Glenn Reynolds has been tracking the progress of James Lileks' new book on Amazon, and is of course, partially responsible for its quick and blinding success. (I had no idea it would be out so soon, and immediately ordered a copy yesterday. Incidentally, can you still use "with a bullet"? Probably not if you're a New York teacher; fortunately for my sanity, I'm not.)

The other reason for its success is its theme, which sounds great, based on Lileks' own description:

It’s called “Mommy Knows Worst,” and the short description is thus: The Gallery of Regrettable Parenting. It’s a compendium of archaic child-rearing advice, going back to the 1920s, when parents were urged to give their kids sunburns and linseed enemas. It’s perhaps the only book I will ever write that devotes a substantial chapter to the greatest problem of the 1940s: CONSTIPATION. You have no idea how slow the bowels of American children moved in the forties. Dads will enjoy how stupid and useless they were made to look in the 50s; Moms will enjoy the detailed how-to-give-birth-at-home section from the WW1 era, and everyone will love the 1960s pamphlet on dealing with home stresses via industrial tranquilizers. It’s the usual retro-fest with many ads, laden with unfair commentary, and attractively priced; perfect for everyone who’s ever had a kid or a mother. I think that covers it all.

Many thanks to the Prof for the push. Now let’s get this thing into the top ten – if only for a minute. It’ll make me happy. It’ll make you happy, knowing that the continued success of these books keeps lileks.com ad-free. AND, if you like the Joe Ohio series, well, good sales figures on this one will make the book version more likely.

Twelve bucks! Cheap. And hours of laughs.

I thank you. Now buy! Or I’ll podcast twice as hard on Friday!

12/09/04 - With the holidays rapidly approaching, you're probably looking for fun gifts for the holiday season. One book that might make a great gift, and at 24 bucks or less, not break the piggybank, is James Lileks' new "Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes From The Horrible '70s".

How hideous? The book's back cover flashes a stern WARNING! in a 48-point all caps bold sans-serif classic-1970s font, followed by this disclaimer:

This book is not to be used in any way, shape, or form as a design manual. Rather, like the documentary about youth crime "Scared Straight", it is meant as a caution of sorts, a warning against any lingering nostalgia we may have for the 1970s, a breathtakingly ugly period when even the rats parted their hair down the middle.

What does this have to do with furniture? Nothing. Everything. The kind of interior design you'll see in these pages is what happens when an entire culture becomes so besotted with the new, the hip, the with-it styles that they cannot object to orange wallpaper— because they fear they'll look square.

Please note that the author and publisher are not responsible for the results of viewing these pictures.

Hear me now and believe me later, these photos are staggering in their horrific ugliness. If any of your rooms look like those in "Interior Desecrations", you don't need a Roomba; you need a flamethrower and a gallon of napalm to start fresh.

But as frightening as the photos are, it's Lileks' captions that make the book so much fun. Lileks, who toils during the day for the "Minneapolis Star-Tribune" newspaper, and writes one of the Internet's best Weblogs at night, is a humor writer on par with Dave Barry and P.J. O'Rourke.

Underneath a particularly horrendous area rug combining patches of blue, teal, green, yellow, red, orange, and a dozen other colors not found in nature, arranged in a pattern charitably described as "abstract", Lileks writes:

"Mommmmmmmmmmm! Fido threw up Smurfs all over the rug again! To fully grasp the horror of the era, you have to realize a crucial, telling fact: this was the perfect rug for someone's room. They were happy when they found this rug."

Lileks alludes to the subtext of his book in its introduction, but it's worth repeating: by and large, these aren't photos of average, everyday 1970s American interiors. Rather, they're photos that Lileks has collected and scanned from 1970s-era home decoration magazines.

In other words, these photos reflect the collected wisdom of decorating pros working inside posh office buildings high above Manhattan's Park and Madison Avenues in the 1970s, and their take on what would be best for homes that wanted to stay contemporary.

I gotta say though, as much as I hate everything else pictured in "Interior Desecrations", that "2001"-style bathroom with the curved Orion Space Shuttle walls is pretty radical. Next time we remodel Casa de Ed, I'm soooo there! I wonder if I can find that abstract Smurf rug on ebay?

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