What I liked about the book is the range of subjects, for example the hundred include: a Filofax; Slinky; bubble wrap; Lego brick; ball bearing race; Hex wrench set; a pushpin; a zip; bar code and from centuries ago a champagne cork. Plenty of other books (and a favourite editorial for magazines, too) cover the origin of every day products but not as many as a hundred.
Maybe the book's sub-deck 'marvels of design' could be stretching it a bit to include Adams chewing gum, a sugar cube or a spaghetti noodles but they need machinery to make them in the most efficient way. The odd one out in the hundred is Milton Glaser's I love NY logo (where love is a heart symbol) simplicity itself and the book shows it on a T-shirt. The text to each object is an interesting mix of historical data and manufacturing detail. I didn't know that the ZEROLL ice cream scoop (the one that's made out of one piece of aluminium) has some antifreeze in the handle part which takes heat from a users hand and transmits just enough of it to the bowl allowing the curl of ice cream to fall out.
This seven inch square book could be considered a marvel of design. Each spread is the same, a large, extreme close-up of the product on the left-hand page and on the facing page a block of copy and a small cutout of the item, the typography is clean and tidy, too. Because the close-up photos are interesting enough they don't make looking through the book predictable.
Sean Adams has created a useful book to explain some of the practical reasons for using a particular typeface. Forty-eight faces, from serif to digital, are examined in six chapters and in two ways.
First, he writes a very brief history of the face followed by two, three or four pages showing the face in use over a variety of mediums though most are printed examples. Secondly, at the end of each chapter, the faces are shown as complete caps and lower case alphabets (in twenty-one point I think) with the letters ARQGag enlarged so that the unique characteristics of each font can be indicated.
These alphabet are four to a spread and are probably the most interesting pages in the book. Non-type folk would no doubt look at the sixteen sans serif faces and conclude they more or less look the same only to have keen typographers point out that a cap Q could, for example, have a horizontal tail (Avenir) a curved tail (EF Real Head) a hook tail (Franklin Gothic) a centred tail (News Gothic) or a forty-five degree tail (Futura).
The forty-eight featured fonts are the author's choice and most designers would probably choose a few alternatives, I wouldn't have included Gill Sans preferring Folio and Century Old Style to Century Expanded. Oddly Helvetica Regular and Neue Haas Grotesk Regular are both included in the Sans Serif chapter and both faces really are virtually identical.
The book is beautifully produced and a useful overview of basic types in everyday use. Design school students in particular would find it a good introduction to the subject.
A remarkably slim premise for a book (especially when considering the original price) with thirty-six photos more or less related to gas stations. They are all from newspaper photo morgues, discarded now that papers have switch over to a digital format. The author has been picking them up here and there.
Individually I don't think the photos are of any consequence and collectively they just about hang together because of the common element of the red grease pencil or white paint cropping marks used by the layout artists to tell the production staff where to trim the photos. To non-newspaper folk these photos, with their casual scribbles and actually on the photo as well, probably seem quite intriguing and if they were to turn the print over they'll see more information that only makes sense to the news desks.
The book's format is as odd as the photo selection. The thirty-six photos fill up the pages until a four-page black paper insert, the spread of this has an interview with the author and George Kaplan (and printed in silver ink). This is followed by the backs of the photos to the end of the book. I would have thought it better to show the front and then the back on a spread because in many cases the backs contain pasted captions from the paper explaining the photo. The pages are unnumbered so flipping backwards and forwards to find out some detail about the pictures becomes rather tedious.Also the photos are printed on a very slightly rough paper where as the backs are printed on much more smoother paper. They are all printed with a two hundred screen.
The title has a slight curiosity feel to it because the images are from the media but real gas station fans should consider David Freund's four book box-set 'Gas stop' with 574 photos taken across the US during the late 1970s.
