This oversize souvenir album, by the collaborators of New York Observed, published to coincide with exhibits at New York City's Jack Gallery and six other NYC institutions, evokes in many photographs and few words the novelties unveiled at the 1939 World's Fair, whose landscape was dominated by the symbolic Trylon and Perisphere, bold structures representing "the global aspirations of democracy and of commercial and industrial enterprise" on the eve of World War II. Heroic as the original Trylon and Perisphere may have been, they spawned a mountain of kitsch--from bookends to salt and pepper shakers--itself a testimonial to American business initiative, and amply displayed here. Yet the coauthors also retrieve artifacts of singular elegance, such as lighting fixtures that uncoil with spare, muscular dignity, and monumental posters.
