In 1955 Ford Motor Company hired Marianne Moore to help name their newest car-model. The 67 year-old poet had some interesting suggestions. Imagine driving a car named "Utopian Turtletop" or "Andante Con Tropo." What about "The Anticipator"? The "Thunder Crester"? The "Silver Sword"? The "Regna Racer"? What exactly is a "Magigravue"? Or a "Turcotingo"? Would you expect a "Pastelogram" to get better gas mileage and good acceleration? I like "The Varsity Stroke" but it might be a bit preppy. She also suggested "Mongoose Civique" and "The Intelligent Whale" (which the car was almost as big as.) "The Resilient Bullet" sounds almost cool.
Ford didn't use any of Moore's suggestions, deciding instead to name the new car after Henry Ford’s son and heir. The Edsel. The question isn't why Ford Motor Company named the car Edsel, but why Henry Ford would give such a name to his son. Maybe he should have let the poet name him.
Marianne Moore appears five times in A Book of Ages. Henry Ford, Edsel's grandfather, appears seven times.
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About Me
- Er-H
- Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
- Eric Hanson has been an illustrator and writer for more than twenty years. His artwork has appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney's, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Spy, the Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times, Travel & Leisure, Gourmet, the Believer and other publications. His work has appeared regularly in juried annuals from Communication Arts, Society of Publication Designers, Luerzer’s Archive (200 Best Illustrators Worldwide,) Print, I.D., A.I.G.A., and American Illustration. Design clients include, Aesthetic Apparatus, Duffy, Robert Valentine, Pentagram, Ogilvy, Stoltze Design, AirConditionedLA, Fallon, Paul Davis, Louise Fili, Kate Spade, Barney's, Tolleson, Landor, Willams Sonoma, Barneys, Nordstrom, Target, Alfred A. Knopf, Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York Review Books, Chronicle, Random House and Pantheon. The illustrations and text on this blog are the property of Eric Hanson, who holds the copyright©. His fiction and satire have been published by McSweeney's, the Atlantic, Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazine, The Paris Review, and others. He is the author of A Book of Ages, which was published by Random House in 2008.
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