Frederic Alan Sharf

Richard Arbib

Now in a hardcover edition, this book of enchanting vintage drawings showcases the beauty and ingenuity of American automobile design in the landmark period from the 1940s to the 1960s. The work ranges from rough, revealing preliminary sketches to carefully drafted, full-color illustrations, which were the presentation drawings auto makers used to showcase concepts, present new design ideals and act as selling tools. Many of these images have never before been published, and each offers a rare glimpse into the thinking of premier Detroit automakers. Includes an informative text on auto styling, the demands and expectations of the major manufacturers, and the ways in which airplanes, rockets, emerging technologies, and popular media influenced postwar car design. Just in time for Father's Day.

Drawings from the Great Age of American Automobiles : Selected from the Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Collection

Future Retro

Charles Edwin Lewis Green

John Hardy Wright

Shore and Landscape Painter of Lynn and Newlyn

C.E.L. Green, 1844-1915

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

From preliminary sketches to carefully drafted renderings, these drawings showcase the beauty and ingenuity of automobile design in the heyday of American manufacture. Whether used to float innovations, showcase new developments, or promote the latest models, they are, first and foremost, examples of graphic art. Future Retro looks at cars from a landmark period in American automobile design, the 1940s through the 1960s, providing a rare glimpse into the thinking of premier Detroit car builders. The text discusses such matters as the role of the designer in auto styling, the influence of emerging technologies on postwar car design, and the ways in which these drawings depict a particularly resonant segment of the American dream. Over 50 color illustrations, many never before published, introduce us to cars that are both futuristic and retro, sometimes decidedly wacky (several were too outlandish to build), and always very, very, cool. Future retro offers a lesson in car creation and history to practitioners and students of graphic and industrial design - as well as to anyone who has ever felt the allure of the great American automobile.

John W. Dower

Jacqueline M. Atkins

Anne Nishimura Morse

Modernity took many forms in 1930s Japan, but in the tumultuous years before militarism pushed the country toward global aggression, it was most visibly associated with a glittering consumer culture. Inundated with western jazz-age trends and new technologies, Japan's big cities, especially Tokyo, offered the most enticing attractions to a newly liberated generation: bustling streets of department stores, cafés and teahouses, movie theaters and ballroom dance halls. Modern architecture, industrial design and fashion overshadowed traditional arts as Japan strove to take its place in a cosmopolitan world. The Brittle Years examines the different ways in which designers and artists visualized what it meant to be modern in Japan in the years leading up to World War II. Its 160 full-color illustrations of paintings, textiles and graphic arts are astonishing not only for their great visual impact but also for the insight they provide into a rapidly transforming nation. Among the more surprising images are kimonos bearing patterns of tanks or futuristic cityscapes, paintings of fashionable Japanese women with bobbed hair in western dress and handbills of factory and agricultural workers joined in solidarity. Essays by leading experts on Japanese art and history, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning author John W. Dower, elucidate the many tensions within Japanese society and show how and why such images of power, progress, and beauty helped the nation celebrate and divert modernity to new purposes during these brittle years.

Visualizing Japan in the 1930s

The Brittle Decade

Frederic Alan Sharf

Books

Your next favorite book is out there