This is a lavishly illustrated collection of the aesthetic and business history of visual merchandising that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century with the expansion and increasing anonymity of retail trade. This interesting assemblage of art, architecture, and design historians explores the neglected world of promotional signage, product design, and sale spaces. While the eleven short essays (most on American topics) are often focussed narrowly on objects, often centering on aesthetic trends, they frequently put their topics in wider historical contexts.

Drawing on illustrated directories and trade cards, Jeffrey Cohen explores the transformation of mostly American city center commercial districts with distinct facades and signage, especially after 1880. Kathleen Chapman relates the emergence of abstract, highly simplified commercial art to the increasingly fast-paced life of urban Germans. Emily Bills follows Roland Marchand's techniques of reading print ads, here AT&T's efforts to acclimatize consumers to the modern practice of communicating over telephone wires and to a private monopoly providing this service, by associating the phone system with highways and with linking the nation in one uniting web of wire. Mona Hadler finds much meaning in the simple hood (or bonnet) ornament on General Motor's Pontiac as it morphed from a sleek head of an American Indian (for which the car is named) in the 1930s into an ultramodern jet (1955) with only a remnant of the Indian's head. This change suggests a shift from American identity with Native Americans (a curious phenomenon with deep historical roots) into a 1950s embrace of the composite modern primitive. Gayle Strege's take on the evolution of the store mannequin is perhaps more conventional as she shows how American department stores replaced dressmaker's dummies with human-like mannequins in the late nineteenth century to provide potential customers a way of imagining themselves in fashionable clothing. Mannequins reflected changing fashion in ideal body types (becoming taller and more slender after 1900). In a review that closely follows trends in women's fashions, she brings her chronicle of the mannequin up to the present. Perhaps less familiar to scholars of American studies is Sarah Cheang's account of merchandising Chinese decorative objects in Victorian London, where she imaginatively weaves the themes of exoticism, orientalism, and nostalgia for a world beyond the modern West to explain British fascination with carved Chinese furnishings, embroidery, and jewelry. The editor Louisa Iarocci offers us an architecture historian's perspective on the rise of the American store display window. She traces the rise of the showman window trimmer (like L. Frank Baum) who created the fantastic allure that pulled thousands into turn-of-the-twentieth-century department stores (while curiously neglecting the Christmas displays of this era).

The final theme of “place” features an essay on the designed spaces of automobile showrooms before 1920 by Robert Buerglener. An expert on early car marketing, he argues that showrooms were designed to overcome buyer mistrust of a still new and often unreliable technology by surrounding buyers in a luxurious and modern environment, carefully hiding service departments, for example. Dean Lampros's fascinating study of the residential funeral home in the twentieth century traces its emergence from the storefront undertaker's facility that provided caskets and burial preparation for families who conducted services at home to a suburban funeral home that combined sales rooms with chapel facilities for memorial services. The contradictions of this dual role are explored in fascinating detail that touches on issues of professionalism, consumerism, and shifting meanings of private and public life. Very different is Ethel Goodstein-Murphree's exploration of the American truck stop in the late twentieth century as a highly efficient commercial center and a “spatial order of the road” that offered truckers a substitute “home” (193). She traces its roots from the gas stations, roadhouses, and haphazard lodgings along American highways in the 1920s and 1930s to the modernized Las Vegas-like megacenters of the 1960s and 1970s. Concluding this collection is John Potvin's essay on the design of Armani's ventures into American luxury stores and department store boutiques from the 1980s, which were designed to reach aspiring consumers with clean and sparse displays and highly professional staff, all suggesting Armani's “unique and controlled runway presentations in Milan” (219).

This is quite a smorgasbord. The theme of visual merchandising, combining aesthetic with commercial history, is certainly a loose one. But most of the essays link up with one phase or another of the history of retail and the modern consumer. This book can't be a substitute for an understanding of that history, but it can enrich the reader's understanding of it.