Money, Changing
By Tod Hunter
Monday, August 4, 2008
Today I drove over to the Farmers Market on my lunch break. That's one of the perks of working on the Miracle Mile, there's a place nearby that not only has good fresh food but you can enjoy it on a shady patio surrounded by tourists, locals, and people unselfconsciously wearing
The Price is Right pricetags (CBS Television City is right next door) and commiserating with each other that
next time it'll be their name being told to "Come on down!!"
In the middle of all this corn-fed wholesomeness is a tiny island of sophistication: the Taschen store. Located directly under one of the Market's iconic clock towers, the smallish store offers a wide range of books from the Taschen catalogue, including books on films and filmmakers; large, unwieldy and expensive books on art and architecture; and, tucked off in one corner, some of the salacious sexy books that the company also puts out, including a six-volume history of men's magazines; an anthology from the under-the-counter '60s humor magazine From Sex to Sexty; The Big Book of Breasts and The Big Penis Book, two complementary books by Dian Hanson; and a collection of cartoons from glamour cartoonist Bill Ward, whose buxom blonde creations were a men's-magazine staple from the '50s to the '90s.
The Big Book of Breasts, The Big Penis Bookand The Wonderful World of Bill Ward are oversize monsters, each with more than 300 foot-square pages and a $50 price tag. I picked up the Bill Ward book to give it a once over — yep, the girls in the cartoons look the same as they ever did — and before I put it back on the shelf I turned it over to see if it was still $50.
The book was marked $29.99.
"Oh," I said to myself, "This discounted price is probably for this shopworn browsing copy I've been looking through. The shrink-wrapped copy behind it is probably the full ticket."
To prove it, I grabbed a shrink-wrapped copy, and flipped it over.
$29.99.
Not believing my good fortune, I grabbed for The Big Book of Breasts hoping that it, too, had been the victim of The Mad Price Slasher Of The Taschen Store. I picked it up, flipped it over, and saw that its price had gone up to $59.99, as had The Big Penis Book.
So that's where the $20 they took off the Bill Ward book went....
