Books by Jim Heimann
Dark City: The Real Los Angeles Noir
by Jim Heimann
In the years following World War I, Los Angeles was a city awakening to its darker side, transforming itself from a backwater town to a gleaming metropolis and city of the future. But along the way a tarnished patina began to coat its ever-more glamorous façade. As thousands flocked to the city with their dreams and desires, so too came get-rich-quick schemes, phony religions, organized crime, and corruption.
A visual history like no other, Dark City brings together images from archives, museums, newspaper photo morgues, private collections, and the author’s extensive image library to reveal the true grit, grime, and sheer horror stories of Los Angeles from the 1920s to 1950s. In large format, we roam through the back alleys, gin joints, tattoo parlors, gambling dens, nightclubs, and the most brutal crime scenes, to uncover a city crawling with murder and mayhem.
From Sunset Boulevard to a jazz-saturated Central Avenue, tabloid headlines chronicle the most famous celebrities and infamous crimes in a hopped-up city that provided inspiration for journalists, pulp fiction scribes, and filmland script writers in their creation of the noir genre. With rare vintage magazine reprints from the crime tabloids of the time, this is a uniquely evocative visual history through which the crime, crooks, crazies, and mean streets of the City of Angels are transformed from myth to reality.
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Toys: 100 Years of All-American Toy Ads / 100 Jahre Amerikanische Spielzeugwerbung / 100 Ans de Pubs Americaines
Up until the 20th century, children’s play was not a subject that demanded much attention. While objects that entertained children have been present from ancient history, it was only with industrial mass production—and a developing urban middle class—that toys appeared more frequently. As playthings began to display a robust economic performance, an industry rose to provide this new market with the objects of their desire. European manufacturers dominated the toy market, with Germany, in particular, supplying the American market with the bulk of both singular and mass-produced products. World War I ended its dominance, and by the 1920s, bolstered by American ingenuity and an ever-growing consumer culture supported by the media empires of newspapers, radio, and television, American toys became ubiquitous in the consumer market.
Ranging from the simple to the complex, children were inundated with a commodity to be wished for and sold to by the millions. From frilly dolls to science sets, children were marketed to with gusto, first through magazines and comic books and later through television. Toys fell along familiar gender lines all while being developed with the unspoken subtext of stimulating developing minds and being vehicles of problem solving with educational value.
If the first part of the 20th century represented the rise of toys in America, the postwar period signaled a market unleashed by the baby boom. That one event gained traction for the toy industry and propelled it to its current state. Unforeseen was the next chapter in the industry—the advancement of the technical revolution—which would create another dimension of toy products that would captivate both children and adults as one century blended into the next.
In the world of toy production, the multimillion dollar industry took the advertising of its product seriously, and toy manufacturers inundated customers with their latest product via trade journals. In New York City, the hub of the toy industry for most of the 20th century, annual trade shows introduced a deluge of new playthings to the buying public. Frisbees, board games, baseball mitts, Hula-Hoops, air rifles, video games, dolls, and miniature trains were all served up to generations of children, cementing forever the memories of playtime.
Filled with a Santa’s sack full of surprises, Toys. 100 Years of All-American Toy Ads takes us down the aisles of America’s toy stores delivering the favorites and forgotten memories of toys that were hugged and hoarded, saved and disposed of, and now finally brought back in their pristine glory. Once again it’s Christmas, your birthday, and a reward for a job well-done.
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Surfing. 1778-today
by Jim Heimann
This volume is a comprehensive visual history of surfing, marking a major cultural event as much as a publication. Following three and a half years of meticulous research, it brings together hundreds of images to chart the evolution of surfing as a sport, a lifestyle, and a philosophy.
The book is arranged into five chronological chapters, tracing surfing culture from the first recorded European contact in 1778 by Captain James Cook to the global and multi-platform phenomenon of today. Utilizing institutions, collections, and photographic archives from around the world, and with accompanying essays by the world’s top surf journalists, it celebrates the sport on and off the water, as a community of 20 million practitioners and countless more devotees, and as a leading influence on fashion, film, art, and music.
An unrivaled tribute to the breadth, complexity, and richness of surfing, this book is a must-have for any serious player on the surfing scene and anybody who aspires to the surfing lifestyle. As one surfing scribe has declared, “There has never been a book like this, and there will never be another one again.”
Copies
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$30.00
Copies
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$80.00
Surfing: 1778-Today
by Jim Heimann
This tome is the most comprehensive visual history of surfing to date, marking a major cultural event as much as a publication. Following three and a half years of meticulous research, it brings together hundreds of images to chart the evolution of surfing as a sport, a lifestyle, and a philosophy.
The book is arranged into five chronological chapters, tracing surfing culture from the first recorded European contact in 1778 by Captain James Cook to the global and multi-platform phenomenon of today. Utilizing institutions, collections, and photographic archives from around the world, and with accompanying essays by the world’s top surf journalists, it celebrates the sport on and off the water, as a community of 20 million practitioners and countless more devotees, and as a leading influence on fashion, film, art, and music.
An unrivaled tribute to the breadth, complexity, and richness of surfing, this book is a must-have for any serious player on the surfing scene and anybody who aspires to the surfing lifestyle. As one surfing scribe has declared, “There has never been a book like this, and there will never be another one again.”
