Academia Nuts images
These bookshelves (it's a professor's house) are altogether more graceful than the ones we did for The Children's Hour just a few months earlier. Though even bigger on the face, they're only half as deep. Nice work. The uppermost left shelf looks out of line with the others; that's because in making the little skirts for the shelves (the pieces that make them look thicker than plywood), we ran out of new 1x2 lumber and had to go to the reclaim pile, and the piece I grabbed was painted dark brown.
Julie has a keen eye for color. The set of shelves got a two-color treatment after this photo was made. The backs and bottoms are "Santa Fe Gold," while the sides and fronts are a rich dark brown. Wouldn't you love to have a job making up color names for a paint company? It might not be an easy task to find a new name every time, but the rewards would be all out of proportion to the difficulty. In my youth I worked for a man called Larry Lee, who had a writer's background and the easiest way of producing text. Good thing, because he was running a radio station. Larry was the only person I've ever known who regularly outpaced an IBM Selectric typewriter (a Machine Age artifact that some of you old-timers will recall), causing the typehead to jam between letters. He told me once that he had worked some years for the Associated Press and one of his assignments had been to write and move the five-minute radio summaries. These were part of a system called "rip 'n' read," where the harried disk jockey would tear the summary off the printer, step into the control room and go on the air with this set of about eight news briefs. Larry said it was not easy work, or wouldn't have been for anybody else, but at the end of the day he would craft the 5:00 summary in blank verse . . . then get in his car, turn the radio on, and listen to some poor announcer cold-reading the sheet and trying to keep from speaking in iambic pentameter. That's the kind of job satisfaction I'm talking about. The person who named Santa Fe Gold must take great pride in the fact that all over the country, people are trying to describe his paint without giggling.
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