Bric-a-Brac: S is for…

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School book clubs

The school book club was a powerful way of teasing money out of tiny hands sent dizzy by a pamphlet featuring a...

198

6

Scrolling LED Displays in Newsagents’ Windows

In the sixties they were a chilling vision of things to come, dispassionately pulsing out messages of doom whilst Michael Caine struggled...

365

3

Shatterproof Typeface, The

OK, so technically speaking it’s called Glass Houses, but the eyecatching, diagonally refracted, jittery typeface (never ‘font’ before 1985) in question was...

241

3

Simulcasts

A giant white ‘SB’ in a black circle in Radio Times was the thing to look for: it meant it was time...

270

4

Slimtel InPhone

Those two words alone, surely, mark the historical spot where the trusty, utilitarian telephone got its first stirrings of fashionability and gadgetdom...

249

2

SMP

In the ’80s, competition was good and proper, in ever sphere of endeavour. Even, it seems, in education. Early in the decade,...

438

15

Soda Stream

’Wow! You’ve got a Soda Stream?!’ Surely there was nothing quite like the do-it-yourself fizzy drink-maker (or ‘dispenser’ as they called it)...

219

Space exploration being taken seriously

The manned exploration of space is the zenith of human technological endeavour, a stirring quest for knowledge and achievement that has the...

254

9

Spidery Octopus Things That Rolled Down Windows, Those

If these worryingly over-adhesive arachnidy cephalopods were affixed to the upper portion of a smooth glass surface, they would gradually roll down...

222

Stage school choruses on adverts

Captain Birdseye’s ‘crew’ was the epitome of this advertising genre: the all-singing, all-dancing chorus of stage school children giving it full-on eyes-and-teeth...

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