"In the hands of one of our best writers on architectures and design, a history of chairs becomes a revealing history of design and leisure, and ultimately of how we see ourselves"--

"Founded in 1917, Paramount Records was but one of the home-grown record labels of the New York Recording Laboratories (NYRL), a subsidiary of a chair company in Wisconsin with operations near Lake Michigan. No outsized hopes were pinned to Paramount or its sister companies; its founders knew nothing of the music business, the records themselves were only to drive sales of expensive phonograph cabinets they had recently begun manufacturing. Lacking...