The 42nd Parallel

by John Holbo on October 14, 2008

Expanding my unsystematic researches into early 20th Century German typography and book design, I recently stumbled across this gem (click for larger):

It’s the George Salter designed cover for a 1930 German edition of Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel.

It’s a perfect example of ‘vague sense of a foreign land‘ phenomenon. He’s got a cowboy in Georgia. A line of Dusenbergs to represent Tennessee, just north of the skyscrapers of New Orleans. A boxer guarding the Mexican border. And we’ve all heard those dreadful stories about trains through Utah menaced by baseball players employing the classic overhead swing. And I dunno what army is invading Chicago. Other examples of this sort of thing?

{ 37 comments }

1

notsneaky 10.14.08 at 3:18 pm

“And I dunno what army is invading Chicago”

Maybe that’s a reference to the Centralia massacre and he’s confusing Chicago with Washington.

2

notsneaky 10.14.08 at 3:18 pm

And Washington with Washington.

3

dru 10.14.08 at 3:56 pm

“And I dunno what army is invading Chicago”
looks sort of like dudes in conquistador garb to me.

4

stuart 10.14.08 at 4:26 pm

The thing that intrigues me is the line from Seattle to NO – what is it supposed to represent?

5

notsneaky 10.14.08 at 4:34 pm

The Autobahn obviously.

6

md 20/400 10.14.08 at 4:37 pm

Th 42nd parallel should be further north too. 42N runs through Provincetown, MA, then (roughly) along the PA/NY border, passes just north of Chicago, then hits the Pacific near the CA/OR border.

7

MarkUp 10.14.08 at 4:48 pm

Space camp [hidden under the ‘t’] to the space needle.

Pancakes must enter the discussion.
http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200310/pancake-kansas.cfm
http://tinyurl.com/3n6ln9

8

rea 10.14.08 at 5:02 pm

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/ is the go-to site for stuff like this–many examples in the archives . . .

9

lemuel pitkin 10.14.08 at 5:32 pm

Nothing to add but that is one truly awesome cover. Under socialism Holbo will be relieved of his teaching duties and spend all his socially necessary labor time dredging up more artifacts like this one.

(It’s too bad, tho, that no one reads Three Soldiers anymore.)

10

Hermenauta 10.14.08 at 5:34 pm

As a brazilian I should say that “a vague sense of foreign land” is all that Hollywood think is needed when depicting Brazil _ people usually use sombreros, speak spanish, we have pyramids hidden at Amazonian rainforest… it´s funny. :)

11

Michael Drake 10.14.08 at 5:38 pm

“And I dunno what army is invading Chicago”

I guess the Race Riot figured unusually large in Germany’s American History curricula back in the day.

12

David Moles 10.14.08 at 5:41 pm

Best cover EVAR.

13

Adam Roberts 10.14.08 at 6:08 pm

I like the way the whole country is pictured in the process of trying to leap over the bar of the high jump.

14

Farren 10.14.08 at 6:13 pm

rea:

“http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/ is the go-to site for stuff like this—many examples in the archives . . .”

Thank you sooo much

signed
The worlds junkiest map junky

15

Murray Jay Siskind 10.14.08 at 6:33 pm

“As a brazilian I should say that “a vague sense of foreign land” is all that Hollywood think is needed when depicting Brazil _ people usually use sombreros, speak spanish, we have pyramids hidden at Amazonian rainforest… it´s funny. :)”

As a Bostonian, I was going to say the exact same thing about Hollywood’s depictions of Boston. “Mystic River,” though shot in the city, is particularly terrible, though I’ve always liked Laurence Fishburn’s endorsement of Dunkin’ Donuts in the middle of the movie.

Either way, the baseball player on this cover reminds me quite a bit of Kevin Youkilis, “The Greek God of Walks.” Perhaps that’s why this little Youk is out in Utah: He walked all the way there.

http://www.carburetordungtoo.blogspot.com

16

notsneaky 10.14.08 at 6:34 pm

This one’s a bit out there and it’s intentionally funny (cia Chris Blattman)

http://chrisblattman.blogspot.com/2008/08/two-great-africa-maps.html

17

michael paleologus 10.14.08 at 8:49 pm

Strange maps is wondrous – look at their obesity map of the US – map 296 – looked strangely familiar to me and then I compared it with the polling map I’ve been looking at for the US elections (I tend to like the one at real clear politics) – a strong correlation unless I’m mistaken between obesity and propensity to be voting for McCain!

18

novakant 10.14.08 at 8:58 pm

As a Bostonian, I was going to say the exact same thing about Hollywood’s depictions of Boston. “Mystic River,” though shot in the city, is particularly terrible

I agree, Mystic River is just unbearable and Gone Baby Gone wasn’t much better. I wonder if it’s the source material, they’re both based on Lehane novels, or if the books are better and the directors/screenwriters simply messed up – has anybody read them?

19

Aaron Swartz 10.15.08 at 12:12 am

I’m also continually amused that the TV show Fringe feels the need to shoot their Harvard-campus scenes at University of Chicago. (Which means that for the exterior shots to match, they have to find obscure Gothic churches at MIT and pretend they’re Harvard buildings.) That said, it’s got some nice architectural intertitles.

20

lemuel pitkin 10.15.08 at 1:03 am

I’m also continually amused that the TV show Fringe feels the need to shoot their Harvard-campus scenes at University of Chicago.

Maybe a subtle homage to Flatliners?

21

winna 10.15.08 at 5:52 am

James Thurber wrote a wonderful short story about the French Wild West novels. Some of Gustave Aimard’s stories of le Far Ouest are on Gutenberg, but sadly none of them are as funny as this excerpt from Thurber’s story.

