Book-It 'o13! Book #31
The Fifty Books Challenge, year four! (Years one, two, three, and four just in case you're curious.) This was a borrow from a family member.
Title: Someone Has to Set a Bad Example: an Anne Taintor Collection by Anne Taintor
Details: Copyright 2012, Little, Brown and Company
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "Where's the fun in being well behaved?
This collection of more than 150 of Anne Taintor's best and funniest images combines whip-smart attitude and vintage illustration to tell the truth about dating, marriage, motherhood, friendship, money, and more.
You can't be good all the time."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I love Anne Taintor's stuff and I was pretty sure I'd like this collection. It'd be a welcome change from the last "hilariously inappropriate captions over aggressively wholesome vintage photos" collection I'd read, Girl Talk: Telling It Like It Is.
How I Liked It: Having seen Taintor's work before (and owning some of these on pieces of merchandise), I knew I'd enjoy it and she strikes a nice balance: a cleaner version of Bluntcard but only slightly but still with a genuine sense of inappropriateness, unlike GirlTalk.
The illustrations are glossy and almost card-thick; given that this is a "gift book", that should be expected. The humor may be a bit more subtle and slightly cleaner than BluntCard's, but it strikes the same sensibility and has the same flare for juxtapositioning just the right caption with just the right illustration (tiny facial tics and little background details make a bigger difference than you'd think; fans of MST3k can attest to this).
While some of the humor may offend some prudish sensibilities (at a casual dinner party, a wife bends fetchingly to serve a man from a tray of hors d'oeuvres that are probably shrimp puffs with the caption "As promised, she served him his balls on a tray"), the punchline is that the humor is supposed to offend such sensibilities, so you're better off getting this than wasting money with what is arguably Hallmark's version.
Notable: The book actually features several (okay three out of the whole book) vintage photos of Black women. Not illustrations, but photos. Pretty cool.
Title: Someone Has to Set a Bad Example: an Anne Taintor Collection by Anne Taintor
Details: Copyright 2012, Little, Brown and Company
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "Where's the fun in being well behaved?
This collection of more than 150 of Anne Taintor's best and funniest images combines whip-smart attitude and vintage illustration to tell the truth about dating, marriage, motherhood, friendship, money, and more.
You can't be good all the time."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I love Anne Taintor's stuff and I was pretty sure I'd like this collection. It'd be a welcome change from the last "hilariously inappropriate captions over aggressively wholesome vintage photos" collection I'd read, Girl Talk: Telling It Like It Is.
How I Liked It: Having seen Taintor's work before (and owning some of these on pieces of merchandise), I knew I'd enjoy it and she strikes a nice balance: a cleaner version of Bluntcard but only slightly but still with a genuine sense of inappropriateness, unlike GirlTalk.
The illustrations are glossy and almost card-thick; given that this is a "gift book", that should be expected. The humor may be a bit more subtle and slightly cleaner than BluntCard's, but it strikes the same sensibility and has the same flare for juxtapositioning just the right caption with just the right illustration (tiny facial tics and little background details make a bigger difference than you'd think; fans of MST3k can attest to this).
While some of the humor may offend some prudish sensibilities (at a casual dinner party, a wife bends fetchingly to serve a man from a tray of hors d'oeuvres that are probably shrimp puffs with the caption "As promised, she served him his balls on a tray"), the punchline is that the humor is supposed to offend such sensibilities, so you're better off getting this than wasting money with what is arguably Hallmark's version.
Notable: The book actually features several (okay three out of the whole book) vintage photos of Black women. Not illustrations, but photos. Pretty cool.