packaging as content

March 16, 2012

Packaging Puppets & Evangelical Ventriloquism

In addition to the Life Cereal box ventriloquist’s dummy that we looked at yesterday, Clinton Detweiler made quite a few other puppets from empty retail packaging.

What wasn’t explored in yesterday’s post was that the purpose of many of these packaging dummies is religious instruction.

These product containers that were designed to carry cleansing products for laundry, have been converted into puppets used to present Bible promises guaranteed to cleanse lives.

“What good is it for you to GAIN the whole world, yet forfeit your soul?”

“For ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

“Let us then approach God’s throne of grace BOLD-ly, so that we may receive mercy…”

–Clinton Detweiler

Lucas Conley, in his book, Obsessive Branding Disorder, compared retail spaces like the Apple Store to a “brand church.” And, in fact, this morning’s news mentions that just yesterday fervent consumers were lining up overnight outside of NY’s Apple Store, to purchase the new version of the iPad this morning. Some marketers have tried to bottle this kind of customer enthusiasm as “evangelism marketing.”

So I’m familiar with the idea that stores nowadays were inspiring a more church-like devotion from consumers, but I hadn’t thought about it the other way round… that churches were becoming more like stores.

Just as consumers happily identify with anthropomorphic retail packages and the concept of fraudulent packaging resonates as a political metaphor, preachers are also finding parables in consumer packaging.

We’ve seen evidence of this before in the content of sermons about the Entenmann’s box and deceptive frozen food packaging, but I had never realized that the packages were actually attending church.

And I never knew there was such a thing as “Christian ventriloquism”…

In the late fifties a new theory on how to sway children to Jesus swept the culture and has survived for almost fifty years against all odds. Ventriloquism. The craze of using ventriloquist dummies to teach Jesus to kids became so huge in fact, that there remains today a heavily attended Christian Ventriloquists Convention held in San Diego every year. Hundreds of Christian ventriloquist LPs have permeated America, the biggest star of which was, of course, Little Marcy who recorded for several major Christian record labels.

Listener Kliph Nesteroff, From Subculture to Major Industry:
Mike Warnke and The Roots of Christian Stand-Up Comedy
WFMU Blog, February 11, 2007

These things being the case, I guess it makes total sense that today’s parishioners might be better able to hear “the word of God” when it comes from a detergent box.

–Randy Ludacer

March 7, 2012

Trix Cereal X-Ray Pack

About a year ago, we featured some package design by Mark Oliver, Inc. (above, left) that used actual-sized product photography of cereal to cover the outside of some Vita Crunch cereal boxes. Not just a photo of cereal in a bowl with milk, but a continuous, all-over pattern of cereal covering the front, tops and sides of each box. As if the boxes were transparent and we could see the contents inside. (See also: Packaging & What Lies Beneath)

“The client wanted to sell breakfast cereals priced at 99 cents each. The budget was tight and limited to process color. We made the product the hero. We laid it on scanners to record, used 3-D type to grab attention, and created distinctive, fun, colorful boxes that jump from the shelves.”

Later I saw this Trix Cereal packaging and realized that there had been an earlier precedent for this kind of X-ray package design for cereal.

Above: the introductory Trix ad from a 1956 issue of Life Magazine.

These earlier, rabbit-less Trix packages were a revelation to me… modern, in the same way that Jackson Pollack’s “allover” drip paintings were considered modern in those days…

“Allover painting refers to a canvas covered in paint from edge to edge and from corner to corner, in which each area of the composition is given equal attention and significance. This is a radically different approach from modes of painting that offer specific focal points, such as the sitter’s face in the case of a portrait. With an allover composition, our eyes are invited to wander the canvas from the top to the bottom, following lines, shapes, and colors.”

Allover Painting, Museum of Modern Art

As a kid, I was convinced that I could correctly identify colors on black & white television. Perhaps it was advertising like this that gave me this idea. Above, is a screen shot from one of the earliest black & white TV commercials for Trix. The way they labeled the colors on screen (raspberry red, orange, lemon yellow) reminds me of Jasper Johns’ allover paintings from around the same time.

Below: Jubillee and False Start from 1959. (via: Flourishing Mirth)

(More Trix-ray vision, after the fold…) (more…)

February 28, 2012

Magic Packaging 2

A new package design book from DesignerBooks, entitled, Magic Packaging 2, arrived at our office last week and guess whose excellent package design appears on page 172? (in the “Intriguing Magic” section)

Ours.

