Did Monkeys Invent The Monkey Wrench

This fun and funny celebration of hardware from Vince Staten answers the burning questions like have plagued humankind from time immemorial. Staten reveals the mysterious origins of all the things that hold your house together and all the tools you’ve ever dreamed of having. Drawing on his years behind the counter of his father’s hardware store, Did Monkeys Invent the Monkey Wrench? reminds readers that there was once a place where like-minded souls could discuss the important things in life, like baseball, bad movies, and box-end wrenches.

We all know we're not supposed to judge books by their covers, but the truth is that we do just that nearly every time we walk into a bookstore or pull a book off a tightly packed shelf. It's really not something we should be ashamed about, for it reinforces something we sincerely believe: design matters. At its best, book cover design is an art that transcends the publisher's commercial imperativesto reflect both an author's ideas and contemporary cultural values in a vital, intelligent, and beautiful way. In this groundbreaking and lavishly illustrated history, authors Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger establish American book cover design as a tradition of sophisticated, visual excellence that has put shape to our literary landscape. By Its Cover traces the story of the American book cover from its inception as a means of utilitarian protection for the book to its current status as an elaborately produced form of communication art. It is, at once, the intertwined story of American graphic design and American literature, and features the work of such legendary figures as Rockwell Kent, E. McKnight Kauffer, Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, Rudy deHarak, and Roy Kuhlman along with more recent and contemporary innovators including Push Pin Studios, Chermayeff & Geismar, Karen Goldberg, Chip Kidd, and John Gall.

A motley crew of saboteurs wreaks havoc on the corporations destroying America’s Western wilderness in this “wildly funny, infinitely wise” classic (The Houston Chronicle). When George Washington Hayduke III returns home from war in the jungles of Southeast Asia, he finds the unspoiled West he once knew has been transformed. The pristine lands and waterways are being strip mined, dammed up, and paved over by greedy government hacks and their corrupt corporate coconspirators. And the manic, beer-guzzling, rabidly antisocial ex-Green Beret isn’t just getting mad. Hayduke plans to get even. Together with a radical feminist from the Bronx; a wealthy, billboard-torching libertarian MD; and a disgraced Mormon polygamist, Hayduke’s ready to stick it to the Man in the most creative ways imaginable. By the time they’re done, there won’t be a bridge left standing, a dam unblown, or a bulldozer unmolested from Arizona to Utah. Edward Abbey’s most popular novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang is an outrageous romp with ultra-serious undertones that is as relevant today as it was in the early days of the environmental movement. The author who Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) once dubbed “The Thoreau of the American West” has written a true comedic classic with brains, heart, and soul that more than justifies the call from the Los Angeles Times Book Review that we should all “praise the earth for Edward Abbey!” “Mixes comedy and chaos with enough chase sequences to leave you hungering for more.”—The San Francisco Chronicle

The author recreates the array of salves, patent medicines, and mysterious lotions packed on drugstore shelves, and brings to life the pharmacist who explained it all.

And the enthusiasm of a barbershop connoisseur, Staten captures a world, both intimate and universal, that nearly every American man grew up with.

Each year, North Americans spend as much money fixing up their homes as they do buying new ones. This obsession with improving our dwellings has given rise to a multibillion-dollar industry that includes countless books, consumer magazines, a cable television network, and thousands of home improvement stores. Building a Market charts the rise of the home improvement industry in the United States and Canada from the end of World War I into the late 1950s. Drawing on the insights of business, social, and urban historians, and making use of a wide range of documentary sources, Richard Harris shows how the middle-class preference for home ownership first emerged in the 1920s—and how manufacturers, retailers, and the federal government combined to establish the massive home improvement market and a pervasive culture of Do-It-Yourself. Deeply insightful, Building a Market is the carefully crafted history of the emergence and evolution of a home improvement revolution that changed not just American culture but the American landscape as well.

Do It Yourself investigates the history behind the current do-it-yourself craze in homebuilding and home repair. The origins of home improvement can be traced to the early part of the century when government loan programs placed home ownership within the reach of growing numbers of families, mass-circulation magazines began providing their readers with information about home remodeling and repair, and increasing numbers of Americans turned to the manual arts and handicrafts as leisure-time pursuits. World War II provided many Americans with the skills and confidence to undertake home-improvement projects on their own, and after the war, changes in the manufacturing and retail of tools and equipment created new possibilities for transforming one's home. As home remodeling became a central feature of domestic life and consumer culture, the "do-it-yourself" movement was born, coming of age in the baby-boomer 1950s and 1960s, when Americans created suburban paradises and reclaimed decaying urban centers. The text of Do It Yourself, which investigates topics ranging from women's roles in home repair to historic preservation, is a lively mix of illustrations -- including period photographs, magazine spreads, and advertisements -- and clearly written analysis of the trends behind these images.

It’s one of Uncle John’s most popular editions! More than 500 pages of absolutely absorbing material are at your fingertips. Divided for your convenience into short, medium, and long articles, this book has it all: humor, history, pop culture, politics, wordplay, quotations, blunders, facts, and more. Settle in and read about… * The world’s rarest rock ’n’ roll record * The secret history of the lava lamp * Da Vinci’s unfinished masterpiece * Famous unsolved disappearances * Animals famous for 15 minutes * The world’s luckiest accident * The birth of the T-shirt * Big, bad Barbie * Cereal flops And much, much more!