Thursday, February 25, 2010

Still in Circulation: Dressing Right

Some books remain shelved, hiding amongst more relevant or popular titles, keeping us from exploring their contents. The well-versed staff is unaware of their existence, even though they are Still in Circulation.

I'm excited to add this feature to my librarian-blogger repretoire. In circulation, I come across so many great, old books that I never would have known about otherwise. Often funny and interesting, sometimes kind of ridiculous and charming. This one's a bit of everything:
Dressing Right might be an easy joke, what with its late-70s/early 80s fashions and extreme male modeling.

So let me get this part out of the way: ha ha ha ha ha ha men used to have mustaches ha ha ha ha ha ha my dad used to wear that ha ha ha ha ha ha ha hairstyles!

Now I've put that behind me, I'd like to talk about the advice found within Charles Hix's guide to the well-dressed man.

Mr. Hix is all about bringing style to the masses: "When fashion becomes elitist, it's a bore designed for boors."

He's also about equality: "Neither biologically nor physiologically superior are women's eyes to men's; nor do women possess an innate sense of what goes with what that men by their birthright lack."

And he's also about clean living: "Believe it or not - and you should - dressing right in the right way with the right attitude can be a natural high."
Other nuggets of truth and wisdom:
"One of the prime reasons for dressing is to get undressed."
"Man does not live by vested suit alone."
"Only creeps hire bouncers to oust nonconforming guests."

Once I got over the "OMG, did people actually wear this?"-ness of Dressing Right, different categories of outfits began emerging. While some remained in the "Did people actually wear this?" category, others fit elsewhere:

Surprisingly not from Urban Outfittersand Downright Bassian

Dressing Right by Charles Hix is available for checkout at the Logan Library. Only, you'll have to put it on hold, because I'm keeping it the full three weeks. xoxo, M

Monday, February 8, 2010

Cover Judging - To Tame a Highland Warrior

All right, friends. I've taken a month off from Cover Judging to remind myself that the GRE board does not define "enervate" as 'a spell in Harry Potter that is used to restore a person to consciousness."
Side note: Other Harry Potter spells that find their home on the GRE Vocab "Hit List":
evanesc(ent)o, impervious, obliviate, and stupefy.

This is all to say that I've not abandoned judging books by the covers. Why, here's one now . . .

First Glance: There's not a whole lot there, visually, with this one: the author's name and the title reserve about three-quarters of the cover. And we get a bicep (though he's cheating by crossing his arms) and a shadowed glimpse of waxed chest in a sort of blue-toned black-and-white. In this case, however, the visual isn't the point . . . Score: 3 out of 5