The New York World's Fair, 1939/1940: in 155 Photographs by Richard Wurts and Others

by Stanley Appelbaum (Editor), Richard Wurts (Editor)

Photographic tour of best-loved world's fair: the 700-foot-tall Trylon; the 200-foot-wide Perisphere; GM's Futurama ride; 3-D movies; Elektro the 7-foot-tall robot; artwork by Salvador Dali, Rockwell Kent, Alexander Calder, and much more. 155 photographs. Map. Introduction. Captions. Index.

152 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1977

Reviews

[Lars Williams]

155 b&w photos of the extraordinary buildings and exhibits of the 1939 New York World's Fair. Lovely techno-utopian architecture and design. The world of tomorrow....

The photos are reasonably well reproduced (I read the Dover Thrift edition, which is a medium-format paperback). I would have liked a bit more in the way of exposition, but I guess there are other books for that.

[Ron Me]

My #1 target when I build my time machine! The pictures (though of course in B&W) are enough to give a feel for what it was like to be there.

[Vlad Golovach]

Although the NYPL digital library contains lots of photos from the Fair, they lack proper description and context. This book provides such a context and serves as a good touring guide to the past. Art Deco! Murals! Strongly allegoric statues of virtues of modernity, mostly with boobs exposed! World fairs and their history is a wonderful aspect of the past and this book is showing it all.