Yesterday Ann o'Dyne sent me to Scott's Abode where there are great scans from the wonderful Newnes Home Management on display.
I have these treasured volumes in my collection, and they (and a couple of other examples of the genre) formed the basis of a play I wrote years ago.
Coincidentally, there was a scene involving a concrete garden stork...
11 comments:
Jesus, this book haunted my childhood! The hideous vérité photos depicting the domestic environment as fraught with perils. I can remember documentary-style nightmares in which my mother combusted in front of the sitting room fire while I melted my face with carefully sited saucepans of boiling water.
The horror, the horror! Nurse, the screens..!
Ha!
Indeed, it was the gothic domestic horror that appealed to me - and to my fellow theatre creators when we pored over the book in workshops.
As I recall, there is a page entitled "Successful Home Dying" (sic) which summed it up really, the horror.
I'll look about the net and, if nothing turns up, I'll scan that page for you.
I am fascinated - I'd love to know more about your play!
Hi Scott, it's great to see NHM blogged.
It was an episodic play that used images (from Newnes and other books) with a story about ... a woman and her quest for a new light. I wrote it while I was at the VCA.
There was a scene that did look a bit like this
And last year at an op shop I found 2 volumes of another DIY book that one of the directors used - so now I have all the original source material.
and erm, I don't have the books on hand right now, so I've been scouring the web looking for a scan of 'Successful Home Dying' - which I'm sure I saw on flickr last year too. But alas, which Tag?
I'll have to retrieve the books this week. I've been going through some old files here too, but all I can find is a 22 y old photocopy of page 743 Cultivating Outside Interests
Cultivating OUTSIDE interestsvirtually Blogging 101.
well, if Scott is not inclined to scan that page, I can scanz at a later date. (Along with Succesful Home Dying - the mistake might been corrected in later editions of the book)
The caption on p 743:
There is a longing in many people to express themselves through (blogging)...
I'll take a look for Successful Home Dying!
Alas - my 1956 version of NHM has the correctly spelt "dyeing", but the text would have been hilarious if the spelling was wrong: "The best approach to home dying is to accept it as a hazard: it can be so successful that the risk is well worth taking, but you also need to take a philosophical view that you may not care for the results. The following notes take the job to pieces as minutely as possible...".
To add to this , I have just discovered a section on exhuming a body!
Great quote - I always suspected it was a Philosophy tome.
(with a Hitchcockian twist)
I still do not have my books with me, but your magnificent page #7 indicates it's a later edition. I would have remembered those saucepans.
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