Ace Jet 170

Mountain

I can’t tell you very much about Hans Thoni except that he died in 1980 aged 74 and was a Swiss graphic designer. There are a few of his posters online and some stamps he designed. There’s much more online about Finsteraarhorn, the highest and less popular mountain in the Bernese Alps.

It’s nothing personal, Finsteraarhorn is, I believe, a perfectly respectable Alp, It’s just that it’s hard to get to. And I don’t mean ‘no public transport’ hard to get to, I mean it’s in the middle of flipping nowhere. It’s, what we explorers call, “a very very long way away”.

Of course, I’m an armchair explorer really and would much rather scrutinise the results of a tectonic uplift from the comfort and relative warmth of my living room, with or without Kendal Mint Cake…

Thoni’s economic illustration of Finsteraarhorn is as sparse as a mountaineer’s emergency rations after three days of blizzard-bound isolation. I count three colours and really, not much drawing. But everything is just right. Just as it should be.

I’m a little obsessed by this tiny depiction of a very big thing. 

Floral Tribute

Between the years of 1876 and 1890 Justus Oehler's great-grandmother Agnes Leibbrand made 42 flower pressings which she kept in a decorative envelope box and which, after her death, remained hidden away, as if forgotten in a drawer, waiting to be unearthed by Oehler decades later. In the latest Pentagram Paper (No. 46) all surviving compositions are reproduced at actual size and Oehler tells of discovering the treasure in his grandparent's house.

Agnes carefully labelled each piece with a number, a date and a description of the fauna's origin. Oehler reflects on his great-grandmother's meticulous work and on the 19th century pastime, "…an art whose delicate beauty and emblematic floriography reflected the social and aesthetic sensibilities of the time".

It's a touching collection, made all the more interesting by how Agnes seems to have stopped pressing when she got married…as if, perhaps, the activity represented a time that had come to an end. I don't know, the Paper's text is very brief but Oehler wrote enough to trigger thoughts on the collection's significance.

Magic

Episode 1: A Potter

I'm not a fan of The Potter. Too derivative for me. But I know, I concede, I’m in the minority; I certainly am in our household. I’m not sure what the dog thinks but everyone else (the goldfish doesn’t count) flipping loves a bit of Potter.

During the summer we went to The Making of Harry Potter, down there at Leavesden Studios near Watford. Even I was a little excited – I imagined there would be at least one or two things I’d find interesting. I was wrong. There was loads of stuff. You’d have to be a very cold-hearted troll to not enjoy it; if you're a Potterette, I expect you’d need some kind of charm spell to keep your brain from exploding. There is much to get excited about.

The sheer volume of stuff is enough to make you pledge your allegiance to He Who Shall Not Be Named in order to obtain just a tiny fragment of it. Thankfully your soul is saved (although not your bank balance) by the gift shop, crammed as it is to the mythical sea creature’s gills with fabulous stuff. The perfect takeaway being, obviously, a wand and we were delighted to be fleeced two-fold…for two.

Magic: a delightful visitor experience and a perfect memento of the day.

 

Episode 2: The Poet

At the end of September Tandem’s latest project went live: Seamus Heaney | Man & Boy is a permanent visitor experience, housed within HomePlace, a new arts centre dedicated to, arguably, Ireland’s greatest modern poet. I had very little to do with the project so when we all went along just prior to launch day, I could enjoy it without too much baggage. I wasn’t that involved but I was in close enough proximity to the project team for a little Heaney magic to have rubbed off on me and I had by this time come to enjoy his words immensely.

Man & Boy has been received very well so far with some great press coverage in the Irish Times, the Guardian and the New York Times. It is a special experience and I think you'd have to be a very cold-hearted troll to not enjoy it; if you're a Heaneyite, I expect you’d need some kind of charm spell to keep your brain from exploding. There is much to enjoy. At the centre of the inspiration gallery upstairs there is a fountain pen, suspended as if in thin air. It's the kind of pen Heaney used.

The perfect takeaway? His wand…his gold nibbed, inky wand.

 

Episode Three: Two Jokers

You can’t buy a Conway Stewart from HomePlace. The company that made them went out of business, first in 1975 and then later in 2014 after an attempt to rejuvenate the brand just didn’t come off; despite the company's reputation for excellent pens demand was just not high enough.

