I watch enough "vintage" movies and television that I find myself thinking about bygone customs and technology a lot — like how writers will contrive to have characters overhear phone messages not meant for them, now that nobody has an answering machine anymore. I thought about it while writing up Grounded, about soda fountains, about the Woolworth's every town used to have.
Reading Obsolete gave me a few twinges for things I took for granted as a ten-year-old that a ten-year-old today would have to have explained to her: plaster casts; pop quizzes printed on a mimeo or ditto (the purple ink smelled so official!); cursive writing; lickable stamps, not just postage but Green Stamps too. We evolved past these things for good reason, mostly, but it's a little sad that, in a generation, we'll have forgotten them. So it's nice that we'll have the book, as the culture gets farther and farther from any firsthand experience with boom boxes and non-microwaved popcorn. The use of the word "encyclopedia" is facetious now, but will have the ring of truth in 25 years' time.
The concept is fab, but the execution is problematic at times; author Anna Jane Grossman tries too hard with the jokey, faux-anthropological tone. The "Girdles" entry is a good example:
Elasticized undergarments that made the wearer look sexy, eliminating the need to diet, exercise, or marry a surgeon. Those who relied heavily on girdles during the day also relied on very dark rooms at night.
It's the kind of "humor" that's shoehorned in during a second edit, and the material doesn't need it. Grossman has a lighter touch elsewhere, and when she's playing it straight with the occasional dry aside or quotation from an expert (the "Focus Groups" entry does that very well), the prose is perfectly engaging — but it's as though she couldn't decide whether she wanted to examine these obsoletoids in depth, or coast on the gimmick. As gimmicks go, the table of contents is a damn good one, but the book is far better when it explains in depth what a given object was, or did, and why it fell from grace ("High-Diving Boards"), instead of passing the buck with a weak punchline ("Singles Bars").
It's a great idea for a book, it's timely, and it will remain timely; Grossman could do an annotated edition every couple of years and not run out of material. I hope she does come out with an updated version or a sequel, and I hope she reins in the clunky jokes, which don't add much, and adds more supplementary research, which does.
I'll give it this without reservation: it's a great gift book. Secret Santas, take note.
