Thanks to a tip from friends who were there last week, I visited the Renwick Gallery Saturday to catch the exhibition Murder Is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. (It runs through January 28, 2018, so there’s still time for you to catch it, too.)

It features 18 miniature dioramas of crime scenes which have been used since the ’40s to train investigators. They were created by “mother of forensic science” Frances Glessner Lee, and are extremely detailed, with little bullet holes and blood spatter, tiny tobacco-filled cigarettes, working mouse traps, and more … but the detail which attracted my eye the most was on the floor of what’s known as the Blue Bedroom, in which the body of a box factory employee was found by his wife.

Old magazines!

I suspect these magazines, less than an inch high, are based on actual issues. I would expect nothing less from a woman who rejected a miniature rocking chair because it failed to rock the same number of times per minute as the full-sized rocking chair found at a crime scene.

I tried (and failed) to track down the cover dates for these issues based on what art was visible, but hope that somewhere out there is an expert in ’40s magazines who can succeed where I did not. Is that person you?

Can you ID these miniature murder magazines?

I was reading the December 1916 issue of The Scoop (as one does), a magazine “written by newspaper men for newspaper men,” which is filled with fascinating anecdotes about the way the world was for journalists 100 years ago, when I came across a reminder that the technology we think of as essential often … isn’t.

A full-page ad which appears on the back cover decries the fact Congress appropriated funds for continued mail delivery by pneumatic tubes in New York City, but failed to do the same for Chicago. According to the ad (which is unsigned, so is apparently more of an editorial), there were 10 miles of two-way, eight-inch tubes running under Chicago at the time which delivered 8,000,000 pieces of mail daily.

In response to the idea that mail should instead be delivered by trucks rather than pneumatic tubes, the question is asked, “If we are going backward, why not get a wheelbarrow?”

“Any change,” insists the author of this piece, “would be calamitous.”

Well, here we are, a century later, and that calamity never came.

Which makes me wonder … what technology do we hold dear today, and insist we could not live without, will a century from now seem as quaint as pneumatic tubes do today?

I sure I must have read the April 1926 Amazing Stories before as part of my desire to see how this thing of ours began, but I have no memory of reading Hugo Gernsback’s editorial in that first issue of the first science fiction magazine.

Wait, no—let me correct that. Because Gernsback didn’t call it a science fiction magazine. He called it a scientifiction magazine.

And what was scientifiction? For those who’ve never heard the term, let Gernsback explain—

By “scientifiction” I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.

And from that statement an entire genre, far more varied that he could have ever imagined (or, I’m guessing, would ever have been comfortable with, as scientific education is no longer our main goal) has sprung forth.

Check out his mission statement from 89 years ago.

I was flipping through the November 1950 issue of Marvel Science Stories this afternoon (as one does on a lazy Saturday), and while the content by the likes of A. E. van Vogt, Gardner F. Fox, and A. Bertram Chandler was intriguing, what interested me most was the back cover ad.

“Most Bald People Could Have Saved Their Hair Had They Acted in Time,” we’re told, with random italicization that doesn’t seem to make any sense. But what’s fascinating is the identity of the celebrity endorser doing the telling—”Rocco, Personal Barber of the late Thomas A. Edison.”

That’s right—the barber to the inventor known as the Wizard of Menlo Park claimed that a formula called Sayve is “the best Science can do to SAVE YOUR HAIR.”

One question, though. (more…)

According to the inside back cover of the Summer 1945 issue of True Comics, the whole Marvel family—and that’s Marvel family as in the original “Shazam!” Captain Marvel, not Marvel Comics—wants you to subscribe to Mechanix Illustrated.

I’m sure the fact Mechanix Illustrated was published by Fawcett, the same company that put out Captain Marvel‘s line of comics, had nothing to do with his opinion that any “wide-awake fellow” wouldn’t want to miss an issue. (more…)

I love ads in old magazines that claim to be able to turn people into published writers, and this one from the July 1932 issue of The American Magazine recently caught my eye. It tempts with a promise of “$25, $50 and $100 or more that can often be earned for material that takes little time to write—stories and articles on business, fads, travels, sports, recipes, etc.—things that can easily be turned out in leisure hours, and often on the impulse of the moment.”

But if someone had cut out and sent in that coupon from the Newspaper Institute of America, how well would they have really done?

Most of these types of ads give us no way to check, but this one does, because it includes a testimonial from Gene E. Levant in which he states that he “sold a feature story to Screenland Magazine for $50,” received “an immediate assignment to do another,” and “have had one short story published.” So what kind of writing career did Gene E. Levant have after that? (more…)

I was reading the July 1932 issue of The American Magazine over at the Comic Book + site, and learned some important medical news … I’ve been using Listerine all wrong!

Seems I’ve been gargling with the stuff all these years, when what I should have been doing with the product is dousing my hair with it and massaging until I can “feel the scalp tingling and glowing.”

Or, based on the photo above, having my loving wife massage my scalp for me.

Somehow I’ve got a feeling that won’t be happening …

While visiting my mother in Florida today, I remembered that during a recent phone call, she’d mentioned the time my father had appeared on one of the magazine covers he’d designed when he was an art director for McGraw-Hill. Back when she’d told me that, I’d searched online for old issues of Coal Age and Engineering and Mining Journal, two magazines I knew he’d worked on, but no matter how many I could turn up—no Dad.

Luckily, something made me remember that cover earlier today, so I asked her about it, and …

Which explains why I hadn’t been able to find the cover. I’d never even heard of National Petroleum News!

Dad would have been around 44 years old there, and coming face to face with him in a photo I’d never seen before got me all choked up. In fact, I almost (but not quite) burst into tears.

It’s been more than five years since I lost Dad, but I still miss him.

And I’m not alone. As my search results show, I’m not the only one missing a father.

The Santa Claus wars aren’t anything new.

An editorial in the January 1898 issue of The Nickell is “grieved to find itself in opposition to certain learned and eminent divines of the Presbyterian church in the matter of the existence of Santa Claus.”

Apparently, those divines felt the concept of Santa was bad for children, because “it distracts their attention from the sacred character of Christmas Day.”

Check out the complete editorial, in which the editorial board advises, “do not try to belittle a saint whose ministrations give joy.” (more…)

I know about Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox the way many people do. Meaning—it’s not from reading the original stories, but rather from the Disney cartoon, the Classics Illustrated comic, tales improvised by camp counselors around a fire, or just absorbing the inescapable pop culture references.

Of course, those original stories weren’t so original, as they were folktales long before they were written down, but since I’m not going to get a chance to sit at the knee of a French Canadian in the 19th century and hear them as they were first told, the works of James MacGillivray and James Stevens are the best I can do.

In any event, what this means is that it wasn’t until today that I got to meet Cream Puff Fatty and Hot Biscuit Slim, two of the greatest (fictional) chefs that ever were.

I’m sure you can figure out which is which in the illustration above. (I haven’t been able to track down the name of the artist responsible for that image. If you know, please speak up!)

I discovered them because for some reason, Irene and I got to talking this afternoon about parsnips, which led to us debating whether Paul Bunyan had died from eating poisoned parsnips, which led to me reading about Paul Bunyan’s Black Duck dinner … which introduced me to Cream Puff Fatty and Hot Biscuit Slim, two cooks so amazing that after they fed a team of loggers, not only were none of Bunyan’s team able to rouse themselves to appear for the following meal, but “for five weeks the loggers lay in a delicious torpor.”

What kind of meal could do that? An epic one! Read an excerpt below from the June 1924 issue of the American Mercury for one of the greatest fictional meals I’ve ever encountered. (more…)