1939: The Lost World of the Fair

New York: The Free Press. Very Good- in Very Good dust jacket. 1995. First Printing. Hard Cover. 0028740025 . Publisher's quarter white cloth over blue boards, gilt lettering on spine, top edge blue, endpapers illustrated with maps, fore-edge deckle. The 1939-40 New York World's Fair was built on a garbage dump in Flushing, Queens. Through the eyes of fictitious characters, we see the exhibits: AT&T, Ford, General Motors, DuPont, Futurama and Democracity. We review the fair's many firsts: the introduction of regular TV broadcasting, FM radio, fluorescent lighting and the fax machine. The computer, which existed in a rudimentary form, wasn't even mentioned. We are introduced to the society of the day: everyone loved big-band music, men always seemed to wear neckties and all feared the European war that had just begun. Also at the fair, "pornography was a mainstay"; the fair perhaps even invented the peep show. The author convincingly argues that the Americans of 1939 were more sophisticated than Americans are today: they were readers, and their educational systems were superior. Three names crop up repeatedly: President Franklin Roosevelt, inventor of the New Deal, which fueled the money that made New York City what it is; Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, the no-nonsense turbo known as the Little Flower; and builder Robert Moses, the man with the edifice complex that made, and some say destroyed, modern New York City. Return to a time when lunch at the Automat was 15 cents, the streets were safe, and remember one thing: the fair went bankrupt. Gelernter (The Muse in the Machine) has given us a portrait of yesteryear that is to be cherished. (Publishers Weekly). . Top edge slightly scratched, previous owner's annotations in black pen on ffep, blue marks on ffep, else tight, square, unmarked, and clean. VERY GOOD-/VERY GOOD . Photographs. 8vo 8" - 9" tall. 418 pp .