“They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose.”
“They,” of course, are the all-seeing eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, Fitzgerald’s fictional oculist from The Great Gatsby, whose weathered billboard gazed unblinking, over the “valley of ashes” (borough of Queens) and all who traveled between Long Island and Manhattan.
Perhaps I will eventually post the barber’s giant straight-razor advertising tonsorial services, or the dentist’s enormous tooth, but right now these disembodied eyes in their many incarnations are getting a post of their own.
(Images are from auction sites unless noted. TOP)
Two-sided sign, SOURCE