It’s our concept and structural design for a shirt-shaped, wrap card for the Totally Living™ velvet hangers 10-pack… which can also be seen here on our web site.

Don’t know why we weren’t included in the earlier Magic Packaging 1, but I do like the way things are trending.

Anyway, you should totally buy this book. It’s only 280.00 元 (or 246.00 元 if you are a member.)

(See also: Choi’s Package)

-Randy Ludacer

December 1, 2011

The Entenmann’s Box as Metaphor

The Entenmann’s box with the see-through window is sometimes used as a metaphor. Usually this has to do with ideas about tranparency. The Wacky Pack “Antenmann’s” parody sticker (on the left) compared the Entenmann’s see-through window to a window on an ant farm. The shrink-wrapped Entenmann’s box on the right is an advertising promotion: a deck of Entenmann’s box-shaped playing cards. Strange for playing cards to have a see-through window. If you’re playing cards, you generally want the hand you’re dealt to be for your eyes only. (See also: Wacky Packages and Playing Card Packs.)

1. Consumer
A 1996 remembrance by Wendy Wasserstein, about Martha Entenmann’s life is entitled, “She Saw Through Us.” By “us” she means Entenmann’s consumers so the metaphor is about Martha Entenmann’s early insight into our consumer behavior—that we customers were as transparent to her as the “see-through convertible bakery box top” that she invented.

2. Coffin
A character in F. Paul Wilson’s, The Tomb, while eating crumb cake, talks about wanting to be interred in an Entenmann’s box:

I’ve decided that after I’m cremated I want my ashes buried in an Entenmann’s box. Or if I’m not cremated, it should be a white, glass-topped coffin with blue lettering on the side.” He held up the cake box. “Just like this. Either way, I want to be interred on a grassy slope overlooking the Entenmann’s plant in Bay Shore.”

Another example of Entenmann’s box as coffin was found in these comments on a blog post about burying a pet parakeet:

I buried my budgie, Petey, in an empty Entenmann’s box . . . the cellophane window allowed for excellent viewing at the wake that we held for the neighborhood kids.

… Naturally, one would use the Entenmann’s box after consoling oneself with some tasty brownies, chocolate chip cookies, and/or cinnamon rolls.

3. “Believers” (and non-believers)
A sermon by Harold C. Warlick, Jr. entitled “People See Through Us” uses the same basic metaphor a Wendy Wasserstein—the “transparency” of people. Here, however, it is not about what Martha Entenmann sees in us, but how we look in God’s eyes…

Martha Entenmann invented the see-through cake box. Suddenly all manner of baked goods from pies to doughnuts began to arrive in see-through boxes with a proud blue Entenmann banner stamped on them. This caused those Entenmann baked goods to fill the shelves from New York to Miami.

As soon as the Christian church was organized as an institution, the letters and epistles of Paul and the epistle of James began to hammer home a message people did not want to hear. All believers and congregations are see-through to the world. People see through us. They really do! There is a see-through box top that covers every congregation and every believer.

from Sermons on the Second Readings

Interestingly, the Entenmann’s box also plays a role in Foreskin’s Lament, Shalom Auslander’s novel of Orthodox Jewish life…

(The Entenmann’s box as “literature-of-last-resort” after the fold…)

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June 28, 2011

Schenley’s Patented Jar Mystery

Recently I saw a design patent for a jar and it struck me that the jar wasn’t much bigger than its cap. The patent didn’t specify what it was designed to contain. I was thinking it would be funny if this jar contained something whose directions called for using “one capful” of the product.

The strange thing is, the patent was assigned to distillers, Shenley Industries. (Note: Paul Rand’s design for Shenley’s Gin packaging above, left)

Assuming the jar didn’t contain a single shot of distilled spirits, I wondered, “What was it meant to hold?”

(Mystery solved, after the fold…)

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April 26, 2011

Scott H. Perky’s Symmetrical Typeface Patent

In addition to inventing round shredded wheat, Scott H. Perky also patented an audacious font concept in 1909. Citing the inefficiencies of reading only from left to right, Perky proposed a symmetrical font that would allow books to be typeset in lines of alternating direction…

The invention consists in certain means of printing alternate lines, whereby the reading can be done from left to right and from right to left in a continuous manner, and the skipping from end of one line to the opposite end of the next is avoided.

