Buzz Poole Livres

This book celebrates the history of toy and novelty cameras, explores how these items spurred international photography movements, and makes clear just how popular they remain today. The introduction of Kodak’s Brownie (the world’s first simple, low-cost camera) in 1900 made photography accessible to the masses. Soon everyone had a camera, and snapshots became the most popular means of capturing a time, place, or memory. As the medium became more ubiquitous, so did the variety of cameras available. This remarkable book celebrates the "toy camera" and its rise out of a novelty market. Inexpensive, often shamelessly marketed to children, and sometimes just plain quirky, these cameras have become a niche industry that thrived during the analog film era and continues to enjoy immense popularity in our digital world. Full-color photographs showcase the most unusual examples of functioning cameras—retro analogs, custom pieces, cool new products from Japan, and all sorts of camera-themed objects and accessories—and the photographs they create. Interviews with the inventor of the Holga and those responsible for Lomography help explain Game Boy and Batman-themed cameras, and cameras specifically made to photograph cats. Insightful essays explore the role of marketing and hipster culture in these cameras’ popularity, as well as the newfound enthusiasm for their "special" effects.

Released in 1970, Workingman's Dead was the breakthrough album for the Grateful Dead, a cold-water-shock departure from the Acid Test madness of the late '60s. It was the band's most commercially and critically successful release to date. More importantly, these songs established the blueprint for how the Dead would maintain and build upon a community held together by the core motivation of rejecting the status quo – the “straight life” – in order to live and work on their own terms.As a unified whole, the album's eight songs serve as points of entry into a fully-rendered portrait of the Grateful Dead within the context of late twentieth-century American history. These songs speak to the attendant cultural and political anxieties that resulted from the idealism of the '60s giving way to the uncomfortable realities of the '70s, and the band's evolving perspective on these changes. Based on research, interviews, and personal experience, this book probes the paradox at the heart of the band's the Grateful Dead were about much more than music, though they were really just about the music.