"Don't touch that dial" / Novelty radios 5/5

Wim Meter lives in Holland and collects novelty radios. He's a graphic designer so it seemed the obvious idea to design a book featuring his collection. From my experience, publishers of books for collectors turn out uniformly dull-looking titles with bland layouts, photos and typography, so it was refreshing to see how the author presented his collection.

The book is all in color and most spreads are devoted to a particular type of radio, pages twenty-four and five has twenty fast food products, seventy-eight and nine shows radios with a Dick Tracy theme, ninety-six and seven has slot machine and juke box radios but what makes this book so fascinating and in my view lifts it out of the ordinary is that all the radios are photographed as a still-life group or they are superimposed on a spread wide image that relates to the items shown, detailed captions and intriguing bits of information are scattered amongst the images.

Visually, this really is a stunning book and if you collect or are interested in novelty radios (and there must be some hundreds included) it is the one to get. Design, photography, printing and especially editorial content can't be beat.

 

The ultimate swipe file

                                            

A fascinating book that originally started out as the first issue of the Pentagram Papers in 1975. Thompson and Davenport couldn't find a publisher for their book but the first three letters of the alphabet provided the ideal material as a printed keepsake for Pentagram's clients. Eventually, Bergstrom+Boyle, a small London publisher, published the book in 1980 (ISBN 0903767074). I bought my copy back then and I've always enjoyed a browse through it over the years.

The essence of the book is a collection of images that illustrate a word; for example, G has gallows, games, games and battles, garden, garter, gate, general signs, giant, giraffe, girder, each illustrated with one or more printed examples with a sort of rather large thumbnail. The book's strength is that all the printed items are well designed with so many of them from the US and Europe in the fifties and sixties, a particularly rich period for graphic design creativity.

It's a marvel that the two authors managed to find such a wonderful variety of printed matter to illustrate the words and now forty-six years later these pages can still provide plenty of creative stimulus for today's designers. The great shame is that the book wasn't printed in color.

 

Pierre's winning CSH 22 4/5

This delightful book is really a love story about a house. The property is at 1635 Woods Drive, Los Angeles, 90069 (if you put this address into Bing Maps, you'll see an aerial shot) and the principal characters are Buck and Carlotta Stahl who, in 1959, purchased a lot in the Hollywood Hills to build a house. Another principal was Pierre Koenig, a thirty-four-year-old architect who saw the potential of a house that overlooked most of Los Angeles. Other characters include photographer Julius Shurman, who had shot most of the modern houses in California and John Entenza, the editor of Arts & Architecture magazine, who created the influential Case Study Houses program (the Stahl House was 22 of the 36 houses).

Koenig's brilliant design was to create an L-shaped house around an outdoor pool. The steel frame had one wall facing the street; the rest of the house was floor-to-ceiling glass, with a seven-foot overhang on the poolside to protect the interior from the sun. The book describes the problems of getting a mortgage on a flat-roofed property, the construction and the Stahl's family living in a famous property, this was primarily because of Shulman's well-known nighttime photo (on the cover) of two ladies sitting in one corner of the living room, with the lights of LA stretching to the horizon.

The book is well illustrated and printed with a 175 screen on good matt-art paper but I have given it four stars because there are virtually no captions for the many illustrations. Some of the photos show the construction and interior rooms and they really should have some explanation for the reader.

US

The Stahl House: Case Study House ú22: The Making of a Modernist Icon: Stahl, Bruce, Stahl Gronwald, Shari, Cross, Kim: 9781797209432: Amazon.com: Books

UK

The Stahl House: Case Study House #22: The Making of a Modernist Icon: Amazon.co.uk: Stahl, Bruce, Stahl Gronwald, Shari, Cross, Kim: 9781797209432: Books