Ace Jet 170

Ernest Hemisphere

 

Have I mentioned I love my job? Actually, have I mentioned what my job is? Yes, obvs, I'm a graphic designer but it would be more accurate to, now, describe me as an interpretation designer. I used to 'do brochures and stuff', now I do 'exhibitions and that'.

We (that is, Tandem) use the term 'Interpretation Design' (a specific discipline that I wasn't familiar with until I stumbled into my current position nearly five years ago) because what we do is much more than exhibition design. It encompasses exhibition design and lots of other disciplines too. As our Lord High Prophet of Interpretation, Freeman Tilden, described it, it is a discipline that encompasses many disciplines.

So now I design exhibitions…and visitor experiences and museums and interior spaces and interior interventions and architectural interventions and environmental interventions and wayfinding and public art and interpretive graphics…all underpinned by principles set out by the main man just over sixty flipping years ago.

Lots of what we do is connected to heritage or cultural stuff. So I often find myself rummaging through the kind of things I would love to rummage through whether I had this job or not. And often I'm lead down tracks I'm not meant to take.

Last week, I was looking for historical illustrated maps and found dealer in antique maps and atlases Barry Lawrence Rudermann. What an amazing image database Bazza has! Ever since I bought my first atlas I've considered the poles to be the finest of cartographic delights. While BLR may have a different preference there is much Pole action to be had.

 

博覧 会

 

I'm sure Expo 70 was a marvellous thing. I've never been to a World Fair – to me they seem like a thing of the Victorian era, full of fantastical inventions, sights and sounds. But of course they are as much a part of the present and the future…and the past…everywhen, really.

Expo 70 was held in Osaka, Japan and was where the USA displayed a lump of moon rock they'd picked up the year before. It's Landmark Tower inspired the designers of the Valley Forge from Silent Running and the site was used to film the final battle between Gamera and Jiger in the Japanese monster movie…Gamera vs. Jiger, obviously.

And then, there were these stamps.

 

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.

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.

The Penrose Annual 1976 Volume 69

For most of my Penrose Annual collecting career, to date, I've concentrated on the 60s. But I've come to realise the following decade has lots to offer. As phototypesetting took hold, memories of letterpress-as-standard still prevailed and also the 70s witnessed some amazing designers at work in various graphic arts.

Paul Piech had began to publish from his private press in 1959, his wood and linocuts full of purpose and protest. Follow that link, from his name, and you'll see what I mean. For this edition of Penrose, he cut motifs to illustrate an article on Caxton as well as being the focus of a piece by Kenneth Hardacre.

Tom Eckersley was in his sixties by now but his poster work was still breaking ground. There's plenty of supporting evidence in this edition to prove that.

A superb piece on the Kelmscott Chaucer gives background on the original and goes on to describe the production of a facsimile copy of the Morris/Burne-Jones masterpiece. I'm going to do a separate post about that.

David Gentleman's here, thanks to Mel Calman who wrote the article which is illustrated with finished work alongside examples of Gentleman's design developments.

As is standard with Penrose, there's a ton of other stuff including an article on the reproduction of old maps and graphic design from Canada – and then the usual technical developments of the day.

I've uploaded more highlights to Flickr.

Houston, we have a problem…

They said it couldn’t be done. They said, it was impossible. They said that 'The Thing' could not ‘travel’ to 'The Place'; that it could not happen. It was impossible.

Even now, some claim that it did not happen. They claim that it could not have happened. But let me tell you, with complete certainty, that it did happen. I know. I was there. I saw it.

Yes…the postman really did post a commemorative 45” single from 1969 through our letterbox. A letterbox, notably, not big enough for this vintage News of the World give-away. A letterbox that measures less than the requisite 7” across, at its widest point.

So how did he do it? I here you ask. HTF? (As the younger generation might abbreviate). How was it possible to bend the laws of physics, to pervert known science – to make something so big, fit through something so not big? How?

By bending it. By fecking bending it.

 

But this was no flexidisc, oh no. This disc did not flex. Or bend. It did not bend and it did not flex. It did not fold and it did not contort. It did, what it had to do. All that it could do.

It fecking broke.

We can send a man to the moon. We can record the account of that journey and we can press that account into a disc of plastic to be played back using a turny thing and a needle. We can package that disc of plastic inside a printed account of the remarkable happenings of that time. We can slip both disc and leaflet into a printed space map depicting the journey made all those years ago. And we can stick all that stuff into a specially manufactured glossy card sleeve with a moon boot on the front.

But we can’t post all that shit through a hole smaller than it without something happening that is not supposed to happen. It's a scientific fact.

[Report Ends]

About a Buoy

For the last lots of months I’ve been immersed in the wild and wind-sweaped world of the Irish lighthouse. It’s been a challenging project, to say the least, and has involved many varied interesting things and not much time.

During the research period, I got my hands of a copy of Brown’s Signal Reminder – essential seafaring documentation. Now I can semaphore, code like a Morse, run alphabetical flags up my rigging whenever I feel like it and, crucially, harmonize my system of buoyage.

Cross

In Umbria €3, after a little accidental haggling, gets you a Nurse/Nun's vintage Red Cross ID card at the local flee-sized flee market that you accidentally pass on your way to buy your hungry family breakfast. Printed interestingness aside, the photo adds a whole other dimension to the ephemeric provocation: Who was this Nun/Nurse/Nurse-Nun? I don't know. But I do know my family is hungry so I'd better get a move on before they twig I'm taking too long.