Rubber: Fun, Fashion, Fetish

Rubber is fun. Rubber is useful. Rubber has fetishistic appeal. It has not only been used for a multitude of everyday objects--tires, wires, handles of pliers--but has also paved the way for a multitude of advances in design, technology, and lifestyle. This complete story of rubber's origins and history shows how the power of rubber polymers--their inherent strength and capacity for recoiling to their contorted state -- charges rubber with a dynamic energy source. Filled with specially taken images by Geraldo Somozo, these pages show us rubber toys, from Wacky Wall Walkers to the collectible of the Auburn Rubber Company; the use of this nonslip, insulating, waterproof material in every room of this nonslip, insulating, waterproof material in every room of the house; its eerie capacity to mimic other forms and substances; how elastic fibers, comprised of rubber filaments, helped fashion designers to realize that women are not made of rigid material; how the German jeweler Bunz combined rubber with diamonds and gold; contemporary rubber in computer keyboards and cell-phone keypads; and --as climax --the steamy, salacious, seductive, (and deliciously sleazy) erotic world of rubber.