Barbara and the Iceman

Here's a novelty postcard I picked up in a small town in the Four Corners region of Colorado. It's from the Baxtone company of Amarillo, part of its Laff-O-Gram series of comical postcards. Like this example several of these were slightly risqué, but what appeals to me about this one is how Film Noir it feels.

 Barbara's relatively realistic, naturalistic depiction looks right out of a low-end romance comic, or a newspaper soap opera strip. Consider the raised hand, as though about to cover her mouth before she can tell hubby another lie, her sidelong glance, her back to her husband and the accusatory ice block:

 She looks like she's wondering how she can convince the amorous ice peddler to knock her old man off. And the poor cuckold of a husband seems to have been drawn by another hand entirely, a grotesque, cartoonish head awkwardly appended to a relatively realistic body:

I'd love to know who drew this.

Oh Boy! Vintage Sleaze!

I picked this up on eBay a few years ago. It may or may not be the work of the same photographer who shot a whole box's worth of very similar stereo brothel views in France sometime around the 1930s. That box is somewhere in storage in the basement beneath my former office and I'm in the process of looking for it. In the meantime, here's a lovely lounging inhabitant of a long-gone maison close:

(Click to enlarge, seriously. And if you have some sort of stereo viewer, use it!)

Globes!

Ever wonder what happens to old globes when they get outdated?

They end up at Rothschild's Antiques in St. Louis.