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20th-Century Fashion
by Jim Heimann, Alison A. Nieder
The 20th century saw fashion evolve from an exclusive Parisian salon business catering for the wealthy elite into a global industry employing millions, with new trends whisked into stores before the last model has even left the catwalk.
Along the way, the signature silhouettes of each era evolved beyond recognition. For women, House of Worth crinolines gave way to Vionnet’s bias-cut gowns, Dior’s New Look to Quant’s Chelsea Look, Halston’s white suit to Frankie B.’s low-rise jeans. In menswear, ready-made suits signaled the demise of bespoke tailoring, long before Hawaiian shirts or skinny jeans entered the game.
20th-Century Fashion offers a retrospective of the last hundred years of style via 400 fashion advertisements from the Jim Heimann Collection. The images trace not only the changing trends but also the evolution in their marketing and audience, as fashion was adopted into popular culture and the mass market, decade by decade. An in-depth introduction and illustrated timeline detail the style-makers and trendsetters, and how historic events, design houses, retailers, films, magazines, and celebrities shaped the way we dressed—then and now.
About the series
Bibliotheca Universalis — Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe!
Copies
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$30.00
Surfing: 1778-2015
by Jim Heimann
This platinum tome is the most comprehensive visual history of surfing to date, marking a major cultural event as much as a publication. Following three and a half years of meticulous research, it brings together more than 900 images to chart the evolution of surfing as a sport, a lifestyle, and a philosophy.
The book is arranged into five chronological chapters, tracing surfing culture from the first recorded European contact in 1778 by Captain James Cook to the global and multi-platform phenomenon of today. Utilizing institutions, collections, and photographic archives from around the world, and with accompanying essays by the world’s top surf journalists, it celebrates the sport on and off the water, as a community of 20 million practitioners and countless more devotees, and as a leading influence on fashion, film, art, and music.
An unrivaled tribute to the breadth, complexity, and richness of surfing, this book is a must-have for any serious player on the surfing scene and anybody who aspires to the surfing lifestyle. As one surfing scribe has declared, “There has never been a book like this, and there will never be another one again.”
Copies
No copies available.
All-American Ads of The 60s
With the consumerist euphoria of the fifties still going strong and the race to the moon at its height, the mood of advertising in the sixties was cheerful, optimistic, and at times, revolutionary. The decade's ads touted perceived progress-such as tang and instant omelets - "just add water"-while striving to reinforce good old American values.
Stars like Sean Connery, Woody Allen, Salvador Dalí, and Sammy Davis Jr. endorsed everything from bourbon to handmade suits in an attempt by Madison Avenue to urge Americans to open their wallets and participate in one giant consumer binge. Social change at the end of the era brought psychedelic swirls and liberated women and minorities to a newly conscious public. Keep an eye out for some of the more surprising and controversial ads-such as Tupperware billing its storage container as a "wifesaver."
From forgotten cars, to cigarettes to food and much more, this colorful collection of print ads explores the wide, wonderful world of 60s Americana.
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All-American Ads of the 40s
by Jim Heimann
At the beginning of the decade, America was at war. Patriotism was an integral part of everyday life, with the sentiment mirrored in advertising. As America emerged victorious out of the darkness of World War II in 1945, the economic boom of the era helped usher in the most dramatic rise in quality of life, excess, and consumerism. The war's end also brought unprecedented pride and prosperity to the American people, and nothing reflects the new wave of consumerism and progress more than the ads of the time. Spending power dramatically increased in the decade's second half, with plentiful jobs and higher wages. Because of the new GI Bill, affordable housing was made available to returning war veterans for the first time. People were ready to embrace the idea of the American Dream.
The postwar era represented a flood of products and services for every need and occasion, reaching every corner of society. Everything from entertainment to travel and automobiles, alcohol and tobacco, fashion and beauty, and food and beverage was in high demand and within reach. This period opened the floodgates of buying as advertisers sought to meet the needs of a population recovering from years of rationing. This engaging collection edited by Jim Heimann dives into the frenetic, lively, and brilliant era of American life and advertising in the 1940s.
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California Crazy American Pop Architecture
by Jim Heimann
At the dawn of the automobile age, Americans' predilection for wanderlust prompted a new wave of inventive entrepreneurs to cater to this new mode of transportation. Starting in the 1920s, attention-grabbing buildings began to appear that would draw in passing drivers for snacks, provisions, souvenirs, or a quick meal. The architectural establishment of the day dismissed these roadside buildings as "monstrosities".
Yet, they flourished, especially along America's Sunbelt, and in particular, in Southern California, as proprietors indulged their creative impulses in the form of giant, eccentric constructions - from owls, dolls, pigs, and ships, to coffee pots and fruit. Their symbolic intent was guileless, yet they were marginalized by history. But, over the past 40 years, California's architectural anomalies have regained their integrity, and are now being celebrated in this freshly revised compendium of buildings, California Crazy.
Brimming with the best examples of this architectural genre, California Crazy includes essays exploring the influences that fostered the nascent architectural movement, as well as identifying the unconventional landscapes and attitudes found on Los Angeles and Hollywood roadsides which allowed these buildings to flourish in profusion.
In addition, California Crazy features David Gebhard's definitive essay, which defined this vernacular movement almost forty years ago. The California Crazy concept is expanded to include domestic architecture, eccentric signage, and the automobile as a fanciful object.
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