Excess Culture

Synopsis
Far from today's subtly persuasive efforts, advertising once liked to point a coldly accusing finger at an easy target of our inadequacies. Stretching from the 19th century to the 1970s, the ads contained in this postcard book show the hard sell at its... (read more)

Publisher Comments
Proof that truth really is stranger than fiction! This wildly entertaining book features excerpts from wide array of public documents that hilariously illustrate some of the most important, scandalous, or bizarre news stories to make headlines in recent... (read more)

Powells.com Staff Pick
Have you ever wondered what white people are all about? From modern furniture to Oscar parties to self-deprecating humor, hardwood floors, irony, and knowing what's best for poor people, the white race is finally demystified thanks to Christian Lander's... (read more)

Publisher Comments
A visual feast of fifty of the most craptastic cars ever to hit the American highway. Crap Cars is a window into the vanity and silliness of almost any decade as expressed through that ultimate of status symbols: your car. Traveling from the ’... (read more)

Publisher Comments
The 3rd installment of the Portland Funbook is on sale now. It's 80 artists and 12 songs worth of coloring, activities, and music from Portland's best artists and musicians. The book is an oversized 11 x 17 with a 7" vinyl record with 12 one-minute songs.... (read more)

Powells.com Staff Pick
As tempting as it sounds to spend the afternoon with the two digital puppies wrestling under Lara Croft's wife-beater, nothing is really more entertaining than plain ol' throwing rocks at stuff. Or, better still, shooting said rocks out of a homemade... (read more)

Publisher Comments
Hideous hats, ridiculous wraps, embarrassing neckties, and more — they're all on display at The Museum of Kitschy Stitches, a photographic gallery of knitting and crocheting horrors. Want to see sci-fi inspired headgear from the 1940s? Gender... (read more)

Publisher Comments
Sexology, founded in 1933, was America's first sex magazine. Through its fifty-year run, Grandma and Grandpa got a rollicking taste of sexual exotica in articles such as... • Extra Breasts in Women • Sexual Vampirism • Pregnant Men... (read more)

Publisher Comments
All the news that's not fit to print! Browse through this fascinating compendium of the best of the Weekly World News and you'll never look at the world the same way again. Admit it. You've sneaked a peek at the supermarket checkout. Where else could... (read more)

Powells.com Staff Pick
A fascinating book for anyone interested in criminal investigation and forensics. Frances Glessner Lee founded the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1936. By the 1940s, she was building detailed doll houses that replicated unsolved crime scenes... (read more)

Publisher Comments
In the grand tradition of Krazy Kat & Ignatz Mouse and the Road Runner & Wile E. Coyote, the Spies (one dressed in black, the other in white) are an endless variation on a Cold War theme — forever one-upping the other, til death do they part. This... (read more)