Welcome...

 ...TO THIS BLOG OF BOOKS AND BOOZE, ODDBALL HISTORY, PAPER EPHEMERA, HIGH-LIFE AND HARD TIMES, HIGH AND LOW-BROW LITERATURE.  I AM CURRENTLY A PROFESSOR OF MODERNIST LITERATURE AND BOOK HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WEST FLORIDA AND THE CHAIR OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ART & DESIGN. THIS BLOG IS MY TOOL TO ORGANIZE AND DISSEMINATE MY WRITINGS ON LITERATURE, COCKTAILS, BOOKS, PULP MAGAZINES, EPHEMERA, AND ESOTERICA STEMMING FROM ONGOING PROJECTS ON THE COCKTAIL AND COCKTAIL BOOKS, FLAPPERS AND FLAPPER AUTHORS (SUCH AS DAWN POWELL, VIÑA DELMAR, AND KATHARINE BRUSH), AND THE PULP MAGAZINE. YOU'LL ALSO FIND COCKTAIL RECIPES, BOOK REVIEWS, AND PERHAPS SOME RANDOM RANTS...

WANDER AND ENJOY! 

Recent Posts...

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Where All Good Flappers Go: Essential Stories of the Jazz Age, a collection of flapper fiction.
Where All Good Flappers Go: Essential Stories of the Jazz Age, a collection of flapper fiction.

Today there is no formal, acknowledged genre known as “flapper fiction.” There is no collection of contemporary short stories from the 1920s dedicated entirely to The Flapper… Until now.

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Dawn Powell, Flapper Stories, and the Pulps

By August of 1921, Dawn Powell had conquered Manhattan: she had safely navigated the way out of a broken and restrictive family in a rural Ohio town, found her way to New York, carved a career for herself as journalist and publicist, had married, and was about to have her first and only child. This was arguably the happiest moment of Powell’s domestic life. Soon, though...

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2016 recap: Designing the Cocktail Plan for Mabel's BBQ
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Lost Cocktails: The Roosevelt Hotel's Williwaw vs. The Willawa Cocktail
Lost Cocktails: The Roosevelt Hotel's Williwaw vs. The Willawa Cocktail

The drink menu is a portal to cocktail nirvana: Cocktails, Mixed Drinks, Scotch, Bourbon, Tall Drinks, Liqueurs, and etc. Not only is there the famous “Sazarac” and “Ramos Gin Fizz” but “The Big Mamou,” “The Jambalaya,” “The Salty Dog,” a “Bayou Swizzle,” and, believe it or not, “Seagram’s Seabreeze,” a drink touted as “Gin and Tonic at its Exciting best” (hence it probably isn’t that vodka drink from the 1980s). You can even order a Grasshopper in “red, white, green, blue, or gold as you prefer!” 

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So You Think You're a Cocktail Geek, huh?: Cocktail Slide-Rules and the "Cocktail Computer."
So You Think You're a Cocktail Geek, huh?: Cocktail Slide-Rules and the "Cocktail Computer."

Sometimes "cocktail books" aren't books at all. Recently, someone sent me a link to this Kickstarter campaign for Lily Szajnberg’s proposed Cocktail Computer – an analog gizmo that selects cocktail recipes for you based upon which ingredients are in your home bar.

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The Glass Cow
The Glass Cow

As a way to counterbalance the esoterica (read: nerdiness) of my posts on the minutia of cocktail book publishing, I think I'll try to interlard my drink posts with actual cocktail recipies -- either new or historic. This way, they're be a li'l sumpin for everybody...

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Jerry Thomas, Oxford Night Caps, and Defining the Cocktail Book
Jerry Thomas, Oxford Night Caps, and Defining the Cocktail Book

As I start researching my Cocktail Book book – an illustrated history of the cocktail book – I keep coming up against the issue of definition...

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Hemingway, Tiki Culture, and the Modern Primitive
Hemingway, Tiki Culture, and the Modern Primitive

You may well ask what the hell Hemingway has to do with Tiki culture, that mid-century fad for flaming rum drinks, pupu platters, and limbo-lines...

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Black Writers for the Pulps: the Case of Wallace Thurman and Harlem Stories.

For years I’ve been thinking about the presence, if any, of African American writers in the pulps. The idea is interesting, especially since the pulps get a bad rap – pretty much warranted – for incredibly stereotypical and dehumanizing characterizations of African Americans and, really, most any non-white race.


 

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