Estate sale discovery: Constance Bannister

I picked this book up at a sale a couple of years ago. I think I spent about ten seconds perusing the pictures before tossing it in a box to be sifted through at some future date. Well, the future date finally arrived and I was able to confirm what I already knew: I'm not a cute baby fetishist and never will be. You will never catch me with an Anne Geddes calendar or a baby doll collection (unless those babies are wooden and weird!). And though what passes for humor in Members of the P.T.A. by Constance Bannister is obviously dated, I'm reasonably certain I would not have found it funny had I been a mother of small children when it was published back in 1970.

But I also confirmed something I else I already knew—that you can make all sorts of interesting pop cultural-historical discoveries while shopping estate sales and library sales. This Constance Bannister was no one-hit-wonder novelty book author; she was an incredibly cool, ahead-of-her time woman with the kind of story that's ripe for a high-end biopic miniseries on one of the prestige networks (HBO, AMC, Showtime, are you listening?). Think Kate Winslet in the title role. Go to the website her daughter has created in her honor to check out a babelicious self-portrait of Ms. Bannister circa 1940. 

So Constance Bannister was a babealicious baby photographer; in the words of the headline for her New York Times obit—she died in 2005—she "photographed 100,000 babies." Her beginnings were inauspicious and reminiscent of more than one legendary country-western singer: She was born in 1913 in Ashland, Tennessee, one of 17 children. As a teenager, she moved to NYC to attend the School of Modern Photography. This was the 1930s, people—that took some serious pluck, don't you think? She moved to Palm Beach to work as a society photographer for the Associated Press. After a few years, she returned to NYC, where she opened a studio and photographed Broadway plays, ballets and the Ice Capades. Somewhere along the way she started photographing babies and pets.  In the ’40s and ’50s, the "Bannister Babies" became something of a phenomenon, appearing on the Perry Como Show, the Frank Sinatra show, Ernie Kovacs, etc. while Bannister was also shooting total midcentury eye-candy covers for Woman's Day, LOOK and McCall's. She published tons of books and had a syndicated comic strip. She was a bona-fide pinup during WWII. She married three times and adopted two daughters. She apparently photographed a baby Christopher Walken. Don't you want to know more about this unsung heroine? I know I do.

Paperback of the week: Isaac Asimov's Lecherous Limericks

I wasn't aware of Isaac Asimov's naughty side until I found this 1975 Fawcett paperback at an estate sale, its saucy cover a beacon amid piles of books about Christianity. But I'm not surprised since all the best sci-fi is at least a little bit tawdry, right? Asimov, it turns out, wrote five volumes of dirty limericks and at least one ribald humor book, The Sensuous Dirty Old Man. I consider this just one more credit earned toward my estate-sale continuing education degree—yet another arcane fact to tuck away till needed (e.g., crossword puzzle, Jeopardy appearance, nerd-cocktail-party fodder).

At some point in my adolescence I was also fond of writing limericks (innocent ones) but it's hard to see the genre ever making a comeback. Then again, haiku had its hipster-ironic moment (or am I making that up?), so I guess anything is possible. I gotta say, as much as I want to love this book, it's a stretch. A hundred limericks is a lot of limericks, even if some are "boldly illustrated." Here's a sampler:

"A Poor Example"
An Olympian lecher was Zeus,
Always playing around fast and loose,
With one hand in the bodice
Of some likely young goddess
And the other preparing to goose.

"Zoological Comparison"
A stately giraffe, when he necks,
Or a hippo, when he's having sex,
Aren't worth a tut-tut
To the bellowing rut
Of the great Tyrannosaurus Rex.

"Reward of Industry"
A woman most gorgeously stacked
Thought screwing a glorious act.
So, for finding a niche
For those who were rich,
She was diamonded, minked, Cadillacked.

"Valedictorian"
A luscious young student at Vassar
Was hailed as a top-of-the-classer.
But not in her studies
You old fuddy-duddies
For she shone as a great piece-of-asser.

That's just the tip of the iceberg—a phrase I'm sure Asimov could've double-entendred nicely—but you get the gist. His material is pretty dated, meaning there are more rape jokes than the average person who wasn't a Republican congressman of a certain age would find palatable. The coolest thing about this volume—apart from the blank pages in the back where you're invited to "write your own limericks"—is that on the page opposite each limerick, Asimov offers up a little critique and/or anecdote. Who could write a hundred limericks let alone remember the circumstance surrounding the writing of each? For the Vassar limerick, he recalls giving a lecture at Smith College and how excited he was to stay in the (all-girls, obviously) dormitory, till he saw his room, which had only one door—and it opened to the street. Buzzkill!

Pity the poor sensuous dirty old man, if you can.

Marie Cosindas, where have you been all my life?

How do we educate ourselves when we're no longer in school? Grad school is my road not taken. I did Stanley Kaplan, took the GREs, applied and got in, but I never ended up going. I don't regret that choice but often wish I were in grad school right now, pursuing that PhD in 19th-century medievalism with the stipend and TA job I was promised back when I was in my early twenties and all that stuff was fresh in my brain. Oh well, perhaps one day I will be the sort of senior citizen who audits classes at the local university (cuz there is no way I could get a vaguely respectable score on the math GRE today—I barely squeaked by the first time around). Till then, I have estate and library sales doing the work of furthering my education, and I don't have to take out any loans to make it happen (at least, it hasn't come to that—yet). For example, I can credit an estate sale with introducing me to the work of Marie Cosindas, yet another photographer I've never heard of but whose work I now totally dig. I'll be featuring photographs from Marie Cosindas Color Photographs (New York Graphic Society, 1978) all week as I regroup after my discombobulating long weekend in NYC. As most excellent poet Sara Teasdale wrote:

I shall gather myself into myself again,
I shall take my scattered selves and make them one.
I shall fuse them into a polished crystal ball
Where I can see the moon and the flashing sun.

Julie and John, 1976

Barbara and Fred, 1976

Faye and Peter, 1976 (Yes, as in Faye Dunaway and Peter Wolf—wowsie wow wow)

Stephanie, Elaine and Tony, 1976