You are guaranteed to have more fun flipping through this book than you will scrolling through the feeds on your socials. The two activities are not unrelated. We are invited here to a visually arresting tour of DIY “life hacks” decades before YouTube or TikTok. When your parents or grandparents (or great-grandparents?) needed to fix something (their golf swing, their waistline, their marriage, their children) in the privacy of their own home, they could spin a platter to discover everything they needed to know in less than an hour. So too when they needed to sharpen their game at work (stenography, vocabulary & pronunciation, salesmanship), or to learn a new skill from scratch (Morse code, varmint calling, yoga, playing tenor just like Sonny Rollins); there was always an LP for that. The day this book was delivered I took it along to peruse at an open mic in a local bar. First my friend started leafing through and grinning, then someone at the next table wanted to have a look, and after their table it went to another. The pages didn’t stop moving until I stood over a stranger waiting for them to stop giggling (over the cover of “Hear How to Tell Your Children the Facts of Life”) so I could take it home with me. No cozy café or sterile medical waiting room should be without this book!
But once you’ve finished amusing yourself after at least a couple of passes through the entire collection of fascinating LP covers, you will discover that you are also holding a real BOOK book. As with the two preceding volumes in their DESIGNED FOR… trilogy, there is a point to Borgerson’s and Schroeder’s curated tour through their midcentury record collection. The LPs – their often-dazzling front covers, the usually earnestly descriptive back-cover liner notes, and of course the music or spoken words on the disc – offer a remarkable portal through which to survey the naked ideals, illusions, aspirations, fantasies, fears, and frivolities of this midcentury world – at once so familiar yet so bizarrely distant from our (quartercentury postmodern?) world. They guide us carefully through the subtle details on the front cover or liner notes of each LP, revealing things we probably missed during the first irresistible urge to make fun of them. And in the substantial introductory and concluding essays, they try to make sense of the cultural and ideological lessons to be drawn from this sample of 200-300 small investments ordinary midcentury Americans were willing to make to improve themselves.
This of course has been Borgerson’s and Schroeder’s ultimate purpose throughout the trilogy. And though the LP cover art in this volume is both more risible and less aesthetically pleasing than in the previous two, the ideological gestalt from this collection is probably more direct and substantial. In DESIGNED FOR HI-FI LIVING they detected a front in the Cold War through LP-covers showcasing the thoroughly modern suburban kitchen, which evoked the Nixon’s and Khrushchev’s kitchen debate at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. But the geopolitical and anthropological implications are much tighter here when we look, say, at the five wildly successful LPs by fitness guru Bonnie Prudden. For it was her research study that prompted Nixon’s boss, President Eisenhauer, to create the President’s Council on Youth Fitness, with Prudden on the board, out of fears that American were getting too soft to be ready, when push came to shove, for the many proxy battles of the Cold War. At the same time, Prudden’s tough-love approach to the flabby housewives, teens, and executives who received her records (often as passive-aggressive gifts – two of them in my own collection were still sealed six decades hence in the original shrink wrap), is emblematic of shifting midcentury beauty and body ideals that remain with us for both better and worse to this day.
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