Brief Histories of Everyday Objects
ISBN10: 1250078652
ISBN13: 9781250078650
Hardcover
224 Pages
$20.00
CA$28.00
Brief Histories of Everyday Objects is a graphic tour through the unusual creation of some of the mundane items that surround us in our daily lives. Chapters are peppered with ballpoint pen riots, cowboy wars, and really bad Victorian practical jokes. Structured around the different locations in our home and daily life—the kitchen, the bathroom, the office, and the grocery store—award-nominated illustrator Andy Warner traces the often surprising and sometimes complex histories behind the items we often take for granted. Readers learn how Velcro was created after a Swiss engineer took his dog for a walk; how a naval engineer invented the Slinky; a German housewife, the coffee filter; and a radical feminist and anti-capitalist, the game Monopoly. This is both a book of histories and a book about histories. It explores how lies become legends, trade routes spring up, and empires rise and fall—all from the perspective of your toothbrush or toilet.
Reviews
Praise for Brief Histories of Everyday Objects
"The most delightfully irreverent illustrated history lesson since Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe (1990)."—Booklist
“[Andy Warner is] equally interested in the chaos that often follows entrepreneurial initiatives, and each strip, though brief, has the power of a parable, outlining how some inventors were cheated, fell into greed, or used their wealth to attempt to fund new, even quirkier endeavors . . . Warner is a deft cartoonist, able to convey a lot of information, humor, and emotion within a single panel.”—Publishers Weekly