Who Would Buy This? The Archie McPhee Story - Hardcover

Mark Pahlow; David Wahl

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0978664973 ISBN 13: 9780978664978

Publisher: The Accoutrements Publishing Company, 2008

Synopsis

From the hilarious to the bizarre, Archie McPhee has been supplying the world with insane toys and novelties for over 25 years. This book traces the history of Archie McPhee through a look at its best, and worst, products. From My Pretty Nose Hair to the Avenging Unicorn, each product is presented with beautiful color photographs. Commentary about the products is also included, along with stories involving the Secret Service, the Department of Defense and enraged librarians! Guaranteed to make you scratch your head and say, Who would buy that?

About this title

About the Author:

Mark Pahlow is the owner of Archie McPhee. He has been in the novelty industry for 30 years.

Review:

The book, which tells the stories behind some of his signature products, opens with an eight-page introduction on Pahlow's own past, from his post-high-school hitchhiking trip across Europe and Africa to his return to the U.S. as a census enumerator to his stint in Los Angeles bookstore, where he sold Bob Dylan the complete works of Albert Camus. At heart, Pahlow who named his store after a great uncle has always been a peddler. "I came to realize shopping existed to help make people less depressed," he writes, "... a symbiotic relationship where buyer and seller both danced and each came away the better for it." In the early days, he sought out cool, kitschy and offbeat souvenirs: official morgue toe tags, World War II propaganda posters and genuine KGB liquor flasks. As the supply of treasures he could find dwindled, Pahlow shifted his focus to items he and his creative staffers could conceive, design and have manufactured in Asia. Sometimes a man's failures are as telling as his successes, and Pahlow details a few of his under the label, "What were we thinking?" The buying public somehow never warmed to his glow-in-the-dark spaghetti and meatballs. Or to plastic noses with long, braided nose hair. The question posed in the book's title is apt: No one needs this volume, any more than they've needed any of the items described inside it in. But the human appetite for fun, amusement or simple diversion shouldn't be underestimated. --Jack Broom, The Seattle Times

About this edition

• Publisher: The Accoutrements Publishing Company
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0978664973
• ISBN 13: 9780978664978
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 184
• Editor: Gibson Holub