It is hardly necessary to allude to the strain upon the eyes and brain, which results from much reading. To students, researchers and others whose lives are cast among books, any device which promises to … lessen fatigue of the optical tract, and consequent headache and brain fag, will appear of unusual importance. In ordinary reading … the brain is exerted through the eyes in movements from left to right with alternate senseless skippings from right to left …

In carrying out this invention it is designed to use a font of type, whereof each… letter, number or other character… is of symmetrical form… and is thus adapted to present the same appearance whether read backward or forward…

In reading print of this character… difficulty will at first be found owing to the unaccustomed appearance of the symmetrical characters, but in a limited amount of time, the mind becomes familiar with them and this trouble will disappear. And in the continuous hold of the eye and mind on the text, as the reading proceeds, without skipping or losing place or connection, will be found much compensation.

from the text of Patent No. 921,156

Note: the highlighted phrase “brain fag” is no typo:

The term “brain fag” was used in the US as far back as 1852, describing an overworked brain, in 1877 to describe mental exhaustion in professionals similar to neurasthenia, and later in 1919 to describe mental fatigue in the elderly. The term ‘fag’ is believed to have been derived from ‘fatigue’. This American usage declined by the 1950s.

from Wikipedia entry on Brain Fag

The other phrase “senseless skippings” is highlighted because I thought it was kind of poetic for a patent.

(The first 3 lines of Perky’s patent, set in his patented font, after the fold…)

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April 12, 2011

Chalky White’s House

Staten Isand Savings Bank on Beach Street (via); Boardwalk Empire “No Parking” sign (via: the telephone pole outside of our house)

In our previous post about the Bechtel beer bottle collection, we promised there was more to say about a house in our neighborhood that brewery-owner, George Bechtel gave to his daughter, Anna on her wedding day in 1887. (NY Times wedding announcement, on right)

Available as a movie location via Cynthia von Buhler’s CVB Spaces—(see also: Von Buhler’s Prize Capsules)—this house has recently been the site of filming by HBO’s Boardwalk Empire—a show whose credits and theme song, we’ve already covered here. (See: Opening Bottle Credits)

Celebrity Sighting
Last week I was walking down to the bank, when who should I see on my street? Apparently heading to the wardrobe trailer, but already wearing a brown, turn-of-the-century gangster suit? The Atlantic City bootlegger, Chalky White! (played by Michael Kenneth Williams who also played Omar Little from The Wire)

I was delighted to later learn that, in the Boardwalk Empire story line, the big historic house built by George Bechtel is to be Chalky’s house!

“Chalky’s operation takes the whiskey that Nucky has smuggled across the Canadian border, distills it and repackages it, allowing Nucky to get 3000 bottles out of the initial 500.”

BoardwalkEmpire.wikia.com

We had initially guessed that the big house around the corner was being cast as a new residence for Nucky Thompson and Margaret Schroeder (played by Steve Buscemi and Kelly Macdonald). That would have been cool too, but for Chalky White to be our new neighbor, in residence at the Bechtel house is historically more interesting…

The HBO series is based on Nelson Johnson’s book, Boardwalk Empire. His follow up book, “The Northside: African Americans and the Creation of Atlantic City” focuses on the history of Atlantic City’s black community…

“The city’s very existence was dependent on money spent by out-of-towners (and) Atlantic City’s solution was unique for its time. The hotel industry reached out to the Upper South and recruited people… former slaves and their dependents, coaxed to the North during the three generations following the Civil War.” According to Johnson, “African Americans built Atlantic City. Remove them from its history and the town we know today never comes to be.” –LTS Wire

In Boardwalk Empire, Chalky White, himself a recent descendant of former slaves, is the head of Atlantic City’s black community— “the de facto mayor of Chickenbone Beach.”

Staten Island had slavery up until 1827 when it was abolished in NY State. Bechtel, Stapleton’s leading citizen (and largest taxpayer on Staten Island) during the NY City draft riots in 1863, appears to have played an Oskar Schindler type role in helping to hide and protect black people:

Mr. Bechtel has been foremost in all public and benevolent matters. During the negro riots in 1861 he sheltered large numbers of these homeless people in the woods and sent them nourishment daily till the trouble had subsided, a circumstance which the colored people on Staten Island have never forgotten and for which they have been ever grateful.