The company was started originally in 1905 when Frank Jarvis and Thomas Garner left De La Rue, a leading fountain pen manufacturer, to set up on their own. Legend has it that they named the business after two music hall comedians of the day. It didn’t do them any harm, things went pretty well and Conway Stewart enjoyed great success with their top notch and affordable fountain pens.

It must have been some time in the 50s that Seamus Heaney was presented with his pen by his parents. He was 14 and went on to use that pen for the rest of his life. He wrote about it more than once: in ‘Digging’, the first poem in Death of a Naturalist, Heaney famously wrote:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun

In the more explicit 'The Conway Stewart’, from Human Chain, he beats less around the bush and goes into so much detail that pen nerds have speculated confidently over precisely which model he describes – probably a 58 although some have suggested a 388.

Mine is a 15.

I got it on ebay. It’s a nice example although not exactly like the Poet’s. His had three gold bands around the lid, mine only has one. But still, when it arrived my hands trembled as I removed it from its modest packaging. It feels nice in the hand and is, I have to say, an elegant pen. Yes, it’s “squat”, as Heaney described his and yes, it does feel “as snug as a gun”.

It also feels magic.

It's a good idea, not nostalgia.

Can we stop referring to the Co-op “re-brand” as nostalgic please?

It’s a shallow response to a well considered solution. If we hadn’t seen that mark before, would we think it retro? Just look at it! I would suggest that if we hadn’t seen it before we’d think it a bold, maybe even ground breaking design for a business built on strong ethics.

OK, perhaps nostalgia comes as a bi-product but it clearly wasn’t the intention of the designers. It’s actually a great example of really smart, grown up graphic design; recognising that the solution was already there and there are better things to spend the client’s money on. In that respect, it’s a beautifully appropriate and ethical solution. It reminds me of this.

Let’s talk about that instead.

Depero Futurista

I just got an email from Russell from Designers & Books. In October they launch a Kickstarter to re-publish Depero's Bolted Book. So, nothing really important then. (Oh my god! They want to re-publish the Bolted Book!).

More here.

Europe in Maps

Here's real treasure for the map fiend: A topographical study of the region known as Europe. I remember Europe – some of it is just below us and there's a much bigger bit over on the other side of the British mainland. We used to holiday there when it was easy to do that, before the walls went up. I liked being in Europe…then one day…one dark day in the 2016, just over half the voting population of Great Britain decided they wanted to leave. Mostly for stupid reasons. But that is, as they say, history. We won't dwell on that.

Still, nice maps: a geographical study based on extracts from large scale maps of European countries featuring the natural environment, agricultural regions, areas of industry that it'll be harder to do business with now and both urban and rural settlements that we are no longer free to visit because an ill-informed population were invited to decide on something they were wholly unqualified to decide on. But as I've already said, let's not dwell on that particular clusterfuck.

Instead let's marvel at the myriad of lines, tones, colours and typography deployed to describe these now more distant regions. 

Thankfully, the beauty of cartography is not influenced by poor socio-political referendums and we can still enjoy the skills and artistry of drafts-people from countries with whom we are no longer unified economically.

Man v Robot

To summarise Marty Neumeier’s 2013 book Metaskills: when the robots rise up to conquer, our only hope, our last line of defence, will be to hit them good and hard with a hefty dose of creativity. It’s our last chance, a full-on, hardcore assault of creative power, right where is hurts. Boom!…Or, at least, I think that was his point…don’t quote me though.

As we automate and roboticise more and more tasks that we really just can’t be bothered to do ourselves, in the end, all we’ll have left to claim we are still superior – that we still have mastery over the machines – is our ability to think outside of the lidded vessel – to think and act unorthodoxically…irregularly…nonconformistically…offbeatedly……as they say.

Not for the first time I’m joining the many voices that have expressed, more elegantly and in much greater detail, that original thought is our most valuable gross international product. And, literally, thank God (or Darwin, if you’re less spiritually inclined) because without that, without ‘new ideas’, let’s face it, we’re robot fodder.

