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Your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Author: Verne Ricketts
Publisher: Lieba Inc., Baltimore
Date: 1985
Discovered at: Used book store

Take a look at that cover.

Consider this candy castle's drooping gables, leaking roofs, and red-nippled towers.

Notice the resemblance between the wavy white shingles and cursive-writing homework second graders might have scribbled in the back of a bus jouncing across train tracks.

Study the severed doll's head festooned to the window, or the mop-haired poop warrior cemented onto a pedestal out in front.

Accept that the title is no promise of slow jams, and ask yourself: is droopy, runny chocolate truly a medium for representational -- even architectural -- art?

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Miss America Pageant Official Year Book

Date: 1952

Discovered at: Antique mall

The Cover Promises: When the night is at its darkest, the police commissioner of Atlantic City aims a beacon to the heavens to summon that great protector of the Jersey shore: Miss America!

With the pageant scene scandalized by nudie pix, breast-implants, and contestants who on occasion answer a question with honesty, Americans might find themselves longing for the glamorous beauty contests of the past, for a time when there was something innocent about competitions wherein judges awarded scholarships to women according to the ripeness with which they crammed themselves into swimsuits and evening gowns.

Judging by this week's extraordinary find, that time, I fear, never existed - not even for the vaunted Miss America.

Your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

You're Asking Me?

Author: Gay Head

Publisher: TAB Books

Date: 1958

Discovered at: Garage sale

The Cover Promises: That even in 1958 there was something odd about teenagers seeking advice from Gay Head.

Representative Quotes:

"If you're thinking of inviting your girl friend's girl friend to the dance because you'd really like to go with her, and honestly believe that you can give her a good time, go ahead." (page 66).

"There are several deodorants, prepared especially for boys and men - with a good, clean, outdoorsy smell, which isn't even remotely 'sissy.'" (page 95)

Way back in the third-ever Study in Crap, your Crap Archivist scored a cheap laugh with a scan of the teen-advice column "Ask Gay Head," one of the many delights in 1955's World Week magazine. After reading a full book by Ms. Head, I now appreciate that I was wrong to present her work as something inadvertently hilarious.

That isn't to say I'm above presenting the innocent as filthy. Consider this 1938 cookbook.

 

Your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Pro-Sumer Power! How to Create Wealth by Spending Smarter, Not Cheaper

Author: Bill Quain, PhD

Publisher: INTI Publishing & Resource Books, Tampa, Florida

Date: 2000

Discovered at: Thrift store

The Cover Promises: Back before the tech bubble burst, all you had to do to get rich was just wave your Visa in front of a computer.

Representative Quote: "The word pro-sumer is a combination of the words producer and consumer. Producers make money. Consumers spend money. Pro-sumers make money while they spend." (page 9).

In all of Pro-Sumer Power!, the first book I've ever wanted to punch in the crotch, there is but one flicker of genuine inspiration, and that's right there in the title. Apparently, we're now free to swap prefixes and root-words as we please. After pro-suming, who's up for a ride on a circum-cycle with an para-hobo?

Other than that, this merely demonstrates how insulting the you-deserve-wealth-because-you're-special genre has come to be. More full of nothing than the deepest reaches of space, Pro-Sumer Power! disguises its emptiness behind asinine parables, laughable charts, self-help lies, a story about Lassie, a discussion of iMac commercials, and countless exclamations of the beauty of an idea it never gets around to defining.

Your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Going Places: How America's Best and Brightest Got Started Down the Road of Life

Author: E.D. Hill, former host of Fox News' "I Have Nothing Else To Live For So I May As Well Watch This" Morning Show

Publisher: The Regan imprint of HarperCollins, the same people who brought you O.J. Simspon's If I Did It

Date: 2005

Discovered at: Thrift shop

The Cover Promises: Thin, airbrushed blonde, tanned liked a baked potato, showing plenty of chest in a cherry convertible? Is this the Playboy Channel?

Representative Quote: "I was six months pregnant with my fifth child when I first met Donald Rumsfeld. Maybe it was my hormones talking, but I'll confess I was shocked at my reaction. Yes, he's interesting, witty, wry, and confident, but he's also so incredibly handsome. Those blue eyes make your knees weak!"