History of Richmond County
by Richard M. Bayles, 1889

He also appears to have had a hand in founding Staten Island Savings Bank…

During the Civil War, Staten Island was home to abolitionists and pro-Union residents as well as those who bemoaned the loss of trade with the South… It was in the midst of the crisis that Francis Gould Shaw, the abolitionist, Louis H. Meyer, a financier, John Bechtel, the brewer and eighteen other Staten Island business men petitioned the state legislature for incorporation of an institution to be know as the Staten Island Savings Bank.

excerpt from the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s
proposal to landmark the Staten Island Savings Bank building

The very same bank that Chalky White’s dressing room was parked right across the street from. Or course Bechtel’s fingerprints are all over our little neighborhood. His brewery was also within easy walking distance.

Prohibition is what ultimately put Bechtel’s brewery out of business, and it’s also what made Chalky White so prosperous.

Bechtel’s NY Time Obituary, July 18, 1889, appears on right.

(A couple more things, after the fold…)

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March 31, 2011

Richelieu Fruit & Vegetable Cans

A collection of Richelieu cans from 1933. (via: iCollector)

Richelieu fruit & vegetable cans (25), sealed metal cans w/colorful paper labels, made for a supermarket exhibit at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, de-acquisitioned by the Chicago Museum of Science & Industry…

Sold in 2009 for $900

Note: the metallic gold banding. (See also: Sweet Peas & Fleur-de-lis)

Founded in 1862, Richelieu made a variety of products, besides canned fruits. [see inset] It was one of the brands manufactured by Sprague, Warner & Co., who put out a 66-page history of their company in 1912…

HAVE you ever noticed a Sprague, Warner & Company salesman when it is suggested that another line of food products is as good as the Richelieu? Nine times out of ten his reply will be, “Let’s compare the goods.”

from “Sprague, Warner & Company, Incorporated”
Written for Sprague, Warner & Co., 1912 by Mason Warner

Note: the vintage hyperbolic sales pitch. If Richelieu’s ghost writer were writing this today for a television commercial, he would probably resort to catch-phrase shorthand like, “Bring it on!”

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

March 29, 2011

The Grape Nuts Anthro-Pack

At top, an illustration from a Grape Nuts ad showing the benevolent ministrations of an anthropomorphic Grape Nuts box for a sickly man. (Note: the flasks by the bed. Medicine?) (via)

The newspaper item on left is from the NY Times, February 28, 1904. I’m guessing that, at that time, there were no editorial rules in place requiring “Advertisement” to appear above. The same “story” appeared in a number of periodicals around the same time.

The ad on the right shows Post’s “The Road to Wellville" pamphlet or “keen, little book,” which T.J. Boyle entitled his book after—about Kellogg’s “Battle Creek Sanitarium.” (Note: C.W. Post spent time in Kellogg’s Sanitarium)

This Little Book FREE.

A Keen, Snappy Little Book
To be Found in Packages.

A copy is placed in every third pkg. of

Grape-Nuts

One of the best known surgeons in America voluntarily wrote a 2-page letter favorably analyzing the healthful suggestions in “The Road to Wellville.”

Some profound facts appear that are new to most persons.

Get a pkg. and study the little book. It wins its own way, and adds to your stock of knowledge.

“There's a Reason”

More Grape=Nuts anthro-pack ads (via)

(One more Grape Nuts anthro-pack, after the fold…)

(more…)

March 28, 2011

Cereal Box Books

Top left photo: from My Handbound Books Etsy Shop; other photos: from Eco Books by Terry Taylor (via: Cutout and Keep)

Cereal box books by Rhonda Miller:

“These are quite small. The notebooks are just 4½" x 2¾"… I deconstructed the All Bran Cereal Bar box, and refolded it to make it fit the two notebooks. We seem to have a lot of Kellogg’s products in our pantry.”

Rhonda Miller
My Handbound Books, July 24, 2008

(Two more recycled-packaging books from MyHandboundBooks’ Flickr Photostream, after the fold…)

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March 11, 2011

Bobby Grossman’s Corn Flakes, Die Originalen

“I photographed a number of friends eating Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. The idea originated at RISD when I took a Mick Rock photo of Lou Reed and put it on a box of German Kellogg’s Corn Flakes… You can find a photo of Andy holding the box in Victor Bockris’ Lou Reed biography.” [above left]

–Bobby Grossman

The photo on right is Grossman’s original photograph. (thank you, Bobby!) A color photo of the box was also published in an illustration annual sometime in the 1970s and a black & white photo of the box was featured in the NY Rocker. (shown below)

Yesterday’s post was about the famous (but not infamous) people who are allowed to appear on Kellogg’s Corn Flakes boxes. But it was this subversive take on their package, by photographer, Bobby Grossman, that first set me thinking about cereal boxes as a new, heavily censored type of media.

