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Review: Everything’s Coming Up Sock Monkeys: Art, History and Business of The American Sock Monkey



Posted: Wednesday, March 28, 2007

by
Norm Goldman





Author: Bonnie Kraus Connelly

ISBN: 978-0-9790323-01: 0-9790323-0-X

160 pages of “cool" illustrations are the focus of Bonnie Kraus Connelly’s coffee-table book Everything’s Coming Up Sock Monkeys: Art, History and Business of The American Sock Monkey.  Without doubt these images convey why this truly American folk art toy with its never-ending smile is, as the front inside cover states, “not just about those lovable monkeys, but about the very things and attitudes that the sock monkey owners embrace."

Readers who are familiar with sock monkeys will immediately connect with the herd of these colorful and uniquely effervescent images that have been contributed by over 80 artists, photographers, collectors, museums and gallery exhibits, vintage and non typical monkey makers, published books, comics and craft magazines, and businesses of the American sock monkey. And this is what makes this book sing!

Organized into six sections, the book contains an amazing assortment of photos illustrating sock monkey characters that have been created over the past fifty years such as Zoë Architect’s characters as Private Volunteer Taskmaster MacKinac, Bo Jockson, Three Monkeytees, Joe Monktana (with a football helmet) Malakahini, Manuel de Mauo, Amigo Murphy and Ming-Ling Manchu. Then there are the images taken from cartoonist and writer Tony Millionaire and his Collected Works of Tony Millionaire’s Sock Monkeys Volumes Three and Four and The Adventures of Tony Millionaire’s Sock Monkey as well as images from various book covers as The Mystery of the Sock Monkeys and Sock Monkey Blues.

As noted in the book, there are many collectors of sock monkey socks who consider them to be part of pop culture artifacts. One such collector, William Swislow, Vice President of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art succinctly sums in up when he states “that sock monkeys are one of those folkish arts & crafts (like bottle-cap figures) in which regular Jill and Joes exercise their creativity using materials and instructions from commercial sources-in this case the either in the package or in crafts magazine such as the inimitable Pack-O-Fun."

To understand where the idea of sock monkeys originated, Connelly has provided an introduction that briefly gives us a history of the sock monkey that began with the invention of the parallel-row knitting machine developed in 1872-3 by Nelson and William Worth Burson. This machine could automatically close the heel and toe of a sock. As mentioned in the Timeline, Nelson’s son William and his friend FR Brown purchased some unused machines from Nelson and they began manufacturing socks as the FR Brown Company. Eventually, Nelson Knitting Company was incorporated and they went on to absorb the assets of FR Brown.

In 1932 the company came up with the ideas of the “De-Tec-Tip" (the name given the distinctive red heel) to its socks.  In 1951 Nelson Knitting learned that its socks were not only for wear but are also were being used to make monkey dolls and in 1955 they were awarded the design patent for the sock monkey doll. This led them to include the pattern for the doll in packages of Red Heel socks. Regrettably, Nelson Knitting received bad legal advice when they invented the tube sock in 1967, as it did not take out a design patent and within months its competitors began manufacturing this very popular sock. Nelson Knitting is no longer around as it filed for bankruptcy in 1985 and its Red Heel trademark was purchased by Fox River Mills which continues to make the Red Heels.

This book is certainly a “celebration of creativity" as mentioned to me in my interview with Connelly, and moreover its perfect union of picture and text pull the whole book together.

Incidentally, if you are wondering how to create a sock monkey, there is even included a page taken from the Nelson Knitting Company Original Sock Monkey Instructions that clearly explains how to go about producing your own sock monkey friend. And as the instructions mentions, “there are many variations from this basic pattern." 

The above review was contributed by: NORM GOLDMAN:  Retired Title Attorney: Editor & Publisher of Bookpleasures. Here are  Norm Goldman's Reviews       

 To read Norm's Interview with Bonnie Kraus Connelly CLICK HERE



 

 

Norm Goldman practiced law for over 35 years and this enabled him to transfer and apply to book reviewing his many skills that he had perfected during his career in the legal profession and as a result he has become a prolific free lance book reviewer & author interviewer.

He is the Editor, Publisher and Reviewer for his own site, Bookpleasures.com (http://www.bookpleasures.com) that he created in 2002.

The site is composed of an international community of book reviewers that come from all walks of life that review all genres of fiction and non-fiction.

In addition to the complimentary reviews bookpleasures.com offers, Norm personally offers his own Priority Book Review service that you can find out more about by clicking on:

http://www.bookpleasures.com/websitepublisher/categories/Do-You-Need-A-Quick-Review-Of-Your-Book%3F/

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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)
» left by Mary Fagan
 4 years 262 days ago.
59 fans. Follow Mary Fagan on twitter!
I always wondered where those little devils came from. My girlfriend had one as a child and I was always a bit scared of it. If I had known its origins, it could have made all the difference!
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