American Signs: Form and Meaning on Rte. 66 | 
| Author: Lisa Mahar
Publisher: Monacelli
Category: Book
List Price: $40.00
Buy New: $5.46
You Save: $34.54 (86%)
New (34) Used (23) Collectible (1) from $4.98
Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 413240
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7.1 x 0.7
ISBN: 1580931197
Dewey Decimal Number: 388.10973
EAN: 9781580931199
ASIN: 1580931197
Publication Date: October 14, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Thank you for looking at Bookscorner1. no sale is ever final.100% satisfaction guaranteed may have a remainder mark, 385
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
The roadside sign has become an American icon: a glowing neon symbol of the golden age of the open road. Yet signs are complex pieces of design, serving not only as physical markers but also as cultural, political, and economic ones. In American Signs, Lisa Mahar traces the evolution of motel signs on Route 66 in a distinctive visual approach that combines text, images, and graphics.
American Signs reveals the rich vernacular traditions of motel sign-making in five eras, spanning from the late 1930s through the 1970s. The motel signs of the early 1940s, for instance, reflect vernacular traditions dating back at least a century, while examples from the later years of the decade reveal a culture newly obsessed with themes. America's fascination with newness and technological progress is manifested in 1950s motel signs. Finally, in the 1960s, a turn toward simplicity and the use of new, modular technologies allowed motel signs to address the needs of a mass society and the beginnings of a national, rather than regional, aesthetic for motel signs.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
Signs of the times... October 1, 2007
This book illustrates, with some technical form, the artful, whimsical commercial signage of days past. If you're wistful or nostalgic about the wild neon and bright painted signage you saw or like from the golden ages of the fifties and sixties, this book is for you! It's chock full of signage, specs and discussions of the form and substance of fanciful advertising. I highly recommend it to anyone who loves the imagery found all along the Mother Road..and beyond!
 Read this and learn how to look at and think about a sign August 24, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Every once in awhile someone from the high culture descends into a part of the low culture, studies it, and comes up with interesting findings. That Lisa Mahar is from the high culture there can be no doubt for she has won numerous awards from AIA, NEA, the NYS council on the arts, etc. That she has come up with another subject of interest (her book on grain elevators being a classic) there can be no doubt. In this instance, a book about motel signs, she gathered from her vast collection (500+) of pictures and old post cards the most interesting motel signs on route 66. She culled the ones that showed best her ideas of the evolution, and development of motel signs in terms of form, materials, orientation, symbols, content, and context. When you finish reading her book, you'll recognize streamline from art deco and colonial from international styles. You will know the possible deep embedded meanings in angled forms, irregular shapes, abstract symbols (like the Holiday Inn signs with that shooting star) and the artistic significance of asymmetry. Some of these deep meanings are frightening, if true as claimed by her, especially the crowns, turrets, shields, arrows, and crests in the context in which they appeared, the 1965 Watts insurrection and the 1967 Newark rebellion. Once you have read and reviewed this book, you will never be able to just look at a road sign again. Instead you will think about them - who made them, when, why, and out of what, as well as the overt and covert meanings. Most importantly, you will think how the sign fits in and reflects the place, culture, and tenor of its time.
 Questionable on many levels November 29, 2005
8 out of 11 found this review helpful
I'm a professional designer and one of my favorite books on the popular cultural environment is "Main Street to Miracle Mile" and I imagine many who seek reviews of this book would say the same. This is not the book for you.
First, the illustrations are small and often not helpful. The author is of a school of design communication that is thankfully fading rapidly, turning up increasingly in the remainder bins. Recall the last time you picked up a 90s era book on, say, deconstructionist architecture and were stupefied by page after page of arid photos and obscure diagrams. This book isn't as bad as most but it clearly comes from that same camp.
Second, her whole point is that signage is an indicator of social change. Like many schooled in modern French criticism (also turning up in remainder bins these days) she frequently asserts without proof, as if an elegant sentence is somehow enough. The example that most irritated me was her statement that in the 60s regal motifs in signage became popular as a result of racial tensions and a yearning for authoritarianism. Aside from the fact that regal motifs were widespread through much of the early 20th century--as even cursory research will reveal--the assertion is made without any real attempt to prove this outrageous point. My sense was that she was writing within an intellectual milieu, of a type that afflicted us all during the 90s, that simply accepted certain cultural issues, like racism, as givens that required no evidence even in their particulars. Not exactly what we called scholarship and now again call scholarship. The book has that preaching-to-the-choir quality that was all too common with socio-politicized academic publications. Thankfully, we seem to be growing out of that phase.
Rather than being useful book on signage in America (that book still needs to be written) or even a useful book on social and cultural change, this is more an Exhibit Z of 90s-era intellectual and academic style, a trendy, obscurantist, frequently sloppy, and sometimes strident style I believe future historians will not mention favorably. From what I do understand about French-school criticism, that's, ironically, what it's supposed to be, a reflection of its times.
what a great book. January 24, 2005
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
It is very possible that this book was actually written for me. As designer, it talks about nerdy things that I actually care about. Shapes, construction, and typography of signage.
 Interesting and informative, but book design is annoying April 25, 2004
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
Anyone interested in the history of roadside signs will learn much from this book, but what a chore it is to read it. The main text is in bright red type with minimal margins. Captions and diagrams are in black type (thankfully) but far too small to be read easily. In many diagrams the type is not only tiny but is also in all-caps, which might not be a problem if the diagrams weren't so wordy. Some of the photos are so small that we just have to assume that they illustrate the author's points.I recommend the book because of its content, but be sure to get a good reading light and a magnifying glass to get the full benefit.
|
|
|