Ostensibly all-American—(Kellogg’s featured an American flag on one recent version of their corn flakes box)—but they’re really a multi-national, hence: a German box from the 1970s. Onto this already somewhat foreign backdrop, Grossman superimposed as unlikely a mainstream cereal box hero as can be imagined: Lou reed in black leather & black nail polish.

On left: Bobby Grossman’s Corn Flakes box (with appropriated Mick Rock photo) as it appear in the NY Rocker (via: SFview’s Flickr Photostream); on right: photo by Grossman of Warhol eating corn flakes

As a photographer, Grossman then proceeded with a series of unauthorized endorsement shots. Celebrities, but not the sort of celebrities that Kellogg’s generally celebrated. Andy Warhol (of course) but aside from him, mostly musicians…

Photos by Bobby Grossman of David Byrne, Deborah Harry, and David Johansen eating corn flakes

Do musicians in particular have some special affinity for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes? I’ve read that John Lennon wrote a song based on a particular Kellogg’s television commercial jingle…

“Good Morning Good Morning” is a song composed by (credited to Lennon/McCartney) and performed by The Beatles on the 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Inspiration for the song came to Lennon from a television commercial for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. The jingle went: “Good morning, good morning, The best to you each morning, Sunshine Breakfast, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Crisp and full of fun”.

from Wikipedia’s entry on Good Morning Good Morning

And there’s also the Robert Hilburn book entitled “Corn Flakes with John Lennon.”

But the irony of Lennon using corn flakes advertising as a critique of the middle class, pales in comparison to the irony of Lou Reed on a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box.

Certainly if Kellogg’s would pull Michael Phelps boxes from their shelves due to pot smoking, they’re not likely to feature the author of a song entitled “Heroin” on their cereal. But the irony runs deeper still…

According to Grossman, his idea for putting Reed’s picture on the box “originated in 1974 while listening to Sally Can’t Dance.”

So considering that Lou Reed’s “Sally Can’t Dance” album includes, “Kill Your Sons” a song about Reed’s electroshock therapy as a teenager in the 1960s…

Reed received electroconvulsive therapy in his teen years to “cure” homosexual behavior; he wrote about the experience in his 1974 song, “Kill Your Sons”. In an interview, Reed said of the experience:

They put the thing down your throat so you don’t swallow your tongue, and they put electrodes on your head. That’s what was recommended in Rockland County to discourage homosexual feelings. The effect is that you lose your memory and become a vegetable. You can’t read a book because you get to page 17 and have to go right back to page one again.

from Wikipedia’s entry on Lou Reed

And considering the history of Kellogg’s founder, John Harvey Kellogg…

One of the leading advocates of circumcision was John Harvey Kellogg, who is well known for his pseudoscientific views on human sexuality. He advocated the consumption of Kellogg’s corn flakes to prevent masturbation, and he believed that circumcision would be an effective way to eliminate masturbation in males.

from Wikipedia’s entry on Male Circumcision

But Kellogg’s antisexual advice did not end with corn flakes & circumcision. Electrical shocks also came highly recommended as a cure for unwanted sexual impulses.

Electricity.—Probably no single agent will accomplish more than this remedy when skillfully applied. It needs to be carefully used, and cannot be trusted in the hands of those not acquainted with the physical properties of the remedy and scientific methods of applying it.

John Harvey Kellogg
Plain Facts for Old and Young, 1881

(For more about John Harvey Kellogg, see: Porn Flakes)

Also chilling: Kellogg was among the early proponents of the American Eugenics movement and helped the found “Race Betterment Foundation” in Battle Creek, Michigan.

Eugenics was practiced in the United States many years before eugenics programs in Nazi Germany (and in fact, U.S. programs provided much of the inspiration for the latter).

from Wikipedia’s entry on Eugenics in the United States

So for all these reasons, I say, Grossman’s Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, die originalen box with the Mick Rock photo of Lou Reed (a Jewish boy from Long Island), strikes me as ultra-ironic.

