Word: shellac
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Pritchett was sent off to learn the leather business. By 1921 he was an expatriate, earning a slender living selling photography supplies, ostrich feathers and shellac in Paris. It was the Paris of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, but Pritchett knew little of it. He recalls a winter evening in 1922 when he watched people walking up the Boulevard du Montparnasse carrying a large blue-covered volume. It was the first edition of Joyce's Ulysses, an author Pritchett had not heard...
...moved with his wife to a co-op on Manhattan's Upper East Side, he was a dedicated gardener at his New Jersey home, and he once tried growing grapes to produce his own wine. His report on Château Volcker grand cru: "It came out like shellac." He is from a middle-class family-his father was city manager of Teaneck, N.J.-and is known to be somewhat parsimonious. His cigars, complain his associates, do not carry a banker-like aroma. (One of his first acts, nonetheless, will probably be to remove the NO SMOKING signs Chairman...
...label. For half a century he has been sitting by the victrola, one ear cocked to the horn, checking out the sounds with the same expression on his earnest face, as if he expected the machine to throw him a bone. He has weathered considerable changes: shellac to plastic; hand cranks to separate components; 78 to 45 to 33; mono to stereo and, most recently, a skirmish with quad. There is a revolutionary change coming up, however, that bids fair to wag his tail and pin his floppy ears back...
...ladybug, celebrated in the nursery rhyme, eats aphids and other small insects?to the gardener's delight. Before the development of dyes made from coal-tar derivatives, a scale insect provided the world with red dye; other species of scale insects are still used in the manufacture of shellac. The flesh-eating larvae of the dermestid beetle are used by museums to strip clean the bones of animals so that their skeletons can be mounted for display. Ancient Egyptians venerated the scarab beetle as a symbol of immortality; among its other activities, the insect breaks up and carries away animal...
...Institute of Recorded Sound Ltd. has just announced it will issue exact copies of some of the choicest antiques under the His Masters Voice label; they will press directly from the original master records and will bow to modernity only by using vinyl instead of the oldfashioned, noisy-surfaced shellac. The idea has more than mere nostalgia to recommend it. Most LP transfers of 78 material change and degrade the original sound. But the new old 78s will have both unfiltered high frequencies and unrumbled lows. Hardly comparable to the sound of the LP era, they nevertheless restore a forgotten...