A Talk of the Town from July, 1951 (in an issue containing a gigantic full-color illustration suggesting you try Guinness with your lobster—"The heartening flavor of Guinness Stout seems to make the lobster taste even better"—Ella Fitzergald and the Weavers at Café Society; Strangers on a Train at the Warner and also reviewed: "The pictorial legerdemain finally winds up in a rooty-tooty fashion, with our two young gentlemen engaged in a death grapple on a runaway carousel"; Guys and Dolls at the 46th Street Theatre; a short and sad obituary for Sam Cobean; Genêt's Letter From Rome, barbed editorials within the listings—for El Morocco, "Selected species of local and West Coast fauna, staring in rapture at people they haven't seen since lunch"—places to dine while out motoring, Rocky Marciano vs. Rex Layne at the Garden; and J.D. Salinger's "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" as the lead article):

The most encouraging word we have so far had about television came from a grade-school principal we encountered the other afternoon. "They say it's going to bring back vaudeville," he said, "but I think it's going to bring back the book." Before television, he told us, his pupils never read; that is, they knew how to read and could do it in school, but their reading ended there. Their entertainment was predominantly pictorial and auditory—movies, comic books, radio. Now, the principal said, news summaries are typed out and displayed on the screen to the accompaniment of soothing music, the opening pages of dramatized novels are shown, words are written on blackboards in quiz and panel programs, commercials are spelled out in letters made up of dancing cigarettes, and even the packages of cleansers and breakfast foods that the announcers exhibit for identification bear printed messages. It's only a question of time, our principal felt, before the new literacy of the television audience reaches a point where whole books can be held up to the screen and their pages slowly turned.

The virtue of the dancing cigarettes (pictured in a Spot) could, perhaps, be questioned in retrospect. Edmund Wilson notes in his review of bug books:

It is the opinion of Mr. Vladimir Nabokov, who is a distinguished lepidopterist as well as a novelist and a poet, that the markings of moths and butterflies, so amazing for the complex detail by which they achive protective mimicry, have been carried to a point that in some cases overshoots the aim or actually defeats it, a point that suggests, on the butterfly's part, a gratuitious aesthetic effort. One wishes that our own human species, if it must drop to an instinctual level, would get going on this tack.

The Talk is unsigned, of course, and my first question about the forthcoming DVD archive will be whether it reveals, as with a Yes & Know pen, the identities of decades of clever devils. I think it does, but I'll let you know. Here's a bewitching poem by Louise Bogan:

Train Tune

Back through clouds
Back through clearing
Back through distance
Back through silence

Back through groves
Back through garlands
Back by rivers
Back below mountains

Back through lightning
Back through cities
Back through stars
Back through hours

Back through plains
Back through flowers
Back through birds
Back through rain

Back through smoke
Back through noon
Back along love
Back through midnight

That's worth memorizing, I think. Finally, a message from the American Viscose Corporation ("America's largest producer of rayon") about men's brave struggle for emancipation through textiles:

Now—a single standard of comfort!

Time was when women had a monopoly on comfort. Men struggled through seething summers clad in heavy fabrics...squirmed through steam heated winters dressed for the old open fireplace days.

But not your present modern-minded gentlemen. He demands equal rights to comfort—and dresses to suit his surroundings—in rayon.

Yes, away with the double standard! Given that his rayon-admiring Miss Modern is probably being smooshed all kinds of ways by assorted foundation garments, however, I'm not so sure the gentleman hasn't come out ahead.