(Another Die Originalen irony, after the fold…)

(more…)

March 7, 2011

Tidebox Tidebook

In contrast to last week’s unspeakably messy Propo packaging, Paul McCarthy’s recent book/package shows his tidy side…

Paul McCarthy's Low Life Slow Life: Tidebox Tidebook is a 640-page tome that accompanies a two-part exhibition presented at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco in 2008 and 2009. The exhibition was curated by the Los Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy and organized by Wattis director Jens Hoffmann. Packaged as an instantly recognizable re-creation of a vintage Tide detergent box circa 1973, the book not only documents the show but is an artwork in its own right.

Edited by Jens Hoffmann and Stacen Berg—(on whose sigasiga blog the photos above were found)—graphic design by Paul McCarthy with Jon Sueda.

Also available in paperback.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

February 7, 2011

McSweeney’s Head Box

Recently spotted at Barnes & Nobel: Issue No. 36 of McSweeney’s Quarterly—a “head box” with illustrations by Matt Furie. (Note: Illustration on bottom of box shows that this is actually a severed head box.)

This package features the kind of orthographic graphic design we’ve discussed before, but usually it’s the contents of the box that are projected onto the side panels. Here, it’s more like a “serving suggestion” of what you might make of the box’s contents—(your head being the presumptive destination of the ideas contained).

But besides serving as a repository for literary contents, an orthographically projected head also makes a nice diagram to explain our human predisposition toward rectangular, Cartesian coordinates. With eyes facing forward, an ear on either side, it’s only natural we navigate the world in egocentric, rectangular directions: forward, backward, left, right, up, down.

In an earlier post about close-packing polyhedrons, I wondered why packaging so often seems to skew rectangular. Egocentric coordinates could be one explanation. Our skulls may be round, but our ideas are definitely square.

The video below shows what’s in the box.
(The sound track is: “Poodle in the Hen House”)

(See also: Skull Bottles and Our Family of Products)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

January 6, 2011

2 American Flag Mosaics from Today’s NY Times

Top photo: Donna Alberico for The New York Times; lower photo: Jamie Schwaberow for The New York Times

In today’s NY Times, two different articles featured mosaic displays of the American flag.

1. The new Converse flagship store in SoHo’s has a large, package-as-pixel shoebox* display:

Just inside the front door is a huge American flag made of red, white and blue Chuck Taylors: it is not an art installation about unchecked consumerism, except that it is.

Chuck and Doc Step Out, Jon Caramanica
NY Times, January 5, 2011

*Note: Just got back from the Converse store and found out that I had misinterpreted this photo: it’s actually sneakers attached to the wall, rather than printed shoeboxes, like I thought. (So, not “package-as-pixel” but “product-as-pixel”) 1/07/01

2. In article about Thatcher Wine (“a former Internet entrepreneur who now creates custom book collections and decorative ‘book solutions’ ”) there was one photo of an American flag made out of stacked books. Most of this article, however, is about about Wine’s repackaging of books:

Mr. Wine, who is more of a library artist than a mere book dealer, and who can swathe a book in just about anything, had fun last month wrapping the autobiographies of Keith Richards and Jay-Z in old-fashioned red leather. It’s a practice that irritates book designers like Chip Kidd, who creates noted covers for Knopf.

“It feels sort of needlessly complicated, like turning on the vacuum cleaner and going and finding a piece of dirt,” Mr. Kidd said. “You don’t have to redesign the jacket; the jackets have been designed. This feels arbitrary, like taking a piece of wood and wrapping it in paper.”

Selling a Book by Its Cover, Penelope Green
The New York Times, January 5, 2011

Just as consumer packaged goods can be packaged to serve as part of a larger whole in a store display, so too, books can be packaged to serve as part of a larger, visually unified library.

Is this just a shallow, superficial trend letting “looks” trump content? Or is it indicative of some last gasp, publishing end game? (as with music CDs that are elaborately packaged with T-shirts and other value-added extras in an effort to make them seem more desirable than an illegal download)

(More about books-as-objects, after the fold…)

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December 31, 2010

The Velvet Underground: Book & Banana

Only collectible because of the influential band that named themselves after a copy they found in the street: this 1963 paperback “The Velvet Underground” by Michael Leigh (on left) was given to me as a birthday present around 1983–84. (from someone in another rather influential band)

Can’t say I’ve ever read it cover to cover, but I like the whippy “T” typography and have kept it in its protective plastic for 28 years. (Also: am I crazy or is the S&M boot illustration by Paul Bacon Studio on the cover kind of related to Warhol’s early shoe illustration work?)

