Tiki Book ...

I was doing some research this evening by browsing through an old Playboy I had and I came across a blerp in the Potpourri section about a book called "Hula Dancers and Tiki Gods", published by Schiffer Publishing.

(Playboy, September 2001)

Does anyone have this book and is it worth the $39.95 price? (Yeah, I know I can probably find it cheaper on ebay).

It says that the book is "a celebration of and price guide to hundres of girl and god tchotchkes, from velvet paintings to ceramic mugs."

(What the hell is a tchotchke anyway?)

If anyone has this book and can recommend it, please let us know before I spend my $40.00.

Thanks.
-C.
:sheckymug:

Keep on reading those articles Stingray!
wink

hello there stingray.
My freind Chris Pfouts put that book out. It is mainly focused on vintage Hula and Hawaianna collectables, but it also has a few pages on tiki stuff as well. me and a friend of mine have some of our collection in the book ( just check out my freind jimmy's witco dinner table at the end of the book. ) So if you are mainly into the hula end of collecting then this is for you.

well I just had damnamazon finally deliver my copy on friday and its only got about thirty pages of tiki which slightly disapointed me to begin with but then I sat down for a really good read of it and got into the hula dancer tip. I was nice to discover the fact that grass skirts were imported to hawaii from the gilbert islands, where my wife-to-be was born.
the tiki in it isn't so bar/style orintated as the book of the tiki more a sixties surfer slant, A good adition to a tiki research libary.

I currently have this book out on loan from the library and am considering getting my own copy. The photography of the items is a little stiff but Chris Pfouts writing about the objects is informative and clever (examining an Escapade magazine cover of an "Enchanting Cherokee" posing with a Polynesian prop he writes "The girl may indeed be Cherokee, but palm-frond tikis are not something the Cherokees are widely known for."). It really is a book more for the vintage Hula Girl fan than the Tiki-phile. The Hula section takes up about three fourths of the book but the collection is exceptional. A wide variety of items are shown, from matchbooks to rare end tables (and many of the pictures of book jackets, decals, and photographs are big enough to make good color copies of to frame). The Tiki section has some interesting items but it's mostly made up of common or contemporary ones.

The only drawbacks to the book is the pointless listing of prices for everything (price lists usually are out of date by the time a book goes to press) and of course the $40 price of the book. Don't count on finding it cheaper on eBay, the two auctions I saw started at the book's list price (they went unsold). This also seems like the sort of book which may go out of print. How to talk yourself into it: You couldn't begin a collection of Hula stuff like this for $40.

Although I don't own the book, I got some info about it from someone who had
this to say about it:

Apparently the author is a passionate collector of Hula girl ephemera, and when he approached Schiffer Books, a collector's book publisher, to make a book with his material, they were interested only under the condition that he would include some Tiki stuff, so they could add the "Tiki Gods" moniker, to be hip.

Unfortunately the result shows this: 10 Years of Hula girl collecting and 1 year of tiki collecting resulting in 170 pages of great wahine images, and 30 pages of mediocre tiki mugs and objects (a few even doubled up to fill the space). Schiffer books are amateurishly laid out, on their covers and inside (their previous Hawaiiana book is a sad example, too) and (have to) include price guides that are pretty arbitrary.

But still, this book is a great South Seas maiden pictorial, just forget about the tiki part.

[ Edited by: sherripfouts 2007-03-31 18:18 ]

A very interesting way to have a very old thread bumped.
Someone joins just to post this after googling a name.

Well, thank you for bringing this book to our attention!

And, Welcome to Tiki Central!

I appreciate the honest reviews given by the original posters.

Actually Google Alert does the handy work. And I didn't look at the dates, so my apologies for not being timely. My apologies, too, for trying to explain that Chris is usually 10 years ahead of trends that breed message boards. Vaya con the facts. SP

Good to have ya back Stingray.