Perhaps taking its lead from Troubador Press’s 1969 Zodiac Coloring Book—and coming out the same year as Troubador’s Occult Coloring Book—the Occult Datebook‘s beautifully vivid images perfectly epitomize the occult’s shift into the mainstream…
San Francisco’s Troubador Press, under the direction of founder and owner Malcolm Whyte, published a long line of innovative (and beloved, to many) coloring books from 1967 through the early ’80s. Often contracting illustrators with ties to the counterculture and underground comix, Whyte chose subjects that were sometimes anodyne—horses, ballet, wildlife, the Bible, dinosaurs—but often daring for the time…
The ’70s was a decade of action figures. In 1972, the Mego Corporation bought toy manufacturing rights for both Marvel and DC comics, along with several popular TV and movie franchises, and two years later brought forth a cornucopia of “fully posable” figures (8-inch tall dolls, really), including lines such as World’s Greatest Super Heroes, Planet of the Apes, and Star Trek, plus many more in later years…
In 1969, pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome commissioned renowned modernist architect Paul Rudolph to design its new corporate headquarters and research facility in Durham, North Carolina. The result was a visionary modular complex whose geometries created a futuristic melding of spaces and forms…
In the 1970s, public belief in astrology and adherence to horoscopes rose to somewhere between a quarter and a third of Americans, but awareness of one’s own sun sign was quite high, at over 75%. Even those who did not believe Western astrology was in any way a predictive science enjoyed it as a pastime…
U.S. Space Camp was inspired by Saturn V designer Werner von Braun—a longtime advocate of a “public program for space science education”—and pioneered by Edward O. Buckbee, a NASA public relations specialist and director of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the location of Space Camp since its inaugural session in 1982…
In August of 1987, thousands of New Age believers, curious skeptics, and others in search of a weekend road trip gathered at dozens of famous destinations across the globe to celebrate the combination of rare astrological alignment and the (purported) end of a Mayan calendrical cycle…
Bob Peak, who I’ve talked about before, did not become readily associated with science fiction until his work on Norman Jewison’s Rollerball, for which he illustrated the theatrical poster and at least six additional lithographs, the latter distributed in press kits and displayed at theaters…
Though positing itself as an architectural practice, ONYX—like many of the progressive architectural concerns of the day—was as much a conceptual initiative as it was anything to do with concrete and construction…
During my late-’80s adolescence on Boston’s North Shore, no automobile better represented a kind of aspirational working-class freedom than the IROC—so much so that it became a broad stereotype and cliché, even among marginally self-aware Italian-Americans such as myself…
We Are the Mutants 