Cover Metamorphosis

If you have bought any of the recent reissues of Franz Kafka’s works published by Schocken Books (and surely most of you have), you have seen the redesigned covers, which are all unified visually by recurring images and motifs. The new covers were designed by Peter Mendelsund and Print magazine’s Steven Heller spoke with Mendelsund.

The eyes are the common (or iconic) visual element. What made you seize on them?

I’ve always loved books that look back at you (don’t all books look back at you one way or another?). The eyes all began with The Trial, and the image that came to me of a wall of scrutiny. A jury, or panel or synod. That cover came first. The rest followed pretty naturally from there. 

… Generally speaking, other designs I’ve seen tend to fall back on particular well-worn Kafka visual tropes, specially: images of a lone man pitted against a faceless bureaucracy, or ground under the wheel of some other fascist/totalitarian entity. Or just nods towards generic, early 20th-century expressionism.

… They ignore the humor and humanism in Kafka’s work. I never read Kafka’s books and imagine, say, a dark palette. I always think of bright color. His books can be bleak and, sure, frightening. But his style is so surreal, whimsical, gnomic and often outright funny 

Makes one want to go reread Kafka…

In the Bag

Some of you who follow 3D printing may be familiar with Rapid Liquid Printing, aka “Gravity Free Manufacturing.” Core 77 describes it thusly:

the machine doesn't print on a bed in layers, but instead squirts its material into a pool of gel. With the material thus suspended by the gel, the vertically-oriented nozzle can move around in all three axes without needing to layer.

Cool. But is anyone using it for anything practical? Well, also via Core 77, French fashion brand Coperni has used it to create a version of its Swipe Bag.

For an exhibition at Disneyland Paris, the company has created a special Ariel edition made of silicone and, appropriately, created underwater.

The original will set you back $830.

Decidedly not a steal.

Lawnotype

Our Midwest Media Maven points us toward That Lawn Dude, aka Chase Stetson, who specializes in lawn-based design. His imaging tool of choice being a mower, he started working for his father’s lawn care company. When a drone video of himself mowing went viral, he began a sideline mowing designs into lawns­—and now does work for high-end clients like BMW, mowing logos into grassy expanses.

The BMW project was not without its challenges…

Truly Scary Fast Fashion

Cary Sherburne has written often about the evils of “fast fashion,” or clothing that is meant to be worn a few times then discarded. However, we are now at the time of year that sees some of the fastest fashion—and the most potentially environmentally toxic: the Halloween costume. Literally designed to be worn for only a few hours and then discarded, it ends up in the landfill probably even before all the wearer’s Halloween candy has been consumed. Says The Guardian:

With no incentive for quality, costume makers can get sloppy. The Center for Environmental Health has found substances such as lead, cadmium and BPA in costume pieces from both Halloween Express and Spirit Halloween at levels that “would have exceeded the amount deemed by [California] to require a warning”, says CEH science lead Mihir Vohra.

Not good.

Exposure to such substances has been linked to harm for humans. For instance, there is no “safe” level of lead exposure. Lead is especially damaging for children, and regular exposure can lead to nervous system damage and intellectual disabilities. Ingestion of cadmium can cause acute gastroenteritis, with permanent damage at high enough levels. BPA is an endocrine disruptor, which harms the hormonal system, and thus the regulation of all the important systems in our bodies, including the cardiovascular system and the brain. Research has found correlations between BPA exposure and brain and behavior disorders in children, and lifelong health effects for babies exposed to it in the womb. It is also linked to infertility, breast cancer, endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).

Even do-it-yourself costume kits are not free from these substances.

Building your costume from ultra-fast and ultra-cheap fashion brands like Shein, Temu and those that sell through Amazon could have its own risks. Products from these brands have been found to contain hazardous substances such as lead, phthalates and formaldehyde. In 2022, Disney children’s clothes sold by a half-dozen retailers, including Amazon, were recalled for containing lead.

And even wearing these costumes can be problematic, as if the wearer gets sweaty, the sweat can leach hazardous chemicals out of the material and onto the skin. The article offers some better alternatives—such as making a customized costume from what you find around the house. And from what we recall from back in the day, it was a lot more fun.

It’s About Time

Print magazine asks, “What’s your favorite time?” No, not Christmas, or a summer holiday, or even The Renaissance. Rather, your favorite time of day. “Pretend you’re working on something. You look up at a wall clock. Would you prefer that clock to say it’s 10:10 A.M or 10:10 P.M.?”

It’s not an entirely silly question.

Because by the time we reach working age, we’ve already identified ourselves as having a favorite time of day to do our work. You know, “I’m a morning person,” or “I do my best work after midnight.”

It’s always fun when “larks” have to collaborate with “owls”—although there can be some overlap, as some people’s days are ending just as others’ are beginning.

Print also identifies that we can have a favorite day of the week, and that days can be “branded.”

Friday and Saturday are strong brands in the modern Western secular world. One’s a day to be endured, but filled with hopeful anticipation and low-light nights; the other, blessed “free time” in the park, and a night alright for fighting!

Or fever.

