May I Take Your Order : American Menu Design 1920-1960
Editorial Reviews Review
Reviews From:
Collector's Showcase
San Jose Mercury News
Brimming with classic restaurant menus from the 1920s to the 1960s, this book features 250 color reproductions that will stimulate the interest of collectors, graphic designers, and history buffs. Heimann, author of Carhops and Curb Service, take the reader on a colorful journey through four decades of American gastronomic tastes, using restaurant menus to document the changes in American popular culture.
Prices for vintage menus range from $5 to $15, but ordinary ones cost as little as a dollar. Rarities, however, command as much as $250. And don't forget to display a group of menus with swizzle sticks, ashtrays, matchbooks, business cards, napkins, place mats and other restaurant memorabilia. Anyone with an appetite for collecting menus will enjoy May I Take Your Order: American Menu Design, 1920-1960 by Jim Heimann.
Communications Art As if the obsessed collectors and incurable packets among us needed another excuse to scour the back road junk shops and flea markets, Chronicle has served up this mouthwatering assortment of vivid vintage menus. Author Jim Heimann provides an enjoyable informative history, commenting on not just the design trends, but also the content and social context (Hawaii gains statehood, hula girls and tape cloth textures adorn menu covers). Heimann also covers the ebb and flow of America's population, from rural to urban to suburban, and its effect on this corner of cultural history. There are 250 color reproductions in 'May I Take Your Order?'-- risque 'girlie' cocktail menus; buffalo, pig and sombrero-shaped menus; train, plane and steamship menus and menus that do double-duty as road maps for the ever-vacationing American family. Every illustration style is represented here, from the Art Deco stylings and cartoons a la John Held, Jr. in the '30s menus, the saturated 'technicolors' and noirish perspective drawings of the '40s to the fish and boomerang shapes and neo-Cubist montages of the of the 50s. And, of course, there are those good old bygone prices: apple pie, 15 cents (1947) and a bottle of beer, 25 cents (1931). You could order a Dorothy Lamour's Sarong ('To be worn inside only') at Sugie's Original Tropic in Beverly Hills or Figs with Cream at the Brown Derby. According to Heimann, vintage menus are still affordable. In the meantime, 'May I Take Your Order?' makes a good appetizer. May I Take Your Order : American Menu Design 1920-1960
May I Take Your Order : American Menu Design 1920-1960,Jim Heimann,Chronicle Books LLC,0811817830,20th century,Art,Graphic Arts - General,History,Menu design,United States,Photography / General
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