Here's a surprise! Turns out that E.D. Hill, the former Fox & Friends host who left the network last year after suggesting that the Obamas bump fists like terrorists, was News Corp's answer to Studs Terkel. Instead of collecting the true, on-the-ground stories of American lives, Hill transcribes inspirational homilies about how the system rewards hard-working dreamers.

One of those hard-working dreamers is Steve Forbes. His secret?

Your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. He does this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Lady, Be Lovely: A Guide to Beauty, Glamour and Sex Appeal

Author: Edyth Thornton McLeod

Publisher: Wilcox and Follett

Date: 1955

Discovered at: Estate sale

The Cover Promises: Foot stretching! Neck powdering! Widow's peak maintenance! Desperately seizing your hand before it opens the refrigerator!

Representative Quotes

Page 13: "When a woman forgets to say 'thank you' for some act of courtesy, the man should verbally remind her of her bad manners, or lack of good ones, whichever you prefer!"

Page 199: "I wonder what makes some women think they can wear tight Levis of clingy denim and wild-patterned blouses or sweaters when they are built like Big Berthas."

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Dangerous Dana

Author: Doris Miller

Publisher: Hill Publications, Queens

Date: 1999

Discovered at: Used book store clearance rack

Representative Quotes:

"The crowd gathers around again and tries to stop Dana from beating Rose with the baseball bat, but it is hard! It is hard to stop Dana from beating Rose with with baseball bat, because Dana swings the baseball bat at anyone who tries to stop her or get in her way! Nobody wants to get hit with the baseball bat!" (page 54)

"Dana violently fights Mark using kick boxing and Hapkido! She punches Mark! She throws several straight blows to his face again! She elbows Mark! She kung fu's Mark! She knees Mark! She knees him real hard again and again in the groin area!" (page 227)

In Dangerous Dana, Doris Miller's astonishing novel of vengeance and exclamation points, styles collide with all the messy force of "Dangerous" Dana Brown's hammer cracking into the skull of the Hispanic plumber whose driving pissed her off.

Here's a revenge fantasy that is written with the just-the-facts tone of a police report, the obsessive repetition of a Dick and Jane primer, and the hopped-up ferocity of someone shouting on a bus.

Your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. He does this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

The Teacher's Aide Volume 2
Publisher: Homemaking Research Laboratories, Tony, Wisconsin
Date: 1978
Discovered at: Thrift Store
Sample crossword and "Word Jumble" clues:
Page 24, "A variety meat. It is found in the mouth. _____ (plural)"
Page 53, "Homemaking courses teach skills in ______ing."

Your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Rave: The Magazine of Intimate Expose

Author: Gay-baiting, breast obsessed,  utterly degenerate/hilarious pretend moralist "Peter Hamilton"

Date: October, 1955

Discovered at: Antique shop

The Cover Promises: That Gretta Garbo "loathes" America, the country that invented Russian Roulette.

Representative Quotes:

"When Marlon Brando taps on those Pearly gates and mumbles at St. Peter that he wants in, the reception he'll get will be about as warm as the one St. Pete recently gave the late Josef Vasily Stalin." (page 22).

"If we are wrong, there's no doubt about it: we'll have pulled the publishing goof of the decade. We repeat: DEBBIE AND EDDIE WILL NOT MARRY." (page 4)

Like the Fox News hosts who denounce spring break lasciviousness while filling the screen with looped images of wet t-shirt action, the scandal rag Rave enjoys nothing more than taking a good, long, hand-in-pants stare into the very vices it purports to oppose.

On one page, Rave is shocked that Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher would dare "mock" the institution of marriage. Not only does Rave suspect the romance was unconsummated and publicist-dictated, Rave suggests of Debbie, in bold, "maybe she was UNINTERESTED in boys."

But just a few pages later, Rave sneers at buxom sexpot Jane Russell for insufficient sexiness, comparing her to "a painted female impersonator who stuck one too many pillows down the front."

Your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. He does this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Science for Christian Schools: Grade 6

Author: Joseph Henson, Georgre Mulfinger, Jr., and Emmett Williams

Publisher: Bob Jones University Press

Date: 1977

Discovered at: Goodwill

The Cover Promises: "With the rock of truth, we can smash the eyeglass of humanism!"

Representative Quote: "Scientists who take God's Word seriously realize that the earth and moon are separate creations, brought into existence for different purposes." (page 57)