Barnaby Conrad III

oaded with vintage photos of early aircraft landing in the tropics, of founder Juan Trippe and longtime Pan Am advisor, Charles Lindberg, as well as art deco brochures and jet age memorabilia. The juxtaposition of fabulous pictures, creative and original advertising art and lucid prose makes this book stand out in its genre of coffee table books.
The author captures with great style the legend of Pan Am from the heroic pilots and their engineering feats (e.g. the first crossing of the Pacific Ocean) to the best flight attendants in the world.
After Pan American's First commercial flight, from Key West to Havana, in 1927, airline visionary and company founder Juan Trippe teamed up with heroic aviator Charles Lindbergh to pioneer routes into the Caribbean and South America. Enlisting early aircraft builders Sikorsky, Martin, and Boeing, Pan Am developed planes that finally conquered the vast Pacific and Atlantic oceans, breaking down the boundaries that separated peoples and cultures.

During its first 40 years the company was responsible for virtually every innovation in commercial aviation, from safety and performance features in its aircraft to jet travel at affordable fares. Along the way, Pan Am attracted endorsements from celebrities, the mistrust of Presidents and the envy of competitors. iPan Am: An Aviation Legend recounts the great friendship between Trippe and Lindberg, the secret wartime mission Franklin Roosevelt made aboard a Pan Am Clipper, and the courageous acts of pilots such as Ed Musick, who bravely flew across Pacific Ocean in 1935. With its logo on everything from tiny single-engine planes to the magnificent 747, Pan-American changed the way Americans saw the world and the way the world viewed America.

Although Pan American World Airways ceased flying in 1991, its photographic history stirs the imagination of the air traveler just as images of the Orient Express, the Titanic and the Concorde intrigue railroad, ocean?liner and aviation buffs. With more than 250 illustrations and vivid text, author Barnaby Conrad III honors not only Pan American's golden era of the 30s and 40s, but also depicts its iconic style of the 50s and 60s jet age in an unforgettable manner. Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seat belts as this book takes you aboard the greatest airline of the 20th century.

Filled with stunning photographs and artifacts, this book evokes the golden age of air travel, when boarding a Pan Am Clipper bound for Pago Pago or Macao meant an adventurous journey in unprecedented style. “Someday,” wrote Claire Booth Luce in 1941, “a clipper flight will be remembered as the most romantic voyage in history.”… (more)

"The more I see of man, the more I love my dog." - {Pascal}

Here is a lovely collection of photographs of Parisian dogs and their Parisian owners...sitting, walking, eating, and loving together. Each decade of the last century is represented, but there's something about the 1950s which makes Paris and its dogs so collectively bourgeois. From Edouard Boubat's cover shot of a pampered but contemplative poodle hanging with his newspaper-reading human to Robert Doisneau's photo of a camera-aware terrier, the B&W stills show a timeless city.

"Deceived by the world, never by my dog." - {Paris tombstone}


Book Season = Spring (joie de vivre)… (more)

After reading a thread on The Sun Also Rises, several perceptive reviews together with queries of "what's all the excitement about," I was reminded of "Absinthe" one of my treasures. The drink's influence is traced primarily through art and artists who imbibed. Hemingway is quoted multiple times and a green light thrown on defining a "lost generation". The green fairy as muse and zeitgeist is implicated in art, literature, crime, gender-bending and just letting the nineteenth century good times roll. This book has served me as an art and literary reference. It informs, colors, and shades the biographies of hundreds and credits 154 art sources for the paintings and illustrations within the soft-cover though large format book. It painted outside the lines of Hemingway's spare style and informs on others. And it's indexed.… (more)