Reddit reviews Mid-Century Modern: Furniture of the 1950s

Publishers like Schiffer and Taschen are pretty good places to start. Many "1950's furniture" books can be quite repetitive and tend to focus on well known makers and designers. I would suggest getting a classic such as this, and move on to more specialized areas, such as catalogs.

Websites such as this, or this are helpful and fun. Sites such as this, show restored furniture, allowing you to see the potential in vintage pieces.

(Well, look at me, getting wordy, too... ) For just starting out, I think you're coming along just fine. The pieces you bought obviously satisfy you, and that's what's important. And it makes for a great mancave, as I see it. I totally kooked out over the brushed chrome and squared edges of your receiver--without being able to read the pic, I knew that was a Marantz, a most supreme '70s symbol all by itself. So you missed a technical mark a few times--mixing styles is a very cheeky/quirky/cool thing to do until you score all those perfect pieces you're looking for.

I can tell you're looking for the right lines, but without having lived through the different eras, you're unstuck in time. That precious dinette shows you're aiming at the '50s--but there were many different design movements at work then, some of them still holdovers from the ruffled, homey look of the '30s. The Mid-Century Modern aesthetic itself is a very particular thing, and to confuse matters, its elements were later swiped and incorporated into successive styles without regard to the MCM design principles. So it's easy to be misled when you glimpse an echo of something that evokes an MCM line or uses a distinctive material or some other deceptive marker.

For the most part, MCM designs have a sort of organic, fluid grace to them--even designs that are very solid and geometric seem to have a light, weightless quality. It managed to hold its own during the '60s, but when filtered through a '70s dynamic, the future-forward parabolas and horizontal lines of MCM designs became blockish, angular, and clunky, then everything made in that decade all collapsed into a massive, dark Mediterranean rumpus room with a puke-green shag rug... Let's just say mistakes were made.

If you want to acquire an expert eye like lobster_johnson, do some research into the history of MCM design. Get a sense of the the basic structural lines used in the furniture design of Charles and Ray Eames (inside poop that took me too long to catch on to: Ray was Charles's wife, and it's pronounced "Ames" wink), and then study their architectural designs, because those are the intended backdrops for their Mid-Century Modern furnishings. The Eameses and other Modernist architects created open spaces that require furnishing that is both dramatic yet understated, spare and minimal with those predominant horizontal lines. Visualizing a piece fitting in one of these houses by Richard Neutra, for instance, could be a good mental exercise to help you weed out the anachronisms from the real deal. A mancave in one of those houses would look like astronauts hung out in it.

You're lucky to have a lot of resources to guide you. Back in the pre-internet late '80s when I first got into it, I had Cara Greenberg's MID-CENTURY MODERN. It's more of a coffee-table book (haha!) with really nice visuals and a general but very informative overview of different designers, but it taught me what to look for. But lucky you can sniff around online, and googling any new names and design movements you find along the way will yield more info. And /r/Mid_Century is a unique resource that's also interactive--you already know that if you're smart enough to ask questions, you'll get a world of answers.

And keep in mind your collection won't always be confined to only one room. Who knows? You may decide to gain the skill sets to recreate some of the classic MCM designs yourself, by carpentry or through some medium like 3-D printing.

Mid-Century Modern: Furniture of the 1950s: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0517884755/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_7vnDCb91D00JG

The creation of the name “Mid Century Modern” is credited to this book.