The Man Who Invented Saturday Morning and Other Adventures in American Enterprise
By David Owen (Villard Books 1988)
Got this as a remainder in a library sale last month, finally got around to browsing it at bedtime, and was startled to find I knew someone in it. Charles F. Rosenay!!!, a local entrepreneur who specializes in Beatles and ghouls whose exploits I’ve been covering of and on for a quarter-century or so, figures in the first paragraph of “Ecstasy in Liverpool,” an essay about a Fab Four fan excursion in 1983, when such things were still a novelty (and before Rosenay!!! started hosting them himself).

Nothing gets dated faster than books about business, but these are entertainingly written, popular-appeal articles originally published in The Atlantic and Harper’s and still amuse and enlighten. They’re about businesses we still care about whose aims haven’t changed all that much, or were changing as much as they ever had right when Owen was writing about them. Other writers have been fascinated by failed inventions, but few have been able to control themselves and keep to 1200 words.

Owen now writes for the New Yorker, and he had that informative-yet-frothy style down over 20 years ago.