The Catalog of Cool

Published in 1982, The Catalog of Cool was a guide to the best of timeless nonconformist music, TV, movies, books, clothes, art, leisure, and cars. Twenty-five years later, it's even cooler. Raw comics, Mad magazine, Ray Ban Wayfarers, Alfred Bester, Zoot suits, ducktails, Carl Barks, Japanese Robots, Wally Wood, Raymond Lowey, Syd Barret, and more. What's not to love? Get with it, daddy-o.

Excerpt:

1962: The Last Good Year
by Davin Seay

It's rare when an esthetic consensus-a movement or school or linkage of like-minded- simply ceases to exist. It's relatively certain, after all, that the cherished flame of any fashion or fancy, no matter how transitory, must somewhere still be lit. In the foothills of the Hindu Kush or the backstreets of Oakland, some cat with bare feet and Goulimine beads still blows on the ruddy embers of peace and love. Off a dank alley in Greenwich Village or North Beach, a bereted and goateed hepster still howls the beatnik mantra. But nowhere it seems is the breath of that last great year still fogging the windows of our collective memory. Nineteen sixty-two is gone forever. Goodbye and amen.

So why '62? Why not '56 or '68, or why not even '23? Sixty-two seems, in retrospect, a year when the singular naivete of the spanking new decade was at its guileless height, with only the vaguest, most indistinct hints of the agonies and ecstasies to come marring the fresh-scrubbed, if slightly sallow complexion of the times. On the first day of that year, the Federal Reserve raised the maximum interest on savings accounts to 4 percent while "The Twist" was sweeping the nation. A month later "Duke of Earl" was topping the charts, and John Glenn was orbiting the good, green globe. That spring Wilt Chamberlain set the NBA record by scoring 100 points in a single game and West Side Story won the Oscar for Best Picture. The Seattle World's Fair opened, followed five weeks later by the deployment of five thousand U.S. troops in Thailand. Dick Van Dyke and The Defenders won Emmys, and Adolph Eichman got his neck stretched. By that summer, the Supreme Court had banned prayer in public school, Algeria went indy, and Marilyn Monroe died of an overdose. "Loco-Motion" was Number One, Sherry Finkbine was on her way to a Swedish abortion, Sonny Liston K-O'd Floyd Patterson in the first round, and The Beverly Hillbillies graced the airwaves. By the time the grass of '62 had withered and died, the discovery of DNA's double helix had garnered the Nobel Prize, Kennedy had ordered the blockade of Cuba, "He's A Rebel" topped playlists and eleven thousand military advisers were in South Vietnam.

Out of print. $3.90 and up on Amazon

I just learned that the book's editor, Gene Sculatti, has a website called The Catalog of Cool.