General Motors Corporation consumer information books from 1955. "A Power Primer" and " Power Goes To Work".

Remember when American manufacturing ruled the world? When steel, home building, manufacturing and the automobile industry were all profitable? When post-world war II times were ruled by the consumer and product manufacturers cared about that fact? The days before social media, cad-cam and computer created design? In the mid-1950's hundreds of artists, writers and creative staff were employed by all of these companies to produce new products, improve old ones, create and maintain a "style", and inform the consumers.

These two books were produced in 1955 by General Motors and can be found described on a very interesting website called The GM Heritage Center. It is basically an online archive of every piece of paper ever created by GM to help sell automobiles, trucks, locomotives, jet engines, agricultural products and power plants. Most are available for a free download which is cool. You can purchase these two books here

The first is "A Power Primer".

A Power Primer - An Introduction to the Internal Combustion Engine 

"Explanation of internal combustion engines. The purpose is to try to explain in an easy-to-understand manner the workings of these engines, using images whenever possible".

 

The second one is called "Power Goes To Work".  

Power Goes to Work: An Introduction to the Transmission of Power 

"Explanation of transmissions that work with internal combustion engines, was made to go along with "A Power Primer." The purpose is to try to explain in an easy-to-understand way the workings of these transmissions, using images whenever possible to help explain more complex ideas".

 These books are full of cool atomic age industrial graphics and mechanical drawings. The covers give me a real Russian avant-garde feel. See if you agree...click below.

The Russian avant-garde was a large, influential wave of modern art that flourished in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, approximately 1890 to 1930—although some have placed its beginning as early as 1850 and its end as late as 1960. The term covers many separate, but inextricably related, art movements that flourished at the time; namely Suprematism, Constructivism, Russian Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, Zaum and Neo-primitivism. Given that many avant-garde artists involved were born or grew up in what is present day Belarus and Ukraine (including Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandra Ekster, Vladimir Tatlin, Wassily Kandinsky, David Burliuk, Alexander Archipenko), some sources also talk about Ukrainian avant-garde.

The Russian avant-garde reached its creative and popular height in the period between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and 1932, at which point the ideas of the avant-garde clashed with the newly emerged state-sponsored direction of Socialist Realism.

(courtesy wiki)