Borax

Photo courtesy Flickr

In the mid-Fifties, I learned from a media salesman to call a certain kind of furniture “borax”, a perjorative term for the characteristic popular style of the period. To the best of my understanding, borax stands for inflated form, substandard construction, high profits, and shoddy materials. Borax was a feature of furniture stores in low-income neighborhoods and was often marketed in ways that exploited paying over time.

Oddly enough, the furniture I remember as borax represented debased versions of the most innovative design of the period, like a pulp edition of a good hardcover book. Borax is the low-brow art of furniture.

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