Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis

Black Hog, Dead Dog

If you’ve ever spent time on Martha’s Vineyard, or know someone who has, you’ve almost certainly seen a Black Dog T-shirt. The Black Dog T is, in a word I’m coming to hate, iconic. I do not own one of those Black Dog T-shirts. I do own these parodies, the Black Hog and the Dead Dog, created by Vineyard artisan Peter Hall around 1990. And thereon hang several tales.

Around 1990, before the Black Dog Tavern turned into an empire but when its signature T-shirt was well on the way to becoming a terrible cliché, Peter Hall created a T with the black dog logo upside down. Threatened with legal action, Hall took the upside-down dog shirts off the market. One of the great regrets of my life is that I didn’t move fast enough to get one.

Above: the Dead Dog (2nd edition). Right: the Black Hog.

Shortly thereafter, Hall’s Basement Designs released two more shirts: the Black Hog and the Dead Dog. This time I moved fast enough to get one of each. The Black Dog sued for, among other offenses, trademark infringement, unfair competition, and unfair and deceptive trade practices. In a June 1993 decision, the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts pretty much supported Hall:

“For all of the foregoing reasons, this court finds that defendant’s use of his Black Hog and Dead Dog marks is a parody of plaintiff’s Black Dog marks having the intention and effect of amusing, rather than confusing, the public. Plaintiff’s claims of infringement, unfair competition, dilution and deceptive trade practices, therefore, are dismissed.”

You can read the whole decision here.

One of the delicious side effects of the brouhaha was that it came to light that in the mid or late 1970s the Black Dog owner had paid only $25 to the woman who designed the logo that was now helping the company make millions. I believe the artist got more money.

The backsides of the Dead Dog and the Black Hog. You’ll notice the similarity of the font to that used on the Black Dog shirts. The 1993 court ruling suggests that this is consistent with parody as long as there’s no intent to fool customers into thinking this is the real thing.

The owner, Robert S. Douglas, was not a struggling entrepreneur. When he died earlier this year, age 93, both Vineyard newspapers, the Vineyard Gazette and the Martha’s Vineyard Times, published extensive obituaries, but neither one mentioned his grandfather, James Henderson Douglas Sr., who was a founder of Quaker Oats.1 Robert Douglas’s influence on the Vineyard, especially Vineyard Haven and the maritime community, is a significant legacy, but it didn’t come out of nowhere either.

This is my one and only Black Dog shirt. I don’t know how I came by it, and there’s no indication of when it was made. It predates the iconic solo dog design. Early or mid 1980s? Late ’70s?

NOTE

  1. The Douglas Archive, a genealogical site based in the UK, has entries for Robert S. Douglas and his father, James Henderson Douglas Jr. The latter refers to James Sr. as a Quaker Oats co-founder, but he doesn’t seem to have his own entry. ↩︎

Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis · 4 Comments

Wayward Books & Women’s Glib

When bookstores move, staffers usually pack the books in boxes, load the boxes in a truck, and drive the truck to the new location. When Wayward Books moved, owners Sybil Pike and Doris Grumbach packed the books in grocery bags and volunteers passed them hand to hand along Pennsylvania Avenue SE to the new shop at 325 7th Street., which was practically next door to Lammas. I was one of the volunteers, and that’s how I got this T-shirt.

True, the distance was only three or four city blocks, and as I recall the brigade didn’t quite stretch the whole distance, so cars were called upon to ferry the books across the gap. But the operation was ingenious and fun, and it worked.

Wayward Books dealt in a carefully curated mix of secondhand and rare works, which meant those books had already been around. They probably took their latest move in stride.

Lammas was well represented in the Wayward Books Brigade, and not only because Wayward Books was moving into the immediate neighborhood. Pike and Grumbach had been a couple since the early 1970s, and Grumbach’s novels were regular sellers at Lammas, notably Chamber Music and The Ladies, which was based on the “Ladies of Llangollen,” two 18th-century Irish women who eloped to Wales, set up housekeeping as a married couple, and whose home became a go-to destination for literary luminaries of the time. Grumbach’s books focused on women’s lives, and often women in relationship with each other, which was not all that common at the time, especially for “mainstream” novelists.

