(Roughly) Daily

Readers may recall that L. Frank Baum was famous before he wrote The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz– he was a celebrity in the then-emerging world of consumer marketing, one of the first great window dressers.

Baum’s art flourished as retailing grew, finding its apotheosis on the Christmas displays that graced department stores around America.  Now, thanks to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, readers can take a stroll past the Holiday windows and Christmas store displays of yore…

Giant Christmas candle carousels, Marshall Field & Company, main aisle, Chicago, about 1956

Take the (online version of the) trip at “Holidays on Display” (and see William Bird’s book of the same title).

As we channel Ralphie’s Red Ryder lust, we might  raise a cup of testimony tea to Emily Dickinson, who was better known during her life as a gardener and botanist than as a poet; only 7 of her 1775 poems were published in her lifetime– which began on this date in 1830.

The Maid of Amherst

From the end of the 19th Century through the middle of the last, the center rings of commercial art were window dressing (L. Frank Baum was a retail celebrity well before The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) and magazine cover and advertising art… as readers can see at Magazine Art– a wonderful online gallery of “magazine cover and advertising art from the Golden Age of American Illustration.”

As we wax nostalgic, we might pull out our manual typewriters to tap out a birthday greeting to “The Sage of Baltimore,” Henry Louis (H.L.) Mencken, born on this date in 1880…  The author of The American Language (and many, many other things) is credited with having coined the term “ecdysiast,” in response to a request from a practitioner who requested a “more dignified” way to refer to her profession.

Often called “the American Nietzsche” (by virtue of his scholarship on the German philosopher), Mencken might better have been considered “the American Wilde”; consider:

Democracy is the theory that holds that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Nature abhors a moron.

Puritanism – The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.

H. L. Mencken