Word: chandlers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...notable that letterpresses, weighing up to 2,500 lbs. and made by companies with Old World names like Vandercook, Heidelberg and Chandler & Price, haven't been manufactured for decades. Not surprisingly, printers covet them. That's why a machine in good condition can fetch a high price. A Vandercook might go for as much as $6,000; four years ago, you could have bought one for less than $1,000. "If one machine breaks down, I want to have another one to back it up," says Webster...
...drinking and smoking at the bar with iron determination. Empty glasses lie on their sides on the beer mats and are swiftly retrieved and refilled by the only two women in the room, one middle-aged with cold eyes, the other a pretty blonde in her early 20s. Raymond Chandler might have described her as "stacked...
...according to Words@Random from Random House: "The tar baby is a form of a character widespread in African folklore. In various folktales, gum, wax or other sticky material is used to trap a person." The term itself was popularized by the 19th-century Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris, in which the character Br'er Fox makes a doll out of tar to ensnare his nemesis Br'er Rabbit. The Oxford American Dictionary defines tar baby much like Romney used it, "a difficult problem, that is only aggravated by attempts to solve it." But the term also...
...Remember that even Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, though they were published by the most reputable house (Knopf) and wrote popular books that became hit movies, weren't considered the equals of "serious" novelists. They wrote genre fiction. The New Yorker critic (and novelist) Edmund Wilson could find "the boys in the back room" lacking. Then came another irony. Later generations of critics threw off their pretensions and mined the gritty glories of pulp fiction; they cogently argued that Hammett and Chandler, and Thompson and David Goodis and others, were worth cherishing (and that writers like Wilson, who's forgotten...
...Hammett, Chandler and James M. Cain all wrote novels that were turned into A pictures (respectively, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep and Double Indemnity) that still play well today. Spillane, who outsold them all, and I mean all together, should have got some sharp films made from his work, through his power or the law of averages. But the very elements that made him a hot property on the paperback market - the sex and violence - made him too hot for '50s Hollywood. If the studio bosses didn't exactly blacklist Spillane, they didn't rush to film his books...