AUTOPSIES: THE AFTERLIFE OF DEAD OBJECTS

The Autopsies Bibliography is a work in progress. It will gradually include annotations and links. If you have suggestions of books, articles, journals, films, artworks, websites, or blogs, please send us a note. We're eager to know about work being done by others related to our interests and to forge links between research projects that share common concerns.

I found this tiny piece of paper (it's about the size that you see on the website) among some important documents that my mother had saved from my father's desk when he died in 1982. My guess is that it dates from 1942 and was the list that he and my mother constituted, in his handwriting, for him to go out and buy for their first apartment together in California near where he was stationed in World War II before shipping out as a naval officer as a ship pharmacist. I love the fact that they needed a jigger (to measure booze for Manhattans?) and a biscuit pan. Are biscuit pans dead objects today? I wouldn't know what one looks like, any more than I'm sure what a "chore boy" or "purex" represented. What would a water bottle have been in 1942?

--Jann