (some enterprising publisher should do a coffee-table book of these with their striking cover paintings) several pages of comic-book type illustrations and thirteen intriguing ads, designed in 1945, from the Bohn aluminium company showing some wonderful streamlined vehicles.

Future transportation has the biggest showing but there are future homes, offices, suburbs, schools, space and everyday living. Bruce McCall sums up the feel of the pictures in an interesting introduction called `Futures that never arrived'. Other than his intro there is no other text so if you want to read about past predictions of the American future have a look at `Yesterday's Tomorrows' by Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan, it is one of the best books I have read on the subject and it includes plenty of excellent pictures. Worth a look also is `Out of Time' by Norman Brosterman, it covers the same subject but I found it historically too broad in scope, some of the pictures date back to the eighteen hundreds.

With `Future Perfect' my brighter tomorrow has arrived today.

Rating:
Summary: Gee, wasn't tomorrow swell!
Review: I love this paperback. Dozens of color pictures (mainly sourced from adverts) of the future created when optimism was in the air and one was led to believe that science would conquer most frontiers and life was going to be one long continuous weekend. Editor Jim Heimann has wisely restricted his choice of images from the mid-thirties to the start of the fifties, so they picture a very streamlined future. Amongst all the pictures are twenty-three super covers from the science and mechanics type monthly magazines (some enterprising publisher should do a coffee-table book of these with their striking cover paintings) several pages of comic-book type illustrations and thirteen intriguing ads, designed in 1945, from the Bohn aluminium company showing some wonderful streamlined vehicles.

Future transportation has the biggest showing but there are future homes, offices, suburbs, schools, space and everyday living. Bruce McCall sums up the feel of the pictures in an interesting introduction called 'Futures that never arrived'. Other than his intro there is no other text so if you want to read about past predictions of the American future have a look at 'Yesterday's Tomorrows' by Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan, it is one of the best books I have read on the subject and it includes plenty of excellent pictures. Worth a look also is 'Out of Time' by Norman Brosterman, it covers the same subject but I found it historically too broad in scope, some of the pictures date back to the eighteen hundreds.

With 'Future Perfect' my brighter tomorrow has arrived today.

Rating:
Summary: Icons
Review: These little icons books are great - if for nothing else than just a pop-culture reference. A little small - and the paper could be better. But overall, lots of images for an unbeatable price.

Rating:
Summary: Icons
Review: These little icons books are great - if for nothing else than just a pop-culture reference. A little small - and the paper could be better. But overall, lots of images for an unbeatable price.

Rating:
Summary: Futuristic Eye Candy from the Age of Optimism
Review: This little book is a sampling of pop futurism from what the editor calls the Age of Optimism, namely the 20's, 30's, 40's, and 50's. In the introduction, it is pointed out that people in these decades had a special need to believe in a better future, because the present, and immediate past, had been so grim. In the 20's people tried to forget the meat grinder of the Great War, in the 30's they tried to get their minds off of the Great Depression, in the 40's they needed to believe that they were fighting for a better world to justify the sacrifices of the Second World War, and in the 50's there was the Cold War and the Bomb to forget.

These images are strictly pop futurism. Almost none of them came from professional designers or engineers. Many are from advertisements. The rest of them are largely from magazines like Popular Science, pulps, and supplements to the Sunday newspaper. The emphasis wasn't on hard science and practicality here, it was on armchair dreams of a better future. Here you have pictures of personal helicopters and flying cars. There are also picture phones and robot lawn mowers. You have many versions of the house of the future, and the great towering cities of the future. There are bases and colonies in space. Even the few depictions of warfare are of the sanitized and automated sort. This was a bright, clean, colorful future for all (everyone seemed to be at the same upper middleclass level of plenty and comfort- there are no excessively rich or poor to be seen.) You quickly realize that this is where the creators of the Jetsons must have drawn much of their inspiration.

In short, these are images of a time when people still believed in the future.

The book itself is almost all illustration with no accompanying text. You are intended to browse through and get an over all feeling for the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist. There is a short, perceptive, three-page introductory essay to set the mood. It is repeated in both German and French- though you really don't have to read any language to appreciate this collection.

My one small criticism is that the pages are not numbered. This makes it impossible to refer anyone else to a specific illustration.

This is the future that I was raised to believe in- and with any luck it still isn't too late to bring it into manifestation....