Now I for one, have what neuro-types might call a “growth mindset”. None of us have to rely on what talent or skill we already have and infact we’d all do well, better actually, to expand our abilities through conscious, mindful, concerted and continual training.

Dorte Nielson and Sarah Thurber's book The secret of the highly creative thinker is an aid to just that. Sub-titled "How to make connections others don't", the book guides you through the theory then the practice – the conscious, mindful practice – of connection making. Building on what people like James Webb Young began fifty plus years ago Nielson and Thurber continue the de-mystification of the creative process with the science and provide numerous exercises to help anyone expand their abilities.

It's a handsome volume, easy on the eyes and pretty quick to work through up to the exercises which you can spread out for as long as you like. It's one of those "I wish this was around when I was starting out" kind of books.

In our modern era of near-androidian supremacy, as singularity inevitably approaches and those in the know – those beyond the "creative industries" – elevate creative thinking to a prized status, teaching like this is welcome and valuable.

If nothing else, it means we’ll be ready for the robots.

Over 900 Years Tall

In the May 6 edition of Daniel Benneworth-Gray’s Meanwhile (you do subscribe to Meanwhile don’t you?) he featured Jan Tschichold’s The Form of the Book. Amongst the details Daniel drew out of that was what Jan said about “Deviant formats” – formats that don’t work. JT mentions formats that are too big, too wide and too heavy. He doesn’t, fortunately, mention too tall.

[Screen goes all wobbly and we jump back in time].

In the dim and distant and dim past – so long ago, in fact, that no one quite knows when it was – someone or other decided it would be a great idea to put a church on a thirty acre island in the Thames known for its thorny bushes.

By the 10th century (those in the know now know) there’d been a Christian church on Thorny for quite some time although there’s no trace of it today. When Edward the Confessor ascended to the throne in 1042, Thorney’s status as a sacred place was well established and he saw to it that the construction of a new, more fancy church was begun. This grander building – probably the largest Norman church of its time – was consecrated on Holy Innocents Day 1065. And not a moment too soon! Just a few days later Edward made his last confession and departed for that even grander church in the sky.

The Abbey continued to rise in national importance as Kings were crowned and later buried within its walls. Although Edward is credited for establishing Westminster, it was Henry III who imagined what we can see today – partly because by Henry’s day, those pesky French were knocking up some really fancy cathedrals and we all know that kings are covetous creatures. So in 1245, Edward’s church was respectfully (Henry was one of Edward’s biggest fans) pulled down and construction of Westminster Abbey began in ernest. Not surprisingly, the building work took much longer than the time Henry III had on the planet and a whole bagful of kings and queens came and went, each making all sorts of additions and modifications to the plans, before the job was done.

[Screen goes all wobbly and we jump forward in time].

In 1965, the 900 year anniversary of that original consecration was celebrated in a year of events and commemorated in a very tall book that I suspect even Tschichold would have approved of. It's mighty tall but just a few pages in and it makes so much sense. Very tall photos of very tall things give way to very tall text columns and then more very tall photos of more very tall things. When tallness doesn't cut it, the designers (Roger and Robert Nicholson, London) turned to a 90° turn for a wonderfully long and shallow vista instead.

The book should have a fancy and rather audacious dust jacket but my low cost copy had already lost it's coat of many colour. No matter – the modest hard cover with that beautifully positioned and thrifty sans type will do nicely for me.

There's a few copies on eBay I notice and they don't all cost that much. Watch out though, there's a low cost paperback version but the overall design is lovely so even one of those would be good.

Getting under your feet

The latest (and over-sized) Pentagram Paper is a celebration of the ignored; ever-present but invisible to many, the ubiquitous maintenance cover is a hatch to a world below our feet that our feet will never explore. The paper is a collection of reproduced rubbings taken from street covers found around London. It was designed by Marina Willer and printed in dayglo inks. You can read more about it here.

Back in The 'Ham

I was over in my old stomping ground the other week, seeing my Mum who wasn't too well, and I managed to squeeze in a conflab with that man Luke Tonge, off of the Internet and the Monotype Recorder and Boat and other things. Anywho, he gave me this, which was terribly nice of him…not least because he also bought me a pint. Hope to return the favour when I'm in The 'Ham again.