Then there are months, as well.

These time preferences get established early in our identities and subtly shape the way we approach days, weeks, and months. We believe they reflect an obedience to deep biological rhythms, and they may. I’m slightly skeptical. I think our preconceptions and attitudes about the time of day, the day of the week, or the month of the year do a lot more to shape our experiences of time than we realize.

… It’s surprising to think about the time favorites we carry around, and the impact they have on what we eat, wear, and do. Until that five o’clock whistle blows and no one owns a piece of my time!

Full Metal Graphene Jacket

Was it a good week for graphene news? It’s always a good week for graphene news! A temperature-controlling graphene-enhanced jacket. From (who else?) Graphene-Info:

DUER, an innovative denim company, has launched its new Performance Flannel that is enhanced with graphene. The fabric is said to regulate body temperature without feeling heavy, fight static and stay fresh longer. 

A steal at $119.

On the Dot

Punctuation. Unless you’re e.e. cummings or Cormac McCarthy, everyone uses it, sometimes correctly, but where did it come from? Via Laughing Squid, Rob Watts of RobWords explores where and when punctuation was developed. (Interestingly, before any ancient civilization contemplated punctuation, they first had to invent the word space, which no one did until the 10th century.)

The story  of our punctuation marks begins with a man called Aristophanes of Byzantium. In around the 2nd century BC,  he proposed a system to solve the problem of the unreadability of Greek writing…Aristophanes put forward a system where dots would be used to mark in sentences  where pauses of different lengths should occur. The middle one marked the  shortest break. The bottom one,  a little longer. And the top one, longer still. These were called comma, colon and periodos (period).

Unfortunately, it didn’t catch on and it took a few centuries before Christian writers started to implement punctuation to clarify their writing.

Decked Out

When vinyl records started making a comeback, it was tempting to think that maybe cassette tapes were next. And it turns out they kind of are. Says the NY Times:

the cassette tape has survived as an underground phenomenon, a deliberately anachronistic medium of choice for artists on the noise, avant-garde and low-fi fringes. But tapes began turning up at the trend-chasing retailer Urban Outfitters as long ago as 2015, the same year that digital streaming first overtook download sales. Nearly a decade later, Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” stands as the top-selling cassette of the year so far, with about 23,000 copies sold through June 30

More and more artists are releasing music on the format, especially for “superfans” who buy albums in more than one format. And a lot of appeal for cassette fans is playing them in the car. However, the trouble for cassette fans is finding a device to play them on. It’s said that the last new car to come with a tape deck was a 2010 Lexus. So its owners of older vehicles who have taken to the cassette. And the manufacturers of tape players like Sony have long exited the market (the last Sony Walkman was made in 2010). The new market is not huge enough to re-start tape deck manufacturing, so fans are looking for used gear. But new players have emerged.

Some new manufacturers have entered the cassette market, meeting a simmering demand but confronting a vastly different supply-side landscape than in the 1990s. FiiO, an electronics company with headquarters in Guangzhou, China, recently debuted a bare-bones, Walkman-style cassette player that sells for about $100. “The biggest challenge has been the near-complete disruption of the cassette player supply chain,” the company’s chief executive, James Chung, said in an emailed statement. “Restoring the technical prowess of 1990s Walkman devices is virtually impossible today.” Then again, vinyl record production has largely overcome a similar supply squeeze in the past decade.

No word in whether the 8-track is coming back. Yet.

Chump Change

Are you a fan of Green Day’s 1994 album Dookie? No, nor are we, although it was a landmark album in late-stage punk. However, via Boing Boing, Dookie Demastered is an interesting project to port the tracks to a variety of “obscure, obsolete, and inconvenient formats.” Like the cassette?

Listen to Burnout on player piano, Having a Blast compressed to fit on a floppy disk, Chump emerging from the speaker of a Teddy Ruxpin, and so on.

Then there’s this:

With a built-in, bone-conducting speaker, this toothbrush plays Green Day’s “Pulling Teeth” while you brush. Finally, you can put Dookie in your mouth (not recommended).

Check out the rest. It’s a hoot!

LinkedOut

If you’re not a fan of social media—and one could hardly blame you—you may sympathize with the anonymous creator of the site i-dont-have-linkedin.com.

Hey, it could be worse: it could be Facebook.

Pants Party

Pants. Perhaps the one indispensable piece of attire (even for many women), at least in respectable company. (What you do in the privacy of your home is your own business, you filthy animal.) Anyway, ’twas not always thus. Via Atlas Obscura, in ancient Rome, pants were the clothing of a “savage barbarian.”

When Marcus Tullius Cicero, an eloquent orator and lawyer, was defending the former Gaul governor Fonteius from accusations of extortion, he cited the wearing of pants as a sign of the “innate aggressiveness” of the Gauls.

Interestingly, it wasn’t anything about trousers per se that bugged the Romans. It was just guilt by association.

There were no particular hygienic reasons for the Roman distaste for pants, says Professor Kelly Olson, author of “Masculinity and Dress in Roman Antiquity.” They did not like them, it appears, because of their association with non-Romans.

