Book Review: Future Perfect: Vintage Futuristic Graphics

Gee, wasn't tomorrow swell!

I love this paperback. Dozens of color pictures (mainly sourced from adverts) of the future created when optimism was in the air and one was led to believe that science would conquer most frontiers and life was going to be one long continuous weekend. Editor Jim Heimann has wisely restricted his choice of images from the mid-thirties to the start of the fifties, so they picture a very streamlined future. Amongst all the pictures are twenty-three super covers from the science and mechanics type monthly magazines (some enterprising publisher should do a coffee-table book of these with their striking cover paintings) several pages of comic-book type illustrations and thirteen intriguing ads, designed in 1945, from the Bohn aluminium company showing some wonderful streamlined vehicles.

Future transportation has the biggest showing but there are future homes, offices, suburbs, schools, space and everyday living. Bruce McCall sums up the feel of the pictures in an interesting introduction called `Futures that never arrived'. Other than his intro there is no other text so if you want to read about past predictions of the American future have a look at `Yesterday's Tomorrows' by Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan, it is one of the best books I have read on the subject and it includes plenty of excellent pictures. Worth a look also is `Out of Time' by Norman Brosterman, it covers the same subject but I found it historically too broad in scope, some of the pictures date back to the eighteen hundreds.

With `Future Perfect' my brighter tomorrow has arrived today.

Future Perfect: Vintage Futuristic Graphics is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

Typical spread.

If only it passed down your Main Street every morning.

I wish Taschen would do an expaned coffee-table version of Future Perfect.

Typical spread.

One of the six Bohn spreads in the book.

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