The Man Who Invented Saturday Morning: And Other Adventures in American Enterprise

by David Owen

The flip side of the Wall Street Journal, these witty essays on American business, reprinted from Harper's and the Atlantic Monthly, probe less familiar issues and personalities. Among the subjects covered are donating one's body to a medical school (and being converted into "a dark form that suggested nothing so much as the week after Thanksgiving"), visiting Liverpool in the company of 66 American Beatles worshippers, attending a convention of convention planners and the history of the U.S. toy business. Owen has a knack for picking offbeat topics as well as a rich and delicious sense of humor: there isn't a paragraph in the book that doesn't sparkle.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, History

215 pages, Hardcover

First published February 12, 1988

Reviews

[Chloe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up as a recommendation from the book reviewer and journalist Molly Young's New York Times Read Like the Wind column, and her review absolutely holds up. This book of essays from the 1980s is a delight to read, covering all sorts of topics, my favorites of which were those on attending a convention for convention planners ("A meeting of professional meeting planners is one of those rare and wonderful phenomena—like the alignment of all nine planets on the same side of the sun—that tingle with cosmic portent."), what happens to bodies donated to science ("Two powerful human emotions—the fear of death and the love of bargains—inexorably conflict in any serious consideration of what to do with an expired loved one, all the more so if the loved one is oneself. Most people secretly believe that thinking about death is the single surest method of shortening life expectancy."), the beginnings of satellite television and American versus Soviet satellite technology, American trade magazines, the invention of copy machines, toy marketing (name, the business model of Toys R Us, the growth of movie tie-in toys, and the subsequent inversion of the concept with the creation of children's television programming made to sell toys), and multilevel marketing pyramid schemes.

If you couldn't tell from the list above, this book is chock-full of delightful fun facts and informative deep-dives on obscure topics, all sprinkled through with a really entertaining and irreverent sense of humor.

I would be remiss if I didn't point out the obvious, which is that the book is incredibly dated. However, I found that to be a plus for the book - it's absolutely fascinating to see the world from the point-of-view of someone in the mid-80s, especially with enough hindsight to know about how technology changes hinted at in the essays ultimately played out. Owens writes about the start of satellite television and how it portends a seismic shift in how people access entertainment, and about the disruption portended by HBO's desire to gate keep their programming via signal-scrambling. It's all a fascinating glimpse at the start of an industry that was just getting off of the ground (literally), and, from my point of view here in 2024, all unbelievably outdated in an era where streaming has absolutely demolished and rebuilt the entertainment industry.

All in all, a really fun book of essay, both despite and because of its age.