Face-off: Paris Vs. New York

Paris Versus New York is a collection of witty, minimalist side-by-side-comparisons of these two great cities. It is the work of Paris-based designer Vahram Muratyan, whose credits include Prada, Hermes, and Lancôme, to name a few. Go to his site for more Paris Vs. New York and to check out his other work.

Thanks, Amela, for going to Paris and bringing the book back for us all to see. I just ordered my own copy, which I know I'll be consulting when the inspiration for visual distillation is needed.

402, and Counting ...

I seem to have blown right past my 400th post without noticing!

Here’s a reminder that Daylight Savings Time is over. If you have any non-automatically resetting clocks, be sure to set them back an hour.

I found this series of vintage “Clock Brand” matchbox labels on eBay (of course) a while ago. I only just now realized, that the labels, which depict quarter-hour intervals, only span from 12:00 to 11:00. So technically, this would be more appropriate for spring, when we lose and hour. Feel free to save it for then. I like this image way too much to wait six whole months to run it.

Stuck at the Met

The Gotlands Museum in Sweden

We’re all familiar with the colorful freeform encrustations that grow on the walls, pipes, and any street furniture in close proximity to museums these days. I always smile at these organic accretions of discarded admission stickers. Their lively messiness provides the perfect counterpoint to the curated seriousness of the very institutions from which they originate.

So, in some way, I was kind of looking forward to seeing what the Met would roll out to replace their iconic and much-loved colored metal tabs which were recently retired after 42 years. Because if ever there was a high-profile occasion for an elegant or interesting design solution, this was surely it. Right?

The other day was my first visit to the museum since the changeover to paper admission stickers. At the exit, there used to be elegant acrylic receptacles filled with colored metal tabs. Now there are very ordinary stanchioned-mounted boards, the kind you might find at a convention informing you which plenary session is to take place in which ballroom. They are positioned to accept the exiting museumgoer’s blue and white rectangular sticker. That’s right, the stickers are, according to a guard I queried, always blue on white.

Too bad the Met, of all places, passed on the opportunity to create what might have been an interesting, or even inspired admissions interface. Instead they seem to have opted for the Staples method (just push the “easy button” and hop on the aesthetic blandwagon).

But let’s wait a while, there’s no telling what might become of those boring little stickers …

Board at the Met

Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki

The Sinebrychoff Taidemuseo, Helsinki

I was very excited to recognize the portraits on some the stickers as the ones photographed by Finnish artist Jorma Puranen!

Results of a Flickr search

Found Palettes: Needle Books

Needle books are usually collected and displayed for their illustrated covers, which were created for advertising and promotion purposes. You can see examples of covers here.

For me, the attraction of these little folders has always been on the inside. That's where small patches of colored foils are pierced with groups of needles and usually a needle threader, for which I am deeply grateful. The colors range from jewel tones to pastels to metallics, and I think of the combination in each book as a unique found palette.

The old foils are usually graced with the magical spider-web embossing that calls to mind the translucent sheets inside an antique photo album or scrapbook.

Roth Wrapped in Bacon?

What would his mother think?

Roth, of course, is recently minted octogenarian Philip Roth, and the wrapping in question is the unmistakable yellow cover of Portnoy’s Complaint designed by Paul Bacon. 

The Rothmania that swept the literary world (and Newark, NJ) on the occasion of the author’s 80th birthday in March, has subsided by now, but it had me looking at early Philip Roth book covers. There’s a lovely Goodbye Columbus cover by Paul Rand, and quite a stylish constructivist cover for the Zuckerman Bound compilation. But nothing beats the 1969 cover of Portnoy’s Complaint for iconic simplicity.

The color yellow, in publishing, has always signified salacious or scandalous content (French yellow books, yellow journalism, etc,). Furthermore, the associative meaning of the color had recently been reinforced in the public mind with the release of the film, I Am Curious (Yellow). Given the amount of sex and nudity consumed today as standard fare on screens of all sizes, it is hard for us now to imagine the shock caused by the Swedish import when it opened here in 1967. The film is now famously remembered as America’s first exposure to explicit sex on the big screen outside of a porn house.

