Studies in Crap & Lover’s Lane All Meat Weiners team up to bring you babies and hot dogs!
Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.
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20 of My Favorite Baby Photos
Author: Constance Bannister, “World Famous Baby Photographer,” and Lover’s Lane All Meat Weiners
Date: 1953
Discovered at: Antique mall
The Cover Promises: Babies! Weiners! The two great tastes that, uh, not so much!
Representative Quotes:
“The photographs in this booklet are among Miss Bannister’s favorites. We hope they will give you a chuckle and help brighten your days.” (page 1)
“Sausage stretches the food budget.” (page 2)
“Sausage is a highly nutritious food.” (page 3)
Steak and eggs. Tax and spend. “Yankees” and “suck.” The history of twentieth-century marketing is the history of pairing words up with such precision that their corresponding ideas lock into something grander than either alone — preferably something that moves your product. Think chocolate and peanut-butter, and you think Reese’s.
It’s understandable, then, that the good folks at the Lover’s Lane All Meat Weiners would want in on this action. But what to pair their weiners with? Popcorn had claimed “movies,” and apple-pie had a monopoly on mom, so they had little choice but the one remaining ideal beloved by the vast majority of Americans: babies.
Yes, babies and weiners. One’s made of lips and assholes, and the other is what you get when a casing machine and some by-products love each other very much! One plumps fleshily up against a delicate membrane, and the other might have cheese baked right inside!
Today, just tagging a blog post with “babies and weiners” is enough to get us investigated. In innocent 1953, though, this inspiration might have had some potential. Lovers Lane contracted Constance Bannister, a photographer with several best-selling baby books to her name. Together they whipped up 20 of My Favorite Baby Photos, a curious freebie pamphlet offering adorable babies in unguarded moments, wacky, adult-oriented captions, and — well, it’s best you see for yourself.