Sybil, a retired research librarian at the Library of Congress, was the on-site manager at Wayward Books — I remember her as a strikingly handsome woman who would have been in her mid-fifties at the time — but Doris was also around when she wasn’t teaching or writing. The two shops complemented each other nicely: their inventories didn’t overlap, but their customers did.

A Washington Post story from April 1990, reporting on Wayward Books’ relocation to Sargentville, Maine, that month, notes that the Wayward Books Brigade comprised 70 volunteers and moved some 3,000 volumes from old location to new. The move to Maine involved three times that many books and was presumably not accomplished hand to hand.

The Post story also says the hand-to-hand move to 7th Street happened in 1985. I would have said a year earlier, because I left D.C. at the end of July 1985 and it seemed Wayward Books and Lammas had been neighbors for more than a few months at that point. But memory is tricky, so maybe not.

I just learned that Sybil passed in March of last year, at the age of 91, but that Doris seems to be alive in her 104th year. It sounds as though, around 2009, they moved together to a retirement community in Pennsylvania, where Sybil died and Doris still lives. Anyone with more information, please respond in the comments. If you don’t want your comment published, say so and it won’t be.

This T-shirt has nothing to do with Wayward Books — except that they both have to do with books, and that Women’s Glib was somewhat wayward in that it had to do with feminist humor, which many continue to swear is an oxymoron. Not for the first or last time, those “many” are so wrong.

Women’s Glib and Women’s Glibber, anthologies edited by Roz Warren, both came out in my bookselling days — I think. Amazon.com gives the early ’90s as pub dates for both books but notes in one case that it’s a second edition. I’m pretty sure I didn’t have anything in either book, although I was the class clown (female) in sixth grade and have been credited with having a pretty good, albeit barbed, sense of humor in all the decades since.

Interestingly enough (to me, at least), this is one of the very few — maybe even only? — Ts I have that features a book. I’ll hedge my bets on that one till I’ve excavated my whole collection. Either few books were featured on Ts or I wasn’t buying (or being given) the ones that were.

My humor tends to be in the moment — I think the word is “situational,” meaning that it arises from circumstances. I’ve never been fond of the other kind, such as stand-up, mainly because stand-up comedy back in the day was so misogynist, even when performed by one of the few women in the trade. Phyllis Diller embarrassed and infuriated me. I could admire Lucille Ball and I Love Lucy while being mortified by her tactics.

As a teenager and young adult I was a huge fan of the Smothers Brothers and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. By the time Saturday Night Live got going, in the mid to late 1970s, I was doing fine without a TV and besides, SNL didn’t seem all that in sync with the lesbian-feminist life I was living.

Humor that was in sync with my life — I loved it. Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For strip and the books compiled from it were huge hits with Lammas customers. So were Nicole Hollander’s Sylvia books. They kept us laughing, and they kept us sane.

The first stand-up comedian who made me sit up, take notice, and even buy at least one of her albums was Kate Clinton. I heard her perform live in the early ’80s. What a revelation! The problem with stand-up comedy wasn’t me, it was the sexist, heterosexist comedy itself!

I’m thrilled to report that Roz Warren and Kate Clinton are still “making light,” as an early Clinton album had it, and you’ve almost certainly heard of Alison Bechdel, if not of Dykes to Watch Out For. I’m not sure if Nicole Hollander is still creating, but it’s not hard to find Sylvia online.

Sylvia — that Sylvia — was one of the namesakes of the TRS-80 that was Lammas’s and my first computer. The other two, as I think I mentioned before, were Sylvia Sherman, my high school history teacher, and Sylvia Abrams, my editorial mentor, without whom I would have had a hard time making a living these last four decades.