JF Ptak Science Books: The Incidental Absurdity of Near-Nothingness

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The History of Ideas Blog by John Ptak is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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The Incidental Absurdity of Near-Nothingness

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Part of the Unintentional/Incidental Absurdist series

Sometimes there's nothing better in finding the absurdity in quiet mundane than actually finding it, rather than creating it. This is the case with the following images, all of which have a certain flat, blatant, absurd quality to them--for their conversation (or lack of it), poses, stares, direction of vision, and so on. All of them come from "Maintaining Good Relationships" a chapter in the provocatively-named Tested Selling Methods (1939). None of the following conversations say very much, and on the face of them (presented without their captions) most are about nothing, or seem to be.

Women of course are approached differently from the men, almost like children, though mostly salesmen were warned to place women in the position of making decisions for the household.

Seems like good postcard material to me.