Books to take to the beach

The summer months bring with them the promise of uninterrupted reading, preferably at the beach, ideally under an umbrella in a lounge chair with a steel sea rolling into the sun-dappled horizon. No, this isn’t a Corona beer commercial; it’s the beginning of a column that makes two book recommendations for whatever version of this beach-bumming postcard you might get to enjoy this summer. 

First up, published just in time for a summer sojourn, is Peter Martin’s “Space Age Design: Icons of the Movement.” While it’s primarily a retrospective, the book’s timing is eerie, because space-age sci-fi furniture is back in a big way. Space-age-y modernism, which the BBC has called this year’s “biggest interiors aesthetic,” is popping again all over pop culture, including the new Marvel Universe installment of the “Fantastic Four” (check out the retro futuristic interiors and car on the movie’s trailer). 

“Retro futuristic” is oxymoronic, yes, but so is “midcentury modern.” It’s also accurate because space-age design takes us back to the future, back to when the whole idea of the future was a good, hopeful thing. And this is what I enjoyed most about Martin’s book. Rather than inviting me to wonder just when AI will revolt and take over our thoughts and lives, “Space Age Design” invites us for a stroll through a paginated museum of some of furniture’s more influential modernist companies, designers and individual pieces. 

Among many of the “hits” Martin’s coffee-table book features are the Tulip Chair by Eero Saarinen for Knoll, Arne Jacobsen’s Egg Chair for Fritz Hansen, and several seating pieces designed by Pierre Paulin for several manufacturers, including his Orange Slice Chair, Big Mushroom Chair and Groovy Chair. The modular seating systems from Ligne Roset and B&B Italia are as stunning as they are sprawling. George Nelson’s Marshmallow Sofa, the Astro Chair by Marco Zanuso and the Space Age bedroom furniture by Joe Colombo also feature in the book, and we see many of these influential pieces in the original advertising that introduced them to the market in the 1960s and 1970s. 

One small step for man

You will likely recognize most of the furniture, but you won’t always know why. For example, it takes a moment to connect Olivier Mourgue’s Djinn Easy Chair from 1965 for Airborne with the scene from “2001: A Space Odyssey” in which it sets the bright space-age mood. Not surprisingly, the roster of great designers featured is mostly Scandinavian, but the star of Martin’s show is Paulin. As relevant today as he was in 1960 when he made a name for himself designing for Artifort, Paulin is seeing something of a revival. I said the book is eerily salient and, as if to prove me right, Paulin, Paulin, Paulin is reissuing many of its namesake designer’s pieces. His Dune Ensemble modular seating, “with its echoes of a planetary surface,” has become a favorite among celebs in the music industry and among professional athletes. Dune is massive, and it makes an appearance in Martin’s book. 

Martin cites the “gravitational pull of nostalgia” to explain the huge increase in interest in space-age design and memorabilia, because the era “still carries the hopes and its endeavors and the scars of its traumas,” Martin writes. “It is the reason why the design icons of the Space Age continue to hold such mesmeric juju. They are inherently sculptural and beautiful, but they are emissaries from a shinier and more optimistic world.”

Where can I get some of this mesmeric juju? 

Illustrating Martin’s point, the BBC, in a wonderful roundup of all things space age, noted how many galleries and furniture fairs are riding the retro space wave right now. The Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, for example, is running Science Fiction Design: From Space Age to Metaverse. The exhibition highlights furnishings from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Men in Black” and “Blade Runner 2049.” Milan Design Week and Brussels’ Brafa Art Fair each featured space-age styling, as well. I saw a new space-age residential building in Queens, New York, highlighted on the Mets-Nats game just last night. 

Furniture noir

For the second book, “Harlem Shuffle” by Colson Whitehead, we turn to fiction. A crime caper set during the actual space age, this narrative will seem both profoundly nostalgic and oddly contemporary, just like all of the furniture pieces featured in Martin’s homage. The central character, Ray Carney, owns a furniture store in Harlem, endearing him to me from the very first page.

Now, I love crime fiction, including and especially noir, and “Harlem Shuffle” is definitely comfortable in the genre. But its author, a two-time Pulitzer-winner, bends the genre to his narrative purposes, which include holding up a space-age mirror to all we have wrought in our own age. As we re-live some of the more violent aspects of the 1960s, this time refracted in the fun-house mirror of social media, we are confronted with the painful fact that we have not achieved what perhaps we thought we might when JFK led us to the moon.

The portrait, of both Carney and his Harlem milieu, is affectionate, but never sentimental. In a scene early in the book, a scene I love for its familiarity with respect to our beloved furniture industry, Carney is opening up his emporium on 125^th Street, a store he took over from a bankrupt predecessor. The Georgia native uses the previous tenants’ “busted schemes and failed dreams as a kind of fertilizer that helped his own ambitions prosper,” Whitehead writes. In the scene, Carney is walking the showroom a half-hour before opening, straightening up and shifting furniture during what he calls his favorite 30 minutes of the day. 

“It was all his, his unlikely kingdom, scrabbled together by his wits and industry,” the unnamed narrator tell us. “His name out front on the sign so everyone knew, even if the burned-out bulbs made it look so lonesome at night.”

On the store floor are Heywood-Wakefield, which would have been brand, spanking new at that time, and what I believe are fictitious furniture lines, Argent and Collins-Hathaway. The narrator tells us he was an “authorized dealer” for all three. Showing a young couple a newly introduced Collins-Hathaway sofa, and he does correctly refer to it as a sofa and not a couch, Carney beams, “If that sofa you’re resting on is familiar, Mrs. Williams, that’s because it was on “The Donna Reed Show” last month.” 

The Melody sofa is, Carney boasts, “a space-age silhouette, scientifically tested for comfort.”

Mrs. Williams’ husband kept a safe distance from the furniture, “as if proximity plucked money out of his pockets.” It seems even fictional consumers are reluctant to devote disposable income to home furnishings.

If this scene rings true, you’ll likely love the book as I did, because the book offers a gritty authenticity populated with painfully human characters. And the dialogue crackles. Carney’s handyman at the store, Pepper, asks his boss, “What made you want to sell couches?” Carney replies, “I’m an entrepreneur.” “‘Entrepreneur?’ Pepper said the last part like manure. ‘That’s just a hustler who pays taxes.’”

What did the Williamses do? They put down a deposit on an Argent sectional with an Airfoam core and tapered legs in a saddle finish! With fabric protection! Ah, the art of the deal.

Happy summertime reading to all. Hope to see you where the ocean meets the sky. 

• Peter Martin, “Space Age Design: Icons of the Movement” (Die Gestalten Verlag GmbH und Co. KG, 2025) 
• Colson Whitehead, “Harlem Shuffle” (Anchor Books, 2021)