Visual rare grooves ripe for sampling

October 8, 2018 5:55 AM

"I’m sorry. By the end of this post, I will have completely eradicated all productivity from the rest of your day, simply by mentioning fulltable.com." (Via) Full Table previously.

"I found myself tumbling down a new rabbit-hole. First I was perusing some Japanese family crests. And then I found a thing about 1930s cattle branding … some diagrams demonstrating frisking technique … a bawdy 1959 magazine called Sir! … an entire book about correct serviette usage … it just kept going.

"And now I can’t close the tab, I’m hooked. As well as all of the wonderful content, part of the site’s charm is how easy it is to get lost. It’s vast and labyrinthine, no two pages offering the same navigation options. With it’s complete disregard for the user experience or consistent design (each page appears to have been built from scratch), and reliance on buttons and tables, I initially assumed it was a mothballed site from the 90s. But further investigation revealed that it is still very much a going concern."

Knitting patterns.

Millinery.

Barbecue.

Honey cake moulds.

Post Office advertising, 1939.

posted by MonkeyToes (18 comments total)

You are a bounder. A bounder indeed. Such links are for Saturdays or Sundays. Not Mondays. People have jobs. Jobs they must, well should, keep. The author has been feeding the site on a near daily basis since 1996. Twenty-two years of web-hole growth! Why it is unthinkable, unthinkable that fresh from one's weekend one should be presented with such amazingly detailed and surreal images as How a Big Restaurant Operates. The detail is beautiful, if also completely unreal. How many people could such a monstrosity serve. There is dining for perhaps forty people with a staff almost three-quarters that number. Are the price equal to a car payment for a sandwich? I have wasted ten minutes just analyzing a piece of commercial art that is ancient. Still there is more to see. More art which is acceptable and that which is, good God, NSFW! The second index alone would take hours to properly explore and most of it leads to such sites as no decent person should see. Good day to you.

And thanks.
posted by Ignorantsavage at 6:52 AM on October 8, 2018 [16 favorites]

Welp. I know what I'm doing tonight.
posted by DrAstroZoom at 7:09 AM on October 8, 2018

Well you can just call me Hazel because I have been searching for a rabbit hole like this for a long, long time.

IgnorantSavage, that NSFW link sent me scrambling for the source material and boy was I not disappointed. (NSFW + amazeballs)
posted by phooky at 7:13 AM on October 8, 2018 [4 favorites]

(also, since this thread will be littered with the rusted undercarriages of railcars that have hopped the tracks anyway-- was the practice of placing the first word or part of the first word of a page at the bottom of the prior page ever common? Because I really like it.)
posted by phooky at 7:16 AM on October 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

phooky - yes, catchwords were common in pre 19th century books.
posted by misteraitch at 7:31 AM on October 8, 2018 [3 favorites]

amazeballs

*snort*
posted by ikahime at 7:57 AM on October 8, 2018

Wow, I'm in too deep already.
posted by turtlebackriding at 8:16 AM on October 8, 2018

Calling @madamjujujive
posted by growabrain at 8:28 AM on October 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

"As a glamour girl I wasn't doing badly until the fall of 1938. Parties, dances and weekends... poor men, rich men, romantic ones and plain... I knew all the types that a girl meets in gay New York. Then all of a sudden something happened."
posted by rongorongo at 9:00 AM on October 8, 2018

You know who else had bad breath, right?
posted by kaibutsu at 9:14 AM on October 8, 2018

Not a BOUNDER surely (And don’t call me Shirley!), a scallywag, perchance?






AWESOME link! Thanks so much !
posted by Wilder at 10:01 AM on October 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

OYE!? Visual gold!
I will thank you, altho' I might as easily curse you.
Much to enjoy here -- it needs be at a time that is not now...
posted by PaperArtist at 12:10 PM on October 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

Several hours later, I'm looking at zeppelins and trying to find background on advertising regulations in 1941.
posted by turtlebackriding at 12:53 PM on October 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

a scallywag, perchance?

An imp, rather.

I came here to post stuff and chew bubble gum, and I'm all outta FPP privileges today...so the story of J. Warren Bowman, the Bubble-Gum King of America, is just gonna have to wait...
posted by MonkeyToes at 1:47 PM on October 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

I found it! The Table of Contents!
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:27 PM on October 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

I miss this kind of internet. Delightful.

Who is Chris Mullen?
posted by latkes at 9:53 PM on October 8, 2018

Who is Chris Mullen?

Dr Chris Mullen, Director of The Culture Archive, Brighton, author of Fortune America, the Visual Achievements of Fortune Magazine, PhD Art History.

Here's his Rationale for the site, and here are his Occasional Notes, with a few photos of Mullen.
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:28 AM on October 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

This is amazing. It's like the Matthew Arnold collections but broader and weirder.
posted by aspersioncast at 8:48 AM on October 10, 2018