Speaking of Thomas Edison (see Bud Parr’s review of the Lydia Millet collection published today in Circulating), Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket Copy asks if this is the best book title of the year:
That crazy Edison — not only did he imagine a concrete piano but also thought poured concrete houses could be the answer to the wooden firetraps that housed the poor at the turn of the last century. The concrete piano would have simply been one musical accessory — like the concrete gramophone he also imagined — in his all-concrete houses. And 10 of the 11 concrete homes built in the early 1900s — which, while priced below the market rate in 1917, went unsold long enough for the project to be abandoned — are still being lived in on Ingersoll Terrace in Union, N.J. . . . presumably with conventional furniture.