Likewise, Portnoy’s Complaint delivered explicit sexuality (often of a solitary nature) from a literary author, to a mainstream readership. The hilariously vulgar novel debuted to an outraged public that, immediately, put it on the bestseller list.

Paul Bacon had recently hit upon a very commerce-friendly approach to cover design, which became known as the Big Book Look. He could deftly distill a novel’s essence into a single, small conceptual image, which he would combine with bold typography for the book title and author’s name. In an interview with Steven Heller, Bacon explains the pivotal role Portnoy’s Complaint played in the evolution of his design style.

Asked why he avoided his signature conceptual image, Bacon says it was because of the difficulty in portraying the book’s most prominent element: masturbation. But also, “In color, it was just so simple and raw.” He continues: “This was one of the things I started to do for books like Sophie’s Choice – that were strictly lettering covers – which in some ways I suppose was a coward’s way out. But it just seemed appropriate for these enormously complicated books.” Given the epic roots of Sophie’s Choice and Ragtime, Bacon felt that attempting to do anything other than a solution that proclaimed “Important book – read it!” would not work. “I guess that’s kind of a dumb thing to say, but it was at the back of my mind,” he admits.

This is a terrific example of how often "brilliant design" is a matter of instinct. Though Bacon claimed that the lack of “content” was a “coward’s way out,” the cover’s broad expanse of the brightest yellow possible couldn’t have been more perfect. The blankness hints at the anonymity of the old plain brown paper wrapper, and the color assures us of sexual content. The blaring, oversized type, however, announces that this book's subject will not be kept under wraps.

And there’s actually some commonality between the designer and the author. Bacon too is having a big birthday this year—he’ll be 90 in December, both grew up in Newark NJ, and both have an astonishing number of best sellers under their belts. While Roth’s output is admirable for its consistent critical acclaim and commercial success, Bacon’s is staggering. He’s designed over 6,000 book covers. 

You may be familiar with some of these …

Bacon designed some 200 record-album covers as well. In fact, it was through his involvement in the jazz world (read a four-part interview here) that he started designing record covers even before he concentrated on books. 

Women of Amsterdam and Other Books

Women of Amsterdam, 1970

I was looking for information on the book, below, about Japan's Expo '70 when I found my self on Arte Contemporanea, an Italian book site filled with some wonderful covers--art, film, politics, etc.

Structure, Space, Mankind: Expo '70

Living Theatre Paradise, 1969

Dropout, 1971

The journal of a brilliant South African academic

who dropped out, took LSD, and lived

rough on the streets of London.

Daido Moriyama, 2011

Usonien: When Democracy Builds, 1950

How to Play the Environment Game, 1973

Uppercase, 1959

Entropico, 1966

Dali + Film, 2007

... Jacqueline Tutta Nuda!, 1972

Offensive Literature:

Decensorship in Britain 1960-1982

Liberty or Death: 

International Protest, 1968

Dutch Graphic Design, 1993

Atlas of Transformation, 2010

Biennale: Metro 6 Special, 1962

Impariamo a cinematografare, 1947

Image Vol. 7 #1, 1968

The Selling of the President 1968 (1970)

The Posters of Dr. Hans Sachs

The legendary poster collection of Hans Sachs, the German dentist and the foremost collector of posters in early 20th Century Europe is being auctioned this weekend by Guernsey’s. Sachs began his collection of what he called “a new kind of advertising art,” as a teenager at the turn of the century and went on to amass over 12,000 posters. He was responsible for founding a society in 1905 to advance poster collecting and scholarship, and launched an associated magazine, Das Plakat with the designer, Lucian Bernhard.

On Kristallnacht, in November of 1938, by order of Nazi propagandist-in-chief Josef Goebbels, the collection was confiscated. The collector’s great granddaughter writes of how, at gunpoint, Sachs loaded his collection onto three awaiting trucks and never saw it again. Read her fascinating story of the creation, loss and rediscovery of this vast collection here.

In the interest of actually getting these images posted, I’ve done away with the annotations. (Is the unannotated post worth posting? I hope so.) You can find all the info here.