Sunday, August 14, 2005

Bookmobile on Ebay! Jalopy Decimal System!


Rather than Ferraris and Porsches, I would fill my dream garage with ice cream trucks, carnival rides, Helms bakery trucks, funeral flower cars, Mercedes Benz ambulances conversions by Binz, Unimogs, doodlebugs, flathead four powered log splitters, Cadillac El Caminos, passenger buses from India, Airstreams, Model T fruit trucks, farm equipment, hit and miss engines, Spartans, aluminum bodied mail trucks, dragsters, utility trucks with cherry picker baskets, Aeroflots, diamond plate F-350s with welders on the back, tear drop trailers, well diggers and, most favorably, bookmobiles. I would collect houses and skyscrapers but that would take up too much space.

The bookmobile is really quite practical. Think of it as the mobile solution to adding a room to your house. Rather than build a stucco disaster, keep adding vehicles like a mobile Winchester Mystery House. This bookmobile is the finest example that I have seen in years of looking. The skylights, the acoustic tile ceiling, the multiple work surfaces, the slanted shelves for spirited performance driving and that darling banquet in the back for taking in the daily newspaper.
Naturally, I would make a few upgrades to create a more homey environment for long rainy days re-ordering the Dewey Decimal system. A taxidermied two headed calf, a 1/4 scale model of a1918 Curtis OX-5 engine, a small aquarium of piranaha, a display dedicated to the evolution of the slide rule, some pencils, a bound run of Harper's Bazaar, a Franklin stove, a kettle, an oil painting depicting the 1860 steamboat race between the Natchez IV and the Robert E. Lee, a wax model of the head of Martin Luther King Jr., a representative collection of early netsuke, a Winchester '73, a magic lantern to show Victorian glass slides, a live scorpian, a microscope and a small humidor. Just a few things to make it comfortable. Aesthetically, the exterior needs nothing but the interior would benefit from a few William Morris rugs and gas lighting fixtures.

Also, astute viewers will note a new logo for Hooptyrides. Luckily, Coop has been digging into his collection of old photographs and has been designing new Hooptyrides logos. Lucky, indeed!