It occurred in a book in which, as I remember it, Billy the Kid, alias Billy the Boy, was the central figure. At any rate, two strangers had turned up in a small Western town and their actions had aroused the suspicions of a group of respectable citizens, who forthwith called on the sheriff to complain about the newcomers. The sheriff listened gravely for a while, got up and buckled on his gun belt, and said, ‘Alors, je vais demander ses cartes d’identité!’ There are few things, in any literature, that have ever given me a greater thrill than coming across that line.

It never fails to make me laugh.

22

notsneaky 10.15.08 at 5:58 am

If novels are game, then speaking of Wild West, there are the really great books of Karl May. Never went to the American West till after he wrote his best books, but that didn’t matter since he experienced everything he wrote himself personally. Or at least one of his personalities did.

23

john holbo 10.15.08 at 8:34 am

Yeah, Karl May. I can forgive him for not researching his subject better since he was in prison, wasn’t he?

24

notsneaky 10.15.08 at 8:40 am

The prison and the identification with the characters had a common cause. He first got noticed for the stories he wrote while in prison, where he wound up for being crazy. Then he got out, continued being crazy, and wrote “Winnetou” believing that he was actually writing of his personal experiences in the American West. Either way, great book.

25

Tony 10.15.08 at 10:37 am

Nabokov’s topographical sketch of Ulysses with ‘England’ about a mile off the Irish coast.

http://www.fathom.com/course/10701032/104_ulysses_lg.html

26

Ginger Yellow 10.15.08 at 12:49 pm

While not denying the weirdness of some aspects of the cover, I’m far from convinced it’s supposed to be associating particular images with particular places. Indeed, the only evidence that it is is the placement of the cameraman in California. Could it not just be things that were stereotypically associated with America, placed on the page so as to fit more or less around the text?

27

jacob 10.15.08 at 1:09 pm

There was a This American Life episode in August in which Chuck Klosterman read an excerpt of an essay he wrote for Esquire about the crazy ideas Germans have of Americans–particularly the cowboys.

Also, Winna’s Thurber quotation made me feel significantly less grumpy than I had been feeling.

28

novakant 10.15.08 at 1:59 pm

Speaking of Karl May and the imagined Wild West, it’s hard to top this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw6sKPk2_4g

Yeah, that’s the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, Winnetou is French (Nscho-tschi too) and Old Shatterhand used to be Tarzan.

29

HG 10.15.08 at 2:32 pm

sorry, but isn’t the cover precisely about Dos Passos book — in the very beginning, the long passage about all those things that the US also is, but that it ultimately is about “the speech of the people” — I think the cover manages to capture the pastiche, the snapshots, the breathlessness.

Sure, unions are missing, and industry isn’t there. But “vague sense of a foreign land”? Nice try, but sorry, no. Just an illustrator who actually looked inside a book.

30

jim 10.15.08 at 3:13 pm

Ginger Yellow @26 has it exactly right (to adopt an unfoggedism). What’s really nice about the cover is the use of the same icon for each of the four cities — New York, Chicago, New Orleans and Seattle.

31

Jacob T. Levy 10.15.08 at 7:18 pm

Winna, thanks for posting that Thurber bit– I’d never seen it before and can hardly stop laughing.

“Under socialism Holbo will be relieved of his teaching duties and spend all his socially necessary labor time dredging up more artifacts like this one.”

That’s socialism I can get behind.

32

Patrick Nielsen Hayden 10.16.08 at 6:54 pm

“Other examples of this sort of thing?”

Well, practically all of Tintin In America.

33

mofo 10.17.08 at 1:39 am

rea–
I really enjoyed the site you linked; thanks.

Funny that in the 30’s New Orleans was envisaged as a Gulf Coast big city; not Houston,which was still a two-horse town compared to NOLA’s then -bustling port & melting pot.

34

notsneaky 10.17.08 at 2:41 am

Re: 28

There was also the whole phenomenon of “Indianerfilme” and “Red Westerns”. Gojko Mitic (“the most famous Indian in Eastern Europe”)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gojko_Mitic)
(http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0593900/bio)(funny)
was huge in Eastern Europe (though until I looked this up I thought he was East German).
Here’s some goodies (Let’s all worship the mighty youtube. Never thought I’d see these again):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zlmj0GkCJKM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raMkYILQp7E&feature=related (there’s a naked male butt in this one)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsQcSKFffNI&feature=related

Can’t find what used to be my favorite as a kid though, “Tecumseh”.

Here’s some essay on the topic:
http://www.wazel.org/wildeast/babook.htm

On the whole topic “Indians and Eastern Europeans” there was also Alfred Szklarski’s “Sioux” trilogy along similar lines as above (though Szklarski did much more research) but that’s even more obscure.

35

Eric H 10.18.08 at 2:33 pm

Yes, from modern Germany: Wild West Pizza Potato!

36

Eric H 10.18.08 at 2:42 pm

(having an odograph moment here)

Oh, I almost forgot: the movie National Treasure: Book of Secrets. The people in the movie have clearly never been to the US.

37

Jeff Rubard 10.19.08 at 1:32 am

I just got in and let me say, boy, I love the real America: full of people with small cars and excellent reasons to be leftists, really somewhat unlike the “bluest” areas of the “blue” states (really, WTF people). So let me retrieve a pearl I dropped somewhere along the way. Brecht’s Mahagonny is set in a Northwestern city with opulent drinking facilities and a forward-minded ambience; but really, The Alabama Song and a city with the world’s biggest bar and a funny name could point in different directions as to the “real-life inspiration”, no?

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