The book on the right was a 1968 follow up sequel. (Nice that it features a photo of the earlier book.)

Also collectible: the first Velvet Underground album (below left)—the one with the peel-able yellow banana skin sticker. (We have one of those too, but only because Debby was cool enough to buy one and her records are mixed in with mine.) It always struck me funny how Andy Warhol’s signature was so prominent with no mention at all of the Velvet Underground or Nico on the front cover. Similar to Robert Brownjohn’s humorously arrogant stationery design for Michael Cooper. (Of course there might have been more information on a label affixed to the disposable shrink-wrap…)

The album with the green banana (on right) is the 2007 “Unripened” bootleg LP, made from an acetate pressing of an earlier version of the official 1967 release. (different mixes, different takes, etc.)

On the original cover the small printed instructions read, “PEEL SLOWLY AND SEE”; the instructions next to the green banana read, “UNRIPENED LISTEN SLOWLY AND HEAR.”

There are lots of other versions of (and allusions to) this album cover, and Warhol’s silkscreened banana design has been pretty influential in its own right.

(A bootleg book/record cover and some related Warhol/Velvets banana merchandise, after the fold…)

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December 9, 2010

William Burroughs: Plinking as Painting

Photo on left via Worthpoint; center photo: still from “Shotgun Painting” (video below); on right: photo of Burroughs standing with two of his paintings (via illustrator, Philip Grisewood’s Flickr Photostream)

“There is no exact process. If you want to do shotgun art, you take a piece of plywood, put a can of spray paint in front of it, and shoot it with a shotgun or high powered rifle. The paint’s under high pressure so it explodes! Throws the can 300 feet. The paint sprays in exploding color across your surface. You can have as many colors as you want.”

William Burroughs from an interview with Gregory Ego
“The Burroughs Brain Machine” from Headpress 25: Flicker Machine Edition (2003)

“Plinking” is not new to us. Bottles and cans have long been used for target practice by shooters. (See: Target Packaging) The shooting of pressurized spray paint cans as a means of making abstract paintings was new to me. The middle photo (above) is a screen shot from the video below: my evidence that Krylon spray paint was indeed the brand preferred by the author of Naked Lunch…

The top left photo is of a vintage Krylon can, offered for sale as an antique. (Later versions of this can feature Web 2.0 colored balls rather than overlapping colored circles.) A more authentic artifact might have been the one mentioned below…

Graham: Do you have any favourite piece of Burroughs memorabilia that you own?

Vale: Oh, that I own? Gee, I guess I had a target that he shot. I took him out shooting and I asked him if I could keep the target he shot and he autographed it. And I also, he had a spray can in his studio in Kansas… he’s sprayed it; it was a used spray can in using his artwork. He’d sprayed it a bunch of different rainbow colors. I asked him if he would autograph it and he did and I kept it.

Can’t Rub Out the Word Hoard: William Burroughs Interviews
V. Vale & J.G. Ballard, Interviewed by Graham Rae (about William Burroughs)
(via: Laura Hird)

(One of his “shotgun paintings” follows, after the fold…)

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October 21, 2010

The Road

Three end-of-the-world packaging scenes from The Road:

1. The underground bunker scene

The point I want to make about this scene—(aside from namechecking of packaged food brands)—is this business about “the people.“

In Tuesday’s post about fallout shelters, I included a quote from Thomas Hine about how the supermarket “replaces people with packages.”

The implications are similar here. For the man and the boy in the hidden bunker, an adequate supply of packaged food appears to be a pretty good trade-off: a huge stockpile of bottled beverages, canned foods and bags of Cheetos, replacing the presumably deceased people who had originally put it all there. In the book, the thanking of the people is little different:

Do you think we should thank the people?

The people?

The people who gave us all this.

Well. Yes, I guess we could do that.

Will you do it?

Why dont you?

I dont know how.

Yes you do. You know how to say thank you.

The boy sat staring at his plate. He seemed lost. The man was about to speak when he said: Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff. We know that you saved it for yourself and if you were here we wouldnt eat it no matter how hungry we were and we’re sorry that you didnt get to eat it and we hope that you’re safe in heaven with God.

–Cormac McCarthy, The Road

(Two more package-related scenes from The Road, after the fold…)

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