The 1950s were the flowering of American modernity — an aesthetic sensibility, tugged along by a newly affluent middle class, devoted to clean lines, simple forms, and a sense of an urgent new century unfolding.
The 1950s were also some really stupid times.
Witness the Bar Guide.

The Bar Guide is a shiny plastic device the size of a Canasta deck that updates the cocktail recipe book with “hep” modern technologies like plastic, newfangled printing methods, and a cool thumb wheel with traction grooves.
Its chief accomplishment appears to be transforming something that works quite well into something that’s confusing, hard to use, and easy to break.
And this was way before the Barnes & Noble “Nook GlowLight Plus.”
I’m thinking of a number between 1 and 80
Located at the heart of the Bar Guide is a paper scroll bearing 80 numbered cocktail recipes, each condensed to the size of a fortune cookie.