WHAT WAS IT LIKE? When Your Grandparents Were Your Age

Toy catalogs from F. A. O. Schwartz rub borders with Depression apple sellers in a composite family album spanning ""your grandparents"" youth from pre-World War I days through the Thirties. Posed photos of Sunday-suited children, school and family groups, weddings, etc.--along with more candid ones of newsboys at work or bathers at play--mix with public shots of stores, streetcars, and celebrities and a scattering of newspaper headlines, appliance ads, menus, sheet music, etc. The commentary rum to price lists and remarks on how different in some ways, similar in others, your grandparents' fashions, traffic problems (just as bad, imply the authors) or eating places were from today's. The pages' dull brown uniformity might be evocative of the period and of old photos, but you'd be justified in classing this with string too short to save.