Wonderfully designed, and a delightful read from front to
back, this manual more than favorably compares to the other
Black and Decker manuals, such as Operating Your Handy
Chopper HC2000 which suffers from a morbid seriousness
one only finds in late 80's B&D manuals. Toast-R-Oven
Broiler opens with the hilarious "Important Safeguards"
section, which seems to be the new standard opening for
manuals. You have to love the Marcel Duchamp reference of
instruction #1, "Please read all instructions." It goes on
to give directions for toasting, top browning and baking,
with a wonderful elegance that seems more from the pages of The New Yorker than your average B&D manual.
Wonderful illustrations punctuate the instructions and show
everything from how to remove the rack to the complex
functions of the broiler pan. The manual ends on an up note
by skipping the usual depressing "Troubleshooting Chart,"
and instead stressing the uses of the oven with cooking
guides for a myriad of delightful dishes--certainly a jaunty
touch. This one is a must!
Well, you can't expect a manual co-written by someone named James R. Bland to be a laugh riot, and this book certainly follows that rule. This one's a real snoozer--the illustrations are barely adequate, the diagrams are laughable and there's little wit or humor in these endless mathematical proofs. Boring, boring, boring! I recommend pictures of busty lady wrestlers demonstrating how to use the slide, maybe a chapter about how to kill various insects with the slide rule, or even a couple of geeky math jokes would make this thing worth reading, but as it stands it's dry as a bone.
Usually the book is better than the movie, but that is not always so. In this case, there are some major discrepancies between this 16-page coloring book and the film it appears to be based on, Rocky III (never mind the title). First of all, the book manages to compress the entire plot from Rocky and Rocky II into two paragraphs, neglecting all of the main characters save Rocky himself. From there, it completely skips the beginning of Rocky III and starts at the statue dedication scene. The discrepancies between the book and the film are glaring here--one of the many poor illustrations shows Rocky and Clubber Lang shaking hands, which never actually happened in the film. After this confrontation, Rocky and Clubber have their first fight, and in this version, Rocky wins! No Mickey funeral scene, no faltering self-confidence, no "Eye of the Tiger," no getting back to basics, no final conflict between good and evil, just one fight that's over in two pages! It's terribly distressing to see truly great works of art butchered in this manner. Even the cover features Clubber Lang (played in the movie by the great character actor of the 80's, Mr. T) instead of Rocky himself. Are they telling us that Clubber Lang is the hero here? In all fairness, I have to say that my copy didn't include the 45 rpm record which is supposed to accompany the book, so I could be missing out on some subtle aural plot clues, but overall I'd have to say that in this case, the movie puts the book to shame.
This novel bills itself as a "type reference book" but it brings to mind Kenneth Goldsmith's No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96, or perhaps the novel which was written only with the letter "e." The main theme is a simple litany of the alphabet, over and over. The first line of every paragraph screams "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ," followed by the quieter, almost echo-like "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz." This book is almost brilliant in the tonal qualities of using different fonts and sizes to express different emotions as the book progresses. From the disorienting Part One: Style Category, a cacophony of alphabets in literally hundreds of typefaces, the book progresses into the more traditional Part Two: Old Style where Gates truly finds his voice, using theme and variation with decreasing sizes of letters as well as alternating plain with italic. Each new section boldly announces the theme, then slowly fades into 6-point type. I won't spoil the almost Melvillesque ending, Proofreaders' Marks, but suffice it to say you will be on the edge of your seat through all of it.