By the way, togas were not the de facto Romanwear.

It is not as though every person walking around ancient Rome was wearing a toga—they were more like formal wear. Tunics where the most common garment, sleeveless or short-sleeved for men, and long-sleeved, ankle-length for women. Squeezing one’s legs into stitched fabric was simply not tradition, and not generally demanded by the Mediterranean climate.

But, times change.

However, as the empire expanded, this began to change. Romans and tribes from newly annexed northern lands fought side-by-side to protect their borders from still other barbarians, such as the Visigoths. So military trousers used by Germans or Gauls became the outfit of choice for Roman troops—presumably because they’re more practical on a northern battlefield than flappy tunics.

Yeah, and by the time they got to chilly Britain they’re probably not going to be cavorting about in tiny tunics. And although the military were allowed to wear pants, when the fad spread to the general population, the Emperor put his sandaled foot down.

By 397, trousers, in all their odiousness, were becoming so common that brother-emperors Honorius and Arcadius (of the Western and Eastern empires, respectively) issued an official trouser ban. 

Initially intended to distinguish the military from the civilians, there were more subtle reasons for the ban.

The ban could also be read as the desperate attempt of late-period emperors to cling to a sense of Roman identity at a time where the empire had become a melting pot of traditions, after hundreds of years of expansion and cultural appropriation. Long hair and flashy jewels soon joined boots and pants as forbidden fashion.

After the fall of Rome and the seat of the Empire moved to Constantinople, pants became the official uniform of the Roman court. Why they changed it, no one can say. People just liked it better that way.

Altogether Ooky

Although some of us find the thought of eating at a Burger King a bit frightening, this time of year it’s intentional. Indeed, every year, BK rolls out a special Halloween-themed menu and this year they are doing an Addams Family theme. Says (who else?) Food & Wine:

Starting October 10, Burger King Guests can enjoy menu items inspired by The Addams Family animated films — including Wednesday's Whopper, Thing's Rings, Gomez's Churro Fries, and Morticia's Kooky Chocolate Shake.

Burger King hasn’t forgotten the kids either (although we’re disappointed that Pugsly didn’t get his own personalized menu item). Later this month, it will release a line of Addams Family toys for its King Jr. Meals. And if your Halloween can’t possibly involve too much Burger King, you can even dress as a side of Chicken Fries.

No, we really couldn’t.

The chain is currently selling Chicken Fries costumes on its website. 

We were morbidly curious…

Abandon dignity, ye who enter here!

This Week in Printing, Publishing, and Media History

October 7

1777: The Americans defeat the British in the Second Battle of Saratoga, also known as the Battle of Bemis Heights.

1849: American short story writer, poet, and critic Edgar Allan Poe dies (b. 1809).

1885: Danish physicist and philosopher and Nobel Prize laureate Niels Bohr born.

1919: KLM, the flag carrier of the Netherlands, is founded. It is the oldest airline still operating under its original name.

1959: The Soviet probe Luna 3 transmits the first-ever photographs of the far side of the Moon.

October 8

1921: KDKA in Pittsburgh's Forbes Field conducts the first live broadcast of a football game.

1962: Der Spiegel publishes an article disclosing the sorry state of the Bundeswehr, and is soon accused of treason.

1982: Cats opens on Broadway and runs for nearly 18 years before closing on September 10, 2000.

October 9

1446: The hangul alphabet is published in Korea.

1874: The Universal Postal Union is created by the Treaty of Bern.

1907: French actor, director, and screenwriter Jacques Tati born.

1940: John Lennon born.

1986: The Phantom of the Opera, eventually the second longest running musical in London, opens at Her Majesty’s Theatre.

1987: American author, playwright, and diplomat, United States Ambassador to Italy Clare Boothe Luce dies (b. 1903).

2004: Algerian-French philosopher and academic Jacques Derrida dies (b. 1930).

October 10

1813: Italian composer and philanthropist Giuseppe Verdi born.

1924: “Actor,” “director,” and “screenwriter” Ed Wood born.

1985: American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter Orson Welles dies (b. 1915).

October 11

1910: Former President Theodore Roosevelt becomes the first U.S. president to fly in an airplane.

1950: CBS’s mechanical color system is the first to be licensed for broadcast by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

1961: American comedian Chico Marx dies (b. 1887).

1967: Typographer, known for work on Times New Roman font, Stanley Morison dies (b. 1889).

October 12

322 BC: Athenian statesman Demosthenes dies (b. 384 BC).

1892: The Pledge of Allegiance is first recited by students in many US public schools, as part of a celebration marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage.

1924: French journalist, novelist, and poet, Nobel Prize laureate Anatole France dies (b. 1844).

1979: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the first of five books in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy comedy science-fiction trilogy, is published.

October 13

1881: First known conversation in modern Hebrew by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and friends.

1892: Edward Emerson Barnard discovers first comet discovered by photographic means.

1903: The Boston Red Sox win the first modern World Series, defeating the Pittsburgh Pirates in the eighth game.

1983: Ameritech Mobile Communications (now AT&T) launched the first US cellular network in Chicago.