Tuesday, June 2, 2009

10 Books A Day: #44

Cereal Boxes And Prizes: 1960...Scott Bruce...Flake World Publishing

The Encyclopedia Of Animated Cartoons...Jeff Lenburg...Checkmark Books

The Complete Directory of Prime Time Network TV Shows 1946-Present...Tim Brooks, Earl Marsh...Ballantine Books

RetroHell: Life in the 70's and 80's, from Afros to Zotz...The Editors of "Ben Is Dead"...BackBay Books

Videohound's Complete Guide to Cult Picks and Trash Flicks...Video Ink Press

An Irreverent and Thoroughly Incomplete Social History of Almost Everything...Frank Muir...A Scarborough Book

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide...by the MST3K Writers and Performers...Bantam

A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making Of A Tradition...Lee Mendelson...Harper Collins

"It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown": The Making Of A Television Classic...Lee Mendelson...Harper

Gahan Wilson's Monster Collection...Gahan Wilson...Barnes and Noble Books


Many good and weighty reference books here, sources of information impervious to power outages, service blackouts, and computer crashes, and oh, so simple compared to all that mucking about on search engines. Of course, their main drawback is they don't get automatically updated; the MST3K book only goes up to Season Six, and the "present" in the TV directory was 1979 (although there have been at least eight updated editions since; I'm thinking about getting the latest one of these days from ERHamilton). But they are all great browsing books, and great contributors to my pretensions of "know-it-all-itude."

Take a look at that box of Quisp. Would any cereal today have the balls to have a character with a gun (albeit a ray gun) on it and the claim that it is "sugary" as well?

The Frank Muir "Social History" is a lovely, curmudgeonly look at history that has to be read to be believed. If you want to know anything bad that anyone famous in history had to say about anything, from music to actors to food, this is the place to find it.

Book Count: 531.

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