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

It really should have looked much better. 2/5

Top left Half the photo has no relevance as it's a building and the bus is minus the back.
Top right Another badly cropped photo, the bus could have been larger.

Bottom left The photo hasn't been cropped to make the bus upright.

Bottom left The photo could be cropped to remove either side to make the buses larger.
Bottom right No attempt to lighten a very grey photo and the buses could have been larger.

Top right A rather tedious-looking photo of the back of some buses.

To left Why is the Strachans sign angled? Maybe to fill some space.

Bottom left The bus area of the photo is way too small, obviously it has not been cropped.

Top left Was it really worth using this badly taken photo? It hasn't been cropped to
reduce the grass and remove the lady with the ice cream.

Bottom left. A very tedious photo that tells the reader very little.

Top left Who wants to see part of a bus on the right? It should have been cropped out
to make the Leyland National larger.

Top left. I guess this was only used to fill a bit of page space. It's much too large.

Top Another poorly cropped photo. Where is the rest of the bus? 

Was this photo really worth using? 

A blank inside back cover, just the place for the publisher to

plug some other transport titles.

I'm a publication designer and live in the Southampton area and I sometimes use the buses so I thought I would find out about the history of transport services in the city. The book is a typical example of the transport press; it's very amateur looking. This type of publication suffers from an inherent problem: it exclusively relies on amateur snaps for the visual content. There are just over two hundred photos in the book and they have just been dropped onto the pages. No cropping to get the best focal point, no lightening of very grey photos, no real editorial selection to reject photos that just aren't worth including and tell the reader very little. Page after page of two photos, one on top of the other. It's also rather pricey.

However, even with this poor visual material, the book could have been designed to give the pages some sparkle, with big and small photos and some worthwhile typography for the title, imprint and intro pages. A missed opportunity to produce a book that a reader could enjoy.