192 x 246mm, 188 pages, Black & white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2024

In the late 1930s, The Coca-Cola Company aimed to spearhead a campaign to better establish their product as a household staple and enrapture the middle-class homemaker’s market. A Trojan horse, the resulting promotion was run through the distribution of a ¢10 mail-order publication via Good Housekeeping on flower arrangement. Three illustrated editions, authored by St. Louis resident Laura Lee Burroughs, that would explore the practice of domestic and decorative horticulture as a means of sitting a bottle side-by-side with a bouquet: Flower Arranging: A Fascinating Hobby (Volume I and II) and Homes & Flowers: Refreshing Arrangements.

In 1940, the first of Burroughs’ works was offered to the public to a thunderous reception. More than a million and a half copies were printed to meet the degree of demand, and a second and third volume would follow in 1941 and 1942. Following the first outdoor wall advertisement for Coca-Cola—a hand painted sign Cartersville, Georgia, 1894—the replacement of the spring-sealed Hutchinson bottle with the signature hobble-skirt design of 1915, and the company’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations, 1935, the campaign cemented Coca-Cola’s market centrality and enflamed its suburban appeal.

Mother of author William S. Burroughs, Laura Lee’s work sits as in poetic counterpoint to her son’s subsequent experiments with collage and cut-up—a formal flower arrangement of his own—and the poems collected in Magnolia or Redbud mimic the Burroughs brand of appropriation and textual re-combination by borrowing words and phrases pooled exclusively from Laura Lee’s three publications for Coca-Cola as a basis from which to essay an afterwork out of the family habit. 

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